Xōchiyāōyōtl

I'm reading Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade. Currently I'm at the year AD 1200; they've called a tournament to Écry.

Écry is, basically, Thomas Cole's "The Past". It was a vital part of the duchy of Campagne... at the time; it is wholly a ruin now. Up to AD 1200 even Thomas Cole doesn't quite do to Écry justice; Phillips makes clear that a twelfth-century tournament was very, very different from the cooped-up gladiatorial-style arena matches seen in Cole (and in A Game Of Thrones). Those reflect a later era.

Over the twelfth century, the tournament was a mock battle. Knights and general men-at-arms formed into armies, and planned a big fight over the entire countryside. The only "rule" was that you had to give quarter to the opponent; the aim was to capture the enemy (but deaths did happen). Spectators observed the whole event from castle walls or on the roofs of barns. They remind me of nothing so much as the Flower Wars between the āltepētl poleis of the central Mexican Nahua.

The tournament phenomenon was cis-Hajnal; taking place over Belgium, Champagne, and along the Rhine. The quasi-French English aristocracy, I assume, also got in on it. By contrast the Cathar-ridden Occitan province in what's now the south of France didn't do 'em. Neither did the Basques or the Irish. The Italians didn't understand them either, and the Popes tried to ban them - several times. These bans made for absolutely no effect among the Franks.

Maybe the tournament had to be a Hajnal thing. A winning team required work across baronial boundaries. Good luck with that in twelfth-century Sicily.

The invention of slavery

Jonathan AC Brown over in Georgetown got himself in trouble a few years back, which even a complaisant media couldn't quite get him out of. The question put to him - which he'd tried to ban hostile audiences from hearing - was whether slavery is all that bad. Technically Georgetown sits below the Mason-Dixon Line, where certain people might get sore about the topic...

Brown was a convert to Islam at the time (I assume he still is), so that faith-system was colouring his opinions. Recall that the whole of Islam is just a late-antique take on west-Syrian Judaism and Christianity. So I'll be discussing here how we got from the Neolithic to Jonathan AC Brown.

"Slavery" in our language comes from an Islamic and Byzantine term: the concept of an alien tribe, dragged into the empire to do the empire's dirty work. For them in the eighth century AD, those aliens were often Slavs. But the Sclovenes are not noted in the Quran; races as such are rare there, beyond "Ishmael", "Jews", and "Arabs" (and there's long been debate about the Qaric understanding of these terms). The Quran instead has the concept of 'abd, the "servitor". The same word is in Hebrew. Are they the same thing?

When you get back to the Hebrew Bible, and very-probably the earliest suwar of the Quran, there's no concept of the chattel race at all. The Torah legislates the 'obed as an indenture: Mr 'Obed was set upon a six-year term, and his master would care for Mr 'Obed until the term was up. 'Obed might well decide he liked his master, at which point he might apply to join the household. Although the Quran does not repeat this legislation (there is, famously, not even Sabbath in it) we do find allusions to the general sentiment. The wala', that post-slavery clientage, was VITAL to early Islamic history.

Sex servitude existed as well. This servitude is the worst sort, in my opinion. This post will deal with that, some; but my angle is more "Marxian", if you like, dealing more with the economics, where (second-worst) chattel racial slavery is most salient.

Slavery as such was impossible at the scale of the early Hebrew kingdom. The great empires, like Egypt and Babylon, did have need for large-scale work; but that work was project-based: building this pyramid, or that road. This tended to be ad-hoc. It could be done with a corvée, or with prisoners taken in a raid, after which the people just... melted back into the local villages. Even foreigners likely had taken up with the local women and would settle near where they were at.

So: what changed?

I had the theory that monocrops changed. Olive plantations in Spain; quarries around the Med; and of course sugar in the Sasanian Iraq. Suddenly there was rough work to be done in the same place over generations. Indenture wouldn't cut it in cane-country (so to speak), and the Marsh Arabs sure didn't want to do it. So along came what the Bible's authors would have hated: the importation of many thousands of blacks from East Africa, and Slavs from Europe. These attended an imperial-scale economy.

With the rise of empires and cash-crops, came apologists for permanent chattel. Among the Greeks, Aristotle argued that Anatolians - "Asians" - were unfit for liberty.

At the same time, polyglot multicultural empires diffused authority to subject peoples. So more-egalitarian voices sprung up. Sometimes we hear from Alcidamas. The Christian baptismal formula we read in Paul assumes that, in what truly matters, which is Christ, race and slavery is irrelevant. Later the Christian cleric Gregory of Nyssa was blunter: he thought very low of slavemasters.

Dennis Prager's commentary on Exodus proposes that book as a reaction against Near Eastern assumptions, large-scale impersonal servitude being one. Prager (if I'm reading him right) argues that if all peoples had heeded the Torah, servitude would never have evolved into true chattel slavery. He could be right... except that Genesis had already nodded to genetic servitude in "The Curse Of Ham".

Also, the world-religions, like Hellenism, Zoroastrianism, and then Christianity and Islam, offered a loophole: what of those who don't adhere to the religion? They can take slaves from the heathens, and those slaves "deserve it". (Judaism is not blameless; the Jew might not keep a slave, but he could trade in one.) The Quran is worst: over and over it speaks of infidels' sufferings on earth as a mere taste of what awaits them in Gehenna. (And it legitimises rape.)

I am Christian myself. I will admit the Bible's imperfections; and I observe how these imperfections have led to evils, in this case The Curse Of Ham and sex-servitude both. But if you'll allow me, I suggest that the overall Christian message, which follows the Jews' message, should not permit (true) slavery; it should also ban sexual servitude. I find otherwise from the core Islamic texts, which start by abrogating both Torah and Christ.

BACKDATING 8/31 1 PM MST - to the time when I was wrestling this point over in 4chan.

PHARAOH 10/17/2020 - Janissaries don't count.

Who takes away the sin of the world?

The problem of sin, and how to remove it, plagues all sentient beings in a "guilt" society. Sure, if you do another man wrong, that other man can forgive you. But can you forgive yourself?

Saint Paul proposed that Adam came to the world, where he sinned and left a legacy of sin onto all humankind after him. This sin, Jesus came to remove; through his own redemptive sacrifice.

Elsewhere, other sects have proposed other salvation-histories. One parallel shows up in Enochian literature. There exists a cycle in the Slavonic language, which came to be written down in the Middle Ages. Andrei Orlov proposes a "polemic" - that the documents which we label "2 and 3 Enoch" react to earlier literature. This goes to the short recension too, which survives in Coptic as well; but my comment here addresses the Slavonic-only long recension.

That 2 and 3 Enoch do belong after "1 Enoch" - after at least four of the five books in the Ethiopic, and we can throw in Jubilees - is the starting-point in this discussion. Orlov points out that the Slavonic books are concerned with Adam where the ancient Enochian texts are not. 1 Enoch eventually came to include the "Similitudes" which elevates Enoch to demigod status.

Orlov's essay really gets going p. 299f. In the Long Recension of 2 Enoch, ch. 64, Enoch is not just crowned in Heaven, but also given the authority to expiate sin. More: LR-2E 64 claims that Enoch has redeemed us already. For the earliest Enochian books, sinners aren't forgiven; they are simply killed. Sin came into the world through the fallen angels, and the Flood erased their wicked followers and progeny. Classic Enoch is like Noah: the righteous man avoids the storm; at most offering some advance warning to others, but we know they won't take it. 2 Enoch by contrast offers its protagonist as al-Ghafûr.

I think Orlov is right: 2 Enoch deals in polemic. The long recension's target is - I think - Christianity. 2 Enoch accepts Paul that Adam left a legacy of original-sin; but it insists, Enoch dealt with it already. (2 Enoch is vague about how. Since we know Enoch didn't die : did he invent the Temple dove-offerings? was he martyred docetically?) Anyway 2 Enoch doesn't - ultimately - care about Enoch. What matters is that Enoch precedes Jesus. Jesus is left with nothing to do. Jesus may be a prophet and/or a worldly-messiah. Jesus might be called upon to endorse Enoch. But that's it. The long recension of 2 Enoch plays the same trick on Jesus as 1 Enoch had on the Abrahamic / Mosaic Torah.

As for who came up with this notion, I am unsure. I don't think it is Muslims; Enoch goes unmentioned by that name in the Quran (its warner against the Flood's imminence is Noah himself), and Enoch never gets redemptive properties in the Hadith. I also don't find these themes in the Talmuds nor elsewhere among Rabbinic or Karaite Jews. The "Metatron" (metathronos?) takes on some Enochian properties in Jewish speculation, but even Qabbalists couldn't have Metatron redeem sin; Metatron is just there to shield us from Divine Perfection.

I'd look to post-Christians outside the Syriac world: Paulicians in the greater Armenia certain Manichees, perhaps. The community of 2 Enoch may have contributed to Bogomilism, as noted (not well I'm told) in 1918 by ASD Maunder (of "Maunder Minimum" fame), “The Date and Place of Writing of the Slavonic Book of Enoch”. This would explain how 2 Enoch ended up in Slavonic. UPDATE 3/23/23: We can rule out Paulicians, as a postMarcion Pauline LARP.

The recensions of 2 Enoch

On occasion this blog has had cause to discuss the Slavonic cycle of Enoch. This exists in several versions, tied to two "recensions" - a long one and a short one. I mooted that the long one was postChristian in some Balkan / Pontic fashion. My muse was Maunder.

The short recension survives best in the manuscript dubbed "U" and - allied with it - "A". The earliest Slavonic copy of any version is, in fact, U. That recension's chapters "36-42" - corresponding to LR 36,39,37,40-2 - survive also in a Coptic language, likely Sahidic which was the official Church language in late-antiquity. This fragment parallels U and A. Orlov's online introduction dates to 2009, right before they'd found the Coptic MS.

Both recensions are in reaction to non-Enochian forms of Biblical religion. The short recension reacts to Judaism but might aim at the Temple cult, rather than at the rabbinical form. (There was no Temple in Enoch's day, and the Temple had become naught but an apocalyptic dream post 70 AD.)

BACKDATING 9/2 9:42 AM MST - because this is the needed background for the redemption-arc of the Tuesday comment.

L'Épuration!

Whilst we are discussing the canonisation of the Conquistadors (leave aside Cortés; he was a pimp), it really has to come down to a matter of degrees.

Yesterday morning in a coffeeshop in the mountains, I overheard Classic Colorado White Girl bending the ear of the baristo. Because of course the baristo agrees with you. (He'd better.) The topic was the death-penalty. She disagreed with it because sometimes an innocent man is convicted and, then, exonerated. Apparently some of these (honestly) Dindu Nuffins are now out on the lecture circuit, arguing that nobody else should be put to death either. (Which by some arguments makes them combatants in a political struggle, subject to the laws of war; but that's enough Heinlein for one night . . .)

We are talking Conservative thought on this night. They'd agree to be very careful about whom to convict, but when someone is a Diddu Sumpin : get a rope.

The Left is hardly immune to such thought either. I'd be sure it was just banter if not for the postwar Épuration in France. Of the many Nazi collaborators, a few hundred were executed, by process of law. Over ten thousand were simply murdered out of hand. The Épuration sauvage, 'tis called. But those guys deserved it. The Résistance may not have had better forensic and juridicial expertise in 1945 than we got in 2019, but they were better people. Or enim silent leges, anyway.

Sure. Why not. Liberals don't lose sleep over 10,000 German-mumbling French traitors - or 80,000; even Conservatives don't. They were all fine with carpet-bombs killing many more Germans than that, per run. Hell, Japan got nuked. Twice!

How many of the Mesoamericans deserved what they got? Or, at what point did that inter arma thing get lifted?

From anyone debating a "1519 Project", I should like to see a number. Nearest thousand, or ten-thousand, or hundred-.

John S. Carlyle Abbott

"Adam Mill", for his take on the Spanish Conquest, relies upon one source: a biography of "Cortez" by one John Stevens Cabot Abbott. This was published ... AD 1855.

I started out with no clue about who Abbott was, up to five hours ago, so I have looked him up. John Abbott shares a name with a later Tory politician in Canada, so we've been projecting his middle names back onto him in our day (not unlike Diego Velázquez ...). Looking over Abbott's bibliography, he put out a more-serious (but equally laudatory) bio of Napoleon Bonaparte at the same time as his Cortéz. Abbott was a contemporary of Thomas Carlyle; after Carlyle's death, Abbott went on to eulogise one of Carlyle's own heroes, Frederick the Great.

So that's "Mill"'s primary source. A fanboy of Carlylean heroes, putting out popular works for the edification of young men in positions of power. Abbott had little interest in the history, by contrast even with Prestcott in 1843.

I have, at the same time, actually finished Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortes - which, the reader will note, I'd started before "Mill" put out that article. "Mill" was of course unaware of this blog but, more to the point, unaware of Restall. I do not believe you should be commenting about the Conquistadors in Mesoamerica without reading that book, first. Restall is not the impartial historian we need, himself. Restall is however the best we got, at present.

Restall and I would admit that Cortés (slightly) deserves exoneration, in that until Otompan he wasn't in charge of the mess, despite his own letters and his son's biography of him. Still : that re-assessment, alone, disposes of Abbott (concerned with heroics which, we now know, weren't) - and it wounds "Mill".

All this leaves open some questions, for "Adam Mill" and for his publisher Ben Domenech. Any serious historian must already know that you don't just cite nineteenth-century secondary sources without even a nod to more-recent material. If not Restall then at least someone else; maybe, I don't know, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs by Michael D. Coe and Rex Koontz. Maybe Richard F. Townsend's book on The Aztecs. UPDATE 9/20 : Camilla Townsend's got a post-Restall book out that looks intriguing.

My theory is that "Adam Mill" - like me, no expert in this field - had read Abbott, and maybe Jennings, and some ambient apologetics. From Abbott, he cobbled this article. And then he flung it over the fence. Hey, why not. That's how I work Ace's weekly Book Thread.

I would pin the blame on Domenech. That Domenech posted this one-trick pony, means Domenech figured it was Good Enough to make his overall point, which point would support those who subscribe to his website and newsletter, who just want a hug and to be reassured they're not living in stolen land like their smug professor told them they do. Domenech is renowned for being sloppy, for cutting corners, and for pandering to paymasters. I wonder if "Adam Mill" is Domenech.

The 1519 Project

"Mill"'s larger point isn't Cortés; it is that the Spaniards correctly ended a damnable civilisation. But "Mill" - from Abbott - must impose some constraints upon that. Cortés apologists typically wave off that he was "no saint". You know the debating-technique from the opening movements of The Shawshank Redemption; the aim is to get you, dear reader, also a sinner; to identify yourself with the wretched, imperfect soul in the dock; or with the victim of the crime, in that movie's case.

Restall, although mostly concerned with debunking the hero-worship of the last century's Abbotts, also makes comments about the Spaniards involving themselves in genocide. I've done my share of mistakes, but I've not done that. For Federalist readers, I can't speak...

Restall admits that Spain (and Portugal) hadn't quite learnt the racial theories of the nineteenth century (to that, The Federalist has your boilerplate Dems R Reel Rayciss article on Calhoun) - nor even of the seventeenth. But - he argues - they were getting there.

I think Restall's right. David Goldenberg's Curse of Ham still holds up, on the Mediterranean nations' template on racial theory, prior to Darwin. Spaniards were a beleaguered minority in Mesoamerica; they tended to stick together, and to see the rest as outsiders. It was natural that the Spaniards abroad would categorise Native Americans as alien.

Europeans before modern science have vacillated between seeing these continents as "the fourth part of the world", and as an extension of transIndian Asia; some have thought the "Indios" were tribes of Israel. For our purposes, we care only about Conquistador rhetoric. I notice that the Conquistadors didn't invoke "Ham". Instead, I notice that "Sodom" crops up. If a Christian (or Muslim) invokes that, it is like a Jew invoking Amaleq.

The Spaniards did see all the New World natives as a different race, they did destroy Mesoamerican civilisation, and they did murder many natives in the process (along with kidnap and rape).

Black legends

This is a year of centennials. The anti-American Left has struck first, by casting the first English colonies (they weren't "British" yet) as illegitimate - the "1619 Project", so called. Ben "Augustine" Domenech's flagship The Federalist has responded with several articles; of which, his personal Transom newsletter links to five. Instapundit has linked several more.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the right of Europeans to live in the United States; and, by extension, any part of the Western Hemisphere excepting maybe Greenland (the Inuits got there late too). This is why the pseudonymous "Adam Mill" mooted a "1519 Project".

For some, the whole question is pointless. Some say that "whites" don't even exist; that the whole concept is artificial. Others - I am thinking of the Patriot Front lately - just state because we live here. For them, there is no point arguing for the morality of white existence or white settlement; they're white, and they seek to secure the existence of their people and a future for white children. The 1519 Project is not for either. Both sides have made up their minds already.

The 1519 Project is to argue for "Western Civilisation" and its essential goodness. Race, to Domenech, doesn't matter; being pro-West is good enough (and if his cheques clear from their Malay bank-account).

[Disclosure: I would support a 1519 Project - because the antiAmericans are going to be doing such a project next, so if nothing else we need to anticipate it. Also because I enjoy a historical challenge.]

The 1519 Project runs up against the concurrent Anti-1619 Project somewhat. Anti-1619 Project says, yay West, we ended slavery. 1519 Project has to admit that the Conquistadors were in it in the first place because of slavery; Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortes documents Conquistador slavery of the natives, extensively. In fact New World slavery outstripped African slavery from 1500ish-1600ish; there was more "raw material" in the New World itself. Until there wasn't, and ship technology improved, so the Europeans (by then Spain was joined by others) went back to Africa.

"Mill"'s article demands a response, but it touches on many points, so I'll be running a series on this today.

The Popol Vuh is a Quiché Postclassic text

... and that should be remembered by anyone studying Choltal Classic texts where they deal with the underworld. Those texts would be the writings on funerary vases as summarised Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code. Which admittedly is a 1993 text itself; it's been well over a vigintuple since then.

Coe, like Schele and Freidel a couple years prior, related the Mayanists' observation that, in vases found in tombs, motifs of the grave abounded (Coe, 221). This induced Mayanists to look at whatever records of the Maya underworld survived for later Maya to record through Christendom. The best record, all agree, is that of the Popul Vuh. In it is a cycle of several sets of twins, who enter Maya Sheol.

Let's evaluate, here, to what degree the Popol Vuh - which is I concede a great text - is also a useful text, in the narrow context of the Choltal Classic mythology.

The Popol Vuh is in a language closely related to Classical Choltal (so to Tzeltal also: chart in Coe, 48). It is, however, not descended from Choltal or Tzeltal. It is Kʼicheʼ. (Their circumlocution for the underworld is The Dread Land, Xibalba.) The Popol Vuh also was not written in a codex of 9.18.10.0.0 / 13 August AD 800. It perhaps was done from a codex but if so, from one of the 1400s (11.9.x.x.x).

The Kʼicheʼ myth starts with two twin ballplayers who play ball with the devil, so to speak. The demons duly drag them down to Xibalba. There, 1 Ahau (well, the disembodied head of this rex primus, because Maya) impregnates one of the local demonesses. There are rules to this particular ballgame: the land of the dead is no place to give birth to life. So she must flee back up here. Her children are, also, twins. These demi-demons grow to become great tricksters; they are able to defeat Xibalba directly where their father and uncle must settle for posthumous revenge (Coe, 220).

They were all Maya here and the old hieroglyphic script, non unlike our Chinese, could be adapted across "dialect" borders. The lords of Palenque had no problem taking on Yucatec Maya names for themselves whilst they wrote their genealogies in Choltal (Coe, 286 n.14). On the other side of the Peten the Kʼicheʼs own brothers the Qʼeqchiʼ borrowed many neolithic terms from old Choltal and perhaps chalcolithic terms from their Chʼolʼti offspring (pdf). So Choltal cast a shadow up the hills to the south - if I may twist that metaphor.

The Popol Vuh populates The Dread Land with many dreadful horrors. For the Choltal, hell is ruled by twins of its own. One such is named: Pauahtun. His aspect survived among the Yucatec Maya (God N in the Dresden Codex: Coe, 222) as presiding over the five unlucky days at the end of their 360-day calendar. I don't know that Pauahtun entered the Popol Vuh.

The Choltal on the other hand didn't talk much about the demi-demon "hero twins", that second generation. They did, however, portray much about the first generation. Rex Primus was the maize god (Coe, 222). Here is the god who dies, and by dying gives life. We Catholics experience such a figure at the Mass every Sunday.

I wonder if the Kʼicheʼ, barbarian successor-race to their Choltal cousins, composed the Popol Vuh as a counter-story to the Choltal Official Narrative.

If I am right, the Kʼicheʼ heard all about Pauahtun and left him where he belongs, in hell. The twins' foil is rather The Dread Land itself, which the Kʼicheʼ cautiously refused to name directly. The first twins, like Rex Primus, remained important; but they weren't worth worshipping as Maize Gods. And why would the Kʼicheʼ care; milpa / chol was drudgework for the cityfolk, the elder ones whose cities were left to ruin. The Kʼicheʼ chose instead to foist their trickster stories upon Rex Primus' children up here on Earth. The Popol Vuh comes from the Maya world's "culture of critique" ASSMANN 2/23/24 - as its "normative inversion".

So - again, if I am right - for direct parallels to Choltal worship, I'd look to the also-civilised Yucatec Maya first. If the Classic Choltal are Canaan, and the Kʼicheʼ their Israel; the Yucatec are Ugarit.

This vast revisionist epic, like our Old World revisionist Iliad, and Prager would argue like the Bible, had the literary merit, and the relevance to Postclassic Maya life, that it survived. It survived even the Inquisition. Perhaps the Inquisition saw in the Popol Vuh something they could use against the still-surviving Cholti.

Poseidon's cave

Latest news from Thera: tephra found in an east Crete cave, dubbed "Pelekita". Tephra means ash.

Thera's tephra has been found all over the place but not, yet, in a cave. That's helpful for constraining how the ash moved across the eastern Med; also, that the wind blew from the north, implies what time of year the mountain blew its top. That wind would be the Meltimi, the summer wind.

Earlier this year Jonny McAneney and Mike Baillie had related (doi 10.15184/aqy.2018.165) a 1627 BC climate downturn to Aniakchak, and not to Thera. It may be of interest, to some, that someone burned a log in Pelekita after the eruption. That log's wood is dated to the earlier 1600s: 1687-1627 cal BCE for the 1σ range (68.2%).

The article must admit that the calibration is "IntCal13" and that an IntCal19 is forthcoming. IntCal19 stands to adjust radiocarbon dates up and down the Mediterranean Bronze Age.

INTCAL 8/12: It's IntCal20.

Old Spain, New Spain

A couple years back I leafed through Matthew Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortés at a Barnes & Noble. Restall aimed to debunk a host of myths about that fabled encounter. Unfortunately one of those "myths", which featured in the first few chapters, concerned the "Aztec" Mexica love of human-sacrifice and cannibalism; Restall thought the Mexica fully comparable to fifteenth-century Spain and the Habsburgs. I suspected Restall of political-correctness (see, now, also here) so I didn't purchase the book; soon afterward, my suspicions were dramatically justified [MOAR 1/1/2021: and it's never going to look better]. On that much.

So today I found the book again in the Estes Park library. Not having aught better to do, I continued where I left off. On this much, Restall seemed more credible. To sum up: Gary Jennings (reliant on Prestcott, Díaz, and de las Casas) may have been right about the Tlatoani regime; but he was wrong about Montezuma and Cortés.

They all were.

"The Conquest of New Spain" happened during pleine histoire, to borrow a Renan-ism; but not quite en it. The Gulf of Mexico was not yet well-mapped; so to get to the Mexica, the Spaniard - based in Cuba and Hispaniola - had to sail to Yucatan and to hug the coast. And to get to Spain required a run through an already pirate-infested Caribbean. Meanwhile the king of Spain was a Habsburg also concerned with his holdings elsewhere in Europe [UPDATE 1/1/2021: if we're to believe this dickhead, we can almost delete the "also"]. So if a ship did land in a friendly Iberian port (that is, not a Portuguese port) it was even money if the king's court was even on the peninsula at the time.

The conquest itself, says Restall, was protracted and chaotic. At first, says Restall, it wasn't a conquest. The Cuban governor Diego Velázquez (later appended, "of Cuellar", because there's been an artist of that same name since then) commissioned a colonising expedition but that ... didn't go as planned. Velázquez chose Cortés to lead the force not because Cortés was the best man for it; but because he was a beta male nonentity who - Velázquez figured - could never earn the trust of the captains under him. In that much, Velázquez had the example of Columbus' failed governorship before him; and Velázquez turned out to have pegged Cortés pretty much right. Where Velázquez erred was in his assumption that the captains - with Cortés or without - could control their own situation, on that side of the Gulf.

The captains and their troops and horses swiftly became pawns in the Mesoamerican "game of thrones"; Cortés, their leader, had to follow them. First the coastal Totonacs launched the Spaniards against Tlaxcala; then, when the Spaniards didn't surrender or flee (because they couldn't) Tlaxcala sicced them on Chololan / Cholula. Next, Tlaxcala dragged them to Tenochtitlan where the latter's tlatoani ("amir" is the best translation) basically put them in his zoo. (To give Jennings due credit here, he related that the Tlatoani had a zoo where the Serious Historians have denied it.)

I am inclined to believe Restall on account of the curiosity that nobody in this Mexica menagerie was sending messages back to Cuba. Not boasts of victory; not pleas for help - nothing. The Spaniards were incommunicado.

Skipping ahead to Mexico City's fall, this opened central Mexico to Spanish immigration of course. But there weren't enough to shift Mesoamerican demographics. Several Nahua-speaking nobles under the Mexica continued on as bilingual nobles under the Spaniards. The demographics, I think, shift in earnest only after the cocoliztli.

As to why the farrago of legend [REMINDER 9/22- it wasn't all legend]: first, the Cortés family put out a self-serving story about the Don's heroics. Second, the locals damned the memory of the tlatoani whose miscalculations led to the disaster. Later, as Spanish Catholic overlordship became more and more entrenched, several major Mesoamerican cities promoted stories that they had served Spain (and/or embraced Catholicism) first and most loyally; by which, they hoped to improve their position relative to other cities.

...

Anyone think that parallels might be drawn with the accounts of the conquests which Islam had made against Spain beforehand...? I mean, besides Chase Robinson.

Top Kek

I attended Royal Shrewsbury School in the late 1980s. My father mentioned a teacher Frank McEachran, known as Kek to that generation. The school was AngloWelsh if anything; McEachran, a grammar-school boy from Wolverhampton, was probably a Scot by ancestry. Kek semi-retired in 1960 but continued to teach and to live near the school, until he passed in 1975.

One "Moonraker" (not me) typed up the Frank McEachran Wiki page in 2012 and, somehow, convinced Wikipedia that the man mattered. Some of McEachran's students went commie - and traitor. I concede that counts as mattering.

Notwithstanding, my dad loved McEachran. So did several of Kek's colleagues at the school, still teaching there in my day: Charlesworth, Holgate, LeQuesne. Those colleagues re-edited McEachran's books of "spells" and published a new version in 1992ish, which my dad duly bought.

McEachran - arrogantly - had published a work on The Civilized Man when he was in his late 20s; then, in 1932, The Destiny of Europe. (He was born in 1900 so converting age to year, and back again, is easy.) Those books made precisely the impact they deserved to make: the man was no Hilaire Belloc (UPDATE 10/19 - who was himself an economic crank). Not in 1930...

...and not in 1970. McEachran in the mid-1930s was a disciple of one Henry George. George was one of those thinkers who crop up now and again, not Socialist, but also against free-trade and the Machine. The Italians had their fascists; certain AngloCatholics came up with "Distributism". Georgism looks like Distributism for nonobservant Anglicans.

On The Site, as a teacher, McEachran was a Dead Poets Society figure. Kek was tolerated in Salopia where he might not be so tolerated in other schools. Among McEachran's chosen pericopae - he called them "Spells" - was Auden's jaundiced look at examinamania. And yes, Shrewsbury did screen DPS at us soon after it came out.

We did not have Kek when we were there, nor a teacher like Kek; but the school honoured his memory. Even the Tory teachers like Charlesworth honoured him.

So: let's talk about the legacy of McEachran. Let's decide if Kek is worth the honour.

That McEachran promoted a Third Way economics, Georgism, hints at an idealism coupled with deep naïveté. Third Way theories in a society tend to fascism or socialism. Kek's classroom even provides a laboratory for how Third Way theories work on a young brain.

What teenagers hear, from Dead Poets Society type teachers, is Question Authority; and - in a "Royal" school - they associate Authority with the Throne and the Altar. The problem is the problem of Chaotic Good: it doesn't exist. The kids just gravitate to the most-coherent alternative authority. It might be some Christian cult, or a hippie commune, or a Right militia. But, against our Modern World, the most-coherent alternative authority is Marxism. At least, so it was in the 1940s; over 1995-2015 the alternative was arguably Islam, but I suspect Marxism is back again, or worse than Marxism.

Kek wasn't a Marxist but he induced many students toward Marxism. He gave his students the metaphysical HIV which opened them up to the Marxist disease.

Kek was a Bad Thing.

BACKDATING 8/18

Dennis Prager is not to be trusted

I read through Dennis Prager's commentary on Exodus and then I read Darío Fernández.

Prager claimed there was no record of a Jew - outside the Bible - being executed according to the laws of Torah. This didn't pass the smell test. If God's Law says "if X happens, do Y" and human nature is constant; then somewhere somehow, Y will happen.

Fernández's book was mostly against the Islamic regime in Andalus, but the text also made some observations about Sephardic Jewish life in the ghetto. If you were a Jew and you broke the Sephardic law, you got killed.

Exile was a tool in the toolbox; a Jew getting exiled for blasphemy against the prophets might well be blaspheming against Muslim prophets too which meant death. But such events might not count for Prager.

Fernández documents that Jews got stoned for apostasy in Spain as well - directly.

Fernández notes a law in the Constantine code forbidding Jews from stoning apostates [n. 79]; the Visigoths in Spain enacted the same law. The monarchs wouldn't have had to forbid that law if nobody was enforcing it. Note also that Jewish law associates apostasy with adultery and, I surmise, some Francescas and Paolos likely got the rock as well.

When Vox Day calls Dennis Prager a liar - that's a reason why.

BACKDATE 8/18.

Why Malik?

I found a used copy of Darío Fernández-Morera's The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.

(Myth is an ISI book, like Spencer's Did Muhammad Exist? and - more to the point - Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind (which sucks of course). It cites Emmet Scott's Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited; which was NERP, not ISI, but both books are of the same stripe. UPDATE 8/18: the terlit review.)

Somewhere in all such books are perhaps-shorter books explaining how the relevant Islamic concepts took shape, and where and when. In Fernández's case, we're looking at extreme Malikite Islam from the end of the 700s AD to the fall of the Almoravids.

Fernández documents that for half a millennium or more, Imam Malik (d. 795 AD) through his pupil Yaḥya bin Yaḥya Ibn Kathir al-Laythi (d. 848 AD) ruled al-Andalus with a heavy, dead hand. Although Fernández doesn't get into this (it doesn't matter much), Laythi was indeed a faithful transmitter of Malik's muwatta, as can be seen by comparison with Abu Muṣʿab's recension [UPDATE 7/19/21: er... upon seeing that comparison . . .]. Malik himself was an adherent of the Madina fiqh, which he believed superior over other schools' fiqh; Laythi and his successors argued for that madhhab against the (later) pure ḥadith-based legal schools, purportedly "Muhammadan". When Malikites came to Sicily, they brought the Warsh Qurân with them; this is now dominant in the Maghreb. It was said that the Maghreb had Hamza's qirâ', from al-Kufa, before that.

That Malikism isn't ḥadith-fundamentalist does not mean that the Spanish Malikites were tolerant. Fernández, 128 notes how amir-turned-caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥman III (r. 912–61 AD) mandated that only Maliki judges rule on Islamic law. In fact, when the amir executed his son, it may have been because his son was deviating too far into "Shafi'ism" - that is, into the ahl al-ḥadith. Mostly Shafi'ites got exiled (p. 99).

There were Muslims in Spain who weren't Maliki. The whole of Valencia was "qabayli berber" and, as fremen do, thumbed its nose at the Umayyad emirs until the Caliphate restoration. Ibn Hazm is a later case in point... but he got exiled (p. 97). [UPDATE 1/8/2022: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Ismāīl ibn Badr too.] I get the impression that Ibn 'Abd Rabbih (d. 940 AD) wasn't interested in sectarian debates; given that he (famously) collected Syrian and Iraqi "merchandise" (not Madinese nor even Spanish) which he "sold back to them"; one suspects this one, at least, could appreciate the Hamza Qurân. The Baqi recension of Ibn Khayyat's chronograph also survives among the Andalusis. The Spanish Umayyads, I take it, tolerated non-Maliki literature as long as it was at least not anti-Umayyad, and if the Malikite wasn't sitting at the bench.

Fernández glides over the rise of the Maliki madhhab; it wasn't born in Spain nor even in Africa, and it wasn't brought there by the first conquerors. Al-Hakam I and especially 'Abd al-Rahman II (r. 822-52 AD) seem to have taken it from Laythi. As to why: pending more investigation (and evidence) I suspect the natural tendency of Sunni amirates to cede more power to God... which meant, to God's jurists. Also the 'Abbasids were succumbing to the ahl al-ḥadith over the 800s; Malikites, especially if given inquisitorial power, could arrest that, at least.

TwoPhilip

On the Catholic-traditional OnePeterFive blog, David Mitchell put up a post contrasting the Anglican hymns he once loved, against the hymns in the Catholic Church today. The consensus of the comments there, was that the modern Catholic hymnal contains namby-pamby and/or even heretical content. I am not arguing with this much; the "Eccles And Bosco" parody blog has highlit an awful lot of cringe.

What I noticed in the comments, is a commenter "James" who said there should not be hymns at all in a Mass. And coming back to it now, I couldn't read my own comment until I signed into disqus. I believe this is known as a "Shadow Ban".

I am not going to argue the point, in this post. (My comment had suggested plainsong in presence of the Host; hymns before and after.) What I will do, is step back from the whole discussion, and observe how extremism happens, taking this discussion as evidence.

Rabbinic Judaism proposes the concept of the Fence Around Torah. The Torah - for rabbis - comes from the Most High God. A Jew must obey every injunction as far as possible unless a situation occurs where it cannot be obeyed, or it threatens the Jew's life directly. To avoid even the possibility of disobedience, the rabbis construct their "fence": for fear of the prohibition on mixing cow's milk and that cow's offspring's meat, the Jew cannot eat a cheeseburger. Before the rabbis, the priesthood had an analogous "fence" around the Temple; the Essenic Temple Scroll extended the Temple's holiness over all Jerusalem.

Every group of humans has a social hierarchy. Where a group is holy, that group contains a subgroup who assert dominance by claiming to be more holy. Synagogues today host Jews who love Torah more than the rabbi does; the Sadducees had the Essenes.

OnePeterFive has its Philip II Catholics, demanding an Escorial of our churches. And if they have a limit to how "Catholic" their commenters go, I haven't seen anyone run into that limit.

BACKDATING 8/12

Word On Fire

In your average Catholic parish, you may have been introduced to the Word On Fire videos. I recommend them to prospective converts, to observe what the bishops of the Vatican II era are asking Catholics to believe.

The "secrets" of Our Lady purportedly delivered at Fatima are a case in point. The reception of Fatima may even involve a revolution in the Faith. I don't, personally, believe a word of it; neither do secular critics. The Russian Orthodox have outright laughed it out the room:

So all these Latin dreams about “dedicating Russian [sic] to the Virgin Mary” and all the other ways to subjugating Russia to the Pope (which is, of course, the real objective here) have absolutely zero chance to succeed, at least long as a sufficient part of the Russian Orthodox people (not just clergy!) keep their traditional “collective/corporate” memory about the true history of the Church of Christ and the roots of Russian Orthodoxy.

Catholicism does not (yet) demand belief in Fatima in order to be Catholic. But many lay Catholics do believe in Fatima. Also, the Church has canonised many Fatima believers as saints (before Paul VI I'd have beatified Nestorius, but hey).

Today we watched WoF's video about John Cardinal Newman. This one started out in Oxford as an Anglican preacher and professor. He sincerely hoped Anglicanism could form a middle ground between Protestant and Roman excesses. He was, at home, a depressive who never got around to getting married.

At some point Newman published "Tract 90", about the Anglican Thirty Nine Articles. The Anglican establishment interpreted this tract as Catholic-curious and subversive. Newman got hounded out of Oxford; although the C of E did not formally excommunicate the man. Instead Newman excommunicated himself, and re-enrolled as a Catholic priest. The Catholic establishment didn't trust him either, up to Pius IX; but his successor Leo XIII loved him and made him a Cardinal.

Unlike the WoF Fatima series, which was - whatever you think of the event - very well done; the WoF piece on Newman didn't organise its topic as well as I would have liked. WoF also implies Pius IX was presiding over a decadent Church. I had to go elsewhere to read that he was the Pope during the Mortara scandal and the reinstitution of the Ghetto system. "Decadent" is not the word I would have used. "Reactionary reformer", is closer to it.

I haven't read Newman's thought myself. WoF presents Newman's philosophy as a necessary underpinning of Vatican II. Newman, in his way of thinking, does strike me as residing on the oecumenical side of Latin thought. On the other hand, WoF lets slip that Newman disapproved "liberalism", another emotive word I beware of using myself. I also wonder if Newman ever would have approved Fatima or similar Mary-centric movements of the twentieth-century Church.

Next week we're to watch a WoF on GK Chesterton - another convert. Chesterton had some real effect on Oxford Christian thought - famously on that "Ulster Protestant" CS Lewis. I am less sure about what fellow Catholic Tolkien made of Chesterton. If WoF has done anything on the French-born half-Anglo Hilaire Belloc, we're not watching that. NOTE 10/19 - both were dangerously naïve and, in fact, out of step with Leo XIII.

I'd already found Word On Fire to be tendentious where it dealt with Fatima. For John Newman, I suspect WoF is reading Vatican II whiggery into his thought. WoF also doesn't explain how Newman's thought advanced Catholic thought, nor on to what extent Newman influenced English thought; although it does well at Newman's theory of rhetoric.

I suggest that prospective Catholics and new Catholics watch Word On Fire videos with a notepad in hand, with a VERY skeptical approach.

Filioque, sed non per filium

OnePeterFive has published Nishant Xavier's dawa to the Greek churches, arguing for the Spirit as "proceeding" from the Son as well as from the Father. This "procession" is hypostatic, meaning it reflects the nature of the Godhead Himself, at least as far as humans can perceive Him. It isn't just energetic.

I am decidedly in the Dyothelete choir, as the saying goes. Still, the article is valuable for showing the career of "filioque" among the Nicene Christians. I'd thought it had been mooted first at Toledo, and therefore a Latin construct. Xavier knows Toledo; but explains how Leo the Great and Gregory the Great had - earlier - mooted filioque.

Also Cyril of Alexandria argues for it in his third letter to Nestorius. Nestorius agreed with that much, given that said letter challenges him from the Monophysite perspective. This implies a consensus in pre-Ephesian Christendom, extending perhaps as far as Iraq.

What should worry Xavier more is exactly Cyril's monophysitism where he is not making a rhetorical appeal to Nestorius' common ground. Dyotheletes insist on filioque to make that distinction between Father and Son and, thereby, between the secular and religious arms of the Christian state. I do infer this distinction from Nestorius. I am not seeing this from Cyril.

What also should worry Xavier is a parallel development in Christology, where the Spirit flows from the Father through the Son. Such Xavier quotes from Tarasius of Constantinople, Basil of Caesarea ("the Great"), and even Maximus (who I believe should have known better). On this language, Arius and Eusebius themselves might agree. I sense a danger in a religious authority asserting itself with the Father, and emitting pronouncements through a captive Church. (Although these instances assuredly have contexts which inspired those wordings, such as what I have adduced for Cyril.)

I don't know that Xavier is going to win many converts from his essay as a result.

SEQUEL 8/15/2021: Charlemagne sensed it too.

Monotheletism in the Torah

Within the Abraham-Lot cycle in Genesis, is an incident where the King of "Elam" gathers a flock of Mesopotamians and conquers Canaan. The Elam-led coalition gets as far as Sodom, whose King Bera cries for help. Abraham's family provides that help. After the victory, some "Melkizedeq (מלכי־צדק)" blesses Abraham; and then the king Bera shows up again.

I mooted a theory another year, at another blog and during another life, that this whole story is nativist (Samaritan?) propaganda against shahs Cyrus and Cambyses. These two styled themselves "king of Anshan", proposed Elamite as a national language, and conquered down to Egypt - reimposing the Jews upon a population who weren't all that keen to see them again. Since Herodotus we've been conditioned to see the Persian regime as Achaemenid, self-consciously Persian, and communicating in Aramaic. For Herodotus, writing about a series of Achaemenid attacks against his people, that's forgivable: it's what Darius wanted us to see. But Darius was a revolution and a reconquest. As Darius started over; when we look at Cyrus and Cambyses, we must start over.

Back to storyworld Neil Godfrey is relating Robert Cargill, that "Melkizedeq" is none other than Bera. Abraham was blessed by a Sodomite, and tithed to him. The scribes then changed everything, clumsily.

I'll be first to admit of much clumsiness in the Genesis. The sacrifice of Isaac is a horrid case in point: two men go up the mount of YHWH, one comes down, and in between the other one is saved (but is he?). And then there's that sordid tale of Sodom itself which is a clear plagiary of the Gibeah episode "later" under the Judges.

Against Sodom at the end, YHWH will call for fire from YHWH in heaven. I've always thought that this should read "from El" or maybe just from heaven, which a monotheist cannot allow; or that Lot had called for such celestial intercession, which goes against the negative portrayal of Lot elsewhere. Later the Christians (and Muslims) would argue for Lot's righteousness; and later still their Monothelete faction would use just that verse before the Muslims' amir when arguing against Maximus' party.

And then there's the question of how long the Torah trundled along the centuries with every sect adding its own little tweaks and harmonisations: the Samaritan Pentateuch, for instance, and several "rewritten" Bibles at Qumran.

Certainly if this part of the Genesis story started out as a nativist tract (or poem?), Sodom won't have been the enemy. But Yehud Medinata never did escape Satrap Ebernari in Achaemenid Persia. Only in Hasmonaean times did it attain autonomy. The Temple was loyal to Persia and could not have approved too much nativism against (coded) "Elam"; and under the Greeks later on, the Jews had become honestly nostalgic for their Persian messiahs. There was also a Prophetic proverb about the wickedness of Sodom, especially its inhospitality to guests - which, for returning Jews, they could re-apply to the Samaritans. To the extent the Samaritans approved Sodom, the Jews must disapprove. Eventually the Samaritans had to accept the Jewish version of the story too.

But anyway, so much for the textual integrity of Genesis 550-150 BC. What does the Melkizedeq story mean for Catholics today?

That Melkizedeq is both king and priest hints as a merger of the two functions. This is the confusion of state and church which, in the late Roman Empire, Dyotheletism arose to combat - first at Nicaea and then, more effectively, at Chalcedon.

Later, that Psalm we number #110 will cite the Melkizedeq account to support a priest-king in that psalmist's own day. This is, perhaps, early Hasmonaean. In Christianity the tractate for the Hebrews - certainly after the failure of their Temple - argues for "Christ" to be taken as priestly. After all, Genesis hardly speaks of Melkizedeq's royal מלכ; the anecdote is of his moral and priestly צדק.

Still, the whole Abraham section of Genesis remains a mess. It were better for Catholics that the whole story made more sense. Cargill might not have the answer, but we can all pray that the Torah's sources for this cycle be found.

Why is late classical philosophy so boring?

When I entered college, we had a requirement in "the Humanities". (Later on they allowed for alternatives to HUMA 101-102; you could take a religious-studies course as well, so I did that instead of 102.) The Humanities, also known as The Liberal Arts, were - I later found out - the point of a Western education. I was introduced to Plato by way of The Republic; not actually a bad starting-point, especially to political thought, especially especially as pertains to Iran today. But then...

As we were learning about the history of the classical civilisation, we got into the history of Christianity, and - in early days - this involved Gnosticism. Plato, we learnt, had written other books. So had his students. Aristotle was the important one (unfortunately we didn't get to read him) but Plato's followers were the ones who influenced the Gnostics.

And the questions the Platonists were asking were... boring.

Specifically they were asking stuff like "what is matter" and "what is existence" (ontology) and "how do we know" (epistemology). I hadn't bothered asking this stuff. Aristotle touched on it too, being more interested in the world we got. The hardcore Platonists thought they could derive it from mathematical first-principles. All this without a working set-theory...

Take Numenius for instance. Numenius, defining matter, was stuck with Greek element theory. Moderns can work with that but if we do, we have to transpose our own consensus upon this frame: the Standard Model of particle-physics, perhaps. Worse: Numenius, although a reader (and fan) of Torah, didn't see spacetime as something bound into a finite-age Creation. As a result he inherited that ancient Near Eastern theory where some creator assembles matter into order; matter being coeternal. Again, we can work with that, but only if we refuse to define "matter" outside this universe.

I just couldn't help but think that the philosophers didn't know what they were talking about, either.

August 2019 status report

So Davidski describes David Anthony's latest, as Davidski annotates it. Anthony himself is basically annotating Wang although the bibliography on Anthony's link is truncated.

Anthony is probably the best archaeologist of Indo-European studies. His prose is still dry and his presentation still jumbled, but he has improved upon his work in The Horse, The Wheel, And Language. I recommend to my readers to go read Anthony's paper in full.

Over the last four to five years has come a veritable flood of genetic information, from the high steppes of Eurasia as much as from hinterland Africa. (And they intersect: this is whence we found the N1 mtDNA - Eurasian - in Somalia.) As of 2015 it all got rather overwhelming; we had to keep track of West Hunter Gatherer and East Hunter Gatherer, sometimes they mixed, and then we found out about Ancient North Eurasians somehow related to American Indians as well and... oh I give up.

Fortunately (for those keeping track of it all) the last four years have mostly resulted in consolidations. Anthony is, as best he can, laying down the consensus, to the extent there is one.

Ancient North Eurasians roamed around the Eurasian steppe accompanied by dogs and hunting the big beasts of the region. After the Ice Age, those who stayed in Eurasia became the East Hunter Gatherers. (Further east, the ANE mixed with Asians and moved to Alaska, no longer concerning us here.) Anthony calls it a "mating network", an amusing turn of phrase, but accurate enough, because when ANE>EHG met outsiders, they didn't accept much of their gene-flow. Not in central Asia anyway; we've already agreed not to speak of the East Asian branch.

On those outsiders, there was a Western Hunter Gatherer "network" too. I suppose these were the holdovers from the Magdalenians. Anthony thinks they were a springback from Spain and mainly even from North Africa. EHG and WHG met around the Danube 7000 "BC" (like me, Anthony has no truck with "BCE") and established a "frontier". If you were in EHG or WHG and you were really up for mating outside the network, the Danube is where you went. Otherwise you stayed home.

Further east meanwhile, a group of EHG met up with a third set of hunter-gatherers: from the Caucasus. (Nobody is farming up here yet.) Along the northern Black Sea, EHG and CHG formed their own frontier, mixing to 50/50 parity. I am unsure what happened to EHG further northeast; Anthony seems to accept they became Finns.

In 5000 BC, everything changed. For a start, pottery starts appearing. Because people were storing up for the winter. That's right: farming is starting up. Those farmers came from Anatolia. And - so Anthony and Davidski are deriving from Wang - this came straight across the Euxine or even from the Balkans; not from the Caucasus this time.

From the Caucasus was a different lot, centred around Maykop. Davidski adds a group in between them: Steppe Maykop, who were partly "Siberian foragers". Asian invaders so far into the west are hardly unheard of; witness the Mongols and (we now know) the Avars.

So Maykop and this EHG/CHG/Anatolian hybrid had little in common and didn't mix; and if Davidski is right, these two Mating Networks didn't even meet, because the Steppe Maykop were, er, cock-blocking them.

The EHG/CHG/farmer mix concocted a culture at Yamnaya and spoke a common language, IndoEuropean. The rest of the story went as it went, ending up with people like me.

One interesting remaining question is: what's up with those weird language-groups in the Caucasus today. Maykop proper is sometimes associated with the Circassian groups of the "northwest Caucasus". But there's also Kartveli, spoken in modern Georgia. We can add the old Caucasian Albanians, now the Udi, and related to the Chechens. During the Bronze Age, Anatolia further hosted the Hattians and the Hurrians. So anyone musing that Maykop is Circassia has, by my calculations, a 20% chance of being right. Maximum.

Some work on the Kura-Araxes culture might help. Pots Aren't People but, as symbols put to concrete form, pottery may well map to language.

UPDATE 9/27: Where we go from here.

Those dark-skinned Semites

Wesley Muhammad is at it again, now proposing Black Muhammad.

I'll point out here that Dr Muhammad is not entirely misguided. I was impressed by his ethnography of the Ọyọ, back in the day. I was very impressed actually. It led me to a wider study, or a deeper rabbithole if you like, on the phenomenon of paraIslamic prophethood generally. Check out the first essay in A Garden for the Poets.

Dr Muhammad's new article is like his other curates'-eggs: Good In Parts. It points out a longstanding linguistic relationship between those languages classed "Semitic" (including, now, Akkadian) and several language-families endemic to north and northwest Africa - and not further east of Sargon's Akkad. Indeed, the Tigris proved the end of the line for the Semites until the Assyrian Age. Where Dr Muhammad falls down, is on genealogy - on race.

Dr Muhammad is aware of this when he tries to slip in, “Semitic” is properly a linguistic designation, not racial. Much depends on "properly". In its base "Shem" is first seen in the Bible where it is a genealogic marker. It is only 19th-century linguists who noted the very-similar Near Eastern languages which mapped fairly-well to the Bible's Shem (appending, interestingly, Canaan ben Ham). 'Twere the linguists wot stuck Shem's name on the languages.

'Tis now 2019. We are no longer able to moot theories on race based on language alone. We have genetics these days.

Where it comes to the Horn of Africa and to the pre-Islamic "Berbers" in north Africa, we have evidence of vast population-movements during the worst winters of that last Ice Age, 14000 years BC. We know the African fringe's genetic turnover came from population-movements from two facts: they involved mitochondrial DNA - meaning, women; and they happened long before a commodity slave-trade was technologically feasible. (We could add a third fact, that the Horn of Africa was never wealthy enough on its own to import significant numbers of shiksas. Although Tunisia perhaps had its moments.)

It happens that the two Pleistocene Eurasian-to-Africa movements were of different peoples - at first. The Somalis got N1 women; the Algerians, U5. But there seems to be a movement from East Africa straight west, by land, toward the Green Sahara, after the Ice Age; then, from the Sahara, moving north. Certainly when the Garamantes went under, they exported many Imazighen northward (so say Elizabeth Fentress and Andrew Wilson); hence the Rif of today. If it happened in 400 AD it happened in 6000 BC.

To sum up, although the "AfroAsiatic" linguistic evidence is weighted toward the Afro Sahara as of, oh, 2000 BC (although, to turn around what I'd noted earlier, not south of that...), the genetic evidence points to a push from the north to the south in 14000 BC. And then we get to the linguistic nature of the AfroAsiatic languages themselves, which point to a very deep divergence between Semitic and, also, Egyptian, Tamazight, and Chadic. We're not dealing with anything like as recent as the separation between Sanskrit and Latin, here. Not even Hittite and Latin.

One more point, from the Bible which gave us the name "Shem"... "Ham" isn't so precise. Ham includes Egypt, and the Imazighen, and Lake Chad, and the Kushites of Somalia (and Canaan) - all alike. The Bible sees Shem as more-aligned with Ham. But it doesn't really know Ham; and its view of Ham will be weighted to the most-immediate trading-partners. That started with Egypt and moved more to the Mediterranean coast, where the Imazighen. These Hamites were darker than Greeks and Iranians; but they were not black.

As to Muhammad, he may not be the father of any of our men as the saying goes, but Muhammad's paternal grandfather was the father of a multitude. The male descendants of the Quraysh bear J-M267, sometimes named "J1". This is not a black gene; it is Near Eastern Farmer.

As to why the classical prohibition on sketching Muhammad as a Kushi, well... there was (and is) a lot of asabiya going on, in Islam as much as among whites. Much Islamic asabiya was shu'ubi from Iran, as Dr Muhammad notes, but it also existed on the Africans' behalf for instance in al-Jahiz's work. Pace Dr Muhammad I don't think the anti-black Muslims struck the first blow. I suspect that Yemeni or even Somali Muslims had made this play. This could not do other than annoy the ulema.

I desire no ill of Dr Muhammad, personally. But he is, sadly, zalam anfusah.