Where now the blog and livejournal? Where the alert that was blowing? Where are the drafts file and imagebank, and the wild words flowing? Where is the strife about small wars, and the cathodes glowing? Where is debate and discovery, and the archives growing? They have passed like bits on a floppy, like tape in a dashboard The sites have gone down one by one, by their owners abandoned. Who shall turn the dry sheaves into green grass waving, Or behold a sunken ship to the Sun returning?
So, 2021 is crawling out the door under a hail of bullets, arrows, javelins, beer bottles, and hurlbats. A lot happened.
I worked the 2021 election where Canadians told their representatives to go back to work and not ask for absolute power, and I got a part-time job with a large Canadian retailer after three years of unemployment.
I got vaccinated against the COVID-19 pandemic.
I finished the manuscript of my second book and am about to sent a draft around to contacts with the right interests.
We don’t have many pictures of clothed women from the middle of the first millennium BCE in the Near East. Most of the local peoples did not paint scenes of daily life on their pottery, and their stone-carvings show a man’s world or a heavenly world. The Assyrian palace reliefs show some queens and deported women, and one Achaemenid seal shows a wealthy woman seated on a throne. One other picture of a clothed woman is a Neo-Elamite bitumen relief in the Louvre. Its 9.3 cm high, so five times larger than most of the little seals.
The cemetery at Yanghai in Uighur territory continues to give. This week, an article about hide scale armour in a grave there has been circulating on the Internet and corporate social media. The grave had other cool things, like a wooden bedstead and a wooden fire drill, but most of the attention has focused on the authors’ claims that the armour was made within the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Unfortunately, that claim is the weakest part of a strong article.
When you point out some of the less appealing aspects of ancient societies, someone usually accuses you of anachronistic morality. For example, it is very hard to find a writer in the ancient world who objects to slavery as a malum in se. There were people who objected to the wrong kind of people being enslaved, or to cruelty to slaves, but there are very few surviving texts where anyone says that slavery is wrong in and of itself. Isn’t it unfair to accuse the ancients of not knowing that slavery was always wrong if none of them seems to have realized this? There are various counters to this, like pointing out that people who point out admirable aspects of ancient societies seldom face the same criticism. But the best counter is listing some ancient practices which other ancient people objected to. One of the central themes of Roman literature is complaining how terrible Romans in the author’s day are.
S.M. Stirling’s Nantucket trilogy is a Late Bronze Age alternate history which does not involve Akhenaten or the Exodus (it does involve the Trojan War). That makes it a novel for me. It even quotes some Stan Rogers lyrics! So in 2021 I re-read my copy of the second volume in Canada. After being cast back to the Late Bronze Age, the Nantucketers have been divided into a majority based on their island and a renegade faction lead by William Walker (not the filibuster). Both factions are rushing to industrialize and expand like unto a game of Civilization.
A wheel of fortune in the Museo Civico, Verona. To minds before the 20th century, the wheel of fortune was not a toy but a thing as terrible as tetanus. Photo by Sean Manning, 2018. It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge. H. Beam Piper, Uller Uprising (1952)... Continue reading: Science as a Way Off the Wheel
I am having trouble writing my usual Remembrance Day post. In 2021, Canada finally lost its first war since the Chilcotin War in 1864 (the Chilcotin still belongs to the Tsilhqot’in, and that road was not driven through it). So far, our government has shamelessly betrayed the people in Afghanistan who helped it. Canadians are... Continue reading: Remembrance Day 2021
if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business. [When I announced my plans to build a huge new real estate development to the press], not all of them liked the idea of the world’s tallest building. But the point is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.
As my gentle readers have probably noticed, I like factual, cautious things. So its frustrating to read or hear things which spend more time rebutting some hurting wrong opinion than presenting facts. I never heard this opinion, and I am reading this book or listening to this talk because I want to see what the author thinks about the topic. They only have so much time to reach me, so why do they waste most of it telling me not to think something I don’t think?
Shiny! This is a medieval comet not an ancient comet but close enough! Copy of a pewter brooch from Salisbury by Billy and Charlie.
In late September, the world was excited by a Nature Science Reports article arguing that Tall el-Hamman, a city on the Jordan River, was destroyed by an interstellar body bursting overhead around 3650 years ago. This paper was published by a team of natural scientists based in the USA, particularly geologists, remote sensor scientists, and earth scientists. Because it is multidisciplinary, very few people are qualified to assess the argument as a whole. There seems to be some pushback from archaeologists on corporate social media. Those threads are far less useful than a footnoted essay would be, and some of the ones by highly educated posters make claims which anyone who reads the article can see are false. One of the better threads is by a Dr. Megan A. Perry, a bioarchaeologist at East Carolina University in the USA:
A scholarship to do a two-year Master’s degree on the Roman army in the east between the University of Manitoba and Dr. Conor Whately at the University of Winnipeg has just been announced on the Canadian Classical Bulletin. The two-year MA student (2022-2024) will be responsible for putting together detailed prosopographies of the people of... Continue reading: MA Scholarship on the Roman Army (Manitoba)
