Elegy for an Iconoclast: Martin Bernal

So, as the year was wrapping up I got to thinking about who might be the most interesting person to have died in 2013. Some passings got a lot of attention, like that of Mandela and Peter O'Toole. One that got almost no attention was the death of historian Martin Bernal (I didn't learn about it myself until September, more than two months after the event, and only then because a friend in England who knew of my interest in Bernal's work passed along the news*).

I have a fondness for iconoclasts, scholars who come up with an idea out of left field that explains things the standard theory about their field don't cover. They ask the right questions, though they may not come up with the right answers (the late great Thor Heyerdahl being a prime example). It's also a good way to keep up to date, especially given that sometimes things we were taught were true back in school (e.g., that dinosaurs are extinct) aren't true anymore.**

In Bernal's case, he started with a very simple thesis that seems self-evident: that classical Greek civilization did not create itself out of nothing but was heavily influenced by the two great civilizations and cultures that dominated that part of the world (the eastern Mediterranean) before the rise of Greece: first Egypt (particularly in the time of the Middle and New Kingdoms) and then later Phoenicia (from whom they derived the alphabet). He suggested this influence took many forms -- most interestingly, drawing parallels between Egyptian gods and what became the Greek pantheon. Most controversially, he pointed out that although Greek is an IndoEuropean language, only some 40% of Greek words can be traced back to an IndoEuropean root.*** The traditional solution to this problem was to postulate that the remaining 60% derived from an unknown people ("the Pelasgians") who'd lived in the Aegean before the Greeks, whom they conquered and whose language heavily influenced their own. Bernal suggests instead that a large proportion of the non-IndoEuropean words derive from Egyptian and Phoenician, borrowed along with the trade goods and concepts that accompanied them.

This proposal led to a firestorm of controversy, which settled into a predictable pattern: Bernal would publish a volume making a number of claims,**** the book would be denounced in whole and in specifics, and Bernal would respond in detail to the attacks. Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers even put together a five-hundred-page collection devoted entirely to essays attacking Bernal's ideas (BLACK ATHENA REVISITED), to which Bernal responded with an equally lengthy point-by-point rejoinder (BLACK ATHENA WRITES BACK).

The fascinating thing about all this was not just that Bernal threw off some really interesting ideas (e.g., that the 'Philistines' were Mycenean Greeks) but that he changed his opponents more than they changed him. Over and over, if you follow through the debate, Bernal will challenge the conventional wisdom, to which The Powers That Be (e.g., Establishment figures like Lefkowitz) would react by (a) denying that his charge was true and (b) shifting their own position towards his, but stopping well short of his mark. I think Bernal himself was something of a gadfly who knew exactly what he was doing and deliberately cast his ideas into provocative form to elicit just this response.

The best example I can think of for this comes not in BLACK ATHENA itself but a side project, the book CADMEAN LETTERS, which investigates the origins of the Greek alphabet (and writing systems in the Mediterranean in general). Conventional wisdom held that the Greek alphabet dates from the 8th century BC (a century or more after Homer's time) or perhaps even later, and that other writing systems found in the western Mediterranean (e.g. Italy, Iberia) were later still. Bernal suggests that the date was sometime in the 14th or more probably 16th century BC and that the Iberian and Italian scripts derive not from Greek but from this early form of Phoenician. His argument bogs down in excruciating detail and sometimes impenetrable jargon ("there is no difficulty in a voiceless velar affricate-lateral simply delateralizing"), but his critics' response is telling: they indignantly denounce his 16th century BC date and adopt an 11th century BC date instead.

In the end, I'm sorry that Bernal got sidetracked in the linguistics (the least interesting part of his argument) and never wrote out in full his ideas about ways he thought Egyptian gods and mystery cults influenced Greek beliefs and practices: he discusses this briefly in the Introduction to his first volume but got diverted and never returned to fulfill his promise to devote a whole volume to it (which wd have been called THE MYSTERY OF THE SPHINX). Alas.

So, 'rest in peace' seems a little inappropriate to this prickly scholar, but I hope he got a certain satisfaction, in the end, from having weathered the storm. I suspect half his ideas will be taught as conventional wisdom in twenty years' time (probably without any reference to him), which I suspect wd have amused him no end. For my own part, I learned a lot reading him ( e.g., that Hebrew is a Canaanite language, and belongs to the same family tree as Egyptian and Ethiopian, or that Hebrew and Phoenician were mutually intelligible dialects of the same language) and I'm glad I discovered his books (through my friend Taum, who bought the first one and whose copy I inherited). But I'm still sorry we won't ever have that book about Egyptian myth and its dissemination.

--John R.
just finished: CADMEAN LETTERS (second reading)
audiobook: MOCKINGJAY (second time through)

*thanks Charles!
**it's now generally accepted that birds are not just direct descendents of dinosaurs but actual living dinosaurs themselves.
***similarly, English is a Germanic language but has borrowed so heavily from Latin and especially French that Germanic words actually make up less than half of our vocabulary.
****BLACK ATHENA eventually ran to three volumes, some two thousand pages in all, but Bernal's entire argument can be found just by reading the seventy page Introduction to the first volume, which summarizes the whole.

We Go to See the Pharaoh

So, yesterday we celebrated our anniversary by taking the day off and heading down to the Pacific Science Center (part of the 1962 World's Fair complex, a little north and west of the base of the Space Needle). We've been there once before, a few years back, to see Lucy*; seems we only go there to see really old corpses.

We'd planned to see the Imax film about the pharaohs, then take in the exhibition, but traffic was bad, so that we arrived after the film's start time. Not to worry; the good folks there shifted our times around so we cd go into the Tut exhibit at 12 rather than 12.30 and the film afterwards, starting at 2.30.

Just before going into the exhibit we all watched a short film narrated by Harrison Ford, famous for playing an old tomb robber (which, given what we were about to see, seemed wholly appropriate). Then it was into the exhibit itself. Janice and I had given a pass on the audio tour with headphones; recently we've noticed how it seduces you into a rhythm: pause in front of item, listen to audiotrack, move to next time, repeat. We had a much better experience wandering around, looking at the items in whatever order made sense at the time.

One of the great things about this exhibit, paradoxically, is that there aren't too many items on display. That's not to say there weren't a lot, but that they weren't all crowded together. Instead, the statues were out in the open, surrounded by don't-cross-this-line cords that nonetheless let you get pretty close (a great help, when you're eyesight's not what it could be). Even better, you could walk all the way around almost every item on exhibit, which meant you could compare profiles of statues, see what was carved on the back of a stele, &c.

My favorite item, by far, was a colossal statue of Akhenaten; the bottom half was missing, but they'd mounted it high enough so the king's long, narrow face looked down on us from the appropriate height. Don't think I've ever seen any of the Amarna revolution art in person before, and it was breathtaking. My next favorite, predictably enough, was the decorated stone box containing the remains of Prince Thutmose (Akhenaten's older brother)'s cat. There were three depictions of the cat itself, one in mummified form, and another of it facing a little table piled with nom (including what looks like a whole duck -- this was apparently one well-fed cat). I'm certain the cat's name must be carved among all the hieroglyphs running up and down the box, but no translation was provided, either in the signage nor on the postcard or souvenir book.**

There were many, many other wonderful things to see -- such as a statue of Khafre, builder of the second Great Pyramid of Giza and also, perhaps even more significant, of the Sphinx, which he had carved with his own features -- thus looking at this statue is a great way to see how the Sphinx originally looked, before forty-five centuries or so of wear and tear had their way with it. Side by side with this statue was one of his son Menkaure, builder of the third (and smallest) pyramid of the three. I looked around for one of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid itself, but didn't find one -- then remembered that only a single image of him survives, a little statuette a few inches high, and no doubt far too precious to go out on the road like this.

Another striking item was a head of an Amarna princess with a bizarrely elongated skull. That this was clearly deliberate was shown by another piece in the next room that showed a charioteer with the same mis-shapened skull. Was this the result of deliberate manipulation of infant's skulls to produce a desired effect, as is still done in some countries in the world today, or an artistic effect, or what? V. odd.

Wandering around an exhibit like this, I was v. much struck by how little distance separates us from the people of pharaonic times: the bed, the chair, the sandals, the pretty little gold cup. Things that initially seem odd on second thought aren't that different at all -- for example, there was a statue of one princess who became became a priestess and was said to have married the god: I've known nuns in my time, who undergo a ceremony to become Brides of Christ. The uncomfortable side of this is that while it's all well and good to move statues around, you can't enter the final rooms of the exhibit -- the ones dedicated to Tutankhamun himself -- without being aware you're surrounded by things looted from a tomb. The unwrapped mummy at the very end of the exhibit is an exact replica of the real thing, which is thankfully still in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings -- but I cdn't look at it without thinking of the flowers (not mentioned here) his widow and friends and family strewed on the real mummy before closing the innermost coffin for the last time. Putting a flower in the coffin when saying farewell to a loved one: something people still do today.

All in all, a wonderful exhibit; one of the most visitor-friendly and satisfying I've ever been to. That makes the second Egyptian museum visit of the year, the first having been to the Carnegie when we were in Pittsburgh last month. That display was mainly pots (many of them pre-dynastic) and tools and jewelry, plus a few late-era mummies in mummy-cases near the end. So that collection was focused more towards relatively ordinary people, while the Tut exhibit was pharaohs and family and nobles.

Next up will be the British Museum and the Flinders Petrie (which turns out not to be in Oxford at all, as I'd thought, but at University College London -- not that far from where we'll be staying, fact.***

After that, we moseyed over to the Imax (only the third Imax film I've ever seen, with one of the other two having been on my only previous visit to the Pacific Science Center) -- this one focused more on the royal mummy cache than Tutankhamun; it was distinguished mainly by being narrated by Christopher Lee and by the actress playing Nefertiti being able to walk slinkily in desert sand. That, and one sequence where it showed the face of pharaoh after pharoah and then immediately cut to the temple or monuments or complex that particularly king had constructed.

A short snack later, and we were off to get stuck in traffic (fifty minutes to get from the parking garage to the interstate, which isn't really that far (maybe a mile or so). A short rest, and then meeting up with friends for a quiet, enjoyable meal in view of the sun setting over the Sound. V. nice!

So, if you're at all interested in Ancient Egypt and live in or will be passing through the Seattle area, this exhibit is well worth visiting. Esp. considering how rarely material like this leaves Egpyt. The official name of the exhibit is "TUTANKHAMUN: THE GOLDEN KING AND THE GREAT PHARAOHS", and it's scheduled to stay at in Seattle until January 2013.

And now we're even toying with the idea of revisiting the Field Museum's ancient Egypt display -- probably the single one we're most familiar with, from earlier visits back when we used to live in Wisconsin -- when we're back in the area for my talk at Marquette in October. That'd be five Egyptian exhibits in one year, which sounds pretty good to me. We'll see what we can manage when the time comes.

--John R.

*with Janice's friend Patty, owner of Henry, himself the subject of a previous post.

**I was right: the cat's name was Ta-Miaut ("The She-Cat"); apparently Prince Thutmose was the literal sort. Here's a link to a site showing the cat's box from all directions; the only thing you miss from this is the rich yellow-brown gold color of the box itself. For that, take a look at the second link below as well and scroll down to the bottom of the first page:

(1) http://www.mafdet.org/tA-Miaut.html

(2) http://carlos.emory.edu/PDF/Classroom%20TUTorial_Thutmose's%20Cat.pdf

***while we're there, I'll have to go by and pay my respects to Jeremy Bentham, if he's still in his glass box (as he was when I was there in '81).

The New Arrivals (1st of 2)

So, got back from the trip to Pennsylvania* to find three new items had arrived in two packages while we were gone.

The two that came together were two of Steve Winter's little Old School adventures he's written for the North Texas PRG Con held in the Dallas/Fort Worth area each year. I found out about last year's too late to get copies (they're released in v. small print runs and apparently sold only on RPG Marketplace, where I didn't have an account**), but thanks to a head's up from Steve was luckier this time around.

The first, THE TOMB OF AMEMNES (a D&D Basic/Expert adventure) we'd played through a few months back, an Egyptian-themed adventure where the characters explore a pyramid complex (Nithian I think in Steve's original, though we pretty much ignored all that Hollow World stuff). It was a good one; when he ran it, Steve had us jumping at shadows and second-guessing ourselves into assuming the things we faced there were much more powerful than they really were, with no doubt amusing (to him) results when we wound up being caught flat-footed by the real menace. I enjoyed it thoroughly, as might have been guessed, given my love for all things Egyptian (did I mention that we swung by the Carnegie while in Pittsburgh in order to see the Egypt exhibit there? Or that we're hoping later this month to see the King Tut travelling exhibit that's here in Seattle? Or to take in the Egyptology rooms in the British Museum and, I hope, Flinders Petrie's collection in Oxford when we're in England this fall?)***

The second, THE DEATH OF TLANGESHAN, is that rarest of rpg things, an EMPIRE OF THE PETAL THRONE adventure. Such are rare indeed: I can only think of one offhand, published by Judges' Guild; company after company keeps re-releasing the setting books for Barker's strange world,**** but adventures to play in it are vanishingly scarce. I have the original boxed set from The Dawn of Time (1975), though I only got a chance to play it a year or two ago -- where we died in droves; we were lucky that one character (mine) was a minor noble, and hence brought along so many minions that we had enough to keep replacing player characters with. Steve has told me it's inspired by a Clark Ashton Smith story (always a good thing); obviously I haven't read through this adventure yet, since I hope to play it first -- though it might be a while, given the D&D Next playtest and ongoing Cthulhu campaigns.

(continued in next post)

-----------------------------------------------------

*which went fine for us, but seemed cursed for various of our friends we'd gone to see, in that mechanical malfunctions kept befalling them: an airplane that cdn't take off because of a flaw in the cabin door's lock, the so-called 'land hurricane that brought on a total power failure in the DC area (bad news to those on breathing machines with a four-hour battery), and (most dramatic of all) a car catching on fire. While being driven. Makes our oven catching on fire, calling 911, and my using an extinguisher in earnest for the first time seems fairly mild in context.

**which is probably just as well, given the amazing rarities they have up for sale. Things I've only ever read about on acanum.com you can actually buy here, if you (a) have the money and (b) don't have other things you need to spend it on, like rent or a mortgage.

***"one of the greatest collections of Egyptian . . . archaeology in the world", according to their own website.

****which is odd, when you think about it, since players for the setting are practically non-existent.

****I'd hoped we might be able to make it to Lord Carnarven's house (the place where they film DOWNTON ABBEY), to see the goodies he stole from Tutankhamen's tomb that were quietly salted away for decades (as I hear the story, his secret gallery was rediscovered in the 1970s or 80s), but apparently that country estate is hard to reach via public transportation (which makes sense, being a country house).

Today's Word: Genizah

So, a week or two back Janice saw an article in the local (e)paper that she thought wd interest me, how a local author was going to do a reading about his new book in an area bookstore.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2013865258_br07sacred.html

Since the topic was one I've been interested in for years -- I suppose it's fifteen years or so since I first heard about the Cairo Genizah, back when I was working for Gareth Stevens* -- we decided to brave the dark and the rain for a long drive (about thirty miles each way) up to Third Place Books after work that evening to see the author do a reading

I'd never been to, or even heard of, Third Place Books before, and I have to say I was impressed. We had a few minutes before the Reading began, so I took the time to poke around and found a modern translation of Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH I'd been looking for, along with a reasonably good Tolkien section.** One good idea they have that I'd like to see put into practice elsewhere is that used and new books by the same author are shelved together. As usual in a good bookstore, I had to restrain myself, but I not only left w. two books from that first visit but when I came back two days later (to retrieve the scarf I'd inadvertently left behind under my chair) I picked up two more: POE ABROAD (which reviews Poe's foreign reputation country-by-country***) -- an impulse buy I knew I'd regret not picking up -- and a mystery novel for light reading: Rhys Bowen's ROYAL FLUSH, one of her 'royal spyness' series**** The cafe/food court alongside the bookstore makes for a pretty good away-from-home place to work w. a laptop, I discovered on this second visit, though I was somewhat thrown off my game when a gospel choir started up nearby (apparently the food-court stage hosts a lot of events on weekends).

In any case, the presentation soon started, and turned out to be a talk rather than a reading per se. That was fine by me: I'd never been able to find out much about the genizah, mainly because I cd never remember the name and didn't know how to pronounce it, so I was glad to finally have the chance to learn more than what I'd been able to gather from passing references over the years.

For those unfamiliar w. the story, there's a longstanding tradition in medieval Judaism against throwing away sacred books. So, instead of tossing worn out scriptures or prayerbooks in the trash, the synagogue in Cairo had an opening in the wall through which old writings could be pushed into the storage room beyond, rather like the 'book return' slot beside most public library doors. Except in this case, the room beyond was unusually large, and the papers deposited there (over the course of several centuries) were left undisturbed until modern times. I'll let you read Rabbi Glickman's book, SACRED TREASURE: THE CAIRO GENIZAH, if you want the details on just how they were rediscovered and brought to scholars' attention, what treasures were eventually recovered from among its more than 300,000 pages of worn-out old manuscripts (handwritten letters from Moses Maimonides, pages from the Hebrew original of a Deuterocanonical book only known to survive in Greek translation, &c); it's quite a story.

The only discordant note was the presenter's rather dismissive attitude towards the remarkable Gibson/Lewis sisters, the ones who actually deserve the lion's share of the credit for the discovery (they also earlier discovered the CODEX SINAITICUS, now in the British Museum*****). Janice had earlier read what she tells me is a really good book about the sisters:

http://www.amazon.com/Sisters-Sinai-Adventurers-Discovered-Gospels/dp/1400041333

That, and someone behind me who seemed upset that Rabbi Glickman said that the Jewish community in medieval Cairo was relatively fortunate, in that they were spared the pogroms and waves of persecutions their co-religionists in Europe were periodically subjected to (he rose during the question-&-answer period to assert vigorously that it'd been "no Paradise" -- e.g., they'd had to pay special not-a-Muslim taxes -- but then no one ever said it was). In fact, the same person had started to voice some objection out loud earlier in the presentation, when Glickman said the reason this genizah had survived so long was that anti-semetism in the Muslim world was a relatively modern development, but had subsided when he went on to talk about the expulsion of Muslims from what is now Israel being matched by the suppression and destruction of Jewish communities around the Mid-east, some of them hundreds if not thousands of years old.

All in all, a v. pleasant evening. I ended up being lucky enough to buy the last copy the bookstore had of the book, which I got the author to sign. I'm looking forward to reading it and finally getting the whole story about this remarkable stash. Having bought a good book on the Dead Sea Scrolls a while back, and now having this on the Genizah's contents, I suppose I'll need to start looking for one on the third of the remarkable Mid-east document recoveries, the Nag Hammadi texts.

Oh, and something I didn't realize until afterwards is that I think this marks the first time I've met a Rabbi. About time! Better late than never, I suppose.

--John R.

current/recent reading: ROYAL FLUSH by Rhys Bowen (a 'royal spyness' mysthery) [#2889], THE THREE COFFINS by John Dickson Carr (a Dr. Gideon Fell mystery) [#2890], and Le Guin's CHEEK & JOWL (in progress)

current audiobook: New Testament epistles (finally done with Paul, who's given to too many senior moments)

................................

*probably while fact-checking the backmatter of their CHILDREN OF THE WORLD: EGYPT.

**I later realized it was somewhat better when I saw the 'collector's items' shelved had several of the HME volumes, along w. the Folio Society LotR set.

***turns out his popularity took a big downturn in Maoist China. Who knew?

**** set in the early 1930s in which the thirty-fourth in line for the British throne, the impoverished sister of a duke, gets assigned odd jobs and tricky tasks by the royal family -- such as, in this case, trying to keep apart the Crown Prince and the American, Mrs. Simpson, he's currently in hot pursuit of.

*****and hence now one of the most famous stolen books in the world

UPDATE/CORRECTION (1/20-11):

Thanks to one of the comments, I now see that what I heard as 'Codex Sinaiticus' must in fact be the Codex Syriaticus, also known as the Old Syriac, or the Syriac Sinaitic, among other names; Glickman (p.48-49) calls it "the Lewis Codex" and "the Sinaitic Palimpsest". It sounds quite interesting -- as interesting in fact as the Codex Sinaiticus itself. So it was a fortuitous error, for me at least. -- JDR

EGYPT part three: THE RED PYRAMID (spoilers)

(con't)

I see I've let some time lapse since last posting, due to an exigent deadline. Rather than a longer lag, let me wrap up the Egypt thread for now with a brief note about another book I just read, Rich Riordan's THE RED PYRAMID.

As the first book in the KANE CHRONICLES, this starts off a new series for Riordan that essentially allows him to do for Egyptian mythology what his Percy Jackson series (THE LIGHTNING THIEF et al) did for Greek myth: presenting the discovery by apparently ordinary modern-day kids that because of their bloodlines they have strange powers that get them wrapped up in power struggles involving vast entities (gods and monsters). It differs from his main series in two interesting ways:

first, while he keeps to the first person point-of-view that's such a mark of his Percy Jackson books, here he has a pair of narrators who trade off, chapter by chapter, giving two distinct 'voices' and versions of events.

second, while part of a series this is essentially a stand-alone novel. It's clear that this more closely resembles Terry Pratchett's DISCWORLD, where he can write as many novels as he wants that share the same setting, rather than the Harry-Potterish model of his earlier series, which focuses on the continuing adventures of a specific hero and his friends.

All in all, I'd have to say it worked for me. Riordan has a strange ability to get the reader to underestimate him. You think you see where things are going, major plot-points signaled a mile off, and then when you get there he turns out to be more subtle and tricky than you'd expected. I think this may be a carry-over from his having been a mystery writer before he shifted focus to the world of young-adult novels. I also thought it telling that, at my recent visit to Marquette, when checking back into the library after lunch, I noticed the student at the entry checkpoint was reading THE RED PYRAMID, which she praised as a good book when I asked about it. After which I learned that both Richard and Jim had read and enjoyed it, as had Jim's teenaged son. So Riordan is definitely doing something right to be able to appear to a diverse audience of young adults, college-age students, and middling-aged longtime fans of fantasy.

So, I'm glad to see Riordan trying a variation on his formula before his books get too, well, formulaic. I think this one succeeds. There's one really funny spot in particular where a mentor of the main characters looks over at Manhattan and says they (the people in the book connected with the gods of Egypt) never go over there; that island has gods of its own. One more thing I thought well done is that the details of the book's cover are actually quite significant, in a way I can't reveal without spoilers.

(begin spoiler space)

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

(end spoiler space)

Riordan does do one thing interesting here: his protagonists, the brother-sister team of Carter (age 14) and Sadie (age 12) Kane, are African-American (or, rather, African-English/American).

Carter takes after his father, who is black, and Sadie after her mother, who was white. The cover art does a good job of presenting a dramatic scene showing the heroes while having them face away in such a pose as hides their ethnicity. Interesting. The book itself also contains a few passing references to how, now that Carter is growing up, he has to be careful to dress in non-threatening ways to avoid trouble -- something that becomes a significant complication to the plot at one point. Riordan doesn't make a big deal about this but he does include it as a simple, unfair, fact of life. Again, interesting, and I think really well done. Kudos.

--JDR

current reading: THE PAPYRUS OF ANI, A CAT'S LIFE

current audiobook: HITCH 22.

Miriam Lichtheim (EGYPT, part two)

EGYPT, con't

(2)

One of the things reading PHARAOH'S FLOWERS did was reminded me of Miriam Lichtheim's* three-volume set of scrupulous translations ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LITERATURE. I've had this set for quite a while, and enjoyed reading it v. much; I'm looking forward to re-reading it at some point after I've done some more background reading, the better to appreciate it (e.g., reading the whole of THE BOOK OF GOING FORTH BY DAY). In the meantime, I enjoy dipping into them now and again.

Of these, Vol. I I inherited from Taum; Vol II I bought about five years later at the long-vanished Blake's Books in Milw, and Vol III I thought I'd picked up at the museum store at the Field Museum next to their impressive Egypt room, but I've written in it that it was one of my earliest purchases on amazon.com--so either my memory is faulty or I must have seen it in the museum store on my first visit there, passed on it, later regretted having not picked it up when I had the chance, and then not been able to find it again on my second visit.

In any case, Lichtheim's series covers everything from Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts (which fall into what we think of today as 'THE BOOK OF THE DEAD') to brief autobiographies, hymns, cosmogonical myths, wonder stories, wisdom literature (think Proverbs), even love poems. One of my favorite bits was an inscription of a pharaoh who, on a long trip across the desert, got thirsty. He ordered that a well be dug so others crossing that desert after him shdn't have to suffer like that, and put up a marker with the inscription to explain why the way-station was there. Now that's my kind of pharaoh.

What particularly struck me this time I looked into the books were the love poems included in her second volume (THE MIDDLE KINGDOM). One of these is so short and simple as to be essentially timeless: a mere six lines from Papyrus Harris 500:

My heart thought of my love of you

When half of my hair was braided;

I came at a run to find you

And neglected my hairdo.

Now if you let me braid my hair

I shall be ready in a moment.

(Lichtheim, Vol. II, p. 191)

That sounds to me v. like one of Ezra Pound's translations from the Chinese. Another, also from the same papyrus, is quite different:

I shall lie down at home

And pretend to be ill;

Then enter the neighbors to see me,

Then comes my beloved** with them.

She will make the physicians unneeded

She understands my illness!

--I found this one striking for its similarity to courtly romance motifs C. S. Lewis claimed (in THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE) to have been the invention of the 12th century. I suspect the attitudes described were already old when those lines were written down, some three thousand years ago. People don't change much.

Speaking of which, another piece included in the same volume is the wonder tale The Two Brothers, which Tolkien famously evoked in ON FAIRY-STORIES (see Anderson/Flieger p. 37 et al). This comes from Papyrus D'Orbiney, and it's rather a nice touch that we actually know who wrote this papyrus -- that is, the name of the scribe, Ennana, who carefully copied it down near the end of what we know as the Nineteenth Dynasty.

--JDR

........

*the late Miriam Lichtheim, I shd say, since a quick check shows that she died a few years back at the age of ninety. Apparently she was a Turkish-Israeli Egyptologist: an interesting combination, and highly respected in the field.

**Lichtehim's original reads "sister" here, and she explains that "brother" or "sister" were terms of endearment between lovers in Egyptian custom. That strikes a somewhat creepy tone to the modern ear, however, so I made the substitution.

PHARAOH'S FLOWERS (EGYPT, part one)

So, while I seem to be in an Egyptological mood, I might as well take advantage of it to make three quick related posts.

(1) One of the books I took with me to read on my recent trip (#II.2874) was PHARAOH'S FLOWERS: THE BOTANICAL TREASURES OF TUTANKHAMUN by F. Nigel Hepper [2nd ed, 2009], a beautifully illustrated little book. I'd seen this in one of the book catalogues I've been getting ever since I started going to Kalamazoo, clipped it out, and then amazingly enough not lost the reference in the intervening months before I finally got around to ordering it.

It turns out to be very much the sort of book you'll really like if you like books like this, and I most definitely do. Basically Hepper, a researcher at the Kew Botanical Gardens, takes every kind of plant found within Tutankhamun's tomb (wood, spice, food, fiber) and explains whether it was native to Egypt (papyrus, willow, linen/flax), not native but capable of being grown there in carefully tended gardens or fields or orchards (cornflowers, wheat, olive trees, barley), or exotic imports (birch-bark, cedar of Lebannon, myrrh, frankincense). It was disappointing to learn that stories of seeds taken from the tomb being planted and sprouting are spurious. Like Hepper, I find myself curious about what persea fruit might taste like. And I enjoyed his story about the amazing discovery, a few years ago, of tiny grains of tobacco in some New Kingdom tombs. How cd this be, when tobacco is a New World plant? Turns out that (a) 19th century archeologists loved them their snuff and (b) our modern equipment for detecting and analyzing plant residue has become fantastically sophisticated. It was also interesting to learn that Egyptian beekeepers wore no sort of protective garments -- Hepper assumes they just had to suck up getting stung as part of the job; I suspect they simply used slow, gentle movements to avoid alarming their bees.

Of all the things found in the tomb, though, the one that surprised me the most was the discovery that King Tut liked watermelons. I had no idea they had watermelons (recognizably like the roundish ones still popular today) in ancient Egypt, but they found a batch of watermelon seeds in the tomb -- apparently the Egyptians liked to eat them like sunflower seeds.

The most moving thing of all, and the one biggest take-away from the book (aside from my ever-increasing admiration for ancient people's ingenuity in discovering food resources) are the flowers that were found in the innermost coffin, laid directly on the young king's body. It drove home, as nothing else does, that this is not 'an archeological sight' but a burial: it's not hard to picture the young widow placing them there just before the lid was put on for the last time, just as people still do today.

In short, a fascinating little book, lavishly illustrated (in both black & white and color). I might have to follow it up by searching down one of the books mentioned in its bibliography, Zohary & Hopf's THE DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS IN THE OLD WORLD [1993], assuming it's non-specialist enough to not be too opaque to a general reader.

--JDR

(con't)

Egypt

So, today I finally finished a forty-eight part lecture series, on two dozen cds, in four slipcases, courtesy of an extended loan from Jeff Grubb. It's one of the offerings from The Teaching Company, and a nice follow-up to the last one of theirs I borrowed, a joint history of Greece and Rome. I'd thought the lecturer of that series 'hearted' Greeks & Romans, but it was as nothing to Professor Bob Brier's enthusiasm for All Things Egyptian (ancient that is -- he covers the three thousand years from prehistory up to Cleopatra but ignores the last two milennia).  If you're interested in ancient Egypt but don't have an expert's knowledge, listening to this series is a good way to get sorted out who's who and what happened when, though I question Brier's judgment on some points (for example, his claim that Elizabeth Taylor's movie CLEOPATRA is extremely faithful to history). His enthusiasm is such that he ends by recommending mummy movies, mummy novels, tourist spots, societies you can join, and magazines to subscribe to to learn more.

My main take-away from this, oddly enough, is the fact that our word chemistry derives from Egypt: chemistry > alchemy > al-KMT, 'the Egyptian art'. That is, the best way the Greeks (and later Arabs) had for describing what we think of as chemistry was as that-thing-Egyptians-do. 

 

This is all the more interesting, because I just went back and re-read the chapters in BLACK ATHENA REVISITED (anti-Bernal) and BLACK ATHENA WRITES BACK (pro-Bernal) about Science. In the first book, Robert Palter tries to demolish the idea that the ancient Egyptians knew much about science, math (aside from some geometry), or astronomy -- certainly, he argues, far less than the Babylonians and incomparably less than the Greeks. Bernal counters that this was certainly not the Greek's opinion, and produces his own evidence of Egyptian achievement. 

Out of all this, the things that impressed me the most was the discovery that (1) our 12 month calendar of 365 days was an Egyptian innovation and (2) the Egyptians had a sign for "zero" (nfr, meaning 'beautiful') -- not a place-holder like our zero, but a tally-up-together sign signifying satisfaction when all the numbers in a column balanced and came out right (it was also used in architecture to mark a leveled surface). It was also rather nice to learn that Imhotep, who designed the world's first stone building, was incidentally the inventor of blueprints, which makes sense.

I was also struck by what seemed to be an impossibly high standard of evidence on Palter's part. For example, in one case, we have a statement by Aristotle that both the Mesopotamians and Egyptians compiled astronomical records of conjuctions. By great good luck, some of the Mesopotamian records (on baked clay tablets) actually survive. Rather than conclude that this shows Aristotle knew what he was talking about, Palter concludes that it shows the Egyptians never had any such records, since no astronomical papyri survive.

That in the end is what the whole argument comes down to: what do you do in situations where absolute proof is not possible? Rule out anything you can't document beyond a doubt? Construct a plausible scenario that fits the known facts but extrapolates beyond them? Establish a grey area which takes into account second-hand evidence? Here's Bernal's take on the matter:

"I contend that the demand for [absolute] proof is inappropriate in academic debate on such distant periods*. . . I believe that all that is required . . . is . . . not proof  but competitive plausibility".

In any case, I find myself hankering for a visit to a good museum's Ancient Egypt section.

--John R.

*[say, Minoan borrowings from Egyptian religion circa 1400 BC]