Galileo wasn't the problem

... but there was a problem, in Catholic parts of Europe. This problem last month received a timespan: about AD 1550-1725. Matías Cabello - going from er, Wiki - blames the Counter-Reformation. Galileo sits in the early 1600s when the Catholic decline was reversing. But not well and not consistently.

After AD 1725 the Catholic nations start catching up again. One might even take some solace in the differential. But up to 1850, the lines still hadn't caught up. I take it that Rhine Germany, north Italy, and France were pulling most of this freight.

As Whyvert notes (as a lot of us Catholics note) what about the Protties huh? They weren't pro-science! (Some still aren't.) Well... yeah, but the Reform was also disorganised; so that if some nerd didn't feel welcome in Muenster he might try Uppsala, or even London.

Incumbent upon this blog is to remind its readers that mathematics often thrives where "science" is limited. A Calvinist or, in the Catholic world, a Jansenist can make great strides in pure mathematics - Blaise Pascal being the obvious contemporary example.

I expect that the more-practical Mediterranean Europeans, if they wanted to get their nerd on, had a whole New World to explore. Many many churchmen and lay Catholics roamed Mesoamerica taking notes. Wiki won't count these natural-historians, anthropologists, and linguists as "scientists" because... they weren't, not exactly. But much scientody wouldn't be possible today without their attention to detail.

Also of no matter to Wiki would be Catholic engineers, like those building the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. Again: maybe they shouldn't count, either.

I'll float that the other problem with the sixteenth-century Holy Office, beyond having the power, is that its main target was autism, Pascal notwithstanding. Could a Newton thrive in seventeenth-century Rome? Like Galileo or (ugh) Bruno, he'd want to branch into theology. The Inquisition couldn't let him; the Inquisition had the power to stop him. But the Inquisition would also stop all the good he was doing. I don't care about Bruno but I do wish we'd done better with Galileo. In England by contrast as long as Newton was profitably hanging counterfeiters, everyone allowed to him his hobbies.

From the Greeks to Trogus

Trogus is assumed well educated in Greek, to write so accurately about mostly-Greek affairs in so many volumes, visible even through Junian's filter. Trogus may have had some Gaulish as well. Bartlett observes that Trogus offered more about Celts than most historians, perhaps beyond his remit. I know less if Trogus dipped his feet into Semitic or Egyptian. Timagenes of Alexandria crops up as a possible source for Trogus' lore on the East and even on the Gauls.

For Jewish Antiquities, Junian's filter reads like a blend of Genesis-Exodus with Ptolemy of Mendes, maybe also Agatharch; as we'll be reading from Apion. Bartlett doesn't see Junian as generally introducing new lore into what's supposed to be an epitome, so this might actually be Trogus reading this Ptolemy and some Bible more-or-less directly. Maybe with help from Diodorus.

Synagogues existed in Rome already by the age of Pompey; Julius Caesar grew up near one. Trogus should have had access to an early Septuagint. I must ask if "Latin targums" could be had as well. A vetus Latina tradition exists - from the Septuagint, and from the Old-Greek generally. Usually vetus Latina is considered a Christian project. But even after Trogus, Philo of Alexandria continued to prefer the Septuagint over the Hebrew.

Trogus' interest in the Jews, I think, starts in the example of Joseph son of Israhel (sic). This sketched out the wisdom and continence of Joseph, and the likewise wisdom of the Egyptian king for listening to his advice. Sic semper is illustrated, royal moderatio. Trogus must have had that from the Bible.

Trogus was uninterested in the Divine Haggadah. For Trogus, perhaps with Ptolemy in mind, Moses alone is responsible for the laws of the Jews. But although sharing Apion's sources and Apion's skepticism, Trogus decided opposite: as with Exagōgē Moses deserves all the credit the Jews offer him, and more. Moses' laws might be extreme now, but at the time they protected Moses' "Jews" from leprosy and scabies, and from passing such to-and-from their neighbours. Trogus didn't call Moses a king himself, but he will bestow that title upon his son Aruas.

Trogus

Vridar has been reviewing Giovanni Garbini's Scrivere. This passes to us a reference to Gnaeus Pompey Trogus Vocontian so I felt an urge to check out who this guy was.

The Vocontii were cisalpine Gauls. Trogus' family had sided with Pompey in antiquity, as you might be able to tell. Octavian for whatever reason allowed clemency so Trogus settled down to write some history. 44 scrolls, we're told; Garbini and Vridar care about volume 36 chapter 2. Brett "B2Bartle" Bartlett in 2014 offered an excellent summary of what Trogus was about (pdf).

Trogus figured Livy and other "Classicising" Latin historians as full of hot air. Trogus tried to tell a world-spanning history as a Mirror For Princes but without making up rhetoric. Latin historians of later generations, like Tacitus, hardly averse to rhetoric themselves, appreciated Trogus for his sober attitude, or at least for his pose as such.

Fortunately and unfortunately, a rhetor named Marcus Junian chose Trogus' history as a fun vehicle to "epitomise" - to which project he spiced up the prose. Junian then (somehow) got confused with Justin Martyr so, as the West became Latin and Christian, the West copied Junian but not Trogus. Bartlett has set himself to deciding what words in Junian are Trogus' and which be Junian's.

Back to Trogus: living under Augustus' rule, our man bore no illusions as to what that rule meant. Trogus accordingly termed the famous leaders of old by the old Latin word rex, even if - like Hannibal or indeed the Assyrians - they didn't claim that title. One can easily imagine Trogus applying rex to our own dux bellorum, Arthur. Garbini may or may not consider the dawîd of the Euphratean citystates.

What made a good rex, for Trogus, was moderation. Trogus saw a lack of moderation in Ptolemy IV Philopator - and, most controversally, in Alexander III whom he won't call "Magnus". Trogus was also constantly reporting on shifts in fortune. That rhetorical One-With-Imagination might see the shadow of the Varusschlacht although Trogus ostensibly won't report past 20ish BC.

Bartlett engages in some moderatio of his own inasmuch as he handles #36.2. All he'll note is that Trogus considered Abraham and his family as kings, which neither Trogus nor Junian should have done based on Torah alone. Bartlett further rules out Junian as interpolator. He concludes that this is Trogus being Trogus, placing his personal touch upon his sources.

Junian's heavy hand aside, I side with Bartlett. Garbini should be reading Bartlett too given how credulously he's reading Trogus.

Mark's Crucifixion

As we're kicking off the week - with NT Wrong, antiapartheid activist - here's Mark's Crucifixion, per ABD.

I would much appreciate for scholars to bring in the Egerton papyrus, to my mind a (much) more credible text than is (ugh) "Peter". Especially if we're talking Paradosis because, for all that Egerton doesn't contain its Gospel's Passion, what it permits us is absolutely a plan to hand Jesus over.

But anyway. ABD agrees that Mark means his empty tomb as a device, to assert the custody-chain. He doesn't find convincing the various attempts to dig out Mark's "missing" ending. One the other hand ABD dismisses that Ephesian trope. Overall ABD allows that a tomb be possible although we'll be seeing how little he trusts Mark.

One ABD contribution here is that the NT paradosis references start with 1 Corinthians 11:23 and refer to Greek Isaiah 53:6. As noted if we exclude Hebrews, then Paul is actually not an Old-Greek guy, being a Jew capable of his own translations. Paul in another letter, to the Romans, shows much dependence upon Isaiah 52. So Paul might refer to shared lore in the community.

Relevant to other gospels like John 3:14+12:34 I'll bring that Isa 52:13 has its Servant "lifted up" / "exalted". Of interest to Evan Powell might be that although John will have Jesus as the True Vine, John won't relate the Last Supper. John's Jesus seems like Paul's and Matthew's, a branch of David. But did Johannines ever accept Paul as Paul, as the Gospel accepted 1-maybe-2 John?

Another ABD point is that Christ predicts that all twelve of his disciples will be ruling in his stead, in Matthew 19:28 / Luke 22:30. Even if you don't accept Q, the earlier of this synopsis - Mark Goodacre says Matthew, Evan Powell and Alan Garrow say Luke - could not have made it up if s/he knew Mark, so bypassed Mark on this lore. ABD concludes that Mark concocted Judas, to stage that event of paradosis, as from Psalm 41:9 and even the Enochian Similitudes(!). Of course Powell would argue that John had done this first, on his way to tar Simon Peter with the taint of Satan, around which taint the Synoptics must work.

Through the Von Neumann Wall

We've been hearing a lot about what a genius Von Neumann was; and like many geniuses, such as Einstein, sometimes he informed us of barriers. In this case it's the limit on passing information across a conductive "electronic" circuit ... like passing memory around a CPU or, for that matter, over to the analog component. The main electronic barrier is Joule heating, less because it melts our circuits than because it attenuates the energy needed to juggle the data around. I don't know to what extent the effect affects superconductors; but you're not using such in your desktop PC.

On the other hand: The Oatmeal used to tell us that Nicolai Tesla was a genius too. Suppose we passed the information with electromagnetic waves. That's not electronics (nor photonics); that's "magnonics", outside those circuits entirely. New word for the day.

Anyone consider that the magnonic information could be dropped-in by Eve, though?

MULTIVAC

We have the binary-digit "bit", and the quantum bit "qubit". The Greeks by contrast had the no-bit; if they needed to calculate the Celestial Spheres they used the Antikythereia or Ptolemy's Meteoroscope. This is the analogy method of computing, the analog-computer which our digital generation forgot was the UNIVAC mainframe. Asimov sort-of reminded us with the MULTIVAC but, well, Asimov was doing science-fiction. The analog-computer wasn't coming back outside retro toys like music-boxes and pinball.

Or maybe... it is? [h/t Nyrath]

Digital computers were brought into play for a number of reasons, like that mechanical orreries can't be reprogrammed like a Newton sim can, and that the mechanics needed power. Well, digital computers need power too and lately AI is demanding a lot of that power. As computers, ACs were imprecise. But, dude: doing algebra with roots was going to be imprecise anyway. Some calculations are supposed to be cheaper with quantum. It seems that others might just as well be done with analog.

The analog use-case I'd assumed would be environments physically unfit for fine-tuned digital components, like on Venus, back before SLS sucked up all the funding. Apparently running lots and lots of differential equations also works for analog, cheaper than digital. Well hello: weren't we recently discussing the Feynman Integral?

The caliphs of Anshar

I was alerted to Eckart Frahm's Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire last weekend. Kyle Harper has a review in the WSJ which is sort-of paywalled, sort-of not. The book itself was on the new-books stand at the Barnes and Noble downtown so I peeked into it.

Warnings against climate change, sneers against our forefathers first for not being able to read cuneiform (the ignorant bible-thumpers!) then for treating them as despots (the Orientalists!!)... sigh. It being the COLONIALISM's fault that ISIS looted the north, because as we all know Ay-rabs have no agency and no pride in their heritage: double-sigh.

Frahm is aware that once the people of the Ashur region became Assyrians, and their leaders flitted between Nineveh, Calah, and Dar-Sharrukin: the god Ashur then became the guiding spirit of the court, therefore of the empire. Frahm is further aware of Anshar as a synonym for this god, which he tracks from the "seventh century". But Frahm doesn't even mention this until the Babylonian period, after this empire had fallen!

From what I find of Frahm's earlier material, he used to publish his work in German. I suppose he could have looked up the article by "Cis Scum": "Meet the New Semites, Same as the Old Semites". This went further, blaming the cult of Anshar as harbinger of (Semitic) universalism. But it is unhealthy for a German to be reading therightstuff.biz... or at least to be caught doing that.

One interesting point is that Ashur, at least, started out as a... republic. The head guy didn't take the title sharru. To the extent there was a head guy he tended to call himself the "steward of Ashur" - back when Ashur was the city itself, or maybe the reified spirit of the city.

One point which Frahm might have scored is if he'd followed up the old sociological meme that culture moves westward. Frahm uses this to mock nineteenth-century Orientalism (although I am unaware he uses the exact word), which considered Assyrians the first despots, eventually to transfer their poison to the Persians and then to the Macedonians, finally to Rome. Frahm might (rather) consider Assyria the first of commercial republics. This system would pass to Canaan, thence to Ionia and Athens (and to Carthage, don't forget them), and ultimately to the Etruscans and the Roman Republic. As Frahm points out, absent an Atlantic crossing, Spain and Morocco were the last stop; the Canary and British Isles, pretty-much the end of the world.

That guy on RightStuff in 2016 didn't see daylight between "Steward of Anshar" and a universal caliph, an ideal still powerful around Nineveh at the time, and I must agree with him, despite mine own Semitic heritage. The alternate concept of "steward of the national-genius" is at least localised but to my ear sounds Robespierrean. I don't think they had a major-domo concept like the Merovings had, but perhaps that's just as well, given how the Merovings ended up.

Rome used to have consuls (to execute the Senate's will) and tribunes (to represent the tribes of the people). I wonder if Assyria would have been happier if they'd experimented with these ideas, leaving the stewardship concept to the temples.