THE HISTORY CARNIVAL #3 is up. It's hosted by a different blog each time it runs. If you're not reading it, you may want to have a look. Ed Cook summarizes some of the posts. I too liked Paul Musgrave's "Linguae Non Francae." Add to that Tim Burke�s "Misrecognitions and Mythologies." It focuses on a recent Rastafarian "mass visitation" to Ethiopia, but deals generally with the difference between popular (mis)conceptions about a country and culture by outsiders vs. actual conditions in that country and culture. The rife modern popular misconceptions about the biblical world and about antiquity in general is directly comparable. He concludes:

More modestly, sometimes such images or constructed pasts simply contribute to a communicative disconnect, to a failure of potential. You can�t help but wonder if maybe the Rastafarians would learn something important if they looked for the real Selassie--perhaps in fact they would renew their faith in the Selassie they imagine by recognizing just how imaginary he is, by unshackling him from a real man who walked the Earth. Maybe you can�t find Ethiopia until you know you�re looking for something that has yet to exist, something that you have to make from nothing, something you have yet to gain rather than something you have already had and lost. Perhaps this is also not so modest a point, but instead the real source of dangerous consequences. Perhaps we should worry less about garden-variety stereotypes sprinkled through popular culture like gaudy ornaments of some barely-recalled past, and worry more about the fervid dreamers, who see a whole and coherent picture in their imagination and set out to compel the world to align itself with their vision.