Month: August 2015

August 2015 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there.

Books

Non-Fiction

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich. Part of the New Oxford History of England.

“The Middle East: The Cradle of Civilisation Revealed” Stephen Bourke. Part of the Thames & Hudson Ancient Civilisations series.

Total: 2

Museums

Defining Beauty (Exhibition at the British Museum) – Greek sculpture as aesthetic objects.

Indigenous Australia Enduring Civilisation – Exhibition at the British Museum about Australian art and culture as a continuous thing before and after the British arrived.

Total: 2

Radio

Brunel – In Our Time episode about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Victorian engineer.

The Earth’s Core – In Our Time episode about what is known about the Earth’s core and how we know it.

Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty – In Our Time episode about the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci who went to China in the 16th Century.

Sappho – In Our Time episode about Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess.

Total: 4

Talks

“The Slaughter Court in Sety I Temple, Abydos” Mohammed Abu el-Yezid – talk at the August EEG meeting.

Total: 1

Trip

Egypt Holiday 2014: Walk from the Valley of the Kings to Deir el Medina.

Egypt Holiday 2014: Colossi of Memnon.

Egypt Holiday 2014: Mortuary Temple of Seti I.

Egypt Holiday 2014: Valley of the Queens.

Total: 4

In Our Time: The Earth’s Core

Despite being relatively close to us the inside of the Earth, and particularly the core of the Earth, is difficult to investigate. Primarily because we can’t just look at it – and the deepest mines or boreholes are only 10km deep which is tiny compared to the 6,000km that is the Earth’s radius. So everything needs to be logically deduced from the readings that we can take. Discussing what we know about the Earth’s core and how we know it on In Our Time were Stephen Blundell (University of Oxford), Arwen Deuss (Utrecht University) and Simon Redfern (University of Cambridge).

Prior to the 19th Century the assumption was that the Earth was the same all the way through – rocks where we can see, so rocks everywhere. But in the 19th Century scientists realised that the theory of gravity required a denser Earth than is possible if it’s just rocks and so they postulated an iron core. This was also the time when scientists began to be interested in how the Earth was formed. The consensus at the time was that it formed by condensation out of a hot cloud, and it was still cooling. This explained (at a time when radioactivity wasn’t known) why it got warmer the further you went underground. So at the time the best explanation for the structure of the Earth was that it had a hot liquid iron rich core surrounded by a rocky shell.

However even in the 19th Century it was clear that there were problems with this explanation. If you spin an uncooked egg, it wobbles – so why doesn’t the earth? During the 20th Century it began to be postulated that the core was two phase – a solid core with a liquid coating. One of the experts on the programme, Arwen Deuss, used seismological readings to show that this was the case. When there is an earthquake seismographs on the other side of the Earth detect the shockwaves that have travelled through the planet. Before Deuss’s work it was thought that there was a shadowzone where no waves were detected because they had failed to pass directly through the centre of the Earth – so it was thought that the core was a different phase to the rest of the planet and the waves couldn’t travel through it. Deuss showed that there are very faint delayed waves detectable in that shadow zone, and that mathematically the best model to describe how these waves are delayed and how they are diminished is one where the core is solid but it is surrounded by liquid. The seismic waves cannot travel through liquid in the same state as they travel through solid, and each transition between states uses up some of the energy in the wave. A wave that travels directly through the core will transition from solid to liquid to solid to liquid and lastly to solid again. As well as each transition using up energy it takes time (hence the delay) and changes direction (so the waves aren’t in quite the same places you’d expect if they had no transitions).

The current theory is that the inner core is an iron crystal that is forming out of a less pure molten iron fluid around it. This iron crystal is about the size of the Moon, a fact which I find mind-boggling. The crystal is still growing and this is not a consistent process, sometimes it grows more quickly and sometimes more slowly. The experts said there is evidence of some sort of discontinuity that formed 500 million years ago, but no-one knows what caused it. The crystal is also split into two pieces. One of the experts made an analogy with the land/sea divide up here on the crust, but I didn’t really follow that. The crystal is also different in the north/south direction as compared to the east/west direction – seismic waves take longer to travel east & west than they do north & south. It’s not known why this is: perhaps to do with crystal alignment, or perhaps it tells us something about the shape of the core.

This solid iron crystal is rotating within the liquid it sits in, I think at a slightly different (quicker?) speed than the whole of the Earth rotates. It’s this rotation that is the cause of our magnetic field (which is another piece of evidence in favour of the two phase theory). And the magnetic field is what protects us from cosmic radiation so in some sense you can say that the two-phase spinning core of the Earth is why there is life on Earth. The current theory is that Mars and Venus have cores that are too solid or too small to generate enough of a magnetic field to protect against radiation. That’s an untested hypothesis, and so Deuss would like to put seismographs on one (or both) of the other planets to see what she can detect about their internal structure.

Bragg closed up the programme by attempting to encourage them to talk about practical uses that have come out of this blue-skies research – but it seems at the moment this is still in the blue-skies phase.

Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation (British Museum Exhibition)

In June we visited the Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation exhibition at the British Museum. The premise of the exhibition was to display the art and showcase the culture of the indigenous peoples of mainland Australia & the Torres Straits Islands from their own perspective. Whilst the later sections of the exhibition inevitably looked at the impact of the arrival of the British the exhibition didn’t begin there as if it was the British discovery of the continent that mattered. Instead it started with the art & traditions that had existed for millennia before that.

The opening section of the exhibition had two purposes – it was trying to convey a sense of the scale and diversity of the continent, and it was introducing the key concept of country. It’s easy (from the perspective of all the way over here) to think of modern White Australia as a monolithic entity – beaches, barbies, sunshine, ex-pats & their descendents. So down one wall of the first section of the exhibition was a series of exhibits to point out the diversity in terms of environment and culture across the continent. This included a set of videos of different parts of Australia, with Aboriginal people walking through them or living in them. It also included a map of Australia divided up by the languages spoken at the time the first Western explorers came to the continent. The other side of this area had several pieces of art by several different groups of Aboriginal people. These showcased the variety of styles across the continent, and also began to introduce the idea of country.

The Aboriginal idea that we translate as the word “country” isn’t the same as the normal meaning of the English word, it’s not country like England is a country. The concept isn’t about a nation-state or a large scale political division of land, nor is it a sort of land (as in countryside). It includes not only land but also the people, animals, plants and other resources on that piece of land. It also includes the myths and the stories associated with that place. There’s a sense of ownership to it – a person or a family has “their country” – but that goes both ways, the people also belong to the land as much as the land belongs to them. A lot (all?) of the artwork in the exhibition was also tightly linked to the country of the artist(s). The art is a visual representation of the mythology and the geography of country. Several of the larger artworks were created by more than one artist – this is because each person paints their own country so as a story or artwork moves across different countries different people are involved. The exact meanings of the symbolism in the art will also only be known to the people whose country it is. Only the senior members of those people will know all the nuances – possibly not even then, as men and women may have different knowledge of their country. Which meant that while some things were explained in the exhibition labels other things were noted as something private to the artists.

I’m not sure I’ve explained country very well – it feels slippery to me because it’s a completely different way of looking at the universe so neither I nor the language I use have the right words for the concepts. I’m also not personally particularly attached to places – less so than J, for instance – so I only grasp the idea on an intellectual level not an emotional one. Starting the exhibition with country as the key idea helped to put the last part of the exhibition – after the arrival of the Westerners – into sharper relief. Taking land from Aboriginal people, displacing communities, taking and using up the resources of the land isn’t just about forced removal of property and inadequate compensation. It’s also damaging and breaking something fundamental about how people’s sense of self is structured.

The next two sections of the exhibition looked at using country (resources, trade) and tending country. Nobody’s country has every resource, so trade between countries and even outside the continent was an important part of the economy. And it was an economy of reciprocal gift-giving with expectations and understandings about obligation which wouldn’t necessarily (ever?) be spelt out – which lead to miscommunication once the British arrived. In order to make best use of the resources country needs to be tended both ritually and physically (although I suspect that’s a division that isn’t made). So this section of the exhibition included examples of ritual actions but also discussion of things like setting controlled fires to stimulate new growth of the local plant life. One of the exhibits was a photo of a chap in his ceremonial gear, sat on a chair taking a selfie with his iPad. While I was looking at it, I overheard a somewhat posh sounding older lady remarking to her companion “I suppose that’s one time when it would be permissible to take a selfie!” which made me laugh (not out loud tho).

At the centre point of the exhibition, marking the transition from the Aboriginal Australia to the Colonial Australia was a memorial pole. These pieces of art were once funerary pieces for individuals the artist & his or her community wanted to remember, but in more modern times they’ve changed to be less associated with a particular person. This one had two figures at the top, one on each side of the pole. Both figures were planting a staff which ran down the whole of the pole through the rest of the design. One of these figures is an important ancestor of the artist, and his staff represents the law of the indigenous people enforced on the land. The other figure represents Captain Cook planting the British flag and enforcing the law of Britain on the land. The artist hasn’t said which figure is which. It was a striking and thought provoking piece (once the symbolism was explained).

And so then the exhibition moved on to the era of British and White Australian rule over the continent. This was divided into two sections – first “encounters in country” which looked at the early settlement days, and then the exhibition finished with a look at post-independence Australia. The early settlement section had as one of its main themes how the indigenous people have been written out of the narrative of this period. Like the reports of explorers discovering new bits of the continent as if they’d gone out and walked alone through the wilderness. When actually they’d been taken by guides, along pre-existing trade routes to communities who they had negotiated to visit. And of course the claiming of the continent for Britain by Cook as it was “owned by nobody” when in actual fact every piece of land was somebody’s country. One of the most striking pieces of art in this section was a modern painting done in an old-fashioned Western style – the ship on the ocean with its sails aflutter, the beach and the heroic figure in 18th Century uniform clearly having just landed on virgin territory. And yet this is not Cook the intrepid Westerner, this is an Aboriginal man.

The last part of the exhibition was pretty grim viewing – it documented the ways in which the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have been treated as less than human since independence. Starting with the constitution of the new country which outright states that when you do a census you don’t count indigenous people. Until shockingly recently Indigenous people weren’t citizens – they were “wards of the state” who were much more restricted in what they were permitted to do, as if they were children. There was art in this section relating to the forced removal of people from their country, of the massacres of Aboriginal people and of the Lost Generation who were systematically removed from their families and adopted by White families to break the cultural ties of these children. Again the exhibition took care to remind us that Australia is not one monolithic place and there were many experiences of colonialism by different communities – in some cases these things were long enough ago that they are history; in others it has happened within living memory. Just before the end of the exhibition the timeline moved on to contemporary times, and highlighted both the ways that things are getting better and the debate within Aboriginal communities nowadays about their art in our museums. As the art and the artifacts are so closely linked to country some people feel that they shouldn’t be taken away and put in a museum somewhere else. But others feel that so long as there is respect for the meaning of the piece and so long as there is an attempt to educate the people who come to see it (not just “oh look at this exotic thing from foreign parts”) then it’s OK. I didn’t, however, really get the impression of enthusiasm for the idea from any of the stated positions … which made for a rather uncomfortable sensation having just walked through this exhibition.

As a sort of palette cleanser the exhibition finished with a short but charming video of a man who is one of the last master basket weavers of particular type of basket we’d seen earlier in the exhibition. We also went to a short talk that evening by one of the curators, Lissant Bolton, who gave us a sense of the artists who’d made some of the contemporary art we’d seen in the exhibition. One thing she said that stuck with me was that it was notable that when she was visiting Australia during the set up phase of the exhibition she would bring objects and they would reciprocate by taking her to country associated with them. A sort of micro-scale view of the difference in the two cultures.

In Our Time: Brunel

The name Isambard Kingdom Brunel conjures up thoughts of the Great Western Railway, and other successful engineering projects that are still well regarded today. But on the the In Our Time episode about him Julia Elton (former President of the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and Technology), Ben Marsden (University of Aberdeen) and Crosbie Smith (University of Kent) explained that this is not all there was to Brunel, and he wasn’t always as successful as his modern reputation suggests. His reputation during his lifetime was mixed – he was an innovator, but also prone to over-reach.

They started the programme by briefly discussing Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s father, Marc Isambard Brunel, who was born in France before the French Revolution. He fled to the US as a refugee during the Revolution, and subsequently moved to England. He married Sophia Kingdom, an English woman who he’d met in France during the Revolution. He was a highly successful engineer, and he educated his son to follow in his footsteps.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in England, and his early education was biased towards science, maths & engineering and came from his father. He was then sent to school to get a proper gentleman’s education to complement this (Greek, Latin and so on). Afterwards he spent some time abroad before returning to England to work as an engineer with his father. The big project that they were working on was a tunnel under the Thames river. This didn’t go as well as was initially hoped, although it was ultimately successful. The ground under the river is not very good for tunnelling through – instead of the clay they hoped for it was gravel. This meant that the progress of tunnelling operations was slow and also dangerous.

Brunel chafed at working in his father’s shadow and was very keen to make a name for himself independently. While he was in Bristol convalescing from an accident during work on the Thames Tunnel he got involved in a project to build a bridge there. This was funded by money left in someone’s will which had been invested until the interest earnt meant that it was enough to cover the project, and then there was a competition for the design of the bridge. Brunel put his own design in, and won – although the bridge that was built was a slight redesign of his idea, because a Grand Old Man of engineering (whose name I forget :/) said that Brunel’s design wouldn’t work. I’m not quite clear if this expert was right or not – bucking the conventional wisdom was to be a noticeable Brunel trait, and often he was right. His approach to engineering was a scientific one – to work from first principles, to experiment and to keep meticulous records. This could be a double edged sword, “the way things have always been done” is not necessarily wrong. This project also highlighted another of Brunel’s key traits – his showmanship. Despite the project running out of money before the bridge was finished, the grand opening still went ahead as Brunel planned.

As I said at the beginning of this post, the Great Western Railway is what I particularly remember Brunel for, and this was his next big project. Unsurprisingly, his winning bid flung out all the precedents for railway design and started over from scratch – much to Stephenson’s disgust. Brunel was aiming for the luxury end of the railway market and so ended up with a design incompatible with other parts of the evolving rail network – his track was a wider guage and his trains were larger than those in the rest of the country. Brunel was initially in charge not only of the engineering of the railway but also of the locomotives, and once again he started over from first principles. Sadly this was not a success, and an inquiry set up to investigate his failures ended by taking control of locomotive design away from him.

Having had overall success in his foray into railway engineering Brunel moved into ship building. This was a natural extension of the Great Western Railway – the idea being you’d travel from London to Bristol by GWR train and thence to the USA by a GWS ship. This project started out as a very nice example of the good in Brunel’s approach to engineering. Here conventional wisdom said that if you built a bigger steam ship it would sink, for what are in retrospect silly reasons. Brunel’s start from scratch approach meant that he challenged that assumption and discovered that big ships will float. This meant that Brunel’s ships could carry more fuel, and so weren’t cutting it quite so fine when crossing the Atlantic on a single tank of fuel.

But then he gets carried away and keeps increasing the size of the ships – not all of these larger ones were successful. Although I’m not sure if this was all down to bad design, or if bad luck also played a part – because once he had some bad luck then his mixed reputation would lead to people assuming it was obviously his fault. When his designs and business ventures worked, they worked pretty well, but as soon as something stopped working public confidence in his abilities dropped. And even when things did work there were always niggles and things that might’ve been better designed differently – like the railway that wasn’t compatible with the other networks. His reputation during his lifetime and immediately after his death was decidedly mixed.

One of the experts on the programme, Julia Elton, summed up Brunel’s modern reputation as fitting into a narrative we like – the lone heroic figure taking on the establishment and succeeding when they said he’d fail. She thinks that Stephenson was a much better engineer – but Brunel was a better showman. Brunel also kept diaries throughout his life – one set of personal ones, one set of engineering “lab books” – which meant that when his descendants wanted to promote his memory they had ample material to work with.

Defining Beauty (Exhibition at the British Museum)

Back in April J and I visited the Defining Beauty exhibition at the British Museum which finished in early July. It’s the only one of their exhibitions where I’ve been as ambivalent about it on the way out as I was on the way in – which says rather more about me than the exhibition, I think. The subject of the exhibition was Ancient Greek sculpture and the incredible impact it has had on the modern Western definition of beauty. And I’m afraid that when it comes to Greek sculpture I’m somewhat of a heretic – I find all those gleaming white idealised bodies rather … bland. Even as I grant that it has indeed had a major impact on the art of more modern times (modern here meaning in the last five or six hundred years) and a worthwhile subject for an exhibition.

(You might be asking why on earth I went to see it! But there’s been exhibitions at the British Museum in the past where I’ve not been enthused in advance but have been by the end, so it was worth a try. And as we’re Members we have free entry so it’s easy to pop into an exhibition just because it’s there.)

The exhibition opened with a bit of scene setting. Part of this was a map of the extent of the Greek world in Alexander the Great’s time (after he did his conquering bit) – despite knowing he conquered vast swathes of the known world I’m always a bit taken aback at how big that is on a map. The other piece of information that particularly struck me was that what’s known about Greek sculpture mostly comes from Roman copies of Greek originals. And one of the pieces in this room was Lely’s Venus (normally on display near the Assyrian Galleries in the BM), which is one of these Roman copies. The other sculptures in this introductory room illustrated the range of styles of sculpture – using three pieces by three different artists who were all training & active in the 5th Century BC. The variation came in whether they were interested in things like mathematically perfect proportions of bodies, or representing the fluidity of movement.

The first half of the next room was the stand out highlight of the exhibition for me. They had half a dozen replicas of sculptures painted as we think they would’ve been at the time. And given my “complaint” about this art form is that it strikes me as bland, well this was anything but. Perhaps a little garish, but so much more interesting. One of the pieces was a large (plaster replica of a) bronze of Athena – it’s easy to remind oneself that the dull green of bronze was once a shiny gold, but it’s quite another thing to see it. I also liked an Athene wearing her snake-trimmed cloak, in a vivid green with the snake heads picked out in colours. And did you know the Persians wore brightly coloured onesies? Me neither!

The next room looked at what made Greek art different from other contemporary (or just older) cultures art styles. One section was a compare and contrast with Egyptian and Cypriot sculpture – three statues in a row each of a young man striding forward, one from each culture. The Greek one was noticeably more natural in appearance, with the Egyptian and Cypriot ones looking very stiff and stilted in comparison. The Greek one was also naked, which came up again in more detail in the other compare & contrast – this time between Assyrian reliefs and Greek reliefs. Again the subject matter was similar, both reliefs were battle scenes – and again the Greek example had more fluidity and motion. The use and meaning of nudity was markedly different between the two cultures. In the Assyrian example it was the defeated prisoners who were naked – a sign of their low statues, shame & humiliation. In the Greek example the heroes are naked to show off their virility and their virtue.

The third room also had a few other themes, although they made slightly odd bedfellows. One of these was a case talking about women in Classical Greek art – most of what I remember from this is the juxtaposition of male nudity as virtue and women clothed for their virtue. There was also a section about representation of the gods, where the key point was that the gods were people. Impossibly beautiful, divine people, but people nonetheless.

The next room started with a look at representation of the stages of life, and ended with the erotic in art – again a slightly odd juxtaposition. The stages of life looked at were birth, marriage and death and my favourite piece in this section was a stunning representation of a baby. The labels here talked about how representation of childhood and children as they really were was a departure from previous art styles. The section on marriage was mostly concerned with how marriage was thought of for women – analogised with abduction (which I was previously aware was a trope) and with death. Having side by side pieces where women are moving from girlhood to wifehood as if they’d died next to gravestones for young warriors slain in battle was quite striking.

In the penultimate room we moved forward in time past the golden age of idealised beauty (or blandness, depending on taste) to sculptures that had more differentiation. Faces in particular began to look like real people – although quite probably not the person they’re were supposed to be. The room ended with a pair of pieces representing knucklebone players, with very different flavours. One of these was two girls playing a peaceful friendly game as a last hurrah before marriage and womanly respectability. And the other was the remains of piece where two boys had come to blows over a disagreement about the game. Only one of the boys was still intact, all that remained of the other was the arm that the first boy was biting – which made the piece very striking in a way the artist wouldnt’ve expected.

That room also had a case looking at the representations of (North?) Africans in Greek sculpture – sometimes as caricature, but sometimes in a more nuanced and human fashion. The piece that caught my eye here was a centrepiece for a table of an acrobat and a crocodile. This part of the room neatly segued into the start of the last room, which looked at the way that Greek art changed as it met the other cultures that Alexander the Great brought into the Hellenistic world – in particular India.

The exhibition finished with two large reclining male nudes which had a particular impact on the Renaissance. The thematic statement for the exhibition, if you will. These pieces when discovered changed the way artists represented bodies in Western art. Think of the way that Medieval art has these stiff clothes horses that don’t really look like they’d move like people, and then think of the art of Michaelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci and you’ll see what a difference this renewed interest in the idealised beauty of Greek sculpture had.

As I said at the beginning, this exhibition wasn’t really my cup of tea. Which doesn’t mean it was bad, far from it – just I’m a bit of an uncultured barbarian 😉 What I came away from it thinking was that I would like to see more of the painted replicas – knowing they were painted and seeing what they looked like are two very different things.

In Our Time: Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty

Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit priest who went to China in the 16th Century with the aim of converting the Chinese to Christianity. He wasn’t particularly successful in that goal, but he was influential on European attitudes to China & vice versa. Discussing him and his mission on In Our Time were Mary Laven (University of Cambridge), Craig Clunas (University of Oxford) and Anne Gerritsen (University of Warwick).

Ricci was born in the Papal States and educated by the Jesuits up to university age. He then went to Rome to study to become a lawyer, but soon decided to become Jesuit priest instead. The Jesuits were a fairly new order at the time, part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The central difference between them and the other orders was that they were directly obedient to the Pope. They vowed to travel wherever they were sent, making them more mobile than the monastic orders. Their raison d’être was to convert the world to Catholicism – as part of showing the superiority of their branch of the faith over the Protestant variant.

The Jesuits saw China as a chance to replicate the success of the conversion of South America, with a hope that perhaps they might even replicate the Spanish conquest of South America. Europeans at the time were aware of China, but it wasn’t a particularly well known country nor was it understood. Before the Ming Dynasty came to power (in 1368AD) there had started to be some trade and contact between Yuan China and Europe (c.f. Marco Polo, who I’m sure we listened to an In Our Time about but I can’t find a post writing about it). However when the Hongzhu Emperor came to power & founded the Ming Dynasty trade with the outside world was forbidden. In practice this didn’t stop contact between China and Europe, but it did reduce it significantly.

Ricci’s over-arching strategy was a tried and tested one for the Catholic Church, although he took some of it to further extremes that his superiors were happy with. His aim was to integrate himself into Chinese society and to make contact with the elite – the idea was that if you can convert the top (the Emperor in this case) then you will convert the whole country. Another part of the strategy was to make accommodations for the current beliefs of the people when explaining Christianity to them, to make it sound not so far from their pagan religion. The theological rationale for this was God had left “hints” in the pagan faiths so that the Catholics would be able to convert the pagans. And then presumably after converting the country the idea would be to tighten up the theology, but Ricci didn’t get anywhere near that far in the process.

When Ricci first entered the country the Buddhist faith seemed like a good point of entry to hook in his audience – so he dressed like a Buddhist monk, and his teaching made analogies to Buddhism. However as he slowly progressed through the country to Beijing he came to realise that Confucianism was more important in Chinese culture, and so began to dress like a Confucian scholar. He learnt Chinese, and invented a romanisation system so that he could write the words down for other Europeans to learn from.

His role as an analogue of a Confucian scholar dovetailed nicely with his purpose as a missionary – he met with Confucian mandarins to discuss philosophy and other learned subjects. One point of entry into scholarly society was his creation of a world map – he tactfully put China in the centre, flanked by Europe and the Americas. This was interesting to the Chinese as they didn’t know much about either Europe or the Americas, and let Ricci start talking about the Pope and Christianity too. He also translated books between Latin and Chinese so that knowledge flowed both ways between the cultures.

Ricci was successful in working his way across the country and in meeting the elite of Chinese society. He eventually was able to enter the Forbidden Palace and “meet” the Emperor – this wasn’t an actual meeting, the Emperor didn’t do such things, but Ricci was able to meet senior officials and courtiers (and eunuchs) several times. From the Emperor’s perspective this was part of the normal diplomatic business – a foreigner arriving to pay his respects to the Emperor and tell him how wonderful he was. There was not the chance that Ricci had hoped for to interest the Emperor in Christianity.

Ricci used the accommodations strategy that the Church endorsed, but took it much further than his superiors would’ve preferred. He wrote a book in Chinese comparing Christianity and Confucianism in order to point out how similar they were. And in this book the life, death and resurrection of Christ were relegated to a sort of footnote – covered in a single paragraph near the end. When the Pope eventually found out about this demotion of such a crucial part of the Christian faith he was not pleased with Ricci.

The biggest stumbling block for the conversion of the Chinese was the Christian insistence on exclusivity – the Chinese culture was very tolerant of multiple religions and generally people would use appropriate rituals from more than one religion during the course of their lives. The Christian idea that you should just worship one God was alien to them. While Ricci did have some small success in converting people (not that many tho) they didn’t always give up their other rituals and observances. Long after Ricci’s death this was to cause tension between the Pope and the Chinese Emperor. The Pope had discovered that Chinese Catholics were still honouring their ancestors in the Confucian fashion, and forbade this. And the Chinese Emperor unsurprisingly saw this as foreign interference in the governance of China.

Ricci remained in China until he died, and was honoured after death by the Emperor granting permission for his burial in Beijing (rather than in the designated foreigners’ graveyard). Whilst he wasn’t the only member of the Catholic mission to China he was the person who had the most influence. His grave has been a tourist attraction in Beijing from the time of his burial through to the present day.

“The Middle East: The Cradle of Civilisation Revealed” Stephen Bourke (Part 1)

This post is about the first chapter from the new non-fiction book I’m working my way through. It’s a complete change of pace from the previous one – the only thing in common is that it’s a history book, but it’s about a different time, a different place and it’s a very different sort of book. The Middle East: The Cradle of Civilisation Revealed is a big glossy book from the publisher Thames & Hudson, part of their series about Ancient Civilisations – I’ve previously read the one about China in this series (first post about that book). The format is a series of one or two double page spreads each about a particular subject. It’s written by 14 authors, but they’re not credited on individual sections – Stephen Bourke is the “Chief Consultant” and so I’m listing him as the author. The book covers the history of the Middle East from before the evolution of anatomically modern homo sapiens through to the Islamic conquest in the mid-7th Century AD.

Introducing the Middle East

The book opens talking about what they mean by the “Middle East”. It’s a term that’s relatively recently coined (at the start of the 20th Century) and is already falling into disfavour for its Eurocentrism. It is also a very nebulous term, and their definition boils down to “that bit there between Asia and Africa, you’ll know it when you see it”. The core modern countries are Bahrain, Egypt (not covered in this book), Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

Another reason that the term Middle East is not entirely favoured is that it elides the diversity of the peoples who live in the region. Modern ideas about race and ethnicity don’t map well onto ancient ones – both are equally complex, just not the same. So scholars categorise the ancient peoples by the languages they spoke or the polities (city or state etc) they belonged to. There are several groups that were prominent during the period this book covers, and the authors devote a double page spread to a brief overview of who was where when. Which also gives an overview of the history that will be discussed in more detail in the book, so I think it’s worth me writing more about it than just a brief summary.

Mesopotamia (in modern Iraq) was a region of two parts – north and south. The earliest* group to live there were the Sumerian speakers in the south. They were conquered by an Akkadian speaking group in the late third millennium BC. Some time after this the people living in the north came to be known as Assyrians (after their city of Assur) and the people in the south as Babylonians (after Babylon). Akkadian and Sumerian are used throughout the succeeding couple of millennia, eventually being supplanted by Aramaic.

*When they say “earliest” here, I think we’re talking about historically and not considering the prehistoric cultures of the region, but I’m not quite clear on that.

Through the Bronze Age the peoples who lived in the southern Levant were called Canaanites by the Egyptians (tho they probably didn’t call themselves that, and wouldn’t’ve thought of themselves as a cohesive group). They spoke a Semitic language (the same family as Akkadian belongs to) and lived in large city states throughout what is now Israel. Around 1200BC much of their civilisation vanished, and their city states were destroyed. Their culture survived in part via the Phoenicians (who were also ancestors of the Carthaginians). In the area where the Canaanites had lived several small kingdoms now formed – the Philistines, Israelites, Moabites, Ammonites and Edomites.

The longest lasting culture in Anatolia was the Hittites, who spoke an Indo-European language and were most powerful in the Late Bronze Age. Between them and northern Mesopotamia were the Hurrians. In the Late Bronze Age these people had a kingdom that stretched across modern day southeast Turkey, north Syria and north Iraq, which was called Mitanni.

Ancient Iran has been inhabited as long as Mesopotamia, but less is known about the earliest people there as their script (Proto-Elamite) hasn’t been deciphered. The first culture whose name we know were the Elamites, who lasted from 2700BC through till 559BC – the book isn’t entirely clear (maybe it isn’t known) whether these are the same people as wrote proto-Elamite or not. In the first millenium BC the Medes were also living in northwest Iran, and were an important power in that region. Iran was unified in the Achaemenid period (559-331BC) which lasted until Alexander the Great conquered the region. When the Classical Greeks refer to “Persians” they are generally talking about the Achaemenids. Post-Alexander Iran was first controlled by his successors in the Seleucid Dynasty and then by the Parthians. They ruled until 224AD when they were overthrown by the Sasanians.

The next section of this chapter feels a tad out of place – it considers the economic & agricultural activity of the region but mostly from a modern perspective which seems outside the scope of the book. It does point out that most of the agricultural production even now is of indigenous species which were first domesticated in the region (and subsequently exported as crops & technology). Other resources discussed are the timber industry in ancient Lebanon (now not thriving due to over-exploitation in the past), and modern oil reserves.

Water is such an important and contested resource that it gets its own double page spread. Because much of the region is arid or semi-arid control of water and management of water is critical to a civilisation’s survival. Particularly in Mesopotamia where the amount of rainfall is insufficient for any agricultural activity, irrigation is essential. The major rivers in the region are the river Jordan, and the two rivers between which Mesopotamia lies (the Euphrates & the Tigris). The latter two both start in Turkey and are a source of modern tensions as damming projects in Turkey and Syria have knock-on effects in Iraq. The rivers were & are vital for food production, and the seas of the region, as is generally the case in the ancient world, were the main transport links between this and other places.

This chapter finishes with a brief overview of archaeological work in the region with some basic grounding in what archaeology actually entails. And makes for rather sad reading in the wake of IS destroying and looting so much that they’ve come in contact with – which we’ll now never fully understand.

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In Our Time: Sappho

Sappho was a 7th Century BC Greek poetess, but I rather suspect the thing she’s best known for in modern culture is for being the reason we call lesbians lesbians. However, it was for her poetry that she was renowned in ancient Greece. Discussing a little bit about the woman and a lot about her work on In Our Time were Edith Hall (King’s College, London), Margaret Reynolds (Queen Mary, University of London) and Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford).

Saphho lived on Lesbos, which is an island between mainland Greece and Turkey – both in a geographical sense and in a cultural sense. Whilst they were definitely Greek there were eastern influences on both their culture and their language. Their dialect of Greek was not the same as the Greek of Homer and would’ve sounded a bit exotic to the mainland Greek people of her time. She was a lyrical poet, which means that her words were set to music – accompanied by the lyre or other instruments. The work of a lyrical poet was an important part of ceremonies, and was also important to memorialise events. Obbink said that what survives is a bit like having the words to an opera, but not the music.

To the Greeks Sappho was “The Poetess” in the same was that Homer was “The Poet”. A lot of her work was written down and still read long into the classical era. In the Library at Alexandria there was a 9 volume text containing all her poetry. But most of what survived to be rediscovered in the Renaissance did so as fragments in other texts – later translations and quotations in textbooks and commentaries. Much more recently papyrus fragments have been discovered from what were originally whole poems written in her native dialect – I hesitate to say originals as I think these would post-date her time but it would be like discovering fragments of a “Complete Works of Shakespeare” after only knowing his work via quotations from other books in modern English. More of these papyrus fragments occasionally get discovered – Obbink has recently found and translated some previously unknown fragments. These can radically change our understanding of a poem where they overlap with previously known pieces.

The subjects of her poetry were very personal in nature rather than mythical as is the case with Homer. Her poems contain several expressions of her desire for and love of other women, hence her later reputation as a lesbian. Some of the language and metaphors that she uses for desire have become a standard part of the repertoire of imagery – e.g. fire in the veins. The people in her poems are often specific named people, and she names herself in her poetry as well. Despite the first person perspective and specificity of the poetry it’s not clear if it was actually autobiographical. In particular it’s not clear if she was actually a lesbian, and if she was it’s not clear if anyone in her culture at the time cared (although it is clear that they did care later on).

Hall suggested that Sappho’s poetry might indicate that in her time and place there were women’s symposiums running in parallel to the men’s ones. Men’s symposiums are well attested through Greek culture. Hall explained them as semi-public gatherings which in effect provided poetic and ritualised training of the next generation in how to be civilised. They were where a young Greek man learnt how to be “a Greek man”. There are no records of women’s symposiums, and in parts of the classical Greek world (like classical Athens) women’s lives were so restricted that they seem implausible as an idea. However Sappho’s time and place were different, and women’s voices survive so rarely from this era (I’m not sure if Sappho is unique or just almost so) that no evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.

In her own time and during later Greek culture Sappho’s poetry was very popular. However she began to become less revered during the Roman period. Her dialect of Greek had died out and so understanding her poetry wasn’t a question of picking up the text and reading it, it required a commentary or a translation. It became even more obscure in the Christian era when it dropped out of the standard curriculum altogether because the subject matter was too much about worldly, sinful things like desire for a beautiful woman. And because of her obscurity her work was not often copied, and thus no copies survived intact. Fragments of her work were only discovered in the late Renaissance, and early translations downplayed the sauciness of the texts.

Since rediscovery Sappho’s work, and Sappho herself, have often been taken up by the women’s movements of various eras. Because there is so little known about the woman herself, and even her work, it’s relatively easy to shape her into an icon. Whether that is for intellectual liberation as in the 18th Century or the sexual liberation of the 20th Century. One of the experts suggested that it’s also because of the position of Greek culture in our own culture as one of the “roots of civilisation”. As the vast majority of what survives from Greece is male voices and male culture that can lead to an equation of men with civilisation. So if you’re putting forward women as the equal of men against this cultural backdrop it’s good to have an example of a feminine Greek culture.

This programme concentrated on the poetry and the legacy of Sappho rather than the woman herself – as there is so very little that’s actually known about her. So it was well complemented by the TV programme “Sappho: Love & Life on Lesbos with Margaret Mountford”, which we watched not long after listening to this. The TV programme was more focussed on Sappho the person – although of necessity it was more about the broader culture of the period than the individual. It also looked at the legends that have grown up around the woman in more modern times.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 18)

In the final chapter of this book Prestwich draws together the ideas and themes he explored in the rest of the book and discusses what it meant to be English during this period (1225-1360). On the one hand England was a pretty cosmopolitan society – there were many leading figures in the government who weren’t English born, and migrants with useful skills were encouraged (Flemish weavers during Edward III’s reign, for instance). On the other hand there was a strong sense of an English identity. Foreigners apparently had a simple stereotype: Englishmen had tails and were usually drunk! The English themselves had a bit more of a nuanced view, although not necessarily more complimentary. The author of the Vita of Edward II for instance said that the English “excel other nations in three qualities, in pride, in craft and in perjury”. The north/south divide is already evident during this time – southerners are considered more civilised. And there is still a sense of an ethnic divide between the aristocracy (of Norman descent) and commoners (of Saxon descent) but both are also considered English.

Language was important to both national identity and social status. There was a sense that English people should speak English – and Edward III used the idea that the French wanted to wipe out the use of English in England as a piece of propaganda to drum up popular support for his wars in France. But speaking French still marked one as part of the social elite. Prestwich discusses how this French is changing and becoming more English – by the end of the period it’s generally a learnt language not a naturally acquired one, and the French definitely think that the English speakers of French don’t speak it properly. Culturally England is still close to Northern France, but differences are beginning to emerge. The English literature of the period (whether written in English or French) has a distinctive voice, and has English heroes and covers themes & political concerns peculiar to England.

During this period English art & architecture also developed a distinct style. For most of the 13th Century Western European culture was dominated by the French styles of architecture, but by the late 13th Century the English Decorated style was developing. It was more exuberant, and featured more naturalistic carving & sculpture. Art in the form of paintings hasn’t survived in particularly great numbers & Prestwich doesn’t discuss how this compared to the previous French style. Illuminated manuscripts and embroidery (tapestry) do survive and display high quality work – some of it reflecting the new English Decorated style of the architecture.

The legal system was an important part of English identity. In border regions whose law you were subjected to was important – a lord who had both English and Welsh tenants in the Marches would be expected to deal with the two groups via their own law and their own courts. The legal system in England was distinctive in that it was not codified – it was a law based on litigation and precedents, and it was primarily learnt by attending courts. This was something that struck me in particular while I was reading this book – how much is known because the court records are preserved, and how often people took each other to court.

The mythology surrounding England’s origins as a country had a couple of different (mutually contradictory strands) during this era. One strand emphasised King Arthur and the Britons, with an ultimate origin of the country in Brutus the Trojan who defeated giants in Albion and founded Britain. The other concentrated on the Anglo-Saxons and the uniting of their kingdoms, and appealed to the authority of Bede’s history of the English.

The wars of the period helped to strengthen the sense of Englishness. In the case of the Anglo-Scottish wars there weren’t particularly large cultural differences between the two sides, but propaganda (on both sides) still made the enemy out to be vicious barbarians coming to commit atrocities against civilised people. The Anglo-French wars are often held up as important in forging an sense of Englishness as distinct from the Norman culture that stretched across England and Northern France. However Prestwich thinks it wasn’t that significant – he sees most of the national sentiments as being there already. And points out that Edward III would want to be careful about negative portrayals of the people he hoped to rule if he won.

The intellectual life of England was a significant part of the mainstream European intellectual culture. Oxford and Cambridge were two of the greatest universities of Europe in this period. Prestwich gives mini-biographies of a few of the intellectual elite – including Ockham of Ockham’s Razor – and discusses briefly the controversy of the day: nominalism vs. realism. Slightly confusingly nominalism is the school of thought that the only real things are those that can be observed and tested, whereas realism holds that there are absolute realities which the actual objects can only be approximations of.

Prestwich concludes by looking at the large scale trends throughout the period that the book covers. In the 1220s England was politically unstable with a weak monarchy and factional rifts among the ruling elite. The country was also militarily weak, and had barely succeeded in keeping independent of French rule. In contrast, the economy was strong, the population was rising and the peasants were firmly under the thumb of the aristocracy. By the 1360s this was reversed – England was politically and militarily strong, but the economy and population had collapsed (particularly in the wake of the Black Death). The peasantry were more able to make their feelings known as labour was now scarce. One of the key developments of the era not touched on by my simplistic summary was the emergence of Parliament as a mechanism for the monarch to consult with not just the highest ranking nobles but also the community of the realm as a whole via representatives for each county.

And so I have finally finished this book – I was reading it for around 18 months in the end. Which is too long! And it was primarily because I wasn’t very diligent at coming back to reading it. But also because writing the summaries takes time and so I don’t tend to read much more till I’m caught up with that in case I get too far ahead of myself. On the other hand, writing the summaries means I’ve retained rather more of the information, so I think it’s a net positive.

I enjoyed reading the book – I found Prestwich’s style readable and at times humorous (in a dry academic fashion). When I’ve whittled down my to-be-read pile a bit I may look for some more of his books – I know he’s written a biography of Edward I which would be interesting. It’s part of a series of books from Yale University Press on English Monarchs, which may make for an interesting project once I’ve finished the New Oxford History of England series (of which the present book is part) in a decade or two!

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