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".

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.