Yellow Submarine (1968) and The Assyrian Winged God

Reviewing the movie Yellow Submarine and I came across this famous image.  But wait, I thought, is this not a homage to the ancient Assyrian Winged God?  The original did not have an ice cream cone, of course.

 

Head of a Griffin at the Metropolitan

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is this head of a Griffin sitting in a case.  I believe that they give an approximate date but very little other information.  What was its provenance.  Where on earth did this come from?  A tomb?  Was it designed to be mounted on a staff?  

I had an opportunity in New York City to hear a lecture by Adrienne Mayor, an art historian from Princeton at the time, about her theory of the origin of the Griffin.   First mentioned by Herodotus who said that the story was spread by nomads and traders on the silk road, Ms Mayor observed that on one portion of the silk road one finds large fields of fossils exposed to the air.  One of the most common would look like the skeleton of a very large, four footed beast with the head of a bird.

Griffin on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin

Adrienne Mayor on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Mayor

Humor in Archaeology

Many Americans see academia as dry and formal, elite and lofty palaces of higher thought staffed by dedicated monk-like professional educators who wouldn't know a good joke if it hit them in the face with a pie.  People whose sense of humor was removed in early childhood. But maybe its just that their sense of humor is on the dry side, with a hint of subtlety foreign to the average American who, in general, like their humor broadly expressed.

This was illustrated in a recent article in the NY Times about an archaeological dig in Gabii, Italy, which is 12 miles away from Rome. The architecture revealed is from approximately 300 BC and is significant because so much of the evidence we have about Rome comes from the Imperial period or by writers of the Imperial period looking back to a Rome they idealized as being simple and unpretentious, inhabited by equally humble and unpretentious Romans. (1)

There are several surprising things about this dig, which the article goes into, but one in particular stands out: whereas in Rome history is layered like a cake, with levels going down a very long way, in Gabii, once the city had its day, it was covered over and forgotten. It is currently lying on undeveloped land. So no Medieval or Rennaisance buildings needed to be moved or conserved. No local pope had robbed the buildings for their materials like happened in Rome. No persnickety Romans to complain that the dig is disturbing the tourists. So this is very lucky indeed, if one is an archaeologist.

But getting back to the topic of our post, on the humor of academics, or at least of archaeologists, the article quotes Christopher Ratte, director of a museum of archaeology in Michigan, who expressed surprise that one could "break new ground" in an area that was so well-researched.

Get it?

 An archaeology dig "breaking new ground"?

I bet no one has ever used that joke in Archaeology before.

NY Times Article on the dig at Gabii

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/romes-start-to-architectural-hubris.html?_r=2&

_____________________________________________

1. This is extremely doubtful. That Romans were ever modest, noble, and filled with a self-effacing humility is a little hard to believe.

What Really Happens to Priceless Artifacts in War-Torn Countries

The following pattern has now happened at least three different times in the recent past. The press and the public are told that priceless ancient documents or artifacts are stolen or destroyed by thieves or stolen by an invading army or militia. 

The press reports all this as true and the world wrings its hands in despair and raises its eyes to heaven. 

How could this be allowed to happen, some angry academic screams in the media.

But three different times, that isn't what happened.

Not in Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded.  Not in Iraq when the U.S. was accused of standing idly by while hooligans looted and burned Iraqi museums.  And not in Mali when Islamic militants occupied Timbuktu where ancient Islamic documents had accumulated.

In Afghanistan, the priceless artifacts turned out to be in the back of the bottom vault of the Bank of Afghanistan where some smart people from the national museum had stashed them, and then conveniently neglected to tell anyone.   Hey what happened to all those priceless gold artifacts ?  Oh, those artifacts, they would say, we don't know, they just disappeared.  Maybe the Soviets took them, they would say.   The Soviets say, what artifacts?    Then, mysteriously, 20 years later, they look in the back of the vault and they find these mysterious trunks.

Anybody seen that big gold thingie ?   You know, the one with the dragons and weird guy with the circle on his head?

In Iraq, it turns out that all most of the allegedly stolen artifacts were in the basement of the main museum.  Where they had been put.  Then when people did come by to loot the museum attendants would say, gee, someone must have already taken them.  Better ask the Americans, they would say, its all their fault.

And finally in Timbuktu, we discover that the priceless manuscripts were smuggled out of town in an operation described in the Washinton Post, see "A Daring Rescue in Timbuktu"

What is going on?

What is happening is that when a country or city is occupied by foreign troops, a militia, or descends into chaos, responsible people who love their country's history put the items away, secretly, for safe keeping. Then when the bad guys show up and ask for the stuff, they are told that someone already destroyed them, or stole them, or that they are no longer there. 

And of course the press reports them as stolen or destroyed because (a) that is what they are told and (b) the last thing you want to do is to tell everyone where they actually are because then they might actually be stolen or destroyed.

So the next time you hear about some cultural disaster, be concerned, but do not despair. There is a good chance that things will show up again, eventually.

But one footnote.  Although it would be a shame if a document were lost, how could it be that they had not already been scanned and put in a dozen libraries around the world?  That is the real story, don't count on reading that story in the press anytime soon.  Way over their heads.

Also see:

Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Afghanistan
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/afghanistan-treasures/

Procrastination Secrets Revealed: The Decipherment of Linear B

I realize that one should not brag, but I believe that I am the best procrastinator that I have ever met or heard about by at least one order of magnitude if not more.  I feel confident that I could compete against just about anyone in the world in this area and be victorious. But it isn't just raw talent, as with anything in order to be the best, you have to work at it, you have to practice, and you have to learn technique.

In this essay I am going to discuss one of several topics I have used to waste weeks if not longer of my time, and they can be used to waste your time as well, if you choose. The specific subject matter may not work for everyone but they will work for some of you. I hope you will try them and that they will be as productive in producing non-productivity for you as they have been for me.

The trick is to find a topic or story that is sufficiently complex that it will naturally lead to other interesting topics, which will lead to other interesting topics and so forth. It helps if there is some sense of romance involved, of mystery, or of controversy. By the time you are through, six months or a year or more can be spent becoming your local expert on the otherwise useless subject.

Michael Ventris, the architect who deciphered Linear B, and an example of part of a tablet

In this post we discuss our first example of such a topic: the decipherment of Linear B.

Once upon a time, a famous archaeologist proved that the Minoan and Greek civilizations were literate long before the classical period. But no one could read what they said. There was no Rosetta stone and it was not believed that the language would turn out to be a known one. But a young architect, with a talent for languages, had heard the famous archaeologist speak when he was a teenager and determined to decipher the tablets. And after many years, he did and he did it in such a way that the scholars in the field accepted the correctness of this outsider's work even though it revealed things that proved many of their theories wrong.

I can not express to you in this brief post how unusual and how important this was.  First, it is very difficult for an outsider to participate in current academic research in a field as obscure as ancient history because to really do it well you need to spend years learning things that have no utility outside of the field. In this case, this includes such things as not only knowing Greek, but having an idea of what the field of philology thinks ancient greek might have been like.  Or know a lot about what we think we know about the economies of Greece and Crete at the time in order to help judge whether a translation might be reasonable in context.   But more than that, this is an area where some very good people in the field had tried for 50 years to find a solution and none had been found, although some progress had been made.  And it was important to know about this work, this progress, because it ultimately opened the door for Ventris's solution.   And last but not least, there is something about ancient languages that attracts the nutty people, John Chadwich at one point had three file boxes of lunatic slush from people who thought they had translated Linear A or the Phaistos Disk.

So not only did Ventris have to solve the problem where others had tried and failed, but he had to do so in a way that this very elitist and closed community of scholars could accept and pay him serious attention.   Ventris knew all this of course, and he had some good fortune.  Part of the story is how he happened to be able to present his ideas on the BBC as part of a discussion of the problem and how a scholar at Cambridge, an expert in ancient Greek languages, heard him speak.  The scholar, John Chadwick, checked into Ventris and tried his proposed solution and, to his amazement, was able to decipher about 20 or so plausible Greek words in a few days of effort that made sense in the context of the tablets.   Then as a team, Ventris and Chadwick published the paper that presented the ideas, and that worked very well for academia: a lead author who is an outsider, but a reputable and known scholar as second author.  Perhaps Ventris alone, although he found the solution mostly on his own, would not have been as strong as the two of them together.

Here is the way John Chadwick begins the story of the decipherment:

So at this point in our story, an outsider has come to the field and presented a solution to a very difficult problem.   But now you have to get people to accept the idea.   And the story just keeps getting better.   Chadwick and Ventris knew that new tablets had been found but had not seen them.   But the archaeologist whose dig had found the new tablets had a copy of an early draft of the decipherment paper and tried the system on several tablets.   But one tablet, a very famous tablet if a tablet can be said to be famous, was particularly useful.  It was an inventory of various things that looked like tripods and cups/vases with a number of handles.   And the translation  listed "tripods" for things with three legs, and vases with four handles said "four ears" (an ear was a term for handle of a vase used in Homer) and one with three handles, said "three ears", and so forth.  As the archaeologist who sent it to them said, "This is all too good to be true, is coincidence excluded"?

But here is where the procrastination comes in, the part where things start expanding into other areas that are related and also fascinating.  It turns out that these are not just any old tablets of an ancient and lost civilization.  No.  Whatever may be historical about Homer, most scholars who study Homer believe that it is an authentic transmission or memory of an early period of Greece, however much it may have been distorted or romanticised.   And these tablets are almost certainly the accounting records of the civilization that Homer wrote/talked about.   And this civilization happens to also be the one which at that period, participated in the catastrophe of about 1200 BC which archaeologists refer to in various ways, but generally as "the end of the late bronze age in the eastern mediterranean".  At this time, most of the civilizations of this area, were either destroyed or attacked, by people who have not been identified but whom the Egyptians called the "Sea Peoples".

And it turns out that we have these tablets at all because they were in cities that were burned to the ground.  These clay tablets are almost certainly the temporary records, recorded in unfired clay, which got fired by accident when the cities were destroyed, and left where they fell in the ruins, where no one was left to clean things up, and rebuild.   

How interesting could the accounting records of a lost civilization be? One of the first tablets they decoded said, and I quote:

At Pylos. Slaves of the Priestess on account of the sacred gold. 14 women.

L. Ryder Haggard would have been proud to write such a sentence.

www.ancientscripts.com has a good summary introduction to Linear B
http://www.ancientscripts.com/linearb.html

Begin researching this topic by reading the following book by John Chadwick:

http://www.amazon.com/Decipherment-Linear-B-Canto/dp/0521398304

Amazon.com will let you read about 1/4 of the book online.

A conference on the decipherment of Linear B after 60 years
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cracking-the-code-the-decipherment-of-linear-b-60-years-on

Its Greek to me.

In later posts we will discuss other topics which have the potential of wasting a huge amount of your time.

Online Panoramas, Streetviews of Ruined Cities, Archaic Panorama Technology

If travelling is a fools paradise, as Emerson said, then what is virtual travelling?  Here we have two examples of recent virtual travelling to exotic places, and one archaic travel photography technology, the ancient but still expensive roll-film panorama camera.   But first the online paradise(s).

1. Online Panoramas

www.airpano.com has collected a variety of photographic panoramas and given them a consistent user interface. We have some of the usual suspects, the Great Pyramid of Luxor for example, but some unusual ones as well. Here is a picture from the Sawminarayan Akshardham in Delhi.  (Thanks to Speer).  I have trouble controlling the interface with these things, so I find them frustrating.  But the photography is pretty good, but better yet, there are some unusual places here.  This first one is pretty amazing and I have never heard of it before, let alone have a clue how to pronounce it.

Link to this and other panoramas.

http://www.airpano.com/files/Akshardham-India/2-2

2. Street Views of Ruined Cities

On the one hand, I love this panoramic photography that has been enabled and inspired by digital photography. On the other hand, I find it annoying after a while that I can see these places virtually, but am so impoverished that I have no hope of visiting them myself. A virtual "street view" of Pompeii is fabulous as an educational technique and I am delighted with it, but it just reminds me how much wealth matters in this world and how stupid one is not to have it.

To get to the Pompeii street view, go to www.maps.google.com, type in "pompeii, italy", and zoom into the street on one of the gray areas to the north which are ruins. At some point it will enter street view mode, and tell you which ruin or building you are looking at.

3. Archaic Panorama Capture Technology

For those who have not seen or know of the non-digital way of creating panoramas, they are pretty amazing. The following all use so-called "roll film" which was one of the earliest film formats that were not individual "plates" of film, such as 4x5 or 8x10. Roll film comes in 120 and 220 format, or roughly 10 or 20 6x6 cm (e.g. Hasselblad) exposures.

In the following cameras, one may get only 1 or 2 exposures per roll of film and the frame will be very long and horizontal. They use large format photography lenses with very large image circles, and they have tremendous vignetting. One normally shoots such things with huge anti-vignetting filters and one shoots very long exposures, which makes them suitable for landscapes but not for anything that moves.

Fuji 617

Linhof 617