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 of 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. 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.

Return of the white wolf

South Sweden was Germanic throughout the Iron Age. Then, AD 450-510, it got invaded - from central European ancestry. The main fort - "Borg" - involved here was Sandby, which after a massacre was left to ruin.

In order to get there, a central European would have to have pushed through what's now Pomerania. Some today argue that a language was there once, separating Prussia from whatever was spoken in Germany at that time - which, duh, was German. I don't know if that language was still around however.

Another thought - and if I may say, a better thought - is that here we are dealing with ex-Huns. Etzel was murdered at the beginning of this timeframe. Better known to Latins as "Attila", his subjects were not Huns (last I heard the Huns were being claimed for the Yenisey). Attila's fighting class were Goths; their peasantry at this time Latinised Dacians and Pannonians. Germans call them Wallacians; they now call themselves Romanians.

Anyway the Gepids et al. weren't in wonderful position to do more invasions south or west. Other Germans were already there and didn't want the Huns' "traitors". The Roman Empire in Constantinople, now laser-focused on the Balkans, was not a nut as could be cracked. From the East whence the Huns, the Avars were coming, uniting the Slavs.

Up north however - what was there? Maybe not the riches of Byzantium; but the Baltic could be fished and amber could be sold to the far side of Denmark. Recall that the Franks were building a viable kingdom, not as grand as Rome, but not too much worse than the Gaulish province had been under, oh, its Constantine III.

Against this "return" the Danes, for their own part, put up a fence, the Danevirke.

At any rate, having taken south Sweden, they'll enter Anglosaxon legend as "Geats". Some genetics hint at that too. Note Peter Heather's name on this one.

Failed sarcasm

In a time when the online Right is touting how well we are doing controlling inbound migration, Prof. Glenn Reynolds first says other countries have the problem too and, second, that DEMOCRATS POUNCE. And third he links the the wrong thing; the actual article is hither.

Yes, Glenn; this is the fault of the MAHA Moms. And you're standing in the way of the brush.

Don't put your finger on the button

The meme goin'round X is the red button or the blue button. I'll just c/p from Brave AI:

• Blue Button: The cooperative choice. If >50% of people press blue, everyone survives. If <50% press blue, blue-pressers die and red-pressers live.
• Red Button: The safe choice. If >50% press blue, everyone survives. If <50% press blue, red-pressers survive and blue-pressers die. If everyone presses red, everyone survives.

The Christian must push blue. To him is promised the next world.

I wonder however if we are ethically allowed to push neither. Since we didn't push blue, we don't die. Since we didn't push red, we aren't culpable for the decision of blue-i-cide. This is also, note, the Moldbug-approved option of refusal to indulge in The Sport Of The Elected.

Whoever forces this on me could of course threaten to kill me. Or err'body, which to a solipsist means the same. But feh. I didn't do it. That's on the jerkoff who composed this sick game.

Second order effects

It's been noted that African - and Italian - populations have genetic defences against the Malaria parasite. Plural: the famous one is sickle-cell, but older mutations exist. These do not lead to the anaemia. Why haven't they led to the anaemia?

Article here has a suggestion: some genetic tweaks are not allergenic, but antiallergenic.

To me this suggests a high-Eurasian pathway similar to the Saharan pathway. People move to new environments. Those environments have not mutually adapted with the newcomers. The environment resists. The newcomers mostly die - but not all. If going home is more hazardous than toughing it out, the survivors will tough it out. Those will stay - but weaker. Weaker relative to their relatives back home; but it's not like those relatives are going to follow them into the swamp, they're not idiots.

- until the body gets countermeasures. Fast-forward thousands of years. Some in the next generation innaswamp are no longer so weak. They got the original antimalarial genes, and new genes to work around all the problems the original genes had raised.