Ancient History
Roy Kay -- Monday, May 17, 2004 -- 06:23:46 PMI don't know how many people are interested in this. By "Ancient", I mean BEFORE (or only edging up to) the history of the Classical Period of Greece, Rome, Parthia, Guptas and Han.
This is for comment, speculation, "what ifs" - whatever you find engaging.
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This just in at ArchaeoBlog:
Breaking news Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
The skinny among those in the know is that, while perhaps not exactly "breaking" news, is nevertheless probably as significant as this article makes it sound.
That's tremendously exciting. I hope not all the works are as fragmented as the little bit from Epigonoi.
Wow! I can't wait to see what they find!
Minor update:
Oxyrhynchus papyri update Infra-Red Brings Ancient Papyri to Light
A vast array of previously unintelligible manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome are being read for the first time thanks to infra-red light, in a breakthrough hailed as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail.The technique could see the number of accounted-for ancient manuscripts increase by one fifth, and may even lead to the unveiling of some lost Christian gospels.
A team at Oxford University is using the technology to bring back into view faded ink on thousands of papyrus scrolls salvaged from an ancient rubbish dump in the 19th century.
Not a whole lot more detail than earlier reports, but a bit more background.
We thought we'd heard of this technique before and we were right: it was used to make some of the dead sea scrolls more legible. See here for an old press release on it.
(Deleted message originally posted by GregD on Wednesday, April 20, 2005 -- 02:49:17 PM.)
Looking at faded documents with infrared or ultraviolet is hardly new technology. However, you used to have to do it with film, and digital technology can make it a lot easier.
A dissenting view on the importance/newsworthiness here.
Well crap.
I posted this at ArchaeoBlog:
Antiquities Market update Ancient Treasures for Sale
As you read this, criminals somewhere in the world are destroying portions of mankind’s past. With backhoe and shovel, chainsaw and crowbar, they are wrenching priceless objects from sites in the mountains of Peru, the coasts of Sicily, and the deserts of Iraq. Brutal and uncaring, these robbers leave behind a wake of decapitated statues, mutilated temples, and pillaged trenches where archaeologists were seeking clues to little-understood civilizations. The results of this looting include disfigured architectural monuments, vanished aesthetic objects, and an incalculable loss of information about the past. And it shows no signs of diminishing.As you continue to read, other people across the globe are purchasing some of mankind’s oldest and most exquisite creations. Contemplating ancient statues, vases, and stelae, many of these purchasers experience antiquities’ near-mystical power to connect them to the past or to transcend time through beauty. Proud of their efforts, these private collectors, commercial dealers, and museum curators view themselves as temporary caretakers of timeless treasures. Their love for these artifacts often resembles the passion one associates with religious fervor. It, too, shows no signs of diminishing.
There are some pertinent arguments in this essay. Vincent seems to side with the dealers in some proportion.
Interesting. My husband is a very small-time dealer, and I've sent that on to him.
Hey guys. I'm thinking of starting an occasional series on ArchaeoBlog about Great Papers in Archaeology, kind of a canon of important archaeological research. I plopped the first installment up on my web site for your perusual. I'm still working on the HTML aspects (it's coming up batty on my FireFox at the moment). Comments on readability happily accepted. I'm aiming it at interested lay readers and maybe professionals who might like it for historical interest.
I really distrust patrimonists because they are basically politicians. It's not like politicians don't destroy documents and such willy-nilly to advance their interests.
The Bush administration might be open to opposing McClain because of it's concerns about the International Criminal Court.
Not yet on ArchaeoBlog:
Breaking news! Revelation! 666 is not the number of the beast (it's a devilish 616)
A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616.The new fragment from the Book of Revelation, written in ancient Greek and dating from the late third century, is part of a hoard of previously unintelligible manuscripts discovered in historic dumps outside Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Now a team of expert classicists, using new photographic techniques, are finally deciphering the original writing.
Heh: Peter Gilmore, High Priest of the Church of Satan, based in New York, said: "By using 666 we're using something that the Christians fear. Mind you, if they do switch to 616 being the number of the beast then we'll start using that."
Okay, I have posted my first paper review of Longacre's Archeology as Anthropology: A Case Study at ArchaeoBlog.
Archaeology Lecture 030806
Tel Zayit Excavation Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Tel Zayit is located about 2/3 of the distance from Jerusalem to the Mediterranean Sea in what would be called the foothills or piedmont region. The Tel is bounded by a wadi on the north, and generally slopes at a low grade in the western direction, but slopes at a 45 degree angle on the eastern side. It is the ease of gleaning stratographic information that led to the exploration of this side of the Tel.
The lower 60-80% demonstrates that Egyptian influence prevailed, and that it might have originally been an Egyptian colony that survived until 1200 BCE. It includes monumental buildings of the Egyptian style, as well as beads in the shape of the lotus which are characteristic of Nile culture. The site was abandoned during the post-Ramesids retrenchment and not reoccupied meaningfully until 900 BCE.
At issue are who the occupants were and their place in Canaanite history. The evidence strongly indicates an allegiance to Jerusalem prevailing for the next 200 year, followed by a hybrid period, which was still most likely pro-Jerusalem. It is considered to have the oldest Hebrew script known so far.
The adventure begins, necessarily at the most recent point in time at the top strata – mid 8th century BCE. Among the more prominent artifacts were amphora, particularly one labeled “Shemun” – Hebrew for “Oil” and presumed to mean olive oil. Amphora are large jars, pointed at the bottom. These have no real free standing ability and are designed to pack into the hold of a ship. This would generally indicate that it is related to the Philistines on the coast. Mixed in with these, however, were diverse forms of red-strip pottery, which is distinctly of upland, i.e. Judaic, origin. These included bowls and krators.
A particularly bewildering set of artifacts were sizable clay beads, about 2” in diameter. They were trying to figure out what those are for when they noticed these were sized perfectly to stopper the amphora. (The border between the stopper and rim would also be sealed with clay.) But what was the function of the hole in the middle, if not to string them together? The guess, and it is partly backed by linen fragments in the hole, is that these were used to provide a means of gas relieve during the fermentation process.
This top level was covered in signs of charred wood, and it is assumed the site was destroyed in war; possibly in event alluded to Biblically in regard to King Zaza-El from Syria. However rough war it on the inhabitants of the time, the destructive conflagration serve well in demarking layers.
There are interesting artifacts along the way as we descend to the bottom iron age level that marks the rebirth of the Tel following the Egyptian late Bronze Age abandonment. It is here that we come to the Hebrew script. This was not a matter of great import at the time of its making. It was nearly a throwaway item – except they tended to reuse anything able to serve a purpose. In this case, the inhabitants has made a stone bowl, at the end of the bowls use it was embedded as a structural element in a wall. Sometime during this transition, it was inscribed on the underside.
The inscription itself was about as plain, pedestrian and the furthest thing from an epic as you can get. It was “Aleph, Beth, Gimmel, Heth, etc.”, 22 characters of the Hebrew Alphabet which consists entirely of consonants. The order is nearly the same as the present order. The conclusion is that this was a student’s abecedary (A-B-C-dary), perhaps an exercise.
Inscription was made with an iron stylus. The process is tedious and takes about 5-7 minutes per character. These styli are what is referred to in Jeremiah “Thy sins, oh Israel, are written in points of iron…” The excavators were please to discover a few of these “points of iron” at this level.
There are 4 adjacent reversals, one of which seems to have been followed by an X. Given that the student inscribed a Chi in at the expected position, it is guessed that the X was what might be called the “angry X”, roughly the equivalent of saying “Nertz!” in the inscribing. Some of the other reversals may simply be a matter of the alphabet having an unsettled order. The alphabet was a recent Phoenician invention, but spread rapidly throughout the Mediterranean. The Dorian invasions had pretty much swept away the residue of Minoan script, and the new fangled writing was resisted meaningfully only by the Egyptian hieratic script, and the Assyrian cuneiform.
Indeed, the main way we can ascertain any particular order in the Hebrew alphabet is through the structure of some poems in the Bible. These are formed using the initial letter in alphabetical order. Similar to the morality abecedaries of the Victorian era which began “A is for Apple which in the Garden of Eden…..”, they would simply write (conceptually speaking) “Apple, which in the Garden of Eden…..”
This excavation continues to proceed. Those who are interested in assisting can contact www.zeitah.net. It had been under hiatus after the Iraq invasion, simply because no insurance was available. Residence is on a nearby Kibbutz.
Well, that's got to be a relief: Tut's penis wasn't missing after all.
Researchers everywhere are swelling with pride at the news.
Roy: I accidentally deleted your ArchaeoBlog email before reading. Please resend.
I'll just post here since it may be relevant to others.
The Cleveland Archaeology Society has 9 lectures a year from Septembe through May (usually none in January and doubling up in March). At the last meeting they mentioned that they were looking for lecturers.
I don't know what the compensation is, but it at least includes transportation. Likely the rest is worked out by the program chairman. They vastly prefer field archaeologists doing current digs; but given the wealth of uncurated materials, they won't be short sited.
If any of this is your (or a lurker's) bag, please let me know.
I might be able to, but I also know a lot of Egyptology people. One in Toledo who gives a good talk, too.
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year.
This and other noteworthy prehistoric factoids can be found in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, a survey of genetic, linguistic and archeological research on early man. Primitive peoples, it appears, were nasty, brutish, and short, not at all the cuddly children of nature depicted by popular culture and post-colonial academic studies. The author writes on science for the New York Times and too often wades in where angels fear to tread.
A complete evaluation is beyond my capacity, but there is no gainsaying his representation of prehistoric violence.
That raises the question: Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, does popular culture portray primitives as peace-loving folk living in harmony with nature, as opposed to rapacious and brutal civilization? Asia Times on the fraud of primitive authenticity
I also just read. . . .one whose name and author is utterly escaping me at the moment. IQ - four hours of sleep today. He argues the same thing as Keeley does.
One really interesting case is the Maya. For whatever reason, people latched onto them as something like the Greeks of the New World, minus all the violence. Which is even odder since so much of their iconography has explicit violence in it.
One caveat on the New World though: Part of the reason we got an image of nonviolence was twofold: One, because by the time Europeans got around to any sustained contact 80% of them had already been wiped out by disease. Second, there was no metal weaponry or armor to be preserved, which Westerners tend to key on when looking at warfare.
I'm linking that at ArchaeoBlog though.
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
Yeah, but if I remember right, Cortez beat the Aztecs (not the same as the Incas, I know) not so much because of technological superiority as to the fact that the Aztec's subject tribes allied with Cortez because of their hatred of Aztec overlordship.
Doesn't argue well for a peaceful utopia.
Also, I was planning a trip to Cuba a few years back and did some background reading on the subject -- seems that the Carribean was named after the Caribs -- who apparently were extremely warlike and tended to sail to other lands to capture prisioners to use as a food source.
And smallpox?
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
From what I remember, it didn't play much of a role in the early stages of the campaign, -- say up until the capture of the Aztec emporer. Afterwards, it did play a role, but the Aztecs were broken before smallpox came out.
I've heard both, but I tend to think disease was still the major factor. Don't quote me on that.
I doubt that either the Mayans or the Aztecs are considered primitive cultures. I expect, and reading the ATimes article still expect that they are speaking of pre-civilization cultures such as New Guinea, pre-empirial tribal Africa, Australian and N. American aboriginals, etc.
I used to crack up every time someone would play Neil Young's Cortez the Killer, I loved regaling the wide eyed innocents with Aztec religious/military practices.
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
Yeah, that always struck me too when talking to undergraduates. I actually had an argument with one over the Aztec's human sacrifice practices -- according to this recent graduate (with a minor in anthropology, no less) all of the Aztec sacrificial victims were volunteers!
Re: the highlight. I may have a faulty memory, but as I recollect, Diamond does not make primitive societies sound cuddly and nature-loving at all. Not in Guns, Germs and Steel at all.
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
In Collapse, he does. Warfare and conflict are almost entirely scrubbed from his description of ancient cultures - and he appears to prefer cultures on islands (e.g. Japan, Easter I, and some Sandwich islanders).
Also, the article specifically mentions Diamond by name when holding up examples of modern-day noble savagery.
I posted an update at ArchaeoBlog:
Update: I've not followed the reaction to these sorts of studies closely, but the couple of (academic) reviews I've come across so far don't seem to take up a lot of issue with the argument that past people have been mythologized as largely peaceful. One thing that did strike, me, however, was the thought that both this concept and its opposite -- primitive people as barbaric savages -- had more to do with a need to distinguish ourselves from them for whatever contemporary purpose we have in mind. Anna Simons, in a review of Keeley's War Before Civilization seems to suggest that this is the case:
Keeley does not doubt the psychic unity of mankind; there is endless archaeological evidence that warfare has alternated with peace across all types of societies, during all periods of time. Even so, anthropologists have insisted on reading the ethnographic record through one of only two sets of lenses, those supplied by Rousseau and by Hobbes. For Keeley this is all unforgivably unscientific and thus deeply troubling, but inadvertantly he may be unmasking more deep-seated problems. For instance, how are we to explain the myth's persistence? If we have been so mistaken in projecting our vision onto others, does this reflect our need (or is it a universal need?) for "us/them," "now/then" divides? And if the mythical narratives we cast backward are inaccurate, what does this suggest about the accuracy of our gaze ahead? (p.151)
Anna Simons Review of War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. by Lawrence Keeley Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War. by Robert L. O'Connell Current Anthropology > Vol. 38, No. 1 (Feb., 1997), pp. 149-151
What a weird thing to attribute to a field you are likelier find the idea of "nature" picked apart than you are to find accounts of noble savages.
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
Frank, thanks for the link.
Beasty --- wtf? Are we talking about two different disciplines? 'Nature' may be picked apart I suppose, but the ideal of the virtuous pre-European society still seems to be the norm.
A zombie, however, prefers it raw.
Also, on Cortez: He had something like 100 total Spanish troops. I really don't care how huge the technological disparity is, or disease, etc. There's no way that he could have conquered as much as he did without support from the natives.
Actually, I remember a source comparing the firepower of the respective armies. The Aztecs had something like 1200 slingers in their army of 30,000, and the envelope of slings were comparable to the muskets of the Spanish. The slings had less range, but a higher fire rate. If the Aztecs had not been riven with their problems with conquered tribes, they would have rolled over Cortez without noticing he was even there.
Well, then, here you can get into social psychology, where they have looked at group processes and prejudiced, and basically found that we tend to do that at the (literal, if you believe Tajfel's research) flip of a coin. This happens for current groups, so why not for groups that are historically separated.
It is an interesting phenomenon (along with other phenomena such as mythologizing scientists who made particularly interesting discoveries, etc), so it is something about the psychological makeup.
I found this interesting. I had a friend who lived in Lahore, Pakistan (but he came from Jhelum, originally) with whom I corresponded for almost 30 years. A few years ago, I stopped hearing from him, and I didn't have any current addresses for him, so couldn't write (we had been IMing each other for a while). A year or so ago I asked a fellow member of a writing forum if he could try to track this guy down for me. He did more than I would have expected: he got on a train and went personally to Lahore to snoop around, and he said that he was looked upon with extreme suspicion on account of his Karachi accent.