Pulled from the fires

Note bene: If you haven't read Umberto Eco's brilliant medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose and are planning to, be aware that the next couple of paragraphs contain spoilers.  If you'd like to read the book and don't want to know the solution, skip down to the stars!

One of the most devastating scenes in The Name of the Rose happens right near the end, when the main characters, the Sherlock-Holmes-like Brother William of Baskerville and his friend and pupil, Brother Adso of Melk, confront the murderous old religious nutter Brother Jorge of Burgos in the place that is the center of all the action -- the labyrinthine Library at the top of the Aedificium of the (unnamed) monastery where the story takes place.  The Library was built not to collect and disperse knowledge but to hide it; Librarian after Librarian voraciously hoarded manuscripts of all sorts but always wanted to be in control of who got to read what, feeling that some books were not fit reading material for anyone but the most holy.

Brother Jorge himself was the Librarian before he had to resign the position because of his failing eyesight, but still kept a tight rein over who got to read what, acting through his proxy (and the nominal Librarian after Jorge retired), Brother Malachi of Hildesheim.  And when Jorge discovered that there was a copy of a particular manuscript in the Library -- the long-lost second volume of Aristotle's Poetics -- that implied that the main purpose of living was not prayer and self-mortification but laughter and joy, he was willing to go to any length to stop people from finding out about it and (in his mind) destroying the solemn foundation of the Church itself.  In the end, he sets fire to the Library, destroying all of the thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts (and himself in the process) rather than let Brother William get his hands on the copy and make others aware of its existence.

All through the book, the Library was built up to mythic proportions.  Eco recreates in us a sense of what it must have been like to witness the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, an event that it pains me to think about even now.  But now, some scientists have found a way to salvage at least some manuscripts thought lost to fire forever.

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Everyone's familiar with the devastation Mount Vesuvius wrought on the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the 29th of August in the year 79 C.E.  If you haven't already done so, you should watch this amazing, nine-minute-long animation that puts you right in the middle of the eruption -- something that makes me very, very thankful I'm in a tectonically benign part of the world.

The main explosion of the volcano occurred at about one o'clock in the afternoon (we have a good account of the details from the historian Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the cataclysm and survived, and his uncle Pliny the Elder -- who wasn't so lucky).  The blowout vaporized a good chunk of the top of the mountain and triggered a pyroclastic surge that geologists estimate was around 300 C and traveling at over 100 kilometers an hour.  Anyone who had survived the previous rains of ash and rock that morning was flash-fried, and then covered up by 25 meters of volcanic ash deposited in the six hours that followed.

Some artifacts survived.  Buildings (although damaged by the pyroclastic flow and the concomitant earthquakes) were found preserved when excavations began in earnest in the eighteenth century.  Tiles and paintings were remarkably unscathed, and there are pieces of art from the ruined city that look like they were created yesterday.  Rather horrifyingly, there are casts and molds of a good many of the victims, who were cooked by the blast, encased in ash, and then once their bodies decayed, the cavity was filled with minerals seeping in, leaving bizarre human shapes still in the contorted positions where they fell.

Anything else made of organic matter, though, was pretty well incinerated.  Any bits of charred wood that survived rotted away within a few years after the eruption.  Even less likely to survive were parchments -- written records -- although the carbonized remains of almost two thousand scrolls were found when the city of Herculaneum was excavated.

Tantalizing to think there still could be readable information there, to wonder what lost treasures of literature and history those blackened cylinders might be.  But there was no way to see if anything was still there other than ash, nor a way to unroll them and find out without having them crumble to powder...

... until now.

Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, working with a team made up of Jens Dopke, Francoise Berard, Christy Chapman, Robert Atwood, and Thomas Connolley, has pioneered a technique that hinges on the fact that a lot of the inks used by the ancients had traces of lead and other heavy metals which are still present in the tracery of script on the burned fragments.  By taking the scrolls -- without unwrapping them and causing further damage -- and using a targeted beam of x-rays, scientists can see inside them and possibly piece together what the text actually said.

One of the scrolls charred by Vesuvius and recovered from Herculaneum

"A new historical work by Seneca the Elder was discovered among the unidentified Herculaneum papyri only last year, thus showing what uncontemplated rarities remain to be discovered there," said Dirk Obbink of the University of Oxford, who has worked with the team to train the algorithm to read the burned scrolls using parchments that have already been (at least partially) deciphered.  "It's my hope that the scrolls might even contain lost works, such as poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Antony wrote on his own drunkenness.  I would very much like to be able to read that one."

As would a lot of us.  The idea that something thought lost forever might be restored is thrilling, and the work Seales's team is doing is groundbreaking.  Until we develop time travel and go back to save the manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria, it's our best chance to find new primary sources from the ancients -- something that historians, and bibliophiles like myself, have dreamed about for years.

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I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

There were giants in the Earth

So our conspiracy theory of the day is: the US government is hiding living giant humanoids to create a race of hybrid super-soldiers.

This, at least, is the contention of one Steven Quayle, who in a video that (should you have fifteen minutes and are not otherwise occupied) you definitely should watch.  The opening shows Quayle, interspersed with science fiction movie clips and backed up by atmospheric music, delivering the following scary lines:

I believe that the big lie that is going to be placed, hoist [sic] upon the world, is that the aliens created mankind... Most people do not understand the evil.  Most people can't even embrace the fact that this isn't about old bones.  When I say mind-blowing, it will also be heart-freeing.  If I start talking about fallen angels having sex with Earth women, they snicker.  Well, that snicker tells me they've already made up their minds.  The super-soldier program is one of the most, well, almost unbelievable, yet so believable, programs that the US military is involved in.

Further along in the video, Quayle assures us that he doesn't believe in alien overlords.  Nope.  That would be ridiculous.  The Annunaki, he says, aren't aliens, they're fallen angels.

Which is ever so much more believable.

Worse yet, they're still around.  "They [the scientists] are starting from the premise that all of the giants are gone.  We're starting from the premise that there are modern-day giants now, and they're not suffering from acromegaly or some pituitary disorder, but they're literally going to fulfill the biblical statement of Matthew 24 where Jesus says, 'Just as in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.'"

The whole thing, Quayle says, is a "multi-thousand-year cover up."

Then, of course, the Smithsonian comes up, because no discussion of archaeological conspiracies would be complete without the Smithsonian being involved.

"It's interesting, Tim," Quayle said to the interviewer.  "There's evidence of the bias of the Smithsonian, and their contempt for out-of-place artifacts -- every time giant bones were found, it didn't matter if it was on the West Coast, the Arctic, the Antarctic believe it or not, the East Coast, the Ohio River Mounds, they always have a fabulous cutoff point, being once the Smithsonian is notified, and those bones are sent to the Smithsonian, they're never heard from again."

A giant skeleton in Brazil, or a clever example of Photoshop, depending on which version you go for

"The point has been to keep this biblically-relevant topic out of the minds of the people," Quayle adds.

Why, you might be asking, would the Smithsonian -- and other scientific research agencies -- go to all of this trouble?  After all, careers are made from spectacular discoveries like these.  If the bones were real, not to mention the Annunaki, you'd think that archeologists would be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to publish these findings in a reputable journal.

The reason, of course, is that the government is intimidating the scientists into silence so that they can keep secret the fact that these giant dudes are still around, and are being used in sinister genetics experiments to create a race of human/giant super-soldiers.

Shoulda known.

Quayle also tells us that he won't appear on camera unless he gets the final say on video and audio edits, and that "No one has been willing to agree to that."  Which makes it kind of odd that he's on camera telling us that.  And that he now has his own video production company and has videos on YouTube.

Of course, he might have been right to avoid the spotlight.  He says he's afraid for his life, that he's being followed by the Men in Black.

"I'll be lucky not to be killed one day.  People have disappeared, Tim.  People who know about this, who have evidence."

And once again, we could convince ourselves that all we have is a lone wacko with access to recording equipment -- until you start reading the comments, of which I will give you a mercifully short sampling:

• People say that it takes place in the future. But I think it takes place in the past. The year is 800 after all. And it seems to have the message that you can't beat the titans without mixing with them. Rendering man almost extinct. No wonder Noah and his sons were the only real men left.
• Do you guys feel the Neanderthals are a creation of fallen angels?
• They are from the Nephilim thats why Neanderthal DNA has only entered the human gene pool through men and why Neanderthal DNA is the source of being white. Enoch 105 says the children born to fallen angels were white. Anakim were white blonde giants, Amorites were white Red heads and some were giants, then the Horites were normal sized white hairy cave men with brow ridges. Thats why Hitler thought if he just got enough blondes to have children, sooner or later they would get a superman. 
• there's stones thousands of years old talking about the ANANANAKI

So there you have it.  Giant Anananaki (if I've counted the "Na's" correctly) being hidden by the government so they can have lots of sex with Earth women, who will give birth to a race of immortal super-soldiers, as hath been prophesied in the scripture.

You'd think, though, that if the US has had this super-soldier program for decades (as Quayle alleges), they'd have brought 'em out by now.  Just think what a race of super-soldiers could do about, for example, ISIS.   So my scoffing doesn't mean that I don't think that ferocious giant half-human, half-fallen-angel dudes wouldn't be useful.

It's more that I think Quayle and his followers have a screw loose.

But that's just me.  And if I end up being taken prisoner by a troop of white hairy cave men with brow ridges and used in sinister scientific experiments, I suppose it'll serve me right.

Rethinking the Sphinx

Can we get something straight, here?

The statement, "Some radical ideas have proven true" is not equivalent to "if an idea is radical, it must be true."  There are many, many ideas out there that are simply batshit crazy, and the experts think they're wrong for a reason.

And you do not improve your case by bringing up the fact that "they disbelieved Einstein at first, too."

This comes up because of a loony idea that appeared over at the site Ancient Code that claims that the Egyptian Sphinx is 800,000 years old.  And no, I didn't slip and put in too many zeroes.  There are apparently a couple of geochemists over at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine who analyzed erosion and wear patterns in the rock from which the Sphinx is built, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that the Sphinx is 200 times older than archeologists are telling us.

This just brings up two questions:

1. You do realize that 800,000 years ago, there were no modern humans?
2. Where did you get your degrees from, Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse?

So at first I thought this was some kind of hoax.  But no, the two scientists, I. Vyacheslav Manichev and Alexander G. Parkhomenko, are apparently serious. "The absolute mark of the upper large erosion hollow of the Sphinx corresponds to the level of water surface which took place in the Early Pleistocene," Manichev and Parkhomeno write.  "The Great Egyptian Sphinx had already stood on the Giza Plateau by that geological (historical) time."

The article, which quotes extensively from their paper, describes their argument, which seems to be based on an assumption that the weathering of the rock from which the Sphinx is built couldn't have happened in 4,500-odd years.  Plus, as the Sphinx is thought to have spent at least part of that time covered in sand and thus protected from damage, there's no way all of the erosion we see can be due to processes that have occurred in that time.  We then hear about the geological history of the area around Giza, including the presence of a freshwater lake 800,000 years ago that could account for the condition of the Sphinx.

No mention is made of the fact that the builders of the Sphinx could have constructed it from rock that was already partially weathered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's only at the very end of the article that they admit the worst problem with all of this:

Some might say that the theory proposed by Manichev and Parkhomenko is very extreme because it places the Great Sphinx in an era where there were no humans, according to currently accepted evolutionary patterns.  Furthermore, as it has been demonstrated, the two megalithic temples, located adjacent to the Great Sphinx were built by the same stone which means that the new dating of the Sphinx drags these monuments with the Sphinx back 800,000 years.  In other words, this means that ancient civilizations inhabited our planet much longer than mainstream scientists are willing to accept.

So, if some model of geological weathering requires that an archeological artifact be 200 times older than anyone thought, it must be all of the other archeological, historical, and biological evidence that is wrong, not something amiss with the model itself?

You'd think this would be a case where most everyone would read this and say, "Yeah, right," and walk away, snickering softly.  But as we've seen before, people love an iconoclast.  All you have to do is claim that you've shown that the fancy-pants ivory-tower scientific experts are wrong about something, and you'll have wingnuts of all descriptions swarming to your defense.  This claim showed up on Reddit, over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, a few days ago, and here are a few of the responses posted:

As someone who has always been into history and science (and the popularly accepted ideas in those fields), lately I've been really interested in alternate, extended human timelines and alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution (which as described in The Origin of Species, is actually much rougher and less accurate than mainstream education would have you think, don't get me wrong we can watch viruses and even plants and animals adapt and "evolve" on a small scale, but Darwin's theory goes a lot further than that). 

Look into the Thunder Bolt Project, pretty interesting.  A lot of shared culture, mythology, cave paintings can be traced back to electrical events witnessed in the sky, by cultures that never spoke to one another. 

Get into any meaningful science discussion about the true nature of reality, and fairly soon the discussion will go toward "14th dimensional hyper-strings" and "wave/particle duality" or "multiverses".  Point being, is that eventually it all becomes philosophy / metaphysics.  And all of it is beyond our level of comprehension.  This is whats [sic] so frustrating in speaking to the "Bill Nye" science types.  You know the ones, with a simple childlike answer for everything.  They are truly no more inquisitive nor intelligent than the average bible thumper.  Instead of quoting John 3:16, they simply reflexively quote their overly simplistic 5th grade science book.  What's so sad is they go through their life actually believing that they have some sort of lock on the objective nature or reality. 

If all possibilities exist, then what we see as our past and the course of evolution up until this point is precisely the way things had to happen in order that we be here right now, no matter how improbable. That, I believe, is the explanation for the seemingly magical leaps in evolution and indeed the genesis of life in this universe itself.  It happened that way in order for us to be here now, and why we are here now is not a question that we can answer. 

Science and scientists want to have all of the answers, they want to have everyone just bow down and believe, they're worse than the religions, look at how they treated Einstein, first he was crazy, now everyone thinks that relativity is gospel.

The last one is the one that made me facepalm the hardest.  Not only is the author an odds-on favorite for a gold medal in the Olympic Comma Splice Event, (s)he apparently doesn't realize that Einstein has one other thing on his side besides blind devotion: evidence.

Relativity has been tested every which way from Sunday -- pressed harder, honestly, than a lot of other scientific models, because its conclusions are so counterintuitive.  And every time, the evidence has supported Einstein.

And where is the support for there having been modern, monument-building humans in the Nile Valley 800,000 years ago?

*crickets*

I'm waiting.

*more crickets*

Thought so.  You can't just make a claim, and then state that your explanation is the only possibility, so fiat lux and q.e.d. and so on.  It has to explain all of the relevant data, or there's something wrong with your model.

Just being a radical swim-against-the-current type isn't enough.  "Many great thinkers were criticized at first" is not logically equivalent to, "I'm being criticized, therefore I must be a great thinker."

And if any further evidence is uncovered that the Sphinx is 800,000 years old, I'll eat it for breakfast.

The demolition of Palmyra

Something that conquerors have understood throughout history is that if you want to destroy a culture, you don't have to kill all of its people; all you need to do is to destroy its languages and its artifacts.  Time and the limitations of human memory will do the rest.

When the Spanish conquered Peru in the 16th century, they did exactly that.  Kill the leaders; wipe out the traces of the existing culture; mandate the use of Spanish and the conversion of the natives to Christianity.  By the time the last Inca king, Túpac Amaru, was beheaded by Francisco de Toledo's men in Cuzco, the downfall of the culture was already a done deal.  There are still traces left -- the Spanish never were able to completely eradicate the Quechua language, for example, and there are still about nine million speakers today, mostly in Peru and Bolivia.  But their actions broke the back of the rich culture that had existed, and the destruction of priceless artifacts -- such as almost all of the quipus, or "talking knots," a computational or archival system that no one now can decipher -- was so thorough we really know relatively little about the day-to-day life of the people who lived there only five hundred years ago.

So it goes.  The suppression of the Bretons by the French, the Basques by the Spanish, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots by the English, and damn near all the minority groups in mainland eastern Asia by the Han Chinese, have all been followed by eradication of native languages and artifacts, and the subsequent cultural amnesia that follows.

I find the whole thing horribly tragic.  Our cultural history is what makes us who we are; language and symbol define us as a people.  And conquerors understand that.  To bring a people to its knees, you destroy those pieces of the culture that are most representative of the conquered group, then let time do away with the rest.

Which brings me to ISIS.

As the members of the "Islamic State" sweep across the Middle East, they are doing precisely what the Spanish conquistadores did; they are killing the leaders and destroying the culture.  And now, they have taken the Syrian city of Palmyra -- a treasure-house of ancient relics, some dating back to the second century B.C.E., declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1958 -- and are systematically destroying its artifacts.

The Roman-era Grand Colonnade of Palmyra [image courtesy of photographer Jerzy Strzelecki and the Wikimedia Commons]

They have already publicly demolished statues and temples, declaring such things "unholy." The razing of the land has not spared pieces just because they're unique, beautiful or irreplaceable.  In fact, they seem to be targeting these relics first.  For example, they announced this week that they have shattered the "Allat Statue," which was a huge and nearly intact statue of a Roman-era god, shown with a lion and a deer between his feet.

"ISIS terrorists have destroyed one of the most important unearthed statues in Syria in terms of quality and weight," Ma'moun Abdul-Karim, Syrian Director of Museums and Anquities, said.  "It was discovered in 1977 and dates back to the second century A.D."

While these acts have been characterized as the wanton acts of ignorant savages, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, got it right.  "Violent extremists don't destroy heritage as a collateral damage," she said.  "They target systematically monuments and sites to strike societies at their core."

I know that the loss of things, however beautiful, cannot be compared to the loss of human life.  The depredations that the vicious evil of ISIS is visiting on the people they conquer -- the beheadings, rapes, beatings, and selling of women and children into slavery -- outweigh the destruction of stone and ceramic relics.  But still, just reading about the destruction of Palmyra, and before it the destruction of priceless artifacts in every city ISIS has sacked, makes my heart ache.

And the worst part is that it's not over.  ISIS is still pulling in new recruits, making headway, taking over village after village.  Here we sit, in the 21st century, watching a group of people who take their directives from a book written in the 7th century sweep across the Middle East, and we are largely powerless to stop it.  We are watching a huge geographical area that has, in less than a decade, been been plunged back into the Dark Ages by the adherents of a violent and disgusting interpretation of a medieval religious text.

I'm no expert in geopolitics.  I have no idea what, if anything, the West should do to intervene, to try to stem this tide of religious extremism.  All I can do is sit here, helpless, as irreplaceable archeological history that had survived for two thousand years is demolished.

And hope against hope that reason and sanity will eventually prevail against the horrible ideology of conquest and destruction that these people represent.