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 Singara / Sinjar highland. From that, it is transferred to the "East Syriac" world.

Pseudo-Methodius denied John's Revelation, instead dipping into Aphrahat's fifth memra (not "memro") on Daniel.

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 had 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.

Where were the University of California's internal reviewers?

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.

A Weinersmithian epilogue

I got Scott Solomon's Becoming Martian and read it today. It's a kinder, gentler version of A City on Mars - less egregiously reddity. It may have been plotted out before Solomon actually read the Weinersmiths, given the overlap in subject.

This is a good thing. It means Solomon doesn't descend into complaining about "colonialism" until the last Becoming Martian chapter - which is in fact the "Epilogue". That's also where is cited Savannah Mandel's execrable Ground Control. I suspect Solomon would have cast stones at the great satan James Watson, too, had he more time; you know Mandel and the Weinersmiths would. I have to suspect Solomon would have cast more shade upon even Musk, whom I can tell he otherwise admires.

I suppose I am saying that the epilogic chapter is out of place. In addition this author still cannot find space to discuss asteroidal coloniessettlements. Maybe it's to be filed with our Moon as temporary housing?

I am of half a mind to rip those last pages off my copy entirely.

Shultanutha

Historians of Islam and, if they are any good, of the Syriac world know šlṭ. Also the esteemed New Republic author Ruth Shalit bore this name, as the sultana of steal. It had been thought that Ruth's (perhaps ashamed) ancestors had the root from Achaemenid Aramaic.

Its first appearance in Canaani thus-far has been in the Joseph narrative in Genesis. This is sus(pected) as informed by Ḥananiah of Yeb (ꜣbw, the elephantine isle). Our scholarship has agreed upon a Persian-era neologism.

šlṭ now appears in an theophoric of Baʻal: Bʻlšlṭ.

This is a reminder of how beholden Canaani/Aramaic scholars are to fragments. Clay tablets don't hold these languages well. Mostly these authors used ostraca and papyrus (or monuments) and if they didn't stumble onto šlṭ as a regular title, the word didn't get writ.

Lecker challenged

Michael Lecker is one of the higher-status scholars in the field of early Islam, to be classed perhaps with later Patricia Crone (or "Cronuh", for the IQSA crew). Like the Danish savant for Mecca, Lecker attempted to salvage the Madinan Era of the Prophet's sira - rather, maghazi - by positing a means it might have happened. Croné had the leather-trade on the north edge of the Hudhayl/Kinana cattle-ranches. Lecker had the [neo]Ghassân.

[Neo]Croné has not been rebutted, I don't think. Lecker on the other hand now has Ehsan Roohi.

I'll admit up-front Yathrib is a tough nut. Mecca has never sat right with us Wansbroughians or, lately, Gibsonites. To me Mecca looks like the Hudhayl poets' annual sanctuary at a time most Arabs preferred the cities of Iraq (being, uh, Christians). Think, how our Christians decorate evergreen trees once a year and sing about the Tannenbaum. But the Madina held more verisimilitude - for 'phobes. Pro-Muhammadan revisionists there tend rather to excuse what the Prophet did there.

As for Ehsan Roohi's argument, this points out that the Madinese clans were intermingled. Here weren't Hudhayl so much as Khazraj. These tribes had Jews as much as "Arabs"; somewhat like recent Abkhazia, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims identify mainly by family tradition. Also - Roohi reminds Lecker - the Constitution of Madina allows for Jews. Roohi doesn't use MacMaster's essay on Heraclius' antiJewish edict, but he well could; this came out in our AD 632 which is well after Year One in Islam. I am unaware of specific antiJewish pushes by Heraclius or by his father in North Africa, during the time of the Prophet.

So it is interesting to see even Lecker being dismantled. Uh, sorry!

The coming of the Shqipe

The mountain men of the Balkans - their "Albanians" - are now genetically-profiled. Nature isn't letting plebs read it but Nrken19 has everything you're going to read anyway, namely the Results.

The Caucasus has people they call "Albanians" too. They're Udi. Completely different.

The Shqipe men have R1b-M269 today. That DNA arrived in the Early Bronze Age, more like an arsenical copper age in that region. It then merged with the people who were there much as we western R1b'ers, from "Corded Ware", did; the first individual of this type was 70% Yamnaya and 30% local "Early European Farmer". Thought is that they came fresh off the steppe 2700 BC and spread around Çinamak. That's Gheg territory spanning the Albania / Kosovo border.

The language won't get written down until, pretty-much, our era. But it took on Doric Greek and then classical Latin (preRomance!) loanwords, so there's no real evidence of these guys living anywhere else since then. In the AD 800s quite a few Slavs dropped in, but these assimilated too (or else modern Albanian would be Macedonian Jugoslavic).

The Kabar Canal

Although I've been poasting here about - say - Ezekiel 38-39 not really belonging to that Ezekielian book, I hadn't much about the book's earlier parts. So: Zilberg and Segev.

All editions of Ezekiel note its writing on the river KBR. Problem: there was no such river under the Babylonians, who ruled when our prophet lived there. Z&S note there came, however, a canal: the Kabârû. This attached Babylon with another city, Borsippa. Documents crop up under Cambyses II of its construction; annals note its use under Darius the Great.

Ezekiel would have been prophet indeed if he predicted the name of a future canal. Z&S instead note that the KBR river shows up only at the beginning of the whole text, and in later passages as make hash of the poetry. The authors conclude: glosses.

Since, uh, blog I get to speculate further. The Bavli community of Jews, preserving Ezekiel, or at least catering to his Judaean fanclub, figured to throw up some tourist-traps why-not. Meanwhile this canal was an important throughfare for the Achaemenids (once Darius had reconquered the place); Jews as Canaanite-bilinguals could do some trade up and down stream. The point of the glosses wasn't to say that Ezekiel was at this river, which didn't then exist. The point was that he was at shrines which became (praise G-d) riverwalk attractions.