Erῑtha's scam

Linear B tablets are famously ... boring. They were written by accountants, after all. Everyone introducing these tablets to a wider audience is on the lookout for content that might be expanded into something that won't render A-level Greek students physically unconscious.

At least, so I hope: that Linear B even can be presented to our ep'hēboi. Some part of Miller's Ancient Greek Dialects should be taught to students if they are to move from Attic/Ionic to Homer, or beyond to - say - Sappho.

As to what in Linear B would be of any interest, these might deal with legal disputes (because there's a social element) or with the coastal garrison (because F@ YEAH, WAR). Others show up because of their place in the history of the decipherment. Some are here just because they list the Olympians and/or other gods from M-et-Me D'Aulaire. As I was reading Miller I recognised some old friends.

Tablet PY Eo 04, DMG 121.1 ff deals with land-tenure: Ai-ti-jo-qo *Aithioqos ("Burntface") owned some arable tracts [likely divided, from - we'll get to this], and leased one to E-ko-to *Hektor a θεhοῖο-δόhελος, an 'abd al-ilahi if you will. The type of lease is ὄνᾱτον, which means Hektor doesn't just sit there but is allowed to grow crops on it. In Latin this lease is usufruct.

That tablet, for Miller, introduces the more-interesting PY Ep 704, DMG 135.5 f, where the tenure is disputed. E-ri-ta is a hιέρεια priestess. E-ri-ta is like Aithioqos an owner of ἐτώνιον land in her own right, so presumably has lessors to work that as ὄνᾱτον. She claims further her "god" owns more (which of course means she'll get to use that land too). The god assuredly has δόhελ's - I think female servants in Pylos tended to weave linen, so these farmboys will be more Hektors. ("E-ri-ta" is usually transcribed "Erῑtha", on analogy from Homer's erῑthos, which itself means "day-labourer".) Problem for Erῑtha: an authority disputes that second plot, the δᾶμος. They agree that Erῑtha's minions have ὄνᾱτον rights there but only so much as they are shared, with the deme's rights.

I understand that some ink has been spilled over this already. Might Pylos' deme have evolved into a bipartite manor...?

Maybe not if Erῑtha could help it. I suspect the holy lady of running a fast-one on the people: since time immemorial.... Either way, we learn why the court keeps scribes - precisely to make that time, memorial. Back to Aithioqos, I'd advise him not to trust temple-slaves to work his land for long.

Let the Mandaeans keep John

I last heard from Charles G. Häberl in 2013 with "Mandaeism in Antiquity and the Antiquity of Mandaeism", which is what it says it is: an argument for ranking the Mandaeans with authentic Late Antiquity, or not so late. Häberl is still at it, with "Mandaic and the Palestinian Question" (pdf) which I just stumbled into this morn.

Häberl questions how come Christians and Muslims get to claim John the Forerunner, and Mandaeans don't. (I'd butt in here that Mu'awiya amir in Damascus also claimed John, more so than he'd claimed Muhammad.)

"Mandaean is an Oriental Aramaic!" has been our touchstone since Nöldeke first noted that dialect's parallels with the Jewish Aramaic of the Iranian-run Irâq. Häberl doesn't question that; instead he points out - since we do have dialectic drift here - that this phenomenon in this dialect makes ciseuphratian loanwords easy to spot.

Häberl is aware of very early loanwords likely taken into Hellenistic Aramaic under the Seleucia. Some of them weren't even Greek at base; the Greeks could borrow Persian words same as the Aramaeans could, and as the Parthians for that matter. Yes there's a Mandaean word for "paradise". Just about every language has that word now. Häberl, whose focus for loans is on the occident, identifies such Iranaica to dismiss them. (Take a lesson from this guy, Dr Perrin.)

Given all that, Häberl locates evidence that, although the Mandaeans and the Bavli Jews represent survivals of a pre-Syriac linguistic Asorestan, they weren't the same community. At the least, they didn't share religious concerns.

Take the Cross. (So to speak.) The Jews reject the entire New Testament so don't care about how Jesus died nor if he even existed, and where they're aware of John (like Josephus Flavius was) they figure he's yet another false first-century prophet who ended up getting a lot of Jews killed. The Mandaeans, here, more agree with Sura 4. Mandaeans do care about the New Testament; they're struggling for the same theory of baptism independent of the Jewish Temple and circumcision, and the NT is simply the best source for that first-century Jewish theory. Where Mandaeans part ways, as gnostics, is that they believe salvation comes from true knowledge of the next world, not through G-d's intervention through Jesus' body and blood. So, to parallel good Semitic shared Christian Aramaic salib, they mock the Latin crux - and not the Greek stauros, nor anything Iranian.

That implies, at the very least, the early Mandaeans had some data on what the Principate was like for provincial residents before Caracalla's imperium. I doubt Trajan's sojourn in the Mesopotamía can account for all of it.

Also here are Hebraisms, hardly unexpected, but... not the local Jews' Hebraisms. Häberl reads mitgamla as Hebrew mitgimla, for being weaned. Aramaic Jews in the Irâq sequestered the gml root to Hebrew and didn't carry it to their spoken language which has Hsl. The gml is instead found with the Samaritans, in their Targum to Genesis 21:8; maybe with other Westerners.

More relevant to Mandaean dogma would be iaunaita. This, Häberl relates to the yawen of Psalms 40:3 and 69:3, where it is the "mire" from which the Psalmist calls for Divine aid. No Jew (or Samaritan) would say this of our entire world. But a gnostic might!

Häberl further cites the western loanwords about where J. J. Buckley's The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandæan History arranges the earliest "stratum" of Mandaean text. "The Mystery and the Book of the Great Ennosh" gets a callout for a number of archaisms, which Mark Lidzbarski had called back in 1925. (We don't have to discuss Lidzbarski's conclusion, that the Ginza had updated / translated this from Imperial Aramaic. We just care that the text we got is early.) The should-be-more-famous Book Eighteen, effectively the Late-Antique Mandaean Apocalyptic Chronicle, is also here inasmuch as it incorporates earlier material.

Overall I don't know that the Mandaean language owns a Western basis. I actually suspect Lidzbarski is closer to it: Mandaeans and Iraqi Jews together represent a holdover from Antiochus III who re-united all the Aramaic-speaking peoples (albeit under Greek). As various post-Biblical communities settled in Iraq, their Aramaics drifted together. As for the Mandaean abandonment of Jewish praxis, well... the Samaritans meanwhile had extricated their Torah from Jerusalem. I have no idea if the Elephantine "Jews" used a Torah or if they just kept a parallel Psalter like we see in the Demotic fragment. The Nile may even have had Jewish gnostics (although this is debatable). I'd not be surprised if the Mandaeans thought of using the Tigris as their miqvah a full century before John did so at the Jordan.

What we can say is that the protoMandaeans made common cause with John's memory. A good parallel in Christendom is how the Church of the East adopted Nestorius posthumously. Häberl, I think, is basically right.

You gotta

Late last month I noted as appendix to this post, 1-2% of MA cops resigned (Hanania knows math). United Airlines shed less than 1%. Probably won't see much higher numbers in the medical profession, either. My conclusion? Fascism works.

Expanding on that, WIRED presents the Civis study on convincing people to take The Jab. The short answer is: order them.

[INTERJECT 10/9: Civis is a soyboy club full of soymilk, Impossible Burger, and reddit. Sure. But . . .]

Reasoning anything with such people as run left of the bell-curve doesn't work, as hardly-a-Civis-author Theodore Beale has repeatedly pointed out; only rhetoric works. That means the people choose their rhetors: Tony Fauci or Candace Owen. More darkly, American Gen-X would rather listen to the guy who writes songs about how American boomers will face The Pillow. Beale is hardly shy about his motivation: generational genocide, by suffocation. Gen-X can pretend to agree with Beale's posts, but boomers shouldn't.

If we can't convince people, say Civis, we have to force them. The Cernoviches and all the crew of PJMedia will still whine about it, but - as Cerno points out - there will be no Civil War over it. Cernovich doesn't even advise resisting it; he's taken it himself. (Cernovich btw predicts a Mexican-Cartel model of regional protection rackets, but these will only survive by D.C.'s sufferance.) In short, the antivaxx movement cannot win and it won't win.

Which means there exists no point whingeing about it. Every complaint posted at PJM just serves to drive up clicks and futile arguments. What they do accomplish, is to mark PJM's posters not just as fools but as contemptible. When you say "I am your enemy and I am powerless", you make yourself a target for bullies; and these bullies will sleep very well at night after they torment you. And then you'll lose elections. (And you'll lose people. The Fauci Ouchie kills drr librulls at an order of magnitude less than what it prevents kills y'all unmasked American-flag wavers; drr librulls'll be right here in 2022 to smugly vote you down.)

PJM anyway does not have conservatives at heart. They are simply more dishonest than Beale. Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, and Stephen Green are content to watch you gasp your last, begging for the vaccine; if they direct more clicks to their sites (and, in Ed Driscoll's case, to Treacher's sites). Mark Tapscott hasn't even the integrity to work PJM for PJM's sake; he's only there to redirect its readers into his (Calvinist) cult.

The solution for the conservative movement, such as it is, is to give up this stupid and pointless fight against the best public health measure we have. And to avoid the grifters preying upon your ignorance and (somewhat deserved) paranoia. To the extent the Right objects to fascism (LOL) it should concentrate on something which does real harm, like "Equity" so-called.

Because you're going to take the jab anyway.

The ongoing decay of the Sîra

On the question did Muhammad exist I should sum up this blog's commentary on the official biography. This comes from the Muhammadan mab'ath / maghazî, often packaged together as "Sîra". Ehsan Roohi presents his take at the start of "Between History and Ancestral Lore" just now posted to Academia.edu; although I see the history of this scholarship a bit differently.

Maybe because we each cite different sources. I should confess here that I'm often that sort of "REF?!" weenie that Richard Hanania hates. But I see Hanania's point that in a 48 page essay, why should it bog itself down with every comment ever tangentially relevant to the topic. So please do consider whatever I bring here to be brought here in a friendly spirit. When I get annoyed by scholarship blithely ignoring relevant data I generally tell you; Roohi has not annoyed me so far.

John Wansbrough in the late 1970s presents a towering figure, and any summary of the Sîra's critical project must mention him. The project did not begin with him (more, below), and the man assuredly had overreached. But he bequeathed to the project the same tools as used in Biblical and classical scholarship; he gave the project its Design-Patterns, as we coders call them. One such tool is the topos, or trope: if the event is made up of clichéd material shared among similar events, and the core of it seems designed to explain something itself nebulous (like a Qurân passage), then the whole event dissolves into so much literary vapour.

After the Prophet's death, we have the example of the "Pact of 'Umar", probably a construct of the 'Umarid line including the man raised to the caliphate in the late 90s AH / 710s AD. This guideline for kitâbî law vied with legal compendia for that purpose as compiled by, for an important instance, Ibn Jurayj. 'Abd al-Razzâq's copyists brought this latter together with Ma'mar's maghâzî as appendices to 'Abd al-Razzâq's musannaf of sunna. The Pact won out, not because it was more authentic, but because it was more useful; along with its counter-tradition in the ur-Ashtinameh.

Within the mab'ath, the scholars we have chosen - Goerke, Schoeler, and Motzki foremost - tend to date the Sîra's narratives of Jewish (alternately, "mushrik") doctrinal opposition to Islam to the first century AH. Modern scholarship finds its basal sources in, so far, Muhammad Ibn Abi Muhammad and now Abu Mijlaz; in House of War I proposed the Zubayrids as important as well. These cast rhetorical devices from the Quran into narrative, or narratio as Wansbrough would put it.

Also to be found in this context is that weird event of the Satanic Verses. What we likely have with this one are late first-century storytellers expounding on the Quran to explain verses whose context they no longer owned, nor wanted to own.

Within the maghazî, we see an overlap in the scholars. The accounts of the raids (literally what ghazwa means; it's even become a Latinate loanword: razzia) are also dated to the first century. In these cases, I do not find where these events are tropes at base. These may actually have happened.

Also in maghazî is a subgenre where the Prophet confronts opponents at home. Since those Muslims (in the maghazî chronology) were on a war-footing these events are likewise violent. These stories, inasmuch as the Prophet is the archetype for the Believer, are what inspire state violence against religious minorities. These selfsame stories get mined by those outside Islam in opposition to that religion as a whole: The Truth About Muhammad being one modern example.

Since even before Wansbrough, not all scholars nor even Muslims have always accepted these sordid tales. Following 1973, when the Arab-Israeli conflict was hotter (and the Muslims' consensus was nominally on the Arab side), Israel made hay of the open Judenhass of the Muslim establishment, especially in Saudi. One particularly vicious maghazî-set episode, increasingly cited by extremists, involved the ethnic-cleansing of the Banu Qurayza tribe. Some Muslims had the integrity to feel embarrassment. Some of these have excused Banu Qurayza or waved it away, even if they should know better. But in 1976 one Walid Najib Arafat (best Arafat) set to refute it. Even some Orientalists have applied the brakes for that one.

Roohi last year questioned the Ibn Ashraf episode; this was family lore done to protect Muslims of Jewish descent, by casting those ancestral Jews as the Prophet's sicarii. With "Between History and Ancestral Lore" he expands his net: all those supposed assassinations come to us from family lore.

Roohi's work may well end up republished as a full book. (THAT book can cite Arafat and whoever else.) I look forward to buying it; I hope its publisher sets the price at a level accessible to a wider audience.

The most potent potable

Monkey Island / Ischia has yielded up some more secrets. The indefatigable Mindy Weisberger writes about Cremation 168: the tomb of Nestor's Cup so-called.

Cremation was the Archaic Age standard (and for Homer) - not like the Mycenaeans, who buried their kings complete with (famous) gold masks, like the Egyptians. Quite a few ashes were interred in this tomb, all from adults. Earlier the thought was that a child was here, but in that case - why this cup?

This Geometric kotyla, stylistically from the late 700s BC, bears a Semitic-order Greek inscription. The alphabet is Euboean, which makes it the ancestor to our alphabet by way of Etruria. Its text makes reference to Homeric metre - and to an already-legendary Nestor with his famous wine-cup (eupoton poterion). The parallel is to The Iliad 11.632-637. Although the cup is pretty, as they said of my boi Alexander Pope - I question if it be Homer.

To put my cards on this table I consider The Iliad a conscious composition and "Homer" to be as good a name for its composer as any. I assume The Odyssey a sequel like Cypria is The Prequel. The Odyssey's Demodokos character is a certain deliberate nod to earlier stock - we'll get to him. The Odyssey has survived on account of not being an outright fanfic. Where that stock is not the Iliad itself; said stock may well be contemporary with our man of Halicarnassus. Or even earlier.

Back to this cup's text I find the Last Word in D Gary Miller's Ancient Greek Dialects and Early Authors, 145-6. Some of the text's flourishes are Homeric, such as ἵ̄μερος αἱρεῖ. However for Καλλιστέφανος (sic) Demodokos in Odyssey 8.267, singing in that Scheria / Phaeacia phantasia, will use εὐστεφάνου τ᾽ Ἀφροδίτης as will many imitators; although we do get Καλλιστέφανος for other goddesses. Note gender: also masculine. In light of the Dipylon vase: Greeks will be Greeks . . .

As paralleling so much the Archaic epic tradition, finding what sort of Greek composed this particular text is a trick. Miller does see some Eretrianisms through the poetic stock. So yeah: Euboean.

The eastern Med hosted a lively trade in Greek epic hexameter up to the tail-end of the Archaic Age. All Homer did was to cobble these tropes into the best (anti-)war poem we'll ever have. This might have been in reaction to Hesiod, who made up his own epic-style poems; or maybe Hesiod reacted to The Iliad.

So we may have a Euboean reference to The Iliad across the water, and associated Demodokos hymnody. Or, a reference to all Homer's antecessors. Or maybe this was a deliberately-archaising cup set to the kiln centuries later based on an earlier model - but it all looks very, very early to mine eyes.

Redwall redated

My work PC is on an interminable update / reboot cycle so I'm not even pretending to be productive this morn. So: in the meantime, I've found some Dark-Age news posted last night that I'd missed then . . .

Last year I dredged up a 2014 study about the Norse Mouse Expedition to Terceira and maybe St. Mary. (The Danish mice colonised Madeira; the other Azores' squeakers hail from western Hispania.) I went out on a limb that Terceira's intrepid Scandi varmints probably had help.

Pedro Raposeiro et al., "Climate change [drink!] facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times", doi 10.1073/pnas.2108236118. If I were Portuguese I'd have submitted this text in Icelandic rather than in English but hey. I also must protest this tendency to appeal to the peanut-gallery by noting muh climate in the paper's focus but, again - hey. We got a paper (well, an abstract) and we got it in a language I can read.

The lake Peixinho at the Pico island holds a record of charcoal and 5-beta-stigmasterol. That last is bullsh!t and Bockmist... literally, it's a compound from herbivore dung. The era of settlement was AD 700-850; there's more evidence from the 800s over at Corvo ("Crow Island") in the lake Caldeirão (which is what it says it is, a volcanic crater). Although these herders likely didn't use St. Bede's calendar.

So that AD 844 raid on Seville would have been about the last gasp of the former colony, most closely a stage-post. Running low on timber, mayhap. This may account for why there aren't physical remains: they dismantled their Germanic log lodges to build the last ships. Recommend a search for forges and hearths.

Island sheep survived to be spotted by the last Islamic Lishbûnatis. As of now, these islands Pico and Corvo have become our first candidates.

Looking earlier, I'm calling out as interesting that whatever rodents they now have in Pico and Corvo were not Scandinavian. How did Lisbon's little fuzzballs win? One notion is that those critters were there before the Norse got there. Might the Romans have been out there, from Lusitanian Olissipón? Tartessos? - More likely, that was Redwall: these first mice floated over in prehistory.

Next stop: the Danes from Madeira. I'm calling it that this outpost lasted longer, whacking Morocco AD 860ish.

Teleologues

Although this guy is en no route to Heaven, there are some avowed Christians who might fare better. Tree Of Woe last Sunday summarised some post-Enlightenment thinkers he'd recommend.

This post shall restrict itself to the actual philosophers he calls out; e.g. Pinker's The Blank Slate is decidedly Enlightening, so we're not touching that further here. We are also not getting into whether T.o.W. is right that we need a wholly new religion. This looks a lot like Jim's Blog or (more coyly) V.D.: both arguing we should go back to one of our older ones, which both imply would be Byzantine in practice. We shall leave that question, as they say, to the philosophers.

Henry Stapp, following up on Quantum Theory and Free Will, suggests the Stoic logos for a universal Mind. Whether this incarnated itself upon our Earth is another question.

Also up is Roger Penrose for The Emperor’s New Mind, which (says T.o.W.) dovetails that. Penrose seems aligned with Eric Weinstein, both of whom Peter Woit endorsed back when he thought Weinstein was honest. (Whether you think Woit is honest is, again, another question.) In mathematics, Woit follows Penrose mainly for his twistor theory although Penrose has got awarded part of a Nobel for Physics. Branching out to a third direction, Penrose thinks the soul is quantum and not mechanical; T.o.W. would summarise it that mind is just a computer is false.

I had to look up Stephen Meyer and Thomas Nagel. Meyer back in 2013 tried to revive Behe and Dembski with Darwin's Doubt, but that book wasn't good. As of The Return of the God Hypothesis, though; Stephen Meyer has earned Shermer's respect. Nagel might have done better with Mind and Cosmos, arguing for teleology.

Teleology has been argued at least since the Greeks, who first stumbled onto the Anthropic Principle and came up with some creative notions around it, of which the Divine was one. The Multiverse was another which, of course, Woit and Penrose cannot stomach.

I stand by that we cannot have any of this in standard biology classes, but... I've also long promoted teaching creationism as history-of-philosophy, since finding out about David Sedley in 2006ish.