Final Palatial

Minoan Crete was literate but presently prehistoric, despite overlapping enimently historic nations like XVIII Dynasty Kemet (or "Egypt", if you follow Ptah), Ugarit, and the Hatti. Between the mid 1400s and 1370 BC, Knossos was Greek. Hermahai recently floated a theory out of school, that this "Final Palatial" Greek colony got sacked in a rebellion.

Everyone knows that Knossos was burned. That is one reason we have this snapshot of scribal tablets, baked in place. This is what proves that "final" construction of this formerly-Minoan palace was administered via the Linear B medium, although some Linear A had survived too.

Excitable speculative classicists like Mary Renault used to get confused about the various major events around here: Thera's eruption, the Greek takeover, and the fire. Most agree these days that Thera blew up on the early side of the 1500s, although some nasty weather events had preceded this from earlier eruptions far elsewhere. The indigenous leaders of Knossos and of other palaces had well over a century to get their acts together and, like, not become Greeks. Anyway: they got took by Greeks who had their own ideas on how to live in a foreigners' palace.

That rule, it seems, lasted eight decades / fourscore years, which I can compare only to the Latin kingdom in the AD 1200s Constantinople. Hermahai is calling it a misrule. He sketches a totalitarian bandit state: capitalism for us, fascism for the yokels. This, we might even compare to the early Bolshevists; or to the Moghuls. Maybe to the Assads.

Elsewhere the likes of Javid Hashmi would discuss "colonialism" or "settler colonialism". I'm not getting into that; except to call him a bully, who makes up words to demoralise and ultimately dehumanise people he poses as beneath him. What I would like to know, is the general phenomenon. I ask if this Greek elite wanted to stay in Knossos, or if they were just using it to fund adventures back in Greece. The Moghuls believed they were Timurids and, stuck in northern India, aimed to fund their victorious return to Central Asia; ol' Clive certainly didn't want to make Bengal his home. On the other hand, we have the Rhodesians and the criollos of Lima, who absolutely did hope to stay where they were. I get the impression that the Greeks' extensive work on the Knossos palace suggests they enjoyed the Knossos life.

As material-culture goes, most place the fire at Late Minoan IIIA2. A minority holds out for LM IIIB, although that is more postPalatial, which term means what it looks like it means. The toponyms of Linear B (we can't read much A) point to Knossos administering, or exploiting, the whole west and centre of Crete. I'd the impression the east was a fair concern once upon a time.

And the Final Palace had some fear that a disaster was coming. Emilia Oddo thinks they were hoarding bronze. Even in those days they might be able to predict a volcano, but not an earthquake or a random blaze. An invasion or a peasant revolt however...

I continue my suspicion that these Greeks had come from the west of the island. The east, perhaps, held forth against the invaders. If so, the east would have provided a haven for the old Knossians. Sometimes they come back.

Although: pace Hermahai, whoever did burn down the palace, didn't erect a Fourth Palatial. Qui bono, was a LM IIIB palace at Chania almost-certainly named "Kudonia" at the time. I'm pondering less a revanchist revolt, and more a protoDorian invasion. I should like to see some tree ring analysis.

BACKDATE 4/17

Erectus amongst both of us

So we don't get it all twisted, let's revisit Erectus Walks Amongst Us. This got famous in alt-right circles in the late 2000s... until the Neander and Denisovan genomes got decoded, which couldn't find much Erectus in African populations. Instead a Super Archaic genome was wandering among the Eurasians.

We had some hints of super-archaism in Africa as well, but a lot of that got put down to twists of two African populations intertwining at home before and after all those parahumans got loose in Eurasia.

So, on 4 April we got Alan R. Rogers, Md Touhidul Islam, Colin M. Brand, and Timothy H. Webster: "Human Ancestors Interbred with Two Distinct Populations of Distant Relatives". This brings the Super Archaic back into Africa. However they remain less super than that which bred into the ancient Eurasian parahumans.

BACKDATE 4/17

Anna Shirav's paraEzekiel

Mladen Popović has posted on the Ezekiel tradition in the Second-Temple era. To summarise: Ezekiel has two versions, as we've discussed here; from one to th'other, MT Ez 38-39 shifts. At Qumran another, third edition was copied. This is wholly wild, which Qumran scholars have in fact titled as a "2 Ezekiel" (which Josephus may even have known) or, lately, the "Words Of Ezekiel". Anna Shirav has been on this beat (pdf); which is now a book, Ezekiel Traditions.

That last link is to Google Books so, as you can see, I haven't read it all.

What I can tell you is that MT Ez 38-39 ain't in the Words. The Words is a secondary tradition mostly around Ez 30's oracle against Egypt and Ez 37's vision of the bone-valley.

What if, however, Ez 38-39 (or, Greek 37-38) started out in the Words...? We'd have precedent - better, Christian postcedent. An attempt was made to inject bits of Aramaic Levi into the (Christian) Testament of Levi. Here, perhaps, somebody extracted the oracles now in MT Ez 38-39 from the Words. At the same time somebody else did it, but in what would be 37-38 in Greek.

The Q-Day may come sooner

I haven't much looked at quantum algos lately, since I flat haven't done those [meta]maths, except on occasion to chuckle at those who've accidentally done my maths. Sabine has lately alerted us that perhaps we should start paying attention.

Again, even the old maths are having trouble in the security sphere. AI has been uncovering Vulnerabilities. Anthropic's Claude Mythos has been making headlines, to which I suggest a cool head.

Presently we've been patting quantum computer engineers on their heads as they build four- or eighteen- or even eighty-qubit monster machines being supercooled with helium. The assumption had been that the Cold Equations, cruel to some, rested upon qubits not reaching the necessary bulk until the 2030s even '40s. As with interplanetary probes, advancement can happen in midjourney... but so can politics.

To Campbell's own 1954 Cold Equations, Quentyn Quinn long ago pantsed the premise (which author/critic Ralph Hayes da-Deuce has since taken offline). It may be we should pants the early-2000s premise of Quantum Forever Tomorrow.

We might not need myriads of qubits to mess up all encryption. We might just need the low hundreds. That-much a vicious government can certainly do. China has a vicious government.

I suggest however we don't do what Altman does, to treat all this as a means to send pensioners into the penury whither they're sending young STEM workers. I suggest research into quantum programming as does not involve breaking codes alone.

The shattered gene

I find difficult to tell when Theodore Beale is lying or not. I propose that when he lies, a larger strategy is at play.

We'll tackle the most-obvious Beale lies first. As to the Apollo missions: they happened, such that nobody has to prove it to Beale. Although just about any skepticism on this particular point is disingenuous, Beale's stands above most. The man was in Fenris Wolf who designed Moon action games in the late 1990s, perhaps not well known today but very popular sellers at the time. Beale, in short, knew full well at that time what really happened in those 1970s missions. Present-day, in this back-half of the 2020s, Beale wants his readers to waste the Clown World's time and to tie their loyalty to Beale himself.

That does not mean that Beale is all about a cult of personality. He sounds sincere on a few points. I believe he really does hate the Clown World - and Jews. I believe I even know how this happens. He is a mirror image of Yamara - or Turtle Island: the more he drives away potential friends in a group, only his enemies in that group will find him.

His Apollo denialism is a feint, to wrap up that para; Beale is lying about lying. So why do it?

The Clown World really does have some problems. Ironically, perhaps, Beale has revived Darwin; or at least devised a new Darwin / Mendel synthesis. Natural-selection alone creates a blob; genetics alone accumulates Mutation. Thus, this long essay devoid of the standard snark. It doesn't read as if Vox Day be trollin'. I'd love to read a counter-argument, if he is.

Davide Piffer may have that counter. Neanders evolved for rote-autism in a difficult and seasonal (hunting) environment, often near-solitary. Africans evolved for group dynamics which needed less brain capacity per person, as long as the larger tribe could retain lore. Tigers versus lions, methinks.

Look how everyone thinks of West Africans today; it's not pretty. As late as 2008 we had Erectus Walks Amongst Us doubting if the blacks were even human, as a tiger might ponder a pack of encroaching lions. Now we know better... that people whose fellow humanity we should have been doubting were the Neanders. And maybe by 45kBC (five hundred millennia after they and we split) they dubiously were.

But now we Eurasians and, indeed, Americans like Beale did recombine with these very estranged kinfolk. Thus unfreezing the gene at a crucial time.

One does wonder what Beale would make of the Danes these days, in that light.

Missing cuneiform

Cécile Michel offers an overview of the vagaries of cuneiform preservation.

Certainly our knowledge of Assyria - and of the reception-history of older lore in Assyrian society - is badly distorted by several accidents. One is that Assyria was sacked in antiquity, with much of its fabled museum carted downriver to Babylon. Another was... modern archaeology: the French carted hundreds of crates down the same river (Tigris) which pirates then hit at Qurnah. The pirates didn't find much gold, so settled for the crates: they then dumped the artwork and any cuneiform into the swamp.

As bad as that disaster was, I don't know that those excavators were shifting that many clay tablets. Those cargoes were meant for European museums, for display more than for research. What absolutely was being shifted were inscribed objects (some claimed precious, although I doubt the pirates would have skipped them) and bas-reliefs. These latter will be monumental stelae. Think: Sargon II's propaganda, assuming he hadn't made copies elsewhere. I've suspected the earlier sackings had inflicted the bulk of the damage here.

The main reason, I think, for our gaps in this culture is the sheer multitude of fragmentary tablets, not nearly so romantic as might be on-display. We lack the number of Akkadian (mostly) readers to sift through all this stuff. The Oxyrhynchus researchers are suffering the same problem out West, in Greek and Coptic. Hence why we're still piecing together legends, yea even unto Babylon.

Khazaria, II

Keith Woods is a man of what's now on the alt- side of the Right. He has lately evaluated the Koester / Sand arguments for a Jewish Khazaria. The arguments still don't stand up.

The Khazar Hypothesis was not, at its outset, a stupid hypothesis. Before Elhaik, we simply didn't own the data. Genetics provides data: with it, we now know the Magyars of Pannonia as a sort of Ugric Khazaria. The language of Hungary is like Finnish; the people, by ancestry, are all Slavs. Could not East European Jews, likewise, be some kind of Turk or Alan who now use Hebrew but are not at all Semitic?

We have an excellent handle on the Ashkenaz genome by now. This rules out a "Magyarism" - here, Judaism - of a gentile people of Eastern Europe. Instead, the evidence points to migration of Rheinlander Jews to the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, famously polyglot, and also (at the time) tolerant. This is why Yiddish looks like mediaeval German plus loanwords (BaltoSlavic, Mishnaic Hebrew / Aramaic, and maybe Latin). I've allowed for "mediation" through Khazaria of (wildly) Oriental intrusions, like mine own. But that's not the majority.

Elhaik came too late to this party: like an Apollo skeptic today, or Erectus Walks Amongst Us in 2008. Jonas Alexis in his rebuttal looks like ItIsHoeMath on Erectus.