In Our Time: The Cult of Mithras

The cult of Mithras was one of several cults that sprang up in the Roman Empire during the 1st Century AD. It was a mystery cult and so what we know of it now comes from archaeological evidence and the writings of people who were not members. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Greg Woolf (University of St Andrews), Almut Hintze (SOAS, University of London) and John North (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London).

The historical origins of the Mithras cult aren’t clear – back in the late 19th Century it was thought that the cult had a direct connection to Zoroastrianism, mostly because there is a Zoroastrian god called Mithra. But more recent scholarship suggests that the connection isn’t particularly direct – it’s more like the Romans took the name & some very basic idea of the worship of Mithra and then reinvented it completely for their own cult. (Which meant it felt a little like Hintze was invited to the programme based on a faulty understanding, as she’s a Professor of Zoroastrianism – she did have other things to contribute, but I felt like she got unfairly cut off a few times.) Other cults that sprang up at the same time had similar types of origins, although possibly had closer links to their parent religion – things like the Roman Isis cult, or a Demeter cult. And of course Christianity can be seen as another of these – Pauline Christianity is partly a reinterpretation of Judaism for Gentiles.

The literary sources of information about the Mithras cult are pretty slim – a lot of it is written by Christians who are trying to show how their religion is a real one, and this Mithras nonsense is a work of the devil. That was apparently a mainstream Christian opinion during the first couple of centuries after Christ, that the devil had started up all these other cults so that the truth of Christianity would be obscured by competing cults. And later in the 4th & 5th centuries Christians were involved in the destruction of Mithraic temples (as part of a wider movement of the destruction of pagan temples).

The archaeology tells us more about the iconography & so on of the cult, but as I said at the start it was a mystery cult and so the iconography is not explained. One of the images that is present in nearly all excavated temples is of Mithras killing a bull, while a dog & a serpent lap up the blood and a scorpion & a raven are also involved in the killing. Hintze pointed out that this is very different from the Zoroastrian Mithra in the level of violence protrayed – whilst there is a Zoroastrian myth that death entered the world with the killing of a bull, it’s the force of evil who does the killing in Zoroastrianism and doesn’t come with so much violence. Whereas in the Mithras cult it’s the god doing this, and it’s a violent scene – still possibly having to do with creation of the cosmos in some fashion. Other scenes include some sort of story for how the bull ends up in the cave where it is killed (although these are not always in the same order which seems odd if they are a sacred narrative). And a meal that Sol & Mithras eat together.

The temples themselves represent a cave – the cave that the bull was killed in. And there are indications that the gathered worshippers (20-40 of them) ate a communal meal. There is also from one temple some recent evidence that there may’ve been some sort of ritual meal for non-initiates around the outskirts of the temple. But by the way this was presented on the programme it seems this is still very much a conjecture based on a single data point.

Another archaeological source for the cult are the dedicatory inscriptions from members of the cult. These are all from men, and as there are a few thousand of these (I think they said) this seems to suggest that there were no women members of the cult. They are also all from the middling sort of people – not poor, not rich. And are primarily members of the military or the bureaucratic hierarchy.

It seems that the cult had seven levels of initiate, the lowest ones were called ravens & the highest paters (fathers). One of the middle levels was called a leo (lion) and from some of the texts & inscriptions this seems to be the “normal” level of an initiate. There could only be one pater per temple, and when there were too many worshippers a new temple would be built. I think they have depictions of the initiation ceremonies for progressing up the levels & it seems that these were fairly brutal. Presumably they also involved transfer of the sacred knowledge, but we don’t have any record of this.

Towards the end of the programme they had a little segment doing a compare & contrast with Christianity, because that has always been one of the things that’s brought up when discussing Mithraism in a modern context. They talked about how the 25th December was supposed to be significant in the Mithras cult, but it seems this was based on a single calendar and it’s not even clear that that’s what the calendar meant! That’s the one I’d heard before, that Mithras’ birthday was the same as Christ’s but that doesn’t appear to be true. They also discussed how Christianity was actually more similar to the Demeter & Isis cult than it was to the Mithras cult – there’s no death & resurrection in the Mithras mythology (that we know of) for instance. And in the Mithras cult your position in the secular hierarchy was often reflected in your position in the initiate hierarchy – which is again not the case with Christianity.

When I set out to write this I wasn’t sure how much I was going to remember, but it seems the answer is “quite a lot” 🙂

Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special; Rome: A History of the Eternal City

There is an exhibition that’s just started at the British Museum about Ice Age Art and to tie in with this there was a Culture Show special covering both the exhibition and Ice Age art in general. The presenter was Andrew Graham-Dixon – we’ve watched a few of his programmes before including something about the art of Spain, and also something about the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum a couple of years ago.

The two themes of the programme were firstly an emphasis on just how old all of these objects are, and secondly how these people were people just like us and much more sophisticated than the stereotype of a “prehistoric caveman” would lead us to expect. The programme looked at these themes by showing us some of the objects in the British Museum exhibition (and talking to the curators etc about them) and by showing us some of the cave paintings – particularly some in Northern Spain.

There was also a segment of the programme where Graham-Dixon met with an experimental archaeologist who makes replicas of some of these objects using the same techniques and types of tools that the originals were made with. I found this particularly fascinating, and it was astonishing how long it took – he was saying that the smaller pieces took about 80 hours each, but a larger piece might take on the order of 400 hours or more. He (and several of the other people interviewed) was saying that the time it took together with the skill & artistic talent shown in the pieces we’ve found imply that being an artist was a specialised profession in the hunter-gatherer societies of the time.

And they were also saying that art was clearly important to these societies – you don’t put that much effort and resources into something you don’t think much of. Perhaps it tied into their religion(s) – in particular the female figures seem to be biased towards representations of fertility, which might have religious significance. Perhaps it was also a means of communicating between groups of people, or over time – the subjects of the art are normally the natural world, the animals that they would hunt and that they shared their environment with. And in a world where people were significantly outnumbered by animals, and where they depended so much on the environment around them for survival, close observation of nature would be a necessity and showing each other what they’d seen would be important. This then shows up in the art – the detail & life-like rendering of animals in some of the pieces is astonishing.

On the subject of people being outnumbered by animals – at one point Graham-Dixon said that the population living outside Africa during this era was something like 100,000, less than the medieval population of Paris. And if the numbers of people are astonishingly small, the time spans are astonishingly large. The range of dates for cave-paintings or objects are from 40,000 years ago to 13,000 years ago – the whole of “history” is small compared to that. And these objects are as ancient to the ancient Greeks as they are to us, to all intents and purposes.

I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibition at the British Museum even more after seeing this programme 🙂

In an attempt to clear some stuff of our PVR (which is why we’ve had a bonus TV night or two this weekend in addition to our normal Wednesday night) we started watching one of the series we’ve got recorded in HD. Rome: A History of the Eternal City is a look at the history of Rome from a religious perspective, presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore who we’ve previously seen present a programme on Jerusalem. This first episode covered ancient Rome from foundation through to just before the conversion of the Empire to Christianity – a large amount of ground to cover in an hour!

The programme opened with some scenes from modern Christian Rome – the crowds coming to watch a statue of the Virgin Mary being paraded around the city first by boat and later through the streets. Montefiore then pointed out that this pageantry had roots in pagan Rome, and explained that Rome has always been a sacred city. He then went on to re-tell the Roman foundation myth – the story of Romulus and Remus, twins who were suckled by a she-wolf after they were abandoned at birth. As adults they were to found a city, but fell out over where it should be sited – both saw omens from the gods indicating that their preferred site was the favoured one. The dispute was only resolved when Romulus killed his brother, and founded the city of Rome on the Palatine hill. The archaeological and historical evidence is that Rome grew out of the union of villages in this region, but from very early in its history it was a sacred area. The dead could not be buried inside the walls of Rome, and soldiers could not bear arms there. This sacredness extended even below ground, and Montefiore visited the sewer that had existed since ancient times (and is still part of the sewer system today). This originally drained the Forum, which flooded frequently, and also symbolised the purification of the city. There were rituals about washing things away in the sewers, including the body of at least one Emperor.

We then had a (fairly brisk) trot through the history of ancient Rome, with an emphasis on how the secular and the religious intertwined. He talked about how the priesthood influenced decisions during the early period when Rome was a monarchy – we got a demonstration of how the omens were read in the liver of a sheep (this being a modern sheep the liver wasn’t particularly blemished, I imagine a less healthy sheep would give more interesting (but less good) omens). Even once Rome was a republic many of the same religious ideas were still present – that the city was sacred, and that they had some divine right to conquer. The Senate even finished off a temple planned during the reign of the last King – it was a replacement of secular power that didn’t affect the religious life of the city. The Romans worshipped many gods & goddesses & would incorporate foreign ones into their worship. The programme noted in particular the Magna Mater, originally a foreign goddess, whose worship & priesthood was brought to the city after omens suggested that she was the only way to save the city from Hannibal during the Second Punic War. The arrival of the Magna Mater was in a ceremony very reminiscent of the modern day procession of the Virgin Mary that the programme opened with.

At the point where the Republic turned into an Empire there were also changes to the religious landscape. Over his reign Augustus gradually set up the Imperial cult – partly by deifying Julius Caesar, and then adding “son of a god” to his own titles. And by setting up altars around the city which emphasised the divinity of the Imperial family, and encouraged people to make sacrifices to him. This was alongside the other gods & goddesses, but still served to help the political elevation of the Emperor as sole ruler.

An interesting programme, although I think that many of the details have escaped me – in part because it covered so much in just an hour.

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Richard III: The King in the Car Park

For TV night this week we watched the documentary about the finding of Richard III’s remains that was aired on Monday evening on Channel 4. It was presented by someone I didn’t really recognise – Simon Farnaby – who turns out to be a comedian who does the Horrible Histories programmes (which I haven’t watched, but know about). The format of the programme was that Farnaby & a camera crew showed up at key moments of the excavation and subsequent analysis of the skeleton & so we got to see what happened & what they discovered as it happened. There were also segments of the programme where Farnaby told us about the relevant history.

The project to excavate the car park in Leicester where the remains were found started with Phillipa Langley & the Richard III Society who did the preliminary work of figuring out where to dig, and funded the dig. So Langley was also present at all the key moments, and a fair amount of attention was paid to her (and her fellow society members’) reactions to what was discovered. Which I felt was overdone – she was quite clearly a nut, and was over-emotional at all possible moments. I would’ve preferred a bit more about the science behind the identification & a bit less of looking at some woman break down in tears seeing the skeleton of a man who’d been dead 500 years.

So, Richard III is the last king before the Tudors at the end period of the Wars of the Roses. He took the throne after his brother Edward IV died – usurping it from Edward IV’s son. Edward IV’s sons were locked up in the Tower of London and subsequently were not seen again, the Tudors claim Richard III killed them and various partisans of Richard’s right down to the modern day say that this is a lie put about for propaganda purposes. Richard only reigned for about 2 years, before he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victor at this battle was Henry Tudor, who then took the throne as Henry VII. Obviously his and his descendants’ regime had good reason to cast Richard III as a terrible despot who deserved to be overthrown (but contemporary accounts suggest he was better liked than that), and also had good reason to insist that the Princes in the Tower were dead (as their claim to the throne would be better than Henry’s). The image of Richard III that’s come down to us via Shakespeare of a hunchbacked, murdering tyrant therefore needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. And the Richard III Society is devoted to the idea that he had no physical deformities, was a wise etc etc ruler & didn’t murder anyone. There was a segment of the programme that showed Farnaby talking to various of the society members on skype or something like that, and they were all very passionately saying things like “he would have nothing to gain from murdering the princes” and so on. Which made me roll my eyes somewhat, it has to be said. Of course there was probably some carefully chosen editing going on here – the programme did seem keen to play up the “aren’t these people weird?” theme. Perhaps to an unkind degree.

Langley & her fellow society members might’ve been nuts, but they were nuts that had done their homework. One of the legends surrounding the death of Richard III was that his body had been chucked in the river, but this was a later invention by a writer who’d visited the wrong church & found no signs of the grave so made something up to explain it. Langley had tracked down (with help from historians) more contemporary sources which said he had been buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester, and she also tracked down where (geographically) that church had once been. And then we had another of the more “nutty woo-woo” bits, as she told us how she’d gone there and stood in the car park that was now there and stood at the parking bay labelled with an R and “felt something”.

So the Richard III Society raised the money (over £10,000) to fund an excavation by Leicester University to see if they could find the bones of Richard III. They double checked the info, and started by digging three trenches in the car park. The first thing they found, in the first trench, right under the letter R were human bones. The rest of the archaeological evidence (which mapped out where the church was) subsequently showed that these were a likely candidate for the bones of the very man they were looking for! I was a little annoyed that the woo-woo had lucked out 😉 But it was good for the excavation because the slim chance had actually paid off – it’s the sort of thing you couldn’t put in a story because no-one would believe the coincidence.

These bones were then properly excavated (with a slip-up of damaging the skull :/ but only that one slip-up) and taken off to Leicester University for analysis. Another more nutty bit was Langley’s insistence that the box containing the bones be transported drapped in the standard of Richard III. But anyway, once at the university they were subjected to all sorts of analysis. The first thing we were told about was the analysis of a piece of metal found near the spine – unfortunately this turned out to be a Roman nail that just happened to be in the soil there.

They also CT scanned the bones & could do quite a bit of analysis from that. The first, most striking, thing was that he did have a curvature of the spine – which was very upsetting for Langley. But this scoliosis seems to’ve been in the same plane as the torso and was probably not particularly visible when he was clothed. Maybe one of his shoulders would’ve been a bit raised, but not by much. And definitely no withered arm. So this shows us that the later Tudor propaganda about the deformities – hunchback, withered arm – was based on a kernel of truth and then exaggerated to fit the purposes of the Tudors. (Bear in mind that at this time any deformity would be seen as a punishment from God, and to indicate something about your moral character.) One other notable thing about the skeleton is that he seemed to have quite feminine features to his bone structure – more gracile than the average male and some particular features of the pelvis were towards the feminine end of the spectrum.

They could also see the causes of death from the bones. The notable wounds included a hole in the top of the skull made by a dagger pounded down through it and a blow that had sliced off a piece of the skull to an extent that would’ve exposed the brain. Clearly these were not survivable wounds (even with modern medicine) – tho it can’t be determined which one was the one that killed him as both happened at or very soon after death. They also said that there was a wound on his pelvis that had occurred after death – a knife thrust through the buttocks. These wounds fit the contemporary stories about how Richard had died – surrounded in the melee fighting and killed then, and subsequently his body was found and carried to Henry VII tied over a horse (for display to prove he was truly dead before he was buried). The buttock wound might well have occurred while he was tied over this horse.

They also carbon dated the bones. The first estimate came out a bit early (by about 50 years) but they then said that given he was a part of the elite he’d’ve had a diet rich in marine food. This would change the estimate, and the range of the new one covered the right date.

And they did the DNA testing, to see if it was an acceptable match of a known descendant of one of Richard III’s sisters. I was disappointed with this bit of the programme because it didn’t actually give us any details, just said that the “the DNA was a match”. Er, right, not much info there. Couldn’t we’ve cut some of the weepy woman stuff & talked a bit about what testing they did? I found more from the Leicester University website for the project – it seems they looked at the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones and compared it to two descendants in an unbroken maternal line from Anne Neville (Richard’s sister). A somewhat simplified explanation of this – mitochondria are the bits in a cell that provide the cell with energy, and once upon a time they were free living bacteria that now live in symbiosis inside other cells. This means that they still have some vestigial remains of their own DNA, which is distinct from the DNA of the main cell. Mitochondria are always inherited from one’s mother – they are present in the egg cell pre-fertilisation. So if you look at markers in the mitochondrial DNA then people who share a common maternal ancestor will share those markers (barring mutation, which is a relatively rare occurrence). So when they looked at the markers of the two maternal line descendants of Richard’s mother (via his sister) and compared it to the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones they found that the markers were the same. Interestingly the website also mentions that the three samples share a particularly rare form of one of markers, making it even more convincing that these are relatives in the maternal line (i.e. this gets even less likely to be a case of coincidence).

The website also mentions looking at the paternal line (i.e. looking at Y-chromosome markers that are only passed down from father to son) but then it just says that this is harder because it’s more clear-cut who someone’s mother is (as birth generally takes place in front of witnesses particularly at that level of society), but it’s harder to be sure who the father is (as conception happens in private and may not be accurately reported). So I guess that didn’t pan out with any of the putative direct male line descendants (of Richard’s father).

So each piece of evidence they showed isn’t completely convincing in itself. But taken all together it seems that this is extremely likely to be Richard III’s skeleton. He died at the right time, in the right way, he had the right sort of physical deformities, he was buried in the right place and he is of the right maternal line. Which is pretty awesome 🙂

They also did a reconstruction of his face from the skull, but I kept wondering about confirmation bias – it turned out to look quite like the portraits, and how much of that is because consciously or unconsciously any time there was a choice the one that made it look more like the portraits was chosen? This bit also drew the somewhat daft observation from Langley that “this wasn’t the face of a tyrant” – I’m not sure you can really say anything about his personality from a model of a computer reconstruction of a long dead man.

Overall I enjoyed this programme, even if I felt they could’ve cut quite a bit of Langley’s emotions and replaced it with the science. Farnaby was a good presenter – he narrated it with a sense of humour (unsurprisingly for a comedian) but this wasn’t at the expense of presenting the actual information.

In Our Time: Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was, among many other things, one of the influential British philosophers of the 20th Century. The experts who discussed his life & ideas on In Our Time were A. C. Grayling (New College of the Humanities, London and St Anne’s College, Oxford), Mike Beaney (University of York) and Hilary Greaves (Somerville College, Oxford). The programme concentrated on his mathematical work and on his philosophical ideas. They started the programme with a brief description of Russell’s early life – he was born in 1872 as a part of an aristocratic family & didn’t go to school until his teens, just before he went to study at Cambridge University. The bit that stuck in my mind from this part of the programme is that he wasn’t sent to school because he was thought of as the sensitive sort – his brother went to school, but that was because he was more into sports & more robust.

He started out studying mathematics, and then moved onto philosophy, and worked in both fields over his life. In mathematics he was particularly concerned with building the whole of maths up from logic alone – so in arithmetic instead of accepting as an axiom that 1+1=2 you first have to prove that. This was partly because of a philosophical point of view that why should you accept those axioms on trust, and partly because if your system of deciding if a proof is valid or not depends at any point upon intuition then it’s possible for different mathematicians to disagree about the validity of proofs.

So to derive something like 1+1=2 from logical principles alone he first had to define the numbers based on logical principles and the operation of addition. He used the then new idea of sets – called “classes” at the time. I think the idea for how to use sets to define numbers worked as follows: the idea of identity (something is identical to something else) is a logical principle. The idea of non-identity is also such a principle. If you have a set that contains all things that are not identical to themselves, then you have a set with nothing in it – this is the null set, or zero. This set is a singular object. If you have a set that contains the null set and nothing else, then it is a member of the set of all sets that only contain one thing. Which you can use as the definition of the natural number 1. Now you have two objects (the null set, and the definition of 1) and can use those in the same way to define the natural number 2. I am a little confused here why this isn’t using the number to define itself – but I suspect the confusion arises from me (and the experts on the programme) using words to discuss something that’s better done symbolically. They didn’t cover how Russell used sets to define the operation of addition, but I suspect that’s even more complicated.

But using sets to define the basic logical underpinnings of arithmetic introduces a paradox – called Russell’s Paradox, because he described this flaw. If you have a set that contains all sets that do not contain themselves, then does that set contain itself or not? The word picture they used to make the paradox more clear was to say imagine there’s a barber in a village who shaves all the men who do not shave themselves, and only the men who do not shave themselves. If he does not shave himself, then he is a man who does not shave himself and so must be shaved by the barber. But the barber is himself, so if he shaves himself then he is ineligible to be shaved by the barber. But the barber is himself, so now he is not shaved by himself and so must be shaved by the barber etc etc. So Russell took his theory back to pieces and tried to rebuild it without this flaw (and ultimately failed, I think they said). He tried to categorise the sorts of objects that can exist into a hierarchy – there are objects that aren’t sets, then there are level one sets that contain objects that aren’t sets, level 2 sets can contain objects that are level 1 sets etc etc.

And I was reminded that I should re-read “Gödel, Escher, Bach” at some point 🙂

On the philosophy side of things Russell was the founder of something called Analytic Philosophy, which is apparently the dominant philosophy in the English speaking world these days. He was reacting against Idealism which was the dominant philosophy when he was studying at Cambridge. I think the key thing was that the Idealists thought of the mind as the dominant thing, the world exists as it is perceived – essentially a sceptical philosophy where you don’t know if anything is real except that which you have perceived yourself. Russell was more of a Realist (technical term, I think) who was on the side where if you can express a thought about something then that thing must in some sense exist (even if what you are saying is “fairies don’t exist” then the very fact you can conceive of fairies means they do somehow exist even if not actually in the actual real world). Analytic philosophy isn’t as far from Russell’s mathematics as one might imagine at first glance – a large part of his system is breaking down language into logical components and using this to express ideas with clarity. I have a feeling I’ve completely mangled this explanation, and looking at wikipedia hasn’t helped. I do remember the example they gave of the sort of thing he was talking about, which is that the sentence “The present King of France is bald” is actually made up of three logical sentences. In words this would be “There is a thing that is the King of France”, “All things which fit the definition of this thing are this thing” and “The thing that is this thing, is bald.” So when you look at the original sentence it’s hard to tell if it’s true or false – and Russell wanted this to break down to a binary system, either a statement is true or it’s false. The original sentence is actually quite complex – with no King of France, is he bald or not? But if you look at the three logical sentences that make it up, then you can assign it to the “false” category because the very first logical part of it is clearly false (there is no thing that is the King of France).

They ended the programme by saying that Russell did lots of other things as well as mathematics & philosophy – for instance he was heavily in politics, wrote several popular books. But clearly there just wasn’t enough time in the programme to do more than scratch at the surface of his life. And even then it felt like one of the more complex episodes of In Our Time that we’ve listened to.

Lost Kingdoms of South America; In Search of Medieval Britain

The second episode of Lost Kingdoms of South America is about the Tiwanaku people, who lived in what is now Bolivia between about 500AD to about 1100AD. The main area they lived in is a large plateau in the Andes over 3500 metres above sea level. Cooper opened the programme by visiting some modern subsistence farmers in the area & showing us how difficult life can be on the plateau. The Tiwanaku people started out near a large lake on the plateau (Lake Titicaca) – this lake creates a slightly warmer micro-climate, and the soil near the lake is more fertile than elsewhere. The Tiwanaku increased the area where they were able to farm by using networks of channels between raised fields to irrigate the soil using the meltwater from the mountains.

The main archaeological site for the Tiwanaku people is a vast temple complex (over 5 square kilometres in area) called Tiwanaku – which means “stone at the centre”. This was constructed using massive stones brought across the lake, and made into walls for ritual areas & carved with faces of ancestors and gods. The religion of the people was about gathering together to make offerings to the gods controlling the environment, so that they would have successful harvests etc. Cooper went to a modern Bolivian “start of the growing season” festival, which was nominally Christian (in that it happened partly in a church, and people brought banners of Christ crucified with them) but also derived from the ancestral festivals of the people (and involved all the surrounding people in the area coming together and having a party). As with the Chachapoya this appears to’ve been a civilisation where there wasn’t such a strict hierarchy as we’re used to – there’s no indication of kings or leaders as such, no memorials to a single person. Instead the social bonds were formed at these festivals & a combination of close ties to the rest of the people and friendly competition is what drives the larger scale projects that require collaboration.

The rituals of the Tiwanaku people appear to’ve involved beer, and hallucinogens – the statues left at the site of Tiwanaku are normally of a person holding a beer cup in one hand and a snuff pipe (their drug paraphenalia) in the other. The archaeologist Cooper was talking to told us that the temple would originally have been painted in bright colours, and the people wore very bright coloured clothes which would add to the hallucinogenic experience. They also probably involved sacrifice – modern Bolivians will still sometimes sacrifice llamas at their festivals. There also appears to be evidence that at least on some occasions there was human sacrifice. However, I wasn’t entirely convinced by that segment of the programme – what they told us about was based on one single skeleton discovered buried at the Tiwanaku site of an individual who’d been hit over the back of the head. Perhaps this was a sacrifice, but without any other evidence how do you know it’s not just a murder? Presumably there was other evidence we just weren’t shown.

The beer cups are a distinctive shape with distinctive patterns, and as the Tiwanaku culture spread and met other cultures you can see those cultures adopt the beer cups & other trappings of the Tiwanaku lifestyle. Including head deformation! The Tiwanaku people wrapped the heads of babies to elongate the skull, or sometimes added boards to the wrappings to flatten the skull. The expansion of the Tiwanaku was presented as peaceful & involving bonding with people over a beer – but again I wasn’t entirely convinced by the evidence we were shown (not saying it doesn’t exist, just the way it was covered in the programme wasn’t convincing).

The Tiwanaku as a large “state” with a common culture appears to have collapsed around 1100AD, not through conquest but through a change in the climate locally that reduced the amount of meltwater for the irrigation of their fields leading to poor harvests. Eventually the Tiwanaku temple complex was abandoned. It was later discovered by the Spanish, and stones from it were used to build churches nearby (bizarrely including re-purposing statues as “St. Peter” and “St. Paul”). More recently Bolivian people have been reclaiming their past to some degree – including performing rituals at the Tiwanaku site. (But not deforming their babies’ skulls into elongated shapes …)

Somehow I got to the end of this particular episode & felt a bit like we were being given the “best side” of the Tiwanaku – even if it did touch on human sacrifice etc. It felt a lot like they were being set up as these chilled out stoned beer drinkers who just want to be friends, maaan. And I just don’t quite believe in 600 years of hippy peace & love with no conflict even as they spread to take-over a large territory. Maybe that just says more about me than about them, tho 😉

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We’d started watching quite late in the evening, so didn’t have time for another hour long programme – instead we watched another episode of In Search of Medieval Britain where Alixe Bovey goes round the country looking at places on the 14th Century map called the Gough Map. This episode was about Scotland. It was quite funny looking at the shape it was given on the map – as Bovey said clearly the map maker didn’t actually know anything first hand or accurate about Scotland. None of the geography was right, but she still managed to go & visit a few relevant places. Particularly entertaining was the segment on wolves – apparently the best way to escape a wolf, according to a medieval Bestiary, is to take all your clothes off (to reveal your sinfulness) and stand on top of the discarded clothing banging two rocks together (to summon the apostles). This will so scare the incarnation of the devil (which is, after all, what a wolf is) that it will turn tail & run away. I hope no-one actually tried that 😉

She also visited the oldest cathedral in Scotland (in Glasgow), a herb garden (complete with herbalist), Stirling, the Isle of May (controlled access to the fishing ports at the south-east of Scotland, a very important part of the Scottish economy of the time), and a safe house in the border region where the border people would protect themselves from raiders. Or base themselves once they’d become raiders …

I do wish we’d managed to record more than two of these 🙁

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January 2013 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, you can follow the internal navigation links from there.

Books

Fiction

“Bitten” Kelley Armstrong. Part of Read All the Fiction, urban fantasy with werewolves. Taken to charity shop.

“Gridlinked” Neal Asher. Part of Read All the Fiction, space opera with cyberpunk flavour. Kept.

“Before The Golden Age 1” ed. Isaac Asimov. Part of Read All the Fiction, short stories from 1931& 1932 plus autobiography of Asimov from birth (1920) to 1932. Boxed up.

“Ran Away” Barbara Hambly. Historical mystery set in 1820s Paris & 1830s New Orleans, one of the Benjamin January series. Library book.

“The Desert of Souls” Howard Andrew Jones. Arabian Nights-esque fantasy set in 8th Century Baghdad, with overtones of Sherlock Holmes. Library book.

Total: 5

Non-Fiction

“China: The World’s Oldest Civilisation Revealed” John Makeham. Part of Chapter-by-Chapter, an overview of the sweep of Chinese history from the Paleolithic through to the death of the last Emperor in the 20th Century.

Total: 1

Museums

Thread of Silk and Gold. An exhibition of Meiji era Japanese textiles at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Total: 1

Photos

Shabtis.

Total: 1

Radio

The Borgias. In Our Time episode about the Borgia family in Renaissance Italy.

Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. In Our Time episode about the epic Persian poem the Shahnameh.

The Upanishads. In Our Time episode about one of the groups of sacred texts of the Hindu religion.

Total: 3

Television

Non-Fiction

Lost Kingdoms of South America. The history & archaeology of four cultures in South America.

Prehistoric Autopsy. What we know about the lives & looks of 3 ancestors of modern Homo sapiens.

Wartime Farm. What life was like for farmers during World War II, part re-enactment.

Total: 3

“Ran Away” Barbara Hambly

A couple of months ago in a thread about book recommendations on Realms Beyond kjn said he thought Barbara Hambly hadn’t really found her voice until “Bride of the Rat God” and then the historical mysteries she wrote after that (by which I think he meant the Benjamin January books). Which I thought was interesting, because I’ve read several of Hambly’s books (including “Bride of the Rat God”) and enjoy them a lot but I haven’t actually read any of the Benjamin January series or indeed anything more recent than “Bride of the Rat God”. The ones I’ve read are mostly portal fantasies, published in the 80s & 90s. So when I saw “Ran Away” turned face out at the library and noticed the cover said it was “The new Benjamin January novel” I picked it up to read.

Benjamin January is a free black man, the son of slaves, who lives in New Orleans. This book is mostly set in 1837 (with an extensive flashback to Paris in 1827). He’s trained as a surgeon, but makes his living as a musician because in that time & place white people don’t like black people being medics. I assume the earlier books give some indication of how come he has the medical training and the rest of his good education in the first place – it’s not the subject of this book. There’s a few things like that which reminded me I was reading the most recent book in an established series, but in general it stands alone well.

The story opens with January being told by his mother that “the Turk” has murdered his two concubines that morning in a jealous rage – it’s the gossip of the town, with lurid details & everyone knows it must be true that a heathen like that would do such a thing. January insists that it can’t be true, he knows the man and knows he’s not like that. And then we’re off into a flashback to 1827 when January lived in Paris with his first wife, a North African ex-Muslim woman. Because of his medical training his wife enlists his help on behalf of one of the concubines of the Turk, who it turns out has been poisoned by one of the Turk’s other wives. When she then vanishes January is the person the senior wife of the harem comes to to help find her and make sure she’s safe. A bit hard to write that plot-starting summary because I don’t want to give away too much of how it works out. But suffice to say that this flashback (which is the first half of the book) demonstrates that indeed the Turk is not the sort of man to murder the concubines. The second half of the book returns to 1837, and January’s efforts to find out who did murder the dead girls and why. The two mystery plotlines are well done, I didn’t find the answers to them obvious at the beginning but when the story got there they felt right. They also linked together well, with things from the first half showing up in the second half (and something that had niggled at me as being unresolved in the first bit was in fact a minor plot point later 🙂 ).

When I think of Hambly’s books I think of well-drawn, solid feeling characters who are often square pegs in round holes and intricate societies where there are hierarchies & manners that keep people reminded of their place and role. (I’m not sure I phrased that well, hopefully I’ve got the idea across). This book is no exception to that – and in some ways is more unsettling because this is an actual society from history and people like January or any of the other main characters will’ve actually existed.

One of the themes of this book seems to be how all the different sub-cultures of “society” are actually much the same under the skin, and how petty all their reasons to feel superior to each other are. Like how much the high-society girls looking for husbands at the Paris balls are the same as the coloured demi-mondaine of New Orleans being presented to society to meet white “protectors”. And how the concubines of the Turk aren’t worlds away from these black mistresses of those white men, despite the latter despising the lives of the former. Or there’s the slave woman who is very clearly sniffy about January’s social status because he’s a darker black than her but he’s a free man and she can be (and has been) bought and sold with no respect for any of her wishes. And the French of New Orleans don’t mix with the Americans, the old aristocracy of France are “above” the “new people” who gained status with Napolean or in the Revolution. Having just read some 1930s stories I was particularly struck by how this is a book with many racist, classist and sexist characters, but it manages not to be a racist, classist or sexist story. People are people, good or bad or indifferent because of who they are personally not because of some stereotype.

I’m not sure I’d say that this is better than the earlier Hambly I’ve read (tho it’s been a while since I read the others), but I would definitely say it’s as good. She’s one of my favourite authors, and clearly I now need to buy everything else she ever wrote – I have about a dozen books already, but there seem to be at least as many others I’ve not yet bought, including the Benjamin January series 🙂

In Our Time: Shahnameh of Ferdowsi

The Shahnameh is an epic poem, twice as long as the Odyssey & the Iliad put together, written in 10th Century AD Persia about Persian history. It took its author, Ferdowsi, 30 years to write and is still regarded today as one of the important pieces of Persian literature. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Narguess Farzad (University of London), Charles Melville (University of Cambridge) and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis (British Museum). The two women are Iranian, and particularly towards the end of the programme were very enthusiastic about how important this poem is to Iran & to the cultural identity of the Iranian people.

At the time it was written it was a few centuries after Persia had been conquered by the Muslim Arabs at a time when the Caliphate was no longer a strong force across the Islamic Empire. The Persian people had kept oral traditions of their culture, and their own language, and during this period there was a reassertion of Persian culture. Ferdowsi was writing as part of this cultural movement & he was setting out to retell pre-existing prose records & oral tradition as poetry because he believed this would be easier to remember. So it was a self-conscious effort at writing something for posterity. It’s written in early modern Persian, so is still understandable today even if somewhat archaic. The format is rhyming couplets, and a specific meter – I think they said it was 11 syllables, a pause, 11 more syllables for each line, and the middles and the ends of the lines in a couplet rhyme. I’m not sure if that means it’s A: A, A: A, B: B, B: B or if it means it’s A: B, A: B, C: D, C: D (if you see what I mean). They said he was a very good poet and within the strict meter he uses the feel of the language to fit the things he’s writing about. So battles have words that feel short and energetic, but scenes like banquets are more flowing words.

The poem is split into three parts – myths, legends & history. The myths are what we might think of as pre-history – the first people (cave dwellers), the coming of gods, that sort of thing. The legends are the stories of heroes, and of early kings and early battles (and these may or may not’ve happened, but certainly didn’t happen like they’re told). And the history is the stories of the Kings of the Sassanid Empire – which runs from around 200AD to the Islamic conquest of Persia in about 650AD. This is accurate in the sense that the right kings are named in the right order, but it’s not really telling you about what happened when, it’s more of a manual for “how to be a good Persian King”. There are lots of dialogues where the wise advisor tells the new King how to rule – reminds me a bit of Ancient Egyptian literature which has a whole genre of that sort of thing.

After it was written it wasn’t all that popular at first – it must’ve survived, and been copied around because it’s referred to in other literature. But it comes into its own once the Mongols conquer Persia, as a way of Persianising the new rulers and of showing what it means to be Persian. Since then it’s occupied a central role in Persian education & culture – they were saying that it’s taught in schools and that even people without formal schooling would learn sections of the poem.

“Before the Golden Age 1” ed. Isaac Asimov

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is a phrase that commonly has two definitions – the first of these is the era when Campbell was editing Astounding Stories and the writers included people like Isaac Asimov. The other definition is that the golden age of science fiction is 12. That the stories that you read around that sort of age when you’re just discovering your own tastes in fiction are the ones that stick with you through your life. This anthology is a selection of stories that Isaac Asimov remembers reading in the 1930s – in his own personal golden age – that had an influence on his writing and thus on “The Golden Age”.

As an aside, I’m not sure I quite agree with either definition – both that those 1940s stories of The Golden Age aren’t (in large part because of my own age) going to be the best thing ever for me. And also that I think I’m still discovering new books & stories I think are as good or better than the things I read in my teens.

But still, as a conceit for an anthology it’s a good one, and as well as reprinting the stories Asimov writes about his own life. He comes across as very full of himself, but also aware of that and poking fun at his own ego. I suspect if I’d ever met him I’d’ve found him irritatingly smug, but the tone works OK in an autobiography.

This volume covers the years 1931 & 1932, when Asimov is 11 & 12. I bought it sometime in the mid-80s, about ten years after it was published. Its been years since I last read it, and mostly what I remembered was that the stories seemed dated, a few were still quite good but most were pretty “meh” to my more modern eyes. That’s a fairly accurate summary – with the addition that some are downright bad to my more grown-up modern eyes. The science tends to be wrong (either because we now know more, or because the author didn’t know what was known then), they tend to be full of info-dumps and “As you know, Bob” conversations. Some of them work despite this.

And they all have what one might euphemistically call “the attitudes of their time”. The sexism tends to be in the absence of women, and in the lack of personality for the women in those few stories with any female characters – the sort of thing you can excuse for any one story as being that the author just happened to choose a male protagonist. But when you look at the collection as a whole there’s a pattern – nobody thought a woman to be interesting enough to be the protagonist or even a primary character (with the exception of the alien in the Williamson story at the end). The racism is … mostly of the same sort. I wrote the little notes on the stories before I wrote this intro & you’ll spot the bit where I’m suddenly taken aback. There are three stories in the middle that are appallingly explicitly racist, two of them (a duology by Meek) to a degree where if you took the racism out there’d be no story left. I skim read the second of those, and wouldn’t’ve even done that if I hadn’t been going to write about the book.

I’ll be keeping the book, but boxed up – primarily for the autobiography and for the nostalgia.

1931

“The Man Who Evolved” Edmond Hamilton

Story about the future evolution of humanity, a morality tale of the “meddle not with things you do not understand” type. Also felt like the H. G. Wells story “The Time Machine”, in that it was a scientist building a contraption to find out how the human race developed & demonstrating it to his friends. The science is dreadful (evolution Does. Not. Work. Like. That. and I suspect even a biologist in the 1930s would wince at it) but the story is still compelling.

“The Jameson Satellite” Neil R. Jones

Another “what will it be like in the far future” tale. In this one a man works out how to perfectly preserve his body after he dies, by shooting it into space in a rocket to orbit the Earth. Much much later he’s discovered by aliens, who are metal men (Zoromes from the planet Zor, I kid you not) who were once biological but have transplanted their brains into metal bodies and now live forever. The science is equally as wince-making as the last one but I have a higher tolerance for bad orbital mechanics etc than I do for bad biology 😉 The “radium repulsion rays” to prevent meteors hitting the rocket were a bit much tho … It was still a fun story to read, I keep wanting to use the word “charming”.

“Submicroscopic”, “Awlo of Ulm” Capt. S. P. Meek

Woah, these two were very much a “product of their time” to an extent that they didn’t have anything to recommend them today. Man builds machine to shrink himself, finds submicroscopic land inhabited by beautiful white people who are being attacked by brutish black savages who want to eat them. The sequel introduces scientifically advanced cruel yellow people with slanty eyes who’d like to enslave them. The hero wins the day because he’s the WASPiest WASP that ever WASPed, and also has guns but if he hadn’t he’d still’ve won. Asimov notes in his afterword that he was uncomfortable with the “touches of racism” he noticed in his re-read, but I’d say that “touches” is inadequate to even begin to describe the level of racism. Oh, and sexist too – these are the first stories in the book to have a woman mentioned at all, but she’s not a person she’s a plot coupon. Save the princess, marry the princess, save the princess (again), duel someone to the death for the princess, duel someone (else) to the death for the princess, reflect on how you didn’t kill them brutally enough because of what they threatened to do to the princess… So I think that’s actually a step back from the woman-free state.

“Tetrahedra of Space” P. Schulyer Miller

A story in the tradition of Wells’ “War of the Worlds” – aliens land, some plucky earth men persuade them to move on when something common on Earth turns out to be poison to them. Astonishingly purple prose, which made me giggle out loud at times because it was so overwrought. Here’s a sample:

It was beyond all reason — all possibility! And yet — it was! Now I could see them clearly, rank on rank of them in orderly file, some hundred of them, strewn in great concentric rings about the softly glowing spheres — harsh as the black rock itself, hard, and glittering, and angular — a man’s height and more from summit to base — great, glittering tetrahedra — tetrahedra of terror!

Unfortunately, also a very racist story 🙁 I kept trying to give it a pass coz I was enjoying the main plot, but it kept getting worse – there’s a nasty subplot to do with a South American native/Portuguese “breed” on the “wrong side” (i.e. his mother was white). However, in contrast to Meek’s stories I feel that it could be edited to remove the racist attitudes & the racist subplot and at the end you’d have a story where the essential plot was the same, just stripped of the 1930’s unpleasantness. (The science would still mark it out as from that time period, mind you …).

“The World of the Red Sun” Clifford D. Simak

Time travel in the style of H. G. Wells – with a well thought out machine that has believable flaws. Plucky 20th Century men save the world of the far future! Given how thought through the time machine was it was startling that the men of the far future still spoke English. An enjoyable story.

1932

“Tumithak of the Corridors” Charles R. Tanner

Far future Earth, long post-invasion by Venusians & the start of the story of how people won back their planet. The framing story is that this is a reconstruction of “how it must’ve been” told from even further in the future. This is one of the stories that had stuck in my mind from reading this book when I was a teenager and I think I like it just as much as an adult – caveats about 1930s story telling styles still apply, tho, and I can’t exactly call it non-sexist or non-racist. It does actually have a couple of women with speaking parts who have about as much personality as the male secondary characters – but that means pretty much none. No overt racism & even an explicit statement that people come in many sorts, good & bad, regardless of nation or era – but everyone’s white except the savages who live in the dark (who are slate-coloured) which is somewhat problematic. Well thought through consequences of the living arrangements of the people, tho the science/arts divide made me roll my eyes a little. My favourite of this volume.

“The Moon Era” Jack Williamson

Another man in a machine goes on an adventure story – this time the machine is invented by an old wealthy childless man who summons his never met before impoverished nephew and announces that if he takes the trip in the machine he will inherit the fortune. The trip is supposed to be to the Moon & back, and indeed he goes to the Moon but the time he arrives is not the time he left the Earth. The alien he meets is female – has to be for the plot to work, but she’s no plot coupon she has a personality of her own. A melancholy story, which I liked although I didn’t quite buy the ending.

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