Sources & Method

The two-register method

Every piece on this site runs in two registers. The division is not a footnote convention or a scholarly hedge - it's structural, visible, and deliberate. Story is on vellum: the narrative prose in the literary serif, the tradition the tribe has carried and told for three thousand years. Stone is in basalt: dark blocks, dated and incised, every claim tied to a named institution or a citable text. You can see the difference before you read a word.

The story register may say "the tradition tells us" or "the legend holds" without blushing. It tells the tradition as the tradition has always been told - as narrative, as meaning, as the thing the community actually carries. It is never presented as archaeology. It never needs to be.

The stone register may say nothing that can't be checked. Every basalt block carries a named institution, a date that can be defended to a scholar, and an accession number where one exists. If a claim is in the basalt, it's checkable. If it's on the vellum, it's marked as tradition.

"The legends are ours and we tell them with pride - as narrative, not as lab results. The evidence is dated, sourced and checkable. Every piece carries both registers, visibly separated. Neither apologises to the other." House Style, Scroll & Stone

The design is the disclaimer. A reader who learns the grammar in their first article - which takes about ninety seconds - can apply it everywhere on the site. There is no small print.

Our sources

The stone register draws on four types of source. All are named; none are anonymous. Where a specific scholar's argument is identified with that scholar - because the argument is contested and the attribution matters - the scholar is named. Where an institution holds the object, the institution is named. This is not vanity; it's what "checkable" actually means.

• Archaeological and museum holdings Named institutions with accession numbers where known. The British Museum, the Israel Museum, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. If a stone block cites an object, the object has a location and - wherever possible - a shelf number.
• Academic scholarship Scholars named where the argument is identified with them. Disputes acknowledged rather than smoothed over - the margin notes in the daf tradition are where scholarly disagreements live, stated fairly, without a verdict. The site does not adjudicate live debates in the field; it surfaces them.
• Primary texts Mishnah, Talmud, and Cairo Geniza documents cited by tractate or document. Biblical texts cited by chapter and verse. Epigraphic evidence cited by standard scholarly designation where one exists (e.g., Merneptah Stele by its Cairo Museum accession, KAI for Northwest Semitic inscriptions).
• Secondary literature Named works cited within pieces. Where a specific edition or translation matters to the argument, it is named. Where a dispute exists about translation or interpretation, the dispute appears in the margin, not resolved in the prose.

The site does not use unnamed sources. It does not summarise "scholars say" without naming which scholars. It does not cite Wikipedia as a terminal source, though Wikipedia is sometimes useful for tracking down the primary citation that matters. Every stone block has a named institution or text behind it.

The review pipeline

Every piece goes through four stages before it reaches a reader. The pipeline is not a formality. Every batch of content has had at least one caught error from the fact-check stage - errors that would have been embarrassing if they'd gone out. This is not a vanity site; the corrections have been real.

The distinction between DRAFT and live is a promise to the reader, not a technicality. Both are readable. Live pieces have cleared a higher bar.

DRAFT vs live

Every piece carries a status that is visible in the site. A thin pomegranate banner above the article header marks any piece that has not yet completed the owner's revision round. When the banner is gone, the piece is live.

Corrections are always welcome at either stage. The site runs on the premise that the evidence matters; that includes the evidence that we've got something wrong. There is no shame in a well-sourced correction. There is considerable shame in ignoring one.

What this site is not

It's worth being clear, because the site is confident about what it is - which can be misread as political, or promotional, or tendentious. It isn't any of those things, and the design rules enforce that.

• Not an advocacy site. Scroll & Stone takes no positions on modern political questions. The history runs to the present but does not adjudicate current disputes. The house rule is exact: pain may appear, it never gets the last word - and that applies equally in both directions. We are not in the business of scoring points.
• Not a memorial site. Joy before grievance is a design rule, not a sentiment. The public account of Jewish life cannot only be Jewish death and Jewish pain. This is a site about what a very old tribe is, not merely about what has been done to it. Catastrophe appears; it is never the whole story and it never gets the final word.
• Not an exhaustive academic resource. The site makes no pretence of covering everything. It is selective, opinionated about what makes a good piece, and openly interested in the surprising, the overlooked, and the cross-continental. But every claim it does make is checkable, and we name our sources.
• Not anonymous. The site is the work of Ashley Hirst and a documented content pipeline. The house-style rules and the pipeline are public. The owner's name is on the revision round. If something is wrong, there is a person to tell.

Cartographic materials

The map on the home page is built from real things: scanned paper, real antique maps, and the earth photographed at night. Everything below is public domain unless noted; where a licence asks for attribution, it is given gladly. Full provenance, with direct links and crop notes, lives in the repository at img/map-materials/SOURCES.md.

• The earth at night - NASA Black Marble composite, and an ISS photograph of the eastern Mediterranean at night. NASA imagery, public domain.
• The Madaba mosaic map (6th century, Church of St. George, Madaba) - photograph by Fallaner, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Marino Sanudo & Pietro Vesconte's gridded map of the Holy Land (14th century) - public domain.
• The PEF Survey of Western Palestine (Conder & Kitchener, 1870s-80s) - public domain.
• Heinrich Kiepert, Neue Handkarte von Palaestina (1880s) - the survey sheet of the return years. Public domain.
• Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina (1539) - the sea creatures of the medieval eras. Public domain.
• Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum (1570) - the engraved atmosphere of the atlas era. Public domain.
• Papyrus and parchment grounds - photographic paper textures, CC BY 2.0 (attribution recorded in SOURCES.md).

Contact and corrections

Errors and corrections are welcome - from teachers, from scholars, from anyone who reads carefully and finds something that doesn't hold up. The preferred form is simple: the piece, the specific claim, and the evidence that contradicts it. We don't need a footnote; a clear statement and a named source is enough to open the conversation.

The full voice guide - the house rules, the palette, the register conventions, the mechanics of the daf format - is at house-style.html. If you want to contribute a piece, read that first. It's short, because rules that matter usually are.