The Beja of old

I saw this one yesterday but was flat too exhausted - I blame altitude sickness - to post anything of it. So I'll try tonight.

These are mass graves in the strip of Sahara east of the Nile, 4000-3000 BCE extending into the third millennium, so overlapping the upper-Egyptian kingdom... in time (we'll get to space and people). The report comes from Atbai in modern Sudan. This abuts the southeast Egyptian coast. I expect similar ruins exist in that side of Egypt as well.

That region was Blemmyes in antiquity; the reaches of the Cushitic language Beja today. Since Browne in 2003 most scholars believe Beja - which is simply "Beduin" adapted to the language - evolved from Blemmyan. The Nubians seem not to have mingled with them much by contrast with Egyptians and, lately, Arabs.

The Red/Erythraean sea maintained links with the Egypt of the Pyramids, of "Red Sea Scrolls" fame. I don't know that any Beja vocabulary appears in those scrolls. It may be too far north for our purpose. There's talk the Egyptians first took note of the Blemmyes in the later Ramesside era or under Sheshonq, because - as with Qeheq - someone then uses a Beja word to open a prayer. The earlier Egyptian pharaohs cared about Nubia, who owned a viable state of their own; but ignored the nomads, who did not and do not.

The article notes that the old desert herdsmen, who assuredly behaved there like the Beja behave today, evolved an elite class. But was it a Cushitic or a Nubian class?

Local Bubble: Origins

A few years back we looked into iron-60 from recent supernovae. I pondered if such were connected to our local bubble. Today we heard that the local bubble indeed has something to do with Fe-60 in Antarctic ice... but this iron's a lot younger. It arrived between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago, say Catherine Zucker, Seth Redfield, Sara Starecheski, Ralf Konietzka, and Jeffrey L. Linsky.

This is about as low as, perhaps, a consistent Antarctic ice core can go, since 122kBC is MIS-5e/Eemian. At least easily.

The explosion which hollowed out this gap, and created the iron, out in space; has been dated 1.2Mya in Upper Centaurus Lupus. Joshua Peek offered some help, whom we remember from 2024 (with Opher and, sigh, Loeb). The paper does not rule out earlier excursions into other iron-poor bubbles, as Zucker's crew point out.

Anti-abecedaries

"Abecedary" refers to the ABCD order of the present common European alphabet, coming as it does from Imperial Latin. Earlier Latin had the "element", which I recall referred to an earlier LMN start to the sequence. Also in use - and perhaps influencing Latin's decision for ABCD - is "abgad". This applies to Arabic (where it's usually "abjad") and Hebrew - also Greek.

Al-Jallad with Prioletta is discussing the wider Semitica where they used a consonantal system as against, like, cuneiform or whatever the Ethiopians are doing. It's been known that the Yemenis preferred a HLHM order. These two argue that the Yemenis, too, used a mnemonic to fill in the letters: "halham".

Safaitic and Hismaic transcribe old dialects of Jordanian and north-Hijazi (respectively) Arabic, like that of the urban Nabatis. The two authors note that they eschewed-or-abandoned halham. When they write their spots in order, the order is that of the Jews. Abgad.

BACKDATE 5/15

Yet another PseudoMethodius book

Ancient Jew Review, which is not the Internet's best site for that - nor is it always Jewish - is hosting Evan Schafer's 23 March(?) review of Christopher Bonura's A Prophecy of Empire. According to the review, the book lifts the prophecy of the title, which it claimed for Mar Methodius, from the Shingar(a) / Sinjar highland. From that, the book transfers this prophecy to the "East Syriac" world.

Pseudo-Methodius famously skipped over John's Revelation. That omission may count as evidence for not being au-courant with such Miaphysitism as held sway among, for one, the Copts. Its main prophetic source instead was Aphrahat's fifth memra (not "memro") on Daniel. I must say here that Aphrahat is evidence for nothing inasmuch as his career preceded the Ephesian councils.

I took the liberty of searching for "Treasures" in the book. I don't find the word. I had the notion that everyone knew the apocalypse relied upon the Cave of Treasures but, it seems, not Bonura - nor Schafer. It is this, not the manuscript-tradition, which scholars use to place this text for the Miaphysite world. I must say that Singara will do as well as any other monastic environment for an east-Syrian Miaphysite origin.

As to why the text itself prefers "Qardu" and does not mention Shingar, I look at a map of old Corduene and I'm ... not seeing much difference. Qardu might be a little up and northeast. One can still find Miaphysite monasteries over there like Elpap / Alfaf / Mar-Mattai though, so even if that MS is wrong about Shingar it still doesn't matter.

Where were the University of California's internal reviewers?

The Bronze Age selection-crisis, I

This will likely be a series of poasts. I hadn't listened to the whole Dwarkesh-from-Reich interview but we do have a transcript. I was always more a reader than a listener anyway.

Among the other bombshells, and the refusal to acknowledge Piffer or Harpending or Cochran or Murray; I'm here to comment on this: The TYK2 variant for tuberculosis risk, a multiple sclerosis risk variant, inflected and increased in frequency before the Bronze Age, and then 2,000 or 3,000 years ago reversed in that period. My boldface.

MS is, I think, associated with a herpes virus: here the Epstein-Barr mononucleosis / glandular-fever. This maybe inspired Aldiss' bone-fever (later, fat-death). The herpes baseline goes waaaayyy back; I think even alligators get it.

"TYK2" refers to on-receptor tyrosine-protein kinase. Wiki relates it not to MS but to arterio-sclerosis.

I wonder if Reich or at least the transcription has suffered his/its own "mis-sense". Dwarkesh's chart seems irrelevant to that part of the interview.

BACKDATE 5/14

Cosmic-ray rule #1

This blog had noted a rule such as cosmic rays may break. The assumption had been that ambient light imposes a speedlimit upon relativistic protons, 5 × 10¹⁹. Since some rays show up with more energy than allowed by this mass and velocity, those rays must not be protonic. Iron ions, for instance.

So here's another rule, which rays of all masses follow. This is an energy limit of 15 tera-electronvolts (trillion 10¹²; TeV). Implicitly rather a steep dropoff than an absolute limit.

- or "TV", in our article. The Swiss - specifically the Geneva Francophobes - here piggybacked upon a project "meant" for dark-matter. The DAMPE space-telescope. Maybe they just used that name so as to get the funds.

BACKDATE 5/14

Lithium-propellant thruster

Been a bit since this blog has last looked in on new thruster tech. JPL have dredged up another 1960s concept. This is a nuclear-fueled, "magnetoplasmadynamic" lithium ejector.

Its chief engineer James Polk has focused on other ions thus far, like xenon. The article implies Polk has always dreamt of lithium for this.

It's high-impulse, not a one-time kick to a new trajectory. It promises 120 kW, 25 times the Psyche power. The problem then shifts to, what dynamo can deliver 120 kW in deep space consistently. Hence, nukes.

The hype is, "it goes to Mars!" - as usual. Really it's for probes to the far-parts of the Solar System. Which also aren't to be scoffed at; so, I'd rather such press releases focus on that.