The emergence of Nathaniel Miller's book

Nathaniel Miller wrote The Emergence of Arabic Poetry to counter Margoliouth 1925, to defend (some) "preIslamic" / "jâhil" poetry. The book follows Wansbrough in calling the genre unIslamic, on account "preIslamic" assumes (ironically) Margoliouth that all of it was composed in praeparatio for the coming Prophet. Even the Muslims should shun the term "preIslamic". (Some Muslims would in fact invent such work, most-notably - to Ibn Warraq anyway - as ascribed to Umayya. But not all the unIslamic poetry reads like ps-Umayya.)

For Miller, classical Arabic poetry starts in the northeastern Arabian highland called “Najd” – in Riyadh, for Saudis. The Arabs came to prefer the tripart qasîda genre. That genre is (mostly) absent from the Hijaz before Hassan (and Ka’b b. Zuhayr and Umayya) pp. 12, 84. Eventually p. 158 must note: Qasîda itself is artificial; so asks, why this form at all? Such couldn’t exist in the Hijaz without a patron, p. 86. Even in pro-Roman Jâbiya (tent city? p. 70) the qâsida arrived after the 584 dissolution of the monarchy p. 71, 302 n5: unless Nâbigha, pp. 83-4, is he who brought it there.

On this basis pp. 74-7 a qasîda to the eastern king al-Mundhir (d. AD 554) is raised as authentic. Also authentic will be extraMeccan references to hajj with details as do not appear in the Islamic hajj nor in the Islamic memory of the pagan Meccan hajj; and Hijazi references to a Meccan hajj where the poet swears by the sacrifice instead of by the God to Whom is sacrificed. With such poems permitted, likewise are permitted many more in that style. Thus, Wansbrough is vindicated.

I have so far read Miller up to chapter 6. Hijazi poetry exists; for Miller, the best western exemplar is the diwân of the Hudhayl tribe, which Miller sees as a reaction to the (greater, and in Islam better-regarded) Iraqi corpus. The poet Abû Jundab plays the same role for this book p. 135 as Umayya did for Spengler and Huart.

To get to that summary, one must wade through poor editing, such as repetitions - such as al-Sukkarî's complaint p. 86 then p. 201. Against p. 70 and unlike phantom Jâbiya, al-Hîra is just Kûfa which site does have archaeologic support, where possible to excavate. Nâbigha - Miller says - was a poet of Ghassân who did qasida; but we are also told that qasîda came to that region only after Ghassân's dissolution p. 71 vs. 83-4. The text introduces Ma‘add before we get support of whether it existed p. 47; consistently the text proffers terms like "Ghassânid" and "Lakhmid" before, hey, the neoGhassân of Late Antiquity was a mere poetic fiction p.73. Bipart qasîda is noted pp. 84-5; up to now p. 11 had led to qasîda as defined as tripart – so here is where we need to explain what a qasîda is, nasib and all; not at p. 75. Then I went to the index which lacks Jâbiya entirely, and p. 11 on qasîda. Abû Dhuayb is noted as Sâ'ida's râwî p. 197; this needs noting much earlier, like p. 88. Mecca in the 570s p. 52 is “urban”; but per p. 85, Mecca barely existed then. A glaring omission comes where discussing 'Awf's poem #35, where pp. 269-70 does a full commentary on ll. 6f. ... after the earlier text (p. 188) was somehow unaware of ll. 4-5 with its comment on the Qurashi hajj (read it instead in Peter Webb um, twice). One shudders to imagine the draught which beta-reader Philip Wood encountered.

On to philology, p.54 flips between Roman and Semitic terms for various cities. The linguistic evidence in Qurân brought p. 52 is incoherent: it claims mostly south Semitic only but it turns out overshadowed by NW Semitic (ie. mostly Aramaic). The page's claim of Iranian as "very rare" in the Qurân is amusing given p. 37 which records two Iranian lexemes; I suppose it depends where you look, like Q. 55-56. I feel like the substantive-adjective discussion at the “counterpoetics” pp. 152-3 could have been noted earlier where are the (“Najdi”) poetics; ditto such constructs as dhû-hashif p. 157.

As far as I can judge, most mistakes are clustered early. From ch. 3f the book translates text and argues therefrom; 'Awf excepted, both the translations and the extrapolations, to me, seem fair. I am left with nitpicks – for instance, kârim / karîm might not mean generous p. 123, nor honorable; although the poem is about a “widow’s mite” – so, giving honour to others is a good middle-ground. Also p. 145 I might delay the Arabic parenthesis to the end of the verse. We don't need "the Bechdel test" in the main text p. 239; this can go to a footnote. Ibn Qays al-Ruqayyât is 'Ubayd Allâh not "Ibn 'Ubayd Allâh" as indexed; and why is he "Ibn Qays" in the text and not "al-Ruqayyât" like al-Farazdaq?

Given all that, I would defer a decision on the Abû Jundab / sûrat al-Kafirûn synopsis p. 136; p. 137 rather than “proto-Qurânic” I prefer paraQurânic .

Where did the Safaitic migrants go?

Let's backdate this one; the idea came in the last hour or so. Al-Jallad has written at least two whole books about the Safaitic corpus, one on language and one on the The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia. Among Nathaniel Miller's comments on the poetry, most of which he convinces me is authentic, concerns the nomadic Arab. The Safaitic graffitists - per al-Jallad - went to hajj-festival enough they had a verb for it, implying (to him) pilgrimage. And I understand that some Safaitic has ended up at Pompeii and maybe Delos. And at Palmyra of course.

On to Religion and Rituals: I was looking up keywords like "season". The graffiti notes a season of "late rain". That's what we'd call "spring". Miller would relate that to Rabi' or to ṣyf. The graffiti don't mention Rabi' but I don't much care; Hudhayl don't mention it either (Miller, 191). ṣyf is followed by qyẓ, when there's still pasturage and springwater, but less rain. Then comes summer.

Question I got: the poetry, and even the Qurân (sura 106), mention winter. Sura 106's whole reason to exist, despite barely being a sura (it doesn't rhyme!) is to give a Divine deed to the Quraysh of a House, as a sanctuary.

The graffiti at the Safa do not mention winter. And assuredly bare rock Jordan is no place to wait out the chill. One graffito even complains that his herd got caught out by a cold-snap in what should have been the ṣyf. These herders must have wintered elsewhere.

So where did they go?

The Saites' view to heaven

Archaeology.org leads to a report on an Egyptian observatory. Buto Temple, 26th Dynasty called the "Saite". This was the long sixth century 664-525 BC.

I assumed that the Egyptians - as farmers and geometers - came to care about the heavens; the Pyramids are said to match the constellation Orion. But I hadn't seen much evidence. I suppose with the Assyrians knocking around, the Egyptians had to keep up with the latest out of Babylonia.

Any observatory should have seen whatever caused the great spike of the late 660s BC. I wonder actually if this portent hailed the Saite takeover.

The long farewell of the Palaeocene

Today we learn that the Palaeocene ended in two heat spikes. PETM was 56 Mya... and then 2 My later came an Eocene Thermal Maximum 2. The warming had started 58 Mya.

They are correlating oceanic heat with atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Here, unfortunately, I scent marketing. They are touting (not to say pimping) its relation to modern anthropogenic climate change. This might include Atlantic cooling but the authors know which side their bread is buttered on.

In Palaeocene times no native life could build coal-fired factories on Earth. The article is looking to "tectonics". That would have to mean volcanoes given that orogeny - mountain-building - should expose easily-reactive ores as to pull carbon from the air as carbonates. Probably "Eriador".

The underground seas of Proxima Centauri

This blog has been (very) down on M stars having useful planets. Last month I'd concluded that Alfvén had delivered the last nail pon Prox' coffin. What I'd failed to remember, is that our Earth holds enough hydro in her mantle and core to roust out Brian Keene's Earthworm Gods.

Deep-crust water has lately been found for Mars 11.5-20 km down. A decade ago, Hop David calculated 15 km for this planet's dig limit. Deep underground water is meanwhile surmised also for extrasolar Super-Earths, where low-density and considered surface-watery. This deconstrains the composition of LHC 1140 b.

So, if these worlds are Pitch Black-y, desert on the surface but with vast aquifers below: we cannot rule out life down there, either. M stars' planets should have ice in the rear which should keep aquifers closer the surface than (say) Mars allows.

As to Life As We Know It, consider taproots. Anything vascular bringing transpiration to the perma'rradiated surface will do a Garamantia from its wells. The vapour blows to the icewall, condenses, flows back into the aquifer.

Fast delivery of a square-kilometer rhenium radiator

Antimatter exists in small doses as in, nanogram doses. Those doses are good for reducing critical-mass in nuclear reactions. In space such could get us past the various bans on enriched-metal nuclear work in space (nobody wants Little Boy in equatorial space). How about... antimatter-on-hydrogen?

Last week Casey Handmer roused himself to post - and yesterday, Gerrit Bruhaug. I may as well get in on it.

Antimatter, mostly antihydrogen but also antihelium and even more exotic stuff, comes out of particle accelerators one nanogram at a time. In theory we could also get it from space. Directly, antihelium at least is so rare it's not worth the bother. Nah: orbital spacemen could get much more antihydrogen from our Van Allens.

Handmer's maths aim more for the ISP, than for thrust. rlelder noted in the comments that for thrust, we should be looking at a pulse method, like ol' Boom Boom or that fusion afterburner. For getting off of Earth we can't use either: we'll still need the (chemical) Super Heavy Booster. I'll add that the SHB's use of methane seems better than hydrogen just for storage, although a small-scale nuclear reactor at a hurricane-/tsunami safe distance up Rio might offer JIT hydrogen to Boca and, whilst we're at it, to Tamaulipan steelworks.

Once already in a midrange Earth orbit, Handmer and Bruhaug are saying we don't need to be goosing fissile matter, which would require too much paperwork up there anyway. We could just spike the antiprotons against regular protons, also farmable by the nanogram from the solar wind. The economics and the safety-requirements of collecting fuel in high Earth orbit make nanogram-farming more attractive than (somehow) hurling stuff up from Earth, and perhaps more-so bringing kilotonnes of radioactive-whatever from some space rock toward Earth.

I expect antimatter-driven cargos could be larger than cargos sent by solar-sail. They would really come into their own, past our solar-system's snow line, the "solar" part delivering diminishing-returns by inverse-square AU.

So now let's get to thermodynamics (boo!). Bruhaug notes that the heat from these monsters exceeds what even those refractory metals can withstand; you know... the rare metals like iridium we are hoping to mine from those outer asteroids (titanium can be had from our moon). Interstellar ships will need ten megameters of radiator space: compare Earth equatorial radius 6.38 megameters.

We're just going from planet-to-asteroid presently. But it seems that our refactory-metal imports may need, in fact, to be functioning radiators, themselves. Not stored in a "cargo bay".

Darien

Rocket Factory, almost antipodal to Rocket Lab, messed it all up in the Shetlands. Scotland since (by law) 1707 is not independent of England so shares its Civil Aviation Authority. Which Authority, being British, is astonishingly nasty as this planet's bureaucracies go, much worse than our FAA. So: why can't Scotland speed up their spacery?

The Rosinante reviews actually mention this, those books being musings about South Sea Bubble schemes. The Scots were deeply implicated in such, John Law having messed up the French monarchy, terminally. Less known (to me) is how the Scots had messed up their own Glasgow-Edinburgh band of Britain. This was the Darien scheme.

Back in the 1600s, pretty much all the European nations (excepting Portugal) were planting colonies and settlements all over "The West Indies", so-called. This region expanded from La Florida (as defined in the Madrid peace 1670) all the way to Panama. Spain could not control all these coasts. The French gobbled western Saint-Domingue and Louisiana; the Dutch had substantial islands as well, and even the Swedes and Latvians got into the game.

So: Panama. The famous captain Morgan - a Welshman - had done a famous raid upon a Spanish fort over there. As of the last decade of the 1600s, a good patch of Panama had gone uninhabited by The White Man. At the time the Scots were feeling some economic pain and figured, hey, why not us?

Scotland and England were united under a common royal family, the Stuarts, of Breton descent but with a long history as Scottish kings and a shorter one over England. William of Orange had taken over both lands, being William II of Scotland (III of England - its second conqueror, mayhap). When the Scots wanted a colony, William - neither Scottish nor English himself - didn't much want to do it, but agreed to it.

If the Scots had paid any attention, they might have asked, why, two centuries after Columbus, nobody else had hit up this coast yet. We now know this region as The Darien Gap. It is arguably the second worst span between the oceans, vying only with the Drake Passage. We wouldn't see a Panama Canal until the nineteenth century I think. Even today the Darien Gap has no highways, because a highway simply cannot be built in this mountainous insect-infested diseased jungle. South Americans get killed there on the regular.

Long story short - I haven't read a history beyond la wik - 80% of these settlers died and everyone else noped out back to Scotland. Scotland now had NO MONEY NO MONEY NO MONEY. We're no longer talking Caribbean Age Of Exploration; we're now onto This Time Is Different. The Act of Union in AD 1707 would be written on English terms, by the London Parliament under a foreign king.

Gilliland, whose name is French, may not have known about the Darien debacle, but assuredly was familiar with John Law at least. Space exploration could mean space speculation, and the latter is a grave of nationstates.