Recently in Excavations Category

If one waits long enough, I suppose, one will see every fantasy of the past reborn. Writing in the Asia Times Online, Spengler threatens Muslims with a familiar bogey man of the past:

As Father Dall'Oglio warns darkly, Muslims are in dialogue with a pope who evidently does not merely want to exchange pleasantries about coexistence, but to convert them. This no doubt will offend Muslim sensibilities, but Muslim leaders are well-advised to remain on good terms with Benedict XVI. Worse things await them. There are 100 million new Chinese Christians, and some of them speak of marching to Jerusalem - from the East. A website entitled Back to Jerusalem proclaims, "From the Great Wall of China through Central Asia along the silk roads, the Chinese house churches are called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ all the way back to Jerusalem."

It is reminiscent of a figure whose supposedly vast realms and millions of followers comforted medieval Christians confronted with aggressive Islamic expansion. Much like the bogus website Spengler cites, a text of dubious origins set off the hope for the coming of Prester John:

In the twelfth century, a mysterious letter began to circulate around Europe. It told of a magical kingdom in the East that was in danger of being overrun by infidels and barbarians. This letter was supposedly written by a king known as Prester John.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the legend of Prester John sparked geographic exploration across Asia and Africa. The letter first surfaced in Europe as early as the 1160s, claiming to be from Prester (a corrupted form of the word Presbyter or Priest) John. There were over one-hundred different versions of the letter published over the following few centuries. Most often, the letter was addressed to Emanuel I, the Byzantine Emperor of Rome, though other editions were also often addressed to the Pope or the King of France.

The letters said that Prester John ruled a huge Christian kingdom in the East, comprising the "three Indias." His letters told of his crime-free and vice-free peaceful kingdom, where "honey flows in our land and milk everywhere abounds." (Kimble, 130) Prester John also "wrote" that he was besieged by infidels and barbarians and he needed the help of Christian European armies. In 1177, Pope Alexander III sent his friend Master Philip to find Prester John; he never did.

The lands of Prester John were never found of course, just as I doubt the 100 million strong Chinese Catholic Church with its mission of back to Jerusalem will ever be much more than a Web site -- and a comforting myth for the deluded.

...a return to semi regular blogging (perhaps not).

The wisdom of the religious imagination: It's all poppycock, ultimately, but there are qualitative differences. The Greeks, I think, were the smartest of all--their theology is at least plausible, flexible, unlikely to be frozen in a text (as if purely human language could express infinity).

I began to suspect this some time ago, but the prejudices of youth are often difficult to overcome. We are taught as children (at least in the United States, or at least I was as a grade schooler in the early '70s, again as a junior high school student in the mid-70s, and as a high school student in the late '70s and early '80s) that the Greeks didn't really believe their myths (after all, Socrates didn't). Compared to the sophisticated Judeo-Christian poppyco--er, theology--Greek notions of gods personifying qualities, gods who are every bit as prone to human weaknesses like jealousy and vanity, but also capable of great passion and courage; they can be humbled and feel pain. I recall my teachers pointing out that, unlike the timeless classics of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Greeks had several different, contradictory versions of the same story (as if Judaism, Christianity and, for that matter, Islam, all didn't offer differing versions of the significance of the same fictional story).

Now -- think of how much more sophisticated the Greeks were. Take the subject of love. We are either to regard the romantic version as something sinful unless it is regulated through the rites of marriage, whereas the parental version is viewed as always being beneficial (indeed, it's the paradigm from which the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic relationship between worshipper and worshipped--with the former being perpetual children to the latter).

For the Greeks, Eros could be destructive but also drove change and maturation. Storge, who personified parental love, could be both nurturing and smothering. The approach is far more sophisticated -- and far more believable.

It's ages since I've read fiction (well, read -- I do occasionally reread Robert Louis Stevenson for his style), but on a late night whim I ordered a copy of Trilby, by George du Maurier, from Amazon.com. It's odd how the name Trilby, or that of George du Maurier, means so little to us--almost as if Jekyll and Stevenson were unknown, but everyone knew the infamy of Edward Hyde. (I think I recently told someone that I thought Jekyll & Hyde was the perfect work of art -- I still think this to be true, but only if the story hasn't first been ruined for us by knowing the connection between the two...)

In any case, the name missing from Trilby is Svengali...

I'm half way through the book, and unlike my first reading of Jekyll and Hyde, I have no idea how it will turn out, but I can't wait to see. Du Maurier is not as skilled a writer as Stevenson -- I think at least 50 or 60 pages could be cut from what I've read without the slightest diminishment -- but he does keep things moving and it is an enjoyable read.

As fascinating (and repulsive) as Svengali is (about whom more later), It's worth pausing a moment on Miss Trilby O'Farrell:

Latin and Greek are languages the Young Person should not be taught to understand — seeing that they are highly improper languages, deservedly dead — in which pagan bards who should have known better have sung the filthy loves of their gods and goddesses.

But at least I am scholar enough to enter one little Latin plea on Trilby's behalf — the, shortest, best, and most beautiful plea I can think of. It was once used in extenuation and condonation of the frailties of another poor weak woman, presumably beautiful, and a far worse offender than Trilby, but who, like Trilby, repented of her ways, and was most justly forgiven —

'Quia multum amavit!'

Whether it be an aggravation of her misdeeds or an extenuating circumstance, no pressure of want, no temptations of greed or vanity, had ever been factors in urging Trilby on her downward career after her first false step in that direction — the result of ignorance, bad advice (from her mother, of all people in the world), and base betrayal. She might have lived in guilty splendour had she chosen, but her wants were few. She had no vanity, and her tastes were of the simplest, and she earned enough to gratify them all, and to spare.

So she followed love for love's sake only, now and then, as she would have followed art if she had been a man — capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else. Like an amateur, in short — a distinguished amateur who is too proud to sell his pictures, but willingly gives one away now and then to some highly-valued and much-admiring friend.
Sheer gaiety of heart and genial good-fellowship, the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading. She was bonne camarade et bonne fille before everything. Though her heart was not large enough to harbour more than one light love at a time (even in that Latin Quarter of genially capacious hearts), it had room for many warm friendships; and she was the warmest, most helpful, and most compassionate of friends, far more serious and faithful in friendship than in love.
Indeed, she might almost be said to possess a virginal heart, so little did she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments and clingings and jealousies.

With her it was lightly come and lightly go, and never come back again; as one or two, or perhaps three, picturesque Bohemians of the brush or chisel had found, at some cost to their vanity and self-esteem; perhaps even to a deeper feeling — who knows?

I'd much rather fall in love with Trilby O'Farrel than with, say, Madame Bovary...

...when P stands for Puritan. G.K. Chesterton argued, here, that the three keys to understanding Shaw's work (three keys misunderstood by the British public at large) were his Irish heritage, his Puritan background and his progressive politics. These elements led Shaw to some fight some battles on unexpected terrain. Chesterton writes of the banning of Mrs. Warren's Profession, also available for online reading here, by a certain Mr. Redford, who was the Censor of Plays. Mrs. Warren runs a brothel; her daughter grows up in the lap of luxury unaware (until the action of the play) of how her mother makes her money. Chesterton explains how Shaw attacked the Censor, the preserver of public morals banning a work on prostitution, to defend his play:

The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many ways his highest quality—righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy's camp at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done, with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting diseases of that life. Mrs. Warren's Profession was not up to a sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the Censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.

That passage really captures Shaw's essential genius--the last line is almost Shavian.

A remnant of a finer age: Gilbert K. Chesterton writing on George Bernard Shaw. Chesterton, a conservative opponent of Shaw's politics, recognized Shaw's talents as an artist and originality as a revolutionary. It is amazing how just Chesterton is to Shaw. Take this paragraph, for example:

I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell. Give me even that[Pg 86] business-like benevolence that herded men like beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils; give me even the suppression of "Zæo" rather than the triumph of "Salome." And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the flâneurs; who could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and ancient emotion of the salus populi, almost extinct in our oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so pure.

We could use more nor neglecting...

Stephen Schwartz puts the Serbian crowds attacking the U.S. embassy into perspective, offering a very harsh, but by no means an unfair, judgment:

Let Serbs dance in the ashes of their undeserved reputation for honor and glory. They will be the black hole of Europe for a hundred years. Albanians kiss our flag and express their gratitude and love for us. Let us not forget who have been our honorable and truthful friends.

I'm reminded of something I read a few summers ago in John Keegan's authoritative work The First World War. Culled from pages 48 to 52:

The chief source of subversion [in Austria-Hungary] was Serbia, an aggressive, backward and domestically violent Christian kingdom which had won its independence from the rule of the Muslim Ottoman empire after centuries of rebellion. Independent Serbia did not include all Serbs. Large minorities remained, by historical accident, Austrian subjects. Those who were nationalists resented rule by the Habsburgs almost as much as their free brothers had rule by the Ottomans. The most extreme among them were prepared to kill. It was the killing by one of them of the Habsburg heir that fomented the fatal crisis in the summer of 1914.

***

...nothing, it seemed, could diffuse [the problem] of the Serbs but the use of force. Their Orthodox Christianity made them a religious as well as a national minority and one which Russia's guardianship of the Orthodox Church made cocksure; their long years of guerrilla resistance to Turkish rule had rendered them headstrong and self-reliant but also, in Austrian eyes, devious and untrustworthy; their poverty kept them warlike. The small kingdom of Serbia was intensely warlike. It had won independence from the Ottomans in 1813 by its own effort and glory and territory in the Balkan Wars in 1912-13. National rebirth had raised the idea of a Greater Serbia, strong within the kingdom and a beacon to Austria's Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. It had to be resisted, for not only were Serbs but one minority among others in those territories but neither could be surrendered.

***

The Serbs, moreover, were odd-man-out even in the wild Balkans, worse than that in the eyes of civilised Europe. The "Asiatic" behaviour of their army's officers in 1903, when they had not only killed their king and queen but then thrown their bodies from the window of the royal palace and hacked them limb from limb with their swords, had shocked sensibilities everywhere.

Their heirs have just destroyed our embassy. Serbs often raise the specter of Muslim extremism to justify their excesses (they equated the Bosnian president and amiable scholar Alija Izetbegovic, who found as much wisdom in Dostoevsky and Hesse as he did in the Koran, with the ayatollah). Yet like their Iranian counterparts, they reject the most basic principles of the international order.

While working with the nine-year-old on division and fractions earlier today, I was reminded of a wrong answer I once gave in a high school math class -- that an integer divided by zero, say, 5/0, equals infinity.

I have no idea where I got the idea (I believe my father told me the same thing when I was learning division) A bit of googling turned up a 12th century Indian mathematician, Bhaskara, and this bit of perhaps inaccurately attributed wisdom:

Bhaskara said that number divided by zero is infinity. (God).

Which reminds me that sitting on my shelf, neglected, is Edna E. Kramer's The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, which tells us that Bhaskara also asked what number multiplied by itself -- squared -- would equal negative one. To this question, he could only suggest the empty set as an answer.

After the nine year old went to bed, I spent the better part of the part of my evening learning card tricks...

I've been reading The Bible Unearthed, which I bought a while back and skimmed a few pages and put aside and forgot all about until this came along. The book reevaluates the Bible--or about two thirds of the Old Testament at least--in light of archaeological findings, and comes up with a fairly different narrative. No Exodus, for example--the Israelites were always Canaanites. The evidence for a Davidic state with Jerusalem as its capitol or for a Solomonic empire extending from the Nile to the Euphrates simply doesn't exist. There wasn't even a united kingdom. While Judah was a pastoral backwater, ancient Israel, the land of Ahab and Jezebel, Baal worshippers and Asherah sticks -- was actually a sophisticated multiethnic state that vied culturally, economically and militarily with Syrians, Assyrians, Moabites and Phoenicians for dominance in the Levant.

Authors Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman have put together a work that, I think, someone not versed in interpreting archaeological evidence could easily follow. The gist is that the Bible begins with two parts, a sort of collection of legends (which may have had some basis in fact but are essentially myths) and a polemical, imagined history concocted to support the goals of the 7th century BCE king of Judah who sought to add to his territory what had been the old Omri empire of northern Israel.

A few caveats: Archaeological evidence is open to interpretation and those interpretations can prove to be totally erroneous by new discoveries (or new techniques--Carbon 14 dating radically changed our understanding of the spread of ancient culture). In the case of this book, it seems to me that the authors are sometimes forced to label certain remains are "Israelite" or "Hebraic" although there's nothing in the material remains that indicates the religious orientation of the creator. As always, reasonable people could find fault with some of the arguments. That said, I think it's a compelling work -- one which demonstrates from actual evidence a counter-narrative to the Bible that makes a great deal of sense. I don't believe fealty to the text is reasonable.

Against my better judgment, I left a comment over on Contentions noting my discomfort with Biblical archaeology. "Biblical Archaeology, which begins by looking for physical evidence consistent with narratives that may have been first written down long after the events they describe, uses an inherently flawed procedure. Researchers put a premium on finding what supports the narrative they seek to prove, and similarly tend to ignore anything the contradicts it," I wrote. However, absence of evidence never seems to persuade the faithful to revise their opinions of the holy texts.

I have a tremendous fondness for Plutarch -- I read most of the Lives in 10th and 11th grade and thought then that they were more accurate than inaccurate (if they were good enough for Shakespeare...). But there are two reasons, my excellent Latin teacher warned me, to be cautious about taking Plutarch with anything less than a softball-sized grain of salt. First, he wrote of many events as distant from his own lifetime as the Renaissance is from our own. And second, he wrote his lives with the didactic purpose of providing moral instruction rather than merely to relate what had happened.

It appears that Plutarch might have been wildly wrong, if we credit this this report:

The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday.

After more than five years of analysis of human remains culled from the pit, also called an apothetes, researchers found only the remains of adolescents and adults between the ages of 18 and 35, Athens Faculty of Medicine Anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios said.

"There were still bones in the area, but none from newborns, according to the samples we took from the bottom of the pit" of the foothills of Mount Taygete near present-day Sparta.

"It is probably a myth, the ancient sources of this so-called practice were rare, late and imprecise," he added.

Meant to attest to the militaristic character of the ancient Spartan people, moralistic historian Plutarch in particular spread the legend during first century AD.

Plutarch is not diminished by this revelation (any more than Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or HBO's Rome should be judged solely on the basis of their historical accuracy); we can even concede that he might well have been working from inaccurate source matter, and chose to include it because it seemed to him to have the ring of truth, or, less charitably, to be too good to check. But what of the Bible?

Zahi Hawass, a fairly cautious scholar and a first rate archaeologist, told the New York Times that the Exodus story--well--"Really, it’s a myth.". That's his considered opinion as an archaeologist:

“If they get upset, I don’t care,” Dr. Hawass said. “This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”

Biblical archaeologists would like us to revise our opinions of the Bible based on their findings. Will they in turn revise the Bible on the basis of the absence of evidence for its historical accuracy?

Joseph A. Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies is simultaneously a dense and gripping read, and incredibly thought-provoking. After noting that for 98 percent of humanity's sojourn on earth, we lived in small, discreet, simple bands, Tainter writes,

It has only been within the last 6000 years that something unusual has emerged: the hierarchical, organized, interdependent states that are the major reference for our contemporary political experience. Complex societies, once established, tend to expand and dominate... A dilemma arises from this: we today are familiar mainly with political forms that are an oddity of history, we think of these as normal, and we view as alien the majority of human experience. It is little surprise that collapse is viewed so fearfully.

6,000 years is a lot of years, but just two percent of the species' time on the planet. Is the ability to live in complex societies an evolved adaptation? (Julien Jaynes suggested that external stresses led to internal changes in the way our brains operate--one need not credit his theory to ask whether a subtle change in our mental make up did open the door to civilization). Obviously complex societies are an evolutionary adaptation that confer advantages (better, more abundant and more diverse food, law and order allowing better chance that children will reach adulthood, and so on), but do they also have drawbacks? For example, without writing, religious beliefs could be changed and adapted by each generation to meet their situations. The idea of a fixed text can be a maladaption. Of course, there's no such thing as a fixed text--the meaning of religious texts changes by the instant--but the illusion of a final, universal text and perpetual, fixed laws will lead to societies structured on fictions, tethered less and less to reality.