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 Among Us in 2008. Jonas Alexis in his rebuttal looks like ItIsHoeMath on Erectus.

Hezeqiah's cage, II

In English we have plenty of misused cliches, like the Iceberg Tip; tonight we'll talk the Sitting Duck or the Embarrelled Fish. Davila in PaleoJudaica has linked to the Caged Bird.

Assyrians used to have their kings "hunt" lions. Woo Min Lee reports that a lot of those "hunts" were more like the Roman Circus where some wild beast was brought into an arena(!). There the king would slay the beast. Like a Spanish bullfight, or Commodus the gladiator. At some point some onlooker scoffed that this was like [fighting] a bird in a cage (kīma iṣṣur quppi). The king Ashurnasirpal II adopted this metaphor with little hint of irony as he slew hundreds of lions. And elephants: the latter which, Wiki is telling me had been introduced from India.

Metaphors of the lion hunt entered the military, Assyrians being Assyrians. The encirclement, at which Assyrians excelled, was perfect for the caged-bird metaphor. For cities this could be, and was, used for the siege. Especially once victorious.

None of this need imply that the bird/lion must be slain in such a battle. If there was a sack and pillage, the Assyrians would tell us - and illustrate it. Jerusalem under Hezeqiah did not receive this treatment. Even a hunter might decide to catch-and-release; why run out the supply.

Lee believes that the Assyrians recognised that Judah was beaten. A sack, of sorts, took place; tribute changed hands. Hezeqiah kissed the emperor's feet. Thereby Hezeqiah got to stay on that throne, if now a poorer throne. At least his shrine now enjoyed a monopoly.

Hezeqiah's successors made themselves odious in later generations as they went so far as to allow the gods of the Empire. YHWH was kissing the feet of Anshar; his angels were caged.

A Magellanic sample

Science Daily linked this horrendous agitprop from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Within it is the story, which is missing a lot of essential information. I'll deliver the story so you don't have to go to SDSS and get snowed.

SDSS J0715-7334 (those are co-ordinates) was reported as a red giant out 79,256 ly away, last October again; ScienceDaily / SDSS are reporting on its formal publication. It hosts ultra-low "metallicity", including a carbon footprint of "undetectable". This means it was formed by hydrogen and helium... only. Also its orbit is unnatural for the Milky Way today and, it seems, all those sub-galaxies which we have gobbled like the one in Exodus. SDSS and the University of Chicago conclude that it must have formed in that Large Magellanic Cloud (nebula, in Latin; galaxy, in reality) halo, back when there were no "metals". 163kly from us.

All this means this - sigh - immigrant bears a time capsule from the founding matter of the LMC.

Initial reports were claiming 2900% solar mass. I find hard to believe that 30 solar-mass primordial red giants should still exist and, yes; later interviews have ratcheted that down. Rather, a 30 sol star - which must be almost the first star ever to exist in the LMC - went Type II supernova, nearly immediately as they would. This explosion from the implosion pushed still-thick hydrogen and helium gas into the star in question. Which was still heavier than us. It went red-giant somewhere on its journey to our own galaxy.

As to how it got here, rather to our own halo (the word "back yard" is getting used): that it was a secondary formation under high wind might have pushed it across our galaxies' mutual L1.

Escapade

Awhile ago NASA launched Berkeley's stereo-vision Mars orbiters. Mars has weather, which affects surface chemistry, so data be needing retrieval. MAVEN existed but is now presumed dead. Although weather exists, its atmosphere cannot aerobrake craft as well as some other planets can. So we gotta talk trajectories.

Here's a map and summary. The orbits are I think clockwise. New Glenn launched it all last 13 November, dumping the booster as they do.

NASA posted a status 25 February, which ScienceDaily got to in mid-March. The occasion was the entry into Earth's magnetotail, also new for us.

Presently this is looping around the STL2 halo wherein live Gaia and Webb. The notion is to take what looks like a low-energy Oberth, as dives back to Earth. But instead of crashing, we hope, this payload will skirt close to ground thence boiiiong to a Mars-crossing intersection.

The launch-window for that opens November.

Starship Uranus

ScienceDaily, belatedly, offers up "Starship Could Cut The Travel Time To Uranus In Half". Andy Tomaswick, 18 October. A mission for six and a half Earth years is more likely to retain mission planners' interest and not be cut off by some President Abernathy (or President Beale).

If the probe stayed encapsulated in the Starship, the heat tiling could aerobrake in 34 Tauri's atmo. This means the mission could be refueled in Earth orbit - by another Starship, perhaps. Then the first 'Ship just blows all the fuel speeding up to meet the Eighth Heaven, where to intercept its Seventh Planet.

This is a chemical mission. Not considered are Princeton's Direct-Fusion Drive or any NERVA. But Starship could be refitted for such engine too, I believe.

The three actor rule

Lisa Marie Haasbroek, Gmirkinite, has "The Book of Samuel and the Three-Actor Rule in Classical Greek Tragedy" (pdf).

When the theatre first appeared as a form of mass entertainment and/or edification, it was soon found that four was a crowd. Scenes could be delivered with a monologue, or with two d00ds. When three appear, they can have a dispute or a messenger can deliver a message which the other two can handle differently. Where a crowd be needed, that can be the chorus.

Playwrights elevated that system into a rule, which some - notably Euripides - saw fit to bend; for instance, allowing the chorus to interfere with the main characters (better: to judge them, as in Shakepeare's Julius Caesar). Comedy got its farcical edge by cracking all such rules, only to acquire its own rules; but we needn't discuss that for our scope. The tragic form informed how Herodotus would compose scenes between historical figures, those scenes being a sight less historical.

My examples have been Greek, or at least Plutarchite. Haasbroek here makes an assumption: that we don't see the three-actor rule before the Greeks, specifically the great tragedians. She would instead point the trope's dissemination around the Near East, even to Aristotle's Poetics (again, ignoring comedy) and Alexander's forcing of same onto the local populations.

Baruch Halpern once called the Deuteronomic History and the Davidic cycle of 1-2 Reigns/Samuel as "the first historians". This, because they are not like the annals of Assyrian kings nor the historical prefaces to Anatolian treaties. Haasbroek agrees on the parallel, but would strip from the Bible that ribbon. That, because the David stories follow the three actor rule.

One might see a Jew who'd gone to class learning from Herodotus, which inspired him (less-likely her) to compose that sort of court history. Not Haasbroek. She collates the paratext of the Aleppo Codex. Sections end, and a Psalm is brought in - for the chorus to sing. Jews might see this as primitive haftorah. Haasbroek sees the tragic form of the Greeks, whence haftorah evolved.

My problem with this argument is that we own a control-set: Daniel. (Also, Esther. Chronicles too.) A Hellenistic book of Reigns (and Judges) should have attracted Late Biblical Hebrew, western Aramaic, and especially Greek.

I suggest instead that the stage play existed also outside Greece. Jews adopted the form in Egypt; more to the point, Etruscans wrote plays in Italy. They called an actor an istrio, or so say the Romans. This must be from Greek historion; suggesting that it was from Magna Graecia that the Etruscans acquired their historical sense, memory, and - important here - medium, to relate such lore to their peers. Etruria was not however conquered by The Greeks as a unified force. The Greeks couldn't even much conquer each other down there.

So if 1-2 Reigns be, er, histrionic; it needn't have been forced by a Greek overlord. More likely the plentiful Greek colonies nearby spread the good word: Pamphylia, Cyprus, Naucratis, even Al Mina.

The first fall of Neustria

I've said a lot here about how northern Gaul steadily grew as a rival power centre against Rome. It had been a centre before the Gauls even showed up: "Population discontinuity in the Paris Basin linked to evidence of the Neolithic decline" by Seersholm et al..

A feature of 4300–3100 BC was the megalith. These quit being built. The study here deals with a grave site toward the last century of this; these were communal tombs. Nobody was being buried 3000, either. The paper implicates the yersinia - and another bug, Borrelia recurrentis. After the crash, the forests grew back.

As to why the focus on this last century, "excess mortality" hit around this time, carrying off the young as well as the old. The paper leaves until later any pathology: starvation? war?... influenza?

Also this earlier "Phase One" tomb was a family tomb, patrilineal (on H2a1). The daughters, if old enough to be married off, were married off perhaps to be found in other tombs. Some of the burials had "homozygosity" - they were from cousin marriages. That cannot have been healthy either.

The forest was reclaiming "Scania" - Geatland - 3100 BC; then Denmark / Holstein 3000-2800.

A new people came 2900 BC, of what the abstract names "Neolithic ancestry". That came from Iberia; that which survives best today in Sardinia. These farmers stuck around for a half century. They say these tended not to build communal tombs; but, here, the paper does look into one tomb, in use until strangely-precise 2470 BC. Regions are regions, we suppose. Anyway, these burials had died older and of more natural causes. Plague was around then too but less of it. They didn't venture much further northeast, leaving Scania fallow.

The Steppe rolled in 2300-1700 BC. These will be the ItaloCelts. The lead author notes elsewhere they also resettled the new-growth Scania.