Jacob Edessene's dispensationalism

Jacob, or James, was Miaphysite (or, "Jacobite") bishop of Edessa-Callirrhoë AD 684-7 - although he'd call it AG 995-8. He then retired to monasteries, first Tel 'Adda. There he dared define Christianity. Michael Penn has translated what remains of the definition.

Reasonably Penn pins this project in reaction to 'Abd al-Malik's supremacism, perhaps preparing for a debate. Jacob would stay in that abbey until AD 698; Ibn al-Ash'ath hadn't yet proclaimed his "nasirate".

The most striking part of this definition is its dispensationalism. In Jacob's thought, Christianity was practiced by Adam and Eve to the extent they were following God's Command. Christ was known to the Prophets, if they didn't know exactly how He'd show up. Christ's age is the sixth age. Outsiders may observe here sura 3's claim, that Christ was rather the culmination of Prophecy - for the Jews; not otherwise to distract from Allâh.

If God was holding back His epiphany in Christ's form, one can ask Jacob to what degree free-will can exist. I take it that his epistle on the qadar, as summarised Michael Cook, would follow this up.

Faliscan Spain

In a former life I suggested an aspect of Spanish, and of Italian dialect, to be Old Latin. The conjecture was that duenos > *buenos > bueno > buono. Spain got the bueno stage, mid-second-century; Rome got as far as bonu, restoring the -s perhaps-artificially because they had Greeks about. Hey, a Dominican blogger liked it over on his blog . . .

Today, let's discuss the famous f > h.

Ferdinand becomes Fernando in several Iberian postLatin dialects. In Castilian, the man is Hernan or Hernando. Similarly what should be filho is hijo. I'd been under the impression this was late. It has to be annoying to the Portuguese which makes some explanation why they are not part of Spain to-day.

But maybe it's not late. Faliscan has hileo. Some northern Italians have reported this shift in their dialects as well. Sicilians might have the excuse of Spanish occupation but I don't think this ever happened in the north; those guys had to deal with the French instead, whose Romance dialects as far as I know have no such shift.

Also northwest[-of-the-peninsula] Italy endured a Gaulish incursion. The late Republic had to call this place Cisalpine Gaul (Caesar being busy on the transAlps). I don't find anything like hileo in any Gaulish.

Propose here that Romanised Faliscans were recruited to settle Spain. Additional waves of Romans, who weren't Faliscan, came later and got to Lusitania and our Galicia.

The Dark Ages are not selection-bias

A kerfuffle has broken out on X upon Crémieux' memetic chart of what the Louvre displays to tourists. tl;dr it's Greek, with a bit of Roman and then a stark dropoff. The High Middle Ages get displayed again and then modernity.

That arrogant "History For Atheists" guy pipes in, such that the Cruel Sardaukar must spank him. Bryan Ward-Perkins, you'd think, should have been read aloud to the man, perhaps with hand-puppets. Now apparently O'Neill finds his buttcheeks insufficiently-rouged: this quaint “dark ages” designation by that insufferable data bro clownboy.

A descendant of Niall might feel that his family back in Eire weathered this storm fine. I can imagine an Arab saying similar - or, later, a Damascene. For the rest of us, Rome's collapse was a disaster. And not just the West: the Greek world contracted (only surviving after re-"Roman"ising) and today Iranians too will, if asked, or not asked, tell you of "two centuries of darkness".

The rot had already started, as the Sardaukar details. One interesting point is how Justinian was able to dislodge the Vandals with a smaller force. Some of that is Belisarios' skill. Some of that is because, economically, the middle class - including soldiers - could push for higher wages in the wake of Yersinia. We might believe an incremental improvement in military efficiency and a healthier soldiery. We do not see any such improvement in art. And certainly not in the sciences: a lot of Greeks and Syrians were retreating to flat-earth theory (Latins, being stubborn, stayed round-earth mostly). There's no way that theory helped out with naval tech or its knock-on, trade.

With fewer men and worse maps, the Arabs became more important as intermediaries, because they didn't need maps where they lived. That's where Henri Pirenne might jump in.

Now: where selection-bias might be cogent, is in the choice of Greek/Gaulish wares over principate-Roman in the Louvre. The French are, historically, taught to be descendates of the Gauls so their muséa may prefer that era. Also possible is that Julius Caesar trashed the place so hard it somewhat suffered its own mini Dark Age. Although here I am unsure. If I were running this museum I might play up the western "Roman empires" especially their Constantine III, as well as their rôle in staging reconquistas of Britain. We've recently mentioned Domitian II.

Emic, etic

I'd shuffled "emic" and "etic" into the bin with the pseudo-scholarly ramblings of Foucault and Derrida. Now that these days I'm less hostile to Foucault, Prof. Davila suggests to us we revisit emic and etic, on the Palestine issue.

Since my focus as a Justinianist is deep into the Roman era, I just use "Palaestina" for the region. "Tertia", out where the Arabs are at.

At base, this is why I restrict "AD" to mediaeval ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪. Not only do Muslims and Maya not acknowledge our Dominus - the Christians weren't acknowledging His calendar, either. They used the Seleucid count. "AD" is, thus: etic. "AG" for the Seleucids is emic, as is "AH" (albeit also rather etic before 'Abd al-Malik's Caliphate) and the year-of-the-colony if we're talking preIslamic Araby.

On the flip side, etic language is why Erik Larson's publisher "Crown" is demonic, and why Larson should self-publish if he has a shred of honor left in him. They know what they did.

I'm not really here to please anybody, and I suspect neither is Davila - which is why I follow his blog.

BACKDATE 2/21

When China dethroned Allâh

The Shang worshipped the celestial deity 帝, pronounced Têks at the time they tell me (Mandarin di). Mongols, Turks, and probably ancestral Huns will call Him "Tengri". Then the Chinese killed Him.

Specifically: the Zhou were the deicides. In 1046 BC they overthrew the Shang and demoted their Yin rulers. The Zhou came up with a new ideology, of "Heaven": 天. This is a Whig understanding, that the emperor be emperor because he's got the Mandate. Maybe you got a better idea on how to emperor. You - and what army?

Various movements in Chinese history have raised such armies. A couple centuries ago, Jesus' little brother raised one (doubtless pulling from nonsense like this). Thing is... none of these armies have defeated Heaven.

Evangelists must ponder this upon the tree of woe.

The evolution of Oriental monasticism

Contemporary with Babay the Great at Bet-Abe, was Shubḥalmaran. In 2004, David Lane published his work, starting with The Book of Gifts. We are learning that Babay presided over a revolution in Eastern monasticism.

It was under Babay, that the Eastern monks adopted Evagrius the Pontic. Jerome himself (letter 133) had attacked this Evagrius; but I suppose later readers figured that Jerome attacks everybody so who-cares. A more pointed condemnation occurred under Justinian's synod AD 553 if you want to count that. Latin ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪 will know Evagrius for listing the Se7en; well, eight, but we Latins merge sadness with wider acedia.

Among Babay's students was one Ishoʿyahb - Ishoʿyahb III. One of his first preserved epistles is Babay's eulogy. They were, then, in the same party. The present Paradise came from that catholicate. But not all east-Syrians agreed with Ishoʿyahb; and some dissidents may have looked askance at Babay as well. These dissidents are those who preserved Shubḥalmaran, and pieces of what became the Paradise.

Those scraps were collected at Sinai, whence M20N. The monks and nuns at Sinai would not consider themselves "Nestorians". Nonetheless they did keep these Oriental books... as, in the Orient, mah boi Jerome was translated.

Shubḥalmaran is in Ishoʿdnaḥ's book, and he contributed to the AD 612 debate. Otherwise - we're learning - Shubḥalmaran was a holdout of the old-school, from the days of Aphraates. Possibly how come Babay was NOT invited to the debate.

It may be that anti-Evagrian dissidents gathered under Shimʿon. After various synods, like that in Dirin, healed that schism; it may be that diehards fled west and bent the knee to us Melkites and Catholics.

Bird poo kingdom

Among the polities the Inca took over were the Chincha. The reason the Inca wanted that site was guano, which is not a Spanish word; here from seabird.

The paper claims the Moche already knew of this resource, which fertilised - what else - maize. Around AD 1250 the Chincha start using bird imagery on their pots. Possibly the birds' pots; DNA analysis might pick it up.

I do not find noted in this paper, the Huari. Perhaps because the Chincha were too far south, better contemporaries with the Tiahuanaco.

Around AD 1400, the Inca came knocking and annexed this kingdom. This is about when the Inca spread fame of the "Lunahuaná", that is the guano people - north of the Chincha. The paper reports that the Spaniards will observe that the Chincha lord ranked among the high notables in the Inca retinue.

The extreme Monophysitism of the Cave of Treasures

I've noted a couple times here Cave of Treasures. This was a Monophysite document... at first. By PseudoMethodius' time, Singar had a copy; Singar before it was Yezidi "Sinjar" was a Monophysite stronghold, like Mar Mattai and others too-close to Nineveh for Isho'yahb III's liking. PseudoMethodius although a Miaphysite himself did not push the issue, contrast his elder John bar Penkaye a decade earlier. Sergey Minov about a decade ago did a study; this came out of his thesis, so underpins his 2020 publication of said thesis.

First, a critique: one piece of evidence Dr Minov brings is the Bet Hale disputation. This is, since formal publication, considered an 'Abbasid-era text. It is too late for consideration in this argument. Now, on to happier content.

Minov relates that Singar at its founding hosted Monophysite exiles from Justin I. The Cave raises many Iranian tropes, not least the name "Peroz" for the wise men. Minov ponders if she hosted this book's very scriptorium.

But as it was copied in the Syriac Orient, Minov finds that the Cave suffered some intrusions, which went against its Monophysitism. In this time 'Abd al-Malik was weighing the scale for Monophysitism, going so far as to prevent the Church of the East from seating a "catholicos" pope. It may however be that Singar had access to the altered version as well. Some evidence that the Cave had trickled outside the boundary is John bar Penkaye, who used a parallel Jubal tradition. At any rate Singar dared use the Cave in an appeal to Melkites and even to Latins, two-qnômë stalwarts since Constantine IV.

This text assumes a cult of Christ's tunic. Minov sees this in Palaestinian / Jordanian churches over the later half of AD 400s.

The Cave proffers a legend of Solomon building Baalbek, which Baalbek's own touristry-department wasn't claiming as of AD 502. But we'll see it in pseudo(?)Zecharia of Mytilene. John of Ephesus is late enough I suspect he knew the Cave (Minov assumes Zuqnîn's several editors didn't interpolate the legend). That's a legend as could only come from a westerner.

Minov raises how Mono- is this text's physitism. Eutychian, that's how; or, so its critics following the councils of Ephesus rated it. (Later they will be called "Julianist", which as Minov points out is unfair to Julian.) The Cave didn't think Christ was circumcised in the flesh(!). Of course this note dropped out of the Eastern revisions but not fully, as by editorial-fatigue references slipped through later on. These "Phantasists" remained an embarrassment to Miaphysites in the early 500s, when Philoxenus of Mabbug/Manbij pens a rant against them. Minov uses that to date the original around that time. He might also have said around that city.

I do however think Minov is pushing the edge as he dates it around AD 600. I'd pin it much earlier, perhaps in Justinian's later years when - they say - he was leaning toward Eutychian "aphthartodocetism".

The Syriac archive concerning Abgar and Christ

As long as we are discussing 2021's fragments of ancient religious literature, Andrew Gabriel Roth would float the Christian tradition of the Abgars of Callirrhoë. We've discussed the hash Rabbûla made of it; Roth here has unhashed it. Unfortunately it is still hashed.

So Roth would further recommend we journey back still further, to Eusebius' history. Eusebius in chapter 1.13 claims to have translated from the Syriac. The Syriac which Roth is here editing has preserved a lot more than Eusebius related. However: what is in our Syriac has anachronisms, like "Palaestina"; no Jew was using this name before Hadrian's rampage (and they still dislike it). Also our Syriac is more hostile to the Jews than [even] Eusebius. By Eusebius' time a lot of Melito was extant and other divisive work. In 1 Clement's time, this antipathy was more muted. One example is that where in our Syriac, Abgar fret that the Jews wish to crucify Jesus; for Eusebius Abgar worried only of more-general "injury".

One might argue that Eusebius is muting the antipathy simply to make it match better with the Gospels' "historic" setting. That is: the evangelists did a fiction; Eusebius is following their line. Eusebius knew as well was we do that the Jews had no authority to perform a crucifixion under Pilate's nose. However: in some Gospel readings and particularly in the sermons, the Jews actually do crucify Christ, anachronism be damned, as it were. That makes weaker the argument that Eusebius - in his own day - would invent or alter this text to have Abgar be less antisemitic, as Eusebius in fact portrays. More likely is that louts like Rabbûla "improved" it.

And Rabbûla owned the library in Abgar's city. So whatever Eusebius read from there, did not survive the theocracy.

Juliana and Origen

[INJECT: I apologise for the hiccup in Blogspot like 8-11 AM MST. I don't know what happened; I don't believe I was HAX0RD. Might be a DNS problem at Google.]

We're doubling-up today. I wish to discuss a source for the Paradise here Palladius' vol. 1.

Budge 1.45 talks one sancta Juliana, of Caesarea-in-Cappadocia. Juliana transmitted from Symmachus the "expositor" (= translator), a collection of... these things.

Straightaway this supports Jerome and Eusebius that Symmachus was Christian, against Epiphanius.

On checking, the author of that Juliana anecdote seems to correct her: that the collection was in Origen's handwriting a little later (Origen had made enemies in his home Alexandria, whence he'd fled AD ~230). But we might posit a harmony: Origen 'an Symmachus. Origen had done the same for the Hexapla.

Chapter 1.34 itself concerns the time of Athanasius who only really gets going from AD ~320, laying the antiArius case before Nicaea. That chapter is here at 1.34 discussing a 20 year old virgin, nameless, who hid Athanasius from "Constantine the Less". Constantine II's full reign AD 337-40 is possible; the editor Budge prefers however Constantius II, who ruled the East earlier. She is 70 at the time of writing, and still won't divulge her name - suggesting the imperium of Valens, which seems (to me) early, for Palladius. Whoever was the author, he thereby makes the case for Juliana as this virgin's predecessor in True Faith.

As to the content of that collection, there is no way a man of Valens' imperium had met Juliana in the AD 240s. I note that 1.46 moves from Cappadocia to Galatia. So (pseudo?)Palladius is, I think, roaming the Anatolian hinterland looking for rare books and stories AD 360s.

I suggest, behind 1.35-46, Origen's abridgement of Symmachus geared toward holy women of lower Egypt, which Juliana - a holy woman elsewhere - commissioned. The Paradise collects much content about holy women, mostly virgins, from 1.34f; in here, besides the oral account commencing it, is lore interpolated from Hippolytus of Rome; but most is later and Egyptian.

The Paradise of the Monastic Fathers

Not to be confused with the Cave of Treasures is the Paradise. The latter will do a fine job doing the confusionment for you. One step toward lightening that confusion is Adrian Pertea's job.

Paradise is the title ʿEnānīšōʿ dropped upon his edition, under the Caliphate; this seems to be what Budge edited. ʿEnānīšōʿ's base text was called Sayings of the Elders, before him. ʿEnānīšōʿ worked at, where else, Bēt-ʿĀbē.

The Sayings of the Elders as a title really only refers to the fourth - which may be the first collection. The first two parts, ascribed to Palladius, are lives of said elder saints; so is the third, which is mah boi Jerome's. I expect Palladius aimed to introduce it all with some clue as to who these guys even were. I don't blame ʿEnānīšōʿ for renaming it. As to why Jerome is here... maybe Palladius injected it and then prefaced it with saints he couldn't find in Jerome.

This divers grouping spread from Egypt to Syria where copies were made, without much reference to other copies, accumulating sayings from later saints somewhat-independently of one another. So the core text is, as noted, a mess. Bedjan and then Budge made editions of manuscripts those two liked. As usual for Budge, he jumped ahead of more-careful scholars... but also as usual for Budge, those more-careful scholars weren't doing their job at the time.

Hence, the mess. Although as a mess, the collection is diachronic. It spans centuries. Some of the later "bad" editions might hold lore deep into late-antiquity, like Anastasius of Sinai. The parallel which Pertea brings is the Pratum Spirituale, which also has deep additions, in its case a somewhat-famous (ie. Hoyland) Georgian edition as might witness to Islam.

Fraktur (sigh)

If you read German literature from the early 1800s, or German scholarship, you'll run into the Fraktur font. The first edition of Nöldeke's Geschichte is in this. Luckily its readers don't have to bother much with that edition no more because he and Schwally revised it into standard Roman. Subsequently-if-belatedly Behn has in 2013 translated all of it. Less-luckily the Hamasa got translated into this font too back-when, which nobody's since updated.

What I didn't know, is that it's a Nazi font now, according to Evan Gorelick. Like... uh. What? It is simply a bad font, mostly illegible to nonGermans. This opinion I share with no less than the Austrian himself - who banned it in 1941 upon taking a panEuropean empire.

Hooray, we can all agree on something! - which is that Gorelick watches too many "Loony Tunes" cartoons on Youtube. Seriously, the cartoonists should have known better too by wartime; but they were running an antiGerman campaign at home, which weird font was just too easy to pass up.

Before Yu

The Shang, and probably Erlitou before them, were Chinese. The Shu probably weren't. Somewhere downstream of Shu was Shijiahe on the Yangtze. This civilisation collapsed 1900s BC.

Jin Liao leads a quintet looking at rainfall "4.6–3.5 kyr BP". At the 4.2 mark, started "disturbances". 3.95–3.84, they got what France got in the early AD 1300s: rain, and mortalité. They couldn't drain the rain so left the plain.

Sturtian news, II

I hadn't looked in on the Cryogene in the last couple years; let's try again.

Last October they were looking at "ooids", laminated pearls but without the oyster. Each layer has data, like tree-rings (or indeed like pearls I guess). Back then, they were looking at "organic" carbon, the carbon in living tissue; even if it's plankton or paramecial tissue, as one might expect before the Ediacaran from 635 Mya on. They didn't find much. So it wasn't plants locking up the carbon from 717 Mya on (this is oft-rounded to 720).

Recently other scientists were looking at the climate patterns - at least during the Sturtian patch 717–660 Mya, from Garvellach. Now they know: climate was happening. A lot of that ice melted 660 Mya, so... yeah. Before the next cold snap, which they call Marinoan (650–635 Mya).

The article hints that Garvellach snapshots a mere 3 ky span, in this 57000 ky Sturtian; but... it's something. Maybe they can finetune more exactly when the sample was laid down, like with ooids.

They can say definitively, during the Sturtian at some point anyway, that some water did peep out from time to time, like 15%... of the ocean. The land at the time is assumed also covered in the white stuff (and quite dead), although Antarctican summer vacationers may ponder Dry Valleys.

You can't be pope all the time

Theodor Herzl accused Pius X of this utterance:

Noi non possiamo favorire questo movimento. Non potremo impedire agli ebrei di andare a Gerusalemme, ma non possiamo mai favorirlo. La terra di Gerusalemme se non era sempre santa, è stata santificata per la vita di Jesu Cristo (sic). Io come capo della chiesa non posso dirle altra cosa. Gli Ebrei non hanno riconosciuto nostro Signore, perciò non possiamo riconoscere il popolo ebreo.

An excerpt can also be had here. The Vicar of Christ goes on to promise that if Herzl's crew do show up in Palestine, he'll have priests ready to baptise them. But I don't care about that. If a crew of Tamils propose to show up, the pope should have priests ready to baptise them as well - or he's no pope.

Of more concern is that Giuseppe Sarto here assumes that popoli exist for anyone else but, it seems - for Jews. Joseph was born a Venetian / Dalmatian. He might or might not have accepted Venice's ontological separation from Italia. But I am sure that once crowned Bishop in Roma that this man could understand the difference between an Italian and a Frenchman, or either from a Pole. A successor to Pope Saint Martin should understand that nations exist in the flesh but come together under Christ Jesus. Has Jerusalem no bishop in communion with Martin? Pius' defenders might want to look this up.

Denying that a Jewish people exist, and dismissing them as ebreo... seems Pharaonic.

It may be that Herzl misremembered or misrepresented. If not, it may be that Fr. Sarto had slipped off the cathedra and blurted Venetian words as a mortal Venetian might. I suspect, the latter. But that is a debate for Pius' defenders; or for his Church.

Noam Chumpsky

New Yorkers have called their boy "Donald Chump" since at least the MAD parody of Gremlins 2. He's now getting grumblings of "pdf protector" due to his Jeffrey Epstein / Ghislaine Maxwell canoodling up to 2003, when - they say - Trump kicked him and (I assume) her out of his Florida properties. Now we hear that in 2006, Trump ratted Epstein out.

Well, maybe [h/t Carrier, who unfortunately is also laundering Raskin]. We might fault Trump as "Chump" at least for not noticing until 2003. MAD was generally good in the 1980s-90s; I bought it whenever I saw it on the rack. But. We are here for the Chomsky chumps.

Apparently the 2008 court was so lenient that nobody knew about it until Cernovich got the files unsealed. So claims Valeria Chomsky, on Noam's behalf. The Chomskys were canoodling with the Epstein/Maxwell crew in and after 2015. Chris Hedges gives a f-u to that. [COUNTERPOINT 2/16: Compact.]

I should point out here that I believe Valeria - inasmuch as that she speaks for Noam. She is the Ghislaine to Noam-as-Jeffery. You don't hang out with a creep for this long unless you are a creep yourself; so I learnt from all the "muh pdf" commenters plaguing X and 4chan.

And boy-oh-boy did Noam ever put out some disgusting content over his too-many years roaming this Earth. Let's float up here, those Khmer Rouge apologetics. Noam always was a weasel too, as when he subsequently denied ever running cover for those maniacs (I got yo' pdf right here).

So maybe let's not pay attention to the Chumpskys at all.

Archaic poetry in a classical time

In Qumran, the Yahad deemed Habakkuk 1-2 only as worthy of tafsirpesher, famously; despite that all traditions, including the Greek, relate three chapters. In 2021, one Joshua Bryan Henson submitted a PhD thesis on all three chapters. He concluded that the same author composed all of it. Excepting the poems in Habakkuk 3 which are ... older, not younger. So those are cited by the author, which is how they survive.

The language of Habbakuk is, overall, classical "CBH": think, the prosaic frame of MT Deuteronomy and Judges-through-Reigns - once corrected. Theodore Hiebert argued Habakkuk's poetic inclusiones are by contrast archaic "ABH". Henson agrees, on assumption for ABH of this corpus: Gen 49, Exod 15:1–18, Num 23:7–10, 23:18–24, 24:3–9, 24:16–19, Deut 32:1–43 and 33:1–29, Judg 5:1–30, 1 Sam 2:1–10, 2 Sam 22:2–51=Ps 18 and Ps 68. Not any of the Prophets, even Amos or Hosea.

...and not Ps[alm] 78. For Henson, this is a CBH composition affecting ABH style. One imagines such might hold of certain other preëxilic Psalms beside 18 and 68. This blog has endorsed Esther as a late production aping CBH; Henson rolls this into "LBH". So as you see Henson does not distinguish between the Temple cant of core "LBH" from other stuff which just happens to fall at the same time. Since Henson nails Habakkuk as CBH, I assume he takes its "Babylon" as Babylon.

By the way this shows that Psalm 78's composer in the CBH era, presumably ~700 BC, owned a library of ABH work. That library, says Henson, would have included the two poems now in Habbakuk 3. Habbakuk himself of course would have done his work after all that, the Hebrew scriptoria now being under Babylonian control.

Freebird!

A Cath/Orth history buff "Blasphemer1054" wants to know why Jews like Eric Weinstein like to pose giving The Finger to the Arch. Glad you asked! here is some torah for you, no shekels required.

Titus princeps and his dad Vespasian in that office - and before - both did some fine things for Rome and for her subjects. Both are role models for leaders. Titus in his Imperial capacity can especially be praised for his response to Vesuvius. Even Jews appreciate the good they did; Josephus got himself into the Flavius gens, partly because he'd disavowed the nuts who dragged the Revolt longer than it needed to run. Some call Josephus a traitor; most - I think - are (now) willing to hear him out. We can let bygones-be-bygones even for the looting, as I am sure Stacy McGaugh will agree.

Where we part ways with Flavius Titus Caesar is how he raised ... That Arch. Yeah: we screwed up, we lost. The man didn't have to teabag us a decade later. That's how revolts get fomented for the future; as our historians should know by now. So, to Eric: if you need another finger, I have two to spare.

Also I do not denounce the Talmud. Whilst we're at it.

The Buddha comes to Berenice

Romans at Berenice did more than just play with the monkey; they had Indian people there too.

I can fault the editors for letting slip about this "Roman" port named after the Macedonian queens and founded in the 200s BC. It's Greek, morons. Although, yes; imports from the Satavahana would indeed correlate with this port's Roman era.

With that date in mind, also posted to the Roman era is the Vrishni religion now (and certainly then) filed under Hinduism. This is northern India specifically, not Dravidian. Which interests me because usually it's south India that traded this sea, at least on the receiving-end. Of interest to the authors this stele ... isn't an import. It was carved in local plaster.

Also certainly northern are the Buddhas here; at least one is of Gandhara. This is late-antique, probably in the time of the Constantii Eunomian emperors but possibly Julian. That workshop mostly did Isis eidola. I see no ::eff::ing way this is fifth-century with Theodosius' men breathing down everyone's necks.

The article marks as most important - and I agree - the bilingual Sanskrit / Greek stele 9 September 248. (Year six of Philip.)

Phrenology doesn't work

The black hole of the Yucatan yielded up a "Naia" skeleton; Discovery Future discusses it.

Naia was a woman, and had the pelvic birth-pitting to prove it; with, unluckily, the pelvic fragility which helped kill her, when she spelunked into a lower cavern. Her head looked like the Kennewick Man's: more Ainu, or European. Luckily for our sciences, modern scientody has recourse to DNA. Since, well, woman there's no Y-DNA so we can't say much of her paternal ancestry.

We can say instead for her mitochondrial D lineage. This is all over South America mostly today. So nobody is calling her a "Solutrean".

At least, I hope nobody is. Beachy Head woman, for those keeping track, was deemed African by phrenology. She was not. On the other hand they did have some Yoruba or Mende DNA in Updown; this girl (whose own mtDNA was European) was probably brought to protoEngland by the Meroving Franks (which is why you don't see me buttmad over mulatta puppettrice too-tall in mediaeval-static Knight of the Seven Kingdoms).

The overall message has to be: don't use skull shapes as a proxy for race or ancestry.

Uranus, blasted

More news from 34 Tauri: the 1986 readings came during a flare. I see Uranus in the news, I, uh, click.

King George III's kawkab at 20 AU was highly radioactive when Voyager zipped past the bulleye 1986. The survey planned for the polar reading they got. Off the charts suggests they got what the Russians that year might measure as 3.6 Roentgen/hour. Since then in 2019 we've seen what flares can do to Earth's Van Allens.

I'd just apply inverse-square to get 1/400 the incoming energy. But that is a lot for a region so naturally cold.

The paper is "Solving the mystery of the electron radiation belt at Uranus: Leveraging knowledge of Earth’s radiation belts in a re-examination of Voyager 2 observations", Geophysical Research Letters per the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) although only with DOI, not link. Keeping in mind that Sci-Hub at .ru doesn't have everything and that Anna's Archive is likely going offline / darkweb.

BACKDATE 2/8

Zuqnîn after Palmer

Philip Wood, whom we've met here before on the Church of the East, has content on the Church of the West. This is a draught from 2011, or earlier; it's been edited and published since. I missed this at the time, and the final version seems hard to get to online. It may or may not affect my work - or/nor Andrew Palmer's. This is "PseudoDionysius" compiled at Zuqnîn.

"PseudoDionysius" tends to be applied to the earlier volumes, which plagiarise John of Ephesus. "Zuqnîn" is what Palmer called the seventh-century in the Syrian chronicles' excerpt, up to AD 715ish / AG 1026ish. Wood was arguing the content after Palmer left off.

A chronicle existed up to 731 / 1042. Wood calls it "A". From what Palmer relays of it, it is rife with errors such that I doubt anyone went back to fix it. (I have found little utility in it.)

This "A" was then copied and revised in 748, to add content starting 718: to chronicle "the Third Fitna" (I think the Muslims' word fitna is borrowed here). If this sounds like what John Ben-Penkâyë was doing for his near-apocalypse of the Second: yeah, we do get "antichrist" memes here. John was an autistic nutcase and an antisemite... which traits "B" shares. The 'Abbâsids were coming from the east and "B" didn't like it. Which was all the Jews' fault of course, as Barbara Roggema, who might not be autistic, lately may attest.

Hither, then, the 'Abbâsids came. So we have a Phase C 742-751; and a D, 749-763.

This is (for me) a lot of "phases" to keep the track thereof. The Zuqnîn MS is, itself, an autograph. How did we get so many editors before this MS? What happened to the earlier chronicles? Did no-one drop by the monastery and copy them?

Perhaps C is a separate smaller chronicle (Palmer relates some of these) and the D guy was also the B guy, splicing the C content into the longer work. That would render suspect the earlier content from 718-763. Why would D care about Marwân as much? This content should also be earlier, like C. Also I didn't see the "distaste for Jews" in A that Wood sees in B. When a charlatan exploits the Jews in the earlier decades, Zuqnîn laments this.

So I don't think "A" and "B" were the same. I think "A" had the core, and that other people wrote their own thing, although if they were all at the monastery they at least owned the "A" basis. The "D" guy brought the "B" Marwân lore and the "C" chaos into the "A" frame. The Marwân lore came from Arabs and the "C" stuff might have been brought from some other Syrian monastery.

BACKDATE 2/6

Zapotec

Last month we got reports of a Zapotec tomb. I was holding off but it is news now so, let's get into whatever I can tell of it.

This tomb has glyphs. They are not just pictographs [em-dash] they are blocky and stylised, like the Maya. The entry is flagged with a stone owl, like we see in the prolog to Raiders; owls were heralds of Xibalbá. The glyphs are, they say, calendrical; they don't report on when-exactly, but the claim is contemporary with the Maya after the AD 536 disaster. Of course they say "CE" but I deem that fair (Christians weren't even using "AD" much, then).

The term "Zapotec" is foisted upon them from the Mexicans. Today they call themselves Bën-za. Their civilisation at this time is best known for the White Mountain site, Monte Albán. This was contemporary with the similarly-exonymed Teotihuacan; that site had a Bën-za quarter, as also a Maya quarter. This tomb may have been cut toward the declining decades of both.

The Zapotec language, something like "Diidxazá", is related to Mixtec and more-distantly to Otomi, around the Teotihuacan region today. Jennings was fond of this language. I expect since the classical Chorti "Maya" were calling Teotihuacan something like "the place of reeds", that so did the Bën-za.

BACKDATE 2/6

Blat in Perú

Matt Stoller has a must-read on how we in the West got from winning the Cold War to creating a late-Soviet superstate based in Little Saint James. Stoller calls it "blat", due to Epstein himself being some sort of Memelite or Königbergian like, in all likelihood, my great-grandmother. Same with the Maxwells.

I wonder if we should trace this to the Americas however. Hernando de Soto in Perú was reporting on the "informal" economy in the 1980s there. You wouldn't call this country Marxist; I hold fair to tag their system Left-Wing Apartheid. South Africans were bitterly saying of their own nation it was capitalism for whites and Jews, socialism for Boers and fascism for blecks.

Listening to Epstein tee off on "goys", that's how he saw the entire planet. And why not? That's how the entire planet was behaving around him.

There were young women, and some females better classed as girls; but that was just for special. Mostly Epstein finessed conflicts-of-interest between others, on the Q.T. Every deal then became a blackmail possibility, even without it being sexy, if nothing else because all those who didn't get that special deal would certainly be angered - and either go to the courts, or find other means of vengeance.

Back to de Soto, his brief for making informal networks legal and formal got a lot of rave reviews, including from Bill Clinton. What we should have read more-carefully in de Soto's book, which got into English in 2002, is that some people like the networks staying informal. Stoller uses the word "Governance" - I think, deliberately pulling the G out of E.S.G., corporate social responsibility, corpocracy whatever you like to call it. Governance requires not just the public face of Davos.

Hedge

The Hedge Knight is on telly as Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I am here more concerned with its sequel, which we stand maybe a 65% chance of getting to watch next: The Sworn Sword. Specifically whether such a thing as a knight-errant existed, rather than "big guy shows up to tourney with armour".

The name is sus, as a mix of Saxon and Norman. Wiki wants me to think it is a creature of romance, like the Japanese ronin. I am unsure. If it be a trope, why is it seen across the globe wherever feudal societies crop up?

The Sworn Sword somewhat illustrates how a knight might end up errant, sleeping in hedges. Feudal lords come into border-disputes. They might reach a deal; that is somewhat the plot of this novella. Sometimes however they fall to blows; and a baron loses his lands, title, even life... but not his men.

Those knights might not have a baron anymore but they still have a king, often the same king as the other lord has. Those now-landless knights are still not traitors; or, if perhaps they were, the king might figure these men are worth some clemency, since they maintained their honour, of a sort, and the king cannot waste good men.

This is how bandits happen of course. Here we may defer to Weis' Daughter of the Empire: knights without portfolio will gladly hire under a lord, or in Weis' case a lady, who promises to restore to them their purpose. For Weis these knights formed a band, and were on their way to banditry - before the lady Acoma rescued them.

But perhaps some knights might hold to their vows ("sigma", Beale might say) to refuse that dubious company.

BACKDATE 2/4.