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. 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.

The Q-Day may come sooner

I haven't much looked at quantum algos lately, since I flat haven't done those [meta]maths, except on occasion to chuckle at those who've accidentally done my maths. Sabine has lately alerted us that perhaps we should start paying attention.

Again, even the old maths are having trouble in the security sphere. AI has been uncovering Vulnerabilities. Anthropic's Claude Mythos has been making headlines, to which I suggest a cool head.

Presently we've been patting quantum computer engineers on their heads as they build four- or eighteen- or even eighty-qubit monster machines being supercooled with helium. The assumption had been that the Cold Equations, cruel to some, rested upon qubits not reaching the necessary bulk until the 2030s even '40s. As with interplanetary probes, advancement can happen in midjourney... but so can politics.

To Campbell's own 1954 Cold Equations, Quentyn Quinn long ago pantsed the premise (which author/critic Ralph Hayes da-Deuce has since taken offline). It may be we should pants the early-2000s premise of Quantum Forever Tomorrow.

We might not need myriads of qubits to mess up all encryption. We might just need the low hundreds. That-much a vicious government can certainly do. China has a vicious government.

I suggest however we don't do what Altman does, to treat all this as a means to send pensioners into the penury whither they're sending young STEM workers. I suggest research into quantum programming as does not involve breaking codes alone.

The shattered gene

I find difficult to tell when Theodore Beale is lying or not. I propose that when he lies, a larger strategy is at play.

We'll tackle the most-obvious Beale lies first. As to the Apollo missions: they happened, such that nobody has to prove it to Beale. Although just about any skepticism on this particular point is disingenuous, Beale's stands above most. The man was in Fenris Wolf who designed Moon action games in the late 1990s, perhaps not well known today but very popular sellers at the time. Beale, in short, knew full well at that time what really happened in those 1970s missions. Present-day, in this back-half of the 2020s, Beale wants his readers to waste the Clown World's time and to tie their loyalty to Beale himself.

That does not mean that Beale is all about a cult of personality. He sounds sincere on a few points. I believe he really does hate the Clown World - and Jews. I believe I even know how this happens. He is a mirror image of Yamara - or Turtle Island: the more he drives away potential friends in a group, only his enemies in that group will find him.

His Apollo denialism is a feint, to wrap up that para; Beale is lying about lying. So why do it?

The Clown World really does have some problems. Ironically, perhaps, Beale has revived Darwin; or at least devised a new Darwin / Mendel synthesis. Natural-selection alone creates a blob; genetics alone accumulates Mutation. Thus, this long essay devoid of the standard snark. It doesn't read as if Vox Day be trollin'. I'd love to read a counter-argument, if he is.

Davide Piffer may have that counter. Neanders evolved for rote-autism in a difficult and seasonal (hunting) environment, often near-solitary. Africans evolved for group dynamics which needed less brain capacity per person, as long as the larger tribe could retain lore. Tigers versus lions, methinks.

Look how everyone thinks of West Africans today; it's not pretty. As late as 2008 we had Erectus Walks Amongst Us doubting if the blacks were even human, as a tiger might ponder a pack of encroaching lions. Now we know better... that people whose fellow humanity we should have been doubting were the Neanders. And maybe by 45kBC (five hundred millennia after they and we split) they dubiously were.

But now we Eurasians and, indeed, Americans like Beale did recombine with these very estranged kinfolk. Thus unfreezing the gene at a crucial time.

One does wonder what Beale would make of the Danes these days, in that light.

Missing cuneiform

Cécile Michel offers an overview of the vagaries of cuneiform preservation.

Certainly our knowledge of Assyria - and of the reception-history of older lore in Assyrian society - is badly distorted by several accidents. One is that Assyria was sacked in antiquity, with much of its fabled museum carted downriver to Babylon. Another was... modern archaeology: the French carted hundreds of crates down the same river (Tigris) which pirates then hit at Qurnah. The pirates didn't find much gold, so settled for the crates: they then dumped the artwork and any cuneiform into the swamp.

As bad as that disaster was, I don't know that those excavators were shifting that many clay tablets. Those cargoes were meant for European museums, for display more than for research. What absolutely was being shifted were inscribed objects (some claimed precious, although I doubt the pirates would have skipped them) and bas-reliefs. These latter will be monumental stelae. Think: Sargon II's propaganda, assuming he hadn't made copies elsewhere. I've suspected the earlier sackings had inflicted the bulk of the damage here.

The main reason, I think, for our gaps in this culture is the sheer multitude of fragmentary tablets, not nearly so romantic as might be on-display. We lack the number of Akkadian (mostly) readers to sift through all this stuff. The Oxyrhynchus researchers are suffering the same problem out West, in Greek and Coptic. Hence why we're still piecing together legends, yea even unto Babylon.

Khazaria, II

Keith Woods is a man of what's now on the alt- side of the Right. He has lately evaluated the Koester / Sand arguments for a Jewish Khazaria. The arguments still don't stand up.

The Khazar Hypothesis was not, at its outset, a stupid hypothesis. Before Elhaik, we simply didn't own the data. Genetics provides data: with it, we now know the Magyars of Pannonia as a sort of Ugric Khazaria. The language of Hungary is like Finnish; the people, by ancestry, are all Slavs. Could not East European Jews, likewise, be some kind of Turk or Alan who now use Hebrew but are not at all Semitic?

We have an excellent handle on the Ashkenaz genome by now. This rules out a "Magyarism" - here, Judaism - of a gentile people of Eastern Europe. Instead, the evidence points to migration of Rheinlander Jews to the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, famously polyglot, and also (at the time) tolerant. This is why Yiddish looks like mediaeval German plus loanwords (BaltoSlavic, Mishnaic Hebrew / Aramaic, and maybe Latin). I've allowed for "mediation" through Khazaria of (wildly) Oriental intrusions, like mine own. But that's not the majority.

Elhaik came too late to this party: like an Apollo skeptic today, or Erectus Walks Amongst Us in 2008. Jonas Alexis in his rebuttal looks like ItIsHoeMath on Erectus.

Hezeqiah's cage, II

In English we have plenty of misused cliches, like the Iceberg Tip; tonight we'll talk the Sitting Duck or the Embarrelled Fish. Davila in PaleoJudaica has linked to the Caged Bird.

Assyrians used to have their kings "hunt" lions. Woo Min Lee reports that a lot of those "hunts" were more like the Roman Circus where some wild beast was brought into an arena(!). There the king would slay the beast. Like a Spanish bullfight, or Commodus the gladiator. At some point some onlooker scoffed that this was like [fighting] a bird in a cage (kīma iṣṣur quppi). The king Ashurnasirpal II adopted this metaphor with little hint of irony as he slew hundreds of lions. And elephants: the latter which, Wiki is telling me had been introduced from India.

Metaphors of the lion hunt entered the military, Assyrians being Assyrians. The encirclement, at which Assyrians excelled, was perfect for the caged-bird metaphor. For cities this could be, and was, used for the siege. Especially once victorious.

None of this need imply that the bird/lion must be slain in such a battle. If there was a sack and pillage, the Assyrians would tell us - and illustrate it. Jerusalem under Hezeqiah did not receive this treatment. Even a hunter might decide to catch-and-release; why run out the supply.

Lee believes that the Assyrians recognised that Judah was beaten. A sack, of sorts, took place; tribute changed hands. Hezeqiah kissed the emperor's feet. Thereby Hezeqiah got to stay on that throne, if now a poorer throne. At least his shrine now enjoyed a monopoly.

Hezeqiah's successors made themselves odious in later generations as they went so far as to allow the gods of the Empire. YHWH was kissing the feet of Anshar; his angels were caged.

A Magellanic sample

Science Daily linked this horrendous agitprop from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Within it is the story, which is missing a lot of essential information. I'll deliver the story so you don't have to go to SDSS and get snowed.

SDSS J0715-7334 (those are co-ordinates) was reported as a red giant out 79,256 ly away, last October again; ScienceDaily / SDSS are reporting on its formal publication. It hosts ultra-low "metallicity", including a carbon footprint of "undetectable". This means it was formed by hydrogen and helium... only. Also its orbit is unnatural for the Milky Way today and, it seems, all those sub-galaxies which we have gobbled like the one in Exodus. SDSS and the University of Chicago conclude that it must have formed in that Large Magellanic Cloud (nebula, in Latin; galaxy, in reality) halo, back when there were no "metals". 163kly from us.

All this means this - sigh - immigrant bears a time capsule from the founding matter of the LMC.

Initial reports were claiming 2900% solar mass. I find hard to believe that 30 solar-mass primordial red giants should still exist and, yes; later interviews have ratcheted that down. Rather, a 30 sol star - which must be almost the first star ever to exist in the LMC - went Type II supernova, nearly immediately as they would. This explosion from the implosion pushed still-thick hydrogen and helium gas into the star in question. Which was still heavier than us. It went red-giant somewhere on its journey to our own galaxy.

As to how it got here, rather to our own halo (the word "back yard" is getting used): that it was a secondary formation under high wind might have pushed it across our galaxies' mutual L1.

Escapade

Awhile ago NASA launched Berkeley's stereo-vision Mars orbiters. Mars has weather, which affects surface chemistry, so data be needing retrieval. MAVEN existed but is now presumed dead. Although weather exists, its atmosphere cannot aerobrake craft as well as some other planets can. So we gotta talk trajectories.

Here's a map and summary. The orbits are I think clockwise. New Glenn launched it all last 13 November, dumping the booster as they do.

NASA posted a status 25 February, which ScienceDaily got to in mid-March. The occasion was the entry into Earth's magnetotail, also new for us.

Presently this is looping around the STL2 halo wherein live Gaia and Webb. The notion is to take what looks like a low-energy Oberth, as dives back to Earth. But instead of crashing, we hope, this payload will skirt close to ground thence boiiiong to a Mars-crossing intersection.

The launch-window for that opens November.

Starship Uranus

ScienceDaily, belatedly, offers up "Starship Could Cut The Travel Time To Uranus In Half". Andy Tomaswick, 18 October. A mission for six and a half Earth years is more likely to retain mission planners' interest and not be cut off by some President Abernathy (or President Beale).

If the probe stayed encapsulated in the Starship, the heat tiling could aerobrake in 34 Tauri's atmo. This means the mission could be refueled in Earth orbit - by another Starship, perhaps. Then the first 'Ship just blows all the fuel speeding up to meet the Eighth Heaven, where to intercept its Seventh Planet.

This is a chemical mission. Not considered are Princeton's Direct-Fusion Drive or any NERVA. But Starship could be refitted for such engine too, I believe.

The three actor rule

Lisa Marie Haasbroek, Gmirkinite, has "The Book of Samuel and the Three-Actor Rule in Classical Greek Tragedy" (pdf).

When the theatre first appeared as a form of mass entertainment and/or edification, it was soon found that four was a crowd. Scenes could be delivered with a monologue, or with two d00ds. When three appear, they can have a dispute or a messenger can deliver a message which the other two can handle differently. Where a crowd be needed, that can be the chorus.

Playwrights elevated that system into a rule, which some - notably Euripides - saw fit to bend; for instance, allowing the chorus to interfere with the main characters (better: to judge them, as in Shakepeare's Julius Caesar). Comedy got its farcical edge by cracking all such rules, only to acquire its own rules; but we needn't discuss that for our scope. The tragic form informed how Herodotus would compose scenes between historical figures, those scenes being a sight less historical.

My examples have been Greek, or at least Plutarchite. Haasbroek here makes an assumption: that we don't see the three-actor rule before the Greeks, specifically the great tragedians. She would instead point the trope's dissemination around the Near East, even to Aristotle's Poetics (again, ignoring comedy) and Alexander's forcing of same onto the local populations.

Baruch Halpern once called the Deuteronomic History and the Davidic cycle of 1-2 Reigns/Samuel as "the first historians". This, because they are not like the annals of Assyrian kings nor the historical prefaces to Anatolian treaties. Haasbroek agrees on the parallel, but would strip from the Bible that ribbon. That, because the David stories follow the three actor rule.

One might see a Jew who'd gone to class learning from Herodotus, which inspired him (less-likely her) to compose that sort of court history. Not Haasbroek. She collates the paratext of the Aleppo Codex. Sections end, and a Psalm is brought in - for the chorus to sing. Jews might see this as primitive haftorah. Haasbroek sees the tragic form of the Greeks, whence haftorah evolved.

My problem with this argument is that we own a control-set: Daniel. (Also, Esther. Chronicles too.) A Hellenistic book of Reigns (and Judges) should have attracted Late Biblical Hebrew, western Aramaic, and especially Greek.

I suggest instead that the stage play existed also outside Greece. Jews adopted the form in Egypt; more to the point, Etruscans wrote plays in Italy. They called an actor an istrio, or so say the Romans. This must be from Greek historion; suggesting that it was from Magna Graecia that the Etruscans acquired their historical sense, memory, and - important here - medium, to relate such lore to their peers. Etruria was not however conquered by The Greeks as a unified force. The Greeks couldn't even much conquer each other down there.

So if 1-2 Reigns be, er, histrionic; it needn't have been forced by a Greek overlord. More likely the plentiful Greek colonies nearby spread the good word: Pamphylia, Cyprus, Naucratis, even Al Mina.

The first fall of Neustria

I've said a lot here about how northern Gaul steadily grew as a rival power centre against Rome. It had been a centre before the Gauls even showed up: "Population discontinuity in the Paris Basin linked to evidence of the Neolithic decline" by Seersholm et al..

A feature of 4300–3100 BC was the megalith. These quit being built. The study here deals with a grave site toward the last century of this; these were communal tombs. Nobody was being buried 3000, either. The paper implicates the yersinia - and another bug, Borrelia recurrentis. After the crash, the forests grew back.

As to why the focus on this last century, "excess mortality" hit around this time, carrying off the young as well as the old. The paper leaves until later any pathology: starvation? war?... influenza?

Also this earlier "Phase One" tomb was a family tomb, patrilineal (on H2a1). The daughters, if old enough to be married off, were married off perhaps to be found in other tombs. Some of the burials had "homozygosity" - they were from cousin marriages. That cannot have been healthy either.

The forest was reclaiming "Scania" - Geatland - 3100 BC; then Denmark / Holstein 3000-2800.

A new people came 2900 BC, of what the abstract names "Neolithic ancestry". That came from Iberia; that which survives best today in Sardinia. These farmers stuck around for a half century. They say these tended not to build communal tombs; but, here, the paper does look into one tomb, in use until strangely-precise 2470 BC. Regions are regions, we suppose. Anyway, these burials had died older and of more natural causes. Plague was around then too but less of it. They didn't venture much further northeast, leaving Scania fallow.

The Steppe rolled in 2300-1700 BC. These will be the ItaloCelts. The lead author notes elsewhere they also resettled the new-growth Scania.

Trogus on Parthia

Three years ago I was looking into Trogus mainly for his take on THE JOOS. Today, let's look at his Parthic chapters, which we're told ran from #41 to #42. For that, I refer to Alice Borgna published 2015 more-or-less contemporaneously with "B2Bartle" Bartlett.

Trogus himself was a Gaul, so by necessity extracted his Oriental lore from others. I'd pondered if he'd used Timagenes; and/or a vetus-Latina Septuagint if only in epitome.

Apparently Trogus had a scholarly Reputation - recently, not in antiquity - as a hater of Rome. I don't think Bartlett ever fell for that trap; luckily, neither has Borgna. Trogus liked laws, and peace; and diplomacy where laws couldn't cut it, as across borders. It is also difficult to see that Trogus could have said much against Augustus living by grace of the prince's mercy as he was. And so it went for Parthia: as long as the Arsacid shahs ruled well and kept the peace, Trogus praised them. Some pre-2015 historians perhaps felt this was overpraise; even in Roman times, later historians will view the Parthians with less aplomb.

Since 1996, we know of Trogus' main source for the great Iranian east: one Apollodorus of Artemita. Borgna here defers to Nikonorov. Apollodorus for his own part was a loyal Arsacid subject, for all his personal Hellenism.

Before Apollodorus' time, the Parthians were also Hellenists. They even claimed descent from one Andragoras, a [Doric] Greek captain of the Macedonian conquest. This was nothing unusual for the turn of the first century BC; Armenia was doing this too, and more-so Pontus, to varying degrees of historical likelihood. Toward the end of the Parthian state, by contrast, their shahs got into their heads to LARP rather as Achaemenids - as shahs sometimes do. Apollodorus, in between, lived his career when the Parthian shahs claimed ancestry from Arsaces an Iranian from Balkh / Bactria. Most of us, too, would accept that "Arsacid" lineage as likely for them. At any rate, Trogus did not challenge Apollodorus' pro-Arsacid bias. The shahs likely hadn't claimed to be Persians, yet, which claim I suspect Trogus would have marked as hubris.

Apollodorus stops after Orodes II / 50 BC, early in Trogus' chapter #42. Our man must fill in the rest from others - Nikonorov suggests Nicolaus, Sallust, and even Strabo. Borgna, later, argues as a source for Trogus #12, Posidonius, back when the Arsacids were still "Andragorids". Borgna won't take seriously Timagenes as a potential source.

The Life of Adam and Eve - in Syriac, or not

Gavin McDowell has The Rewritten Bible in Late Antiquity. We can read it legally; thank you Brill. This concerns the Pirqe ascribed to rabbi Eliezer, and its contacts with good ol' Jubilees and that Cave-of-Treasures. I haven't read all of it yet. I just got to it.

One point worthy of mention is that the Cave, Syriac itself; relied upon the Life of Adam and Eve, which is not. McDowell does not think that this Life was ever translated into that language. I deem that statement in want of a footnote - better, a paragraph.

Yes yes, I know: proving a negative is a mug's game, don't do it, so don't demand of others to do it.

What can instead be done is some hint that the Cave had access to Greek lore directly elsewhere.

Movses Khorenatsi and John bar Penkaye each can be tagged as men who did not read languages beyond Armenian and Syriac, respectively; unable to cite lore outside what had been translated into their languages already. I say "can be" because, I mean, this is just a blog; but I am pretty sure most Movses forewords, and Yulia Furman, can be brought to back me up here.

McDowell is not writing a blog. If I needed him in hardcopy, I'd have to front $110 minus a penny, plus a tax and shipping.

If the Cave could read Greek, we are good. If not... then the Life had to exist in Syriac. In this case the reason it ceased in Syriac is simply that the Cave supplanted it.

Enclitic -na

TheTorah is discussing Hebrew נָא. The Rabbis treat it as a "please", as does mah boi Jerome. Steven Fassberg thinks it is a consecutive.

That it is a suffix hints at something like how Greeks use de or oun, or maybe Latins with -que. Among the Semites, Arabic doesn't use it at all; but if Fassberg be right then fa- is bearing this weight over there. Some Arabic Jews, not yet accepting Talmud, thought it was like Arabic alân "now".

The נָא examples brought are all in dialogue segments. The Bible treats it as spoken Hebrew, not literary. God uses it Micah 6:5 (I had to hunt this up; Micah 6-7 may be Persian-era); usually it is the people using it, for requests. This may explain the Rabbis.

The examples cluster 1-4 Samuel/Reigns, Genesis, and Judges; we also have Micah (elsewhere), Deuteronomy 3 ("Moses"), and Ezekiel. In language, these contexts are later stages of Classical. Micah's king Hezeqiah also uses נָא; its Greek (in narrative passages) is kaige, so the translation is late, but the story is I think considered ancient and near-authentic.

Perhaps נָא is an archaism. It is common in all languages for dialogue to be constructed as if it were "authentic".

Ezekiel v. Trito-Isaiah

Let's talk Ezekiel 40-48. Whatever we may or may not say of Ez 36 or Ez 38-9; this proposal for the Temple follows up Ez 37.

Lenny Prado's bit - that Ez 44:15-16 does not belong to Ezekiel - assumes Joachim Schaper, Priester und Leviten im achämenidischen Juda: Studien zur Kult- und Sozialgeschichte Israels in persischer Zeit, FAT 31 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). Schaper went on to argue that the rest of Ez 44 indeed belongs to Ez 40-8 and that Trito-Isaiah (Is 56f) is based upon that.

I recently got hold of Nathan MacDonald, Priestly Rule (de Gruyter, 2015). This argues the reverse of Schaper: that Ezekiel 44 used Isaiah 56 - actually, rebutted it. Overall it is a development of Michael Fishbane: Ezekiel 44 is an exegetical oracle. If it's that late then maybe vv. 15-16 isn't intrusive.

MacDonald would shift the intrusions mostly elsewhere than Schaper - and far more thoroughgoing. Immediately before, chapter 1.2.5 argues Ez 44:10-14 has blended Numbers 18 and Ez 14. MacDonald sees a core instead within v. 15: But the Levitical priests, ... will come near to me to minister to me and they will stand before me to offer to me fat and blood – declaration of Lord YHWH. The Zadokites since intrude into v. 15 and then inject the whole of v. 16. As well as vv. 8, 10-14.

The core, for MacDonald, had constructed its anti-Isaiah-56 rebuttal from Lev 1-7 and Deuteronomy. As to the canon: the expansion's use of Numbers is suggestive of a very late date, for which MacDonald cites Achenbach, Die Vollendung der Tora as published (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003) unavailable to his colinguist Schaper in 2000.

That assessment of Numbers runs against the ABH language of the Balaam poems' language, and the Josiah-era dating of the poem of Sihon. On the other hand... ABH poetry elsewhere lingered until Habakkuk, and Wellhausen had proposed Numbers 13-14 for the "J" source.

Lord of the Rings is not pagan

Jack Posobiec has revived a scholarly argument about the paganism of Tolkien's work. It is not entirely a stupid argument. Posobiec (and del Arroz) should know, however, that this argument has already been had. The pagans lost.

Lord of the Rings is to be understood as Mel Gibson intended Apocalypto. This is a world before Christ, and before the Flood; a Hyborean age if you will (the canon Unwin maps even look similar to Howard's). Gibson's "Icon" production-company, in the Maya world, had a pregnant character appeal to a blessed Mother-Virgin. She does not know Mary, but she still knows deep down she intercedes.

As such, no Tolkien character can refer to Scripture - unless that Scripture be the Silmarillion. The characters can, however, prefigure Douay-Rheims and the Vulgate. Aragorn heals the sick of Gondor as will the secret Markan messiah. Samwise calls upon Elbereth to retrieve the elven rope. One can go on and on here: down to Mairon's presence as the twentieth-century war engineer, doing Melkor's will perhaps against his own instinct. (Mairon - Sauron - consciously had spread a Melkor cult in Anadûnê; but I suspect that from malice, because Númenor stood in Sauron's way.)

As to del Arroz, he has shifted to defending Posobiec from himself. My thought is that Vox Day needs to wrangle his 'tard.

Here comes the Neander diversity

HBDChick alerted us to Charoula M. Fotiadou, Jesper Borre Pedersen, Hélène Rougier, and Cosimo Posth: a "diversification" event within the Neander community of Europe ~63kBC during Marine Isotope ("MIS")-3. That doesn't mean their genetics were becoming more diverse, through intermarriage with their neighbours. Oh no.

This is a demic replacement of mtDNA lineages, in favour of one lineage: an Aquitanian lineage, to be exact.

That means the Neanders of Aquitaine went out to conquer those neighbours' land, after which that group's women followed their warriors. What happened to those ex-neighbours, seems about what happened to the Omanis of Zanzibar in Africa Addio. Nice to know it's not just us "sapiens" doing it - to our Neander relatives, or to each other this time.

The victorious Aquitanians - "Mousterian", in material culture - carried on carryin' on for another 20ky. They saw off the Neronian colony and, 43kBC, even Bacho Kiro. But also 43kBC, came the Laschamps flip and the Châtelperronians; the Neanders subsequently endured three millennia of population decline and, uh, cannibalism. Laschamps is generally thought to be Sapiens' first (successful) "Cro-Magnon" intrusion.

Ge'ez and Armenian

Armenian in typescript today looks like it could be modern Cyrillic. But it is not. Cyrillic is pretty much an update of Byzantine Greek to fit the Slavic voice, with maybe a few nods to Latin (like the Cyrillic D), and (some say) old-school takings from runes and Glagolitic. Armenian by contrast looks like a cypher.

Apparently - I didn't know - some observers thought old Armenian looked like Ethiopic. But false-friends abound; even some Linear B can be abused to look like Greek with sufficient wishful-thinking. But lately announced, someone's run it through AI.

If we are to believe this, we must ask: why. The Hayots "Armenian" language is enough like Greek (or like old Bactrian for that matter) you'd think that, if you lived there and you were sick of the Pahlavi system, you'd just use some assemblage of Greek and Bactrian, analogous to what the Slavs would use. Like the Copts abandoned their serviceable-for-centuries Demotic, for that Greek alphabet; and Egyptian was nothing like Greek or Bactrian or Armenian in-between.

Here is one point: politics. The Iranian overlords REALLY did not like Greek, nor Latin for that matter. Armenians seen writing in the western scripts would be accused of western sympathy. The Sasanians further made a push to Aryanise the culture; they tolerated the 'Iraq as Aniran but not Armenia. Bactria kept its Greek alphabet basically because it's Afghanistan, which half the time the Sasanians abandoned to the Huns. The Romans when and where in charge simply didn't care as much; they'd just say "learn Greek bro".

For Armenian patriots, a None Of The Above script had to do. Aramaic scripts were available, like that used for Hebrew; but they went in the wrong direction and were designed for Semitic languages which do not include Armenian. As none-of-the-above, anyone looking for inspiration might have to go afield. Hey, like to where Glagolitic was used! - except by now these Armenians were Christians. To the Holy Land it was, then.

I do wonder if we are talking about Ge'ez proper, or to South Arabian and/or "Thamudic" scripts. I understand that Safaitic and Hismaic were no longer in use, but the musnads were still running strong in Saba.

Sumerian bacon

Abu Tbeirah was probably Sumerian, south of Lagash and Ur as it was. I don't know if it was a canal city, but I am pretty sure it had a wharf until 3500 BC. What we do not know, yet, is what these Sumerians named their own city.

The period is 2900–2350 BC, which is called "Early Dynastic". They don't have documents, but they do have a menu. Usually we get some clue from bones - carbon and nitrogen isotopes get skewed for seafood-eaters (which famously annoys carbon-daters); ideal would be coprolites. But marshy lower Iraq tends to be bad at preserving either; and in a city context, likely the honey wagon is taking potential copro's back to the fields. So the scholars're looking at zinc in the teeth. Of course cereals were a big part of their diet, why else live here.

A surprise, to me, is that they didn't eat fish. They ate pork, and imported other meats from the hills. As to why no fish, uh. Maybe the swamps had been drained and the only fishwater was irrigation-water, which got fertilizer-runoff. Whatever fish could survive in what is basically a sewer, I'd not recommend frying up.

Dryas platinum

ScienceDaily was breathlessly boasting they'd "solved" the Younger Dryas. What seems done instead is to rule out an option. The platinum at the time is ruled volcanic. And happened 45 years into the event.

So, no dramatic meteors. No Larcher See, neither - at least for the platinum; this was a low-metal mountain. Iceland has the metals.

The YD proper might have been from a low-metal mountain itself however. Also those Black Mats weren't addressed.

Naboth and Jezebel, at Jezreel

Last December I discussed Jehu "ben Omri", suggesting a power-struggle between the nephew and the queen. Paul Davidson had, beforehand, discussed the queen.

Most of our lore is contested between the traditions of 1 Kings in the MT, 3 Reigns in the "LXX" Greek, and the Chronicler. The Chronicler has no stake in the Jezebel lore. This whole bit in Greek would fall within the 3 Reigns 2:12ff γγ section. This survived the "kaige" revisions, revisions which hit other books at Naḥal Ḥever / R-Text. But not γγ: so our story retains early features, likely preMT. (3 Reigns 22 onward gets KAIGE'd again.)

Jezebel probably did exist. All the royals of the time would have needed strong internal relationships against Shalmaneser. Somebody was getting married to a Lebanese in Psalm 45. 1 Kings 16:31 survives uncontested in the crossover verses MT/LXX. If the Chronicler ignored this, it wouldn't matter.

Paul D is saying that had all that Jezebel / Naboth lore featured in the original, the Chronicler couldn't have ignored it like he could ignore stray 1 Kings 16:31. Somebody was spinning tales during the late Persian era. Paul D notes parallels to the Bathsheba episode... which in Greek falls in Kaige, so we haven't a "second opinion" on that. Nonetheless Paul D thinks the Bathsheba lore be early.

Michinmahuida

In the 9000s BC, Michinmahuida erupted and coated the Chilean side of Patagonia with ash. Prevailing winds pushed that cloud against the Andes so it might not have affected the planet beyond that.

It's in the news now because its ash is the floor - not ceiling - for Chile's Vermont or, in Spanish, Monte Verde. Tom Dillehay had touted this one over the 1990s as the Clovis-killer: it was, he claimed, inhabited long long before the 9000s and the Clovis culture. Proof of human expansion past the Darien Gap.

If the ash is from Michinmahuida, then this isn't true. The artifacts aren't preClovis; they are merely ignorant of Clovis. Maybe they didn't need Clovis tech down there (which has the function of Solutrean tech, famously). Also the artifacts in question are perishables: nets, wooden wall-planks, and the like. The new study claims that to the extent they look lower-tier (older), it's because they were swept down a river and buried in anoxic conditions. Which is fortunate for diggers, since that is how they were preserved from rot.

It does make stratigraphy something of a bad joke however. On any side.

Can the wood be wigglematched? At least to disprove dates around one of those elder Miyake events?

Judges replaced Jashar

As I'm going back in time through Paul Davidson's blog, here he proposes the book of Judges - and maybe Joshua - as Hellenistic-era additions to our Bible. Paul D doesn't see where any text in our Bible refers back to these heroes (who aren't judges) until Ruth. And Ben-Sira.

Some are warlords or, in Deborah's case, war-ladies; Gideon and Abimelech were failed kings. But the roaming justices show up only with Samuel. Samson, and "Shamgar", act more like Conan of Cimmeria; Paul Davidson gives to them about as much historical credence. Those stumbling upon Judges' translation in Greek would immediately think of Heracles.

To be noted, the song of Deborah is I think in ABH, unlike some songs we could note. I don't know if Solomon's song - which the Greek cites from Jashar - is ABH, but it is short and not all the Hebrew survives.

I get the impression however that as Shamgar seems Hurrian / Horite, which language is pretty-much gone from the scene by the time of Josiah; and since Judges 5 is ABH, that a lot of these heroic tales are indeed old. As Judges 4 attempts a narrative of Judges 5; the ancient lays may have sung of Gideon, and of Jephthah and certainly Samson.

"Judges", for Davidson, is - then - a postHellenic answer to Hesiod and, perhaps more-so, Alexandrene summarisers of ancient myths (think, Robert Graves).

The song of Sihon

Last month I looked at some Archaic Hebrew songs in the Classical era. Among those songs quoted in our "Numbers" not in ABH is 21:27-30... which is also cited in MT Jeremiah 48. Looks like it might refer to the king "Amon", who preceded Josiah. (Catching up on Davidson's site, here.)

When I saw the name "Amon" I'd thought this was some Egyptian motif. Paul D, however, notes that it is spelt "Ammon" in Greek and by Josephus. Based on this and on certain other motifs, Giovanni Garbini concluded that this wasn't a king at all, but a kingdom: that of Ammon. The real king then would have been he whom the song names: Sihon.

Sihon cast rather a shadow on Josiah-era Hebrew literature, such as the Psalms and the Prophets. He might also be mentioned in Deuteronomy and in that paraDeuteronomy. Also one must consider times when Judah was a vassal to the northern kingdom, or to Gath, or to Hazael of Damascus who destroyed Gath. Why not Ammon?

BACKDATE 2/23

The Talmud versus the MT

What we call "Judaism" is associated with a Biblical text which descends from the pre-Revolt era. This text supplied all translations of the Middle Ages except for the Greeks', and a few Greek-based translations like the Sahidic and some Syriac. Tradition claims the Masoretes, for this. It was the primary source for the Qaraiya sect of the Jews.

Mainline Jews, famously, use besides their Bible (which is MT) another text: "The Talmud" - specifically, that of Babylonia. This is a difficult text to pin down. It might not have been intended as a final compilation, although it has become one.

The Talmud is aware of the MT but perhaps only as the default Bible. A Karaite would refuse Ben Sira out of hand; the Talmud cites it, and arguably treats it with more respect than (say) Clement was treating "The Gospel Of Thomas". The Talmud is aware of variants in the accepted canon as well, usually ascribed to those pesty Septuagints (in east-Aramaic?) but TheTorah.com cannot rule out old Tanakh scrolls from the Seleucid era. Variants lingered in the Rabbinic tradition even after the Talmud.

It may be that the MT attracted errors which later copyists had to ratchet back - which could end up canonising some errors, rather than fixing them. Similar has happened to the Peshitta which is why Syriac scholars are looking into the earliest Arabic translations.

The Peshitta is, mind, a Christian translation - or has become one. Naturally Jews desired their own Arabic translations. Saadya Gaon created a quick-n'-dirty translation using some Jewish Aramaic lore, which strikes me as creating a Jewish Arabic Peshitta himself. Naturally the Karaites hated it, so redid their own Bible from Ebrea Sola - if I may.