Kings of the jungle

When I visit New York City, one of my favorite places is, unsurprisingly, the American Museum of Natural History.  

And my favorite spot in that museum is the Hall of Mammals in the paleontology section.  I've always had a fascination for prehistoric mammals, especially those lineages that are extinct -- strange animals like the gargantuan brontotheres, the oddly rodent-like multituberculates, and the diverse South American hoofed litopterns.

Seeing all the dioramas of what these creatures may have looked like always highlights two things, which I was chatting about with a paleontologically-inclined friend a couple of days ago.  The first is that even though we know a great deal about Earth's biological history, there's a ton that we don't know and will probably never know.  Fossilization requires a very specific (and rare) set of conditions -- most organisms that die are never fossilized in the first place.  Then, those few fossils that form have to survive all of the geological processes that happen afterward, and not get eroded, melted, or crushed.  And last, a paleontologist (or interested amateur) has to find it.  So chances are, for every one species we know about, there are likely to be hundreds of others that we don't -- because the remains from those species haven't been found, or perhaps never were preserved in the first place.

Second, the natural world has often been a very, very dangerous place, with large quantities of animals with Big Nasty Pointy Teeth roaming around.  My friend and I both agreed that as fascinating as they are, neither of us would be keen on hopping into a time machine and visiting the Cretaceous-age Western Interior Seaway or the shallow sea that led to the Kem Kem Formation in what is now Morocco.  Both were chock-full of enormous BNPT-owners who would have been thrilled to turn any human-sized animal into a light snack.

Well, a recent discovery has added another place and time to the "Fascinating Spot, But Let's Not Visit, Mmmkay?" list: Oligocene-age Egypt.  It was the home of an extinct lineage of carnivorous mammals called hyaenodonts -- named after, but only distantly related to, modern hyenas -- in particular one spectacularly scary beast called Bastetodon, a complete skull of which was the subject of a paper last week in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.  

Study lead author Shorouq Al-Ashqar of Mansoura University, along with the Bastetodon skull (and a statue of the Egyptian goddess Bastet, after which the species was named) [Image credit photographer Hesham Sallam]

The skull was found in a fossil-rich stratum in the Faiyum Depression, a green oasis in central Egypt surrounded by trackless desert.  During the Oligocene, Faiyum (and the rest of northern Africa) was a lush jungle, and Bastetodon and the other hyaenodonts were apex predators, preying not only on the hippos and elephants of the time, but on primates like Aegyptopithecus -- a close cousin of our own ancestors, who evolved farther south in what is now Kenya and Tanzania.

Bastetodon was brilliantly equipped to fill its niche.  "I think of them as like really beefy wolverines or basically like pitbulls," said Matthew Borths, of Duke University, who co-authored the paper.  "They have really big heads that were just covered in muscle."

That, combined with an impressive set of BNPTs, made it a fearsome animal, but it bears mention that it wasn't the largest of the hyaenodonts.  That honor goes to Megistotherium osteothlastes -- the name is Greek for "giant bone-crushing beast" -- which is estimated to have weighed five hundred kilograms, with a sixty-centimeter-long skull.

Yeah, fascinated as I am with prehistoric mammals, I think Oligocene-age north Africa is a place I'd just as soon not visit.

Interestingly, though, not long after Bastetodon and Megistotherium reached their apogee, the entire group went into steep decline.  No one is quite sure why, but it's probably that climate change had a lot to do with it.  The region was getting hotter and drier, reducing the amount of vegetation and ultimately producing the desert we have now.  These sorts of changes percolate their way up the food chain, ultimately hitting carnivores the hardest; the last of the hyaenodonts went extinct during the Miocene Epoch.  (Even bigger changes were on the way, however -- during the Pliocene Epoch, the Straits of Gibraltar closed for a time, the Mediterranean Sea dried up almost completely, and the entire region became so hot it was uninhabitable -- then when the Straits reopened, it created a flood the likes of which is nearly impossible to imagine.)  

But for a while, when northern Africa was lush jungle, the hyaenodonts were on the top of the heap.  There was nothing that could come close to matching their strength and fierceness, until the climate and the passage of time ended their hegemony.  Just showing that no species is immortal -- and that today's powerful are tomorrow's (pre)historical footnote.

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The strange story of Omm Sety

Dorothy Louise Eady was born on the 16th of January in 1904 in a suburb of London, the only child of a tailor and his wife.  She seemed to be a perfectly ordinary little girl until she was three years old, when she took a tumble down a set of stairs and developed a highly peculiar set of symptoms that was to change the trajectory of her life.

She developed foreign accent syndrome -- a real, although rare, condition where stroke or head trauma causes an individual's speech patterns to change, giving their voice a superficially "foreign" accent.  (Significantly, they don't suddenly gain proficiency in another language, despite what's sometimes claimed.)  Weirder still, when she started school, she began demonstrating a knowledge of ancient Egypt that is, at the very least, unusual for a child her age.  She got in trouble for comparing Christianity to the Egyptian pantheon, and was finally expelled when she flat-out refused to sing a hymn about the Exodus calling on God to "curse the swart Egyptians."  She frequented a local Roman Catholic church, until a chat with the priest revealed that she was doing so because the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic mass "reminded her of the old religion," at which point the priest suggested she probably should entertain her reminiscences elsewhere.

These setbacks didn't discourage her in the least.  A visit to the British Museum as a teenager sent her into raptures; when she saw a photograph of the temple of the Pharaoh Seti I, she said, "There is my home!  But where are the trees?  Where are the gardens?"

Interestingly, most people seemed to tolerate her odd claims, and in fact she studied Egyptian history and hieroglyphics under E. A. Wallis Budge, one of the foremost Egyptologists of the early twentieth century.  Eventually -- perhaps inevitably -- she moved to Egypt, describing it as "coming home."  During this entire period she was plagued by dreams, sleepwalking, and nightmares, including a vision of an entity that called itself "Hor-Ra" and claimed to be the spirit of Seti I.  This spirit proceeded to narrate to her a tale, which Eady wrote down in hieroglyphics, telling of her previous life.

Eady, Hor-Ra said, had once been a priestess of humble origins named Bentreshyt, who had fallen in love with Seti.  Despite her vow of chastity, she had sex with Seti and got pregnant.  Knowing that once her transgression was found out, it was likely she'd be executed -- and in the process, disgrace the pharaoh -- she chose to commit suicide.

Alongside her claims of having been reincarnated, however, Eady did real, honest-to-goodness archaeological and historical work, assisting such brilliant scholars as Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry, earning their respect and also the respect of her friends and neighbors.  She was celebrated for her tolerance, keeping to her own practice of rituals celebrating Ra and Horus and Osiris and the rest, but also fasting during Ramadan and celebrating Christmas and Easter with the Christians.

Whatever you think of her story, Dorothy is kind of hard to dislike, frankly.

Dorothy Eady, ca. 1928 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some pieces of her story do, oddly enough, seem to have some verifiable basis in fact.  She pointed out a spot near the Temple of Seti where she said there'd been a garden in which she'd first met the pharaoh, and later excavation revealed the foundations of a garden that matched her descriptions.  She was brought into a newly-opened room in the temple in complete darkness, and asked to describe the paintings on the walls -- which she did accurately enough to freak out the people present.

Eady -- by then usually known by her adopted name of Omm Sety -- died on the 21st of April, 1981 in Abydos, never wavering from her claims that she was a reincarnated Egyptian priestess.  So what are we to make of her story?

One thing that strikes me is that although her persistence in devoting herself to Egyptian studies was certainly uncommon for a woman of her time, she does not seem to have been in it for fame, money, or self-aggrandizement.  She was unassuming personally, and had no particular interest in making more in the way of income than she needed to be reasonably comfortable.  In fact, Jonathan Cott, in his book about Eady's life called The Search for Omm Sety, quotes William Simpson, professor of Egyptology at Yale, as saying that "a great many people in Egypt took advantage of her because she more or less traded her knowledge of ancient Egypt by writing or helping people out by doing drafting for them for a pittance."

And it also seems certain that she really believed what she was saying.  Unlike a lot of people who make similar claims, she doesn't have the look of a con artist.  Even Carl Sagan, surely a skeptic's skeptic if there ever was one, was impressed, saying she was "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology.  This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy...  However, we must keep in mind that there is no independent record, other than her own accounts, to verify what she claimed."

This, of course, is the sticking point; Sagan is certainly not saying he believes she was reincarnated, just that it can't be rigorously ruled out.  And, more importantly, that there may be no way to prove it one way or the other.  Certainly her knowledge seems uncanny, but it's important to remember that during the 1920s and 1930s there was a significant Egyptomania happening, especially following the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922.  Stories and photographs were circulating everywhere, and it'd be hard for an unbiased evaluator to tease apart what Eady learned through her studies or other media, and what she might allegedly be recalling through strange supernatural pathways.

As you would no doubt expect, the people who already believed in reincarnation use this as one of their favorite examples, while the doubters still doubt, attributing Eady's obsession with Egypt not to a buried memory of a past life but to a blend of genuine curiosity and scholarship with delusions brought on by an early head injury.  For myself, I might be convinced if her odd claim to knowledge had included understanding the Egyptian language prior to being taught it, or some other piece of verifiable information there's no way she could have obtained by ordinary means.  I have to admit, describing the paintings in a newly-excavated room in the dark comes close; but given that others had seen the paintings, and also the commonalities that exist between a lot of examples of New Kingdom-era art, it doesn't quite get there, evidence-wise.  She could have been told what the paintings looked like, or they may just have been shrewd guesses based on her extensive knowledge of Egyptian art and artifacts.

And it does strike me that this is yet another example of James Randi's objection to stories of reincarnation; that everyone in their previous life seems to have been a high priest or priestess or prince or princess or whatnot, and nobody -- as would seem, simply by the statistics of the situation, to be far more likely -- was a dirt-poor peasant in China or India, or someone who died as a child of diphtheria or measles or smallpox.

The fact remains, though, that Eady's case is an odd one.  It doesn't convince me, but it does leave me scratching my head a little. 

However, I'm not so fond of the idea of reincarnation in any case, so maybe it's for the best.  Life is no cakewalk, and especially given that you aren't given any choice who you're reincarnated as, I'd just as soon not press "reset" and start the whole thing over.  If I had to choose an afterlife, I'd go with Valhalla.  Sitting around the table quaffing mead (can you just drink mead?  Or do you have to quaff it?), having mock sword-fights with your friends, and generally raising hell just for the fun of it.

Certainly better than harps, hymns, and halos, which seems to be the only other thing on offer.

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Altered flow

John McPhee's wonderful book The Control of Nature describes three attempts to alter naturally-occurring geological processes: the shift of the course of the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya River (which would leave New Orleans without a port); the lava flow from the 1973 eruption of Eldfell Volcano on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, which threatened to seal off the main town's only harbor; and the ongoing problem with landslides in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, which have been exacerbated by people's insistence on building multi-million-dollar homes in steep-sided canyons.

Of the three, only the Icelanders had a success story.  They halted the lava flow by pumping cold seawater onto it, and stopped it before it closed off the harbor completely; the tongue of solidified rock actually created a useful seawall.  The other two were, and still are, drastic failures.  The levee/spillway system in Louisiana, intended to keep the Mississippi in its channel and prevent it from switching over to the Atchafalaya's shorter and more direct path to the Gulf of Mexico, has caused more silting of the channel and subsidence of the land, both of which were direct contributors to the severity of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005.  California still deals with landslides, despite their best efforts to contain them with various slope stabilization devices -- and rich people are still building their mansions right in harm's way.

33% is not a great success rate, but it's pretty reflective of our attempts to control natural processes.  It's not that I'm saying what we do has no effect; the unfortunate part is most of what we've tried hasn't worked, or has actually made the situation more dire.  The obvious example (anthropogenic climate change) is only one of many examples of times we've messed around with things and come off very much the worse.

Although we're unique in the animal world in being able to control our environments to some extent, we're still very much at the mercy of the natural world.  Big, sudden cataclysms -- events like major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods -- are the most obvious examples, but sometimes slow, gradual processes can alter the course of history just as profoundly.  The fall of the Roman Empire, about which I've written a couple of times recently, may well have been triggered by a climatic shift causing freezing drought in the central Asian steppes, inducing the Huns to migrate west and starting a domino effect of invasions.  Certainly the rising and lowering of sea level as ice ages came and went altered migration patterns; both Australia and the Americas were colonized during periods when the areas now at the bottom of (respectively) the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Bering Sea were dry land.

The idea that climate has been a major driver for history has gone out of vogue, and is sneeringly referred to as "climate determinism" despite the fact that (1) there's no denying the vagaries of climate have had obvious and dramatic effects, and (2) no one has ever claimed that climate was the only thing affecting the course of events.  Consider, for example, some new research out of the University of Southampton that came out in Nature Geoscience this week.

Life in Egypt has always been dicey -- the valley of the Nile is thickly-inhabited, but go more than a few miles east or west from it and you're in marginally-inhabitable desert.  We all learned in elementary school how the ancient Egyptians survived by learning how to manage what are always called the Nile's "life-giving floods" through irrigation channels and catchment basins, but the truth is, all it took was a dry year or two and the entire civilization was in deep trouble.

The situation changed -- for once, for the better -- about four thousand years ago, when the Nile shifted course and created the floodplain around Luxor.

The reason was the same as what John McPhee explains about the Mississippi, but with a happier outcome.  As rivers flow, they pick up sediment, and when they reach the sea and the water velocity slows down, that sediment is deposited on the river bottom.  This raises it, creating an impediment to water flow, slowing down the water further and making it drop more sediment, and so on and so forth.  Eventually the delta becomes impassible, and the water is forced into another channel (unless people step in and try to stop it, like what is happening with dubious success in Louisiana).

In southern Egypt, though, the switch in paths brought the flow of the Nile out over a broad, flat plain that prior to that had been high and dry.  The outflow into the Mediterranean moved east as well, and the outgoing river broke up into dozens of outflow channels.  This proved extraordinarily beneficial to the people living all along the river's northern half.  "The expansion of the floodplain greatly enlarged the area of arable land in the Nile Valley near Luxor (ancient Thebes) and improved the fertility of the soil by regularly depositing fertile silts," said Benjamin Pennington, who co-authored the paper.  "The Egyptian Nile we see today looks very different from how it would have been throughout much of the last 11,500 years.  For most of this time, the Nile was made up of a network of interwoven channels that frequently changed their course.  Around four thousand years ago, the Nile abruptly shifted and there was rapid floodplain aggradation, where the river began depositing large amounts of sediment, building up the valley floor.  This created a more expansive and stable floodplain."

The result was that the New Kingdom -- which included the reigns of famous pharaohs such as Ahmose I, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun -- had the resources to become one of the significant political powers of the region.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mohammed Moussa, Ramses II in Luxor Temple, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Like McPhee's one-out-of-three success rate for humans trying to control nature, however, it bears keeping in mind that for every example of a natural event benefitting humans, there's one that didn't turn out so well for us.  The collapse of classical Mayan civilization in the eighth century C.E. was largely triggered by a prolonged drought; the onset of the Little Ice Age in the fourteenth created a perfect storm of conditions that fed into the Black Death killing one-third of the population of Europe.

However confident we are in our comfortable high-tech world keeping us safe, it's always good to remember how tenuous it is -- and the fact that in the long haul, Mother Nature is still very much in charge.

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The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

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Egyptian light speed

There's a claim I've now seen three times on social media stating that the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light.

This is pretty outlandish right from the get-go, as there is no evidence the Egyptians had invented, or even had access to, any kind of advanced technology.  Plus, even with (relatively) modern technology, the first reasonably decent estimate of the speed of light wasn't made until 1676, when Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer used the difference in the timing of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was moving toward them as compared to when the Earth was moving away from them, and came up with an estimate of 225,300,000 meters per second -- not too shabby given the limited technology of the time (the actual answer is just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second).

But there's something about those ancient Egyptians, isn't there?  There have been "secrets of the Pyramids" claims around for years, mostly of the form that if you take the area of the base of the Pyramid of Khufu in square furlongs and divide it by the height in smoots, and multiply times four, and add King Solomon's shoe size in inches, you get the mass of the Earth in troy ounces.

Okay, I made all that up, because when I read stuff about the "secrets of the Pyramids" it makes me want to take Ockham's razor and slit my wrists with it.  But I was forced to look at the topic at least a little bit when the aforementioned post about the speed of light started popping up on social media, especially when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You have got to deal with this."

The gist is that the speed of light in meters per second (299,792,458) is the same sequence of numbers as the latitude of the Pyramid of Khufu (29.9792458 degrees north).  Which, if true, is actually a little weird.  But let's look at it a tad closer, shall we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerome Bon from Paris, France, Great Pyramid of Giza (2427530661), CC BY 2.0]

29.9792458 degrees of latitude is really specific.  One degree is approximately 111 kilometers, so getting a measurement of location down to seven decimal places is pretty impressive.  That last decimal place -- the ten-millionths place -- corresponds to a distance of 0.0111 meters, or a little over a centimeter.

So are they sure that last digit is an 8?  Measuring the position of the Great Pyramid to the nearest centimeter is a little dicey, given that the Great Pyramid is big (thus the name).  Even if the claim is that they're measuring the position of the top -- which is unclear -- the location of the top has some wiggle room, as it doesn't come to a perfect point.

But if you're just saying "somewhere on the Great Pyramid," there's a lot of wiggle room.  The base of the Pyramid of Khufu is about 230 meters on an edge, so that means that one-centimeter accuracy turns into "somewhere within 23,000 centimeters."

Not so impressive, really.

There's a second problem, however, which is the units used in all the measurements in the claim.  The second wasn't adopted as a unit of time until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.  The meter as a unit of length wasn't proposed until 1668, and was not adopted until 1790.  (And some countries still don't use the metric system.  *glares at fellow Americans*)  So why would the ancient Egyptians have expressed the speed of light -- even assuming they could figure it out -- in meters per second, and not cubits per sidereal year, or whatever the fuck crazy units of measurement they used?

Oh, and while we're at it, the first person to slice a circle up into 360 degrees -- the basis, of course, of our system of latitude -- was Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B.C.E.  Which, not to put too fine a point on it, was two-thousand-odd years after the Great Pyramids were built.  So to sum it up: what we're being asked to believe is that the ancient Egyptians sited the Great Pyramid based upon a quantity they didn't know how to measure, expressed in terms of three units that hadn't been invented yet.

Makes perfect sense.

So as expected, this claim is pretty ridiculous, and not even vaguely plausible if you take it apart logically.  Not that there was any doubt of that.  In fact, this is only one of dozens of examples of pseudoscientific metrology, which is the general name for claims that the measurements of ancient structures have some relevance to scientific findings.  The bottom line is that the ancient Egyptians were cool people, and the pyramids they built are really impressive, but they weren't magical or advanced or (heaven help us) being assisted by aliens.

No matter what you may have learned from the historical documentary Stargate.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't invent the unit of "smoot" for length.  A smoot is 1.70 meters, which was the height of Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot, who in 1958 got drunk with his fraternity buddies, and as they were dragging the semi-conscious Smoot home, they decided to measure the length of Harvard Bridge in Smoot-heights.  It turned out to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus the length of Oliver R. Smoot's ear.

And considering they were drunk at the time, it's pretty impressive that they thought of including error bars in their measurement.  Better than the damn Egyptian-speed-of-light people, who couldn't even get their measurement to within plus or minus 230 meters.

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Tut tut

I ran into an interesting article in Science News yesterday about a new museum in Egypt that will feature the famous treasure trove of King Tutankhamun's tomb.  Tutankhamun was, as you undoubtedly know, the pharaoh of Egypt between about 1332 and 1323 B.C.E. before dying at the age of nineteen (probably of complications from malaria).  Because of his short reign and youth he's been nicknamed "the Boy King," and prior to his tomb's discovery in in 1922 held a relatively obscure spot in Egyptian history.  This may have been what saved his tomb nearly intact for archaeologists to find; no one knew it was there.

He was also eclipsed by his infamous father, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the "heretic king" who attempted to replace the Egyptian pantheon of gods with a single monotheistic religion, the worship of the god Aten.  Trying to decree a change in people's religion went about as well as you'd expect, and after Akhenaten's death everyone went back to worshiping Ra and Horus and Thoth and Anubis and the rest of the gang, not to mention erasing every trace of Akhenaten they could find.

The whole thing, though, put me in mind of the famous "King Tut's Curse," which supposedly claimed the lives of a number of people who investigated the tomb and has since spawned countless movies and horror novels about evil befalling people who violate people's final resting places.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roland Unger, CairoEgMuseumTaaMaskMostlyPhotographed, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The story goes that shortly after Tut's tomb was opened, people associated with the expedition began to die.  The first was Lord Carnarvon, who had funded Carter's expedition, who cut himself badly while shaving and died shortly thereafter of sepsis from an infection.  While it's easy enough to explain a death from infection in Egypt prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, the deaths continued after the members of the expedition returned to London:

• Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, was found smothered in a Mayfair club.
• Bethell's father, Lord Westbury, fell to his death from his seventh-floor flat -- where he had kept artifacts from the tomb his son had given him.
• Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of the first victim Lord Carnarvon, died in a London hospital "of mysterious symptoms."
• Ernest Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, was found dead in his home shortly after arranging for the first public show of King Tut's sarcophagus.

And so on.  All in all, twenty people associated with the expedition died within the first few years after returning to England.  (It must be said that Howard Carter, who led the expedition, lived for another sixteen years; and you'd think that if King Tut would have wanted to smite anyone, it would have been Carter.  And actually, a statistical study done of Egyptologists who had entered pharaohs' tombs found that their average age at death was no lower than that of the background population.)

Still, that leaves some decidedly odd deaths to explain.  And historian Mark Benyon thinks he's figured out how to explain them.

In his book London's Curse: Murder Black Magic, and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End, Benyon lays the deaths of Carter's associates in London -- especially Bethell, Westbury, Herbert, and Budge, all of which were deaths by foul play -- at the feet of none other than Aleister Crowley.

Crowley, you may recall, was the subject of a seriocomic post here about a magical battle only a couple of months ago, so he's a bit of a frequent flyer here at Skeptophilia.  For those of you who missed that one, Crowley is the guy who proclaimed himself the "Wickedest Man on Earth," and was a sex-obsessed heroin addict who became notorious for founding a magical society called "Thelema."  Thelema's motto was "Do what thou wilt," which narrowly edged out Crowley's second favorite, which was "Fuck anything or anyone that will hold still long enough."  His rituals were notorious all over London for drunken debauchery, and few doubted then (and fewer doubt now) that there was any activity so depraved that Crowley wouldn't happily indulge in it.

Crowley ca. 1912 [Image is in the Public Domain]

One of Crowley's obsessions was Jack the Ripper.  He believed that the Ripper murders had been accomplished through occult means, and frequently was heard to speak of Jack the Ripper with reverence.  Benyon believes that when Crowley heard about Howard Carter's discoveries, he was outraged -- many of Thelema's rituals and beliefs were derived from Egyptian mythology -- and he came up with the idea of a series of copycat murders to get even with the men who had (in his mind) desecrated Tutankhamen's tomb.

It's an interesting hypothesis.  Surely all of the expedition members knew of Crowley; after all, almost everyone in London at the time did.  At least one (Budge) was an occultist who ran in the same circles as Crowley.  That Crowley was capable of such a thing is hardly to be questioned.  Whether Benyon has proved the case or not is debatable, but even at first glance it certainly makes better sense than the Pharaoh's Curse malarkey.  It's probably impossible at this point to prove if Benyon's claim is correct in all its details, rather like the dozens of explanations put forward to explain the Ripper murders themselves.  But this certainly makes me inclined to file the "Mummy's Curse" under "Another woo-woo claim plausibly explained by logic and rationality."

In any case, I'm glad to hear the archaeologists are still working on the discoveries from Tutankhamun's tomb, and not afraid that they themselves will be struck down by the ghost of the Boy King.  I'll take actual scientific research over loony superstition any day of the week.

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Head hunters

Today's post combines archaeology, mythology, and an etymological mystery -- surely a recipe for something fascinating.

I first ran into the Blemmyes in Umberto Eco's tour-de-force medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, where they are described as a race of people living in Africa who have no heads; their faces are in the middle of their torsos.  The topic comes up because of the habit of a manuscript illuminator, Brother Adelmo, who has a habit of adorning his manuscript with fanciful creatures -- not only familiar ones like centaurs and unicorns and dragons, but Cynocephali (dog-headed men), Sciapodes (people with one leg and a huge foot, the inspiration for the Monopods in C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and... the Blemmyes.

One of the Blemmyes (from a 1556 map by Guillaume de Testu) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So naturally I thought that the Blemmyes were a complete fiction.  (Actually, given the illustration, I hoped they were a complete fiction, because they're freakin' creepy-looking.)

That's why I was pretty surprised when I ran into a story on Science Daily yesterday, about some research out of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona that was published last week in the American Journal of Archaeology.  The paper was about the Blemmyes -- who were apparently a real nomadic people that lived in what is now southern and central Egypt during Roman times, and who had their faces on their heads as per the usual human specifications.

What's weirdest about this is that the sources that mention the mythological headless Blemmyes and the ordinary human Blemmyes have almost no overlap; it's as if the authors of one didn't even talk to the authors of the other.  This might be understandable if it was some kind of linguistic coincidence, where two groups of people just happened to use similar-sounding words to describe two entirely different things; but I'm sorry, "Blemmyes" -- not only identical-sounding word, but identical spelling -- is just too weird for me to accept that they're unrelated homophones.  Add to that the fact that the alleged territory of the mythological Blemmyes and the home of the real Blemmyes both were what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan, and I can't swallow it as some bizarre coincidence.

But the medievalists don't seem to have a good idea of how it happened.  The real Blemmyes, according to third century B. C. E. historian and writer Eratosthenes, were named after one of their ancient kings, King Blemys, but he is unattested elsewhere.  Other linguists have traced the name of the actual people to the Coptic word Ⲃⲁⲗⲛⲉⲙⲙⲱⲟⲩⲓ, Balnemmōui, but tracking the word earlier than that has proven impossible.  What seems certain is that the real Blemmyes are the ancestors of the people who today call themselves the Beja, who live in southern Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea.

The mythological Blemmyes are even more of a mystery to linguists.  Seventeenth-century French antiquarian Samuel Bochart thought their name came from the Hebrew bly (בלי) "without" and moach (מוח) "brain;" linguist Louis Morié believed it was from the Greek blemma (βλέμμα) "look, glance" and muō (μύω) "close the eyes;" Egyptologist Hans Wolfgang Helck drew its descent from a Coptic word for "blind."

The truth is, no one knows for sure.

Oh, but if you want an even stranger coincidence, the paper in The American Journal of Archaeology about the real Blemmyes is about the discovery in the Egyptian town of Berenike of one of their shrines, within which was entombed fifteen mummified falcons...

... all of which were headless.

You can't make this shit up.

In any case, we're left with a mystery.  The fictional Blemmyes and the real Blemmyes -- and the descendants of the latter, the Beja -- seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with one another, except for a common name and living in approximately the same place.  But there has to be some connection, right?  I dunno, maybe we should be out there looking for real Cynocephali and Sciapodes.  

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Forensic geology

I've been interested in rocks since I was a kid.  My dad was a rockhound -- more specifically, a lapidary, who made jewelry from such semiprecious stones as turquoise, agate, and jasper.  The high point of my year was our annual trip to Arizona and New Mexico, when we split our time between searching for cool rocks in the canyons and hills of the southwestern desert and pawing through the offerings of the hundreds of rock shops found throughout the region.

Besides the simple beauty of the rocks themselves, it fascinated me to find out that with many rocks, you could figure out how and when they formed.  A lot of the gem-quality rocks and minerals my dad was looking for -- malachite, azurite, and opal amongst them -- are created by slow precipitation of layers of minerals from supersaturated water; others, such as lapis lazuli, rhodonite, and garnets form when metal-bearing rocks are metamorphosed by contact with magma far underground.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olga Semiletova, Минералы горных пород, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license]

Once I found out that the "when" part was also often knowable, through such techniques as radioisotope dating and stratigraphy, it was always with a sense of awe that I held pieces of rock in my hand.  Even around where I live now, where there are few if any of the lovely gem-quality stones you find in the southwest, there's still something kind of mind-boggling about knowing the layers of limestone and shale that form the bedrock here in upstate New York were formed in the warm shallows of a warm ocean during the Devonian Period, on the order of four hundred million years ago.

But if you think that's impressive, wait till you hear about the research out of the University of Johannesburg that was published in the journal Icarus last week.

The research centered around a stone in the desert of western Egypt called Hypatia, given the name by Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat in honor of the brilliant, tragic polymath whose career was cut short when she was brutally murdered by a mob on the orders of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria.  (The aftermath, although infuriating, is typical of the time; Hypatia was largely forgotten, while Cyril went on to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.)  The stone, fittingly considering Hypatia's contributions to astronomy, turns out to be extraterrestrial in origin, later falling as a meteorite to the surface of the Earth.

But "extraterrestrial" is a big place, as it were.  Where exactly did it form?  Chemical tests on the rock found that it didn't match the composition of any known asteroid or comet; then, the mystery deepened when it was found to contain nickel phosphide, which has never been found on any solid material tested in the entire Solar System.

Further tests only made the rock seem more anomalous.  Silicon, second only to oxygen as the most common element in the Earth's crust (a little over 28%, to be exact), was almost absent, as were calcium, chromium, and manganese; on the other hand, there was far more iron, sulfur, phosphorus, copper, and vanadium than you'd expect.  The ratios were far off not only from rocks in our Solar System, they didn't match the composition of interstellar dust, either.

The researchers decided to go at it from the other direction.  Instead of trying to find another sample that matched, they looked at what process would create the element ratios that Hypatia has.  And they found only one candidate that matched.

A type 1a supernova.

Type 1a supernovas occur in binary star systems, when one of the stars is relatively low mass (on the order of the Sun) and ends its life as a super-compact white dwarf star.  White dwarf stars have an upper limit on their mass (specifically about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun) called the Chandrasekhar limit, after Nobel Prize winning astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.  The reason is that at the end of a star's life, when the outward pressure caused by the fusion in the core drops to the point that it can't overcome the inward pull of gravity from the star's mass, it begins to collapse until some other force kicks in to oppose it.  In white dwarf stars, this occurs when the mutual repulsion of electrons in the star's constituent atoms counterbalances the pull of gravity.  In stellar remnants more than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, electrostatic repulsion isn't powerful enough to halt the collapse.  (The other two possibilities, for progressively higher masses, are neutron stars and black holes.)

In binary stars, when one of the members becomes a white dwarf, the gravitational pull of its extremely compact mass begins to siphon material from its companion.  This (obviously) increases the white dwarf's mass.  Once it passes the Chandrasekhar limit, the white dwarf resumes its collapse.  The temperature of the white dwarf skyrockets, and...

... BOOM.

The whole thing blows itself to smithereens.  Fortunately for us, really; a lot of the elements that make up the Solar System were formed in violent events such as the various kinds of supernovas.  But the models of the relatively rare type 1a (only thought to happen once or twice a century in a typical galaxy of a hundred billion stars) generate a distinct set of elements -- and the percent composition of Hypatia matches the prediction perfectly.

So this chunk of rock in the Egyptian desert was created in the cataclysmic self-destruction of a white dwarf star, probably long before the Solar System even formed.  Since then it's been coursing through interstellar space, eventually colliding with our obscure little planet in the outskirts of the Milky Way.

When I was twelve, holding a piece of billion-year-old limestone from the Grand Canyon, little did I realize how much more amazing such origin stories could get.

I think the real Hypatia would have been fascinated.

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Pharaonic forensics

I'm fascinated with history, and have always been especially interested in times and places for which we have few records and, therefore, not much way of knowing what really went on.

I'm not sure if this is because I'm a fiction writer and rely a lot on imaginary realms of the mind to fill in the gaps, or if I just have a perverse enjoyment of setting myself up with impossible tasks.  My favorite time and place to read about is western Europe during the Dark Ages, in the centuries after the fall-ish of Rome.  I phrase it that way because just as Rome wasn't built in a day, neither did it fall in a day, as if the Hordes of Barbarians went through the gates and the Romans basically just dropped their swords and said, "Okay, fuck it, we give up."  In fact, the aforementioned hordes weren't themselves a single unit; starting in the fourth century C.E., various tribes and sub-tribes of Celts, Goths, Huns, Scythians, et al. kind of chipped away at the empire until there wasn't much left of it.  The Western Roman Empire collapsed first, but the Eastern persisted for a while longer, devolving into chaos more than once -- nearly falling apart entirely during the mid-sixth-century Plague of Justinian, that wiped out a quarter of Europe's population and seems to have exceeded the both the fourteenth-century Black Death and the twentieth-century Spanish flu for sheer number of victims.  (I dealt with that topic, and what may have caused it, a couple of years ago, if you want to read about what historians call "the worst century in history.")

Another time and place I find intriguing is the early years of ancient Egypt, once again because so little is known for sure about it.  Our knowledge of the Old Kingdom, First Intermediate Period, and Middle Kingdom -- up until around the sixteenth century B.C.E. -- is hampered not only because it was a long time ago and a lot of the records haven't survived, but because what records were kept weren't all that accurate.  Just as with a lot of other theocratic cultures, the scribes of early pharaonic Egypt were as invested in depicting the rulers as gods as they were with writing down an accurate account of what happened.  The result was a mishmash of actual history, divine genealogies, miracle stories, and whitewashing that makes teasing the truth from the fiction damn near impossible.

Not that I blame the scribes, mind you.  Keeping monarchs in good humor is a full-time job, and often doesn't end well.  I've recently been re-reading the Shakespearean history plays, and he, like the scribes, knew which side his bread was buttered on.  Shakespeare was writing during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James 1, and if you take a look at works like Richard II, Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), Henry V, Henry VI (parts 1, 2, and 3), Richard III, and especially Henry VIII, you'll pretty quickly notice that any ancestors of the monarchs he was writing for are depicted as good guys, while ones who weren't -- like the villainous King Richard III of the play -- are the opposite.  I love the history plays, and that sort of treatment makes for great theater, but honestly, "history" is kind of the last thing they actually are.

So all of this is a long-winded way of leading up to a paper I stumbled upon yesterday in Frontiers of Medicine entitled, "Computed Tomography Study of the Mummy of King Seqenenre Taa II: New Insights Into His Violent Death," by renowned scholars of ancient Egypt Sahir Saleem (of Cairo University) and Zahi Hawass (former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities).  Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa II was the second-to-last pharaoh of the Seventeenth Dynasty, and ruled over part of Egypt during the chaotic Second Intermediate Period, when much of Egypt was controlled by a race of "warrior kings" from what is now Israel, Jordan, and southern Lebanon called the Hyksos.

The constant fighting, along with a long run of weak, short-lived rulers, makes the Second Intermediate Period hard to parse, because records from that time are even more sparse than they were from the preceding dynasties.  We know that the pharaoh in question, Seqenenre Taa II, was killed in battle with the Hyksos, and after a short reign by his elder son, Kamose, his younger son Ahmose I took over, overcame and drove out the Hyksos, and became the first pharaoh of both the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom, which saw the peak of pharaonic power.

Fortunately for us history buffs, the Egyptians did leave behind one thing that helps us to figure out what was going on back then -- mummified bodies of their leaders.  And despite the chaotic conditions of the Seventeenth Dynasty, Seqenenre Taa II's body has survived for almost 3,600 years, and now Saleem and Hawass have done a CT scan to see if they can figure out more about him.

The hints from the records of the time that Seqenenre Taa II died in battle are almost certainly correct.  He had multiple injuries, including wounds that appear to have been made with an axe, a dagger, a club, and a spear.  (It's grimly amusing that several times in the paper, during the description of each injury, the authors say "this blow was probably fatal," as if the poor man got killed over and over.)  Most interesting, injury to his wrists suggests his hands had been tied behind his back -- and that he probably was captured in battle, possibly injured at the time, and afterward executed.

Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa II's skull, CT scan by Saleem & Hawass

"This suggests that Seqenenre was really on the front line with his soldiers risking his life to liberate Egypt," said study lead author Dr. Sahar Saleem, in a press release.  "In a normal execution on a bound prisoner, it could be assumed that only one assailant strikes, possibly from different angles but not with different weapons.  Seqenenre's death was rather a ceremonial execution."

Which is gruesome but fascinating, and illustrates that parts of history that have seemed like closed books may one day be understood using cutting-edge techniques from science.  And a bit of luck; the information about the unfortunate pharaoh only is available to us because his mummified body survived for three and a half millennia.  But it does mean that we haven't uncovered everything there is to study about cryptic and chaotic chapters in our history -- and that with diligence, ages that have appeared dark might eventually be illuminated.

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Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]