The Inca started earlier

The Quechua-speaking Huari had an empire, and Tiahuanaco a kingdom; both failed. From these ashes, new kingdoms arose. One came from Cuzco, near the Titicaca. Their incas became emperors. We're mainly quibbling over dates, also spelling because nowadays the sorts of idiot talking about ancestral-wisdom make a point of rejecting Spain's spelling.

We owe our account of events to Miguel Cabello de Balboa. By "we" I mean John Rowe in the 1940s. Radiocarbon wasn't a thing then; and, as we all know, radio-all-of-it got (badly) adulterated after those late 1940s - 1960s radiation bursts. Lowe was still adamantly pro-de-Balboa up to 1997, when radiocarbon recalibration started to work against him.

Frankly I don't consider Lowe to be in the same rank, in archaeological hell, as Thompson for the Maya. Lowe had every right to question radiocarbon. I do that here on this blog all'a-time.

"Lizzie" Wade is relaying that our calibrations have been getting better, even for the understudied Southern Hemisphere. Dendrochronology is coming online. It can peg New Zealand eruptions with world-spanning Carrington events. The Incas had access to vast quantities of wood from the upper Amazon and their northern and southern trade-partners.

Also, I'll have to concede here, de Balboa's account of events reads a lot like Livy. Rah-rah, our people fought these people, we won; on to the next battle. Also it is north-focused. The Spaniards could appreciate this on account those are the provinces they reached, first; also those regions had the most-recent experience with the Inca. The main languages up there were Quechua dialects. Cuzco - the Inca hometown - is about where begins another language, of the Aymara.

One large difference here is that South America didn't really have a Tlaxcala, or even a Texcoco, to record rival versions of events. Also - as Wade notes - nobody could write over there (can't really say "down there" for an Andean society); Mesoamerica was intensely literate.

Lowe, I think, could have stood to shown (if that's grammatic) more humility. He had no reason to defend the honour of de Balboa, which was really the honour of the Inca court; save inertia. If anything Lowe was too solicitous of ancestral-wisdom. Wade is pointing out that the incas were colonialists too, just like the Mexica "Aztec" hoped to be.

The new map has the Inca concentrating south of Titicaca. A rampage occurred in the south over the last decades AD 1300s: the far south, as in present Santiago. Then, the Inca turned north: around ~1400 (same time as Chincha), they hit Saqsaywaman. They did major construction at an exact date 1418 (dendro?). That's about when serious Inca remains also make serious inroads into the old Tiahuanaco environs. Over the ensuing 1400s the Inca faced a stubborn resistance at (southern) Copiapó, which - Wade says - got resolved when the Inca took the copper-mines and left alone the villages. The northern push against old Huari / Quechua homelands did happen, but (to me) that looks like it happened over the 1440s.

From 1450 on, I suppose the Tahuantinsuyu was being consolidated, in particular a new focus on Quito. Perhaps, as Bayes might suggest, the Spaniards found peoples who indeed had only recently joined the Inca Empire. That made easier to peel them off.

I have to admit, I find the new map difficult to interpret. Warrior-caste of Aymara hardened at the Mapuche frontier? Summoning the old Tiahuanacis out of caves?

Out Of Israel

With the h/t to Moldbug (for the title): David Reich floats a hypothesis. Not co-written unless he used AI, which I suspect he didn't. This claims a strong modern-human presence in the Levant that never ventured east, but led to 3%-7% of the resultant Neander genes found not only in Iberia but also in the Neanders they'd replace.

Because it was that early: 300kya. That'd be the long downslope from the MIS 9 Purfleet peak before MIS 8's false subpeak. I'd assumed some modern humans mixed n' mingled but, if Reich is right, they did this well before Eemian MIS 5.

This wasn't intuitive to me. We are aware of Neanders roaming the Levant before the modern-human expansions of the 60s kya (and the contemporary Iberian Neander expansion). Reich's conclusion implies all the Neanders would have pushed into the Levant since MIS 8 (and Eemian).

I don't know how this accounts for the ghost lineage of "modern" Eurasians which avoided all Neander contact until finally reuniting with their modern kin (us). Said modern kin meanwhile subsumed the Neanders of the Levant.

But most of Reich' conjucture seems to be cluster the 300kya horizon. When we hear of modern-modern humans (including subsaharans) being 80/20: the 80% - for Reich - is east Africa ("Kush"), Nile, and north Africa. That's what spilled into the elder Neanders. The 20% was... erectus, pretty-much.

There may have been a green-sahara at the Purfleet peak. This would have dried out pushing the hunter-gatherers there southward, maybe northeast too.

Habakkuk's song

Earlier this year I looked into Joshua Henson's look at Habakkuk 3's language, which he claimed for ABH. I figure it might be worth extending that to theology. The chapter has one. It is highly ancient, even Canaanite. I ask if it's truly ancient or just reactionary...

The consensus ABH corpus includes Psalm 18 (which might have come from the pre-Psalter "Jashar"), Psalm 68 (presently elohist), Exodus 15:1-18 (maybe with l. 19), Judges 5, and Deuteronomy 32-33. In ABH, YHWH is recalled as coming from the south.

Various projects as venture beyond ABH bring also Psalm 29. This is notable, or notorious, for treating YHWH as the god who assails the forces of death and violence at a sacred mountain, striking them with a storm, which storm restores life to the dead land. As is too well known to repeat here, these tropes trend northern. They are rife in Ugaritic lore (where the mountain is Zaphon) and in various stelae of the neoHittites (spread around the Cilician plain). Psalm 29 is I think considered CBH (it shares its mabbul flood with P/Genesis 6-11) but this may reflect the Canaani/Punic syncretism of preDeuteronomic Carmel (since the psalm is otherwise hardly Priestly).

Psalm 77 is also brought, despite also not itself being ABH; as to be read alongside the ABH Exodus lore. Habakkuk 3 (I think) evokes a canon CBH-era assemblage. These would assume the Deuteronomic Moses cycle and the coming of the House of David.

Gert Prinsloo has taken the above dataset, which I suspect most will agree is relevant; to deliver a highly spicy conclusion, that the author deliberately composed a ABH-style poem as reaction to Habakkuk 1-2. The chapter is "Towards an Intertextual Reading of Habakkuk 3" in Intertextuality as Reinterpreting. (We also learn here of the non-Septuagintal alternate translation of Habakkuk 3: "Barberini".) Habakkuk 1-2 leans upon Isaiah 1-39 (perhaps already assembled as such); Habakkuk 3 - for Prinsloo - leans mainly upon the ancient ABH core and some exceptions like that Punic song, as well as upon those first two chapters.

Henson might object that we can see scars of the archaist process in Psalm 78 which is properly CBH although pretending not to be. Henson didn't find such scars in Habakkuk 3.

But... this may be less that Habakkuk 3 was truly ABH, and more that Habakkuk 3 relied on so ABH-weighted a collection of poetry. Our poet might postdate MT's Psalm 78 but rejected it as a clumsy and unworthy effort. Other non-ABH had crept into the collection like our Psalm 29 and, Prinsloo adds, 74 and 77. Our poet allowed these because, let's face it, they're awesome.

It follows that Habakkuk 3 would have read the old songs in accordance with a Deuteronomic proto-history, which history consensus already suspects of existing, just without the Joshua and Judges we know, and of course without the Holiness content. Prinsloo sees his subject as an "inset poem" but in a prophetic book and not, as usual, the narratives. Mind, other prophetic books have included their own psalmic content that doesn't read like the usual oracles.

More Neolithic maths

Earlier we had attempts to apply Gini - social inequality - to Neolithic states. Here, Ukraine and Germany are looking into their potter(ies): diversity versus standards.

The maths here are Shannon. Enough pots have been dug out and (reasonably) dated that the paper can watch them change over time. In Germany, that's Linearbandkeramik LBK; in Ukraine, it's western Trypillia aka Region C (more on the Cucuteni side). The former ended ~5000 BC (soon after 5040 on the chart) and the latter featured almost a full millennium afterward, before declining itself. They skip, say, Achenheim and the arrival of the rodent.

Luckily they do use BCE (here-on, "BC") rather than "BP" which has always been a pain in my ... neck.

Start with LBK. This enjoyed a rise in social complexity over the 5000s. As that happened, the ceramic styles proliferated. It would appear that the artisan behaved as an artist, such that his customers purchased accordingly. Also I recall that LBK towns were internally diverse, perhaps on a model like mediaeval Central Asia where herders might even speak different languages from the farmers, but more-or-less getting along in the market-place. At Vráble one group ended up walling itself off from the other(?) plebeians 5075 BC.

Trypillia was already important 4800 BC; the paper discusses the 4100-3600 BC half-millennium, because data fall away over the 3500s. There they at least got the ox which they could use for plowing rather than, one suspects, making women and serfs do it. At first, 4100-4000 BC, they had six local styles. Here social complexity led to the opposite of old LBK: ceramics were made standard, like in a factory. The paper marks the century 3950-3850 BC as a cultural, or political, era when locals' choices got limited. The paper says that the pottery, being simplified, would have been faster and cheaper to make. This - further - would have allowed for standard rations, and easier identification of foreign imports. These towns - cities really - might not have had cultural (or national) diversity, and if any did show up (like, a trader from Anatolia) the city leveled it.

The "megasites" like Maidanetske (region A, well to the east) were generally egalitarian, best they can tell, and given that some Gini did exist. Mind, those cities were abandoned and/or downsized 3750 BC (one ponders architectural disease mitigation). Smaller sites carried on that ideal before the 3500s BC general collapse. That was probably plague-driven. I don't think the cat had been domesticated; although the culture may have been aware of arsenic as a pest-control.

Blogger takes sides

It looks like Google-Alphabet is about to turn the screws on content posted here. It might be related to a certain upcoming election.

Keys here are "hate", which goes beyond violent threats (absolutely actionable, I don't want them against me) into inciting more "hate" against such characteristic as be associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization. What if we can argue that a characteristic is intrinsically marginal - don't, says Goog; or we'll call it "hate" and block you. Let me raise here that every system must have a centre, surrounded by margins, and the whole point of debate is to argue for one's centre against alternatives.

The "misleading content" rule is even worse. This is defined as such that contradicts official government records. Included here are medicine, which we recently found was wrong; or harmful conspiracy theories, such as that the fact of the medicine being wrong was covered up. Seems that the theory had harmed those people who messed up and tried to hide it.

The multi-aperture telescope

Spyware is constantly trying to improve upon resolution constraints; Raytheon have been funding quite a bit of it. But as our Nancy Grace Roman telescope shows, what is designed for spying on people can be repurposed to spy upon other stars and dwarf-planets. Today we're discussing the Rayleigh criterion. The minimum resolvable angle is proportional [1.22] to the wavelength (λ) over the diameter (D) of the aperture of a monolithic telescope. Or: tyranny of the aperture limit.

They want their multitude of 'scopes to be pushed into orbit or the Lunar farside or, most-likely, some SpL2. In space it's presently constrained by the Starship (D = 9 m), which compares with the Chilean 8.5 m mirror-'scopes.

In 2023, Stephen Fleming with Amit Kumar Jha and some others presented a telescope which might obviate the "monolithic" side of that, kind of like putting rockets in series to boost thrust. Last year they got their idea published.

They want to image other worlds without having to go there. We want to go to the Uranian moons and Triton again, so the project isn't for them. It might however be of use to get some better imaging of the KBOs, and Sedna.

They are teasing this for other systems. In that case they think they can remove the starlight from the array of images, without blocking the star in the 'scope itself (like with the Coronagraph). I expect the prime targets will be the Proxima and Trappist worlds.

The (smaller, cheaper) mirrors in space will have to stay at 20 meters, or whatever, from each other. So - pack poles? A better idea is to give Beyond Reach something to do.

Precedence

Over my time studying early Islam through Islamic sources, I stumbled upon Gerald Hawting's The first dynasty of Islam. This was published 1986; I had some 2000 paperback, but it really hadn't absorbed much 1990s scholarship. It was anyway hard to read - for me - because it concentrated on internal debates about who got dibs on all that pelf. In particular I had trouble with "Muhajirun" versus "Anṣar".

Adrien de Jarmy (with whom readers will be familiar) offers some help, which we may read in preprint.

For sura 9, Mahajirun and Anṣar are peers. What matters is precedence - tasbîq - within each group. This may even react to chauvinists in one camp or the other. These sentiments become rife among the poets, but such may be earlier: I suspect Ḥassan bin Thabit as an Anṣarist representative. I find in Ḥassan little contact with suras 9 (or 48).

De Jarmy finds the crux at the turn of the 2nd/8th century. That implies AH 80-100 / AD 700-720: the reign of al-Hajjaj in the east, after the fitna of Ibn al-Ashʿath. In the Madina, the family of ʿUmar was paramount: these included ʿAbd Allah bin ʿUmar's (d. 73/693) mawla Nafiʿ, and the governor ʿUmar future caliph. Anyway before the Ashaʿitha, the muhajir was the man who went out for the sake of God in the conquests. This agrees well with suwar such as 3-6 and 8 (not 9 - nor 48), and with the consistent Syriac term mhaggrayë (which will naturally lag Arabic semantics). De Jarmy sees an attempt to define the sabiq first in al-Kufa: he is one who pledged the oath to the Prophet himself AH 6 in al-Ḥudaybiyya under a, uh, tree. These are the ahl al-shajara. The anṣar don't figure in this side of the paper's conclusion and seem an afterthought in the tradition; some anṣar may well themselves have been muhajirs.

This paper sees the Madinese offering their alternate definitions. Such may have been floated in the Madina first, only getting out to the rest of Islam after ʿUmar the governor became ʿUmar II the caliph. This city restricted the muhajir such that one only existed in the time of the Prophet; if you emigrated to Iraq after that, that wasn't a real hijra/hegira. All those muhajirs are sabiq by definition; the Anṣar may or may not also count, depending on when their ancestors joined the crew. De Jarmy promises a new paper to explore another clear implication, that the Madinese had also raised the Madinese Hegira to preëminence.