European civilization is built on ham and cheese, which allowed protein to be stored throughout the icy winters.

Without this, urban societies in most of central Europe would simply not have been possible.

This is also why we have hardback books. Here's why. 1/ Cheese meant female sheep & cows were usually more valuable than male ones which were accordingly slaughtered young as they were not worth feeding through the winter. The skins of these young animals was used to make vellum, giving us the basic material of the European book. 2/

An exquisite Syriac miniature Gospel manuscript, just 64 x 50 mm, likely written in Aleppo in the late 17th century.

144 folios of microscopic Syriac script in brown ink. Some titles in Hebrew, and two Arabic inscriptions at the beginning and end of the manuscript. 1/ The ms also contains a series of intriguing diagrammatic designs & carpet pages. Made up of 5 squares across and 7 squares high, these grids have been outlined in red ink. Inside most of the corners of the individual squares are small golden circles with black outlines. 2/

1/4 A Machzor, printed in Sulzbach in 1794, with a heartbreaking contemporary manuscript Kinah (lament) in Hebrew for those murdered in an unrecorded Polish pogrom on the 2nd day of Pesach 1655 bound in, together with an additional later Yiddish translation, written in pencil. 2/4 The manuscript is undated, but the text has the character of a first-hand account, written by someone who saw the pogroms, and likely dates from around 1700, thus predating the book itself by nearly a century. The vowelization was apparently added at a later period.