The Christians threw away bad books

Richard Carrier is casting shade at Christians, as he does; this time for not preserving books as weren't theirs.

First of all, nobody should be commanded to do work he doesn't want to do. Okay, amend that: not without payment. If Christianity proved more appealing to the Roman citizenry (since Caracalla, most subjects were citizens) then that is a problem with Christianity's alternatives at the time. Maybe they just weren't that good!

... and maybe their books weren't that good, either. All those "alternative" Christianities that have been dug up here-an'-there really weren't better than what was good enough for Paul and Silas. Among the most-formidable was the religion of Science! or, as they called it, Gnosis. These depended upon geocentric celestial spheres - as Carrier is well aware. He may well also be aware that most of this stuff was done to feed the Astrology grift. How much of that did later generations need? or of alchemy?

Indeed somewhere around there we did, perhaps, need to keep more books on mathematics. I'd say medicine too but as Tannous has reported a lot of that did get translated into Syriac-Aramaic, by... Christians. ctrl-F "Syria" and I come up with one "Syrian" (sic) linguistic reference and that's related to Callimachus. That is: too early for Syriac.

A contrafactual where the old classical culture doesn't get this sharp break is, I suppose, possible. But I've already pointed out the case of Islam, which likewise pruned away Natural History. To replace it with some real mathematics.

Also to be added is that the fate of lost literature was never uncommon before the Printing Press. Xanthos wrote a history of Lydia. The Lydian language was then lost. So much for the Lydian library. Same with the Etruscans'. The Canaanites wrote reams and reams of literature, from Sidon to Carthage. Only Jews cared to keep that language alive; it's not like the pagan Romans were bothering to translate much of that (although it turns out, they did; an agricultural manual survives). Egypt? Nah brah. "Manetho" (that is, Ptolemy of Mendes) did try, for history, but the other works - the proverbs, the novels - got buried. If Carrier isn't blaming pagan Greeks and Romans for neglecting all the above, and why shouldn't they, because they were... Greeks and Romans; why blame the Christians, for not being pagans?

To sum up, Carrier is insinuating a charge against Christianity which is more a charge against the breakdown of law and health in the Mediterranean, which pushed intellectual activity into the Frankish and Syrian hinterlands. Where, I'll posit, they did the best they could. Not despite being Christian but because of it.

The Spaceline's long L1 station

A few years ago I evaluated the selenosync space elevator - poorly. I ended up rewriting the thing. Since then some people keep revisiting, especially, the "Spaceline". Which ties in with the lunaport at Sinus Medii.

Wang Weiweia, Wu Zhiganga, and Liu Jiafu have a paper "Conceptual Design and Mechanical Analysis of a Lunar Anchored Cislunar Tether". It is in English... sort of. They don't have good Anglophone editors in Shenzhen. Also the nonexotic fibre they propose remains Kevlar or, I kid you not, wet bamboo; not Zylon or anything good.

The notion is that a L1 station between us and Luna will float away unless counterweighted - on our side. A strong, thick cable to L1 must, then, have a strong thick cable toward the other direction - not necessarily the same length but to pull the same weight. As a side-effect of a beam this long being physically anchored to Medii: I don't think the L1 Lissajous is a thing. The L1 "halo" will be almost a point.

Take the unit of measurement, such that 1 = radius of our Earth. The Moon's semimajor is around 60, eccentricity-allowing. Our mutual L1 is at 51 (85%ish); GEO is 6.6.

The Shenzhen trio prefers the counterweight dangle as far as 110 Mm over the Earth so 114.8 Mm semimajor. That would be an internal tension of about two kilonewtons along the L1 plateau. Hence Kevlar; T1100G could, I think, bring us down to the 80s Mm. Of course then someone has to pay for all that cable.

I recommend to attach a rotating torus at L1. Just one: there's no need for a counterspin. And this cylinder isn't high, from its axle to the rim. Instead the L1 plateau is suited for length. Tethered to the spaceline it's not floating away. It's not Hyperion and we certainly can't have Janhunens wrapping themselves around the axle; I'm thinking, that classic O'Neill cylinder.

I pondered making this long tube an integral part of the tether itself but then I started thinking of ball-bearings or, failing that, how we'll radiate the heat off; or even how to build it. So we'll just tether it until someone else figures all that out.

As to what this station buys us: it's the cheapest point to launch high-Earth-orbit cargo to stations in TLL4 or L5. As well as TLL2 on the far side of the Moon; and from there, the whole Solar System. Lunar prospectors will want a station to regrow their bone-mass. So: yeah, I'm expecting this to be where the Medii colonists actually live.

Ezekiel's Greek translators

Yesterday we discussed the Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah. Today, we'll address van der Meer's extension of the argument to Ezekiel.

Unlike Greek Isaiah, and more like Syriac Isaiah or indeed Greek Jeremiah: Ezekiel was translated in committee. Present consensus has Ez 1-24, 28-39, and 40-48 by three different editors. Van der Meer handles 28-39; so is unconcerned with the Babylonian canal or that floating chariot. He also isn't touching the Ez 25-27 gap. This blog has raised an additional question about whether someone parasailed into Ez 28-39 to attach our 38-39 in there, somehow; van der Meer's project takes some sides on that, which we'll have to get to.

Van der Meer sees the first and third parts of the main translation-groups as more-faithful (we'll get to that); whatever the Jews might have been doing before them. The middle part - which is where the Greeks couldn't decide on Ez 38-9 - is different, earlier, as well. Van der Meer discusses Ez 28:1-19, an oracle against Tyre. With the assumption that the Ezekiel committee is all on the same page, as it were.

In Hebrew, Ezekiel has your typical Iraqi interest in gemstones. So too his translator into Greek... but in Greek, this guy has spliced in the gems from the Septuagint. That's right: from the Greek Torah, Exod 28:17–20 and 39:10–13 (LXX 36:17–21). The effect is to make of the Tyrian jabbâr - the mlk king - a blasphemer.

Except he's not the king in Greek. He is consistently the "archon". To this, van der Meer notes a Hasmonaean tweak back in Ezekiel 21 vv. 30–32(25–27). In Hebrew, this mocks the man with a crown, which as royal should be a "diadem" in Greek. This well befits the bitterness of the exiles against their last kings who'd... not exactly got to keep that crown. But the translator didn't use this word, instead using "turban" and the stephanos-crown. Those are for priests, not kings. Van der Meer also accepts Lydia Lee that the Greek removes even the satire of Tyrian royal khwarrah. So: a high-priestly figure [has] abused his position and for that reason is discredited. The Greek translator of Ezekiel 28 has associated this abuser with Tyre, van der Meer says; which is best ascribed to a Jew - better, Judaïst - who has observed Antiochus IV from his Tyrian base making a hash of Jerusalem's priesthood.

As noted van der Meer builds his argument from Johan Lust; but from Lust's earlier work, which van der Meer prefers over, say, "King/Prince of Tyre" 2012. Also brought is Maria V. Spottorno [Díaz-Caro]... 1982. This is in van der Meer's fourth section. That whole line of argument is problematic nowadays, at least for the later side of this middle translation-group; now vide Tracy McKenzie. The project in my opinion doesn't even need to discuss the placement or nature of our Ez 38-9. As to why van der Meer insisted on butting in, it may be that the assumption of a team all working together would be strengthened if the whole text was assumed intact at the time of translation.

And if I may inject an unhappy aside, Egyptologists will shudder at this line: the nearly fifty-five years rule of king Ptolemy VII Euergetes II (170–116 BCE). Wiki points here instead to Ptolemy VI Philometor 180-145 BC - and Cleopatra II; overlapping Ptolemy Physcon, 170-164, who will return to rule under this Cleopatra from 145 BC on. As Ptolemy VIII and second Euergetes... not VII. (Some other Ptolemy seems to have been raised posthumously as VII. It gets confusing. Greeks remember Pt. Physcon as "Cacergetes" although maybe Jews and Copts think better of him.)

Incidentally we are not yet at Philometor's last years with Cleo'. Those are the (Physcon-free) years the Egyptian Jews are building their new "Isaiah" - or, at least, Ezekiel's translator(s) presented their case otherwise. Unlike Greek Isaiah: Ezekiel's translator supports the Hasmonaeans, as did the books of Maccabees; van der Meer points mainly to 2 Maccabees. 1 Macc and Daniel perhaps hadn't made it out of Hebrew yet; and of course as a Hasmonaean he has no love for the Aramaic Levite literature including "Enoch".

Ezekiel's translator makes further appeal to some Greek Torah we might still own, which I don't see in (say) the contemporary translation of Isaiah. What I don't know, is to what degree Ezekiel's translator supports the LXX as-such (Egyptian as it was) or some "Lucianic" edition of Judaea.

The Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah

I argued last month, if on slender evidence, that Isaiah, in Greek, was taken from 1QIsa^a itself. For more evidence, Michaël N. van der Meer summarises the Greek Isaiah in the course of "Prophecy and Politics in the Old Greek Version of Ezekiel 28". We'll address Ezekiel later.

The "translator" of Isaiah which Christians have inherited is no translation. It updates the text; for instance changing Aram > Syria, the Philistines > Greeks (Hellenes, not "allophyles"), and Tarshish > Carchedon i.e. Carthage. On the surface such is mere geographic gloss, to aid "the modern audience" as we'd put it. Narratively the effect is to insinuate "Isaiah" (already encompassing chs. 34+, remember) into the role of a predictive prophet.

The Isaiah 8:23b-9:6 oracle had concerned the historical Isaiah's king, the young Josiah. In Greek, not so much. Its focus is no longer the king. In fact he's not any king: he is "the herald of the Divine Council". Although sometimes we do get wordplay on MLK - king/angel (see Lydia Lee) - he heralds YHWH, and at no point heralds the elohim. Such title does, however, match an angel like Gabriel or a prophet - or a priest. Van der Meer relays his homeboy Arie van der Kooij, against other scholars, that Isaiah intends some chief priest of the Hellenistic age. Specifically Onias IV; who had to serve out his priesthood in Leontopolis from the early 140s BC.

Onias is, then, the once and future High Priest in Jerusalem; and the suffering servant. It was in Leontopolis and other Ptolemaic cities that Isaiah was interpreted, for that Jewish community. Ptolemy VI Philometor (and Cleopatra II, please don't forget her) kept these priests around in case the Ptolemies (and Cleopatrae) could ever reclaim the Judaea.

Well... they couldn't, and this is one reason Jews today justly dismiss Onias' pretensions for a load of cods. It seems to have gone little better for this sore loser in his own day; Jews elsewhere entertained rival translations of other books. Eventually the Jews as a people would get so disgusted they embarked upon real translations of the Hebrew, here and elsewhere (although not in time to save the MT from, say, the injections into Jeremiah - nor to save Isaiah itself!). One does, however, hope the Aramaic communities kept shtum on this, because they were (famously) floating their own targums.

Other evidence that Isaiah is late is the practically CS Lewis word "terebinth". The Septuagint proper retains the Attic "terminth". Elsewhere the two lower-Egyptian texts mostly share a language, for instance the oddly male parthenos for the female Hebrew alma "damsel" (if the Greeks ever implied a not-yet-a-woman, LXX didn't restrict it to physical virgins). I posit here that the Isaiah translator, living after this Torah, should have had access to such. If so, it looks like our man simply ignored the text. Isaiah's reactionary priestly translator may have preferred the Levite corpus, some of which also survives in Greek; which in early HasMaBean times was downplaying Torah.

We do not eat ze bugs

Manuel Peñero and Pablo Librado set out to show how their European ancestors ate land arthropods. Owen Lewis has got to the core of it: they quit.

At least they quit in "Northern Eurasia". These are the ancestors of us Indo-Europeans on the one side; and the Huns, Manchus, Turks, and Mongols on the other. We can certainly add the Koreans and Japanese to this.

Our ancestors could eat ze bugs - chitin at all - and the Neanders assuredly did. Until 7000 BC, the two authors (through Lewis) say; at that point we lost the ability to process chitin, a enzyme-family called chitinase. So small shellfish were still possible if we just peeled the shell off (I suspect some of these have been aquacultured in prehistory). Note that some coastal populations simply imposed a taboo against the last, although even some of these could be talked into munching a cricket or locust.

I don't know if larvae have chitin (I think little). Either-way some Neolithic populations did attract larvae to eat, infamously the Sardinians (early Levantine farmers) with their cheese.

Anyway as the Neolithic trundled along, I expect that insects attracted some taboos of their own, because people who lived near insects got malaria, and breads and puddings (and beer) were getting less expensive. A family that couldn't eat chitin would naturally have zero reason to live anywhere near ze bugs.

New Punjab

Fifteen years ago seven Hindu-and/or-Sikh monotheists from Punjab got together and designed a space (kilo)station. They called it "Hyperion" in homage to their Greek cultural roots. The basic design is the torus; which they stack, so as to keep it from tumbling chaotically like the Saturnine moon of that name. They had clearly thought deeply on the topic, and the NSS agreed awarding their proposal a grand prize.

The plan was to put this station at TLL4. As to scale: 900m radius (=1.8km dia), staffed by 18000 people.

As to L4 and not L5: interplanetary dust. We call this the Kordylewski Cloud after its 1961 discoverer and, yes, it is more visible in L5. The authors did not know this at the time but a Magyar crew has verified that L5 captures more dust than L4. This is caused by Terra-Luna-particle not being a perfect Lagrangian system, as the Sun also hits the particle; and that Terra-Luna orbit their barycentre with an eccentricity (Brave AI sez: 0.026 to 0.077, higher than Earth's own) and inclination relative to the Sun. For my part I don't rate this dust-delta as so important.

If we must have a megastructure at our own L4 or L5, and I repeat I am very skeptical, a trio of Japanese evaluated the cost: 20MT of material. If they brought it from Earth even with that fancy Starship they'd be looking at ten million million 2025 dollars and over fifteen millennia (Egyptian history is said to be five of these/a third of that). But the Punjabis probably figured as much which is why they wanted to feed their station from Luna... maybe by coilgun. Nitrogen and phosphour might have to be fed from ambient passing asteroids.

I hadn't noticed Hyperion being referenced much since 2011. Janhunen's dumbbell is smaller so cheaper and safer, for TLL4 or L5 (UPDATE 6/10: but not L1). Same holds for Orion Ruzicka's reinforced torus if they keep the mad lad in check. Miklavcic's spinning bag of dirt and since-then Jensen's various schemes were always meant for in-situ mulching of asteroids... somewhere else.

Doctor Moreau

I have recently finished HG Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau which I supplemented with a viewing of Island of Lost Souls. The latter is to-date the best cinematic rendition we've had from the book, and might structurally be better than the book itself - I might get to that.

Wells had - famously - burst out the gate with six books 1895-8, five of them SF including our topic the third. They were, I understand, all big sellers, if not at the time then certainly in their reprints. Wells may have felt guilt over his newfound wealth and fame, as he became a socialist. At least four of the SF books remain classics to this day including (I repeat myself) our topic. The man kept writing - which has proved a problem, because it doesn't look like his later projects (which were many) have fared so well. Although there remain apologists for, say, Kipps.

Moreau - I must report - presents "early work" problems to the modern reader. The book wasn't Wells' first; but he may have felt that he needed to put in as many ideas as he could, so he could force them upon a readership which he feared might abandon him. The movie, at a trim 70ish minutes, slashed out a good deal of Wells' philosophical ramblings, and dared have one of the Lost Souls feel an attraction to the character "Perkins" who is, uh, Prendick in the book. Wells could not dare this in late Victorian England, so postpones such "anthro" after Moreau's (sorry) end as remote-observation.

Wells was writing before genetics, and in anycase was not writing a genetic book. If you are looking for Jurassic Park, you should read Jurassic Park. Moreau at heart may or may not be a "Darwinist", but what he absolutely refuses is eugenics. Moreau believes instead in the medical biology: in Biblical terms, that you can change the leopard's spots, right now. Moreau, Londoner, has made excellent strides in this "endeavour", uplifting several species into humanoid form. He's got into their brains, too. And into their minds: to which end, he's instilled a cult.

Wells would become a(n) eugenicist. Wells, I suspect - darkly - didn't really believe that a man, even a genius of a man, could turn an actual @#$% puma into a catgirl waifu. (Indeed, we learn, here Moreau failed; although he does do fairly well with a dog.) Moreau is, Scott Alexander would say, Wells' steelman. Sake Of Argument.

No. Our text is a parable. Wells was more thinking of British idiots, of American Negroes, and of all the tribes for which London had (somehow) ended up responsible as of 1896. He thought that the British might indeed be able to dress up a Kenyan and make a passable Christian of him. But it would end up a shell of Christianity, and that the Kenyan would revert within months of British neglect. Christianity was a joke to Wells at the time - and in all the time G-d provided to him. If a bear could become like a man it would have to take place over the same millions of years as it took the apes.

Second contact

In AD 1022ish, a tree surrendered its life to build a Scandinavian-themed home in Markland. Map Myths reports a possible Danish attempt to reëstablish contact. With the help of a couple of German pirates and the Portuguese.

As you may imagine this has run up against 1930s German nationalism and general we-wuzzery around Europe about "who discovered the Americas". (The answer is "the Navajo". Because screw you.)

Frankly all this is the wrong question for the last decades of the AD 1400s, on account of a few factors long mooted here on this blog. tl;dr everyone already knew about the "Markland" for at least a century. Few in the 1400s cared about cold worthless islands. The great powers - which did not then include Denmark nor England - cared about bypassing the Ottomans and getting to the Indies. Whatever these privateers were doing well north of all that, didn't figure. No northwest passage, no cities of gold in Labrador, nothing but cod.

I do however find this of interest for several other, if I may say better, reasons. Cod wasn't worthless in this Catholic age. And the fisher fleets were improving. Perhaps the Danes were starting to care about those "islands" again.

It may witness the fifteenth century in Greenland; when the old towns were abandoned. The island might not have been abandoned. These Danes coming toward the end of the century thought some "pirates" might have lingered there. If so: what was their prey? Basque fishermen? the Welsh and Cornish?

Evaluating the large temporary laboratory

ToughSF's actual link, for which we were planning those mammoth toroidal habitats, was to "Tackling a Mars Cycler Design Head-On" (pdf but badly encoded). Let's abstract it out.

These habitats aren't asteroidal mines. For the trio who wrote that paper, they're temporary housing - shuttles. That allows them to be designed smallest, first. The smallest torus they'll allow fits maybe high-fifties of people. There's a lot of room per person, because this is a 180 day mission until the cycler drops them off at Deimos. Once at Deimos they're Mars' problem; their emptied shuttle then cycles back to Earth where it's Earth's problem.

The trajectory this paper assumes is the classic Aldrin, maintained by solar-electric propulsion. They want to build it in LEO where the SEP paper proposed much higher: TLL1. I'd rather the far-side lunar base with assembly at TLL2... but that might be harder now.

This doesn't have to be a T/M cycler. It could be Hohmann, with less outgoing delta-V. But to Mars/Deimos that takes longer and then it would have to brake and stay there. It could also be a temporary lab in space but then, why not just use a Janhunen or an asteroid-colony to be worked indefinitely. So, we hohmann it out to Deimos or some isolated nearby rock, which we then dock and exploit.

The lab of 55 dudes isn't a colony. Whether it stay there or cycle back, its crew-and-cargo are not staying at Deimos or Atíra or wherever. This is a mission to say they were there. What they might be able to do is patch together some infrastructure for the next shuttle - which will host hundreds.

The design overall might be better for shifting into other orbits. As noted the outgoing Hohmann is less delta-V than the insertion into Aldrin. If the shuttle can take that, it can certainly take the deceleration to dock Deimos. Can you do that with a Janhunen or a big rolling bag of Bennu? I am pretty sure once you have an orbiting Janhunen, it's not going anywhere else.

How planets (can) lose (half) their crusts

On topic of lavaworlds, last April four people wrote "Coupled orbital and interior structure evolution of lava planets" and, on the 20th, posted it. But the pdf says 22nd. Dude! Whoa.

The claim is they ain't natural. Planets born to that heat should have all their material blasted out on formation. Where planetary systems are known to have stayed in-situ, like the Trappist-1 system, are no lava planets. The lava planets instead are around K2-141, K2-360, TOI-141, TOI-431, TOI-2431, HD 3167 and GJ/Gliese 367 all marked "b". (No 55 Cancri e?)

The thought is that they formed in systems where are much larger planets further out. These, as our planets have done to Mercury, pulled their orbits into eccentricity. As they skirt their stars, they raise tides - on the star and on themselves. Now another equilibrium can assert itself. These shattered worlds (like in Star Control 2) reform themselves this close to their stars, in a circular orbit which outer planets cannot much touch. Then they lock tidally. Inner side melts; outer side re-hardens.

The process happens over billions of years so is not done for, say, TOI-431 which isn't even 3Gy yet.

A hundred tonnes at a time

TransAstra proposes to shift 100 tonnes of rock from near-Earth space to Earth space (or Lunar).

ToughSF prefers this over sending humans over to the rocks. Longterm I agree. What's a Bennu orbit compared to a planetary orbit, or a Lagrangian or even the 13:10:8 Laplacian? People should live on natural ports-of-call.

And some of those rocks are eminently movable. 740 missions by such robots and they could disassemble all Bennu, or at least the parts colonists want; and bring its pieces to, oh, STL4 or to a soft landing on the Lunar equator. In the other direction Casey Handmer can yeet Lunar regolith and maybe even Lunar-assembled critical parts - somehow; and catch them at TLL2.

Cooling the halo

This morn we posted Orion's answer to the Halo: the spinning wheel is supported by a nonspinning magnetic shell. Like a lobster is boiled in its own shell.

You see, the older, simpler, thicker shell can offer something Elliot Orion Ruzicka hasn't considered: heat exchange. The outer shell gets outfacing radiators pointing in any direction. But... if there's a vacuum between the habitat and the outer shell, how's the habitat getting its heat to the outer shell?

Perhaps the separative medium is an efficiently-conductive gas. Like hydrogen. Superheated hydrogen between our oxygen-infused habitat and the outer shell, which spin we maintain by some turbine in the hub of the spokes. Oh the humanity.

Nah. The outer shell has to be a half shell, reflective on the outside. The radiators are then attached to the inner shell orthogonal to the direction of spin, or maybe tilted slightly outward.

As they say, amateurs study engineering; professionals study thermodynamics.

Breaking diameters

Been a hot minute since I last dropped in on the ToughSF X account. Ten days ago it linked to a cycler plan - to which I may or may not get. Right now I'd like to discuss its own source, Elliott Orion Ruzicka's submission to the IAF's 75th congress 2024. In his capacity as head of "Orbital Design" in New York.

That's a "Mr.", not a "Dr.". Shows how much credentials matter for awesome material-science papers.

Ruzicka notes that the Halo doesn't work, much less the Ringworld. Since they both spin, each puts pressure on her outer wall. Maximum pressure happens to correlate with radius (or diameter, or circumference): F / gr. Humans like g=9.8 m/s². I'm willing to negotiate for Venereal 8.7 - but now we have to consider the tensile strength of the outer hull, and how thick that might be. The outer shell can't be allowed to dip much less than 9.8.

Given alla'that, cometh our list of tensile materials before this contraption flies apart. As usual Kevlar is in here, maxing out 0.513 mega-meters... 513 km across. As a post-1980 paper we can also use Zylon 759 km. Nanotubes and graphene also make their appearances but I consider them unobtania. Six years ago our boy ToughSF related the T1100G. This was density 1790 and max force 7000 MPa. That last looks rounded: I get 400 km radius = 800 km diameter.

Janhunen's dumbbell and Jensen's smaller stuff were keeping it to decakilostructures, fit for high Earth orbit where space is at a premium and we don't want to bombard our green home. The max-out hectakilostructures were more than enough and, who cared about muh nanotubes. Ruzicka, mad lad, wants a MEGA structure. He floats up to 102,040 km held by 100 m of graphene; compare Earth equatorial 12,756 km... or Saturn 120,536 km. Maybe keep this monster at Venus Equilateral.

But even if we're not demanding this absurd artificial subSaturn, Ruzicka can still save on construction-material to keep it together. A 10,204 km subEarth might need that 100 m now; this would go down to 9.09 m.

Ruzicka's magic is in installing a torus within a torus. The outer ring keeps the micrometeors out and does not spin. Only the inner ring rotates for the artificial gravity. The inner and outer rings are thereby decoupled. They just need to keep from mutually crashing into each other, which can be gently nudged by magnets.

Ruzicka proposes to spin it up in the first place, by - you guessed it - magnets (but stronger). This will require the outer ring to spin in the opposite direction, at first; but this can be mitigated either by using rocket-engines or, better, building two at a time to spin in opposite directions, which would cancel each other's twists.

THERMO 9:50 AM: A hot minute indeed.

The book of Psalm 108-110

We have a few articles by Christians asserting that the early Church read the Psalter - which is our Psalter - as a unity, a single book. Lately: SD Ellison (which I haven't read) and James Hamilton Jr (pdf - have read). Maybe Jon Alan Ginn. Let us ponder unity as unification.

The Greek translation is pretty-much just the MT here except enumerated with some offsets. Qumran has some differences to be discussed (soon!). Our main topic is the Psalms triplet 108-110 in MT, 107-109 in Greek. If deliberate, the editor presented Psalm 109 as a royal work alongside 108 and 110.

Most agree the edition of this last fifth of the Psalter dates well after the exile, adopting Psalm 137 among others. The collection's motive would be that of Messianism: the people didn't necessarily have a king in those days, so - they wanted one. Note that this is the fifth where Qumran rates the collection as fluid-enough that variant orders can be ventured, secondary or not; Qumran does not venture this for Psalms 1-88.

I stress this does not mean all these Psalms were composed for that editorial purpose. Psalm 137 didn't expect any king but God. We are, for now, discussing the edition, which allows for angry strays like Psalm 137 to exist along more-hopeful work.

Psalm 109 would then be such an angry stray. It reads like a curse tablet. The man is going before the court with a satan at his right v. 6, an accuser human or otherwise. Instead the man requests YHWH at his right v. 31. Thematically it leads well into Psalm 110.

Somebody moved to the Chincha valley

When the Huari ruled, they dealt with postMoche coastal peoples without much conquering them. Then around AD 1100 the Huari collapsed. We next find people harvesting guano... much further south, in the Chincha vale. AD 1250 is about when they start advertising their birdey wares on pots.

The link between the Chincha of their guano era, and their northern postMoche origins, now exists from genetics.

As to: why the migration. Uh. We have evidence for rather a lot of upheaval around that continent, from the 1200s (thirteenth century) on.

Once having migrated, the Chincha jealously maintained their culture, some even being endogamous. The language of that coast when the Inca came was Coastal Quechua; "Chincha" itself means "ocelot" in that language. The homeland of "Quechua I" also lies north of Cuzco; which highlands today speak an archaic dialect called Huanca (no jokes plz).

I suspect the Huanca and the majority Chincha both descend from the Huari, who spoke Quechua. The bird-doo-doo people, as coastal... I doubt. Their ancestors had spoken something more Mochean-era in northern Peru, if not Mochic itself; further, I expect they maintained their nonQuechua language among the Chinca. This is difficult to tell because both the Inca and the Spaniards discouraged indigenous languages as weren't Quechua or Aymara.

What happened to Arab astrology?

Antoine Borrut has a book out, Astrology and History in Early Islam. You may read its introduction on academia.edu.

Several chronicles in the early centuries anchored themselves in astrologic observances... in Babylonia. The 'Abbasid moment was similarly Babylonian, at heart. So great astrologers invented mathematical tools... in London. Al-Khwarizmi had done so first. As Borrut points out, our modern disdain for astrology is postNewtonian. One is tempted to put a boldface over "post".

Devout Muslims like Ibn Jarîr Tabarî had disdained astrology before us, from a reading of sura 6 (the fifth for Ibn Mas'ud and Ubay) amid general distaste for antique quackery. But old habits died hard. Christians like James/Jacob of Edessa were using astronomical tables to peg their annals; indeed the very annalistic form had come out of old Babylonian habits. This is in fact a major boon to us moderns, who can use their mention of eclipses, comets and even aurorae against what we know of the eclipse cycle and of visible comets, also lately tree-ring anomalies.

Perhaps universities should force history departments to install a mandatory astrology course. We could host it in the 200/2000 range.

Ancient liturgies

Short one for now: Philip Jenkins shows where to find lost text. Namely, embedded in other text, as the Didache is embedded in the Apostolic Constitutions, Jude in 2 Peter, and Aristides in the Life of Barlaam and Ioasaph. This blog has occasionally delved into Archaic Hebrew works in late Classical stuff like Habakkuk. Or maybe 2 Isaiah in the 1QIsa^a. Or all this stuff.

One fascinating thought is the ancient Christian liturgy. Paul in 1 Corinthians famously cites a formula of the Last Supper. Why would the Last Supper matter? Perhaps because every Christian was already reënacting some sort of postJudaic Messianic-Banquet. In fact the younger Pliny must report on a weekly ritual meal from Bithynia. The war of the Diaspora (mostly Cyprus and Cyrene) was approaching but Pliny's Christians were gentiles so wouldn't be affected. Elsewhere Barnabas 1:9 speaks of an altar; Hebrews 13:10 elaborates that all lay Christians may find food there.

That liturgy was certainly the same as Ignatius was recommending at around that time; or the Didache 9. Note, as with John none of the above require a Last Supper.

But as Paul embeds some rituals of the, what, AD 50s; so other texts were embedding other rituals. Occasionally a gnostic text will involve people banding together to make some weird chant in a weird direction. Like the Acts of John section C chapter 94 - not just a hymn of Jesus, but stage-direction.

Proxima d

The inner planet of the closest stellar system to ours now has more evidence behind it. Kyplanet reports: interactions, with the chromosphere (above the photosphere which is the visible disc). Elsewhere reported: YZ Ceti, and the aging Sol-like HIP 67522.

Besides pretty-much proving that Prox d even exists, which I didn't rate obvious three/four years ago, we get some constraints on what d is. At M sin i of 0.26 M_⊕ it is rocky, with a magnetic field. The field isn't well constrained except that it's enormous. The sucker's enough to raise flares on a red dwarf. It's much greater than ours on Earth and might even be superJovian although Kyplanet doubts this.

Among the constraints we don't got, besides planetary inclination, would be a map of Prox' magnetic field. Zeeman Doppler Imaging has mapped such field for YZ Ceti - at 3.6pc: a sun's flares coincide with exoplanet crossings of the Alfvén surface as the planet orbit approaches the stellar magnetic equator. I suspect we can measure, by this, both the inclination of the stellar rotation relative to us; and that of the planet's orbit relative to the star.

Prox is closer us at 1.302pc. So that's a tool I'd suggest for the Prox team.

In addition: if some better-constrained nearby planets, like, oh, TRAPPIST-1 b, are not raising flares: is this because they are insufficiently inclined against their stars? I think resonant systems like this one might not be much so inclined.

As for Prox b, this may have a magnetic field too. It's too small and far to be inducing flares itself but the d-induced flares seem modulated by... something. The planet b is bigger than d so if d held onto a dynamo, why not b. Kyplanet is careful here to note that some of the outside interference might not come from b but from an "e" between d and b, or a retrograde capture inward of d (I find this unlikely).

The first Book Of Isaiah

Davila had posted the Isaiah Scroll commentary this very morn. He asserts, from evidence elsewhere, we should be thinking of an Isaiah of 1-33 and then an Extension To Isaiah 34ff. Our Isaiah 34-5 belong to the second Isaiah. The 36-9 drop-in would then be done by the Extender.

The Great Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa^a may be the very autograph of our Isaiah - and of the Greek.

I might explain the Peshitta thus: Oriental Jewish traditions stubbornly held on containing only 1-33, inasmuch Zionism mattered less to the Diaspora. The Isaiah-to-Syriac project was done by Christians juggling between a Hebrew (or Bavli-Aramaic) 1-33 / 34f tradition and a Greek 1-29 / 30f tradition... and by then also Jewish copies of the G.I.S. what we simply know as Masoretic.

That Greek translator, for his part, never had a tradition of Isaiah 1-33 by itself, or if he did he abandoned it so started from scratch.

Isaiah's sawmill

Most today put the second Isaiah from chapter 40 on. It's a nice round number and it follows Isaiah 36-9 which is an obvious narrative drop-in from the Deuteronomist. In antiquity, other splits existed. The Sahidic Copts split after 30:5 and 46; but that translation came from the Septuagint. From Hebrew the Peshitta split after 33 although at least the later translators worked across those bounds.

Rossella Tercatin last January reported on the Great Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa^a. This is, famously, Masoretic. Less-famously it comes from two scribes; which scribes tried to harmonise their efforts. But that's a curiosity not worth the blogging.

Marcello Fidanzio has raised a point worth the blogging. The first part of the scroll was preëxistent. It was an old parchment that had to be patched-up and corrected. The second part was simply copied anew from some other text, and affixed to the first part.

The kicker: the first part - which is a holdover from the first edition of Isaiah - goes up to chapter 33. Just like the Peshitta. The next part starts at 34 (and then gets 36-9 dropped-in).

The cursed Creation

Paleojudaica is pointing to Andrei Orlov, Cursed Creation. This argues that Job 3 and Job 38 parallel the Enochian myth, not the Biblical.

The parallel is that something proposes to corrupt Creation, by a curse. Required is to heal the land. In Job, God tells the protagonist how He created all things. It turns out Job - mortal - can't curse the world, not by his own say-so anyway. The narrative circle is closed by Job admitting as much.

In Enoch - we are speaking of 1 Enoch 1-36 - the demons come to teach mortals how to spoil everything. God's loyal angels give Enoch a tour of the afterlife such as to make an implicit promise: restoration is coming.

Our books of Ruth and Jonah are known subversions of the mainline Biblical narrative. Jonah is sometimes called a parody of prophets-against-the-goyim; Nahum, against Assyria, being the root of the tree. Job hits the apocalyptic genre, says Orlov. 1 Enoch 1-36 made a major inroad into the Jewish canon. If Job is being ironic, such would put Job's authorship somewhen in the late Persian or Ptolemaic eras.

Orlov thus reinforces James Harding, "Divine Knowledge" (T&T, 2012).

Not all Job is parody. It still relies upon origin-myths. Perhaps Eden and the Serpent, in Genesis Two, is such a one; the Satan already substituting for the Serpent. But we don't see Genesis One. Instead we hear of Tiamat / Leviathan.

The coming of the Anasazi

Our family visited the Chaco Canyon "Anasazi" ruins a long time ago, like summer 1991. My brother went to college around there, later. I don't remember much about the 1991 visit - probably the usual rot about peaceful natives living in harmony with nature until climate chanzzz*snore*. By the late 1990s, some of the shine had come off and we got Serious Discussions. Cannibalism in the valley. Migrations to the Pueblos. Hints that that Navaho/-jo term "Anasazi", which term is hostile, may have been earned honestly - at least by the elite.

Let's revisit. There's a youtube with a Something Was Very Wrong With - series; it looks like a slop account, "Thoughty2" being the origin of the phrase. Still. This notes Mesoamerican influence. If "New Mexico" (and various reference to "Aztecs" in the region) remain insalubrious; something came here to make of the place at least a New Chichen Itzá.

This YTer is arguing that Mesoamerican influence wasn't all chocolate and ballgames. It entered the place in the AD 1000s and then, 1130-50, got to a fever pitch. This coincided with a climate downturn. Starting 1180ish the locals, who were not Mesoamericans, did what the Maya had done in the 900s. They said - this isn't fun anymore, let's get out of here. Several "pueblos", as the Spaniards call them, exist to this day claiming ancestry from the region, some even able to tell you which ruined town they'd left. They don't find "pueblo" offensive but they don't like "anasazi".

They assuredly have some motive to say they dindu nuffin and if there was ever some cannibalism or an "evil spirit" or any of that, it wasn't them doing it. Unfortunately for them, somebody was doing it. They may not have been born anasazis but anasazis were there. People can lie, but forensics can't. And I am loath to call the Navajo, invasive as they are, liars - in this event anyway. They got there well after-the-fact, such as to lack a dog in the fight. (I vaguely recall that they did arrive in time to watch some of the closing festivities or at least to hear some locals deliver some hair-raising tales.)

The Navajo, further, are not those who introduced any of this - too late, remember. So, let's look at the ethnic groups as might have been there before the Navajo showed up. Best I can tell they are three: Hopi, Tiwa, and Keres.

Keres are an isolate. I take them for the true natives here until I can be convinced otherwise.

Tiwa and Tewa look like branches as different as East and (former) West Baltic. The Slavs of that group would be the... Kiowa. Who live very far from there. Some nomadism happened here, like how Apache are the nomadic branch of the Navajo or, better, the Navajo the settled para-Apache. The Kiowa tell no tradition of coming from this desert; instead they say they came from the north. It looks, then, like the Tiwa, Tewa (and we can throw in the Jemez) migrated off the plains into this region, where people were growing food.

Then... are the Hopi. These are related to the Comanche as fellow north-Uto[-Aztecans], but are not Comanche (these also came later) nor Ute. This language family is also intrusive to, really, anywhere northeast of Puerto Penhasco.

However: we are talking about "intrusions" on a potential scale of millennia. How long ago was the Kiowa / Tiwa split? or Hopi / Ute? I don't see these splits as late as AD 1100.

Compromise: the Hopi, speaking the closest language to the Nahuatl Mesoamerica, would have been the choice vector for Anasazic thought into the region.

LHS 1903

Thomas Wilson and-Co. published DOI 10.1126/science.adl2348 last February. Science Daily, late as ever, has delivered the ESA' press release. Adam Mann at Science News might have the better summary.

The LHS 1903 system is 116 ly away, a red dwarf half Solar mass. Its four planets are all too hot as well as tidally-locked. The outer planet e is raising the hype because it is 1.7 Earth radii. Up to now, we tend to get Earthlikes up to 1.6 and then the "superEarths" from 1.8 up, more like miniNeptunes.

LHS 1903 e turns out to be Earthlike in density, not a Neptunian at all. It could have held onto a Venereal cloudy Sudarsky II layer but, it seems, not.

Wilson posits that the system simply ran out of gas, if I may: the "Gas Depleted Formation" / G-DF. The planets formed from the inside, outward. The fourth, and whatever might exist in the habitable zone on out, did not have anything left.

That G-DF model assumes planetary migrations at least for e. And yeah: no migrations for systems like this tend, I think, to produce orbital resonances. The periods are 2.2, 6.2, 12.6, and 29.3 days. Perhaps for b:c:d, 6:2:1 be close-enough (libration?). Planet e as the literal outlier, like Callisto outside Jupiter, demands a different theory. They ponder if it got smashed up early, such that on its final formation out there the ices weren't available.

Jeroboam the Great

The younger but not the lesser Jeroboam is known to have extended his writ over the Negev. Meanwhile an Assyrian fort at Kheleifeh was excavated. This is a fort on the vale between the Dead Sea and Eilat / Aqaba. It's being rethought, in light of 'Ayn-Hatzeba on the Israeli side, closer the salt sea. Some trash there now has a carbon-date.

This blog is on record as holding carbon dating at about the same level of credibility as the Bible, which is - let us say - conditional. Dendrochronology, which I like better, is hard in a region where trees barely exist. Luckily the Israel Antiquities Authority brings additional evidence.

A third site exists, known to be Israelite: Kuntillet Ajrud, which is more famous than those other two, bearing as it does some local artwork. The only reason to venture this desert is to stop over on a trade-route (or to prey on the traders).

The article points out: Israel, not Judah - and not Damascus. By this time Gath was long gone and so was its destructor Hazael. Israel was returning from its torpor.

Scores had been settled with breakaway Jerusalem also. Its rulers identified with the House of David. To Jeroboam II, Jerusalem's boy king probably mattered about as much as neo-Gath or maybe even Damascus itself: don't raid our caravans and we'll get along. As to why Jeroboam permitted a Davidide identity for that city: the alternative would be Omride, possible through Athaliah of recent memory. David had dubious currency up north where the Omrides had ruled, more recently and more credibly. David, to Jeroboam, was less of a threat where it mattered.

We might hope to see some merchant ostraca. The hope to see some Jeroboam-era literary texts is more like a pipe dream, but we can hope for that too.

SIDENOTE: hat to be tipped to Dr Davila at Paläojudaïca. A lot of my links on this topic come from there. Sometimes he links to something I'd already found on (say) Archaeology or ScienceDaily or TheTorah; sometimes he links over there and I'd have likely found it myself eventually. Not always however, as in this case. Blogspotter to blogspotter: thank you for what you do.

Right vote, wrong man

Newly-lamed quackie Senator Bill has had a change of heart over the Iran !War. Wholly unrelated to the wooden spoon which his Acadiens voters recently delivered to him (not even 1/4!)... or so he'll claim.

Personally I rather liked Cassidy as a Senator. He was holding the line against the execrable Robert Kennedy and his "MAHA" Mansongirls. I can only assume he wanted to hold other lines. Does anyone really think that "fellow RINO" Lindsey Graham would have flipped like this?

Or maybe he is acting out of spite now.

Still... we'll take it.

Which way, young autist?

Cell Genomics does what the magazine does. Journal of Independent Medicine does... one thing.

Like how the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs only does one thing. And I do believe they are connected, as Dr Offit might be able to tell a goy.

Anyway, Laura Loomer seems to understand the Massie coalition of "OG MAGA": MTG and Boebert. The abusers of X's community-note feature; the Paul family. The American Reich; Cenk and Bilzerian. Pence's henchies have likewise slithered in.

They are on the side of disease. Of the demons, in MAHA's case. What, indeed, is to be done?

Ibn Barrajân (and al-Biqâ'î)

Waaay long ago in a library a thousand miles away, I picked up a published tafsîr by al-Biqâ'î. It made several Biblical references as I'd not seen in any other tafâsir. Many of these were referred, or deferred, to an Ibn BRGAN. Later I found out about Ibn Barrajân but, as of 2013, you could download a raw manuscript but not an edition.

Live long enough, and sometimes things change for the better. I am not the only one to travel down the same path; nor, I suspect, the first. Roy McCoy III, or Roy Michael McCoy, has a few articles and a full dissertation. It's not so easy to read the articles but the University of Oxford has generously allowed all to download the dissertation. I assume it's earned for him a PhD now.

Ibn Barrajân was an Andalusian. He was born in Tunis and made his way to Seville. Unfortunately this, and he, ended up under the Almoravids. On AH 536, which is AD 1146, their emir in Marrakesh summoned him and clapped him in irons, where he died.

Yousef Casewit in 2016 floated a summary of Ibn Barrajân's interface with the Bible. By his time, also the time of Ibn Hazm the Zahirite, a Catholic population existed in the Arabophone community. One may compare the Melkites in Jerusalem and Cairo. Outsiders in Spain called them the Musta'rabs, "Mozarab" for those still speaking Iberian Romance. As Arab-speakers, they needed a lection... and, perhaps, a Bible. Local traditions insist they had a Bible although such does not survive.

I am not willing, yet, to credit all this. Assuredly lections, at least, existed. Popular bases for the day's Lesson came from the Creation, from the Abraham/Isaac/Lot cycle, and from Matthew's Gospel. Casewit finds Ibn Barrajân quoting extensively such passages. Enough to finger the source as the Latin Bible; mostly Jerome's, but with a touch of Vetus-Latina as well. I assume Matthew has come from the Byzantine text of emperor Theodosius which Jerome promoted against the Alexandrine.

It is of high interest that Ibn Barrajân considers Matthew the Gospel against Luke. John the high-Christologer offers little of interest for the Moslem, and Mark - although eminently low-christologic - simply doesn't contain all the material one wants. Suras 3 and 19, I had thought, were more tied with Luke or at least with the harmonies. Harmonies existed in Latin and even in Arabic, which we tend to ascribe to relics of the Diatesseron. But not here: only Matthew is here.

Perhaps the Mozarabs were insisting on Matthew-alone so they didn't have to get sura 3 preached at them. Also famous, I must note, is an ancient translation of Matthew into Hebrew which was making the rounds among the Jews, of course not that many of them were much preaching from that book.

Zahirites like Ibn Hazm believed that the Bible was near-worthless, read only to be debunked. Ibn Barrajân by contrast loved the Torah (in Vulgate/MT form) and even defended it. He was accused of more of Christianising than of anything else, though. Perhaps because he did, in fact, use a Latin basis over Hebrew (plenty of Arab-speaking Jews existed, using their own translations). But also he may have accepted Original Sin from Adam, which other Muslim Sunnis deny.

Another Phaethon

One Patrick M. Shober has reported a cluster of meteors. He argues the same clustering-effect happens with the Geminids. The Geminids have a source: 3200 Phaéthon. So a different - but similar - nearEarth asteroid has delivered this set of meteors.

This sort of rock behaves more like a comet. Shober's parent body is probably a C like Phaéthon, or Bennu.

The next project, Shober leaves to others: to get 'scope time for the hunt for this now-invisible asteroid.

Enamel

Denisova 3 - and Harbin / longi - has been called out as containing a "super archaic" introgression. It had been suspected from Erectus if circumstantially. More circumstantial evidence came in a couple days back. Here's a release mostly from Kirsty Penkman of York; here's the article from China.

This is from proteins, such as Linus Pauling might have approved; not full DNA. These teeth are simply too old and rare to risk mulching for DNA, as we might for Neanders and Denisovans which are everywhere now. One protein is AMBN-M273V found in the tooth-enamel. And in some (mostly later) Denisovan DNA; but not in the rest of us. Another is AMBN-253G which isn't anywhere else, so is now available to tag a tooth as specific to Erectus.

The Neanders perhaps never met any Erectus, as the post-split Denisovans met-n'-matched them. Erectus seems met in southeast Asia, preEemian, maybe when it was Sundaland.

As a humble protein-set rather than DNA, this thesis remains circumstantial: evidence, but not "proof". One reviewer, Massilani, points out that parallel mutations be possible. But: how come these mutations outside Erectus be so rare (M273V) or nonexistent (253G)? Penkman asks similar questions.

The Beja of old

I saw this one yesterday but was flat too exhausted - I blame altitude sickness - to post anything of it. So I'll try tonight.

These are mass graves in the strip of Sahara east of the Nile, 4000-3000 BCE extending into the third millennium, so overlapping the upper-Egyptian kingdom... in time (we'll get to space and people). The report comes from Atbai in modern Sudan. This abuts the southeast Egyptian coast. I expect similar ruins exist in that side of Egypt as well.

That region was Blemmyes in antiquity; the reaches of the Cushitic language Beja today. Since Browne in 2003 most scholars believe Beja - which is simply "Beduin" adapted to the language - evolved from Blemmyan. The Nubians seem not to have mingled with them much by contrast with Egyptians and, lately, Arabs.

The Red/Erythraean sea maintained links with the Egypt of the Pyramids, of "Red Sea Scrolls" fame. I don't know that any Beja vocabulary appears in those scrolls. It may be too far north for our purpose. There's talk the Egyptians first took note of the Blemmyes in the later Ramesside era or under Sheshonq, because - as with Qeheq - someone then uses a Beja word to open a prayer. The earlier Egyptian pharaohs cared about Nubia, who owned a viable state of their own; but ignored the nomads, who did not and do not.

The article notes that the old desert herdsmen, who assuredly behaved there like the Beja behave today, evolved an elite class. But was it a Cushitic or a Nubian class?

Local Bubble: Origins

A few years back we looked into iron-60 from recent supernovae. I pondered if such were connected to our local bubble. Today we heard that the local bubble indeed has something to do with Fe-60 in Antarctic ice... but this iron's a lot younger. It arrived between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago, say Catherine Zucker, Seth Redfield, Sara Starecheski, Ralf Konietzka, and Jeffrey L. Linsky.

This is about as low as, perhaps, a consistent Antarctic ice core can go, since 122kBC is MIS-5e/Eemian. At least easily.

The explosion which hollowed out this gap, and created the iron, out in space; has been dated 1.2Mya in Upper Centaurus Lupus. Joshua Peek offered some help, whom we remember from 2024 (with Opher and, sigh, Loeb). The paper does not rule out earlier excursions into other iron-poor bubbles, as Zucker's crew point out.

Anti-abecedaries

"Abecedary" refers to the ABCD order of the present common European alphabet, coming as it does from Imperial Latin. Earlier Latin had the "element", which I recall referred to an earlier LMN start to the sequence. Also in use - and perhaps influencing Latin's decision for ABCD - is "abgad". This applies to Arabic (where it's usually "abjad") and Hebrew - also Greek.

Al-Jallad with Prioletta is discussing the wider Semitica where they used a consonantal system as against, like, cuneiform or whatever the Ethiopians are doing. It's been known that the Yemenis preferred a HLHMQ order. These two argue that the Yemenis, too, used a mnemonic to fill in the letters: "halham[aq]".

Safaitic and Hismaic transcribe old dialects of Jordanian and north-Hijazi (respectively) Arabic, like that of the urban Nabatis. The two authors note that they eschewed-or-abandoned halham. When they write their spots in order, the order is that of the Jews. Abgad.

BACKDATE 5/15

Yet another PseudoMethodius book

Ancient Jew Review, which is not the Internet's best site for that - nor is it always Jewish - is hosting Evan Schafer's 23 March(?) review of Christopher Bonura's A Prophecy of Empire. According to the review, the book lifts the prophecy of the title, which it claimed for Mar Methodius, from the Shingar(a) / Sinjar highland. From that, the book transfers this prophecy to the "East Syriac" world.

Pseudo-Methodius famously skipped over John's Revelation. That omission may count as evidence for not being au-courant with such Miaphysitism as held sway among, for one, the Copts. Its main prophetic source instead was Aphrahat's fifth memra (not "memro") on Daniel. I must say here that Aphrahat is evidence for nothing inasmuch as his career preceded the Ephesian councils.

I took the liberty of searching for "Treasures" in the book. I don't find the word. I had the notion that everyone knew the apocalypse relied upon the Cave of Treasures but, it seems, not Bonura - nor Schafer. It is this, not the manuscript-tradition, which scholars use to place this text for the Miaphysite world. I must say that Singara will do as well as any other monastic environment for an east-Syrian Miaphysite origin.

As to why the text itself prefers "Qardu" and does not mention Shingar, I look at a map of old Corduene and I'm ... not seeing much difference. Qardu might be a little up and northeast. One can still find Miaphysite monasteries over there like Elpap / Alfaf / Mar-Mattai though, so even if that MS is wrong about Shingar it still doesn't matter.

Where were the University of California's internal reviewers?

The Bronze Age selection-crisis, I

This will likely be a series of poasts. I hadn't listened to the whole Dwarkesh-from-Reich interview but we do have a transcript. I was always more a reader than a listener anyway.

Among the other bombshells, and the refusal to acknowledge Piffer or Harpending or Cochran or Murray; I'm here to comment on this: The TYK2 variant for tuberculosis risk, a multiple sclerosis risk variant, inflected and increased in frequency before the Bronze Age, and then 2,000 or 3,000 years ago reversed in that period. My boldface.

MS is, I think, associated with a herpes virus: here the Epstein-Barr mononucleosis / glandular-fever. This maybe inspired Aldiss' bone-fever (later, fat-death). The herpes baseline goes waaaayyy back; I think even alligators get it.

"TYK2" refers to on-receptor tyrosine-protein kinase. Wiki relates it not to MS but to arterio-sclerosis.

I wonder if Reich or at least the transcription has suffered his/its own "mis-sense". Dwarkesh's chart seems irrelevant to that part of the interview.

BACKDATE 5/14

Cosmic-ray rule #1

This blog had noted a rule such as cosmic rays may break. The assumption had been that ambient light imposes a speedlimit upon relativistic protons, 5 × 10¹⁹. Since some rays show up with more energy than allowed by this mass and velocity, those rays must not be protonic. Iron ions, for instance.

So here's another rule, which rays of all masses follow. This is an energy limit of 15 tera-electronvolts (trillion 10¹²; TeV). Implicitly rather a steep dropoff than an absolute limit.

- or "TV", in our article. The Swiss - specifically the Geneva Francophobes - here piggybacked upon a project "meant" for dark-matter. The DAMPE space-telescope. Maybe they just used that name so as to get the funds.

BACKDATE 5/14

Lithium-propellant thruster

Been a bit since this blog has last looked in on new thruster tech. JPL have dredged up another 1960s concept. This is a nuclear-fueled, "magnetoplasmadynamic" lithium ejector.

Its chief engineer James Polk has focused on other ions thus far, like xenon. The article implies Polk has always dreamt of lithium for this.

It's high-impulse, not a one-time kick to a new trajectory. It promises 120 kW, 25 times the Psyche power. The problem then shifts to, what dynamo can deliver 120 kW in deep space consistently. Hence, nukes.

The hype is, "it goes to Mars!" - as usual. Really it's for probes to the far-parts of the Solar System. Which also aren't to be scoffed at; so, I'd rather such press releases focus on that.

A Weinersmithian epilogue

I got Scott Solomon's Becoming Martian and read it today. It's a kinder, gentler version of A City on Mars - less egregiously reddity. It may have been plotted out before Solomon actually read the Weinersmiths, given the overlap in subject.

This is a good thing. It means Solomon doesn't descend into complaining about "colonialism" until the last Becoming Martian chapter - which is in fact the "Epilogue". That's also where is cited Savannah Mandel's execrable Ground Control. I suspect Solomon would have cast stones at the great satan James Watson, too, had he more time; you know Mandel and the Weinersmiths would. I have to suspect Solomon would have cast more shade upon even Musk, whom I can tell he otherwise admires.

I suppose I am saying that the epilogic chapter is out of place. In addition this author still cannot find space to discuss asteroidal coloniessettlements. Maybe it's to be filed with our Moon as temporary housing?

I am of half a mind to rip those last pages off my copy entirely.

Shultanutha

Historians of Islam and, if they are any good, of the Syriac world know šlṭ. Also the esteemed New Republic author Ruth Shalit bore this name, as the sultana of steal. It had been thought that Ruth's (perhaps ashamed) ancestors had the root from Achaemenid Aramaic.

Its first appearance in Canaani thus-far has been in the Joseph narrative in Genesis. This is sus(pected) as informed by Ḥananiah of Yeb (ꜣbw, the elephantine isle). Our scholarship has agreed upon a Persian-era neologism.

šlṭ now appears in an theophoric of Baʻal: Bʻlšlṭ.

This is a reminder of how beholden Canaani/Aramaic scholars are to fragments. Clay tablets don't hold these languages well. Mostly these authors used ostraca and papyrus (or monuments) and if they didn't stumble onto šlṭ as a regular title, the word didn't get writ.

Lecker challenged

Michael Lecker is one of the higher-status scholars in the field of early Islam, to be classed perhaps with later Patricia Crone (or "Cronuh", for the IQSA crew). Like the Danish savant for Mecca, Lecker attempted to salvage the Madinan Era of the Prophet's sira - rather, maghazi - by positing a means it might have happened. Croné had the leather-trade on the north edge of the Hudhayl/Kinana cattle-ranches. Lecker had the [neo]Ghassân.

[Neo]Croné has not been rebutted, I don't think. Lecker on the other hand now has Ehsan Roohi.

I'll admit up-front Yathrib is a tough nut. Mecca has never sat right with us Wansbroughians or, lately, Gibsonites. To me Mecca looks like the Hudhayl poets' annual sanctuary at a time most Arabs preferred the cities of Iraq (being, uh, Christians). Think, how our Christians decorate evergreen trees once a year and sing about the Tannenbaum. But the Madina held more verisimilitude - for 'phobes. Pro-Muhammadan revisionists there tend rather to excuse what the Prophet did there.

As for Ehsan Roohi's argument, this points out that the Madinese clans were intermingled. Here weren't Hudhayl so much as Khazraj. These tribes had Jews as much as "Arabs"; somewhat like recent Abkhazia, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims identify mainly by family tradition. Also - Roohi reminds Lecker - the Constitution of Madina allows for Jews. Roohi doesn't use MacMaster's essay on Heraclius' antiJewish edict, but he well could; this came out in our AD 632 which is well after Year One in Islam. I am unaware of specific antiJewish pushes by Heraclius or by his father in North Africa, during the time of the Prophet.

So it is interesting to see even Lecker being dismantled. Uh, sorry!

The coming of the Shqipe

The mountain men of the Balkans - their "Albanians" - are now genetically-profiled. Nature isn't letting plebs read it but Nrken19 has everything you're going to read anyway, namely the Results.

The Caucasus has people they call "Albanians" too. They're Udi. Completely different.

The Shqipe men have R1b-M269 today. That DNA arrived in the Early Bronze Age, more like an arsenical copper age in that region. It then merged with the people who were there much as we western R1b'ers, from "Corded Ware", did; the first individual of this type was 70% Yamnaya and 30% local "Early European Farmer". Thought is that they came fresh off the steppe 2700 BC and spread around Çinamak. That's Gheg territory spanning the Albania / Kosovo border.

The language won't get written down until, pretty-much, our era. But it took on Doric Greek and then classical Latin (preRomance!) loanwords, so there's no real evidence of these guys living anywhere else since then. In the AD 800s quite a few Slavs dropped in, but these assimilated too (or else modern Albanian would be Macedonian Jugoslavic).

The Kabar Canal

Although I've been poasting here about - say - Ezekiel 38-39 not really belonging to that Ezekielian book, I hadn't much about the book's earlier parts. So: Zilberg and Segev.

All editions of Ezekiel note its writing on the river KBR. Problem: there was no such river under the Babylonians, who ruled when our prophet lived there. Z&S note there came, however, a canal: the Kabârû. This attached Babylon with another city, Borsippa. Documents crop up under Cambyses II of its construction; annals note its use under Darius the Great.

Ezekiel would have been prophet indeed if he predicted the name of a future canal. Z&S instead note that the KBR river shows up only at the beginning of the whole text, and in later passages as make hash of the poetry. The authors conclude: glosses.

Since, uh, blog I get to speculate further. The Bavli community of Jews, preserving Ezekiel, or at least catering to his Judaean fanclub, figured to throw up some tourist-traps why-not. Meanwhile this canal was an important throughfare for the Achaemenids (once Darius had reconquered the place); Jews as Canaanite-bilinguals could do some trade up and down stream. The point of the glosses wasn't to say that Ezekiel was at this river, which didn't then exist. The point was that he was at shrines which became (praise G-d) riverwalk attractions.

Return of the white wolf

South Sweden was Germanic throughout the Iron Age. Then, AD 450-510, it got invaded - from central European ancestry. The main fort - "Borg" - involved here was Sandby, which after a massacre was left to ruin.

In order to get there, a central European would have to have pushed through what's now Pomerania. Some today argue that a language was there once, separating Prussia from whatever was spoken in Germany at that time - which, duh, was German. I don't know if that language was still around however.

Another thought - and if I may say, a better thought - is that here we are dealing with ex-Huns. Etzel was murdered at the beginning of this timeframe. Better known to Latins as "Attila", his subjects were not Huns (last I heard the Huns were being claimed for the Yenisey). Attila's fighting class were Goths; their peasantry at this time Latinised Dacians and Pannonians. Germans call them Wallacians; they now call themselves Romanians.

Anyway the Gepids et al. weren't in wonderful position to do more invasions south or west. Other Germans were already there and didn't want the Huns' "traitors". The Roman Empire in Constantinople, now laser-focused on the Balkans, was not a nut as could be cracked. From the East whence the Huns, the Avars were coming, uniting the Slavs.

Up north however - what was there? Maybe not the riches of Byzantium; but the Baltic could be fished and amber could be sold to the far side of Denmark. Recall that the Franks were building a viable kingdom, not as grand as Rome, but not too much worse than the Gaulish province had been under, oh, its Constantine III.

Against this "return" the Danes, for their own part, put up a fence, the Danevirke.

At any rate, having taken south Sweden, they'll enter Anglosaxon legend as "Geats". Some genetics hint at that too. Note Peter Heather's name on this one.

Failed sarcasm

In a time when the online Right is touting how well we are doing controlling inbound migration, Prof. Glenn Reynolds first says other countries have the problem too and, second, that DEMOCRATS POUNCE. And third he links the the wrong thing; the actual article is hither.

Yes, Glenn; this is the fault of the MAHA Moms. And you're standing in the way of the brush.

Don't put your finger on the button

The meme goin'round X is the red button or the blue button. I'll just c/p from Brave AI:

• Blue Button: The cooperative choice. If >50% of people press blue, everyone survives. If <50% press blue, blue-pressers die and red-pressers live.
• Red Button: The safe choice. If >50% press blue, everyone survives. If <50% press blue, red-pressers survive and blue-pressers die. If everyone presses red, everyone survives.

The Christian must push blue. To him is promised the next world.

I wonder however if we are ethically allowed to push neither. Since we didn't push blue, we don't die. Since we didn't push red, we aren't culpable for the decision of blue-i-cide. This is also, note, the Moldbug-approved option of refusal to indulge in The Sport Of The Elected.

Whoever forces this on me could of course threaten to kill me. Or err'body, which to a solipsist means the same. But feh. I didn't do it. That's on the jerkoff who composed this sick game.

Second order effects

It's been noted that African - and Italian - populations have genetic defences against the Malaria parasite. Plural: the famous one is sickle-cell, but older mutations exist. These do not lead to the anaemia. Why haven't they led to the anaemia?

Article here has a suggestion: some genetic tweaks are not allergenic, but antiallergenic.

To me this suggests a high-Eurasian pathway similar to the Saharan pathway. People move to new environments. Those environments have not mutually adapted with the newcomers. The environment resists. The newcomers mostly die - but not all. If going home is more hazardous than toughing it out, the survivors will tough it out. Those will stay - but weaker. Weaker relative to their relatives back home; but it's not like those relatives are going to follow them into the swamp, they're not idiots.

- until the body gets countermeasures. Fast-forward thousands of years. Some in the next generation innaswamp are no longer so weak. They got the original antimalarial genes, and new genes to work around all the problems the original genes had raised.

The zutt claim their own

David Wilcock passed away on the day self-destruction often occurs, the 20th. The county - Boulder, blameless here - released a few statements culminating in the family statement. That's the statement to take meaning from the man's life.

That meaning was negative.

David was born with a blessing and a curse, as the Deuteronomist says. The Wilcock family indulged the curse. Wilcock grew up preferring the "spiritual" - matters which cannot be verified, against the real, which can.

CS Lewis would have it that the demons prefer we focus on the real and disdain the spiritual. I dispute this. Demons by definition, if they exist, are spiritual. As partakers in human company, demons prefer we focus on the demonic - to join them. Wilcock could have sought help. Instead he sought company in his delusions.

To sum up, I implore my readers to seek better company.

BACKDATE 4/25

Dormant

Article here on Methana. That's a volcano on the Thera chain. The study runs from before even Neanders got there 700kBC, down to the early-third-century-BC eruption Strabo noted.

You'd think we could date Strabo's eruption more securely but, the paper doesn't.

The worry in that paper is a dormant epoch 280-170kBC, preEemian/MIS5e. The underbelly was producing zircons - raising them up from the depths, anyway. But there/then was no eruption. This suggests churn under a volcano that looks as frozen as Olympus over on Mars but... isn't.

People around Rainier and Hood, take note.

BACKDATE 4/30 like it matters.

Cro-Stajnia

I think the Stajnia cave is pronounced sty-nia. Whatever the Neanders called it, they were there. The article focuses on their women (or mothers), by mitochondrial DNA.

The chart in this article is ... pretty bad, to be supplemented with this one. The two charts don't really overlap inasmuch as our topic handles a group clustering with Thorin and a couple Mesmaskaya (1 and 3; plus, lately Peshturina 3). The earlier paper was handing Goyet, primarily, products of the great MIS 3 replacement.

The Stajnia timespan is done by molecular branch shortening rather than radiocarbon or something, anyway difficult so long back. That points earlier, MIS 5 from the fabled Eemian on. Sadly we're not able to bring the Timshemet; their DNA hasn't been recovered.

The desert of Tatooines

ScienceDaily and a few other sites of poor repute are pointing to relativistic effects in binary systems. The stars are too light and too mutually-distant to be doing much in the way of gravity waves as seen here. What they can do, is what the Sun does to Mercury's orbit - but worse. So relates the presser.

They warp their planets' orbits to such degree there seem no planets at ALL at close range. Also, transits don't repro; because the orbits are shifting, once seen in one transit they might not transit the next time.

Planets and for that matter red and brown dwarfs that orbit WAY out from the barycentre remain unaffected by relativistic effects, which of course matter most in a Mercurial orbit or less. Hence Proxima which even has a planet of her own.

So what Tatooinic planets have been found - which are close to their barycentre, such we can even see 'em - formed similarly further out. Those planets have migrated inward.

One might ponder a metal-poor planet coming into the range of a double star, such that it once had water but then steadily loses it.

BACKDATE 4/25

The zutt cometh

It's always diverting to look in on Vox Popoli (sic) to see what crazed Christic nonsense will be uploaded onto us any given day. Today it's demon day. DOCTOR Heather Lynn - and don't ever forget a woman's PhD which she EARNED! - is just askin' questions. About demons.

It took very little time to dig up reviews of the book she's summarising. Here's one from Moreau Vazh, gaymer. Carl Feagan might have the best review; anyway the most-brutal, because he checks.

At least in the 2020 edition, Lynn's work was sloppy - laughably so, as she refers to a "Mount Zagrou". Zagros is, of course, a range of mountains; Zagrou is the (Greek) genitive. Feagan notes that Dr Lynn has taken this datum from a site posting essays by, we kid you not, high school teenagers. I adjudge Lynn to have disgraced her touted doctorate; I shan't use it further. What she gonna do.

Vazh, although lacking Feagan's investigative reportage, provides his readers with a different service: studying Lynn's rhetoric. He likens it to a space station orbiting a singularity, edging closer and closer to madness, and away from the sane universe. It relays plausible lore... at first. But then the zutt encroach into Lynn's circle and, if you are not careful - into yours. Remember that Lynn is cavalier with her research.

And then there's "Vox Day"... who has this day admitted to zutt in his own dreams:

not only were the dream-thoughts definitely not my own, but the characterizations of other people in the dream were intrinsically false and fundamentally different than what I absolutely know to be my true perspective on them. It was scripted to attempt to influence my thinking in a destructive direction, and the temptations offered were not of a sort that even appealed to me.

I, too, am permitted to Ask Questions. Perhaps the thoughts not "Vox Day's" own were, in fact, the thoughts of Theodore Beale. Something in his shell - something surviving in there - may be warning him not to trust the likes of Lynn. I leave for others to ponder what exactly is "Vox Day".

In happier times

Before the great [Neander] replacement, some of that parahuman community were friendlier than they'd become. Welcome to Cro-Timshemet; where, when you came for dinner, you got to leave again.

The site is in Israel, which surprised me inasmuch that t-X-t pattern reads as Tamazight. Not that Afro-Asiatic was anything like a thing then-and-there. I did know that Neanders and this branch of African (i.e. us) shared space but not that they would share a cave.

I don't know if any cave art features Neanders and Africans holding hands under a rainbow. They did share, around that cave, a religion; and hunted together.

The era went from the Eemian/MIS5e - 130kya - until 80k. The cave is 100k. These ranges look rough so I'm devolving to "kya", anchored in AD 1950, rather than kBC as I prefer. This is all certainly long enough that the postAfricans would have adapted to the Mediterranean climate as against the African. Although genetics be hard from this deep intervention of time.

I expect taboos against much racial mixing on account the genetics were going to be difficult. Possible they worked together fine however, each with their own specialties. In hunts the Neanders could crouch in the ambush position with the postAfricans running the prey down.

It all failed in the end and did not result in the two populations or their hybrids contributing much to general out-of-Africa later.

BACKDATE 4/25 with some hats to be tipped in the Bluefishcake Discord direction.

Greek manuscript shenanigans

Katie Leggett reports on Greek manuscripts of the full New Testament. Far fewer survive than are thought - the old liste claimed sixty. The real number might be twenty.

I personally wonder if the Revelation should count, here, in Greek. I'd say it should count... in Latin, and maybe Sahidic. But out east this book was questionable. And indeed several "complete" MSS have this book penned in a separate hand and later than the rest of the NT.

Leggett further finds that miniscule MS 141, if complete-with-lacuna, becomes less lacunose when 866 is restored to it. Amazing this hasn't been found until now. But then, miniscule MSS tend late and Byzantine, which might interest Byzantinists and Erasmians, but is considerably less sexy to critics.

Least sexy of all - to them - are Handschrifts from ... printed editions. Yeah, some people copied books off the printed page, by hand, and sold that. I dunno. They didn't have xerox in those days. This is like how Slavs went from relating epic tales - to retelling the epic tale, that had got to print as the official version; a famous comparandum with Homer. Or maybe how published Ethiopic literature, ended up translated and handcopied in Amharic, which "MSS" now have to be filtered from authentic mediaeval work.

But now I wonder. May one perhaps hope for handcopies of printed Shakespeare whose volumes we no longer own...?

BACKDATE 4/18

Final Palatial

Minoan Crete was literate but presently prehistoric, despite overlapping enimently historic nations like XVIII Dynasty Kemet (or "Egypt", if you follow Ptah), Ugarit, and the Hatti. Between the mid 1400s and 1370 BC, Knossos was Greek. Hermahai recently floated a theory out of school, that this "Final Palatial" Greek colony got sacked in a rebellion.

Everyone knows that Knossos was burned. That is one reason we have this snapshot of scribal tablets, baked in place. This is what proves that "final" construction of this formerly-Minoan palace was administered via the Linear B medium, although some Linear A had survived too.

Excitable speculative classicists like Mary Renault used to get confused about the various major events around here: Thera's eruption, the Greek takeover, and the fire. Most agree these days that Thera blew up on the early side of the 1500s, although some nasty weather events had preceded this from earlier eruptions far elsewhere. The indigenous leaders of Knossos and of other palaces had well over a century to get their acts together and, like, not become Greeks. Anyway: they got took by Greeks who had their own ideas on how to live in a foreigners' palace.

That rule, it seems, lasted eight decades / fourscore years, which I can compare only to the Latin kingdom in the AD 1200s Constantinople. Hermahai is calling it a misrule. He sketches a totalitarian bandit state: capitalism for us, fascism for the yokels. This, we might even compare to the early Bolshevists; or to the Moghuls. Maybe to the Assads.

Elsewhere the likes of Javid Hashmi would discuss "colonialism" or "settler colonialism". I'm not getting into that; except to call him a bully, who makes up words to demoralise and ultimately dehumanise people he poses as beneath him. What I would like to know, is the general phenomenon. I ask if this Greek elite wanted to stay in Knossos, or if they were just using it to fund adventures back in Greece. The Moghuls believed they were Timurids and, stuck in northern India, aimed to fund their victorious return to Central Asia; ol' Clive certainly didn't want to make Bengal his home. On the other hand, we have the Rhodesians and the criollos of Lima, who absolutely did hope to stay where they were. I get the impression that the Greeks' extensive work on the Knossos palace suggests they enjoyed the Knossos life.

As material-culture goes, most place the fire at Late Minoan IIIA2. A minority holds out for LM IIIB, although that is more postPalatial, which term means what it looks like it means. The toponyms of Linear B (we can't read much A) point to Knossos administering, or exploiting, the whole west and centre of Crete. I'd the impression the east was a fair concern once upon a time.

And the Final Palace had some fear that a disaster was coming. Emilia Oddo thinks they were hoarding bronze. Even in those days they might be able to predict a volcano, but not an earthquake or a random blaze. An invasion or a peasant revolt however...

I continue my suspicion that these Greeks had come from the west of the island. The east, perhaps, held forth against the invaders. If so, the east would have provided a haven for the old Knossians. Sometimes they come back.

Although: pace Hermahai, whoever did burn down the palace, didn't erect a Fourth Palatial. Qui bono, was a LM IIIB palace at Chania almost-certainly named "Kudonia" at the time. I'm pondering less a revanchist revolt, and more a protoDorian invasion. I should like to see some tree ring analysis.

BACKDATE 4/17. Also this review.

Erectus amongst both of us

So we don't get it all twisted, let's revisit Erectus Walks Amongst Us. This got famous in alt-right circles in the late 2000s... until the Neander and Denisovan genomes got decoded, which couldn't find much Erectus in African populations. Instead a Super Archaic genome was wandering among the Eurasians.

We had some hints of super-archaism in Africa as well, but a lot of that got put down to twists of two African populations intertwining at home before and after all those parahumans got loose in Eurasia.

So, on 4 April we got Alan R. Rogers, Md Touhidul Islam, Colin M. Brand, and Timothy H. Webster: "Human Ancestors Interbred with Two Distinct Populations of Distant Relatives". This brings the Super Archaic back into Africa. However they remain less super than that which bred into the ancient Eurasian parahumans.

BACKDATE 4/17

Anna Shirav's paraEzekiel

Mladen Popović has posted on the Ezekiel tradition in the Second-Temple era. To summarise: Ezekiel has two versions, as we've discussed here; from one to th'other, MT Ez 38-39 shifts. At Qumran another, third edition was copied. This is wholly wild, which Qumran scholars have in fact titled as a "2 Ezekiel" (which Josephus may even have known) or, lately, the "Words Of Ezekiel". Anna Shirav has been on this beat (pdf); which is now a book, Ezekiel Traditions.

That last link is to Google Books so, as you can see, I haven't read it all.

What I can tell you is that MT Ez 38-39 ain't in the Words. The Words is a secondary tradition mostly around Ez 30's oracle against Egypt and Ez 37's vision of the bone-valley.

What if, however, Ez 38-39 (or, Greek 37-38) started out in the Words...? We'd have precedent - better, Christian postcedent. An attempt was made to inject bits of Aramaic Levi into the (Christian) Testament of Levi. Here, perhaps, somebody extracted the oracles now in MT Ez 38-39 from the Words. At the same time somebody else did it, but in what would be 37-38 in Greek.