The disappearance of Tartessos

I'm not a historian, but I certainly have been fascinated with history for years.  I just finished re-reading Robert Graves's wonderful books I, Claudius and Claudius the God -- fictionalized, but largely historically accurate, accounts of the tumultuous life of Tiberius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as the Roman emperor Claudius, fifth and penultimate emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.  Since then I've gone back into reading some of the mytho-historical works I first looked at while doing my master's degree, the Icelandic saga literature (I'm currently in the middle of the Laxdæla Saga, the tale of the people of the Lax River Valley.  The highly entertaining chapter I just finished is about a guy named Killer-Hrapp who was so awful he didn't want to stop doing awful things after he died, so he had his wife bury his body under the floor of their house, and he proceeded to haunt the place as a reanimated corpse.  Apparently zombies are not a recent invention.)  After that, I'm back to the southern Mediterranean (and pure non-fiction) for How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy.

So I'm what I'd consider a reasonably well-informed amateur.  Which is why a link I was sent by my friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, Gil Miller, came as such a surprise.  Because the article describes a civilization on the Iberian Peninsula, contemporaneous to the ancient Greeks, that I'd never heard of before.

The civilization was called Tartessos.  They dominated the southern parts of what are now Spain and Portugal in the first part of the first millennium B.C.E., and inexplicably vanished sometime around the middle of it.  They spoke an unknown non-Indo-European language which has survived in written form in 95 different inscriptions; the alphabet has been deciphered -- "Southwestern Paleohispanic Script," a "semi-syllabic" script in which some characters represent single sounds and others represent syllables -- but the language itself is still largely a mystery, and doesn't appear to be closely related to any known language.

The Tartessian Fonte Velha inscription, found near Bensafrim, Portugal, which dates to the seventh century B.C.E.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Tartessians were known to the Greeks, who valued their trading partnerships with them because it gave them access to tin, necessary for the fabrication of bronze.  In the fourth century B.C.E. they were going strong -- the historian Ephorus describes "a very prosperous market called Tartessos, with much tin carried by river, as well as gold and copper from Celtic lands" -- but then, right around that time, they vanished completely, for reasons that are still uncertain.

They went out with a bang, too.  The link Gil sent, which was to an article at the wonderful site Atlas Obscura, describes an archaeological site called Casas del Turuñuelo, located in the Spanish province of Extremadura, near the border of Portugal.  What the researchers found seems to indicate that immediately before their mysterious disappearance, the Tartessians had a massive sacrifice of horses, donkeys, cattle, dogs, pigs... and possibly humans.  After arraying the sacrificed animals -- for example, deliberately arranging two horses facing each other symmetrically, with their forelegs crossed -- the Tartessians set fire to the entire place, burning to the ground what had been a thriving city.  They then apparently buried the ash, bones, and rubble...

... and took off for parts unknown.

Why a thriving and apparently wealthy civilization would do this is an open question.  There's been some speculation that they had been hit repeatedly by earthquakes, and thought that an enormous hecatomb would appease the gods.  But without any hard evidence, this is nothing more than a guess.  And the great likelihood, of course, is that they didn't vanish, nor even die out, but migrated elsewhere and merged with a pre-existing population.  But if that's true, then where did they go?  After about 400 B.C.E. there seems to be no sign of clearly Tartessian artifacts anywhere in western Europe.

They were still remembered long afterward, though.  In the second century C.E. the Greek historian Pausanias was in Olympia, Greece, and saw two bronze chambers in a sanctuary that the locals said were of Tartessian manufacture.  He elaborated thusly:

They say that Tartessos is a river in the land of the Iberians, running down into the sea by two mouths, and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name.  The river, which is the largest in Iberia, and tidal, those of a later day called Baetis, and there are some who think that Tartessos was the ancient name of Carpia, a city of the Iberians.

Which squares with what we know about the Tartessians from archaeological sites, centering on the area near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, which flows into a marshland that is now the Doñana National Park, a beautiful place I was lucky enough to visit a few years ago.

But of course, there's no historical mystery without some kind of wild speculation appended to it, and the Tartessians are no exception.  There are people who claim that Tartessos is actually the civilization of Atlantis, described by the ancient Greeks as being "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" (i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar).  Which Tartessos is.  But any other connection to Atlantis seems way beyond tentative to me, starting with the fact that supposedly Atlantis "sank beneath the sea," while all of the sites known to be inhabited by the Tartessians are on dry land.

Inconvenient, that.

Of course, I have to admit it's hard to do underwater archaeology, so if there are Tartessian sites sunk in the Atlantic, we might not know about them.  Still, it seems a little sketchy to decide that "rich civilization near Gibraltar that vanished suddenly" leads to "Tartessos = Atlantis."

So that leaves us with a conundrum -- an apparently wealthy and powerful civilization upping stakes and taking off.  Of course, the Tartessians aren't the only instance of this happening; pretty much the same disappearing act had occurred eight hundred years earlier to the Myceneans, who had dominated the eastern Mediterranean for a good half a millennium before suddenly abandoning their strongholds (many of them were burned to the ground) in around 1,200 B.C.E.  (Some historians have attributed the collapse of Mycenae to a prolonged drought, but that's also speculation.)

In any case, that's today's historical mystery that I'd never heard of.  Hope you enjoyed it.  For me, it brings to mind the words of Socrates, when someone told him he'd been judged the wisest man in the world, and what did he think of that?  Socrates responded: "If I am accounted wise, it is only because I realize how little I know."

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

The rocks drawn down

The map of the world's continents is so familiar that for most of us, it seems permanent.  Even when you find out that the Earth's land masses have moved dramatically, that (geologically speaking) you don't have to go back very far to get to a time when the map would be unrecognizable, it's a little hard to fathom that the map is still changing now.  The tectonic plates are sliding as you read this, and every earthquake adjusts their positions a little bit.

Practically speaking -- and to any readers who are geologists, I will apologize for what will seem to you a drastic oversimplification -- there are three ways plates can move relative to one another:

1. Divergent plate boundaries -- where the two plates are moving apart.  This is what's happening in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone is upwelling magma that drags the North American and South American Plates toward the west and the European and African Plates toward the east.  New divergent boundaries can tear a continent in half, which is currently happening in eastern Africa, where the East African Rift Zone is eventually going to rip the continent in two, sending most of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, and all of Somalia, eastward, and creating a new ocean in between.
2. Convergent plate boundaries -- where two plates are moving toward each other.  If both are thick, cool continental plates, this causes a pile-up -- i.e., non-volcanic mountains, such as the Himalayas.  If one or both is a thin oceanic plate, one will dive underneath the other and melt, creating a line of volcanoes more or less parallel to the plate boundary.  Examples include Japan, Indonesia, and the Cascades.
3. Strike-slip boundaries -- where two plates are moving alongside one another in opposite directions.  An example is the famous San Andreas Fault and the other bits and pieces of the southern California fault system.

The result is that the continents are being moved around, torn apart, and slammed back together all the time, just at a pace so slow we usually aren't aware of it.  But the reality is that the western bits of California are in the process of sliding northward along the North American coast and will eventually smash into Alaska; Australia will run into New Guinea, and north Africa into southern Europe; and Antarctica will slide northward, away from the South Pole and into what is now the southern Pacific.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But new plate boundaries can form, as the subterranean forces in the mantle create new breaks or seams.  That's actually what brings this whole topic up; a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about research that's a few years old but that I'd somehow missed, that there's an "embryonic" subduction zone -- a convergent plate boundary -- forming off the coast of Portugal.  These things don't happen overnight, and the surmise is that this developing subduction zone is responsible for the devastating earthquake that hit Lisbon on November 1, 1755, and damn near flattened every building in the city.  It killed an estimated twenty thousand people, and geologists estimate that it had a magnitude of 8.4, more powerful than the more famous San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

This complicates the picture in the Atlantic, however. The conventional wisdom is that the divergent boundary in the middle of the Atlantic -- shown in red in the above picture -- is moving North and South America away from Europe and Africa, but if there's a convergent boundary off the coast of Portugal, that'll eat up bits of the oceanic plate off the coast and pull Europe closer to North America.  (It also creates the possibility of Andes-type volcanoes in Portugal and Spain.)  Geologists are still investigating how, and how fast, this new convergent zone is moving, and what its capacity is for generating earthquakes and tsunamis -- we really only have the one significant data point, the 1755 earthquake, to make a stab at what the potential for seismic activity is.  And how this will affect the positions of the continents in the long term is at the moment anyone's guess.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how the face of the Earth can change -- for example, there have been at least three times that more or less all the land masses were fused together into one supercontinent (and the rest of the world was covered by one superocean).  Mountains and oceans have been a symbol of something eternal, unchanging, but in reality everything is in flux.  It recalls to mind the lines from Percy Shelley's evocative poem "Mont Blanc," which seems a fitting way to end:

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin’d path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter’d stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim’d.  The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost.  The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known.  Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about as cutting-edge as you can get, and is as scary as it is fascinating.  A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, is a crash course in the new genetic technology called CRISPR-Cas9 -- the gene-editing protocol that Doudna herself discovered.  This technique allows increasingly precise cut-and-paste of DNA, offering promise in not just treating, but curing, deadly genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.

But as with most new discoveries, it is not without its ethical impact.  The cautious are already warning us about "playing God," manipulating our genes not to eliminate disease, but to enhance intelligence or strength, to change personal appearance -- or personality.

A Crack in Creation is an unflinching look at the new science of gene editing, and tries to tease out the how much of what we're hearing is unwarranted fear-talk, and how much represents a genuine ethical minefield.  Doudna and Sternberg give the reader a clear understanding of what CRISPR-Cas9 is likely to be able to do, and what it won't, and maps out a direction for the discussion to take based on actual science -- neither panic and alarmism, nor a Panglossian optimism that everything will sort itself out.  It's a wonderful introduction to a topic that is sure to be much in the news over the next few years.

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

To dye for

The history of dyes is actually way more interesting than it sounds.

People have been coloring cloth (and pottery, and cave walls, and their own bodies) for a very long time, but all colors don't turn out to be equally accessible to the palette.  Red, for example, is fairly easy, especially if you don't care if it's not screaming scarlet and has a slight brownish tint (what we'd call "brick red"), because that's the color of iron oxide, better known as rust.  Iron oxide is plentiful, and I know from messing around with pottery glazes that it's got two properties: (1) mixed with other minerals and/or heated in the absence of oxygen, it can give you a variety of other colors, from black to dark blue to green; and (2) it sticks to everything.  I have brushes I use in the glazing process that I used once or twice to apply an iron-based glaze, and now they're permanently stained red.

Other colors, however, aren't so easy.  Some of the more notoriously difficult ones are true blues and purples; our appending the word "royal" to royal blue and royal purple is an indicator of the fact that back then, only the really rich could afford blue or purple-dyed cloth.  Blue can be achieved using small amounts of cobalt, or finely powdered lapis lazuli, but neither is common and although they have other uses (cobalt in pottery pigments, lapis in paints) neither works well for dyeing cloth.  Lapis, in fact, was used to produce the finest rich blue pigment for oil paints, which got named ultramarine because the mineral was imported from what is now Afghanistan -- a place that was ultramarinus ("beyond the sea") to the people in Italy and France who were using it.

But dyeing cloth was another matter.  One solution was, bizarrely enough, a secretion of a sea snail of the genus Murex.  These snails' hypobranchial glands produce a gunk that when purified produces a rich purple dye that is "color fast" on cloth.

How anyone thought of doing this is an open question.  Maybe they just smeared slime from various animals on cloth until they found one that worked, I dunno.

Be that as it may, the color of the dye was called φοῖνιξ (phoinix) by the ancient Greeks, and the sea traders who cornered the market on producing and selling the dye were called the Φοίνικες (Phoinikhes).  We anglicized the word to Phoenicians -- so Phoenician means, literally, "people of the purple."

The reason all of this colorful stuff comes up is a paper in Science Advances last week that a group of chemists in Portugal have successfully determined the origin of a purple to blue (depending on how it's prepared) watercolor pigment called folium that was used in medieval watercolors.  It is a gorgeous color, but all previous attempts either to replicate it or to determine its source had been unsuccessful.  The difficulty with trying to figure out things like this is that there was no standardized naming system for plants (or anything else) back then, so the name in one place could (and probably did) vary from the name in another place.  Reading manuscripts about natural dyes from that time period, about all we can figure out is "it's made by boiling this plant we found" or "it's made from special snail slime," which doesn't really tell us much in the way of details.

Samples of medieval folium on cloth [Image courtesy of Paula Nabais/NOVA University]

In the case of folium, it was known that it came from a weedy plant of some sort, but there was no certainty about which plant it was or where it grew.  But now some Portuguese chemists have identified the source of folium as the seedpods of a roadside weed in the genus Chrozophora, a little unassuming plant in the Euphorbia family that likes dry, sunny, rocky hillsides, and when you grind up the seedpods, creates a knock-your-socks-off purple dye.  The dye was then applied to cloth, and you took small bits of the cloth and soaked them in water when you were ready to use them to make a natural watercolor paint.

The scientists were able to determine the chemical structure of the dye itself, which is pretty astonishing.  But even finding the plant was a remarkable accomplishment.  "We found it, guided by biologist Adelaide Clemente, in a very beautiful territory in Portugal [called] Granja, near a very beautiful small town Monsaraz -- a magical place, still preserved in time," said study co-author Maria João Melo, in an interview with CNN.  "Nobody in the small village of Granja knew [anything] about this little plant.  It may look like a weed, yet it is so elegant with its silvery stellate hairs that combine so well with the greyish green, and what a story there is behind it."

I'm always impressed with how intrepid our forebears were at using the resources around them to their fullest, but as with the snail slime, I'm mystified as to how some of it came about.  Some of it was probably by happy accident -- I think fermented milk products like yogurt and cheese probably were discovered because of milk that spoiled in just the right way, for example.  But bread has always mystified me.  Who first thought, "Let's take these seeds, and grind 'em up, and add this fungus powder to it with water until it gets all bubbly and smells funny, then stick it in the fire!  That'll be delicious with jam spread on it!"

And here -- grinding up the seedpods of a random weed ended up producing one of the rarest and prettiest dyes ever discovered.  Undoubtedly the brainstorm of some medieval artist or botanist (or both) who happened to get lucky.  Makes you wonder what other plants are out there that could have odd artistic, medicinal, or culinary uses -- especially in places of enormous biodiversity like the Amazonian rainforest, where there are probably as many plant species that have not been identified as there are ones that have been.

So if you needed another good reason to preserve biodiversity, there it is.

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Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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