Disease cheese

The tomb of Ptahmes, a 13th century BC mayor of Memphis, Egypt, contains the world's oldest cheese.

University of Catania and Cairo University

It's lucky the archaeologists didn't eat it, as scientists found it was made with sheep or goat mixed with cow's milk that contained traces of Brucellosis.  They found this by chemical analysis, so scientists are all agog to see what DNA sequencing might tell them about the evolution of the bacterium over the years. (It's still a concern in cowherds.)

The rest of us are just happy to make jokes about Sarcophagus Juice pairing well with Egyptian Tomb Disease Cheese.

Edit: More on the cheese (which apparently isn't the world's oldest) here at Buzzfeed, including a very informative answer in the comments.

Cross Bones Graveyard feels the love at last

Peromyscus's law: The nearer it is to October 31st, the probability that a link you click will lead to skeletons begins to approach 1.

This is of particular interest to me as I don't actually like Halloween. Brought up a long time ago in England, we didn't have Halloween in the American sense. We had Mischievous Night, where the bolder children went smashing windows and setting fire to things. At the end of October and before Bonfire Night many of us carved faces into either rutabagas or turnips, depending on which ones are the big, grey wrinkly ones in your dialect. I think one year, in a fit of superstrength, I managed to hollow out enough turnip (or rutabaga) flesh to actually put the stub of a candle inside, but that was the one and only time. I have no idea why we did that, though. And nobody had any candy.

But the world wibe wed is no respecter of county traditions, and leans heavily Halloween.  Even though today is the first day of Diwali, I think I've only heard that on the radio. Everything on the 'tubes is geared towards skeletons. From Twitter, I clicked this link at the Smithsonian, and came across a sprawling write up of a cemetery in Southwark that borders on an area of London that has housed prostitutes for 1900 years. (Which is a whole lot of years. I'm not convinced we know for a fact that Roman soldiers were visiting ladies of the night in Southwark during the first century but the article seems to think we do.)


History Cold Case. Crossbones Girl by thegrantuk--

Crossbones Girl - a 'cold case' investigation of one of the skeletons found
at the cemetery.

The article gives a necessarily brief history of the area, and dwells on the cemetery, the Cross Bones Graveyard. Although the Bishop had the local licensing rights for prostitutes, for some reason they were still considered outside the church, and so were buried in unconsecrated land. There were a lot of them (and local poor, along with their children, who were also apparently buried here) and the later burials were shallow, leading to a bit of NIMBYism from the locals, who thought this might not be very sanitary. Still, the article says the burial ground was eventually "more or less forgotten" until the London transport authority needed the land to build a substation in the 1990s. Historians were given a brief window to check the ground, and then all hell broke loose. Not so much in terms of the corpses springing up and haunting South London, which would have been cool, but more in the sense of the living suddenly deciding that Cross Bones was Important And Must Be Commemorated.

The article says that "[t]he International Union of Sex Workers has even called for Cross Bones to be the first World Heritage site dedicated to those in the sex trade"; a local 'poet' called John Constable Had A Vision and wrote extensively about the site - and, in a less likely conclusion, was actually published and his work put on as a play; and lots of those New Agey/ Old Hippy folks who seem to lurk in the brick walls and cobbled mews in London like the Boneless in last week's Doctor Who sprang from the brick walls, as they do, and formed The Friends of Cross Bones. They have made a "wild garden" in the graveyard and festooned the gates with ribbons, and they aim to preserve "the garden as a more permanent place of reflection and remembrance".


A short doc on the Cross Bones cemetery.

This is the sort of story that presses all my buttons, despite being a little too Halloweeny to be really real.  Two thousand years of illicit sex, presided over variously by the original world authority, the Romans, and then their successors, the Christian Bishops; haphazard burials in unconsecrated ground, syphilis and miasma; a strange mass forgetfulness; the graveyard's revelation by the London Underground's mechanical backhoes; and the subsequent flume of psychogeography-related hysteria by those still remaining alive above ground, like the screaming mass hive panic in Quatermass and the Pit.

The spokeswoman from the local council is called Ms. Dark.

And, when the article declares...

An 1832 letter from parish authorities had noted the ground was “so very full of coffins that it is necessary to bury within two feet of the surface,” and that “the effluviem is so very offensive that we fear the consequences may be very injurious to the surrounding neighborhood.” [...] The land was sold for development 30 years later, but the sale declared void under the Disused Burial Grounds Act of 1884. Locals resisted further attempts at development, although the land was briefly used as a fairground, until complaints about the showmen’s “steam organs and noisy music” became overwhelming.

 ...it led me to believe, just for a moment, that it was the dead who had complained about the steam organs and noisy music. If the fairground featured a Ghost Train ride, I bet that was more than usually exciting.




Notes: Southwark is pronounced Sutheck. Quatermass and the Pit is pronounced Five Million Years From Earth.

Egypt in 1981

After only 33 years, I have made the photos of my trip to Egypt into a photo book. Well, technically I made them into a photo book in 1982, by arranging them in a scrapbook by affixing them with photo corners and adding hand written text, but that wasn't very robust.

Eventually, in 2013, I got offered a Groupon to have my photos scanned, so I did.

Then last month I was offered a Groupon for a Shutterfly photo book, so I did that too. In 2100 I expect to be offered a Groupon to have them turned into a 3D skywritten Bollywood movie on Mars, and I'll do that as well.

One of these days I hope to save up enough to go abroad again. Keep on saving me money, Groupon!

 

I'm not sure how either Groupon or Shutterfly makes any money, but I suppose that's not the point.

Click here to view a larger version of this photo book.

No one knows how the camera lucida...

As a kid, one of my obsessions was Egyptology. One of my favorite books was C.W.Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars (Goetter, Graebe und Gelerhte),  which I think I almost learned by heart. In my teens I got hold of another of his books, The March of Archaeology, which was pretty much identical except for a larger format with many more good-sized pictures. Each page began with the first phrase of the text in bold on a line of its own, and one page was headed, "No one knows how the camera lucida".

It went on to add, "...was used by [Edward William] Lane to obtain this picture. The camera lucida was a device much favored by draftsmen of the period. It is still used by beginners in art schools. In principle the instrument is extremely simple. By means of a rotatable glass prism, the artist can cast a reduced image of the object upon a sheet of paper. [...] Lane's remarkable "air view" shows the pyramid of Chephren from above the north-east corner of the Great Pyramid."

Today I thought I saw the equivalent viewpoint from a modern camera obscura, or camera as we call them.  It's from a Nova article investigating who built the pyramids.



Excitedly, I went back through all my books. (Would you believe that "no one knows how the camera lucida" doesn't bring up any Google hits? (Well, until tomorrow when the Google bot finds this, of course.) Usually you can find these phrases through Google books.) After a while I remembered March of Archaeology and found the picture Edward William Lane projected and drew between 1826 and 1827.



Ceram was right - the viewpoint on the top of the pyramid is not the same as Lane's drawing. His really does appear to have been drawn in mid-air. The cut stones on top of the Great Pyramid (now called Khufu's pyramid) are accurate (as this detail shows) and Chephren's (now called Khafre's) capped pyramid is completely accurate also. But it's from above!

How about that? How did the Victorian drafstman guy get this particular shot?

Poisson d'Avril!

One of my proudest possessions is a book I read when very young indeed - Henri Lhote's book on the rock paintings of the Tassili N Ajjer, called The Search for the Tassili Frescoes, The Rock Paintings of the Sahara. Published in 1959, it describes a journey to the burning heart of the Sahara to study the wonderful brightly colored rock paintings left there by the locals when the Sahara was green and home to antelopes and giraffes, only a few thousand years ago. The paintings are all wonderful, scenes of hunts and dances and ceremonies rendered in a delicate style using earth pigments.

When I read it with my dad, there were a couple of paintings in there that he would gasp at - "They're so modern," he said. And they were, with a delicate hipster touch I recognize from some of the 50's jazz pictures I've seen. They are most unlike the others, although the others, it must be said, are breathtaking too.

I was browsing around looking for more material on lost cities and remembered this book. I found this wonderful detailed website, Tassili n'Ajjer, The Most Beautiful Desert of All and was enjoying it until I came upon this:

Lhote published in his book two paintings which had an unmistakable ancient egyptian influence, yet were strangely different. This caused quite a stir in scholarly circles, as it seemed like unrefutable proof of contact between the Tassili and Ancient Egypt. Eventually it emerged, that the paintings were done by one of the playful artists of the Lhote team, who was familiar with the ancient egyptian style. The hoax misled Lhote himself, who argued very authentically about this cultural link in his book, and probably only became aware that he was set up much later.

Rats. It's always sad to learn your idols have feet of clay. Not that this diminishes the other paintings, of course, but to have this lemon described to me on April Fool's Day was a bit too ironic. A little like learning Jacques Cousteau once tried to net Nessie. (Someone will no doubt write in and tell me he did.)

Here is one of the small number of apparently hoax pictures, scanned from a color plate in my copy of the book.




Lovely, isn't it? But once you know what it is, you can see that slight French Left Bank hepcat look. Or maybe I'm imagining it. Not that I can find any other websites saying it is a hoax, mind, but that's mostly because if you plug 'tassili hoax' into Google you get a gazillion pages claiming modern global warming is a hoax (because the Sahara sure warmed up a long time ago), and I couldn't be bothered to wade through it all.

There are many photographs of the paintings at the website linked above. Lhote's book does not contain photographs, but traced or copied drawings in the standard archaeological tradition that always makes me wonder how much interpretation the artist put in before deciding where to draw each line.

You've probably seen at least one famous picture from Tassili - the "Great Martian God" as Lhote unfortunately termed it, a round headed giant apparently wearing a thick neck-cloth and a puffy suit. Von Daniken said it was a picture of an ancient astronaut, and indeed it does look like a man in an Apollo-era space suit. You can see one here.

The Sahara is not exactly an abandoned city, but it certainly fits the theme. This one I would only visit, however, if someone ran an air-conditioned train to within about five miles of each site. Call me lazy.

Folks just melted away

I've always loved abandoned houses, and by extension, abandoned cities. The currently most famous abandoned city is Detroit in the USA. In 1970, about the time rock musicians like David Bowie were working up entire theses on TEOTWAWKI and making dance songs about them, the population of Detroit was 1,510,000, down from 1, 850,000 in 1950. By 2000, the city's population was 950,000 – about half that of its heyday. The spectacular hollowing out of the city has taken place while the regional population has grown normally - from 3,350,000 in 1950 to 4,740,000 in 2000. For an archeology rat like myself, convinced that something horrible has to happen to cause people to flee their centers – as I had always been told happened to the classic Maya in 950 AD, for instance – it's been a weird thing to watch. Or as I should more properly write, observe from a safe distance. I doubt if the Detroit natives would like me rubbernecking their empty skyscrapers.

Time Magazine recently had a photospread on Detroit, the beautiful, undisturbed decay of ornate buildings and fine furnishings captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
Here's one of their photos – a nice Victorian house, almost settling into the earth.




And here a great theatre is so far gone it is not even fit for its ghosts.




A few years ago, the writers of Detroit Blog posted their adventures exploring these ruins at night, stepping between squatters and dealers and avoiding the police to catalogue such heart-wrenching sights as trees growing from gutters, the glamorous Book Cadillac Hotel reduced to fragments, Mayan symbols painted over the beautiful United Artists building, and flotsam and jetsam drifting from the Motown Building, including chits of Marvin Gaye's benefits statements. Motown, man! The music I grew up with. And these papers were not even snatched up by fans or historians, just scattered on desks and on the floor like autumn leaf litter. (Edit 2017: Detroit blog is no more, but the author has published this book.)

Most abandoned places are either abandoned entirely, like Pripyat, or run by successors to the original inhabitants who will, for several periods every era, vaguely tolerate a visitor for the tourist dollar they bring in, like Petra. My lifelong if rather diffuse ambition was to visit Babylon, and people do keep having wars over it so I haven't managed yet.

But I have been to Egypt. To fail to go to Egypt would be a serious omission indeed. Here we see the Colossi of Memnon, now in fields and towering over geese, repaired a few times over history and still standing, grim and hellish looking doorkeepers now, not fair guardians.





Nearby is the Ramesseum, with the fallen statue that inspired Shelley's Ozymandias.
Here's the view from the top of the pylon – the desert and the fields. On the skyline over the fields you can see the Colossi. They are aptly named.





The area – the Valley of the Kings – is still inhabited, as this picture of our guide shows. I say guide; he was actually a local man who would show you the way around the ruins if he got a kiss from a pretty girl. (Luckily I'd brought one with me.) I'm not really outing him too badly, I hope – the photo was taken over twenty years ago.





Dubai's next, of course. Now the entirely imaginary pile of money that fuelled its growth has disappeared, gone when we stopped believing in it, as with so many other ancient gods, the buildings are being abandoned in mid-skyscrape and the workers are going home, some so fast they are leaving their vehicles at the airport with the keys still in them as they flee their debts in a kingdom not particularly nice to debtors. Shame, in a way. I'd always hoped Dubai would be the Vermilion Sands or similar folly of Western Civilization, but it would have taken a few more years to truly cement (no pun intended) its place. If the towers fall in the desert, will they inspire the same (complete lack of awe) that the Ramesseum inspired in Shelley? Or would the giants be so tall that future explorers will genuinely despair at our mighty works?

A more prosaic explanation for the fall of the classic Maya civilization is, simply, crappy government.

So what happened in the collapse, at least in this part of the Maya world? It was a bellicose place," Emery acknowledges, with evidence of warfare and walls across some ceremonial sites. "But the bodies aren't there," from any massive fighting, she says. More likely, there was just a political collapse in which rulers came to be seen over a two-century period as no longer delivering the goods, better crops or more rain." Modern-day Maya still live relatively close to the abandoned sites, after all, descendants of the folks who lived there long ago. "Folks just melted away" from ceremonial centers, Emery says, just like people today changing rulers come election season."

(USA Today)

Much like Detroit, then

Ref: Buildings Are R Us Population Change.
Did Environmental Disasters Play a Role in Mayan Decline?

(Edited to renew links, where possible, 07/2017)

Holy Hand Grenade

A few days ago I wrote about a man cleaning a pond who had a Dalek float up to the surface and look at him. And about how surprised he must have been.
This weekend a pub was closed off in Shoreditch, East London after the police found a Holy Handgrenade of Antioch. (Usually only used for retiring Killer Rabbits.) They had to decide how to render it harmless before the pub could be reopened.

Story Here.

Resurrect Your Own Osiris For Spring

It's almost spring, the time when the dead ground brings forth new life. That means it's almost Easter. At that time, the Christian God is resurrected. For the rest of us most modern rituals at this time of year involve things like coloring rabbits' eggs and putting Peeps into baskets of excelsior.



Osiris



In olden days, the new life was considered to be part of a cycle. The new shoots were cause for celebration, but the death of the old plants was a cause for celebration too - you grew them to make beer and bread, after all, so their death was your life. There's a British figure that corresponds to Osiris in this way, called John Barleycorn.

Robert Burns describes his life and death. And the beer.

They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.

But the cheerful Spring came kindly on,
And show'rs began to fall;
John Barleycorn got up again,
And sore surpris'd them all.

If the peeps and rabbit eggs aren't doing it for you, it may be time to resurrect a god yourself. How about Osiris?

The ancient Egyptians used to resurrect Osiris using a simple technique. In Tutankhamun's tomb, in the room called the Treasury, was found a wooden frame filled with Nile silt. It had been planted with wheat seeds and watered, germinating in the tomb to symbolize the resurrection of both the god and the deceased.

In her classic book on Tutankhamun, Tutankhamen (Penguin books, 1965) Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt says:

In the south-west corner of the room, beneath several of the black chests, was a long narrow box containing a frame outlining the mummiform silhouette of the god Osiris. It contained alluvial Nile mud sown with corn. The grains had germinated in the darkness of the tomb, and had thus recreated a sprouting and new-born outline of Osiris, symbol of resurrection. Of human size, it had been wrapped in linen like a mummy.

Later she explains:

To assist the deceased to reconstitute himself and be reborn, the great silhouette of Osiris, laid flat in a coffer at the bottom of the tomb, was covered with grain which was watered. The corn soon germinated, its tender young shoots giving promise of a harvest. This magical mechanism was intended to recreate the process leading to resurrection.

Here's the original from Tutankhamun's tomb. It's a bit faded but it is several thousand years old.




To do this yourself, you need an outline of Osiris (here's one as an Excel file), some paper, some earth, and some wheat seeds, or failing that, grass seeds. You'll also need water and patience.

Print the outline and cut out the seedbed center



Put the outline on earth and sow the seeds on it. Sprinkle some more earth on top of them and water. Here the paper is held down by stones. I've laminated the paper to help it last for two weeks while being watered.



A week later, the seeds have sprouted



In less than two weeks, you have a living Osiris!



The first day of spring this year is March 20th. Easter Sunday is on April 12th.
In a city, you can get wheat and barley seeds from a beermaker's supply shop - plus ca change there.

Stonehenge May Have Been a Temple, say archaeologists

One of the advantages, or perhaps drawbacks, of being older than dirt is that I remember the newsflashes and stop presses of today from the first time they came around. Actually, I take that back. Some of them have probably been going around as New News since before I was born.

I had to literally stop reading New Scientist, which I'd read since I was a kid, when I swear to God it started having articles along the lines of "Stop Press DNA Might Be Genetic Material Says Controversial Scientist" and/or "Scientists Divided Over Ramifications of Carbon Based Life-forms Recently Discovered on Earth".

Of course I didn't take any notes, I just tossed them aside with a so-what, so I can't vouch for those being the actual headlines. They were equally earth-shattering, anyway.

I thought I'd keep notes the next time one of these Shock-Horror stories came up, and there's one today.

The headline is Stonehenge excavation may alter history which got my goat straight away, since of course an excavation can't alter history. Unless the thing they excavated was a time machine and they went back in time and caused the Allies to win WWII or something. But even if they did, when they got back, everybody would have grown up with it, so they wouldn't be impressed when they said they'd altered history. It would be the same old history to everybody else. I fully expect New Scientist to discover this blog post and write an article next month saying, "Time paradoxes may occur if time travel becomes reality, says controversial scientist".

Anyway, after the misleading title, the article says, and I quote,

A new excavation of Stonehenge may alter historians' concept of the British landmark site's purpose, researchers say. By studying a set of unusual stones linked to the historical site, a team of archaeologists are attempting to prove Stonehenge was not an ancient burial site, but actually a temple of healing, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

That's pretty earth-shattering, right? Stonehenge might be a temple, not a burial site. Stop the press!

But...wait, hasn't it always been understood to be a temple and not a burial site? Luckily the same article is standing by to clear up the inevitable fog of confusion. It says,

"I think the one thing everybody would agree on is that Stonehenge is a temple, which is easy to lose sight of in the kind of to-ing and fro-ing of ideas."

So, there you have it. Today's big controversy is that archaeologists are proving Stonehenge was a temple, completely overturning the previous theory that it was a temple.

It's no wonder people find the whirl of progress overwhelming these days. I can't keep up myself.

I can hear trumpets!

One of the stranger things found in Tutankhamun's tomb - at least from my point of view, which regards canopic jars and amulets as perfectly ordinary - was a trumpet. The Egyptians left us many pictures of musical instruments, often guitars or a percussion instrument called a sistrum, but I don't recall seeing many trumpets. It's probable that the item was actually a signalling device used in battles, rather than a musical instrument. If so, that'll make what's coming up next sound a little less weird.



There were actually two found in the tomb, a silver one and a bronze one. They were tuned differently. People being what they are, they were determined to play them to see what they sounded like. The silver trumpet was played on BBC radio in 1939, using a modern mouthpiece, whereupon it promptly split apart. The bronze trumpet survived being played in 1939 and in 1941, the last time without a mouthpiece inserted. Of course, there's no available recording of the 'real' trumpet. The general consensus was that the trumpets made poor musical instruments are were probably used rhythmically in their mid-range for signalling purposes.

In the folder named trumpet here, you can listen to or download an mp3 of Bandsman Tappern sounding the crap out of the silver one, just before it split. Unfortunately, being a bandsman, melody is not his strong point. Since that may be what the instrument was originally intended for, I suppose I can't complain. Shame we don't have one of the guitars.

Look on my works, ye mighty

I have a favorite pin-up.

He's been my favorite pin-up since I was a kid, when I first got a copy of C.W. Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars. I've always been interested in archaeology. I suppose 20th century western children came in three main brands – dinosaur kids, airplane kids and Ancient Egypt kids. I was the latter. I loved Ceram's book and currently have two editions in English, one in German and one very similar book of his with more pictures in it. I reread one or more of them every now and again. This photo, more than any Egyptian stele or Assyrian frieze, is an image burned into my imagination.



Click on the small picture for a larger picture. The smaller is from a paperback edition; the larger is from the German hardback edition. I believe the hardback is the original and the ppbk is the flopped copy. (Giles G Healey)

The photo is of a Lacandone Indian, standing against the walls of Bonampak. The photo is credited to Giles G. Healey, which means it was taken in 1946.

Ceram published the photo to show the similarity of the modern jungle dweller's profile to the silhouette of the ancient city dweller. The man, who could well have been called Na Bor, is a descendant of the Maya who built Bonampak. He, Na Bor, lived in the jungle on subsistence rations of cassava, maize, sweet potato, tomatoes, beans and the occasional monkey shot with a flint arrowhead. His family also grew tobacco. His relatives still live there today – I hope. Eleven hundred years before this photograph was taken, his ancestors built stone cities, reservoirs and observatories. They had a written language and studied astronomy and mathematics.

I've always found the picture moving. Na Bor is beautiful. When you see the other photos of him standing next to Giles Healey himself, you realize he is not a tall, dark hunter but virtually a hobbit – probably about 5' 1" tall. He's barefoot. Na Bor looks so serious as he emulates the warrior's face in the plaster. In other photos, the local Lacandone families have open, cheery grins on their faces. They are dressed in identical grubby single-piece shifts, woven by the women from locally grown cotton, giving one the impression of complete inability to buy or trade any goods whatsoever. They are still smiling. They love their world and apparently they were happy enough to see Healey or Tozzer or later travelers to come by and chat with them or photograph them, as long as the white men didn't offer them any of their god-awful food. [1]

I believe I've discussed Ozymandias here before – and the melancholy feeling that comes with understanding that great civilizations fade away. Na Bor is a different teacher, because he is not looking on his ancestors' great works and despairing, either from awe or from regret at what he's lost. The ultimate impression is that he can't comprehend the changes. Maybe I'm wrong, but...

Looking at it, I can never shake the eerie feeling that one day our children, six inches shorter than us, armed with bows and dressed in cotton shifts, will be standing outside our dead cities trying to look serious.

Except our cities won't last eleven hundred years.


[1] The Four Suns, Jacques Soustelle, p. 26