Redactle 26, May 2, 2022

Not a lot of interesting punctuation to go on,

However, some clues I'm picking up (I think):

• was in the first sentence indicates this isn't something we still consider being around anymore;
• "Near ████" seems likely to be "Near East";
• there are a number of phrases like "in ███ ██", which make me think it might be a year followed by AD

I'm once again trying to solve this without spending hours and hours on it.

I'm just thinking it's either a place or an era or event.

The title is 9 characters long.

So let's guess some fairly generic words to try to narrow it down:

Well, no, first, I have to guess Babylon, not sure why, just a hunch after skimming ... and that gives us 97 hits. Good start.

Then: city, river, east, king, empire, queen, egypt and egyptian; then borders, fall, center, and state. And that last reveals that this place was some kind of state: "was an ███████ ████████-████████ state".

And here's where the many holes in my knowledge of history become visible; I feel like I should know more about Babylon and thus have a better idea of what this is.

Right, so: not the Ottoman Empire, not the Napoleonic Empire - but the Assyrian Empire.

And after a few more minimally helpful guesses (Ur, capitol, central, Sumeria, Hittite, Sumer, Chaldea, Iraq) and a typo (histor for history) it dawned on me:

Babylonia.

So, not too bad - 32 guesses, and half an hour.

(Funny that it's Akkadian; my brain kept wanting me to guess Arcadia, but I knew that would be wrong.)

I was right about (at least some of) the ADs (there were also, unsurprisingly, a bunch of BCs ... I would have thought Wikipedia would be using BCE. Huh).

The blanks for the mathematics section which turned out to be "First, the number 60 has many divisors (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30)," were intriguing. I'll have to remember that all kinds of topics can have mathematics sections.

So:

I solved today's Redactle (#26) in 32 guesses with an accuracy of 78.13%. Played at https://www.redactle.com/

Congratulations, you solved Redactle #26!

• The answer was: babylonia
• You solved it in 32 guesses
• Your accuracy was 78.13%
• You have solved 17 consecutive Redactles

Global Stats

• Globally, 7862 players have solved today's Redactle so far
• Global Median: 96.00 Guesses; 66.67% Accuracy
• Global Average: 130.38 Guesses; 66.43% Accuracy

I wonder whether tomorrow's will seem easy or hard.

Maybe a nice 20th-Century work of literature, or an artist?

We shall see.