4Q185

4Q185 as its enumeration suggests is an early, Allegro publication of the Judaean Desert series from Qumran (v. 4). Some publications have reviewed it, such as Matthew Goff, Discerning Wisdom (Brill, 2007) ch. 4 (concluded, pdf). If you have $125 lying around Isabell Christine Hoppe is revisiting it, also Brill.

I don't have $125 for this and find Brill unreasonable to expect this of you, dear reader. So this post defaults to Goff.

According to Goff, 4Q185 is a non-Yahad work aligning with Ben Sira - and with Psalm 1. The Dead Sea Scroll uses the Psalter and the "covenant" to propose the Bible as the fount of Wisdom. Wisdom is female, as in the later layers of the Psalter and Proverbs; but 4Q185 won't reify "her" as hard as some postJewish near-pagan feminists have done, nor even as Ben Sira or (say) Baruch.

Goff notes that 4Q185-as-4Q185 relies further on Isaiah 40. This is where Hoppe seems to depart. Hoppe is arguing that this is a redaction. In this case, the base-text behind 4Q185 might not, in fact, rely upon the Isaiah Scroll as we have it.

Although that does not mean that the "Vorlage" precedes shah Cyrus II. I am still seeing Hellenism in this impulse. When does the Hagia-Sophia first arise in the Semitic Near East?

The early Triassic dead zone

This week we've got a few glimpses at the aftermath to the Great Dying. Frogs survived, as did conifers. This is all before the great rain, when the air was bad.

And it was hot. It got hotter in the "Late Smithian Thermal Maximum", lasting 700ky; this killed the tropical conifers.

Amphibians, it seems, can manage without air, if the water is decent; also, some bugs can burrow around in low-O₂ conditions. Some land animals could sleep it off, seasonally. But the tropics don't really have hot/cold seasons. This equatorial band was the deadzone - except for amphibians.

Eventually the Triassic got the "Smithian-Spathian Event", cooling off the planet enough for seed-ferns (that staple of the Mesozoic, pre-deciduous era). Conifers clearly survived but, it appears, as marginally as today, up in high mountains and around the poles.

How large planets form

It was early noted that a lot of the larger exoplanets, which were detected first, have eccentric orbits. This week come two articles about them: when they form, and how they end up.

Can I just say that Ji Wang looks like Oriental Elon Musk or am I going to get this blog demonetised for that... oh yeah! This is a hobby. MUAHAHAH

Anyway 王吉 is talking ⪆10 AU which is further-out than Jupiter, even than Saturn. Those are the ones we can see separate from the star specifically: 51 Eri b, β Pic b, HIP 65426 b, HR 8799c and e, AF Lep b, and YSES 1 c. These formed over an early stage (⪅2 Myr) when large amounts of solids are available in young massive protoplanetary disks.

Ji Wang is aware of the "Grand Tack" theory of our ice and gas giants. He agrees: these four all formed further out, to migrate to where they run now. This suggests that other large exoplanets, which we perceive mainly from radial-velocity measurements, might also have formed early before their own inward migrations. Which brings us to Gregory Gilbert, Erik Petigura, and (undergrad) Paige Entrican; Entrican apparently writing the code. It seems that after "runaway" accretion from superearth to Neptunian, the planets get large enough to mess around with each other. Then they get eccentric where the usual superearth simply doesn't have the power to nudge, say, a nearby Venerian.

Over billions of years, though, I suspect that inner planets of these superplanets get pulled into eccentricity anyway.

Noricum falls

There exists a famous anecdote from saint Severinus' vita. Severinus lived in old Noricum, older Helvetia. Here a Roman camp was supplied until the middle 400s. The camp sent envoys across the Alps to Rome... wherever that was, probably Ravenna. They never got paid; often the envoys would get ripped by bandits. Here's the sequel: Historic Genomes Uncover Demographic Shifts and Kinship Structures in Post-Roman Central Europe.

Under the Empire, Romans afield would be... Romans. Some married locally or at least retired to a local colonia like, um, Cologne or LinColn. But most just wanted home to their native town in southern Gaul or wherever. And I guess some slipped into monasteries, like Severinus. But the monkish life ain't for everyone.

This genetic study notes where soldiers quit hoping to go back. It seems the locals weren't really offering a lot of likely maidens. The men, here, took wives from further north; deutscher wives. Everyone likes tall muscular blondes Nah - they just worried about inbreeding. They didn't even do levirate marriages, in accord with the Catholic ban. Severinus taught them well.

Iron Age Armageddon

Lately is found evidence for the first Armageddon - Josiah's battle at Megiddo. They found, at this Levantine site (which was still spinning pots in Semitic), a lot of "imported" Egyptian ware. It was cheap ware... like what might serve a host of Egyptian soldiers, rather than of rich Egyptian traders. These pots served Lydians and Greeks, too.

We're still unsure what brought Josiah to show up and get killed. That murder (or execution?) was the beginning of the end for the Judahite Kingdom, which - many believe - formed the template for the Jewish Kingdom of the Maccabees.

Inasmuch as that later kingdom could never live up to Josiah's promises, Armageddon became a byword for the Last Battle, mostly in Christianity although I suspect the Jews had preceded him.

Note here that it's Israel Finkelstein who's raised this to attention. Finkelstein is considered a revisionist. It would appear "Biblical Archaeology" trends better in later years, as is also the case for Lakhm Archaeology. I take it that every halfway-decent king commissions a Royal History beyond the bare king-list (which, for Assyrians, was a proper chronology). Some kings might incorporate earlier kings to associate the better predecessors. The books of Reigns associates Josiah's reforms with Hezeqiah's reign.

This finding validates the factual accounts of Josiah's reign, in particular a possible bent against Egypt. AntiEgyptian propaganda can be associated with this reign, like the Exodus.

Duck soup

Five years ago I gave to Unz's posters more credit than I give to them now. One topic over there was the French Revolution in its later phases. I bought and (eventually) read Schama Citizens, which I liked. Unz himself is back, to discuss the Revolution's early phase. Specifically: the Duck of Orleans' part in it (RIP Gene).

Credit where due: the Duck did own a large part in the King's ouster, larger than Schama in 1989 allowed. As late as 1968, no less an historian as Durant admitted as much. Schama downplayed this - but without refuting this. It was just a "Conspiracy Theory", floated by the likes of Nesta Webster. This has aroused Unz's suspicion.

Let's pretend for now that Webster was nuts and that Durant was credulous. Say we ignore the Masons, the Templars, the Zionists and the Lizardfolk. We are - still - left with an ambitious prince. Might it not be of historical interest, of Mirror For Princes interest; that we know when a prince aims to be King? Might historians at least consider that an attempted palace coup ran away from the plotters as to become a Revolution?

Congratulations to Firefly

Yesterday Firefly successfully got its Blue Ghost lander onto the Moon in this its Earth-facing early dawn. Firefly is a corporation, not a nationstate; Intuitive had landed an earlier vessel, but onto a slope it couldn't handle (I didn't bother blogging this). Blue Ghost by contrast is a full success.

Firefly launched the Ghost on 15 January. A craft being unmanned means it can take longer hauling its way across gravity-wells. I assume Intuitive got enough data it can produce slope-tolerant landers in future... or at least to find better slopes, because its Athena is aiming for the lunar antarctic in the 80s°.

Ultimately we want mass production of cheap landers to get cargo up there for cheap.

Tomorrow Wednesday, the Starship launch 8 will, hopefully, not explode Starship 34. UPDATE 3/6: welp, so much for that...

The self-cleaning NIH

Francis Collins, having presided over the politicisation of the NIH, is now to enjoy the newly-solvent Medicare and Social Security to which his generation is entitled. He had the opportunity to endorse the Overhead cuts which DOGE has forced on him - he certainly didn't implement any useful reform in office - but nah, he's whining about "respect". How much respect did his NIH grant to flyover Americans?

in the meantime the middle-management of NIH is taking puppies hostage. Where administrators fear their rice bowls, administrative chaos ensues. Not our fault, it's the fault of "the Cuts"!

The new generation should, if interested in improvement rather than on dunking on Team Red as this 'ere poast hath dunked on Team Blue, consider taking up review reform. This would at least use the newly-constrained overhead costs more effectively.

In search of the Minoan Bronze Age

Christopher Pare cannot find tin bronzes in Minoan, pre-Santorini Crete. The alloy was minted first in southern Britain ~2000 BC as we can expect from the tin in Cornwall and maybe south Wales. Dan Davis has a map of Pare's findings.

Pare has it that bronze may have come to the Mycenaeans first.

Davis' comments point out that all these European-Continental sites owned bronze artifacts long before the LBA. To read Davis, standard equipment was still copper or arsenical-bronze. Tin bronze was a sort of magic, "the smith and the devil"; iron in those days was Divine, rained from heaven. Archaeology has a bias to grave-goods which are precious - as is clear from the vast looting they endured in antiquity.

Overall I found Pare at first difficult to believe. Not that tin bronze was Cornish first - that seems obvious - but that it took so many centuries to reach Sicily and the Aegean. I admit the "EBA" Maghreb down the Atlantic used stone but they were a sideline until, what, the Almoravids.

Perhaps we should ponder Tartessos including the Mediterranean Maghreb. We're looking for El Argar, which from 2200-1550 BC mined the copper. So: Murillo-Barroso - it's open, and it's in English. Not much tin (Sn) is found in the deliberate alloys (which don't have arsenic) and where tin is blended, it is blended further with lead. The paper instead notes much more "arsenical copper" which they don't count as a bronze. That implies that tin was known but, I guess, too expensive, unless you were queen.

I'd elsewise expected more Orichalc: not with tin, but with nickel and/or zinc. But no, Zn was only a trace element in El Argar.

The post-Beaker Celts

Recently up is a piece about the Celts, by Hugh McColl et al.

One coauthor Jean-Paul Demoule is active on X in his belief that the AfD - the patriot party in Germany - is "extreme right". JPD further holds that currently-mainstream conservatives must beware of any alliance with this extreme (because Hitler); in the US, that anyone right of Bernie Saunders is problematic. A French patriot flags JPD as a fraud. It may be fair to question how fair he'd be to any "extremist" in his classroom. However:

For our purpose the most-serious charge must be that Demoule's entire career has been dedicated to deny the very existence of Indo-European people or langage (sic). To translate this ESL from Angry Twitter Bro, it may be that Demoule would introduce some Nuance against classic Aryan Invasion theories, which Gimbutas upgraded to Kurgan Invasion theories, and posthumously Bell Beaker theories. The Bell Beakers are indeed associated with vast male replacement in west Europe (if R1b; Aryan would be R1a). These regions are, in Roman times, found to be Celtic or at least IberoCeltic. But we have some loose-ends. Lusitanian appears to be paraCeltic. Italy hosts, south of the Cisalpine Gaul (and northwest of Messapic and Greek), the Italic languages. They're paraCeltic too. And somewhere in north Britain we have Picts.

The Discussion of the paper associates the Celts/Gauls with Urnfield alias Knovíz. It proposes the Tollense bustup with a Celt defeat in the north; this will be Vendic in postRoman "Migration" times. Late-Bronze Celts did a lot better south and west. For geneticists one problem with Urnfield is, er, the urns - cremated remains don't leave much DNA. Anyway even if somewhat eastern, Celts were not east enough to be majority Aryan/R1a; Celtic invasions did bring some R1a, but remained R1b-dominant.

Given that, I'd suggest one reason Celtic tongues did so well displacing the old Bell Beaker tongues is that they weren't all that different then. Lusitanian if preCeltic looks much like Celtic. A similar pattern will hold as Latin displaces Gaulish - and, perhaps, as Gaulish had displaced the languages in north Italy, which may have been Faliscan in character.

As for Demoule, I propose we don't dismiss his like (or ilk) just because they are antipatriots and bullies. We flag them where they are being antipatriotic bullies. For scholarship it doesn't help in reaction to be a patriotic bully.