Tamil steel

I had to dump all the planned poasts yesterday; to handle this one, last: Times of India on the Tamil Iron-Age... 3345 BC. That dating makes little sense. I call shenanigans. At the very least I want linkers like Archaeology.org to interrogate their sources.

Why wasn't anything iron exported? Where's the Bharati iron at Oman or Qatar, even Sumer or the Red Sea? There's bronze all over the place, and when the Near East found an iron-nickel meteor the Pharaohs treasured the steel they wrought from it. Millennia later the Arabs will sing of "Hindi" steel, so everyone agreed the stuff was worthy of export in their time. But not BC?

These artifacts include knives, arrowheads, rings, chisels, axes, and swords. Some may be prestige items, like King Tut's knife. But axes are for farmers. That means the smelting was done not from space but from South Indian ores; as assumed in Times.

Tamil Nadu's chief minister, a man with the delightful name Muthuvel Karunanidhi Сталин, is touting this to prove his state's superiority over the Indus. Which is signalling a selfinterest.

STEELMAN 2/1: Boats are hard, as early retirees often tell us at the Gulf Of Twitter. I'm also pondering the Wisconsin experience of entering the Chalcolithic just to retvrn to the Neolithic. To salvage the Stalin Thesis: suppose the iron simply couldn't be exported in the 3000s BC. Then shipping improved; in this brave new age of bronze, international bronze could compete with Indian iron as well as with skymetal. By then nobody wanted the iron even at home. So the manufacturers quit making it, and forgot how to make it.

Shannon entropy

Stephen Baxter once applied Shannon entropy analysis, in his story Turing's Apples, to language. He figured human language at 8-9th order in the Markov chain (I still haven't studied that); dolphins at 3-4. So long and thanks for all the fish, if I may cross streams. Today we learn that Shannon has application in quantum physics also.

The key here is that Shannon is dealing in information. Von Neumann once proved that the closed system of quantum is nonentropic. The Austrians point out that Von Neumann assumed we have all the information about a quantum box. Yeah, no. Uncertainty-principle, bitchez!

The entropy of information, and therefore that box with the kittycat in it, devolves to whatever theories we have on that entropy, which is Shannon.

82 G. Eridani

Although Geneva won't tell Anglophones, 82 Gould Eridani is open access. This system, also Henry Draper's 20794 or Gliese 139, owns at least two planets. The inner one b was constrained, sort-of; so was a 90-ish-day one, once-upon-a-time "d". The forty-day one between, then "c", was sus, and ruled out a couple years back. NASA still haven't updated c which they still think is "d".

After decades of watching, Nari et al. have a new "d" (I'm tweaking the format):

We confirm the presence of three planets, with periods of 18.3142 ±0.0022 days, 89.68 ±0.10 d, and 647.6_−2.7^+2.5 d; along with [minimum-]masses of 2.15 ±0.17 M_⊕, 2.98 ±0.29 M_⊕, and 5.82 ±0.57 M_⊕ respectively. For the outer planet, we find an eccentricity of 0.45_−0.11^+0.10, whereas the inner planets are compatible with circular orbits. The latter is likely to be a rocky planet in the habitable zone of HD 20794. From the analysis of activity indicators, we find evidence of a magnetic cycle with a period of ~3000 d, along with evidence pointing to a rotation period of ~39 d.

The rotation is what raised up that forty day phantom.

The system is only 19.7 light years away, 6.04 parsecs. Its star is 68.7% luminosity, ~79% solar mass. It is too heavy for us to use the photoeccentric-effect on its planets. Eccentricities, rather, are measured direct - where they could be; the inner planets are e<0.15ish. The planets were verified with a post-processing pipeline ... tool called YARARA.

This 2014 paper is how they got HZ. As to "d":

The stellar flux at the periastron [0.75 AU] is almost seven times stronger than the stellar flux at the apoaster [1.96 AU]. HD 20794 d spends ~59% of its orbit inside the optimistic HZ, and ~38% of its orbit inside the conservative HZ.

I am not an optimist; "d" is mostly too cold. Its extreme eccentricity crossing the HZ suggests it also loses air, as well as running off any other HZ planets. 'Tis hardly a laboratoire pour la quête de la vie.

82 G.E. might rather serve as a lab for planetology and orbital-dynamics. Its star is a quiet one by G standards so might actually not be hitting the planets too hard; and "d" is heavy. I assume this planet a Sudarsky II subUranus and not hycean. Nari's paper likens it to Gliese 514 b around a M at 7.6 pc.

Planet "d" should be directly visible to Habitable World Observatory, they say. Giving us inclination, radius, albedo; therefore density.

To me, that "d" eccentricity signals some "e" they haven't seen yet. They allow a 50 M_⊕ halfSaturn could run out at 3-10 AU. This may be visible to space 'scopes also. That's the sort of thing that could Zeipel us some transits someday.

Alien organics on Ceres

Ah how I love clickbaitey titles. Anyway: dwarfplanet Ceres, our own little Centaur imported from beyond Jove. The Dawn orbiter found organics, after telling us of that famous saltlick in its Occator crater. As an orbiter and not a driller, the probe could report directly only from the surface.

Now, with AI (preDeepSeek); the Max Planck Institute somehow now involved in planetology has looked into where the organics lie upon Ceres. It's all around certain craters, not around volcanoes. Ceres does have volcanoes, being salty and I assume with some ammonia; water flows at lower Kelvins, perhaps at a thicker viscosity.

All this means that Ceres' surface organics are not from Ceres. They've been delivered from other asteroids. Ceres may host some organics deep beneath, in fact the Planckers assume it probably does; but they're not coming to the surface. Ceres is darker and denser than (much larger) Callisto today but perhaps had more ice where it formed.

So where did the organics form? Plenty of complex hydrocarbons exist on, say, Bennu. As to where Polana's chains started, I'd ask after Sagan's star-tar: the tholin group. They're from even further out than whence Ceres came.

How old are the craters? Can tholins be distinguished from other organics? Is the presence of tholic matter helpful in dating them?

Phobos orbit injection

Mars doesn't own a lot of air, compared with (oh) Venus fit for some cheap delta-V correction. But Mars does own some. Back in 2019 Buzz Aldrin mooted, for payload: an aerobraking probe destination-Phobos.

This blog's first preference for a fourth-ring Solar System base is Deimos. Deimos has less gravity and is further up, than Phobos.

But a Phobos orbiter, even with a lander, isn't nothing. Say the delivery has several small-cargo units. Also if we're doing Mars at all then a base on Phobos makes Martian interplanetary intercourse a lot cheaper.

What Aldrin has done here is open direct imports to Phobos from the solar-system without need for Deimos, which at least relieves Deimos' traffic-control. Deimos remains best-placed to handle Phobos' nondigital exports, and imports of anything heavy and/or fragile - like humans.

How Aldrin gets to the Martian system matters. Aldrin here assumes the least delta-V effort, the one way Hohmann. Aldrin in 1985ish had another trajectory, the flyby-and-return-to-Earth cycler. After some years Earth gets the shipping back, which may even be a human maintenance-crew; I expect it scales better than Hohmann. But a delta-V cost hits the flyby for anything dropped from the container.

The beginning of wisdom

Last Sunday we sang Psalm 19:7f, on the decrees of YHWH. First off I suspect it's appended to the psalm of El vv. 1-6, but that's not very important right now. More to the point I was pondering the fear of YHWH is the beginning of hikma. This is Proverbs 1:7a... and 9:10a.

And I doubt the verse fits either poem, Proverbs 1 or 9. Proverbs 9 is a hymn to the Hagia Sophía. Proverbs 1 begins as a Testament of father to son before, vv. 20f, shifting to a Prophetic sermon of reified Hikma to us mortal fools. Lord YHWH doesn't do anything. He doesn't even give any laws like the Lord of Psalm 19:7f did; Holy Wisdom is to do that.

The editor of the Proverbs-as-canon stuck those verses in, to steer away from taking the literal words seriously, which might lead to what the Muslims call shirk.

Photoeccentric effect

Last weekend I caught David Kipping's youtube on the "photoeccentric effect", floated over a decade ago but impractical at the time. Kipping's crew has lately applied this upon a necessarily-small sample of M and K transiting systems, which stars could have their densities directly measured.

The notion is to compare the real stellar densities to densities inferred from planetary orbits. The latter inferral comes with assumption of orbit eccentricity zero. Where the latter density is, er; wrong: how wrong, tells us the eccentricity.

This was all moot until we could get real stellar densities for the far-off stars in question. Before the Gaia data-releases (DRx) we often didn't have good parallax for how far-off; if you recall Whatmough's "Extrasolar Visions", it was stuck with the wrong distance for at least 70 Virginis. Since then, we have Andrew Mann et al. 2019. This concocted a method from 63 nearby binaries; unfortunately only up to 70% Sol mass (I take it that above that, like with our G-type Sol, we are tripped up by stellar age and/or second-generation effects). Also a signal:noise contraint applies although I don't see where Kipping's team used that exact paper.

Rather than constrain by mass they went with the eclipse radius, up to twice Earth's. Such're probably superEarths. But even Musk isn't hoping to travel to a literal Kepler Object-of-Interest (KOI) or TESS-O.I. These are proxies: for, yes, Earths; albeit more for Veneres since the research allowed insolation up to four Earths.

I'd actually thought that eccentricity could be measured directly. I take it that I've been living in the late 1990s when the star's radial velocity was harshly perturbed over long light-curves. That was seen with such planets, say, as 70 Virginis b. But when we're talking sub-Neptune size, their mass doesn't budge the star as much and - for close orbits like transits - the light-curve is short. We might not even have a good idea of the planet's mass, let alone eccentricity. The photoeccentric effect - lovely name by the way - does the constraining, at least for e.

It was found that of the seventeen test-cases, all but KOI 4087.01 orbit with low-eccentricity: e ≤ 0.1. For reference Mars has 0.09; Earth is - you know, Earth, and Venus has hardly an ellipse at all. Habitability doesn't really become a problem until 0.3 - they claim that the summers however short will boil off the seas. Which, yeah, can't have helped Mars' seas.

If these can serve as proxies, Earthlike planets in the HZ - at least a K's HZ - mostly didn't migrate far. As not being boiled, I've expected that each K HZ bears mainly high water planets, like Trappist-1 efg on the M side.

Pat Rothfuss on OnlyFans

Herr Doktor Esquirel points to Correia and Van Stry about how Certain Authors, by not finishing their Big Important Epics, have ruined the genre for everyone else (some additional blame goes to smug enablers like Tubcuddle). Which Correia at least would like us all not to think about when picking up new epics from up-and-comers like Van Stry.

If Van Stry is giving decent perspective to readers; to authors his advice is less helpful. Good advice would have been to read what Stephen Donaldson said about his first epic, the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. He said he'd written the whole trilogy in advance: so that when the first book came out, his publishers could honestly promise there would be more. Because they already had the galleys of "more". The next few years were all about editing, book tours, and planning releases around whatever-else Del Rey had on-deck.

As I recall, Stephen Lawhead's paperbacks for the early parts of his Atlantis/Avalon series even had cover designs of what was upcoming. (Later the third book got cut into more.)

I suppose one way around readers not buying your first books is to write an action-packed serial. We who are reading Skyler Ramirez's "Worst X in the Y" books don't mind that it's not finished; same goes for Andrew Moriarty's "Imperial Z". Also if it's on Kindle Unlimited, what are we really losing. Another way 'round is just to write pr0n on account, lol, "story", how cute.

So I guess I'm telling Van Stry to swallow some pride and start with genre slop. The fans will come. They will trust you to finish an epic series once you write one. Just like... Larry Correia, who wrote a lot of urban-fantasy I didn't care about until he floated his epic, which led to his old fans promoting the new work, on his behalf. (Even for a Correia, I suggest finishing the series before shopping it.)

The next pitfall is if you're Peter David, so have attracted several thousands of fans; but you keep writing (basically) fan fiction for franchises. When the franchise dies, as Star Trek and Star Wars both are dead, you don't want to be a sixty year old with no savings whose fans have forgotten who you were.

Austronesia+Papua

Polynesians come from Austronesians, who came out of what's now Taiwan. Polynesians moved on to take over most of the Pacific. Back home, however, Vanuatu's Polynesians got replaced by Papuans. They kept their language however, suggesting that those incoming Papuans may well have mixed with Polynesians. Lately the Turtle is looking at "Wallacea".

Wallacea is on the east side of the Wallace Line - and west of the Lydekker Line. That is the strait between Sunda (when Borneo and Java were Southeast Asian) and Sahul (when New Guinea was Australian). The mainstays of Wallacea are Sulawesi and Timor.

Sulawesi, and eventually Timor, got peopled by the oldest humans in the region: the same lot as the Australians and Papuans. There they stayed. Until, we are told now, some coastal Papuans learnt to boat. They got that by merging with Austronesians around 1500 BC.

This means genetics of Timor after 1500 BC don't much help before that year, requiring preservation between the monsoons they get.

Trends of K dwarfs

K dwarfs get a lot of attention for habitability-prospects. Also, there are simply a lot of them, not least because none of them have burned out yet like the oldest G dwarfs are starting to. Anyway: David Moore is looking at trends.

The Habitable-Zones (HZ) around red M dwarfs can usually be counted-on to cough up some planets, if tidally locked and irradiated planets. K dwarf HZs, perhaps with nicer HZs, also unfortunately (for observers) have further-out HZs: between 0.26 to 1.04 AU depending on how big the K primary. It takes longer to detect gravitational swings on the star, the massratio gets difficult, and hardly any will transit. So what we've found runs superEarth on-up.

If they don't have a superEarth or Neptunian, what can we speculate about what we don't see - is Moore's aim.

We have a control-set of sorts: TRAPPIST-1, which is M not K. Its worlds are different: mutually-resonant. Pace Moore these, I think, formed in-situ. Moore further claims 20% water-ice. I doubt for the inner ones, even if they were migrates; T-1b is hardly steampunk. But f-g-h could hold it on their dark sides.

For Ks, where not resonant, Moore is finding a lot of planetary migration. 3-6 M supervulcans dominate the ten-day-year zone, which can't be formed in-situ. There's plenty of room in that HZ, but they'd have to have migrated too.

For the migrates I expect waterworlds and carbonworlds. Exception: if the hot innermost planet is a Hot Jupiter. These can scatter protoplanetary rubble such that said rubble then forms in the HZ, citing Martyn (with y) Fogg's PhD-in-progress. That second-generation planet wouldn't own a lot of water.

The HALEU tug is banned

The LEU Tug is on-hold.

Angry Astronaut reports that Lockheed Martin and DARPA lost the 1960s test-facility. In fairness during the #Wokening, Lockheed were busy sketching up diversity_inclusion.html pages and following ESG. Although these terms are harder to find on the site today for some reason, doubtless the management's deeply-held Values.

Regulations have overtaken what America could do in the 1960s according to the Draco manager Schumacher. The HALEU "nerf" workaround for LEU still does not satisfy the post-1960s regulations mostly environmental.

So what is Draco actually... doing? The Angry Astronaut notes that NASA and DARPA both failed to prepare for the coming-online of a working NERVA prototype. That v'tuber is calling upon Elon Musk to fix these regulations.

As I've noted, SpaceX is all in the chemical-world, not nuclear. But with SpaceX's stuff, we absolutely need heavy-duty space tugs in the Earth's orbital ranges. We can only get this with NERVA. This can only increase demand for Starship.

NTP being tested

It looks like Nuclear Thermal aka NERVA is out of the lab. General Atomics - Electromagnetic Systems is testing hydrogen propellant at 2600 K. h/t Angry Astronaut.

There's a "nonhydrogen environment" test also, which ran up to 3000 K.

The fuel is HALEU, which is lowenough for cislunar operations. NTP means, more I_sp; less massratio needed as the propellant gets ejected faster. Heavier actual-cargo can get moved around to better orbits. Of course GA-EMS has pix of Mars everywhere because hype.

As the Astronaut points out, Starship is a chemical system - because it's all supposed to land back on Earth in one piece. What Starship can do is to set up GA-EMS as a tugboat, and supply it.

This suggests that NASA shouldn't shut down where they did the testing, the Marshall Space Flight Center at Alabama.

Hocazade Esad Efendi

Hocazade Esad Efendi was a Shaykh al-Islam of the Ottomans from AD 1615 until his death 1625, with a year-long hiccup around 1622-3. His claim to my attention is a short "sentence" - fatwa - he did against the Safavids over in Persia; against 'Abbas the shah at the time.

Ignac Goldziher in the infamous second volume of Muhammadanische Studien, 112; and the tamer Nöldeke-Schwally, 2.100; quote from the broadside. This exists in English which one Sir Paul Rycaut excerpted The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: 1686). So, after the Efendi was dead.

In the edition I linked, the fatwa runs pp. 2.10.227f. This is what the German Orientalists quoted: You deny the verse called the covering in the Alchoran to be authentick; you reject the eighteen Verses, which are revealed to us for the sake of the holy Aische [`Âisha]. The translator sidenoted, the chapter so called; the wife of Mahomet so called. (He also thought the screed went against this shah's grandson and successor from AD 1629; but by then our Efendi would have been a revenant of some shade.)

I can certainly believe that some Muslims could not accept sura 24; as a text of law, the non-sura stoning-verse is still preferred today. I find harder to believe that the whole of sura 88 had gone missing from a Persian Qurân.

I'd love to read the screed in its original tongue - it could be Turkish, as the Safavids were Azeris who should have known it, even if the fatwa's main audience was the Ottoman elite at home. Arabic would be the common language of religious disputation however.

I suspect we're looking for Esad Efendi, Fetava-yı Müntehabe, comp. Şaranizade Hafız es-Seyyid İsmail İbn Hafız Abdülkerim, Kasecizade, nr. 277 (1218/1803).

BACKDATE 1/22

Qabra

An excavation in Iraqi Corduene has unearthed cuneiform. The Stele of Dadusha, at Eshnunna, refers to a "Qabra" around here.

Dadusha was an aristocrat c. 1830-1760 BC, the era of Hammurabi's Dynasty. His stele is about how he killed Qabra's lord Banu-Ishtar.

Some mysteries I got include: what kind of name is "Banu-Ishtar". It sounds more like a tribe. Maybe that's the Arabist in me . . .

Also, um, Ishtar was female. I'd expect a -t ending in female names of this era; indeed we read much of "Asharat", Aramaic "Astarta" and Hebrew "Ashera". I gather that Akkadian dropped this feminine suffix in this one case. How to explain "Qabra", then? It looks Semitic with no -t. Do we have the Aramaic emphatic already? Hammurabi is very early for Aramaic, they were still looking at Amoritic then.

Clan-names in Ezra-Nehemiah

May as well get back into Ezra and its sort-of Greek transmission, Esdras. Qumran hits up chapters 4-6 in its former, Ezra form; also the Temple Scroll relies on Nehemiah 10, with Ben Sira noting Nehemiah the man. Charlotte Hempel raises to attention that these are the parts of the Ezra / Esdras / Nehemiah tradition as ... don't mention Ezra himself. He'll show up in Ezra 7.

Mentioning the Temple is the "Enochian" literature, priestly as it is. Even the Second Temple: I find building all which was fallen down of that house in the Animal Apocalypse 1 Enoch 88; which still belongs in Dugin's ambit. Abraham's vision in Jubilees 23 might neglect this; but in 4Q390, which uses Jubilees, G-d Himself finally boasts of how He allowed the Second Temple. Haggadically mayhap, none of these credit His agents who did the rebuilding. Meanwhile(?) the Zadokite "Damascus Document" so-called is more Jubilaic in skipping over the Second Temple, preferring the late Teacher Of Righteousness (perhaps deeming this new Temple too fake and gayGreek).

Once Hempel gets to Ben Sira and 2 Maccabees, we read of Nehemiah - and of Zerubbabel, a figure of some later Prophets. Still no Ezra.

And a prayer exists in Nehemiah which seems written before the Samaritan / Judaean split. So maybe in these one/two/three books we're looking at composites of basal material.

Anyway with hattips galore (and a decade-off URL): now, Mitka Golub. She's looking at the Ezra 2 / Nehemiah 7 synopsis which, again, is nowhere in Qumran. Golub finds that they aren't very theophoric. By contrast, Judah's onomasticon was full of -yahw names, and so was "Elephantine" Yeb's under Darius.

Golub concludes that the names in Ezra 2 reflect later fashion. They'd be a clot of Hebrew- (or Canaani-)speaking people coming into Judaea from, Golub guesses, "the late Persian period" even Hellenistic, so: 4th century BC.

Starship's mishap

So far we've had three attempts at booster-retrieval; for all three, the booster worked within parameters. The second attempt failed because the launchpad wasn't ready for it. The paperwork had accounted for that, and FAA accepted it. The FAA did not account for the Starship itself to R.U.D. over the Caribbean.

Which happened last week. Now, surprising nobody, the FAA is calling Mishap. Here's UPI.

SpaceX is going to write up its own report, which Elon's already started. The FAA is likely to stamp whatever they get. We expect Turks-and-Caicos will write up a protest of their own after they lift their faces from the white stuff, and before Trump annexes them.

4chan's been running jokes that SpaceX should stick with boosters (including the chopstick, now running 2-for-3) and let Blue Origin run the craft into orbit.

Gliese 1214

This blog hasn't touched the GJ 1214 system as yet. It looks like it's time.

The system is 48 light years away, in Ophiuchus behind Barnard's. The star is red dwarf. A transit dips into the light relative to us every 1.5804 days. No eccentricity, so we assume its planet is tidally-locked. If it be a "superEarth" it is a fluffy one: zero-albedo equilibrium temperature of ∼600 K, a radius of 2.7 R_⊕, and a mass of 8.2 M_⊕. So miniNeptune has been mooted - Sudarsky II, which is measured from kelvin (to my chagrin; we cannot talk of albedo a priori).

Everett Schlawin and Kazumasa Ohno, together with their harem of et al., are now telling us it is high in carbondioxide. They talk of "metallicity" which is a stellar term for anything not hydrogen or helium: our two ice-giants have eighty times our Sun's metallicity; miniNeptunes are more like a hundred (like GJ 3470 b or K2-18 b). For that, this GJ 1214 planet is more in the thousands. There's no hydrogen "hycean" layer; that element is bound up in molecules UPDATE 2/1 like methane.

They don't say outright, but with CO₂ this high, that fluffiness should be a cloud-deck with low water content; room-temperate acid would do. Gliese 1214 b is a superVenus. Like Aphrodite in that Gateway book; although the Heechee haven't been detected yet.

THAT METHANE 2/1: on review, I am curious how methane survived there and not down here on Venus. Something seems up with the magnetosphere of the star and how it interacts with this planet's core.

Our rocky past

An umlaut university is finetuning the events leading to our Moon. Yes, it's still Theia. The difference, to the extent there's a difference, is that Theia was very stony - and metally. Theia's core has sunken into Earth's mantle; its own mantle was blown off by earlier crashes before it got here.

So Theia didn't bring water; furthermore, we didn't get a "late-veneer" of water afterward. Apparently our water is similar to that of enstatite chondrites. This blog has mentioned them barely once; as high-density conglomerates mostly rock, forming well in the stone-line like we did. This rock would be low in volatiles... like water. But even minimal water adds up; or, hydrogen-infused molecules in rock might react with rusts.

Inonu cave is Palaic, not Kaska

Bulent Ecevi university are looking at Cro-Inonu at Karadeniz Eregli in Zonguldak, near Heraclea Pontica. They've found signs of sentient life during around what would be the Hittite period.

This article from Türkiye Today is poorly edited. Although I do appreciate Gordon Doherty's map. Very late-1990s amateur 2e-D&D. I might have drawn some maps like that myself.

The region could be protoPhygrian (Thracian), or Mycenaean (Greek). I take it they've ruled out these cultures. Native to northwest Anatolia, this is about where I'd expect Palaic. Apparently they're ruling these out too. Left are those dirty woodwoses and troglodytes whom the Hittites named "Kaska", of whom all we know from their personal names is they're not Palaic or Greek.

I've heard musings the Kaskians might be the original Hatti; expelled from Hattus and Nerik (and Sapinuwa which just means "Divine City" in Hattic).

The problem I got is that even the map is suggesting that the Kaska clustered around the mouth of the Red River later named (after old Hattus) Halys, spreading east. Even Nerik was pretty far west of the core Kaska-land... which is why the Hittites were able to retake it. The cave is far westward of Nerik, across the river.

PostKurgan gylanism

As Marija Gimbutas and Merlin Stone noted, there never was a matriarchy. Matrilocality, by contrast, may be seen in a belt across the Bantu southern regions of the African continent. Here's Lara M. Cassidy et al. arguing for its existence in old Prydain.

The Celtic/Volcae Netherlands were in close contact with what's now southern England, including Cornwall. North of that, the Britons tended not to move abroad much. The solution stumbled upon, was to define "wealth" as "this land". A man who wanted wealth and status had to marry the land (as documented in Holy Grail). That meant he had to move abroad. This kept inbreeding low-enough for the locals to survive and not to war upon each other too much. It also avoided the queen's brothers muscling in, to get their own daughters on the throne in place of the queen's... therefore, really their daughters' brothers: the word for that is "avunculate". Instead I think we're looking at anarchosyndicalism, the only "communism" as can possibly work.

The system contrasted with the Gauls and Aquitanians in what's now France. The mainland grew more urban. The weather was better and it has more navigable rivers, plus some of those rivers drained into the Med.

With the Gaulish (or Belgaic?) to-and-fro, it may be that the Celtic of southern Britain had to shift to be more Gaulish, notably taking on the q>p shift of the Greeks (like Oscans did). Cornovia and Cambria, both rather marginal, would have lagged. Roman influence in Gaul sidelined Gaulish, so the southern Britons simply spoke Gaulish Trade Latin. Ireland meanwhile was less tied with the Gaulish/Greek world; when it got Med visitors, the visitors were Latins who never did q>p, so the Irish didn't either.

Maybe Hezeqiah wasn't rescued

As followup to this piece, I'll bring in Johanna Markind. The claim is that Exodus' core narratives, around Moses being drawn from the Nile and then drawing water abroad, and around Moses striking the overseer, and about the Nile flowing with blood, are legends like what Sargon II spread about his heroic Akkadian namesake. Traditionally Genesis 13; Exodus 16, 22-3; and Isaiah 30 had thought of Egypt as a refuge. And so modern-day Egyptian apologist Henry Aubin in The Rescue of Jerusalem.

But then Sennacherib shut Hezeqiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in his cage". The siege was lifted; but Sennacherib doesn't seem aware that Egypt had helped much. Markind, against Aubin, argues for a Surrender of Jerusalem. If the Assyrians would just content themselves with a garrison and an alliance, against the Nubians calling themselves Pharaoh (like the Ramessides did); Hezeqiah could stay on his throne.

If the Exodus 1-16 be antiEgyptian propaganda, this may go to explain how it wasn't always canon in Egyptian Judaism, which maintained the old Pesach as having nothing to do with any earlier "sojourn" by the Nile. And why nonJewish Egyptians don't seem to know the tale until Ptolemy of Mendes, Agartharch, and others. That half of the book would then fall along with Isaiah 19. (Isaiah 9 might be Josiah's.)

If the tale is from Hezeqiah, that is after the northern kingdom fell. There's no Elohist up to Exodus 16; green and blue here be merged. If to this farrago there be earlier sources in Hebrew, we can't get at them.

BACKDATE 1/16

Lead pipes again

Here's the latest on the muh-lead-pipes canard. The good news, I guess, is they're not talking about the piping.

They are talking about the process of smelting which brings lead into the air.

They may also mention the lead "silver" ware, actually mostly pewter. This is fine for water cups too. But less fine for acidic drinks like, er, wine. Also I think lead was sometimes used in sweeteners.

Psalter pscholarship

Open-access journal on Biblical translations on Ancient World Online. This concerns this Psalter.

First up, the Psalter tends to be the most-copied book in any language. From John Lee, the Greek Psalter was late-Ptolemaic, second-century B.C. This is bourne out by its deviations from the Hebrew ("MT") which Emmanuel Tov count as hardly any. They even resist fixing that Elohist nonsense.

Although there do exist some Greek changes; nine years back I'd noted Hebrew Psalm 130 "fear of God" against the Greek #129 "law [*torah] of God". And wasn't there Hellenistic south-Syrian jargon not used in Egypt? If the Psalter be Ptolemaic I think it was, nonetheless, done in the Ptolemaic Judaia. (We are here ignoring the three Christian interpolations; after all, the Ethiopian Christians ignored two of 'em.)

Peshitta started as a translation of the MT, although Christians did 1 Isaiah. Van Peurson notes they did the Psalter too. (When the Jews were called in, they did Matthew - which I find ironic.) Later Peshitta MSS have some "corrections" toward the Greek, although not much changing the Christian elements. Of course meanwhile the "kaige" lads were correcting the Greek toward the MT, although with the Psalter they had little to do.

On topic of Aramaic, this article is Greek-focused - we are not here looking at the Targum, either Palaestinian or Iraqi or Late Jewish Literary. Although I understand the Jews fell under heavy Syriac influence when they got past Torah, especially Proverbs.

The Arabic Psalter was Melkite so done from Greek. Later the Muslims will make a run at Psalm One, possibly from Peshitta. I assume Quranic vocabulary slips into all this. Score another W for Sidney Griffith.

For comparison with the Greek MT, Michael Segal brings the Ode of Hannah. This actually does have variations. Psalm 113 may depend on this.

This brings to mind, what about the "variant Psalter". Emmanuel Tov says there wasn't one. Where we see variants as in Qumran, these weren't competitors to the canon. 11QPsAp/11Q11's use of Psalm 91 is a case-in-point. Van Peurson agrees: those extra psalms found in Syriac like 152-155 may have been dug out of the caves, during Timothy I's papacy/catholicate. Qumran's paraPsalters were done for the liturgy; they could be considered lectionaries. Like the Odes, which the Greeks compiled as separate from the Psalter although sometimes attached. Psalm 151 may well have started as Ode.

City of exiles

Every few years I get back into Cucuteni. Anyway Dawn of Everything is in the news again.

The theory here is that Cucuteni - a Romanian site - was indeed an egalitarian town with, in the centre... nothing. The town-commons, in Yankee / Anglian terms. Maybe it was an agora with temporary tents. Maybe it was for town meetings. Maybe they just grazed sheep there. Or choose-your-own-adventure.

But before the culture ended, it changed. (That happens a lot.) The villages emptied (one final ritual burn); the people, however, moved. They moved ... trans-dnestrovie. The big cities are in what's now western Ukraine. All this before the IndoEuropean irruption, Corded-Ware and all that; maybe some of those had moved into Anatolia and/or Tocharia.

Maidanetske 3800 BC - some time after the big farms, and the mouse - has a 200-hectare "megasite" which they don't (yet) want to call a city, given that the Cucuteni towns before it are difficult to define as such. But it has larger buildings. They don't know - yet - if these are what we'd call public, or if they're temples, or palaces. (I doubt festhalls, those seem more IndoEuropean.) Either way they should class as urban, so their "megasites" as urbes.

There's guff about Climate but I doubt this. Climate crises would be 6200 BC then that nasty Bronze Age 22nd-C BC. In between, things should have been fine. Excepting the 3400 BC yersinia which hit the Ukraine-now-urban. Maybe because they'd not been doing the burn ritual anymore.

Karl Popper's other philosophy

Since we've been looking into historian philosophy... why not political. George Soros has one: he claims Karl Popper's. We've dealt with Popper's inductive reasoning; Soros more concerns the Open Society. There are those who think little of Soros. For now we'll start with that run on the Bank of England / "Sterling" he did, under PM John Major.

Dropping out of the Euro allowed Britain to get out from under the Thatcher / Major recession. Yes, that was $3G-1993 lost, from which Soros took $1G. Overall Britain bought, with that money, some prosperity. We can discuss how Major and his successors have handled that prosperity, some other time.

Opposed to Popper are the likes of Putin and Xi, and here Maduro and Ortega. Popper's most coherent proponent these days seems to be Richard Hanania.

Britain basically cannot run herself so requires that outside billionaires intervene to help. It is exactly Popper's Open-Society that saved the Brits under Major, and is attempting to save them under Starmer. If Brits find this "unsporting", they should elect a better King.

Soros' main fault, meanwhile, is that since his good work in Britain, he has failed Popper.

Direct-democracy doesn't work with Democrats

We are told not to blame Los Angelenos for what is happening. We are told to blame the Snail Darter (in CA, in the form of Delta Smelt) and the courts, DEI hiring (leading to insufficient boats and reservoirs), Trump - for being annoying, or the weather. Suppose, however, that Californians did choose some parts of their fate. California allows for voter-initiatives, a form of Direct Democracy.

Among these initiatives is Proposition 103 which declared that insurers can't hire actuaries. I'm serious. Another one was Proposition 47 which lightened sentences for Quality Of Life offences like Urban Camping.

Even if California politicos would like to bring back insurers and to keep mentally-unfit and angry people off the streets, they... can't.

These Props are not on Mayor Karen Bass, disappointing as she has been (I recall Sailer and Cole, both famously #based, as more-or-less supportive, years back). These are on you. Likewise on you is all that NIMBY against doing the Israel on the potential water-supply off the shore. As Cerno has noted, Maslow was wrong: most people freed of Problem A won't solve Problem B, they'll - literally - Problematise what is good.

My suggestion to the incoming Administration and to Congress is that, when California sends Representatives with their hands out, to tie some serious strings around those hands. To whit: Federalise the coast from somewhere south of the SF Bay all the way to Tijuana. Make that strip a Territory, with some name taken from an Indigenous pre-Uto-Aztecan tribe like the Chumash. If these people are simply not in California anymore, they're not ruled by those stupid Propositions.

(Incidentally this is why I haven't bothered with Romania lately. If you vote for a joke, get treated like a joke.)

The antimessianic prooftext

Psalm 91 was constructed as an apotropaic prayer to relieve suffering from the afflicted. And so the Jews have used it. Muslims claim that it was messianic like Psalm 22. Although some Christians - like Augustine - have shoehorned it into the Ecclesiatical History; most Christians have observed that no Jew has ever read this messianically. But... what if the Jews, opposite our Muslims, used it antiMessianically?

I have in mind the tradition where a protoChristian holy man was thrown from a high roof. This is what Hegesippus said of Saint James, Jesu's brother. The Gospel of Matthew has brought a parallel into Jesus' temptations which we shall commemorate in Lent. Here the Devil, no less, brings Psalm 91 as relevant Scripture. Jesus doesn't exactly deny this - the Passion had already brought Psalms like 2 and 22 - instead, countering its abrogation with Deuteronomy, "do not put the Lord-your-God to the test".

Matthew will present a nondocetic Crucifixion, more so than Mark by the way; so Matthew already knew that Psalm 91 was not a relevant Scripture. I would even venture Matthew was structuring a Gospel that excludes Psalm 91 from consideration.

I think we're missing a scene from the oral-tradition around James where Psalm 91 was used against James' claim to be the heir to the Messiah, therefore the Messiah of his day. But the Jews had not thought to use it against Jesus. Jesus wasn't killed in that way and it hadn't occurred to Jesus, nor to his immediate followers, to use Psalm 91 for their own cause. Matthew was safeguarding not just Jesus, but also James.

The separated Gospels in Syriac

I went looking up Syriac Gospel studies over the past year. I don't know that David Taylor has yet published New Finds 37+39 or the Sinaiticus. I did however see Haelewyck's 2017 Status Quaestionis. Done with knowledge of New Finds; but before the bolsterment of the Curetonian Gospels.

We do get the Palaestinian Jargon of Joosten, bolstered by Lyon 1994. Only the lyt thing seems overthrown.

Baethgen 1885(!) remains the textbook for how Curetonian (alone) went about translating the Greek Gospels, presumably before those later tweaks which have plagued the text on its way to us. The translation is not Aquila. The Matthew, in particular, has taken on glosses to tell us which personage is meant by a pronoun. So word order and prepositions are not to be trusted; but whole omissions are to be trusted. Intergospel harmonies might point to the Diatesseron.

The Acts of Thomas, by the way, quotes the Lord's Prayer from the Curetonian Matthew... not Peshitta. The Diatesseron has the same text but the Acts - developing its own harmonies of content - doesn't use Diatesseron there. Use of harmonised text can actually be tested: not just against other witnesses to Diatesseron, but also against Aphrahat.

Sinaiticus is considered oldest, as the freest translation, even by comparison with Curetonian. S also lacks that Marcan ending; that might be because S's base text had bracketed out that sus passage, but still - the bracketing would have to be early.

On topic of the four gospels: Hjelt 1903 found the Sinaiticus was translated by four people who did not have access to one anothers' work. Matthew's translator, furthermore, was a Jew by upbringing perhaps still trying to evangelise Jews, based on the glosses.

Lagrange 1920-1 claimed all four were done in Egypt, explaining how they did not get accepted by Aphrahat or Ephrem even if they'd already existed. Maybe. Acts of Thomas would suggest at least Matthew did get over at least to west-Syria, in its Curetonian form.

Although most seem to think Diatesseron preceded Curetonian, we may still have debate about where earlier Sinaiticus sits. Also at issue is if gospel-harmonies preceded the Diatesseron. I'd wait for Taylor's publications.

India today

The western Right has been arguing with itself about the H1B Visa, which I think is hyphenated H1-B sigh, H-1B. As opposed to the O-1, which brings to us the top talent; H-1B is argued to bring over talent which we hope will become top. There's a lot riding on that hope. Elon Musk likes the H-1B. Musk's main platform, X, has people in it who are autist enough to look into the H-1B, who's using it and how much and what they're bringing.

This is all happening whilst Canada and Australia, smaller nations than the US, have been dealing with the sudden irruption of Indian males (and not females, females are always less migratory). Also going on is the resurrection of the Rotherham issue in the UK. Which discussion is also happening on X.

Leaving aside all that, we should like to know more about where India is going. (We know where Pakistan is going - to Taliban invasion and tribal-war.) So: here are some observations on Modi-ism. Last month we got a shufty on Indian culture.

How these factors intersect, would be the issue. India still has problems. Is Modi, at least, going to face these problems honestly? Or is he going to blame the West and push the West toward Indian interests against Western interests?

For now this blog will err on the side of caution. We will assert that, if you disapprove Modi: then you should expect few good things from Modi-supporters abroad. You might be able to work with, say, the Sikhs.

Positivism

Vridar offers a few observations. Past the theatrical land-acknowledgement headtilting, we learn of Positivism. I haven't really evolved a philosophy of history; just hearing about Foucault last year.

For Vridar, Positivism comes from Hempel. Hempel argued to discover predictable cause-effect relationships. The aim is for historical laws. If such laws exist... first up, that's Asimovian psychohistory, so woohoo. But also we can apply Bayes' theorem to solve ancient mysteries like, was Henry Beauclerc of the Normans aware that brother William II Rufus was about to die.

For Vridar, at stake is if we can say anything about the historical Jesus. He's in a conflict with Richard Carrier. Carrier is a Positivist. Carrier suggests that the Jewish Scriptural Canon, as of our first century, was already setting up messianic expectations. Maybe the Psalter wasn't intended as prophecy, but prophets were already mining, say, Psalm 72.

All this, Vridar warns, means that a hero was being set up. We barely need the man. This is what Life of Brian was getting across, that even a total loser could be imbued with the mantle, whether he wanted it or not. The Joke^TM was that this was happening to luckless Brian in his own time, the Romans reacting with trademark semiïnformed callous brutality.

Tarshish and Sheba

Today was the vigil for Epiphany. I am unsure if this means the display of Christ to the world, or the manifestation of the Divine in Christ - the latter implies a holdover of Adoptionism. Anyway. Psalm/OT correlation!

The Psalm was #72-MT, "Elohist". This prays God to grant judgement to the king and righteousness to the king's son. Christians, I think, read this as God the Dayyan, advised by a more idealistic crown prince who might see extenuations as the king missed. A Protestant would dislike this psalm on account it implies one can intercede with the king: here through his son, but why not his mother or any other saint.

Also interesting is the hope that this royal family will rule all the nations as trade with the king, from Tarshish (Tartessos) to Saba.

Old-Testament was Isaiah 60. Many themes of the psalm recur here: Saba bringing gifts, and then Tarshish is mentioned. Classically Psalm 72 would be considered Davidic such that Isaiah himself postdated it. Nowadays I don't know if Psalm 72 be dated prior to king Hezeqiah. I do know that Isaiah 60 is considered far, far posterior: scholarship has marked it after the second Isaiah 40-55 which hails shah Cyrus II. And then later psalms will use TritoIsaiah.

Simushir

Simushir blew up AD 1831. This solves a longstanding question about a bad Northern winter that seems less bad south of the Equator; implying something like Hekla. Tropical blasts like Tamboro (spellings vary) tend toward global problems.

On the other side of our globe, a New Zealander blast like Taupo would appear to inflict minimal damage up north. Although the Hatepe eruption was spectacular. This coincides, within two decades, with shah Ardashir I and the abortive reign of Alexander Severus. Was the German invasion driven by poor weather?

In AD 1831 nothing happened on Iceland, forcing research afield. Out East, nobody lived on Simushir who survived; nobody lives there today, although the Russians claim it. There also seems not to have been a tsunami. So we don't get - say - Japanese records or Native tradition such as AD 1700.

Aleutian and Kuril volcanism seems understudied. Alaska is doing a bit better, witness Aniakchak II 1628 BC. It may be political inasmuch as disputed territories present a visa nightmare. Also who wants to spend much time in a semitundra volcano.

BACKDATE 1/6

The universe exists for the Sabbath

I was pondering lately the structure Genesis One. Cody Moser is talking about Myth as Model: origin myths in general ... provide shared narrative frameworks for aligning and coordinating members of a group. What better time to poast than before reading the thesis...

Genesis One starts the whole Bible, not just for Jews and Samaritans but also for Christians. Muslims are aware of an origin-story - sura 7 sort-of prologues it all - but that's secondary to its revelation to the Prophet.

With Genesis-One, Judaism and Samaritanism ties the seven day week with the foundation of the universe. This is at tension with... Judaism and Samaritanism, inasmuch as even the basest fundamentalist intuits that humans came to the scene after the scene was already set, with night, day, sun, moon, oceans, sea creatures, and birds(!). It is on Day Six when animals finally get out onto land and stay there. (Dinosaurs before even reptiles is an... odd flex.) On Day Seven, Walton says that's when God ascendeth the Throne, misinterpreted as a snooze.

As a summary of Creation, 'tis flawed. And as justification for solar-calendar, projected to 364 days, it's off by a bit. On the other hand the dynamicists tell us that the days will become longer relative to the year (also lengthening) so... maybe it's prophecy.

Where Genesis One does serve, is as parable. Of Cosmic Order, of the duties of a state-founder, and of the centrality of a calendar. We get six days to work, and one day off (or at least set-aside for administrivia). This has proven to work well for populations as have adopted it.

Christians can point to other myths, like that in Paradise Lost. These myths cannot tie the seven day week with the Big Bang and, honestly, not even with our Solar System; I don't know that any myth can.

In the "Orange Catholic Bible", perhaps the Sabbath could instead be delayed: as God relenting from some of the punishments inflicted after Eden.

Before the Targum

In lieu of a New Year resolution, I'll just continue my thoughts on Jewish Aramaic. I just remembered it precedes the Targum. In fact the Dead Sea Scrolls include a couple of translations: one of the Yom Kippur ritual from Leviticus (perhaps done as a florilegium rather than actual Torah); and one of Job. We lack sufficient evidence to decide if the former competed with the Targum genre. The latter on the other hand...

Gavin Mcdowell (pdf) offers some insights, garnered from David Shepherd 2002 among others. He points out that the Targum genre was midrashic. It took the text, which (usually) it didn't override, instead adding content to explain the meaning. As a translation, compare Theodotion even Aquila in Greek. As to the expository content, the Targum acts more like... the Septuagint, or the Samaritan expansions, excepting that the additions were all Aramaic and not dragged in from other spots of the Hebrew Tanakh. Muqatil bin Sulayman seems to have had a similar attitude in his tafsir of Quran. And then there's that old Latin Quran...

Qumran's Job, by contrast, is a paraphrase. The attempt is to get across the meaning of the book without transmitting word-for-word Hebrew. At least here, the translator figured he could do good-enough. Here wasn't a legal principle, nor the word of G-d as might be delivered to (say) Isaiah; just the book's philosophy. This is like how that book got translated into Syriac (independently).

I understand that the Greek of Job is pretty-much a different book entirely, forcing Job to be a good deal more patient than he was in Hebrew or Aramaic.