Rising from the waters

Keeping with an archaeological bent after yesterday's post on Stonehenge, today we're going to take a look at a newly-discovered site in Iraq that was only uncovered -- literally -- because of a terrible drought that made the level of a reservoir drop.  The result was the reappearance of a 3,400-year-old Bronze Age city that was part of a little-known culture that (in fact) I had never heard of -- the Mittani Empire.

The Mittani ruled over a large part of northern Mesopotamia and what is now Lebanon, Syria, and the eastern parts of Turkey, for about two hundred years (1,500 to 1,300 B.C.E.).  They were overthrown by attacks from the much-better-known Hittite and Assyrian Empires, and were broken up into small disjoint settlements that were subsumed into the conquering people.

For a linguistics geek like myself, the coolest thing is that the language they spoke -- Hurrian -- is a linguistic isolate, unrelated to all the surrounding languages as far as we can tell.  In that way, it's rather like Basque -- surrounded by widely-spoken Indo-European languages to which they have no affinity whatsoever.  (There has been speculation that Hurrian is related to the Caucasian languages such as Armenian, but that is controversial and, honestly, has little support amongst the linguists who have studied the languages.)

The Mittani did leave a scattering of place names of Hurrian origin, a bit like the Picts did in Scotland, virtually all of which were eventually superseded by Assyrian, Persian, Hittite, and Arabic names, and their original names mostly forgotten.  Even the capital city -- Washukanni -- was more or less erased from history, and in fact its location is still uncertain.

But now archaeologists have some new information to work with.  Due to a drought, the water behind the Mosul Dam in Iraq has fallen drastically, and much to everyone's amazement the receding waters revealed a city that was part of the mysterious Mittani Empire.  The site is called Kemune, and preliminary work has dated it to about 1,600 B.C.E., although this is tentative at best.

What's most stunning about this discovery is the degree of preservation, considering that not only did it have to deal with the ordinary ravages of time, it's been under water for forty years.  The archaeologists studying the site have found (relatively) intact wall paintings on plaster, not to mention ten clay tablets using a cuneiform script but in the extinct Hurrian language.

In a press release from the University of Tübingen, which led the research, we read:

The palace ruins are preserved to a height of some seven meters.  Two phases of usage are clearly visible, [team leader Dr. Ivana] Puljiz says, indicating that the building was in use for a very long time. Inside the palace, the team identified several rooms and partially excavated eight of them.  In some areas, they found large fired bricks which were used as floor slabs.  Ten Mittani cuneiform clay tablets were discovered and are currently being translated and studied by the philologist Dr. Betina Faist (University of Heidelberg).  One of the tablets indicates that Kemune was most probably the ancient city of Zakhiku, which is mentioned in one Ancient Near Eastern source as early as the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1800 BC).  This indicates the city must have existed for at least 400 years.  Future text finds will hopefully show whether this identification is correct.

What the whole thing highlights for me is how little we honestly know about our own ancestors, how much has been erased by conquest and suppression -- or simply forgotten over the centuries.  That we could find something about a culture from 3,400 years ago, whose language is extinct and whose ethnic affiliations are completely unknown, is nothing short of spectacular.  You have to wonder how many more sites are out there, drowned or buried, and are waiting for archaeologists to discover, and what they might tell us about the people who lived so long ago.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

The fire of the mind

In Umberto Eco's masterful medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, we meet a villain who is willing to kill, over and over, to stop his fellow monks...

... from reading a book.

The following is a spoiler, so you can skip the next few paragraphs (scroll down to where it says [end spoiler alert]) if you haven't read Eco's novel.  Which I hope you all will, because it's brilliant.  But the punchline makes a point that needs to be made now, seven centuries after the time in which the novel is set, as strongly as it did then.

Europe of the early 14th century was a grim place, and life was, in Thomas Hobbes's words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  Religion had an iron grip over people's lives, and the learned men of the time taught that the fear of god was paramount.  This fear was translated downwards into fear of the "hierarchy of heaven," as represented here on Earth by the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, and the monastic system.  And within that system, questioning and freedom of thought was considered heresy, punishable by death.

In this system we find two opposing characters: the brilliant and curious scholar Brother William of Baskerville, and the stern and unyielding Brother Jorge of Burgos.  William is called in to solve a series of murders that have occurred in an unnamed abbey in the mountains of Italy.  The murders revolve around the abbey's magnificent library, the secrets of which are only accessible to the librarian and his assistants.  And one by one, the monks connected with the library are being picked off by someone who is bound and determined to keep some of its knowledge out of the hands of the monks (or anyone else).

The knowledge in question turns out to be a book by Aristotle that was thought lost; the second volume of his Poetics, in which he describes the proper use of comedy, and argues that laughter is freeing, proper, and purifying for the soul.  When Brother William solves the mystery, and discovers that Brother Jorge is behind the murders and has hidden the book, he confronts the old man, and asks him why it was so important to keep such a seemingly innocent volume out of people's hands.  Brother Jorge responds:

(L)aughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh... (H)ere, the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the world of the learned are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy, and of perfidious theology...  You saw yesterday how the simple can conceive and carry out the most lurid heresies, disavowing the laws of God and the laws of nature.  But the church can deal with the heresy of the simple, who condemn themselves on their own, destroyed by their own ignorance...  Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable.  But this book could teach that freeing oneself from the fear of the Devil is wisdom.  When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the villein feels he is master, because he had overturned his position with respect to his lord; but this book could teach learned men the clever, and from that moment, illustrious artifices that could legitimize the reversal.  

To Brother Jorge, it is worth killing, and dying, for his desperate necessity to keep others from knowing the justification of laughter, mirth, and irreverence.  And in the end, he destroys the book and burns down the library to keep that knowledge from the world.

[end spoiler alert]

Which brings us to what has happened in the Middle East in the last few days.

The depredations of ISIS have been all over the news lately, but none have seemed more bizarre and pointless to the western world as two that have occurred recently.  The Islamic State's arm in Libya four days ago burned a pile of musical instruments, saying that such things are "un-Islamic."  Then, just two days ago, ISIS members in Iraq burned the hundred-year-old library in the city of Mosul, destroying 8,000 rare books that were a treasure-trove of cultural information and history.  "900 years ago, the books of the Arab philosopher Averroes were collected before his eyes...and burned," wrote activist and blogger Rayan al-Hadidi.  "One of his students started crying while witnessing the burning.  Averroes told him... the ideas have wings...but I cry today over our situation."

[image courtesy of photographer Alan Levine and the Wikimedia Commons]

Why, in a situation where ISIS members are fighting daily to maintain ground and to keep control of the people they've conquered, would they stop what they're doing to burn musical instruments and ancient manuscripts?  It seems pointless.  Wouldn't they have better things to do with their time and energy?

No.  What ISIS is doing has its own pervasive, evil logic.

It has to do with exactly the same thing that Venerable Jorge hated the idea of: reading, laughter, and music free people from fear.  If you are going to control people, you must control their thoughts.  The first thing you do, therefore, is to destroy any opportunity for them to experience something outside of that control.

Music lifts our emotions into heights that cannot be measured.  When we read, our spirits are free to think any thought, put ourselves in other people's minds, other places, other times.  Dancing does the same thing, which probably explains why Saudi Arabia's "morality police" arrested some young men four days ago for dancing at a birthday party.

Can't have people experiencing anything outside of the narrowly prescribed range of thoughts, feelings, and actions.  If people go outside that range, anything could happen.  And would.

And then, the sword-bearing horrors who are now running much of the Middle East would not be in control any more.  People would learn that there's more to life than fear and obedience, more than living in terror of a grim, humorless cadre of thugs who are so afraid themselves of intellectual and emotional freedom that they will stop at nothing to prevent it from spreading to others.

I live in hope that in our world of interconnectedness and free flow of information via the internet, such control cannot be maintained for long.  We have seen the difficulty the Saudis are having in keeping the holes in the dam from leaking; bloggers and activists who openly criticize the regime are growing in numbers.  Some, such as Raif Badawi, have paid a horrible price for exercising that freedom.

But the truth that ISIS doesn't want their victims to realize is that the spirit of free thought burns hotter than the flames of destruction.  Even if you set fire to books and musical instruments, you can't really control thoughts, even through threats and terror.  The human mind is stronger and more resilient than that.  So even though I weep for the treasures that were lost in the burning of the Mosul Library, I remain optimistic that the desperate and amoral men of ISIS will one day be trod underfoot and forgotten to all but historians, just as their brothers-in-spirit -- the Inquisition of the 14th century -- have been.

James Foley, and the moral bankruptcy of the conspiracy theorists

Every time I think the conspiracy theorists can sink no lower, they outdo themselves.

Not that it's easy.  These are the people who think that everything from the Sandy Hook massacre to the Boston Marathon bombing were "false flags" to distract us from what the Evil Government is doing, or else outright hoaxes staged by "crisis actors."  They've dogged the footsteps of bereaved parents who have lost children to school shooters, desperate to prove that their child never existed, thereby ranking even lower on the Great Chain of Being than the members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who fall somewhere below slime molds themselves).  They spread their fear messages amongst the gullible, turning jet contrails into toxic "chemtrails," fluoridation of water into a campaign by the government to convert us all into mindless drones, and vaccination programs into a plan by "Big Pharma" to give our children autism, ALS, and lord alone knows what else.

And now they have latched onto the brutal beheading of James Foley by the butchers of ISIS as the latest target of their poisonous nonsense.

The flag of jihad [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We have the conversation over at the r/conspiracy subreddit claiming that ISIS is an arm of the CIA.  Worse still, from the site Epoch Times comes a claim that the execution video itself is a fake, and that the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actually an Israeli Jew named Elliott Shimon who is on the payroll of Mossad.  Other claims are floating around various social media, suggesting that Obama operatives staged the execution (or possibly carried it out for real) to distract us from the riots in Ferguson or the illegal alien crisis or the ongoing non-scandal surrounding Benghazi.

(And just for the record: though I provided links to the r/conspiracy thread and the Epoch Times article, I am actively recommending that you don't click them, unless you really enjoy experiencing outrage at near-aneurysm levels.)

But to the people promoting these ridiculous claims, I have only the following to say:

Have you no shame at all?

A man died, for fuck's sake, slaughtered in the desert with less dignity than we accord cattle in an abattoir.  His executioner's blank eyes are the face of true human evil, and the cause he belongs to is representative of the worst human nature can do.  I am by nature and philosophy a pacifist, but reading about Foley's horrifying last moments (I refuse to watch the video, and so should you) makes me roundly in favor of tactical strikes to wipe every last member of ISIS off the face of the earth.  These subhumans deserve no better.

And you dare to bend this story to fit your twisted little view of humanity?  You have only proven your own moral bankruptcy, if there was any doubt of that left.  Your lies are nearly as sickening as the brutal jihadist message of ISIS itself, because you, like they, have no apparent regard for the life and dignity of a human being who (by all accounts) was a kind, courageous, intelligent man whose death should be mourned in peace by his family and friends, not used as a means for bolstering a warped worldview.

It shouldn't surprise me by now.  You people are willing to lie about damn near everything else, why wouldn't I expect you to lie about this?

But it always does, somehow.  I always think, "This, at least, is beneath even the conspiracy theorists."

And I'm always wrong.