Burning down the house

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did.

Most of the time, all we have is the traces of what they made to go by, and that only gets you so far.  Imagine some future archaeologist got a hold of some of the artifacts from our civilization.  These kinds of remains are always fragmentary; like fossilization, the preservation of human-made objects is largely a matter of chance, and the vast majority of them don't survive.  So... suppose a future archaeologist found a bent, rusted hand-cranked can opener.

What would (s)he make of that?

Unless there was the fortuitous survival of a can of beans nearby, they might never figure out what it was used for.

So it would very likely be placed in a museum with a card saying "Probably used in rituals."

I'm not meaning to cast aspersions on the archaeologists, here.  To their credit, they are unhesitating in saying "we're not sure" -- something every good scientist should be willing to do.  We humans are just endlessly curious, and we want solutions to mysteries.  Leaving the question open might be the most honest thing for a skeptic to do, but it's also profoundly unsatisfying.

Especially when we have lots of evidence.  Like, for example, the strange case of the "Burned House Horizon" -- the layers of accumulated archaeological evidence (horizons) in a large part of eastern Europe showing evidence of entire settlements being repeatedly burned to the ground.

For over two and a half millennia.

The earliest evidence we have of the practice is from the the Starčevo–Körös–Criş Culture, which spanned from what is now Serbia all the way to eastern Bulgaria, and dates to around 5,900 B.C.E.  The latest is from the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, which is found from Romania to western Ukraine, in 3,200 B.C.E.  How the behavior spread is uncertain -- whether one culture learned it from the other, or one culture descended from the other, is unknown.  Unfortunately, it's usually impossible to differentiate between cultural (learned) transmission and genetic transmission, barring (even more) fortuitous survival of adequate human remains from which to extract DNA.

So we don't know how it spread, or why.  Some anthropologists believe that it didn't spread as a behavior; there are a few who claim the Burned House Horizon is simply preserving a record of accidental house fires, tribal violence, or both.

A lot of others disagree, however.  Mirjana Stevanović of the University of California - Berkeley, writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, makes a persuasive argument that a simple house fire of a wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof structure -- whether accidental or deliberately set -- wouldn't cause temperatures sufficient to produce the kind of vitrification of clay that is seen all through the Burned House Horizon.  In fact, Stevanović, along with archaeologists Arthur Bankoff and Frederick Winter, actually built a house using the techniques known to have been utilized by cultures in Neolithic eastern Europe, then burned it down:

[Image credit: Stevanović et al., 1997]

They found the only way they could get the clay to vitrify was to pile up enormous amounts of brush, straw, and other burnables against the foundation of the house.

In other words, the houses seem to have been burned deliberately, and regularly, by their owners.  But why?

Hypotheses vary from the practical to the bizarre.  Some suggest that it was a way of destroying the habitats of disease-carrying pests during the regular epidemics our forebears were prey to.  Others think that because wattle-and-daub structures eventually become dilapidated, it was a way of getting rid of them so their owners could rebuild -- using the convenient fired clay bricks produced by the burning.  Some have even suggested that it was a religious ritual they've called domicide -- the symbolic killing of the houses in an entire settlement, followed by another cycle of "birth."  (The adherents of this model point out that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, the one we know the most about, the complete burning of houses in a settlement happened on average every 75-80 years -- back then, pretty much the upper bound of a human lifespan.  Coincidence?)

The thing is, though, all we have is the evidence, which amounts to 2,500 years' worth of burned rubble, distributed over a (very) wide geographical region.  The reason why this happened could be any of the above, or a combination, or one thing during one period and something else during another, or an entirely different reason we haven't yet dreamed up.  It's a puzzle.

But then, so is much of our history.  If you're interested in the past, you have to get used to that.  Even during periods when there were written records, the sad fact is that a great many of those documents didn't survive to the present, and whatever was contained within them is gone forever.  But in non-literate cultures, we have even less -- just broken remnants of what they did.

Why they did these things, and in fact who those people were, will always remain in the realm of informed speculation.

So that's this morning's rather unsatisfying conclusion.  Burned houses, ancient cultures, and the persistence of mystery.  It's the way of things in science, though, isn't it?  As Richard Feynman put it, "I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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Mysterious mosaic

I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England.

It's called the "Shell Grotto."  It consists of a set of steps, framed by an arch, leading down into a serpentine passageway through the chalk bedrock.  Then there's a room called the "Rotunda," with a circular arched dome over walls arranged in an equilateral triangle.  This leads into a winding underground tunnel about two and a half meters high by twenty-one meters long ending in a five-by-six meter rectangular space that's been nicknamed the "Altar Chamber."

The entire thing is lined by mosaics made out of seashells.

4.6 million of them.

Looking up into the Rotunda [Image is in the Public Domain]

The mosaic designs are constructed from the shells of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters, all relatively common in nearby bays.  They feature patterns appearing to be stylized suns and stars, floral motifs, and some purely geometric or abstract designs.

A detail from one of the mosaics [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Emőke Dénes, Shell Grotto, Margate, Kent 3 - 2011.09.17, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Shell Grotto was discovered when the entrance was stumbled upon in 1835, and immediately became a sensation.  The West Kent Advertiser newspaper wrote the following in 1838 (which also should have taken first place in the Run-On-Sentence of the Year Contest):

Belle Vue cottage, a detached residence, has been lately been purchased by a gentleman, who, having occasion for some alterations, directed the workmen to excavate some few feet, during which operation the work was impeded a large stone, the gentleman being immediately called to the spot, directed a minute examination, which led to the discovery of an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly conceived, and must have been executed by torch light; we understand the proprietor intends shortly to open the whole for exhibition, at small charge for admission.

No one in the area had any memory of who had built it and why, so this opened up the floodgates for speculation.  Historian Algernon Robertson Goddard, writing in 1903, listed the possibilities as follows:

• a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rich person's "folly"
• a prehistoric calendar
• a meeting place for "sea witches" (whoever those might be)
• something connected to the Knights Templar

This last one made me snort-laugh, because there's a general rule that if there's something mysterious and you want to make it more mysterious, throw in the Templars.  Umberto Eco riffed on this theme in his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, when he had his character Jacopo Belbo explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics:

A lunatic is easily recognized.  He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes.  The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be.  The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Be that as it may, we still don't know who built the Shell Grotto.  There are also extensive shell mosaics that were created by the Romans and the Phoenicians, but the archways in the Rotunda have impressed archaeologists as being more consistent with those used in twelfth-century Gothic cathedrals (although not nearly as large, obviously), and therefore not nearly old enough to be Roman or Phoenician in origin.  It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to carbon date one of the shell fragments -- mollusk shells are largely calcium carbonate, so it should be possible -- but the site is under private ownership, and to my knowledge no one has done that yet.

So the Shell Grotto remains mysterious.  It certainly represents an enormous amount of skill and dedication, whoever created it; just cutting a tunnel that long through chalk bedrock would take extensive and back-breaking labor, not to mention then hauling over four million shells there and somehow getting them to adhere to the walls in beautiful and flowing artistic patterns.  It's open for visits from the public, and next time I'm in England I'd love to check it out.  Just another reason to travel to a country I love -- as if I needed another one.

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Good friends

It's a point I've made before, but it's worth saying again: we queer folks are not "pushing our lifestyle in other people's faces" simply because we'd like (1) some acknowledgement that we exist, and (2) the same rights and respect that everyone else gets automatically.

In the current regime here in the United States there are places of employment where people in same-sex relationships aren't allowed to display photographs of their partners, or even mention them.  "It's okay, I guess, as long as no one knows who you actually are," is the general gist.  There seems to be a real fear that just being around openly queer people will cause straight men and women to switch teams.  But really -- do you honestly think that's how all this works?  I mean, think about it.  Some one hundred percent straight guy finds out his coworker is gay, and suddenly gets this dazed look on his face and says, "I shall go out and kiss a man immediately"?  Seriously?

After all, it's not like it works the other way, is it?  As a teenager I was exposed to dozens, probably hundreds, of books, movies, and television shows depicting couples in straight relationships, and not a single one about queer people, and I turned out queer anyhow.  Funny thing, that.

Almost like it's inborn and hardwired, or something.

The result of this mindset is that we not only have to deal with out-and-out homophobia, but a whole array of attitudes that don't wish us active harm, but just would prefer it if we were invisible.  Take, for example, the article about a monument built by Alexander the Great for his lover Hephaestion I just stumbled on a couple of days ago.

There, I said it, didn't I?  They were lovers.  Alexander was either gay or bisexual, and he was deeply in love with Hephaestion.  They were described as "one soul inhabiting two bodies" by Aristotle, who knew both men well.  Their relationship was compared more than once to that of Achilles and Patroclus, which is not exactly a chaste allusion.  Plutarch recounts that they paid a visit to the tombs of the two Greek heroes, where Alexander garlanded Achilles's tomb and Hephaestion Patroclus's -- then ran a race, naked, in their honor.

Totally straight behavior, that, right?

Of course right.

Then there's the incident -- also related by Plutarch -- where Alexander allowed Hephaestion to read something he'd written but wanted to remain secret, and to symbolize this touched his signet ring to Hephaestion's lips.  The moment has been depicted many times in art:

Alexander Touches His Ring to Hephaestion's Mouth by Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1781) [Image is in the Public Domain]

When Hephaestion died suddenly of what was probably typhus in Ecbatana (now in Iran) in 324 B.C.E., Alexander was inconsolable.  The historian Arrian says that upon seeing Hephaestion dead, Alexander "flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his companions."

Oh, what good friends they were.

Alexander commissioned a massive tomb in Hephaestion's honor at Amphipolis in Macedonia -- the Kastas Tomb -- which is the subject of the article I linked above.  [Nota bene: Alexander didn't live to see it completed; he died himself the following year of uncertain causes.]  The tomb is filled with symbolic representations of the spiritual and physical bonds of love, and the hope for being reunited in the afterlife.

Despite all this, when the two were depicted as lovers in the 2004 film Alexander, there was an outcry that "Oliver Stone turned Alexander the Great gay!" and how dare they depict this heroic figure as perhaps having same-sex attraction.  It's apparently hard for some people to imagine that a guy could be a brilliant king and military leader, and still be queer. 

What's striking, though, is that there's a much more subtle aspect of this, beyond the predictable snarling from the overt homophobes.  What I noticed about the archaeology article was that never once was it explicitly mentioned that Alexander and Hephaestion might have had a sexual relationship.  Throughout, they're referred to as "friends" or "confidants" or "companions;" the closest the writer comes is saying that they clearly had a "strong emotional bond" and that the tomb is a "tribute to love and loyalty."

Why the hell are they afraid of saying it?  I mean, if you want to err on the side of caution, at least admit that it was possible.

Apparently even that is a bridge too far.

It's all part and parcel of the "don't ask, don't tell" mentality, isn't it?  "We're fine as long as we can pretend you queer people don't exist and never have."  Well, allow me to point out that this, too, is homophobia.  I spent decades in the closet out of fear and shame from this kind of thinking.  And, straight readers, if you don't think this is damaging, I want you to imagine what it would be like if your employer told you that you must never mention you are in an opposite-sex relationship.  Oh, it's fine, as long as no one knows.  Don't bring your spouse or significant other to the company picnic, don't be seen holding hands in public, don't have a photograph of you as a couple on your desk.

Now imagine if your government was saying the same thing.

Yes, I know that there are places in the world that have it much worse, where being openly queer can get you imprisoned, tortured, or executed.  But we here in the west need to keep in mind that there are ways to oppress people that are subtler and more insidious.  How is this sort of thing any different from putting Jews, Romani, and Blacks (just to name three of many groups this has happened to) in a position where they feel like they have to hide who they are in order to "pass?"

If you think that's wrong, then so is this.

I'm out publicly, so it's far too late for me to hide even if I wanted to.  But honestly -- I wouldn't go back to being invisible even if I could.  All those terrified years did a lot of damage to me emotionally, damage I doubt I'll ever completely heal from (and that's not even counting the regrets over the richer, more honest life I could have had).  To make it clear, I'm not unhappy where I am today; despite all I've been through, I've arrived at a good place.

I just wish I'd had a happier past, is all.

And I will continue to speak out against this kind of straightwashing.  Because it not only is an inaccurate view of history, but does damage to queer people right now.  I've often wondered if there had been honest, positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people in the fiction and nonfiction I read as a teen, maybe I'd have come out as bi when I realized it (age fifteen or so) rather than hiding for another forty years.  Maybe I still wouldn't have, I dunno; southern Louisiana in the seventies wasn't exactly a congenial place for people who were different, and I'm honestly not a very brave person.

But if by speaking out, I can help other people who are still in the closet -- well, don't expect me to shut up.  It's the least I can do after maintaining my own personal silence for four very long decades.

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Monks at sea

The phenomenally silly song "St. Brendan's Fair Isle," by the Arkansas folk singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood, tells the wild tale of St. Brendan of Clonfert, sometimes called "Brendan the Navigator:"

We'd been on the ocean for ninety-four days,
And came to a spot where the seas were ablaze;
Those demons from Hades were dancin' with glee
And burnin' the sailors alive on the sea.
Well, St. Brendan walked on the blistering waves,
He drove all those demons right back to their caves,
And all of the saints wore a heavenly smile
As we sailed for St. Brendan's fair isle, fair isle
We sailed for St. Brendan's fair isle.

St. Brendan himself is something of a historical mystery.  He lived from around 484 to 577 C.E., although the first extant mention of him isn't until a hundred years after his death (in Adomnán of Iona's Vita Sancti Columbae), and the earliest account of him as an explorer is a hundred years after that, in the ninth century Martyrology of Tallaght.

The story is that St. Brendan and some of his fellow monks took off into the Atlantic Ocean in a leather-bound coracle in search of an enchanted island he'd heard was "somewhere in the western ocean."  Sources differ as to whether he found it, but upon his return he told (amongst other claims) of a place where "great demons threw down lumps of fiery slag from an island with rivers of gold fire" -- considered by some to be an indication that he reached the volcanic island of Iceland.

While St. Brendan's voyages might well be mythology -- no one, for example, gives much credit to his boat spending time riding on the back of a giant enchanted fish -- the idea of Irish and Scottish monks making it across the north Atlantic actually has some basis in fact.

A medieval illustration of St. Brendan of Clonfert and his fellow explorers (ca. 1460) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The twelfth century Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders) by Icelandic historian Ari Þorgilsson describes the arrival of the first Norse settlers in around 874 C. E., and states that they found some settlements already there -- small clusters of buildings inhabited by "holy men" called Papar (from the Old Irish word papa meaning "monk").  Þorgilsson said that the Papar were Christian ascetics, and when they found out the island was being taken over by pagan Norsemen, they basically said "there goes the neighborhood," upped stakes, and left.  The Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), which in general is considered pretty reliable as a historical document, concurs, and said that when the Papar took off they left behind items that confirmed their Christian faith, including books, bells, crucifixes, and crosiers.

Some historians believe that the place names Papey (which seems to mean "island of the Papar") and the Vestmannaeyjar (the "islands of the western men") hearken back to Irish and Scottish inhabitants who actually predated the Norse settlements, perhaps by as much as two centuries.

While all this is intriguing, it bears mention that despite extensive archaeological investigation of the locations of alleged settlements by the Papar, there have been no unequivocally Celtic artifacts located in Iceland yet.  So right now we're left with a couple of moderately-plausible historical documents and a highly mythologized account of a saint whose exploits include some highly questionable events such as an island inhabited by bow-and-arrow wielding pig-headed people and a place where Judas Iscariot is tortured by being frozen on one side and burned on the other.

I might believe that St. Brendan sailed to Iceland, but that bit is a little more than I'm willing to swallow.

A statue commemorating St. Brendan's voyage, in Bantry, County Cork, Ireland [Image is in the Public Domain\

Anyhow, that's our historical curiosity of the day.  Whatever the truth of the Brendan story, I find it incredible that back in the days before reliable maps anyone was willing to launch off into the ocean.  I have my adventurous side, but that's way beyond anything I'd ever consider doing.  And that goes double if I thought there was a chance that demons from Hades might burn me alive if my faith wasn't sufficiently strong.

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The letter and the labyrinth

A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn't make the cut to be part of the canonical Bible when the whole thing was hashed out at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), after which the Bible had something close to its current form.  (As I mention in the post, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a commonly-held misconception; Nicaea had nothing to do with decisions about what was scripture and what wasn't, but was about the nature of the Trinity and how to determine the date for Easter.)

What's interesting is that even since all of the late-fourth-century wrangling by the church fathers, there hasn't been an end to what is Holy Writ and what should be written out, because new documents keep popping up.  The most famous are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank; those, although they were certainly a fantastic historical and archaeological discovery, didn't much affect religious belief, because they were mostly composed either of (1) canonical Old Testament books, (2) writings that we already knew about but had been declared non-canonical apocrypha (like the supremely weird Books of Enoch), or (3) descriptions of religious and secular law.

Sometimes, though, a document is discovered that leave both the historians and the devout scrambling for an explanation.  And that brings us to the "Mystic Gospel of Mark."

You ready for a tangled tale?

Back in 1958, an American historian named Morton Smith was poring through some old manuscripts at the Monastery of Mar Saba, and found a handwritten Greek text appended to the end of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch.  Smith identified the text as an eighteenth-century copy of a letter from the theologian Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 C.E.), which made reference to the Gospel of Mark -- not the standard version, but a longer, "secret" gospel (τοῦ Μάρκου τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον).

Smith hand-transcribed the document, then requested (and was approved) to take the original to the Greek Orthodox Library in Jerusalem.  Despite Smith writing a paper on the discovery in 1960, little attention was given to the document; as far as we know, only three other scholars ever set eyes on it, the religious historians David Flusser, Shlomo Pines, and Guy Stroumsa.  Stroumsa, who saw it in 1976, appears to be the last person who gave the manuscript a close look.  Smith took photographs of the pages in question, but the document itself mysteriously disappeared some time between then and 1990 and hasn't been seen since.

One of Smith's photographs of the alleged "Mystic Gospel of Mark" document [Image is in the Public Domain]

The putative Clement of Alexandria letter included two passages that occur nowhere in the current Gospel of Mark, but were supposedly from the longer "Mystic Gospel."  One passage is much lengthier than the other; and it's that one that caused a furor, especially given how Morton Smith translated and interpreted it.  Here's Smith's translation:

And they come into Bethany.  And a certain woman whose brother had died was there.  And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me."  But the disciples rebuked her.  And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb.  And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb.  And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand.  But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.  And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich.  And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body.  And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.  And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

So yeah.  Smith interpreted the naked young man "remaining with Jesus that night" to mean that not only did Jesus condone homosexuality, he participated in it.

You can see why that turned some heads.

Whether this interpretation alone was the cause, historians immediately started claiming the whole thing was a forgery.  Quentin Quesnell stopped just short of accusing Smith outright, but said that the "hypothetical forger matched Smith's apparent ability, opportunity, and motivation" (Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 353–378).  Stephen Carlson went even further, as you might surmise by the title of his book on the subject -- The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark -- and points out that a 1910 catalogue of the holdings of the Mar Saba Monastery Library doesn't list the book where Smith allegedly found the document, and from that (and the book's later mysterious disappearance) Carlson concludes that Smith forged the letter, then made sure the original vanished so that modern hoax-detection techniques such as ink analysis wouldn't reveal what he'd done.  Jacob Neusner, a historian specializing in ancient Judaism, called it "the forgery of the century."

Not everyone is so sure, though.  There are a good number of historians who point out that the photographs of the document (which still exist) demonstrate a sure hand at writing eighteenth-century Greek calligraphy, and further, that the writing style and word choice is completely consistent with known writings of Clement of Alexandria.  Producing such a close match, they say, would have been beyond Morton Smith's knowledge, skill, and ability.  New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, in his book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, writes, "It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat.  For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark.  If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it."

And the historians are still arguing about this.  One of those impossible questions to settle, as far as I can see, given that the original document is AWOL, whether by accident or design.  Responses by scholars and interested laypeople vary from "it was a hoax from beginning to end, and Smith did it" to "the letter isn't authentic but was an earlier forgery, and Smith got fooled but was acting in good faith" to "the letter was an authentic transcription from Clement, but the passages weren't actually by the Evangelist Mark" to "okay, they're by Mark, but the gay Jesus passage is being mistranslated or misinterpreted" to "yay!  Gay Jesus FTW!"

It's hard to escape the conclusion that everyone's taking this and finding ways to use it to support whatever it was they already believed.

The problem here is that the evidence we actually have is somewhere beyond thin -- a photograph of an eighteenth-century transcription (for which the original is lost) of a third-century letter (for which the original is even loster, if it ever existed in the first place) of some extra passages for a Gospel that a even lot of the devout think wasn't itself written until at least three decades after Jesus's death.  So from that, you can conclude damn near anything you want.

I mean, I love archaeology and history, but really.

So that's our excursion into the labyrinth of biblical scholarship.  Me, I think I'll move on to something I can be more sure about, like quantum physics.  At least there, the whole concept of the Uncertainty Principle has a clear definition.

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Old fake news

Last year I did a post about the remarkable Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, whose passion for history (coupled with an understanding of how fragile and easily lost books are) led him to compile a 53-volume set of transcripts of the writings from historians of antiquity.  His work preserved accounts for which we have no other copies, so without his tireless efforts, huge chunks of the history of early Europe would now be unknown and unknowable.

And that's even taking into account that of his original 53 volumes, only four of them survived.

So many works of ancient writers are lost forever, some to natural disasters like fire, flood, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but others to deliberate destruction -- often motivated by religious fervor, or the desperation by rulers to discredit their rivals and predecessors.  This latter, which was all too common after there'd been conflict over succession, led to the systematic purging of works painting previous regimes in a positive light.

The loss of primary sources makes the job of modern historians hard enough.  But a further complication arises when you consider the question of what happens when one of the documents that did survive is unreliable.

This is exactly the situation with regards to a major source of our knowledge of the later Roman Empire, from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117 - 138 C.E.) to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carinus (283-285 C.E.).  The document is called the Historia Augusta and seems to have been written during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (285-305 C.E.).  Diocletian himself was looked upon early in his reign as a usurper -- he wasn't of royal blood, but was a soldier who rose up through the ranks -- so it's no wonder that a writer during his reign would be motivated to dig up all the dirt he could on the preceding dynasties.

"Okay, they may have been royals, but a lot of 'em were loonies," seems to have been the approach.  "Diocletian, on the other hand, will Make Rome Great Again."

Cover of an eighteenth-century edition of the Historia Augusta, from Ettal Abbey, Germany [Image is in the Public Domain]

To be fair, there was a lot to be critical of, especially in the last half of the period the Historia covers.  The fifty-year time period between the assassination of the Emperor Severus Alexander (235 C.E.) and the accession of Diocletian is known to historians as the "Crisis of the Third Century" because it was marked by chaos, lawlessness, and one short-lived ruler after another.  

The problem with the Historia is that for a lot of the period, there's nothing to cross-check it against.  There are chunks of material that have no attestation anywhere else; it's literally the only source that's survived.  There's an ongoing debate amongst historians about its accuracy, and some believe that even many of the sources the Historia cites are themselves made up.  The historian Anthony R. Birley, of Universität Düsseldorf, did an analysis published in the journal Classica called "Rewriting Second- and Third-Century History in Late Antique Rome: the Historia Augusta" in which he estimates the total amount of reliable historical information in the document as only seventeen percent -- from a high of thirty-three percent in the section on the life of Marcus Opellius Macrinus all the way down to a flat zero for the accounts of the usurpers Firmus, Saturnius, Proculus, and Bonosus, all of whom immediately preceded Diocletian's rise to wearing the purple.

Probably not a coincidence, that.

Historical research always runs into the problem that accurate records are no more likely to survive than inaccurate ones.  Also, there's the whole "history is written by the victors" thing, which complicates our understanding of any period of history where there was regime change.  But considering the problem of the Historia Augusta has made me wonder how historians of the future will read the documents from the United States of 2025.  Not only are the members of the Trump regime lying their asses off about what's going on, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson's claim that the economy was tanking under President Biden, and that Trump's repeatedly playing Tariff Peekaboo with Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. is somehow going to get it back on track, they're actively destroying documents having accurate information about what's happening.

My fear is that the Crisis of the Twenty-First Century won't end up any better understood by historians than the Crisis of the Third Century is.

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Mad world

Given my dual fascination with history and botany, it's a bit surprising that yesterday I ran into a story I'd never heard before that involves both.  I wonder if you know about it?

It's the strange tale of "mad honey."

Turns out in eastern Turkey, near the Black Sea, there are two species of rhododendron -- Rhododendron ponticum and Rhododendron luteum -- that grow in such great profusion that they dominate the landscape.  When they flower, the effect is absolutely spectacular.

Rhododendron ponticum [Image is in the Public Domain]

But there's another species that appreciates the display, and that's bees.  Both species are pollinated by bees, which are lured in not only by the flowers' bright colors, but by the abundance of nectar.

So when these plants flower, the local honey comes almost exclusively from these two species.

The problem is, these plants don't only produce sugar, they produce organic compounds called grayanotoxins.  The grayanotoxins appear not to bother the bees at all -- it would be seriously counterproductive for the plants to poison their pollinators -- but humans who consume the honey made from the nectar of these species end up with serious problems, including hallucinations, dizziness, nausea, bradycardia, and vascular hypotension.  The symptoms are rarely fatal; you'd have to consume a lot of the stuff to die from it.  Most people with what is called "mad honey syndrome" recover in a day or two, although during that period they might well think they're not going to make it.

So, of course, humans being what they are, there are people who take it recreationally.  Me, if I want a mood-altering substance, I'll stick with a glass of red wine.

Where it gets interesting is that "mad honey" has intersected with history on more than one occasion.  The Greek historian Xenophon, in his chronicle Anabasis, recounts an interesting experience some of the troops had while traveling through eastern Anatolia on the way back to Greece from their time as mercenaries in Persia:

Now for the most part there was nothing here which they really found strange; but the swarms of bees in the neighborhood were numerous, and the soldiers who ate of the honey all went off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, and not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men.  So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed.  On the next day, however, no one had died, and at approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey they began to come to their senses; and on the third or fourth day they got up, as if from a drugging.

A few centuries later, a similar incident happened, but deliberately, and with a much less happy ending.  The Greek historian Strabo writes in his book Geography of the unfortunate fate of some of Pompey the Great's soldiers during their campaign against King Mithridates VI of Pontus:

Now all these peoples who live in the mountains are utterly savage, but the Heptacometae are worse than the rest.  Some also live in trees or turrets; and it was on this account that the ancients called them Mosynoeci, the turrets being called mosyni.  They live on the flesh of wild animals and on nuts; and they also attack wayfarers, leaping down upon them from their scaffolds.  The Heptacometae cut down three maniples [around 1,500 soldiers] of Pompey's army when they were passing through the mountainous country; for they mixed bowls of the crazing honey which is yielded by the tree-twigs, and placed them in the roads, and then, when the soldiers drank the mixture and lost their senses, they attacked them and easily disposed of them.

Which raises the question of exactly how stupid these Roman soldiers were.  They were marching through a hostile region occupied by people who were known to be "utterly savage," and just happened upon bowls of honey left for them on the side of the road -- and instead of being suspicious, they were like, "Nom nom, looks good to me!"

My opinion is that the resulting massacre was just natural selection at work.

Anyhow, apparently "mad honey" is available for purchase if you go to Turkey, where it's (1) legal, but (2) strongly discouraged, because like many psychotropic substances, the difference between "whoa, far out" and "HOLY SHIT THE WORLD IS ENDING" is a very blurry line.  So even if there aren't savage bands of Heptacometae waiting for you to get high so they can stab you with sharpened sticks, you might find yourself regretting consuming it, like a middle-aged couple did in 2008 when they heard the stuff improved your sex life and instead of having a fun frolic ended up in the hospital because they thought they were having heart attacks.

So restraint is recommended.

Anyhow, that's our curious historical vignette of the day.  Greek military campaigns, beautiful flowers, and hallucinogenic honey.  And given what some plant toxins can do -- monkshood and manchineel come to mind -- this one is pretty mild.

But if I ever get to visit Turkey, I still think I'll still steer clear.

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The man in the well

Some time around 1150 C.E. in the Faroe Islands, a comb-maker named Unås and his wife Gunnhild had a baby boy, whom they named Sverre.  Unås's brother Roe was the bishop of Streymoy, and once the boy was old enough Roe saw to it that Sverre was educated, intending that he would eventually be ordained as a priest.

However, Sverre had other ideas.  He had dreams that he was destined for greatness.  Then in 1175, when Sverre was about twenty-five, Gunnhild threw gasoline on the fire by telling him that his father wasn't actually the humble comb-maker Unås, but King Sigurd Munn of Norway, who had been killed by his brother Inge Haraldsson twenty years earlier, precipitating what would end up being a fifty-year civil war.

After finding out about his paternity, Sverre decided to head over to Norway and see what he could do to rectify the situation.

Historians differ on whether they accept the claim that Sverre was actually Sigurd's son.  The main source for this claim, Sverris Saga (thought to have been written by Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Þingeyraklaustur Monastery in Iceland), was certainly biased -- no aspersions meant toward the good abbot, but it was written under the direction and supervision of Sverre himself, so it's no surprise that in the saga the claim is treated as rock-solid fact.  And certainly, kings fathering children with mistresses isn't unusual.  But the whole thing definitely has overtones of mythology -- "the king's lost heir coming back to claim the throne" is a tale old as the hills.  (Interesting that most of the fictional ones, like Aragorn son of Arathorn and Taran the Wanderer, succeeded brilliantly, while the real-life ones, like Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, and Kaspar Hauser, almost always came to bad ends.)

Whether or not his claim was legitimate, Sverre certainly acted like he deserved the throne.  He landed in Norway in 1176, and predictably meeting with little support, allied himself with a rebel group called the Birkbeiners ("Birchlegs," so called because they were so poor they made themselves leggings out of birch bark).  And initially, that didn't go so well, either.  Sverre and the Birkbeiners were defeated in a series of battles, eventually whittling their numbers down to about seventy.  But in a turn of fate that is astonishing by any measure, in 1179 they beat the much larger forces of King Magnus V Erlingsson, seizing control of the entire district of Trøndelag.  

Magnus wouldn't give up, however, and certainly wouldn't accept Sverre as a co-regent. Sverre had to fight for another five years before fate once again intervened on his behalf.  After yet another battle between the Birkbeiners and the Heklungs (Magnus's supporters) led to an unexpected rout, the surviving Heklungs -- including Mangus himself -- attempted to flee on ships down the long, narrow Sognefjord.  The overloaded ships sank, drowning Magnus and the majority of his supporters, leaving Sverre the uncontested king of Norway.

A marble sculpture of Sverre Sigurdsson from Nidaros Cathedral (ca. 1200)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Sverre's reign, however, was never to see real peace.  There were conflicts with landholding nobles, conflicts with the church, uprisings from rival parties, and even (ironically) a pretender to the throne who claimed to be Magnus's long-lost son.  (The pretender, unsurprisingly, didn't last very long.)  It was during one of these fights, however, that an event occurred that is why the whole topic comes up today.

In 1197, Sverre's forces were trapped in Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim, and it wasn't looking good.  In a desperate attempt to end the siege and wipe out Sverre and the Birkbeiners once and for all, the besieging forces threw the dead body of one of the men killed in a skirmish into a well -- the main water source for the castle -- in the hopes that it would poison the water and either kill them outright or force them to give up.  In the end it did neither -- Sverre would live to fight on for another five years -- and the story would have seemed to be one of those odd historical filigrees that could as easily be fabricated as true.

Except that researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology believe they found the body.

The skeleton of a blond, blue-eyed man, approximately thirty years old at death, was found in a well near Sverresborg Castle that had been clogged with stones.  There were two deep cuts in his skull that are thought to be what caused his death.  From DNA extracted from a tooth, the scientists determined not only the bits about his appearance, but a surmise that he came from the province of Vest-Agder, in the very southernmost tip of Norway.

"This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found," said Michael D. Martin, who co-authored the study.  "There are a lot of these medieval and ancient remains all around Europe, and they're increasingly being studied using genomic methods...  The important Norwegian Saint Olaf is thought to be buried somewhere in Trondheim Cathedral, so I think that if eventually his remains are uncovered, there could be some effort to describe him physically and trace his ancestry using genetic sequencing."

It's amazing that techniques of cutting-edge genetic analysis are being brought to bear on questions from history.  And in this case have corroborated a peculiar story from a saga long thought to be of questionable veracity -- giving us a lens into a turbulent, violent, and chaotic period of Scandinavian history.

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Breaching the wall

Spartacus was a Thracian slave and gladiator, born in around 103 B.C.E. in what is now Bulgaria, about whose early years (despite several movies and books giving lots of lurid detail) little is known for certain.  He may have been conscripted into the Roman army -- certainly he knew a great deal about fighting and tactics -- but ultimately ran afoul with the notoriously harsh Roman discipline and was forced into slavery.  His physical prowess made it inevitable he'd be chosen as a gladiator, an occupation that could on occasion win you renown and eventual freedom, but much more frequently ended up with your dying a painful death in front of a large, cheering audience.

Spartacus by sculptor Dénis Foyatier (1830) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Spartacus statue by Dénis Foyatier, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Spartacus was having none of it, and in 73 B.C.E. he escaped confinement with about seventy other gladiators.  Soon their ranks were joined by an estimated seventy thousand slaves and poor people, which began the Third Servile War, a conflict Voltaire referred to as "the only just war in history."  They held out for two years -- no mean feat -- by this time, swelling their numbers to 120,000, before the inevitable happened.  The Roman army, under Marcus Licinius Crassus, defeated Spartacus's forces at the Battle of Lucania in 73 B.C.E.  Spartacus himself was killed in the battle (although his body was never found, leading to rampant speculation, lo unto this very day, that he somehow escaped).  In a way, even if he was killed during the fighting it was damned lucky for him, because after the battle ended six thousand of his compatriots were crucified along the Appian Way, surely one of the most horrific and cruel means of execution ever devised.

The Death of Spartacus by Hermann Vogel (1882) [Image is in the Public Domain]

For what it's worth, Crassus got what he deserved in the end.  In 53 B.C.E. he died at the disastrous (from the Roman perspective, anyhow) Battle of Carrhae, by one account being held down and having molten gold poured down his throat.

Man, they did know how to come up with some creatively gruesome ideas, back then.

The reason Spartacus comes up is because of a story over at Smithsonian Magazine about an archaeological find in Calabria, the "toe of Italy's boot" -- a three-kilometer-long stone wall running alongside what appears to be a deep military ditch, and nearby, obvious remnants of a battle, such as broken iron sword handles, curved blades, javelin points, and spearheads.  The types of artifacts are consistent with production during the late Republic, which is right about the same time as the Third Servile War occurred.

In fact, Andrea Maria Gennaro, superintendent of archaeology for the Italian Ministry of Culture, who worked at the site, believes that the wall and ditch were built to contain Spartacus and his fellow rebels, but that there is a spot on the wall that shows sign of a breach.  It's known that the rebellious slave army did fight battles against the Roman army in the region -- and more than once succeeded, before finally being overwhelmed and defeated in Lucania, forty kilometers south of Naples.  Gennaro thinks this very spot might have been the site of one of those breaches by the famous rebel.

Part of the stone wall thought to have been part of the defense against Spartacus and the rebels [Image credit: Andrea Maria Gennaro]

"We started studying weapons recovered along the wall, and the closest comparisons are with weapons from the late Republican period," she said.  "We believe we have identified the site of the clash...  The wall is a sort of barrier due to its topographic location and other factors, like the absence of gates.  It divides the entire large flat area into two parts...  When we realized what it was, it was very exciting.  It's not every day you get to experience history first-hand."

I was struck by that palpable sense of history beneath my feet the entire time I was in Italy two months ago.  Mind you, there's history everywhere in the world; right here where I now live, the Seneca and Cayuga Nations and their ancestors thrived for thousands of years.  But there are few places in the world with as many tangible traces of antiquity as in Italy.

And now we have one with a direct connection to one of the most famous figures from the Roman Republic -- someone who is still held up as an inspiration to those fighting against oppression and servitude.  Even though Spartacus and his rebels ultimately failed -- certainly, the practice of slavery in Rome continued unabated afterward -- seeing the wall that they breached over two thousand years ago still acts as a symbol of brave men and women willing to put their lives on the line to be free.

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