When cats are a pest

TheTorah offers a fine article about how Judaism considers the Libyan desert cat. It preyed upon small birds and rodents; both of these came to humans, so the cat followed them. (Another breed followed them in Asia; but we're talking the western Semites today.)

Egypt and old west Eurasia venerated the cat; they weren't wholly domestic, but did drive off the smaller rats - and pigeons, also arguably vermin. But then, some pre-Thai southwest Asians started cooping the junglefowl. Cats had the bad habit of hunting chickens too; and of course many islands to this day consider feral cats a menace. The Sasanians ruled that cats be vermin, no better than poisonous snakes.

Under Iranian rule in the Eraq, Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar permitted to raise kufri-dogs [hedgehogs], cats, monkeys, and stone-martens because they are likely to rid the house of vermin. The oriental stone-marten would stand in for domestic ferrets out West. Inasmuch as contemporary Hatrene Christians would hardly have a problem with kittycats, I think we're seeing a general urban Semitic resistance to more-rural Iranian rulings upon them.

Cooling the southern subtropics

A concern shared with the Loop and the Ring is that either will shade equatorial-to-tropical waters. This stands to weaken monsoons and other storms. A post dedicated to that, is in order. We'll start with the southern Indian Ocean.

I suspect that Indian-Ocean Loop to contribute, as would the Ring, to north-Malagasian, Australian, south-Asian aridity. On the plus side: Zanzibar, Timor, north Australian space sites won't have as many weather-warnings for whatever direct spaceflights they might want to do. As to the Loop, with fewer bad storms we're allowed to build it that bit closer to Madagascar - which should help Cape shipping.

The Loop boards... in the middle of the ocean, from a freighter. One pillar may be worth anchoring at Aldabra, where humans aren't supposed to live; run a set of birdnests up the shaft.

On to central Pacific: how would the Ring or Loops affect the Ninho?

Loop and/or Ring still look better for Mars than for Earth.

Where the Lofstrom Loop

About four years ago I mused about megastructures to space, which came to include the Lofstrom Loop. I figured it wasn't going to compete with the Starship in the long-term we're necessarily looking at. Last December, ToughSF took a look anyway. In light of the Baltimore bridge collapse... how's that looking now?

We have limited options for the Loop. A selling-point of the Loop as opposed to, say, Birch's ring is that we don't have to build it over inhabited areas. That means Loops can be built only over the oceans, blue-water. Those also need to be more-or-less equatorial, for best delta-V and ecliptic-aiming results; anyway too far north or south and we get into those hurricane-latitudes.

First problem: oceans aren't wholly devoid of human activity. We run shipping through them. Freighters are already large enough to take down a bridge in brown-water like Balto. Blue-water is getting massive; they might even get nuclear shipping. Imagine that monster knocking into a Lofstrom pillar. Leave aside if someone does this on purpose. How about on accident?

As I'm looking at the map, I'm calling that the Atlantic is offlimits. No Loop there. Just... don't. Indian and Pacific Oceans look better, though.

A South African ship (or any ship rounding that Cape) bound for India has two options of avoiding that east-west line. Luckily: that big Malagasy island already forces those choices. That landmass would appear to shield the Loop from the southwest; and, from all along the north, mission-planners can just plan ahead, we hope. We'd install this thing as far south as the storms let us; where the prevailing wind goes against our easterly trajectory, but maybe we can use ramjets (which we reuse) to assist.

On to westbound traffic running the Falkland gap, and basically all the Andes; in trade with western North America. There I suggest simply keeping such a Loop, or Loops, west of the line connecting southern Chile with California.

Latin across the Tyrrhenian Sea

The Latinists among us may be interested in two books from the last two years. It looks like we should read first Nicholas Zeir, on Orthographic traditions and the sub-elite in the Roman empire. Next would come a collection of essays Uniformity and regionalism in Latin writing culture of the first millennium C.E.. Subelite Latin would, out in the boonies, become local Vulgar Latin(s). Ultimately this glob of late-common-Latin alongside Church-Latin became Romance. Excepting maybe Sardinia.

Why "C.E." and not "A.D."? Because even the Christians weren't on the "A.D." system yet! I keep tellin' y'all this... sigh.

Rodney Ast talks (north-)Africa. Between Rome and Africa, Tino Licht notes the Visigothic script ... if we want to call it "Visigothic". The evidence is the Basilicanus D 182, mostly a collection of Saint Hilaire de Poitiers which codex you can look at online if you like. This made its way to Sardinia, where in Cagliari some African bishops corrected it 509/10. I don't know we should count this as Visigothic; Ostrogothic, maybe. Not-Vandal at least. Isabel Velázquez Soriano is writing from Spain so would appear to be better-situated to discuss Visigothic-era Iberian protoRomance.

I harp on Sardinia on account it held onto close-enough actual Latin. More to that point: Wolf Zöller contributes to the Papacy's use of Latin, on monuments. Who's to read those monuments? Coastal West Italians read those monuments, back when Sardinia and Latium weren't as mutually-distant as they became.

The song of Melito

Brent Nongbri announced late last week a codex of one Melito, a Jew baptised in Sardis and then its bishop. Melito composed a memra on the Pascha - in Greek. I hadn't yet looked at this one here; let's do that.

The codex, Crosby-Schøyen, is not Greek; it is a Sahidic Coptic translation of the Greek. This Coptic got edited - in 1990. Before that publication, one Stuart George Hall (a relative of my maternal grandfather's mother, I warrant) edited the Greek in 1979 with some help from the then-unedited MS. I assume this was helpful to the Coptic edition; I don't know if anyone has gone back to the Greek. Officially.

Unofficially Nongbri points to the public-access version from Rev. Alistair Stewart-Sykes (pdf). A second edition exists, but the translation remains the same; thus, how Nongbri can endorse the text.

I shall name him "Sykes" here so as not to confuse him with unrelated Stuart Hall.

Sykes adapts Hall's translation to make it read line-by-line, like the memra it is. I cannot help but think that this was cantillated. In Catholicism, the deacon cantillates the Pascha introduction at the start of the Vigil: this is the niiight.... Melito was a Quartodeciman, arba'-'ashari as it were, hosting the Feast on the very day of Jewish Pesach. I feel like cantillation was something he'd taken from his own Seder as a child. I done tol' you this was ancient.

As Sykes reads Hall: Melito's community was big on the Apostle John, as were many in Anatolia. Jesus heals the blind in all gospels, but only in the Fourth does He perform the semeion of a man blind from birth. Also there's that Passover thing, where John stands apart.

Melito need not have had his "Johannine" lore from John alone. Nails feature in Ignatius and Justin also. And in that Passion-Resurrection narrative we get in a "Gospel" narrated in Peter's name.

Sykes says that Peter was likewise Quartodeciman. Where John's Gospel wants to say that the Jews killed Christ, it slips later and admits of Romans hammering the actual nails (the nailmarks visible later still). Melito #76, imagining a Jew (like himself) wishing he had not sinned against the Saviour, has the Jew pray he had not hung up and nailed Him. The Jews should have been like Pilate, washing hands, maybe letting some Syrians and Arabs do it. Peter is where you go, for Jews taking over the SPQRs' carpentry.

For more harmonic notes, Melito #98 has an earthquake. John 19 (like Mark 15) has no such thing; this is Matthew 27:51>54, also - yes - Peter. Melito mixes the 19:19 vinegar with gall, as did the Psalmist. John 19:19 does not; we find the Psalm's recipe instead in Matthew 27:34 and (then?) Peter. Being #104-5 seated at the Father's right hand is Psalm 110, as cited by Mark and Paul (Romans) and 1 Peter, later Barnabas and Hebrews and Ephesians... but also not John. Born of a virgin? Also Matthew, and Ignatius and Justin - not John.

Melito, I agree, used John and Peter, and I'll add Matthew. Perhaps not Mark anymore, a dying gospel at the time (it got better). I don't think he had Luke.

ANC-E

The eclipse allowed an extra day to ponder, hopefully free of bias, the Blackfoot paper. The important takeaway is the existence of a ANC-E.

This blog before June 2022 was aware of -A (red on the barchart) and -B (purple). No pure -B survived to Columbus, probably not even Erikson; pure -A by contrast own "Latin" America, aside from a few Melanesians in the Amazon (which is quite-another strange story). Anzick was mostly -A; likewise, I strongly suspect, Clovis. Ojibwe are near-50/50 A+B; that's not too far east of the Blackfoot headwater.

ANC-E (yellow) broke off before the A/B split. This is like the Sonora Ghost. That is: we have archaeology of ANC-E but had seen no descendents... yet.

Blackfoot are mostly that A+B mix too. Also some modern descendents are part white (blue on the chart, because of our big throbbing veins, I dunno). What is getting everyone excited is that they have that yellow portion still: ANC-E. Nobody else still has this.

Stonetoss should update his comic to include a NSFW panel, just for the Blackfoot (and for his own people). Demic diffusions were not entirely violent.

Eclipse day

I already saw a totality in my lifetime so shall spare the roads my car, this day. Instead I'll clog up the blog: with chronology. Thiele's 1965 limmu-list remains canon for 891-648 BC; Illig, "Scott", and Guyénot notwithstanding. Its last generation may even be reinforced in light of that Miyake event now pinpointed 664/3 BC.

It gets uglier before 891 BC, when Chinese records get difficult (thanks loads, Qin); of course we have nothing from Europe, India, or the Americas here. All we have are Egyptian and Mesopotamian records, suffering a lengthy hiccup before which at least the later Hittites are helping us out.

The Catholic University of Argentina is hosting a Damqatum 18 (2022) paper as would shift the New Kingdom - and the Hittites with them - 243 years to the "future", toward us. It would illuminate the "Dark Age"... at the expense of darkening Anatolia further before the Hittites. We would really be hurting for any reference to Thera, semi-decently located early 1500s BC, as isn't pots.

I don't accept this paper any more than I accepted Illig, whom Miyake debunked; or Guyénot, who's barely on any radar. We own too much Aegean and Anatolian dendro' by now not least, this drought published 2023.

Still. We do need to know where the weaknesses in our sources. That the weaknesses allowed for a 2.43 century fuzzball, as late as 2022, should be... worrying. Also we need all the eclipses; UCA / Damqatum 18 make much of 31 May 957 BC, which should have been total over Thebes, if Egypt recorded any of that.