How the Persians failed to make their case

I skipped chapter 2 because it's covering similar ground as Mark Durie. Between chapters 1 and 3, one might explain why it was that Europeans thought that the Persians had degenerated under their Achaemenid shahs. To use the Middle Persian for xšāyaθiya.

Germans and, maybe, Russians and certainly Greeks and Latins could see that the Persian language changed 500-350 BC. I pick on those four because they retained, stubbornly, the inflexions of their own languages; against such pressures as applied to English and French. But the English and French orientalists were saying the same. Since Beowulf and Tolkien I suppose some of the English have inflexion-envy. Frenchmen might, also.

Value-judgements might also be brought at the empire filling its palaces with eunuchs and harems. Van Bladel, head-scratchingly, makes a point of refusing to judge. Okay. The Greeks sure diagnosed the Persians as an unsteady empire, and literally wrote the book on politics. Eventually the Greeks proved that thesis by destroying their empire. Difficult to dispute results.

Even before the disaster of Alexander III's takeover, Persians already could see that the spoken common language was not that of Behistun anymore. This embarrassed some, who then tried to spell their monuments in the good old way. It appears they had no textbook for that; so such inscriptions ended up being... wrong. Like the Book of Mormon (in its first editions) did Tudor/KJV English wrong. If what you put out there isn't evolved but is just wrong, someone is going to point and laugh at you.

A linguistic history of Persian

Old Persian was an inflected language like Avestan and Sanskrit. Farsi is so, no longer. Apart from the vocabulary and the Semitisms (Aramaic then Arabic), it is pretty-much a pidgin of the ancestral tongue. As of last month Kevin van Bladel is explaining it all - for free.

The pidginism thesis, for van Bladel, came from a chapter in John McWhorter, Language Interrupted (2007). That was before McWhorter's late disgrace. The chapter in 2007 was impressionistic, but still insightful, so van Bladel is now doing justice to a topic which McWhorter - I fear - cannot anymore do himself.

Van Bladel sees the most drastic pidginification in the Achaemenid era. Old Persian was still inflected for Darius I, at least for Darius' monuments. Darius III presided over a language well on its way to the Middle Persian of the Sasanians which, in turn, isn't too far from late-mediaeval Farsi.

This process is what the book essays to sketch. For van Bladel, pots come with people: one people brings language - the pots - and other peoples must react based on how the pots are presented. Greeks, Indians, and Armenians all had to learn Persian; perhaps less hard for them. But so did Aramaeans and Elamites. First, these two languages simply weren't/aren't IndoEuropean, nor are they relatives to each other. More importantly these two were the preponderant populations at the imperial core, where "Javonia" was, like Egypt and Caria, peripheral.

Looks fun. Will read.

Fake myths

The Homeric Iliad contains summaries of maybe hundreds of old legends and myths, mostly Greek and found in other summaries of that legendarium. Eight years ago André Lardinois pinpointed two - which are disputed elsewhere in the epic.

Lardinois believes that the poet intended them to be taken as lies. He brings seven criteria for their ... I suppose, barbarity. Specifically his choices are what Homer calls "Phoenician": that great Other for the Archaic Greeks, what with their Canaanite book-larnin' and mathematical sorcery.

One concerns Tethys and Oceanus, parents of the gods. Here Hera is begging of Aphrodite her magic Venereal bracelet; and of Sleep, because Hera is trying to knock Zeus out for awhile. Sleep, at least, is aware that Oceanus is parent only to rivers... if you're Greek. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, contemporary with Homer, assumes less-ironically that the world came from the salt and clear waters, an ancient Iraqi trope that might even be Sumerian. For Eudemos of Rhodes, likely looking to Aramaic, the two waters were Tauthe and Apason. It's not that Tauthe<*Tjavat/Tiamat had any real etymology with Tethys; for Lardinois, suffice that the names were close-enough for the goddess to lie about it.

The other concerns the division of the cosmos by lot. That sounds positively Deuteronomic. And indeed we don't see this in mainline Greek or otherwise IndoEuropean storytelling. Zeus is simply the god in heaven; Poseidon gets the sea, and Hades gets the underworld. Where we find three gods of heaven, sea, and earth casting lots is in Ugarit. I take it that Greeks didn't really own an earth god, instead having various earth mothers: Demeter, Gaia, Rhea and I'm sure I'm missing some. Seems reasonable that this be Phoenician as well.

Your gold is safe a month after H-Day

In the 1950s came a rash of nuclear-war books. The worst is, I think, Nevil Shute's On The Beach, worse even than Ryder Stacy's porn and the Gamma World oeuvre. I just got through Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. That one was mostly okay, for a Kennedy voter. You know... a voter for the guy who put Confeds in Portraits in Courage.

My recent interest has been in neutron activation. Which is a sideplot in this story, as the gathering of gold becomes the undoing of several characters as beta-decay hits the higher isotopes of precious metal.

Except that gold-198's halflife is 2.6946 days. Push that up to mercury-198, and after that... nothing happens. (Hg-199 would be trace but that's stable too.) Maybe the bulk of the gold, annealed as it will be with mercury, will chip away a little more on the outside. Would mercury poisoning be a problem for rings and watches? Either way, after a few weeks it shouldn't be radioactive no mo'.

Silver-108 and -110, they say, stay hot for longer.

T-FINER, the alpha dog

The starfire / sunbird engines fuse elements to make helium propellant. You know what also emits helium plasma: α-decay. In 2024, quite the year for deep-space rocket ideas, Loura Hall posted how to do it. A yuuge wall poster of its powerpoint can be downloaded (pdf); the project released an update last year.

Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket. But not TFI-Ner[va], oddly, they prefer T-FINER.

This is a sail of (foully) radioactive metal, maybe 36 m². This sail provides its own propulsion, backward. Alpha particles, which are helium-4 ions, blast away up to 0.05c. That calculates to specific-impulse you... you might not even believe if I told you; in the millions (refer to PDF). Mass-ratio would be the mass of the radioactive metal (+ cargo) over the mass of the waste (+ cargo). This ratio would decline by half-life of the element, rather than the rate of burn.

The structure would be to drag the cargo behind. The sail is thin, like 20-50 μm for Thorium-228.

I didn't do the delta-V maths, but NIAC has, and they say they can get 100 km/s. That's a ticket to anywhere in the Solar System. ²²⁸Th (1.9 years) might get us to the 550 AU solar-lens in 25 years. Cf-254 is advertised as 300 AU in one year! (After which, they can maybe flip-and-drag, to 550 AU.) Outside that, this system will stall out so it's not a serious Centauri candidate.

Launching rolls of thin sheets of radioactive sail from Earth is less a problem, I suspect, than making it all in the first place. Alpha-emitters are neutron-deficient and trend heavy. Those meatballs we can spice in space are the opposite. The consortium is talking about skimming reactors or making in cyclotrons (e.g. Ac-227... and Ra-228). That's done on Earth.

Initial thrust remains a problem, unless we just use this to putt around various Earth orbits. One option is to bring layers of this stuff.

Cargo will have to be low-mass; they aim for 8.2 kg. I don't see a comm relay onboard. So I don't know how well it can beam data from Sedna or wherever. This would compete with the sunsail. Because there isn't 'nuff sun out there and, better, the vessel can be steered.

Meanwhile they hope for demo missions. Uranus, with Ra-228, to launch 2034. If someone else sends a full relay to orbit that planet, T-FINER will demand less comms.

Going bananas

Kalium-40 famously has one too many neutrons, β-decaying to argon-40. Not quite radioactive enough to give you argon burps; so it comes up from the mantle with normal potassium in eruptions. How radioactive, is the trick; if it's too long, as with bismuth-209 (2.01×10¹⁹ years) the halflife gets imprecise.

Pumice is telling us more-exactly how radioactive is ⁴⁰K: from Vesuvius. This is done in tandem with recent work verifying the Plinian Eruption against the first months of Titus' imperium.

The latest coins in situ predate 24 June AD 79. I guess the Romans wanted to wait a bit in case someone assassinated the likely heir. It turned out his bro Domitianus liked the guy, better than he liked anyone else in Latium anyway. I don't know any coins got minted in Campania for a year or so after the eruption; Roman coins after 8 September get the "IMP XV" sigil, the fifteenth acclamation of their new imprah. Also "P P", pater-patriae.

The town with the pumice in question was Oplontis. With the assumption of a July-August eruption - Pliny says 24 August - the halflife is narrowed. 1.2044×10¹⁰ years, twelve billion. Give/take 88 million.

Which they then overlay back on the eruption for 1,938 ±13 years before 2025. Which is AD 87. So uh. I guess they added these calcs to some others to get the halflife. The precision is still not what we'd prefer, but ¹⁴C is also a pest.

A spirit-haunted church

It's October! And a new year on Mars...

The position of Orthodox Christianity, in history, has held that natural processes and the movements of the planets are driven by angels. In the past few hundred years, scientists - with mathematicians' help - have dispossessed most of our universe. Some questions remain, yes. But increasingly beyond the purview of, say, the accretion of our Milky Way galaxy.

Modern Orthodoxy seems to be arguing that, yeah, we were a bunch of superstitious ignorants up to Epiphanius and John Damascene. But you can totally follow us when we do necromancies!!

Unlike the veneration for the angel of planet Malacandra, or maybe for the angel who is that planet; necromancy is contradictory in the Bible. On the one hand it's forbidden. On the other hand, as Alex Sorin points out, you can call upon the Sancti for intercession; and the saints are not restricted to the angelic movers of wind and planet, but include also (certain of) the dead. Somewhere in between: king Saul, then barred from asking intercession himself, once called upon a woman in Endor who might bring up a saint on his behalf. That differs from a sinner begging a nun at Agnes' convent to pray for him because... because.

Catacombs and tombs tend to survive the ages and, indeed, Christians could be found down there doing veneration - and begging intercession - from very early years. So Sorin wins on points. The intercession of saints has existed from the earliest days, and extended to dead humans from scarcely-later days. For "great apostasy" restorationists, this happened (I think) too early to extricate from Christianity as the first authors intended. Note that the most notorious restorationist sect, the LDS, goes as far as to post their dead righteous to rule over exoplanets.

Some Christians did attempt to eject necromancy from the faith. Vigilantius is here noted. Jerome had taken him to school, as mah boi does.

To invoke practical necessity, as Gavin Ortlund might, I sometimes dispute Jerome. Jerome was one who preferred the dead to the living. That can be a problem.

I propose here that it is not a problem at base; there is indeed wisdom to be had from the departed, if not from the process of departing. Here I think practical necessity supports Jerome. So - perhaps Sorin could have stopped there.