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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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In Our Time: The California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush was sparked by the discovery of gold in a river in January 1848 and not only did it make some individuals rich but it also had a significant impact on the politics and economy of the USA and the world. Discussing it on In Our Time were Kathleen Burk (University College London), Jacqueline Fear-Segal (University of East Anglia) and Frank Cogliano (University of Edinburgh).

When gold was discovered in what would become the state of California the land it was discovered on was not actually under the control of the USA. War between the USA and Mexico ended in February 1848 with the signing of a treaty that had the Mexicans cede that part of the continent to the USA. I imagine once they knew what they’d signed away they weren’t best pleased. At the time the area was inhabited by around 150,000 Native Americans, down from a previous population of 300,000 due to diseases and other effects of the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans. There were also around 6,000 Mexicans and other assorted immigrants.

News of the discovery of gold was initially slow to spread, and didn’t get taken seriously by the outside world until late 1848. Thus the gold rush proper was in 1849 – and until I listened to this programme I hadn’t really put two & two together and realised that the song Oh My Darling Clementine refers to the gold rush (“In a cavern, in a canyon, Excavating for a mine, Dwelt a miner forty niner, And his daughter Clementine.”).

In 1849 the population of the area increased significantly – by 1850 there were 100,000 settlers who had been drawn there by the gold. Most of the new immigrants were young men looking to get rich. The region was not yet a state, and it had none of the apparatus of government – amongst other things no law enforcement nor even laws. One of the experts described it as like “a stag party, they came and trashed California”. Most came to mine gold and hopefully make their fortunes that way, but those who came to sell supplies (mining equipment & food alike) to the miners were the ones who were most likely to become rich. This second category included Leland Stanford, who founded Stanford University.

These new settlers came from all over the world. From all 21 states of the USA and from 25 other countries. Not just Europeans either, there were settlers from various South American countries and from China. The journey to the territory was an arduous one no matter where you were coming from, and particularly so from Europe or the East Coast of the USA. By land it took 5 months, and there are few places where it’s possible to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains. By sea – you could cross the Pacific from China, or sail round the bottom of South America, or cross the continent at Panama (by land, the canal is not there yet) – all of which options have their difficulties and dangers.

The scale of mining operations progressed quickly. At first the stereotypical image of the lone miner panning for gold in a river was pretty accurate, and it was possible for individuals to set up on their own and strike rich. But as time went on mining techniques became more intensive and required more capital to set up. No longer did a lone incomer have much of a chance of getting his lucky strike on his own. As it became more industrialised it also became more destructive. By this I mean they were doing things like diverting rivers and blowing up parts of the mountains in order to extract more gold. As well as this physical destruction of the environment there was also a lot of mercury used in the gold extraction processes – which ended up in the rivers of California.

California may’ve started out as a lawless place in 1849 but it became incorporated as a state of the USA very quickly. In 1852 they had got themselves organised and went to the Senate with their constitution already written and asked to be made a state. At this point they already had double the number of people necessary to be considered. This had an unforeseen knock-on effect – they were the 31st state and were a free state. At this point in the USA’s history tensions were rising between the North (free states) and the South (slave states) although it would be another few years before the Civil War broke out in 1861. To ease the tension states were being admitted in pairs, one slave and one free at a time. However California’s swift self-organisation side-stepped around that procedure and unbalanced the Senate. Utah and New Mexico were admitted as slave states to re-balance it but didn’t actually have a slave owning economy.

And in a reminder that the issues are never simple: despite being a free state California is actually one of the first to enact institutionally racist laws. One axis of this is the regulation specifically of Chinese immigration. Another is protection and governance laws concerning the Native American population. Despite the idealistic name these laws actually disenfranchised and dispossessed Native Americans. There was also official encouragement of the lynching of Chinese & Native Americans who “stepped out of line”.

Obviously the biggest effect of the gold rush was on the economy – not just of California and the USA but also globally. For instance one of the experts made a case that the gold rush was critical for the Industrial Revolution in the UK. If there had not been more people with more money to buy the goods that the newly mechanised UK industry was producing then it would not have happened so fast or so succesfully.

The gold rush also affected the culture of the USA. For instance the American Dream mythology began as a spiritual Puritan vision of the City on the Hill being a shining beacon of virtue for the rest of the world to look up to. But after the gold rush this changes to a more material idea – you don’t go to the USA (or to the West Coast) to live the best life you can, you go to get rich quick. California still occupies this sort of cultural space – you go to California to [find gold]/[be a film star]/[join a tech startup] (delete as appropriate). Hollywood and Silicon Valley are the descendants of the strike it lucky & get rich quick ethos of the gold rush.

Towards the end of the programme they talked a little about the role of women in this era of California’s history. The main point they brought out was that there weren’t many women, and so in some ways their social capital was higher than in other parts of the USA. The example used was that divorce was easier for a woman to initiate. I’d’ve liked it if they’d spent a bit more time on this – my notes that I’m writing this up from say that I thought they had more to say about the knock-on effects of this on modern US society.

In Our Time: Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali was a leading intellectual in the Islamic world of the 11th Century AD, a philosopher, lawyer, teacher, thinker and mystic who made important contributions to Islamic philosophy and to sharia law. The experts on In Our Time who discussed his life and work were Peter Adamson (LMU in Munich), Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities) and Robert Gleave (University of Exeter).

The era in which Al-Ghazali lived was one of political change. The caliphate was beginning to collapse, and the Christian Crusaders were fighting for and conquering parts of the Middle East. There was a rump of the old Umayyad caliphate in Spain, and their Abbasid replacement had for a while been a figurehead government with the Shi’ite military holding the actual power. When Al-Ghazali was alive the Shi’ites were in control in Egypt, but the Sunnis had restored the caliphate to actual power in the east (where Al-Ghazali lived). This was an intellectually rich era, with many important and influential scholars. An important piece of context for Al-Ghazali’s life and work is that he was born when the translation movement had just finished its project of translating the works of the Greek philosophers into Arabic.

Al-Ghazali was born in the 11th Century in Persia and was of humble origins. He was orphaned, and so doesn’t receive his education because of his family connections – instead he is identified as being particularly clever. He was educated in all the subjects that an Islamic intellectual of the era should be – including the Qu’ran and Sharia law. He clearly excelled as when he moves to Baghdad in 1090 he soon gets the best job in the city, when he is still only 33. During the 5 years he lives in Baghdad he is the most senior person in the biggest mosque in the city. His primary duty is teaching, but the role is also a political one – for instance he wrote a tract rebuking the Shi’ite rulers of Egypt.

During his time in Baghdad he writes a work called The Incoherence of the Philosophers which is a rebuttal of the use of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers in Islamic religious philosophy. this sets him in direct opposition to the leading thinker of the previous generation. The main thrust of his argument is that the Greek notions of causality leave no room for the actions of God in the world. For example if you hold a flame to cotton then the Greek philosophers would say that the fire causes the cotton to burn. But Al-Ghazali believes you need to leave space for God and for miracles. So it is God that causes the cotton to burn when the flame is held to it, and God could choose that the cotton doesn’t burn (i.e. a miracle would occur).

Al-Ghazali was also influential in the field of Sharia law. His work on this topic was philosophical in nature and focussed on the principles behind the laws. These are more important than the details of the laws themselves because an understanding of the principle behind a law will allow the law to be adapted to the changing realities of the world.

After he had been in Baghdad for five years he suffered some sort of breakdown. He left the city and his high status job and wandered as a Sufi mystic. Sufism is focussed on a direct personal and mystical connection with God, and this contrasts with mainstream Islam (which focusses on obedience to the laws). Although he lived a life outside the teaching structure of Islam he continued to publish on philosophical matters – now within the Sufi tradition. At the time Sufism was not very closely aligned with the rest of Islamic thought and it was Al-Ghazali’s work in this part of his life that brought it and mainstream Islam closer together.

In their summing up at the end of the programme the experts said that although a lot of his writing concerned philosophy (and he played an important role at the time) his lasting legacy is in the field of Sharia law.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 17)

I’m into the home straight with this book – and actually finished reading it a while ago, I’ve just got a backlog of posts to write 🙂 This is the penultimate chapter, all that’s left after this is the conclusion.

Population and the Black Death

The overall picture of population changes in England between 1225 and 1360 is first growth in the 13th Century, followed by a plateau in the early 14th Century and a catastrophic decrease caused by the Black Death in 1348. However despite this clear big picture the details are more difficult to get a proper grasp of, and so Prestwich spent the first half of this chapter looking at the sorts of evidence used to assess the population and discussing the sorts of numbers these indicate.

The population of a region is affected by three things – birth rate, death rate and migration – and Prestwich looks at these in turn. There’s very little evidence for what the birth rate in England was during this period – births were not required to be recorded. And it is difficult to make generalisations from what data there is because birth rates vary within populations & across time. There is some evidence that people tried to control the size of their families (via herbal concoctions or coitus interuptus) despite the disapproval of the Church. However a lack of understanding of reproductive biology & the female anatomy meant that this was difficult to do successfully. Prestwich notes that there is very little evidence for abortion (or attempted abortion), nor for infanticide. Death rates were affected by environmental causes like famines, and also by economic circumstances. Prestwich suggests that the growth in the 13th Century may’ve lead to the population outstripping the ability of the cultivatable land to feed it, leading to the plateau in the early 14th Century. Migration to and from England had little effect on the overall population, however internal migration had a large effect on the population of particular towns etc.

Prestwich next works through a couple of examples of starting assumptions and hypotheses to arrive at some estimates for the overall population at the peak at end of the 13th Century. All the methods of calculating the population have their own problems, and the margins of error are huge. However Prestwich suggests figures of between 4 million and 7 million, with 5 million being a plausible number to keep in mind. This is about two to three times the population at the end of the 11th Century (which one can estimate using the Domesday Book as a starting point). For a couple of modern comparisons: the modern population of Scotland is of the order of 5 milliion people, in contrast the population of London in 2013 (according to wikipedia) was on the order of 8.5 million.

On a more local level there are sometimes surviving records that give a better indication of population levels in a particular community – but historians disagree about how reliable these are (and how to extrapolate from what’s there). For instance manorial court records survive for some areas – like Coltishall in Norfolk where numbers of tenants can be calculated: 119 in 1314, 168 in 1349 and 74 in 1359. That doesn’t tell you how big their families were but it does suggest a rising population which then falls sharply after the Black Death. Prestwich goes through a few examples of the types of records that survive and what they can tell us. He also discusses the indirect evidence that can be used – like how much land is in cultivation (more suggests more people need fed). Or how much tax was returned from a community.

The second half of the chapter discusses the Black Death. This was probably the biggest human catastrophe ever to affect England – up to half the population died. It is generally said that the Black Death was an epidemic of Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague), and I had thought this was a known thing. However Prestwich devotes three or so pages to discussing the problems with this identification and what alternatives there may be. The argument against bubonic plague being the Black Death is that the symptoms & fatality levels as well as the spread speed & pattern of the disease do not match that seen in more modern outbreaks where we have much more accurate information. The usual answer to this is that the bacillus has mutated significantly since the 14th Century, and thus the disease we see now is not the disease they suffered. Prestwich is very keen to point out that this is just a hypothesis, and other explanations should not be dismissed out of hand. He doesn’t, however, have a favoured answer – he lists three possibilities (anthrax, influenza, a viral haemorrhagic disease) but also explains why they are implausible.

The epidemic, whatever it was, arrived on English soil sometime in June 1348 at the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. By November it had reached London, and in 1349 it spread throughout the country. Mortality was highest during the late spring & early summer of 1349. Death rates can be estimated using the surviving records although these generally do not list cause of death so some interpretation is needed to arrive at figures. Although perhaps as much as half the overall population died this was not evenly spread through society. The higher aristocracy were much less affected with only one member of the royal family dying in the outbreak, and only 13% of the parliamentary peerage in 1349. Clergy were more affected than this – with figures ranging from 29% to 60% in different areas. Those who resided with their congregations were more affected than those who did not. Mortality among monastic communities was very variable with some being nearly wiped out and others barely affected. Mortality amongst the rural population was much the same as for the clergy who resided amongst them (unsurprisingly). Data for the urban population is much more incomplete but one might assume it would be higher than in rural areas due to the greater numbers of people in close proximity. There are indications such as numbers of wills registered compared to a normal year or how many tax payers are recorded that back up this assumption.

The immediate effects of this huge loss of life on the economy & on government are surprisingly limited. The greater amount of available land (due to deaths of the tenants) and the death toll combined to reduce the number of landless labourers available to work did exert pressure to raise wages for labourers – and similarly for other professions in urban areas. However the government acted to freeze wages to pre-Black Death levels, and the long term economic effects of the population drop don’t show up till after 1360 when these measures began to fail. The mechanics of government and law & order also show surprising resiliance – the effects that show up in the period this book covers are primarily in low tax revenues and greater difficulty fielding large armies. The effects on the Church were greater. With so many dead clergy there weren’t as many truly appropriate candidates as needed to fill the vacancies. However again there was no danger of a collapse of the system. Society in general was also very resilient. There must surely have been an effect on the general population of seeing half the population die in such a short space of time, but Prestwich says it’s difficult to detect in the contemporary sources.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by reminding us that longer term effects were much greater – transforming society during the 15th & 16th Centuries.

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Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman was partly a biography of a specific woman – Mary Arden, the mother of William Shakespeare. But there’s not really enough surviving detail about her life to get the full picture from, so the gaps were filled in with more general information about the sorts of lives women (and men) of the time lead. The presenter, Michael Wood, did a good job of stitching the two sorts of information into a coherent whole, so it didn’t feel disjointed or patchy.

Mary Arden is an interesting person to look at the life of, not just because of whose mother she is, but also because of when she lived and what sort of person she was. She lived through a time of great change – she was born around 1537 near the start of the English Reformation, and died in James VI & I’s reign having lived through the whole of the Tudor changes of religion. It’s easy to forget that these changes all took place within a lifetime. Her personal situation also changed a lot over this time, showcasing some of the increased social mobility of the era.

Mary was born the youngest daughter of a relatively well-to-do husbandman, and had seven older sisters. Her family were part of the local gentry so in marrying her John Shakespeare was moving up the social scale. John & Mary Shakespeare were a part of the growing middle class in England. John was primarily a glover, but also involved in other trades. They marry in the 1550s, and begin having children – Mary was to bear eight children in all, of whom 5 survived to adulthood. William was her third child, the first son and the first to survive infancy. The programme used this as a hook to explore the dangers of childbirth in this period for both mother & offspring, and infant mortality (and the effect it would have on the parents).

John and Mary rose in the world both socially and financially during the early years of William’s life. John is a respected member of the Corporation of Stratford upon Avon and eventually even becomes Mayor of the town. They owned land both in the town and outside – Mary had inherited her father’s land when he died. Which is particularly interesting as she was the youngest daughter – perhaps she was his favourite? Perhaps she was the best at the financial management necessary to run the farm? John Shakespeare was also involved in less respectable financial trading. He leant money at interest (strictly forbidden by the church), and also got involved in the illegal wool trade. This was a very lucrative business – all wool trading was supposed to be done through Crown approved channels at Crown approved prices, and paying duty on the trade. So there was money to be made by a middleman who avoided the official routes. Michael Wood speculated that Mary was also involved in the trading – in part because as the person who would be at the house most of the time she’d be the obvious point of contact. And in part because there are indications she was good at financial management.

The wool trading was to be the Shakespeare family’s downfall. There was a clampdown on this illegal activity, and John Shakespeare was one of those who was caught. The family were financially ruined, and spent several years living in fear of their debts being called in. John stopped attending church or the meetings of the town corporation, because those were places where his creditors might find him to demand their money. This, of course, had social consequences for the family. They also had to sell off land to pay back the debts that were called in, and even take young William out of school. The family’s fortunes only turned around after William had moved to London and begun to make a name for himself (and money!) as a playwright and actor. Once he had money he provided for his parents and so Mary lived on into a comfortable old age.

I was mostly interested in the tidbits of information about Mary herself so that’s what I’ve discussed most in this blog post, but the programme also did a good job of covering the social situation & changes of the time. For instance it looked at what the religious and social changes actually meant to the ordinary person of the time. And at some issues specific to women – childbirth in particular as I mentioned. Also how women lived in general – housework, household management etc.

In Our Time: The Eunuch

Modern Western culture is unusual in having no role for eunuchs in the machinery of bureaucracy – throughout history in a variety of different cultures castrated men have played an important part in governance (and in some cases in the arts). The In Our Time episode about eunuchs took a compare and contrast approach to three cultures in which eunuchs were particularly important. The three experts each had a different speciality: Karen Radner (University College London) talked about Assyria, Shaun Tougher (Cardiff University) discussed Rome and Michael Hoeckelmann (King’s College London) was an expert on China. The aim was to draw out the parallels between the three situations but it didn’t quite gel into a cohesive picture for me – particularly the Rome section as it always seemed to be different to the other two. So although all three threads were interwoven in the programme I’m separating out the Roman bit in this write up.

In Assyria and China the origins of using eunuchs in the bureaucracy came from the idea that they were safe to have around the royal women. They were trusted palace servants whose lack of family ties were an important part of that trustworthiness. In addition the future ruler was often brought up with & by his eunuchs, so the bond formed between them was particularly strong. In both these societies being a eunuch was seen as a way to get ahead if you were from a poor family.

Whilst a lack of family ties was part of the rationale for creating eunuch servants it seems that the level to which this was true varied over time in Assyrian and particularly Chinese culture. Eunuchs might seek favours for their birth families, using their closeness to the ruler to their family’s advantage. The position of eunuchs in Chinese culture was cyclical and later in each cycle eunuchs would start adopting children and posts might become “hereditary” – which rather defeats the original purpose of using eunuchs in these roles. This cycle was tied to the history of the dynasties of Chinese rulers: as a dynasty began to decline the eunuchs would gain more power. Then when a new dynasty conquered/overthrew the previous one they’d stamp their authority more firmly on their servants.

Radner, talking about the Assyrians, was keen to point out that as a farming society they would’ve been castrating their livestock and so knew the effects (on size & strength) before they started to do this to people. A noteworthy feature of eunuchs in Assyrian society was that they were also the ruler’s bodyguards as well as his bureaucrats. Not quite the effete image that we have of eunuchs (mostly based on Italian castrato singers, I think).

In Assyria the eunuch was created by cutting between testicles & penis – the minimum necessary operation. However in China the entire apparatus was removed, and kept in a jar to show the Emperor on demand. Chinese eunuchs were an interesting exception to the normal Confucian idea where family was more important than anything – and this is a part of why they were restricted to serving the Emperor. He was the only person important enough (as semi-divine Son of Heaven) to be able to over-ride the proper order of things. And there’s a paradox as well: eunuchs had status and power, yet castration was also used as a punishment. The two things co-existed but were entirely separate (you didn’t become a eunuch after punishment by castration).

In contrast to these two cultures, in Rome having eunuch servants was a status symbol. They are a part of the Roman obsession with Greek culture, and the Greeks had got the idea from Persia (via Alexander the Great’s conquest). So a eunuch servant was a luxury, and having one showed that you were sophisticated and rich. It wasn’t restricted to the ruler (or ruling class), even though later (in Byzantine times) the eunuchs became important in the bureaucratic machinery of the Empire. They also became prized for their singing voices – and in Europe this lasted into the 20th Century.

As I said at the beginning of this post, the programme felt a little disjointed – perhaps they needed to pick a different third culture (if there is one). Tho I can see why Rome would feel the obvious choice.

“The Ark Tablet: How the Life of an Assyriologist Could be Transformed by a Single Tablet with Sixty Lines of Writing” Irving Finkel (Part 4 of BSS Study Day)

The last talk in the Bloomsbury Summer School’s Cuneiform Study Day was about the ark tablet that Irving Finkel has recently published a book about. There was also a TV documentary about the discovery of the tablet, and the building of a boat using the information in the tablet as a starting point (which I’ve written about before). The talk was mostly unconcerned with the TV programme, but about halfway through Finkel did go on a digression about the awfulness of it (as he saw it) – the “turning it into ‘good’ TV” process made it shallow and theatrical in all sorts of ways he didn’t like. He did think the boat was cool, tho!

Finkel started off by giving us some context for Flood Stories in cuneiform texts (which is exactly what I complained the TV programme didn’t do). George Smith in 1852 was the first person to read a cuneiform tablet containing a version of the Ark Story. This was the first time it was shown that a Biblical story pre-dated the Bible. The impact of this in society at the time was huge (much larger than it would be today), as it’s such a fundamental Old Testament story. There are close & specific links between the story that Smith read and the Biblical version, too. One of these is the releasing of the two birds to see if there is any land yet. However the boat as described in that text is cubical, so those who were particularly upset said that showed it was all a coincidence. The tablet that Smith read is part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and is actually one of the more recent cuneiform texts with a Flood Story. Since Smith’s discovery other (older) versions have been found. Although details differ, including the protagonist, they all share a common point that the gods had decided that the creation of humanity had been a mistake. The gods thus cause a flood to wipe them away, but one man is saved by one god warning him.

The new tablet that Finkel has translated & published dates to around 1800BC. It was initially brought to the British Museum along with various other bits & pieces by a man who’d inherited it from his father (who’d picked up these things on various trips). Finkel thought it was a letter at first glance, but then when he read the first lines it was clear that it was a Babylonian Flood Story and it didn’t match the ones he’d seen before. Which was very exciting, but sadly the chap who owned it took it away again and it was a while before Finkel had the chance to properly study it.

This version of the story includes a “How To” manual for building the ark. Unusually it describes a boat that is round – shaped like a coracle. Coracles are normally pretty small scale, but this one is much bigger. Finkel made the point that it didn’t need to go anywhere (coracles are normally propelled by oars, so it might be difficult to move a larger one) – for the occupants to survive the flood it only needed to float. The numbers and instructions in the text are surprisingly specific – not like mythological numbers generally are. If you calculate how much of the materials you would need to make a boat of that design the figures come out within 1% of those in the text. And the instructions match up well with those in a book published in the 1930s (AD) talking about coracle building in the more modern Middle East. So this is effectively the story being interrupted for an (accurate) info-dump about boat building. Finkel pointed out that this would’ve been of interest to the audience for the story, particularly if it was told orally (as it probably was) – there would be many fishermen and other river-goers who might want to know just how big this big boat was and so on. (It made me think of things like Tom Clancy’s novels where the story gets interrupted for a loving description of exactly what sort of gun is being used).

After his digression about the TV programme Finkel talked about his interest in the broader picture into which this tablet fits. Primarily – how did this ancient Mesopotamian legend end up retold in the Jewish Bible? Clearly the Exile of the Jews in Babylon must have something to do with it. Judea is invaded twice by Nebuchadnezzar, and this is documented in both the Old Testament and in the bureaucratic records of the Babylonian Empire. The texts corroborate each other to a pretty high degree – for instance there are people named in the text of the Hebrew Bible who are also mentioned in Babylonian documents. The second invasion of Judea is when Jerusalem was sacked and the bulk of the Jews were forcibly marched to Babylon. Finkel talked a bit here about what it must’ve been like for the Jews – his analogy was that in terms of culture shock it must’ve been much like it was for the rural Eastern European Jews who emigrated to New York in the 1930s.

The Book of Daniel talks about the young nobles of the Judeans being instructed in the language and literature of the Babylonians during the exile. This was a policy on the part of the Babylonians intended to indoctrinate the Judean elite with Babylonian culture, so that they would be less likely to rebel and instead be assimilated. Evidence from the Bablyonian side of the education of the Judeans includes a tablet which lists the Aramaic alphabet in cuneiform signs. The cross-cultural mixing went both ways – written around this time is a Babylonian tablet musing about monotheism and postulating that all the other gods are manifestations of Marduk. I.e. that Adad is “Marduk of the Rain” and so on.

At the time one of the ways students learnt to read & write was copying out set texts. From student tablets that have been found archaeologists have some idea of the school curriculum of the time that the Judeans were in Babylon. The stories they would’ve been copying included not only the Flood Story, but also one with a baby discovered in bulrushes and other legends of early rulers who lived unfeasibly long lives. And these all have parallels that end up in the Hebrew Bible.

This was a good talk to end the day on, and answered several of the things I was curious about after the TV programme. I intend at some point to read his book about the tablet, too. Overall this was a very interesting study day. Finkel is a very good speaker – my write-ups of his talks are sadly a rather dry rendition of the actual performance.

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“The Royal Game of Ur: From Ancient Grave to Modern Rebirth” Irving Finkel (Part 3 of BSS Study Day)

The third talk of the Bloomsbury Summer School Study Day about cuneiform was all about the Royal Game of Ur. Irving Finkel is interested in board games as well as being an expert on ancient Mesopotamian cultures and so this game is of particular interest to him. There were six boards for it found the Royal Cemetery of Ur (in southern Iraq) by Leonard Woolley. The photo below is one that I took of the board on display in the British Museum. These boards date from around 2600BC and for a long time they were the only game boards of this sort to be found. Other similar examples are now known from around the same sort of time (for example from eastern Iran, and from the Indus Valley).

Board for the Royal Game of Ur

The game is a race game, and the probable route is that the players start their pieces at the right hand end of the big block of squares and proceed horizontally leftwards to the rosette squares – one player at the top, one at the bottom. They then both move along the central line all the way to the right, where they separate and each follow their own track to the final rosette on the lefthand end of the small block of squares where they leave the board.

Somewhere around about the transition from the 2nd Millennium BC to the 1st Millennium BC the board changes shape. Instead of the two players separating and looping back at the end of the central run the run is extended by a further four squares. This shift in design takes place everywhere the game is played at around the same time. Finkel said this is probably because it makes the end of the game more exciting – in the original layout once you got to the split point then you probably knew you couldn’t be prevented from winning, but you still had to play out the last whatever moves before you actually won. The game spread even further with this changed layout. When the Hyksos invaded Egypt (in the Second Intermediate Period) they brought the game with them. In fact the game boxes from Tutankhamun’s grave have senet on one face and the modified Game of Ur board on the other face. Finkel took great delight in tweaking the noses of the Egyptologists in the room at this point – he pointed out that when the hieroglyphs on the sides are the right way up then the senet board is face down. So he thinks that makes it likely that the Game of Ur was the primary game not the Egyptian game of Senet!

Bringing this back to cuneiform writing Finkel discussed the first known written rules for a board game – which are on a cuneiform tablet dating to 119BC right near the end of the period that cuneiform was used. The front of the tablet has a 4×3 grid, each square of which has a zodiac sign & an inscription in. This seems to be some form of divination game – fling the dice, read off your fortune. On the reverse there are the rules for a “game fit for nobles” called the Game of Pack of Dogs. The first part of the text is a library tag written by the scribe who wrote the tablet explaining what it is and where it was copied from, the rest is the rules of the game. The rules talk about different pieces for each side, and they start in different places depending on type and on the dice roll. For instance if you roll a 5 the piece called the Storm Bird will start on square 5. There are also rules for when each type of piece lands on one of the special squares (marked with rosettes on the game board above). The rules are full of puns/jokes based on the fact that the phrase for “pack of dogs” also means “troop of soldiers”.

These are believed to be the rules for a descendent of the Royal Game of Ur, because of similarities to the only known modern survival of the game. There is a Jewish community in India who are descendants of Jews who moved there in the 1st Millennium BC from Babylon. They play a game on a board similar to the second layout for this game, using rules that are similar to the ones from the cuneiform tablet.

Game of Ur Board Scratched at Gate Guardian's Feet

Game Board Scratched at Gate Guardian’s Feet

Finkel finished up by talking a bit about the spread & popularity of the game. He believes it was invented in the Indus Valley in the 3rd Millenium BC, and rapidly spread through the surrounding area – to Iran and then Iraq, and through India into Sri Lanka. As mentioned before the board changes in the 1st Millennium BC and this change propagates through the whole of the game playing region. It was widely played – game boards are found scratched in floors all over the region, even between the feet of the Winged Assyrian Bull gate guardians that are in the British Museum. However it was replaced almost entirely by backgammon – leaving only that one survival discussed above.

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“The Cyrus Cylinder: Unexpected Discoveries and the Rediscovery of Meaning” Irving Finkel (Part 2 of BSS Study Day)

For the second part of his Bloomsbury Summer School study day on cuneiform Irving Finkel talked about the Cyrus cylinder which was found in Iraq during excavation at Babylon in 1872. It is a cylinder of baked clay which is covered in cuneiform writing, and you can see it at the British Museum. The largest part actually belongs to the BM, and there’s another fragment that they have on permanent loan from Yale. (My photo below is actually of a replica, I think the real thing was on loan somewhere at the time I took the photo a couple of years ago.)

It was written at the behest of King Cyrus in 539BC, shortly after he invaded Babylon. This was apparently a bloodless conquest and it was the end of native rule in Babylon: the previous king was the last Neo-Babylonian king. The text starts with a description of the chaos in Babylon before Cyrus came along (which made me think of the Egyptian 1st Intermediate Period texts where a nomarch’s tomb will announce how he brought order out of the chaos that Egypt was in). It continues by saying that the chaos was so bad that the gods had left their temples, and the god Marduk went in search of a candidate to rule Babylon instead of the current king. He found his ideal man in Cyrus – not a Babylonian but from Iran (Persia).

The text implies that Cyrus was a Marduk worshipper, but this is probably propaganda – especially as the Babylonian King whom he overthrew (Nabonidus) particularly worshipped a different one of their pantheon (which didn’t go down well with all of his people). Finkel pointed out that one would never read a modern text (newspaper article, press release, whatever) credulously so why do so for an ancient text? Propaganda and spin is nothing new. A more cynical reading of the text is that Cyrus took advantage of a schism in Babylonian society and picked a religious side that was opposite to the King whilst still popular with the public – and so rode that wave to a “welcomed” conquest.

In another act of propaganda Cyrus had Nabonidus’s name removed from any places where it was. There are a couple of pieces of evidence for this – the first is a tablet that has written on it a satirical poem about Cyrus doing so. And it’s backed up by a large stone stela which has on its front a relief of a king with a big blank space next to it where one would expect an inscription. If you look at the sides of this stela there are inscriptions naming Nabonidus. Finkel suggests that this stela perhaps once stood in an alcove & so when the men came to chisel off the inscriptions they only saw the front one and the sides got overlooked.

When it was discovered the Cyrus cylinder was a particularly big deal to Victorian London society because Cyrus is also mentioned in the Bible. He is the King who let the Jews return to Israel after the long exile in Babylon. However this interest resulted in the cylinder being built up into even more that it actually is. One myth is that it’s the actual decree permitting the Jews to go home – which is rubbish, it never mentions the Jews. Another (slightly more recent) myth is that it was the first charter of human rights … which is also rubbish. It does say that Cyrus will rule as a just king etc etc, but that’s a pretty standard thing for rulers of that time and place to say particularly after they’ve conquered somewhere. “Your old king was crap in all those ways; I will be awesome in all these ways”. But Finkel did say that even though the text itself has no relation to our concept of human rights the cylinder has taken on a sort of second life in modern Iran where it is a symbol of pride in their ancient civilisation and of human rights.

Another thing often said about the Cyrus cylinder is that it’s unique – this is also rubbish. This seemed implausible to experts from the start (it’s the sort of text you expect to be churned out by a conquering king) and there has been recent proof that it is indeed not one of a kind. Both Finkel and a colleague have discovered fragments of the Cyrus cylinder text in the British Museum’s collection of tablet fragments. These two fragments overlap with the text, but also with the missing portions of the cylinder. And they are from flat tablets rather than cylinders. So they are definitely from one or more separate copies of this text. Interestingly the fragments are also better quality than the cylinder, which is both of poor clay and lower quality writing. Finkel said this was probably because the Cyrus cylinder was intended to be buried – so people wouldn’t see it particularly often. He thinks there were probably thousands of copies of the text buried and distributed amongst the land that Cyrus ruled over (and beyond).

One of the (several) tangents that Finkel went on during this talk was about some fossilised horse shanks from China which were discovered with cuneiform on them that turned out to be the Cyrus cylinder text. The text had many omissions and was overall poorly copied, leading to thoughts that they were a fake. But equally the signs used for the text weren’t the same as those the cylinder – they were a different style and from a different period. So legitimate signs, and clearly not (poorly) copied straight off the Cyrus cylinder, which might incline one to think they were real. Finkel said he nearly published something saying they were real for these reasons, but shortly before the book was sent to the publisher he discovered where they’d been copied from! Wallis Budge (he of several Egyptology books of slight dubiousness by modern scholarship standards) had published an article about the Cyrus cylinder text. In it he’d presented the cuneiform using these different forms of the signs, and had presented the exact bits of text the horse shanks had (pooly) copied. So that was the origin of these fakes!

The two take home messages from this particular talk were first that one shouldn’t take anything at face value. And that there are no unique things in history, if we think there’s only one that just means we haven’t found another. And Finkel finished up with an anecdote of a surprising example of this – the Ishtar Gate from Babylon seems a prime candidate for uniqueness. However! A life size replica has been discovered in Persepolis built during Cyrus’s reign, outside his palace. Clearly he was pretty impressed by it when he conquered Babylon.

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