Tarmod

I thought last Thursday was going to be slow but boy howdy, did a lot show up in my feed. First was Cardoza, "understanding Islam from the light of earliest Jewish Christianity". Before mine eyes had finished rolling, Paleojudaica delivered: Haggai Olshanetsky's "Zenobia", she of Palmyra = Tadmur. Christians remember this queen as a Jewish queen in alliance with Paul of Samosota, forerunner of the archeretic Arius and his emperors. Jews remember her as a persecutor, and refused converts from "Tarmod".

Jews of whatever denomination had inhabited Tadmur before the Arab Kingdom erupted in it. Several late Latin histories note young Gordian's death in Circesium, after Herodian quits; and his tomb. This burial was in scope for Eutropius and for John the Deacon's Epitome De Caesaribus. Here the Historia Augusta would inscribe the imperial cenotaph: in Greek, Latin, Persian, Jewish, and Egyptian. The HA / Eutropius / Epitome synopsis lately is considered Victor. Olshanetsky vouches for the HA plus, thus: Jewish names served in the XX Palmyrenorum legion, stationed at Dura-Europus.

So I cannot dismiss the existence of a "Jewish Christianity" in the Arab/Aramaic interface to which political adventurers might appeal. (I got yo' "understanding Islam" RIGHT HERE, Bozo.)

The Jews outside her anti-imperium might have sniffed her out even at the time. The Tadmuris were converting to Judaism under a "persecutrix". Olshanetsky must conclude that she was a heretic. Christians wouldn't accept Paul; Jews - from the Sasanian Iraq - couldn't accept Zenobia. "Tarmod" itself reads like a reversal of "Tadmur", as nonSemites write a word. And, in postZenobic text, the metonym stuck: יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ

I suspect these texts against Zenobia and her "Tarmod" arose when Paul's doctrine was dominant in that Roman Empire of the first Constantines.

Palmyrene Judaism has been termed "Hellenistic", by Jews and by their Protestant sympathisers; inasmuch as their text was not the Talmud. Olshanetsky dislikes the term. If I may - the Iraqis may have distrusted Palymra as Hellenist at the time. Zenobia was no amica of Rome; but her late husband had professed to be, and inflicted more damage to Iraq than to the Roman provinces (whence, after all, he was extracting rents). The Palmyrene coinage identified even more with Rome than with Greece. It's not like Semites cared, any more than Westerners cared about the Parthian / Persian distinction.

Later Iraqi Jews could see the Constantines reviving the Tadmur doctrine in a Christian dress. Their Father was monarchical; the Son was simply of some other substance, human and inferior. Their Talmud, compiled from the later 300s to the 600s, moved to a blanket ban on "Tarmod", a herem by any other name. By extension: to any "Jews" who got that way under the Constantines. Constantinople agreed fully, as John Chrysostom blasted what we'd call a "LARP" of Judaism.

MUNUS in Knesian

Half a decade ago I looked into some hinterland Hurrian femininity in which, offhand, I noted that in the Hittite tablets, "woman" is ideogrammed. Specifically MUNUS (you might see SAL in older quotes); pronounced "mumble-mumble-n". Nobody knew the pronunciation before the 'n. Hittite taxmen, it seems, preferred to account, oh, seamstresses (here, seam-iššara) rather than just plain "women". We see the same in Linear B palaces.

Unlike in Linear B, the Hittites did have a place for pure phonetics: rituals, where it mattered that the pronunciation was right. Unfortunately the relevant rituals are imports: hence, that Horite (if I may) witchcraft ritual is scripted phonetically. The same held for Luwian (and, later, Lycian and Carian); and for Lydian: wana and kana respectively. So we can project the paraKnesian as *whána. Problem: that was a sister to Knesian, not the common Anatolian ancestrix. It does at least look something like the Proto Indo European *gwón-eh₂ however, as our Matter-Of-Britain avalonians will remember from names like Guenevere and Hen Wen. Or, more prosaic, "gyno". (One suspects QU-NA- somewhere in Linear B. If they weren't using ideograms too.)

Meanwhile the Ortakoy / Sapinuwa archive is being - painfully - reassembled. In 2019, Süel saw a feminine personal-seal. But he punted: it could be Woman or it could be Fate(!).

Based on the protoLuwian and on IndoEuropean, most scholars expect something like kuwan-. But people may simply have given up.

Sumerian pronunciation

If you go through older articles on cuneiform, sometimes you have to retranslate (e.g. Upper Hani as "Hani-GALbat"); and sometimes you have to make the retranslation happen in Sumerian itself. Was he UruINIMgina or UruKAgina? Is she MUNUS or is she SAL? It turns out that the Bronze Age found Sumerian at least as alien as does modernity.

Aygül Süel (and Daniel Schwemer) in The Akkadian and Sumerian Texts from Ortaköy-Šapinuwa (2021) illustrated how the Hittites sussed out sumerograms: they understood their pictographic nature. Then they used other, monosyllabic sumerograms as transliterated Hittite, to sound out the sumerograms in question. They did this for Sumerian numbers like "eleven".

The charitable anathema

OnePeterFive argues for the practice of "charitable anathema". This reminds me of dear Jerusha at Rice University in the middle 1990s who "prayed with me". I was in fact being prayed AT.

Now: I deserved something like that at the time. I was flirting with the Gnosticism. I didn't know better since I had no grounding in the Apostolic Fathers at that time; I really only understood the Didache and 2 Clement, hadn't fully grappled with 1 Clement (which was long) and Ignatius (who was alien). But I'll never forget Jerusha's theatrically pitiful face. I am ashamed to admit, I was angered. No really, I am not now proud of my emotional reaction even if I did, I think, succeed in hiding it. One might even ponder if I had a demon in me.

In self-defence of my resistance, if not of how I felt at the time: I do not think Jerusha handled this well. I think a better interlocutrix could gently explain that the gnostic texts are all secondary, by contrast 1 Clement and (more relevant) Ignatius are less secondary. Unfortunately for both of us, Jerusha did not have these tools any more than I did. She just had... well, she had a pronoun. The appeal anyone of XX might have over an XY.

Here is what I can report on what does not work. Dumping New-Testament cant upon that guy: circular. Psychoanalysing him: his wife or his mom might be able, but you aren't either of them. Invoking prayer: are you so sure your god is the right one? simple statistics would show that you're both wrong. We might be seeing a pattern - a particularly XX pattern. Instead of entitlement wrapped in therapy speak I might have received epistemic-closure wrapped in cant.

One can dress up arrogance all one likes. One can tell the other person he is "spiritually dead" and in denial of Christ's Love or Not Having The Truth In Him or Making God A Liar or - whatever. But: you don't really know the other person. I mean, he could well be jackass wrong; I certainly was. But that is not the same as refusing the truth; he mightn't even know where to look.

And if you don't know, yourself; you are less likely to win him over than to make an atheist of him, even (G-d forbid) a hater.

John Muir, future bishop

Our bulletin gets John Muir's meditations.

Muir was born and raised in Burlington, major city of the state Vermont. He was appointed by Cardinal Dolan; he now serves in Phoenix. Muir was a public mourner of the late Pontiff. He loves Ben and Jerry's.

In today's bulletin, Muir called George Floyd's death in police-custody a "killing". He associated this wilful unaliving with "racism", which we need to fight. He was pretty ambiguous about whether this fight meant spiritual struggle against a sin, or the dismantling of a social structure. Inasmuch as this is an "-ism" most would read this as the latter.

Muir is in line with how the archbishop of Denver reacted in 2020. I think it safe to assume Muir speaks for the majority of bishops.

His assumptions on the righteousness of the Derek Chauvin verdict may or may not be true, but they haven't hurt his position in Phoenix. They'll likely not hurt him when he becomes a bishop, either.

A11pl3Z

The object "A11pl3Z" is confirmed hyperbolic. This makes it extrasolar. It would join 'Oumuamua and comet Borisov, and maybe some Centaurs.

I've been hearing it nicknamed "apple". How about "A1, please!"? - but they are going with "3I/ATLAS" and "C/2025 N1".

It is bearing in from Sagittarius / Scorpius so Zodiacal, inclined a bit north. It was 10 AU last February. Luckily for us, none of our outer planets are in the way and perihelion will be 2 AU. I don't know about asteroids however.

They don't speculate whence C/2025 N1 came since the spectrograph isn't in; HIP 88477 seems the nearest star. This object looks like it has a coma, which would make it a comet. At 20 km long it's pretty big.

We should be spinning up a Project Lyra.

The Old Kingdom's genetics

After the unification of Egypt, a man was buried along the Nile. His genome is now published, and is continuous with modern Egyptians (especially Copts)... given historical introgressions since. We'll get into those, later.

The burial is dynasty III or IV, backed up with radiocarbon admittedly vague. That is early Old Kingdom, so Pyramid-era perhaps immediately pre-Cheops. He was a shortie at slightly under 160 cm. He seems to have been a potter, earning enough in the end to get his upper-middle-class burial. One hopes he rested in peace since his work injuries rendered him stooped and arthritic.

The genome is under 80% Moroccan, with 20%... Mesopotamian. There isn't any Kushite here; although - supposedly - our man was dark skinned. Both contributors seem far from upper Egypt; presumably the African DNA is what darkened him as much, but also hey - this climate selects for that. His male lineage was E1b1b1b2b; female was I (=N1a1b2). I do not find in his paternity Levantine J, but the mix overall may hold a little Levantine.

The Levantine, the paper argues, came later. Instead came earlier, a "Neolithic package" of agriculture, in Egypt 6000 BC. I recall this follows that nasty 6200 BC frigidity which, in the Sahara, would have been an aridity.

The paper further evaluates how the genome changed from the Late Bronze through the "Third Intermediate". Egyptologists since Herodotus have accepted Saite propaganda that the dynasty XXVI Pharaoh Psammetichus was Magnus, and forget he started as an Assyrian stooge. This paper picks a burial from 787–544 "BCE". Anyway, this king's Egypt was now a sight more Levantine than was Cheops' Egypt. They got BLEACHED.

This paper, then, presents the baseline for the Old Egyptian people, therefore culture and language. It should assist in constraining models for the Tamazight and Semitic languages as well.

We still have some millennia between this burial and the Saites (meaning, Assyrians). How did that BLEACHing occur? I understand we do own some Pharaonic DNA but the paper doesn't bring it. They might not represent the common riverside potter. King Tut / dynasty XVIII was R1b (I still don't know if my sort, or Chad's V88 sort); Rameses II and III were more-natively E-V22 downstream of E1b1a / V38. The pharaonic DNA seems corrupted and incomplete.