Euxine, II

Neolithic farms spread with Neolithic farmers. At two points before 5500 BC – before the urbanisations – those farms paused. A former blog, in 2006, had discussed these pauses, in context of the book Noah's Flood.

Here is a study measuring sea surface salinity not far west of the Dardanelles. As expected, this water gets fresher as the ice melted, starting 9000 BC (after Younger Dryas) and stabilizing again 3000 BC. This desalinization trend is punctuated with two sharper drop-offs.

One drop is at some span within the longer range 5756-5621 BC. Below that, another drop within a range 6492-6364 BC. The spans coincide with the melting of the Laurentide… in Canada, the earlier stage of which also drained Agassiz. The lake drained 6500ish BC – suddenly; and the whole sheet was melted I’m guessing more gradually over the late 5700s.

The former drainage chilled worldwide temperatures; which, I presume, delayed the final melting of the rest of the ice. The harsh 6400s BC flood and ensuing winter further retarded development of the nascent Neolithic settlements, over 6400-6200 BC.

Back to the north Aegaean: here is a circulation between freshwater from the top of the Black Sea, draining southwest, and denser saltwater flowing back northeast along the seafloor. To this day the Euxine is sharply differentiated with a somewhat fresh and fishy top, over a lifeless dead-sea floor.

So, the abstract: “The meltwater events point to an increased outflow of low salinity water from the Black Sea”.

I wonder that the rising of waters in the Atlantic, to the west of the Med, should correlate with the outflow of Euxine water, from its east. As I read the PDF, it turns out the Euxine was already (relative to the Med) full 9100-7200 BC and spilling westward (lowering the north Aegaean salinity) 6800 BC. William Ryan, whom I'd cited 2006, was wrong!

The Mesolithic waterfall from the Euxine, over millennia, eroded the straits. After water levels rose sufficiently in the Med – much more from Canada than from Pontus – the two levels reached an equilibrium. This ended the waterfall; instead, creating the two-way current seen today. All that shook out around 6400 BC.

It happens that the shorelines in the Euxine are shallow. A small rise in sealevel can mean a large loss of lakeshore. Also, the new water starting 6400 BC was salt. Med-water was by then less salty than it had been; but still much saltier than native Euxine water, and it came over too fast for the fisheries to adapt.

The next, 5600 BC, rise in seawater was also abrupt. They say it was less abrupt than 6400 BC, and that it didn’t change the weather this time. It still would have disrupted shore life along the rugged Med and – more so – shallow Pontus.

The “Noah’s Flood” hypothesis, I gather, still stands. Also: starting 6200 BC, Caucasian Hunter Gatherers hit the northern rivers, as far as Samara. Here and now was established the CHG / EHG(=ANE) boundary; which had become a mixed, consistent culture as of 4500 BC - an Indo-Hittite culture. The Anatolians and the Maykops weren't here yet, but they're on the horizon.

North African variability

Another point of interest in Dartnell: variability. Dartnell, 22 dates such events, in East Africa: 2.7-2.5 mya, 1.9-1.7, and 1.1 mya to 900kBC. All before anything mate-ably human. Dartnell sets an 800k period to these cycles.

This implies, for a fourth, the end of the Eemian 120kBCish. But "Eemian" didn't make the index. And by then the various humans around the Old World were smart enough to weather the changes. Perhaps.

Of the three spikes, Dartnell holds that these were the crucible which made humans. I quibble here that he's not looking at the Sahara, North Africa, nor West Africa. East Africa preserves the remains, and is more-or-less Qaeda-free; so East Africa's where he's got to look.

The middle span of variability falls in the ~2.3-1.46 mya Dry Sahara epoch - at least, as seen from Tenerife. But the other spans fall outside it. Either the Sahara was wet or else the westbound wind wasn't strong; and since we know that the Sahara depends on the monsoons (or not) we can rule out the latter.

Dartnell, 38 instead cites the Milankovitch Cycles. These have always been ongoing but 2.8 mya, the Atlantic / Pacific current got SERIOUSLY weakened when Panama was closed off. That in turn weakened the North Atlantic conveyor. So next time the cycle hit, 2.6 mya... ice age, in the Northern Hemisphere. Which was Variable Age in East Africa.

I propose in the Sahara it just took another 400ky or so to dry out Chad again.

The death of Lake Chad

Earlier I posted about the later years of Sahara. I am now reading Lewis Dartnell's Origins. With that, let's talk about the early years.

If Egypt is the Nile's gift, the Sahara is the monsoons' curse. When they falter, the region dries out: so Dartnell, 72. Also, per p. 105: by 6 mya the old Tethys had become a literal "Mediterranean", an almost landlocked salt lake, open only to the west - and ever shrinking. Meanwhile the Alps and other European mountains arose, to weaken the north winds; and, between this newly re-occidented ocean and the rest of Africa, the Atlas mountains rose up to block what was left. Given the prevailing winds of that latitude, the only moisture the Sahara region could get, was from the east.

Gibraltar closed off 6-5.5 mya. The western Med turned into a salt plain; the eastern Med, into a big Dead Sea. But this mattered little to North Africa; the passage reopened 5.3 mya. What mattered more: the Rift formed to Africa's east 5.5-3.7 mya (p. 11). This blocked all but the mightiest monsoons.

We know there was enough Sahara dust to blanket the Canary Isles 4.8 mya. That delay looks, to me, like the death of Lake Chad.

I think that the Wet Sahara depended on Lake Chad, much as the Garamantes would depend on their wells. The lake effect watered the surrounding sahel and small forests; the (seasonal) monsoons watered the lake. Without the monsoons, Chad was and is a fossil.

Heather Heyer's death

Everyone knows that Heather Heyer was run down by a neo-Nazi, said neo-Himmler being one James Fields Jr / James Alex Fields, currently serving time for that crime. At least, so say those who use this as an example of why we need to ban more books and more blogs.

If we're getting pedantic, Fields was properly a White Identitarian, not a supporter of National Socialism. Although that's likely changed now that he's seen where moderation has gotten him...

More to the point, after Fields tried to push his way through a mob of rioters, and although some overweight 30+ white women were observed beating on his car and being flung to the side... initial reports were that Heyer wasn't one of them. She collapsed on the sidewalk. Her own mother at first thought she's suffered a heart attack. The autopsy reported instead, "blunt force trauma" on the chest.

So we can at least question those initial reports, which we got from Red Ice and the Occidental Observer, that Heyer died of a heart attack.

The series of events look more like: after Fields plowed his car through the mob, many people in the road (not Heyer) were hurled in the air, pushed to the side, or just tripped and fell over. Some socialist named Burke fell on Heyer. Heyer, dressed in black on a hot day, passed out. Burke - severely injured himself - noticed she wasn't moving and got up so she could get CPR. The CPR broke her weakened ribcage. She did not survive it.

That means it wasn't Fields' direct intent that Heyer died. But. Helen Dale notes some Latin clause about, if a death happens as a result of acts taken whilst you're doing a crime, even if that death or even injury wasn't your object, you're still liable for the damage. It is Fields' fault that he'd hit the other rioters...

... who were, in fact, obstructing traffic and terrorising Fields. The alt righters currently defending Fields would, I think, counter, okay then, was this 20 year old loser supposed to get out of the car, step out, and reason with the crowd? Maybe they should lock up Burke (guilty of riot) with Fields in his cell.

This much I'll leave to other blogs to decide.

Banned Books Week: a contrary opinion

It's not just Melissa Barnett who supports trashing texts which aren't in step with our braver new world. One PE Muscowitz has written a whole book on that topic. Which book he'd not like if an opponent trashed it, itself; but hey - he's one of the good guys.

Just ask him.

This isn't the first such brief I've seen around the place. The University of Chicago Law School wrote similar (pdf) in 2016. Vox Day has been asserting that sham that is Muh Free Speech for years. Even Ace over at Ace of Spades has observed that free speech, as the Constitution defines it, doesn't mean much when extraConstitutional monopolies and oligopolies sign on with the "no platform" agenda.

As far as Moscowitz is concerned, yeah - he's a liar and a hypocrite, in the service of evil. I expect he'd wear that label with pride, coming from the likes of me. I will simply observe that "corporate" does not mean "Right-wing", these days, if it ever did, which is why Jared Taylor's White Identity is no longer sold on Amazon, despite it being Right(ish). Moscowitz would applaud that decision; but it is of interest that Moscowitz still sees Amazon as "Right-wing" even after banning that book and thousands like it.

Which is not to say that such a critique cannot be made by (actual) honest men. Critics of "capitalism" are being shut out, along with critics of such corporations powerful enough to support capitalism for themselves and despotism for everyone else. Those latter critics, properly critics of fascism I might add, aren't faring much better.

1 Ahau

I've noticed a pattern with dying-and-resurrected gods. Such patterns have been noted before by others; I'll use this blogpost as a mere marker.

As a rule, myths are composed and publicly recited when they mean something to their audience. Dying-and-resurrection has to do at minimum with earthly seasons; seasons do not pass in the underworld nor in the vault of heaven. Nor is there a life-and-death cycle outside middle earth. I suspect similar of Persephone.

Dying-and-reincarnate deities, further, mean the most to a deliberately-agricultural society. Such societies are all recent. Humans were roaming all over Eurasia for fifty thousand years - longer, if you're counting Neanders - and we didn't get past hunting and gathering until, when, the Younger Dryas 10000 BC. The hierarchical walled town came later - in Eurasia, and in the New World.

I suggest that the celestial deity who comes here, dies, is buried, and gives life has (mythically) come here so recently that he may as well be historical himself. This deity taught us to be civilised: before which time and outside which place, humans were and are still apes on feet. I'd go so far as that this deity makes possible the historical brain. He cannot be extracosmic.

Mesoamerica adhered closer to Neolithic patterns for longer than did Eurasia, such that they recorded their thoughts in hieroglyphs. In the Maya myths, 1 Ahau descended into the Xibalbá. On his emergence, or perhaps by his twins' emergence in the Popol Vuh, 1 Ahau became the Maize God. This didn't happen on Kolob out there in Zeta Reticuli. This happened right here - or at least right down there in Olmec territory. Or so the Maya believed.

By that analogy, I expect that Old World farmers also believed that their corn gods came to them to teach them the arts of farmwork, in a physical past. The first Egyptian dynasties (NOTE 2/22/21: only seven centuries from herders) asserted that Osiris had lived here on earth, that he had died here, that his widow retrieved that organ used for child-conception so to use it to conceive Horus.

Further: Horus then became king and, upon ascension, passed his sovereignty to Menes. (The Fifth Dynasty would shift to solar-worship, and the Turin Canon and Manetho would still later interpolate a series of demigods between Horus and Menes; but the Horus Name remained integral to Pharaonism.) Once the society had succeeded well enough, it would scale up. The succession of seasons became an analogue for the succession of kings in a dynasty.

Did Celestial Jesus exist?

Critics of Christian origins tend in two directions. In one, Jesus was just some dude in Roman Judaea; maybe a prophet, true or false, doesn't matter. In another, Jesus was a celestial being outside of spacetime - which, for atheists, doesn't exist. Earl Doherty was big on the latter.

Toward Doherty, and moreso Richard Carrier, Vridar has boldfaced this comment: Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm. Vridar seems to disagree, himself. Now that I've looked, a bit, at Neolithic farming cultures in Europe and in Mesoamerica, I propose to discuss this.

Mythic events which we humans may set outside our spacetime do exist. It is just that the dying-and-reincarnate god is no such event. Such a god acts out his drama here on earth, where seasons come and go; and especially wherever and whenever a farming season comes and goes. When the agricultural society reaches a certain point that god is associated with royalty. The king is dead, long live the king...

This much, therefore, identifies which side owns the burden of proof. Doherty's acolytes must answer: how's Jesus different from 1 Ahau and Osiris-Horus? Why wouldn't Jesus come to Earth, be buried in our Sheol, and rise again from it?

Manchuria

I am reading AJP Taylor this week. Since I can't (yet) tackle this text head-on, I'll take this space to touch on its side-shows. One side-show which, in American war propaganda, was the main show was the career of Japan. This, to Capra's Why We Fight, starts in Manchuria.

Manchuria is named after the Manchus. They were one of many barbarian tribes which aimed to raid and sometimes to conquer China proper. In modern times, some Manchus actually succeeded at it, founding the "Qing" dynasty there. But then in the early 1900s the Chinese deposed that ruling house and founded a republic. This republic claimed to inherit Manchuria along with the other Qing-ruled lands.

What the Chinese Republic claimed and what it could extract taxes from weren't exactly coterminous. In fact Manchuria - like Mongolia, and Tibet - went into limbo. Mongolia had the "advantage" that a Russian warlord took it over and reorganised it; when the warlord was deposed, the Mongols with Communist aid organised a non-Chinese "independent" government. Manchuria, meanwhile, went full anarchic. Where AJP Taylor steps in, page 62 has the Japanese (and the Koreans, he might add) losing out on Manchurian trade over the 1920s; the Japanese military 1931 took measures to secure it.

In this, the Japanese had done what they'd done before, and what the Brits had done before - and by "before" I mean as late as 1927 to Shanghai. Also, by securing Manchuria, a reasonably-strong and reasonably-sane state kept it away from Stalin. Then - Taylor adds - the Chinese republic accepted that they'd lost what they'd never had and what they arguably shouldn't have ever claimed. In 1933 they signed a treaty with Japan in as many words.

Herein is, perhaps, an analogue to German (and Hungarian) foreign policy over the 1930s. Certainly to the Romanians' policy in Transylvania 1918-19, although Taylor scorned any citation of rival Bryant. A region fell into near-anarchy and the locals weren't fixing it, except for communists from outside. Rather than see that happen, some militaristic force acts first.

In this light, there was no real problem with the Japanese invading Manchuria. There was, perhaps, a problem with the 1930s Japanese invading Manchuria. An earlier, more-"Western" government could have taken Manchuria as a mandate like France took Syria. By the 1930s Japanese culture had gotten a little... intense.

Understanding that, we can turn back to Mitteleuropa over 1923-31 versus over 1932-39. Taylor proposes that "Appeasement" in the 1930s was just a natural progression from movements in the 1920s to scale back the scope of Versailles and, in places, to reverse it.

We could counter - Taylor would likely counter himself - that appeasing a reasonable if pro-German negotiator like Stresemann was one thing; appeasing Hitler, quite another. To decide on that, Neville Chamberlain required the services of a mind-reader with a crystal ball. Chamberlain, tragically, had neither.

BACKDATING 9/27: This post developed from some comments at the HQ last night.

The Neolithic proletariat

Over the 1970s and the 1980s, there was something of an industry in feminist palaeoanthropology. Marija Gimbutas and her heralds, "Merlin Stone" and Riane Eisler, proposed that Europe was an egalitarian paradise until the Indo-European androcrats ruined everything.

The Indo-European invasion was, it turned out, real. It was just hard to take, given the politics involved. Mallory (not unlike Coe on Maya glyph translation) supported the Indo-European invasion against critics; the latter counter-proposed that these languages had come with the Neolithic. Genetics has ended that debate. Mallory was right. So was Gimbutas, up to that point.

But as usual it has started up new debates. Among them: if Neolithic society was so gylanic and wonderful, why'd it fall. Over 2017 to early 2019 I floated some ideas of mine own. A big factor, I thought, was plague - yes, as in yersinia pre-/para-pestis. When disease weakens a society, invaders more resistant to those diseases can take over. Someone has to.

The next question is how did the plague get in there. Plague exists out in the steppes but it doesn't destroy cities - there aren't cities. For plague to cut down a city requires a slum. It requires... a proletariat. (I think that the Harappan urban planners had solved that problem, because by then they had learned from the West: that there was a problem here to be solved.)

So here's our proletariat: "Inequality's Origins Go Back at Least 7,000 Years". After 5000 BC, which is Ceramic / Chalcolithic I believe, a revolution in ox-husbandry allowed industrial-scale farms. This was after the "mating-network" frontiers of the Balkans and the Pontic. All before the horse though, and LONG before the Indo-European language(s) had left the steppe. Large scale farming leads to chattel slavery out on the field. For those displaced who don't want to be slaves... some might flee; but most will likely just drift down town.

After 5000 BC, there was cannibalism at Herxheim. Then walls went up in Elsass at Achenheim. At some point 4400-4200 BC the men of Achenheim repulsed an invasion from the west - murdering a lot of the invaders. Note, this was all many hundreds of miles west of the Balkan ethnic frontier, called the "Cucuteni Culture" as of the middle 4000s BC. The recent map hints that the western farmers had gone up from the Rhone; the easterners, overland from the Balkans. They were related a millennium prior, but they had forgotten that by now.

This "Hyborean" situation could not do other than to force people off the undefended farms and into new cities. Cities hadn't existed here before.

WHEN'S THE BEEF 8/9/2020: 4400 BC.

Sahara, on and off

From Alton Parrish's blog of press-releases, comes a presentation held last Monday: delivery of African dust to the Canary Islands between ~4.8-2.8 Ma, ~3.0-2.9 Ma, ~2.3-1.46 Ma, and ~0.4 Ma. This blog doesn't much cover anything pre-Neander / Heidelberg; but I will pipe in to say that the first two spans overlap. Unfortunately Parrish hasn't called them on it (a man after Jessica Saraceni's own heart...).

Interesting to me is that last, 400,000 BP/BC sandstorm over the Canaries. Is that one ongoing? Even given distrust of the timeline, a 400ky desert isn't unprecedented here. That "~2.3-1.46 Ma" is probably accurate, and longer.

What do we make of Green Sahara in our Mesolithic, 8000ish BC? And what of the Eemian - the Neanders' Holocene, up north? Here's a paper that puts Sahara Eemian 126–120k BC. Here: wooded grassland occurrences (10–40% woody cover) across the Sahara, which is supported by the occurrence of tropical humid plants (Ficus, Celtis, and ferns) and subtropical vertebrate fauna as far north as 23–26°N in the Western Desert. I do note that the best Sahara times are only a subset of the overall warm period in each, themselves mere blips in the long Pleistocene winter. Still: are these six-millennium pauses in the deserts recent enough, and non-sandy enough, to (not) show up in Canary rock layers?

BACKDATING 9/25

Banned books week

I am told it is Banned Books Week, when booksellers and librarians preach to us about how baaad it is that books get censored. Usually that means some publicly-funded library or school being told they can't anymore teach from lying liars full of lies like Zinn's "People's History". Given half a chance those same librarians will trash a skipfull of books that were Products Of Their Time.

In light of that, Ron Unz has another of his characteristically verbose posts concerning stuff we're no longer supposed to read about the twentieth-century. This time he's on the case of AJP Taylor 1961. As it happens my local used-bookstore had a hardcopy - the 1983ish reprint. That one's blurb was pretty useless; also, it described Taylor's text as "revisionist".

That begs the question as to what Taylor imagined he was revising, a scant fifteen years after victory in Europe. In fact (so it claims) it was the first crack at writing a history of the war's cause. We're (apparently) not counting Bryant 1940; partly I guess because Bryant had already recanted his work, partly Bryant was discussing Germany, but mostly because Taylor libelled Bryant as "A Nazi Apologist" ... covering up a deep jealousy. Instead, Taylor promises to discuss how Britain and France got themselves involved in what - up to then - had played out solely over the Bloodlands. I can only surmise that Taylor meant to revise conventional wisdom, the late 1950s texto implicito; like Thucydides did for his fellow Greeks a few years after the Peloponnesian War.

Unz proposes that Taylor wasn't revising much, at the time. It is later that the texto implicito became a full-on Narrative. At that point, simply stating facts would get you tarred as a World War Two Revisionist. Worse: as a Holocaust Revisionist; then you'd be in for it.

Since the middle 2000s I think our culture has been less reflexive about small retractions here and there. Liberal Fascism and The Forgotten Man have pushed FDR off his pedestal, some, although unfortunately his mug persists on our dime. Human Smoke was still more daring. "Sovorov" and Solzhenitsyn took awhile to get translated over here; but it's happened, and people have been coming to terms with them. And Google Books, Archive.org, Gutenberg and now Unz have been preserving and displaying what was once lost.

That is, of course, why Melissa Barnett and others are working so hard to trash those Products Of Their Time. And why our Internet has become more curated.

Proserpina

A candidate name for our candidate "planet nine" is Proserpine. So: who she?

The peoples of Italy had a long relationship with the Greeks, from the Bronze Age on. Greek mythology is stuffed with references to (southern) Italy and Sicily. Both peninsulae likely contributed to the Sea Peoples. The very name "Greek" comes from a Helladic name for southern Italy, subsequently adopted by other Italians for the Hellenic race generally.

The Etruscans and then the Romans looked to the Greeks, on their own peninsula, for guidance on their mid-Italian evolving civilisations. Greek gods and Greek myths were equated with Italian gods and myths (this was easiest for the IndoEuropeans in Italy, one imagines); and, if not, such mythoi were simply adopted. A good example of the latter is Heracle(we)s.

Proserpina in Latin corresponds to Persephone. But here the Doric-through-Etruscan path doesn't hold. In fact: any Greek-through-Etruscan doesn't hold. Etruscans have told us here, too, how they named this half-dead princess: "Persipnei". The Per > Pro and the Sip > Serp happened in Latin.

Given how Latin was given to accenting the second syllable, from Persipnei I should expect "Persippina" (like Agrippina); if straight from Greek Persephónē, a fair Latinate transliteration would be "Persiponna". The "per-" prefix is familiar to Latins and they wouldn't replace it without good reason.

One etymology I've seen for Proserpina is from proserpere, "to emerge". In this case, the Latins had a goddess of the springtime, or felt like they needed to have one. They heard "Persipnei" and/or "Persephone" being uttered around them. They figured "She Who Emerges" for a good-enough epithet for the actual goddess, and so they used that.

Restall at Otumba

First, a guest post. "Posted by: Tom Servo at September 22, 2019 11:32 AM" as they say.

302 I read the linked article about Cortez, and his final victory over the Aztec armies on the plain at Otumba, where Cortez and an army of probably less than 1,000 men defeated an Aztec Army of 200,000 by charging directly for the Aztec Leader. I wonder if Cortez had read of Alexander and Gaugamela, or if he just had the same insight under similar circumstances. Alexander was outnumbered 400,000 to 50,000, but he and his personal cavalry led a charge straight at Darius in the center. When Darius panicked and fled the battlefield, the rest of the Persian army collapsed into confusion and was routed. Similarly, once Cortez took out the Aztec leader, the Aztec army lost all command and control and scattered.

A brief look 'round the 'Web and, yes, there was such a battle. And then I looked into Matthew Restall and, all he's got is this: Cortés's stoicism and heroism are further emphasized in Painting #6's depiction of the Battle of Otumba. There he rallied the survivors of the nocturnal escape from Tenochtitlan for a heroic last stand. In this painting, Cortés is in the foreground ...

What I'm reading here is Restall sneering his way around an episode starring Cortés that goes against Restall's portrait of Cortés so far. Up to now Restall has painted the Ultimate Beta Male, just going where the tides take him; and at this point those tides'd taken him right out of Mexico City into Otompan and were about to whelm him. But here, the commanders hit upon the winning tactic. If anyone had claimed that some commander other than Cortés was leading the charge, they would have said so, and Restall would have reported it.

[NOTE 7/7/2020: some say that decapitating the Aztec force did not rout the survivors; these rule this outcome a "draw". I take the new evidence seriously, but I reject the verdict. By allowing the Spanish and their allies' leaders to escape, the Aztecs failed to achieve their aim. In plain English: the Aztecs lost.]

I'd held two strikes against Restall already, where he'd been politically correct. He miscounted the sacrificial dead in Mexican sites; he downplayed the savagery of Mesoamericans where they merrily joined into the Conquistadors' rapine. Otumba is Restall's third strike.

Morrell v. Rambo

I have never seen a Rambo movie. I have seen a Rocky movie: Rocky Balboa - I'd give it 6/10 in its present form, 7/10 if they'd edited it better. I did, however, grow up when Rambo and Rocky both were in the cultural air, namely the early 1980s.

Sylvester Stallone was a megastar then. Much more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger, to whom Stallone is oft-compared; Ah Nuld was a B-movie action actor until the end of that decade. Don't get me wrong here: Total Recall, Conan, Predator, and (tho' mainly offstage) Terminator are all fine movies which still hold up. But they took awhile to quit being B-movies (like, oh, Running Man still is) and to earn their cultural respect. By my memory of BBC One radio memes, Ah Nold became so memeworthy in 1990ish. But I'm digressing.

Anyway First Blood's author David Morrell has turned on the series. The First Blood movie - we're told - followed Morrell's vision to his satisfaction. The sequels diverge from Morrell's path, especially this new one Last Blood (out now) which is - again, so we're told - 1970s grindhouse.

I think what Morrell has found out is that Stallone isn't John Rambo - more exactly that Morrell's Protagonist, whom he didn't name (I'm going to call him M.P.), isn't the character Stallone wants to play. Both M.P. and J.R. are assuredly post-Democrats, but they are not the same post-Democrats. M.P. is an apolitical nihilist, basically D-FENS from Falling Down (a post-Republican). J.R. joined the Reagan coalition which is, today, Trump's Rust Belt base. Morrell is also likely miffed that his book's name is still in Stallone's whore mouth.

Because that's what Stallone would do. Nobody was saying no to Stallone in the 1980s; and nowadays, Stallone plain owns Rambo (less so Rocky / Creed now).

I am tempted to watch Last Blood but I am unsure I want it to be My First, so to speak. There's political nonsense from the mainstream critics but screw them; they lied to me about Ad Astra which I hated. I'm okay with watching a 6/10 movie but, why pay full price. And I have heard better, in retrospect, from the 2008 Rambo movie. Mind, at the time the critics didn't like the 2008 movie either.

Three eruptions in six decades: AD 670-730

In order to pin down Umayyad history, we need reliable chronicles of the era. I'd mentioned before an attempt to constrain various Western chronicles by what they share on climate reports.

So now I've found Chaochao Gao, Francis Ludlow, Or Amir, Conor Kostick, "Reconciling multiple ice-core volcanic histories: The potential of tree-ring and documentary evidence, 670-730 CE", Quaternary International 30 (2015), 1-14. That's doi 10.1016/j.quaint.2015.11.098. This argues Three major volcanic events can now be identified, dated to 681, 684-686 and 706-707.

Indeed, the early 60s/680s were rough in the Near East. John Bar Penkaye thought they represented the final tribulations. I was unaware of climate trouble early in al-Walid's caliphate, by contrast.

Also, the Greeks recorded Thera popping off in the 100s/720s. Gao et al. don't mention "Thera" or "Santorini" anywhere (the bibliography notes Pearson 2009, but on a different era). That is, I think, because that eruption - although important to the Greeks - didn't have the global scale of the three eruptions in question.

The Lydian famine under Artaxerxes Longhand

About the last record in the Lydiaca, at least as later Greeks found it, was a famine under Artaxerxes Shah, first of that name, nicknamed "Longhand". Famines in peacetime imply poor growing conditions for crops and, one imagines, for trees. Which leave behind tree-rings, per growing-season.

It would be nice to have a date for that event but, by then, there was a wood shortage in the affected region, western Anatolia. Artaxerxes reigned four decades, 464-24 BC, so that's not great for narrowing stuff down.

Lydian trees may have been a victim of Lydia's prosperity first as an empire and then as a satrapy. If the wood was used in architecture, it has all burned by now, thanks to Anatolia's turbulent history. Some Anatolian wood was also likely used in Carian shipping; one hopes for more discoveries of Achaemenid-era shipwrecks.

Until then, this looks promising: a volcanic event dated not long before 426 BC. That's late in this shah's reign but it is in the span.

BACKDATING 9/20

Legacy

In Christmas season 1995 I sent my grandfather George Reid a letter, composed in Microsoft Word, part of which concerned the research I'd just done about the Arzawa kingdom (my first history webpage!), much of whose content now makes up the Infogalactic page. Over early March in 1996, my grandfather composed a very long letter back. This, he'd typed out on a typewriter. I've always wanted to script out his letter into a web page of his own; but never got around to it. In August this year, the family reunited to honour my grandfather's memory. I still hadn't got around to typing up his mail.

Now that I've been on the topic of the Crusaders' endgame, and since Khwarezm was noted, I have picked up his letter again. I have broken it into three pieces: the personal letter, the main body, and a postscript. You can read them in any order you like. They are all dated to 15 March 1996. I have edited them all as lightly as I could, except for the postscript.

The main body has Mr Reid's chosen title, "The Rise and Fall of the Khwarismian Turks". You will find that its main text is a chronicle of the Indian Summer, if you will, of the Crusade in Palestine as the Lion's Heart had left it. The Khwarismians are passers-by.

Maʿadd's world

Next year, Routledge is publishing a collection: Andrew Marsham, The Umayyad World. I hear it was supposed to come out this year but it has been delayed. In it, is / will be a Peter Webb piece: "Ethnicity, Power and Umayyad Society: The Rise and Fall of the People of Maʿadd".

Webb has asked us not to cite this article yet. He has, however, posted it on academia.edu for us to read the article. I interpret this as Webb's call to critique the article, before Marsham and Routledge put it out and make Webb look silly. Honestly, I think Webb has little to fear here; the article is good.

One critique I must raise, is its assumption of the Marwani-era Islamic narrative on the status of Mecca. I don't see Mecca as a pilgrimage site until the Zubayrites insisted upon it during the Fitna, 60s AH /680s AD. I marshalled the relevant arguments in House of War, which I last tweaked 2015, and in the last four years I have found nothing to alter that base calculus. ʿUmar b. Abī Rabīʿa is noted here as the great poet of Mecca, writing love (or lust) songs of the time and place. If my math is right, when the Zubayrites raised the site's profile this ʿUmar would have been in his mid 30s. This is a little old for a man to be messing around, but not too old for poets; witness the late Ric Osacek. I wonder if I am detecting subtle satire. Anyway ʿUmar is here to illustrate where certain factions of Arab didn't talk much of Maʿadd, rendering all this something of a side-show.

Webb finds Maʿadd as an internal ethnonym for West Arabian peoples sharing a culture and language, more-or-less. These peoples overlap with the inscriptions in the Safaitic, Hismaic, and Nabataean languages before them and with the heartland of Quraysh after them. We'd call them "Arabs". The qurrâ, also West Arabian (at least affecting the dialect) never mention Maʿadd although they do preach about the Arabic speech: whether language or poetic-register, opinions have always differed. As the Umayyads spread, some used Maʿadd for pan-Arab propaganda, but this fell by the wayside. One watershed seems to be a paean to Bishr (d. ~75 / 695) which mentions a Maʿadd tribe who hadn't been envisioned before. After that one finds sporadic mention of Maʿadd in poetry and in hadith, but Webb points out it's mainly to discuss the secular virtues of the ideal Arab male - generous and brave. One gets the feeling the use was nostalgic; that nobody was anymore claiming to be Maʿadd by birthright.

In part, I think, the earlier Umayyads "jumped the shark", shoehorning Maʿadd into a genealogical scheme that the term simply couldn't bear. Maʿadd-as-tribe remained, still, secular thus outside the interests of the qurrâ. Where the qurrâ and where their Qurân raised their own rank in the Arab empire's self-image, Maʿadd was redundant.

That left Maʿadd to the nostalgic poets. Where the first literate and self-conscious Muslims became re-acquainted with Maʿadd, they filed the term in their adab literature for righteous conduct among fellow men here on earth.

Permian

The Great Dying has been dated to 252 million years ago for some decades now, but its cause(s) remain/s elusive. Part of the problem is that although they've nailed down the end of the extinction era, they hadn't constrained its start. Of course the start is what you want if you're looking for cause.

Last week this blog got a visit, I think, from the Triple-I Blog. I went to the main blog and found it, basically, an aggregate of news-releases. But hey: why not. I looked at it today and found this announcement, pointing to Michael R. Rampino and Shu-Zhong Shen, "The end-Guadalupian (259.8 Ma) biodiversity crisis: the sixth major mass extinction?" in Historical Biology (2019) DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2019.1658096.

When you go that far back, it's not easy to tell one mess from another. And indeed I have seen charts of the extinction that looked "hump backed" over a span of the end-Permian.

If these guys are right, we're over that first hump, so to speak. The Emeishan Traps were the trigger for the 259.8 Ma disaster and then, a few million years later, came another disaster which hit the by-now genetically bottlenecked survivors.

Saladin's hollow victory

Standard Western summaries of the Crusades end with amir Saladin's capture of Jerusalem (hence the "Kingdom Of Heaven" movie). We typically get a coda on the Fourth Crusade. (For a recent example I am casting a side-eye at Catlos, here.) Sometimes we read about crusades after the Fourth, namely that there were some; but by that point nobody's paying attention - the historians switch to the Mongols. Or to crusades like the attack on the Cathars which were western so Don't Count.

And to be fair, the Fourth Crusade is a big deal, for a start in the context of Western / east-Christian and Slavic relations, but also for its own sake. I am not saying, don't study the Fourth Crusade. I am saying that the Fourth doesn't matter in Crusade history. For Innocent III, and for his apologists like Rodney Stark, the Fourth was just a big ugly detour.

In 2014 I started reading Paul Cobb's The Race for Paradise. After I got to Saladin I put the book aside... and then forgot where I put it. I found it again maybe in 2016 and today, I picked it up again. (UPDATE 9/18: and cf. my grandfather.)

Cobb describes Saladin's taking of Jerusalem as a booby prize.

As with many Glorious Victories, the win made the winners feel overconfident. After Saladin proclaimed his victory for Allah and for His Caliph (in Baghdad), many of his mujahids just... went home. They'd already earned their ticket to Paradise. The jealous Caliph meanwhile turned up his nose at this adventure which he hadn't requested. Saladin's most-enduring legacy was to stir up the Frankish hornets, who responded with their Third Crusade. This grueling war bled out the will to fight from both sides; by its end, the Crusade hadn't reached the Holy City, but they'd retained much of the Mediterranean littoral.

We all know the sordid tale of the Fourth Crusade's main force; but some elements called to the cause had meanwhile split off and attached themselves to Crusader might in the Holy Land. And the Fourth Crusade's blueprint, which involved an invasion of Egypt, remained available for future reference. During all these distractions, the Christian kingdoms in Spain had beat the Almohad pseudo-caliphate so hard the latter abandoned the whole peninsula; leaving the Muslim presence to a few rump states around Cordoba, Seville, and Granada. And ten years later, came the Fifth Crusade.

Hardly anyone talks about the Fifth and Sixth Crusades. They're left to apologists like Rodney Stark and to full-on Crusade wonks like my granddad. The main aim of all three of the early thirteenth-century Crusades, IV-VI, was Egypt, which obviously didn't happen (the West had forgotten how the Nile works, so they didn't plan around the floods). But whilst the newcomers were keeping Egypt engaged, the Franks back in the Holy Land kept getting replenished by off-shot freelancers - as happened during the Fourth. And they retook Jerusalem. Moreover: they'd done it by treaty this time.

I propose that the Fifth and Sixth Crusades weren't the footnotes the major histories claim they are. Over AD 1200-1244, which is a long generation, the Near Eastern Muslims were on the back foot... again. There was no Saladin to unite them. There couldn't be; they'd given up Jerusalem themselves. In 1244 the Khwarezm Turks retook Jerusalem for Islam; and there was a Seventh Crusade which failed to get it back, but the Crusader States outside that city were doing just fine without it. (UPDATE 9/18: my grandfather thought differently; but battles were always being won and lost and subsequently overturned by diplomats, including even Hattin.)

Cobb holds that what did in the Crusader States, finally, was their alliance with the Mongols. The Egyptian Muslims, many of whose main commanders were Turks, knew how to fight steppe cavalry, or at least had learnt how to do it in by-now-familiar turf. Once Qutuz had seen off the Mongols, all the Christians were left looking like traitors to every Muslim in the Near East. The Crusade was, now, left without friends. Qutuz's successor Baybars picked off the forts one by one.

It should amaze the amateur historian that those histories in the English language have obscured this resurgence of the Crusader states, over a stretch of two generations 1200-1244. How haven't we heard of this?

I'm going with: Gibbon... again; or at least Gibbon-ism. The Protestants and, later, the Enlightenment needed a Crusade that "stalled out"; they needed the Third to present a check on Rome's ambitions and the Fourth to be its farcical coda. The rest, they can just dismiss as Popes Saying Stuff.

Well, they shouldn't. Even my grandfather, no lover of Rome he, cannot support this narrative. The Fifth and Sixth Crusades carried on from the Third, and achieved the Third's strategic aims. Jerusalem was perhaps too slippery but it had ceased to matter in the meantime.

To finesse Unfinished Victory

Ron Unz is keeping up the books listed on the Current-Year Forbidden Index. His latest exhibit is Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory.

Arthur Bryant was the heir to Chesterton in British Tory literate circles [UPDATE 10/19 - for better or worse]. He wrote Unfinished Victory over the 1930s, but Events-Dear-Boy overtook his opus so he hastily re-edited what he'd done and hustled that manuscript out the door, for a phoney-war audience, in the New Year 1940. Its palimpsest was, as EH Carr noted in his review, likely a Case For Appeasement. Its 1940 publication, as the Unz crew notes, still preceded when Britain had yet decided upon a total-war attitude against the Nazi menace. And for many months the British public and political-class tolerated the text: so Richard Griffiths 2004, doi 10.1080/0031322032000185569.

Over 1940, the Blitzkrieg overwhelmed all the western Continent and forced a mad English flight from Dunkirk. Bryant could no longer support his own manuscript and did his utmost to recall such copies as had been sold. Bryant shifted to by-jingo patriotic fluff over the rest of the war. He died in 1985.

Unz, though a Mischling like myself, is catering to an antiSemitic audience and that's what Unfinished Victory has attracted to its comments. So I went looking for a proSemitic reaction.

Most reactions I find to this book assume that it's "pro Nazi" and "anti Semitic"; so we find in the "Beast Rabban" blog. Emily Lorimer, Rebecca West, A.J.P. Taylor, and Richard Crossman all deliver ad-hominem along these lines; in lieu of reading them all I shall assume the paraphrases are In-Conclusion. Not listed here is Michael Bernstein in summer 1941. This blog shall look into that review as representative of the batch.

Bernstein's text came out... after the Nazi attack on Stalin. Bernstein implies himself not to be the Stalin sort of communist early on: A profound contempt for the mass of mankind underlies the philosophy of totalitarianism, whether fascist or communist.. But then Bernstein objects to Bryant: Hitler was acute enough to realize that the Marxist did not stand for freedom but for a despotic uniformity, enforced by terror and the annihilation of all who opposed them. From that, Bernstein puts words into Bryant's mouth: Hitler, in Mr. Bryant's opinion, obviously stands for freedom and individualism. Bernstein, if he were opposed to Marx, should - in my opinion - spot Bryant this one as a point of mutual agreement.

As I read Bernstein's review, I notice a lotta wottabowt. Here: Mr. Bryant has no word of criticism for the Junkers who made the war, refused all possible attempts at a peace during its course, forced the Republican government to sign the armistice, bled the Republican government to the tune of hundreds of millions of marks, and then aided Hitler to gain control of the German state. That's a bold statement. It is also a slander: per Bryant, at the end of 1916... the Central Powers had made the first peace overtures. It was to have been a pacification based on the status quo of 1914, together with the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France. But it was not taken seriously either by the German militarists who hoped to retain strategic advantages in Belgium and Flanders...

As to why Bryant glides over "the Junkers" by name: I imagine it's in part because that caste, then ascendant in German military / diplomatic circles, did contain a faction who wanted peace; it's just that many didn't. Also, it's hardly relevant to the book's theme, which is the German proletariat and their Bavarian Catholic-raised Führer, whom Bryant holds up (correctly) as about the polar opposite to the Nationalist-voting East Prussian lord. I would flip this on its head and ask Bernstein why he'd brought it up; I hazard, less for what it says about Schiklgruber and more for what (Bernstein imagines) it says about British Tories like Bryant.

Bryant is trying to be fair to the Junker caste, in short. And he is just as fair to the Jews - at least, the German Jews: the quiet, decent, inoffensive people who had acquired the outlook, habits and sober morality of the German bourgeoisie, and who today have become the tragic victims of an unreasoning loathing which they had done nothing themselves to create. For Bryant it was the arrivistes from the east, who sought those quick profits which Bernstein cannot disassociate in his totalist mind from all "capitalism".

As for the Nazi regime as of 1940, Bryant is under no illusions: a little minority of cruel fanatics to infect a whole nation with their own undiscriminating hatred; It was puritan rather than personal. It is this that accounts for its cruelty and inhumanity. And, since Bernstein is playing the Context Game elsewhere, I note that where Bernstein excerpts They destroyed because they were shocked, he omits to include its prefix Yet to the small minority against whom the popular instincts to which they appealed were directed, they were ruthless and inhuman in their unappeasable hatred.

Bryant's Unfinished Victory may have started as an Appeasement brief, but it evolved - as its author evolved. Bryant had shifted this text (slightly) to the sort of book rife on bookstores during America's own "war on terror": Why Do They Hate Us. Which the Allies needed to understand, should they win the day; before imposing a Versailles II, or - worse - allowing Stalin to bathe his sword in the sea at Calais.

In my neocon phase, I too thought it disgusting that we should bother asking Why Do They Hate Us - of Muslims. Of pretty much any Muslim. For such sentiments I was chastised as a simple hater. So I took it upon myself to learn Islam and to learn its history. And yes, sometimes when people take on the Why Do They Hate Us question they're acting in bad faith. But sometimes perhaps they're not.

For those claiming Bryant as antiSemitic or proNazi, we should dismiss them as simple haters themselves.

BACKDATE 9/15 4 PM MST: for when I finished Bryant's book and found its retort.

Lyra

A long time ago, aliens fired a missile toward our solar system. Our sun nudged the thing into an "orbit" that was almost, but not quite, parabolic: eccentricity 1.2 or such. Since it was found by astronomers in Hawaii they named it `Oumuamua. A standard elliptic orbit can be nudged into hyperbolism but in this case, there wasn't anything around that could have done that.

So, aliens it was. Okay okay, sorry to take the fun out of things; it wasn't little green men who did it, it was some other solar system's gravitational chaos.

Unfortunately Oumuamua was very dark so we only saw it on its way out. Last November Greg Cochran suggested we send a probe to chase Oumuamua down and film it; in parallel, there was a "Lyra" mission proposed to do just that.

Nothing came of Lyra, not for Oumuamua and not for the eight hyperbolic visitors spotted as of March 2018. But now, here comes another alien. This one is VERY hyperbolic, eccentricity 3. The good news is: it's a comet, coated in bright ice. We've seen it on its way in. The Bad Astronomy blog on SyFy has the best summary.

I suggest that the Lyra team pick up where they left off and hurry up and do it. This is as close to Rama as we get.

UPDATE 11/5 - we'd caught more visitors last year but I'd missed that article.

The end of the particles

I bought Carroll's The Particle at the End of the Universe for my dad in 2013, soon after the book came out, which was soon after they finally found the "Higgs Boson". Here's Woit on it. And now, since my dad has palmed this book back to me... I'm on it too.

I'll tell y'all up front that my A-Level in Physics was a "B". I did not do more science in college; just the maths. When I was doing A-Level I recall the course being solidly Newtonian with some standard electronics thrown in. We weren't building atomic bombs in the lab. So approach this post as if it was done by an ignorant blogger just looking in on things from outside.

As I see it, the Higgs is indeed the end of the universe ... for physicists. There was a Standard Model hammered out pretty-much the year I was born. Everything done since then has affirmed that model: the W and Z particles exist, the Top Quark exists, and they all have inertial masses in accordance with the existence of a then-hypothetical field which Higgs - among others - had hypothesised.

Field theory, even for Higgs which was special, works at the quantum level as a couple of "fermions" passing massless particles around which we call "bosons". Electromagnetism, for instance, has a boson: the light-particle, "photon". The weak force has W and Z. These nonHiggs bosons have a directional impact, given that they represent interactions between fermions, so their forces work as vector fields. The Higgs field was supposed to be scalar so would work even if the fermion was sitting by itself. Mass is inertial, remember.

At least, so I've gathered.

It happens that many bosons are yuuge. The photon is obviously tiny, but the W and Z - for a start - don't last long in physical form. Under normal circumstances they only zip in and out in quantum timescales. The biggest they is, the shorter they live. We can create some bosons with enough energy but we don't see them. We can, however, see how they decay and measure the sorts of particles they give off.

All the experimenters had to do, to prove the Higgs field theory of inertial mass, was to conjure up a Higgs boson and watch how it decays. And that, they did.

But they'd pretty much gathered that this was going to happen anyway due to (for instance) the predictions of the top quark mass based on Higgs' theory.

That has been my life, watching physics experiments at this scale: seeing physicists "shoot the wounded". They looked for a Higgs boson and found it. They wondered why the mu-lepton-hydrogen method predicted a proton mass different from the mass which earlier physicists had measured by the less-precise election method; they figured that out (the less-precise method had barfed out the wrong number). Black holes were surmised to have no stranded extra properties beyond mass, spin, and serialnumber charge; ayep.

I'm not going to call the end of Standard Model physics but I am going to say that we are at Diminishing Returns. I got convinced we'd reached that point in the early 1990s - and so did the voters (I was not yet an American voter) - which is why Congress called off the Nacogdoches Super Collider (yee haw!). Experimental physics was better placed in gravitational inferometers like LIGO, looking at the great particle-colliders that are neutron-star collisions.

UPDATES 9/16 - Carroll has entered Woit's killfile. Also, as usually happens, Turtle Island has a parallel post that's better than mine.

Tel Erani as an Egyptian colony

Yesterday Jessica Saraceni posted a summary of Science In Poland's report from Marcin Czarnowicz’s expedition at Tel Erani. This is an Egyptian colony in Early Bronze… I guess they’d call it Retenu. It’s eight miles southwest of Gath. The region would be called Canaan, to West Semites; this is all before Aramaic split off. Maybe even before before Ugaritic.

I must say, Science In Poland hasn’t done well on the reporting. That report is talking a “culture of Nagada” 3150-3050 BC. That, to me, smells like an outgrowth of radiocarbon dating “BP”, which date is subtracted from 1950 AD. I disapprove BP, and I outright hate BP where we’re entering the literate age. I suppose it does offer some precision but I question how much precision we can get 5000 years ago; I mean, look at Thera. I’d have preferred the release had said “about 3100 BC according to Nagada radiocarbon specialists”.

The Nagada in question corresponds best to “Naqada III” also known as Dynasty Zero or (for Dwayne Johnson fans) the Scorpion Kingdoms. Indeed, before the modern Polish digs, Israeli archaeologist Shmuel Yeivin had found therein a sherd from a pot that bore the royal crest of ol’ Catfish-Chisel himself, conventionally pronounced “Narmer”.

Czarnowicz tells us they are now looking at the “earlier phase”, before Narmer’s great unification. Egyptians who weren't yet "the Egyptians" – says he – founded Tel Erani 3300 BC(ish). That’s the end of the Gerza period. This is sometimes labeled “Naqada II” but the Girza site would have enjoyed better access to the Med and thereby to the colony. The Upper Egyptian despotates, of which Naqada was one, hadn’t yet reached that far north. And so the Poles report – Egyptian Mediterranean Retenu was an economic extension of Lower Egypt (pace Saraceni). Think of mediaeval Dalmatia’s relationship to Venice; with the other Italians doing their own thing.

I am, therefore, curious about the early-Bronze Egyptian “Dalmatian” patois spoken at this tel. Egypt is a long country whose antique people tended to be homebodies; even its last phase, Coptic, came to break into dialects. Given that Narmer’s boys would march down from the south, I expect the Archaic Egyptian tongue as we’ve read it derives from Upper Egyptian. Did it replace the dialect spoken at the tel?

I’m not reading about Girza-era Tel Erani writing, beyond seal-stamps. At this stage, as hinted above, Egyptian written communication was still pictographic, Aztec-style (or Cycladic), not yet even hieroglyphic. Per Mattessich’s “Oldest Writings, and Inventory Tags of Egypt” (2002) we might also get accounting data but, as we know from Susa III in Elam, such data can encode negligible linguistic content (draw a picture of a wheat sheaf and then a number… yay).

The first neoconservative pundit

If I am reading Phillips right: the Pope (Innocent III) called a Crusade, lacking the funds to direct said Crusade. After the Fourth Crusade set sail and didn't go the way Innocent wanted, Innocent bemoaned how it didn't go the way he wanted.

For some people, that would exonerate Innocent - and exonerate Catholicism - from the disaster.

For others, that excuse runs hollow. Unfortunately for Catholics, the Venn of "those who don't buy Innocent's excuse" and "those who aren't currently Catholic" is pretty much the same circle. For those New Romans who still remembered the Latin tongue, "Innocent" - the "Harmless" - was a name ironic indeed.

When you start a war, you enter a dark room - so said another cradle-Catholic, at another time. When you ask for a war and you don't think too hard about who's paying for it: ... later on, I'm sure you can find some apologists to defend your agitations, retroactively.

G-d knows better, as they say.

Holy Mary, pray for Innocent... and pray for the neoconservatives, and pray for me.

Upload #181: Mr. Fix-It

It's that day again, its eighteenth anniversary. On this day I like to do something relevant so : herrre's an Upload post.

Since we last did this, a couple months back, I read Brubaker on scribal corrections. For "Scriptures of the Women", I now understand - through the scribes' failure to understand - why sura 4 used kâna so often in its rhyme-endings. (I had help from Nicolai Sinai here.)

Further, scribal omission-and-readmission in sura 9 led me to a new 9>57 link for "Monks and Muslims". "Ledger of War", further upstream, has an improved understanding of "God's Pleasure" and its sources - mainly sura 5. "Clarity" has a 68>42 link. "Promised Egypt" has sura 10 possibly witnessing a sura 30 variant.

Madrassa.

Don't give up

Everybody enjoys a scandal, especially as it hits Christians. We gloat over the family-values preacher who is found to be having affairs. We laugh giddily about the gay-conversion advocate who comes out of the closet himself.

If you liked all that, you'll love this story: Jarrid Wilson has committed suicide. IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE WILSON PREACHED ABOUT DEPRESSION.

(That is called sarcasm, Bloomberg writers.)

What the mad prophet Nietzsche said holds here as well: you may be able to peek into the Abyss, and it is likely you will have to, someday; but it remains - still - the Pit Of Hell. You shouldn't devote your life to fighting demons. Because then, that's all you'll come to know; you're effectively training yourself for your afterlife. Or, if you don't believe in an afterlife, at least you're training yourself to be like a demon right here.

You need something to strive for. For Christian pastors that can be the Kingdom of God but, here too, I'm not sure that looking into the next world is all that healthy all the time. There is good in this world as well; there is good that you can leave behind as a legacy. Focus on that.

As for Wilson's legacy, he did provide an example of the stakes in play for depressives, so his death can be viewed as a martyrdom of sorts. But - as noted elsewhere - I'm not sure it's worth the direct pain caused to his loved ones, of whom Wilson left many.

Palaeolithic Central Asian oases

Around the same time the last Neanders were packing it in out West, the Asians' ancestors were wandering the steppes East. Before 30000 BC they didn't have any domesticated beasts, and not even the Solutrean Toolkit; so it all went on foot. Most agree that whatever east/west traffic could be done, had to be done along the coasts; the vast Siberian interior should have been too cold and dangerous. Interbreeding with the Denisovans may have helped with the cold some.

Last May, I hear they're figuring out the geography. The earlier 30000s BC weren't a warm period but it also wasn't the full Ice Age. And they were a distance away from that Italian volcano. The main article is Feng Li, Nils Vanwezer, Nicole Boivin, Xing Gao, Florian Ott, Michael Petraglia, and Patrick Roberts: "Heading north".

They think that the Taklamakan then was more like the Aral Sea in historical time: dotted with landbound lakes. This would allow migration even without the cisterns, roads, and camels that made the corridor navigable in Neolithic times.

It's a theory. Doesn't seem a well-constrained theory.

The map of 'ilm

@ImperiumRequiem over on Twitter cited Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment. Murray thought that eastern Eurasia hadn't figured out the scientific method until the Europeans showed up in their ports.

The West didn't have a scientific method either, as we know it, as has been pointed out in the History For Atheists blog. But up to, oh, AD 1400 parts of the West did have something like it. This proto-scientody had reached its limits by then; but it was still being practiced around the Mediterranean. Ibn Khaldun rated the nations of which he knew : he thought the Greeks, Egyptians, and Iranians to be best at it; and the northern Europeans and subSaharan Africans to be savages. In between, Ibn Khaldun placed India and China.

But then something changed - and it changed among us European savages, first. Gregory Cochran points out that the discovery of Jupiter's main four moons enabled a proper definition of latitude here on Earth. It strikes me that Central Asian Iranians should have figured this out first.

Ethiopia, after the ice

Via Razib, here's a preprint on Ethiopian populations.

The "Discussion" isn't very well organised, but I gather from it that in the preChristian era, Ethiopia already had groups we can associate with the Cushites and Semites; mainly Amhara and Omoro, but also others. They all coexisted in a dizzying array of inbred subcastes (Negede Woyto, Shabo, Nanjo) and valleydwellers that would put India and Mesoamerica to shame.

Around 2200 BC (I think) there was an influx of "West and Central African groups". They'd have met the protoCushitic peoples there who - as I'd pointed out earlier - were probably light skinned Near Eastern farmers.

Perhaps another subSaharan portion of modern Ethiopia arrived around 500... AD; Late Antique / Byzantine / Nobadian times. These were mixed with full Nilosaharans: the true Nubians.

UPDATE 9/11: Turtle Island.

A slap against knowledge

Last May one Violet Moller put out The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. This purports to relate the transfer of classical Greek lore to our day, as told through seven cities. Moller's order: Alexandria, Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, and Venice.

The sequence alone worried me. This looked like the self-satisfied Gibbonian reading of those ignorant Christians burning down libraries, because we all know how much we hate books, thus forcing Science to pass through the Moslem world before finally being rediscovered by "Renaissance" Italy.

And... so it is.

This book's take on the "library of Alexandria" is - literally - a quote from Catherine Nixey; there is no curiosity into Nixey's own (mis)use of sources. We do read of how Rome and Constantinople looted Alexandria for manuscripts and thinkers, but to read Moller that's all they did - there is no dedicated chapter to Rome or Constantinople in here (where's Greek fire?). Also missing is a chapter on Syrian Christians and the immense work they achieved under the later Umayyads. They're waved off in the Baghdad section. Jack Boulos Victor Tannous has had his thesis on the Internet free of charge for the last nine years (pdf). You'd think that someone could condense its 650+ pages into a largish-print 20 page chapter including pictures. There's no excuse for not even looking at it!

Then comes the Córdoba chapter... oh man. Moller viciously cracks at the Visigothic kingdom as "Invisigoths" (she says, based on "some historians", without naming any) who retarded Spanish development. But this bleak period... ended when the Arabs and Berbers invaded and immediately set up a bunch of libraries. Or maybe not immediately. Waves of new settlers arrived and made it chaotic. They required strong, direct leadership, finally provided by "Rahman" (sic). Seems to me that one presumably "bleak" period was replaced by another. Also seems to me that Moller hadn't read anything about how the Visigothic kings were working to get their own house in order - like writing that lawcode - nor about the challenges they faced in their last generations over the 600s AD as the Mediterranean had turned into a warzone.

That's as much as I'm going to read; I've wasted too much time on other worthless anti-European books to be going further with this one as well.

Moller is a lazy hack masquerading as a historian, to deliver the conventional-wisdom of the post-Christian university to another generation of suckers. If there's good news to be had, Moller is an "independent", like "Emmet Scott" on the other side; she's not speaking for the academy - as arguably Nixey might, as an ex-classics prof. Unfortunately in the popular press the reviews are on Moller's side. Included in the roll of shame are the Telegraph, the Times, and Publishers Weekly. (And Kirkus if you count them. Plus Nixey herself of course.)

I hope that the university presses get on this case soon whilst this thing is still in the major bookstores. Because as long as Respectable Historians won't present us with the facts, readers will keep turning to likes of Moller... or worse. Or, if you like: do you want more Emmet Scott and Darío Fernández-Morera? because this is how you will get more Emmet Scott and Darío Fernández-Morera.

The Burushaski civilisation

Turtle Island is discussing Rakhigarhi. He notes that "Peripheral Indus" - that is, Bronze Age Indus - is its own farming-group, independent of the "Iranian" plateau both in its modern Iranian form and in its existence before the Iranian peoples showed up (Elamite, I guess). Where he adds his own observation, is that the autochthonous Indus was less South Indian than it is today.

Turtle Island believes that Ockham's Razor is best applied if we accept that the Dravidian languages had always been South Indian, and that a few of them trickled up north to contribute to the multicultural Indus. They'd be following the same path as the Brahui later, and the Gypsy Dom/Romani later still. I would allow that some Dravidian language or languages were, indeed spoken in the Indus cities...

... but that these languages were not dominant. Dravidian is unlikely to be recorded in any of such official inscriptions as we have, which so far are (notoriously) just seal-impressions. We are, still, doing better with Linear Elamite per François Desset.

So if Dravidian was a minority tongue in the Indus then as today... what was the majority? We can wholly rule out any flavour of Elamite, and the Aryans.

I'd have to go with Burushaski.

Wedge

Hugh Fitzgerald takes a look at the Ahmadiya, which the Malays call Qadianism. Fitzgerald would like public Ahmadis like Qasim Rashid to distance themselves from the Sunnite madhahib which preach violence in jihad. He also suggests that where and when Ahmadis promote "Islam" among us kuffar, that we invite the Ahmadis to go that distance on camera.

I agree with Fitzgerald - to that point. However the man has shown his hand at the end: he'd like Ahmadis, one by one, to exit Islam entirely. Like the Bahaiya has done as a community.

There's actually a split in the Ahmadiya itself between the old school, who still reveres their founder as the prophet he'd claimed to be; and a newer school which is attempting to rejoin Islam. The latter have congregated around Mawlana Muhammad Ali from Lahore; you've probably seen his Quran translation and commentary. I suspect Rashid and the other public-facing Ahmadis sit mainly in the latter camp.

Although I haven't yet addressed any Ahmadis myself, overall an analogy can be made with the Bahais; with whom, I have held conversations on this topic. Those conversations addressed the possible reform of the Quran, and the Bahai approach to its contents. The Bahai - last I looked - persist with Shoghi Effendi and have no intention toward a revisionist attitude. Sura 9 will remain in their canon, as a Gabriel-mediated Revelation delivered in a Muhammadan age. Since Ahmadis are more insistent on their Islamic identity I expect such conversations with Ahmadis to go similarly.

Ahmadis and Bahais do, still, follow new prophets, which sura 48 (an obvious forgery) bans to the more benighted Muslims. This means that they are both open to a revision of the Quran like the Barghawata movement had done in the Maghreb, and as several other movements in historical Iran. If they're banned from Hajj to Mecca, why should a revisionist care.

Rather than taking Ahmadis out of "Islam", I'd focus more on taking them out of the Sunnite consensus on Islam's definition.

BACKDATING 9/8 10:52 AM MST

Rakhigarhi

I woke up this morning to a bombshell announcement: they published the Rakhigarhi genome.

Rakhigarhi is one of the sites of the ancient civilization of the Indus 3300-1300 BC. Of these, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro have been more famous – although, maybe not in future, because now Rakhigarhi has DNA. We still don’t know the cities’ names; the language remains undeciphered.

Razib is all over this story. So’s LiveScience.

By now we know the sites trend “cosmopolitan”; think, that polyglot “Place of Reeds” called Teo[ti]huacan in Nahuatl. The cultures in these towns already differed internally such that – per Mark Kenoyer – they differed in burial practices. Many locals did cremation. Good luck getting DNA from that. But at least one group was doing burial, like those in this cemetery, so that’s whence the DNA.

Getting the DNA even from a burial is hard enough in hot, humid India. And the Rakhigarhi sample is female so, we can’t know who daddy was.

Even in segregated neighbourhoods there should be SOME intermixture after millennia. And so they find at this burial. But… the mixture is special. It’s a small bit parallel to Andaman Islander and a large bit some sort of west Eurasian farmer. It all looks like “Peripheral Indus”; we already have eleven other samples of that. Which is fortunate; this can fill in the gaps from the Rakhigarhi burial.

I don’t know if the Indus peoples were already doing caste; I’ve not seen the evidence for endogamy found in modern Pakistan or India. But there’s not much mixture with anything else beyond Peripheral Indus.

Mark Kenoyer notes that the Peripheral Indus remains found in Turan (now Iran and Turkmenistan) are atypical of the peripheries in which they are found. Indeed, they are peripheral. The best model is that these other eleven came from the Indus and moved north.

That this genome is not linked to many outside populations implies that it’s autochthonous to the Indus. Their split from other West Eurasians is Ice Age. This is a STARK contrast with Europe: the Indus locals (like Anatolians) learnt to farm whilst Europe imported farmers.

Another implication is that the west-to-east route – “the Iranian plateau” – was blocked, until (I am guessing) the domestications of camel and horse. Iran is rugged and full of deserts, and those parts that weren’t were inhabited by Iranian farmers, who (we now know) were alien to the Indus. During the Neolithic and Early Bronze, the route to the Indus instead went north-to-south. That’s the road the Aryans would take: from Bactria and Ferghana, through the Kush.

The worst cereal

I first heard of this "millet" thing from the excellent wuxia movie Iron Monkey, which (I think) Quentin Tarantino had recommended to us. It was some sort of cereal. The protagonist of the movie was sent to hunt down the Iron Monkey, a folk-hero in that part of China. The hunter was left to eat millet because nobody would sell him any other kind of food.

Again via the HBDChick: millet spread westward during the Bronze Age, into the steppes, where the Afanasievo / Agnean protoTocharians were starting to settle. The researchers don't find millet among the humans; it went to their livestock. (I don't know what, if any, cereal grains or other veggies these humans did eat; it just wasn't millet.)

So, finally, I "get" the joke in Iron Monkey: this guy was left to eat feed for sheep.

That's why we club 'em

via hbdchick, the recent news out in DNA-land is that tuberculosis existed in Peru before the Spaniard got there. It was sealions what brought 'em. The find is from 1000 AD but the DNA branched from the critters early 3000s BC.

Told you, dude.

Two cities of Gath

There've been rumblings that Gath was a Goliath among the Philistine cities. Now, confirmation: in the early Iron Age, slightly before the Bible's record extended to the coast, the city's fortifications enclosed 123.5 acres. (Pardon the clickbaity title.)

To return to Nadav Naʼaman, "Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City? The Case against It" in 2017 (pdf): Khirbet Qeiyafa was a contemporary Canaani city, until it got conquered by Gath. Although I think this was later. UPDATE 1/6/23 at any rate, Hazael seems to have done for the place.

So I am left to wonder about timelines. Did some other state check Gath's progress? If so, was it Israel under Saul or David, or Shishak / Sheshonq, or some mixture of all these, or even other Philistines like those in Ashqelon? Second-acts are certainly possible in this part of the world: Omri's kingdom was powerful, Jehu's weaker, but Jeroboam II's a return to (regional) greatness.

An Islamist Apologetic Without Islam

In 2010, one of the CIA's "old Arab hands" put out A World Without Islam. I tried to leaf through it in 2010 and failed. I bought it used in 2013 and again, failed.

This book presents itself as a what-if and (more self-consciously) as an argument (p. 15). Its underlying assumption is that theology doesn't matter, but is only a coverup for national aspirations (p. 13). Fuller believes that theology ruined Christian unity. Church-and-state debates affected Christendom far more than they affected Islam (p. 12).

I kept getting put off by Fuller's tone - and by his many historical mistakes. bullshit, errors, and snide remarks, I said at the time.

To the first, I note that those debates which Islam did entertain internally, especially involving the "createdness" of the Quran which went to the relation of the judiciary with the state and the mosque, which brought about the Mihna inquisition under the 'Abbasids... those don't count, for Fuller. The contemporary Awza'i / Hanafi debate, over to what extent the "imam" controls the Jihad: that also doesn't count. Because, Fuller assumes, these debates concerned the role of the mosque in a part of the state. I respond: humbug!

In part, Fuller is just lazy and his editors, worse. Some howlers include that the Queen of Sheba was contemporary with Christian Axum (p. 24); or the wholesale adoption of Islam's claims about its own origins, including Mecca, questions about which even Fuller must acknowledge (p. 24) before he blithely accepts it as The Great Hijazi Trade Hub.

As for the tone, the Passive Aggressive First-Person Case is employed over the introduction, on how "we" are blinkered and mindlessly patriotic and pro-Israel... implying not himself, of course. I rate the humbug level five "bahs" out of five.

Fuller's book is An Islamist Apologetic Without Islam.

Also, whatever you think of Emmet Scott or Robert Spencer or Darío Fernández-Morera or any other of the many anti-Islam ideologues, at least they've put up serious arguments. Fuller writing in 2010 wasn't privy to all these arguments; I think that, nowadays, Fuller would have to spend some time on them.

Some flashes of light burst through the bafflegab. I do appreciate Fuller's eventual admission that, yes, some aspects of "theology" did have serious political and social implications (p. 30, his italic!). He is right that "heresy" - disagreement - becomes criminal wherever a state applies an "orthodoxy" (p. 53f). I also appreciate his Wansbroughian observation that Islam came out of a Christian Late Antiquity in the Near East (p. 11) although, he doesn't cite Wansbrough, any more than he cites the innumerable translations of Ernst Renan (full light...) in p. 27.

Niches

Research into Pleistocene Man continues.

In this article, we (still) have the last Neanders contributing to a "40,000 year old" European. That would be a man from Peştera cu Oase, who (last this article has heard, in 2015) lived 40-35kBC. That era is considered "Proto-Aurignacian" (or Cro Magnon perhaps); most would site Aurignacian proper after 35kBC. In the middle of the span is the Campanian volcano, which likely nuked the Neanders for good (Gibraltar aside). I'll propose here that the man's Neander grandparent was a survivor of the Italian blast and surrendered to the tribe. Although this one's successors didn't survive the Gravettian interlude [UPDATE 5/5/22 also here] as other Aurignacians would.

The article doesn't touch the Neander brain much. It does see the Neanders as prone to addiction and depression; other articles have it that the Neander brain-type got selected against. Those anti-mutations perhaps left the other mutations stranded, which remnants have expressed themselves as depressive / addictive; although the latter didn't die off. I presume that the new hybrid tribes found a use for the village Eeyore. The archaic genes also affect "chronotype" - by which, they mean Neander Man was a night person.

What does seem clear is that the Neander-Tal type was pale and sunburn-prone. The Cro-Denis type (they are absolutely talking the Denisova Cave, not the para-Denis peoples in Australasia) tended more to cold-resistance and altitude-resistance. Neander, I take it, was a wood-wose (he could swim too); Denisovans lived under the open sky high on the plateaux, or at least crossing mountain-passes a lot.

Each of these gene-packages, I will note, select for life in VERY marginal environments. No riverside savanna for them! These peoples, then, were able to hide away from postAfrican humans who did, in fact, settle the lowlands. And so it went 60kBC-37kBC. But modern-man didn't consistently settle Eurasia before all that; moreover, these genetics predate the great postAfrican arrival. So what were Neanders and Denisovans, hiding from before that?

I'll guess that the megafauna of Eurasia owned the lowlands, and forced the one into the forest and the other to the mountain-passes. African man was better-suited to fight off the tigers and bears.

UPDATE 9/22: Tools from Burma. Did paraDenisova own the Asian lowlands?

Perú apocalypto, II

The archaeologists of Trujillo, which city now occupies Chimú capital ChanChan, are still pecking away at the child sacrifice burials. Last we heard was from Huanchaquito: at least 140 children (and two hundred llama-calves) were marched from ChanChan for a mile's walk, and at Huanchaquito the hearts were extracted. Now we're hearing from what I guess is the father-site, Huanchaco: 227 children there, buried facing the Pacific. They've figured out that the children died "in wet weather" so they're going with El Niño.

Laura Geggel had observed, of that first run, that the sacrifices weren't all local Chimú. I piped up last spring that this means that it was done by imperial forces.

I will go further: this Moloch-style butchery was done by the last Chimú for their own empire. I think that if it had been Inca (they took over in the 1470s) the victims should have come from the local elite, and not from the occupied provinces. And they wouldn't have hit just the children.

A suffering church

If you went to Mass last weekend, you may have picked up Bishop Barron's epistle, via the Word On Fire imprint which we've met last month. Our Lady's at Silverthorne was handing these out gratis. I took one and read it.

The needle which Barron needs to thread is this: to explain the gravity of the situation, to put it in context (somehow), and to urge the lay faithful to stay. The book's chosen tack is "stay and fight". The pamphlet has responses [SHIFTED 3/4/24 formerly: churchmilitant.com/news/article/a-response-to-bishop-robert-barrons-letter-to-a-suffering-church]; I'll respond too, here.

In order to fight, we need to know what, exactly, we are fighting for and what we are fighting against. The Catholics' claim is that our priesthood owns the Real Presence of our Lord - the ability to transform wafers and wine into His body and blood. (Not chemically; but in its Platonic essence.) The Orthodox claim the same, which Barron knows; so his book remains incomplete. I would have started with Coptic Miaphysitism, and taken it through the Monothelete pope Honorius, to explain why we need the Catholic rite delivered through the Catholic structure.

On the other side, Barron tiptoes around the ex-apocrisary Viganò. McCarrick is mentioned but not that Pope Francis reinstated him, and kept him around five years.

Also, the book has no index. Makes it hard for the reader just to look up what needs looking up.

I regret that this pamphlet is like other Word On Fire tracts: comfort-food for the lightly discomfited. But it is without substance; it will convince few.

Our honoured guests

I have finished Phillips. UPDATE 9/22: the terlit review.

The Fourth Crusade is not a revisionist work. Revisionist texts supporting the other Crusades do exist; for post-Phillips literature I'll pick on Rodney Stark's God's Battalions. Stark here just summarises Phillips (with footnotes). Since the Bagestan is a blog interested in revisionisms (right or wrong): as far as the Fourth Crusade is concerned, this blog is done ... with Phillips. (Although I do recommend reading Phillips for yourself.)

I've been interested in the Spanish experience in Mexico lately. Both cases played out similar: the Catholics showed up to the imperator's capital, the Catholics made chaos, the imperator invited the Catholics thinking he could control the Catholics. And then the Catholics overstayed their welcome. But ultimately the imperator should have anticipated that this might happen.

Restall, on the Aztecs, revised a ton o' stuff which Phillips didn't revise for the Greeks. So this blog has an interest in why Restall had to do it. Why, if we're all agreed on the Fourth Crusade, did the narrative on the Spanish conquest of Mexico go so wrong?