Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
Conestoga wagon at the National Museum of American History By Daderot - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26706952
The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking people living in the lower Susquehanna valley. Successful in the early stages of the Beaver Wars, in which they fought, amongst others, the nascent colony of Maryland. From the 1680s the population collapsed, not least because a large number, designating themselves as the Conestoga, moved into a town settlement somewhat misleading known as their reservation, in Lancaster County, on the Conestoga River immediately above its junction with the Susquehanna that creates the ferry to York, Pennsylvania. The timing and extent of the Conestoga's population decline is not a matter of careful attention from the historians of colonial Pennsylvania, but must have been late and extreme for there to have been a flourishing town in the 1820s and only twenty-odd victims of two massacres during the Paxtang Boys rebellion of 1764.
The Conestoga is a characteristic but folk design associated with western American roads.
Look what they found at Hattusa in 2015! It is unfortunately Galatian rather than Early Iron Age, but it's definitely a saw. I'll throw in a 17th C BC bronze saw below, but as an insight into my method, if the Blogspot automatic pagesetter leaves ugly spaces. I'm not fixing them!
I'm thinking about saws in connection with butchery rather than carpentry today, which means that I'm also thinking about pemmican, so I'm going to start by retelling the story of Fenimore Cooper's 1843 Wyandote: Or, the Hutt'd Knoll, which I may have talked about before here. (I'm holding it in my mind that I have, as an incentive to the brevity I find so impossible.)
Wyandote is a frontier novel, and a Western, "Indian" novel, as they said at the time. It is also a difficult one for American readers. Cooper was an Indian lover who supported Removal, and a champion of the uniqueness, originality, and value of American culture at a time when Americans of culture were hopeless in thrall to European norms, but at the same time a man of strictly hierarchical values who often suggested in his fiction that he would be much more strongly opposed to the Revolutionary settlement if he thought he could get away with it. The villains in Wyandote are the frontier farmers who live as tenants on the land ("patent") of a retired British army officer. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, they ally with some Indians and stage an "Indian" attack on their landlord in an attempt to convert their tenancy into freehold at the expense of massacring the officer, his wife, daughter, Maude, adopted daughter, and loyal retainers, because eggs, omelets. The "Wyandote" of the title, is introduced to us as the shiftless, drunken Indian, Saucy Nick, who in spite of his overt status on the page, flirts with protagonist status, being omnicompetent off page, carrying off various adventures, and then, in what would be the climax of the fight, single-handedly defeating the enemy in desperate battle in the dark. Yet he also murders the British officer, to all appearances his friend, in cold blood shortly after declaring himself "Wyandote," and no longer "Saucy Nick." At first glance it is an almost perverse plot development, not that we'd expect any less of Cooper, who, after writing a romance explicitly pairing cousins, brings a brother and adoptive sister together.
And the perversity doesn't end there, as often in Cooper romances, the plot makes much more sense with a bit of added history and some race mixing. substitute Joseph Brant for Saucy Nick and one of Sir William Johnson's daughters for Maude, and it all makes sense, even the romance. Maude, is, under Indian law, the officer's daughter right up to the moment when she repudiates that status in order to pursue her relationship with his son. This instantly restores her uncle, Nick/Wyandote's, status as a Tuscarora sachem and her guardian, and her ownership of the patent. The contradictions between Indian and English inheritance are, as always, reconciled by marrying the Indian heiress to the English,and the murder becomes instantly understandable in a class and status-conscious society as a tragic clash of cultures. (And also because the officer had idiotically inserted himself into a rescue mission even though he is too old for the work.)
As an interpretation of the plot, I am hanging a great deal here on the patent itself, "the hutt'd knoll." Or, rather, on Nick/Wyandote's references to it in terms of its ability to sustain beaver. It is a natural hillock showing above a hundred-acre beaver pond, itself the centre of a disc of good land about the size of the officer's thousand acre patent, in the wilderness of the upper Susquehanna not far from Binghamton. It used to yield (maintain?) four beaver a year, but no longer does, and the local Indians are willing to sell, Nick tells the officer, "clearing" the patent of Indian claims, as required by New York law. The quality of the drained land under the pond is praised immoderately in the text. The soil is, of course rich, but years of decay under the pond have freed it of the stumps and roots that troubled frontier farmers. The hillock, a natural rocky eminence in the middle of the former pond, recalls a beaver lodge and is the natural place for a fortified manor, the "hut" of the title. This is why the tenants covet it, and why Nick darkly warns that it held beaver in the past, and might again. Of course, if Nick is using "beaver" in the vulgar way that you might expect of Shakespeare, but not a Regency writer, that's exactly what happens. It used to maintain Maude's mother, and when Maude, a mature woman and mother, returns to New York as the wife of a major-general, and finds Nick (his crime never to be known by anyone but the reader) and the other retainers living in retirement at the knoll, it is still "maintaining" her, only with rents instead of pelts.
Okay, yes, blah blah blah, Cooper the secret key to early American history, get over it, can't you, Lund? The dynamics of the fur trade are very simple. People go out to do very hard work on the trail and trapline. They have to be fed with a portable and durable food. That's your pemmican, and parched corn. Their work is thus based on the land, and we can ask ourselves how many acres and farmers are needed for each coureur de bois. The answer is "not a lot of land" for the corn, and "Hunh?" for the pemmican, because buffalo are just there. This here article I found with Google says that a 90lb bag of pemmican was the standard unit, and accounted for two buffalo. Which brings me to Robert Morrissey's People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America, which is a book in the UW Press's Weyerhauser Environmental Books Series, because this is 2026. Blogspot spellcheck doesn't recognise "Weyerhauser," by the way. Forgetting is the best greenwashing! Also, if you go to the link, you will find that the fabled forest products company characterising its "work" as managing 40,000 square miles of "timberland" in Canada and the United States. It's a giant landlord! (The fine print notes subsidiaries that are still in "wood products.")
Something about how for every Southern boy, it's 3PM on 3 July 1863, and Pickett's Charge hasn't been launched yet and I'm not even going to continue with this line of thought about history not being past. The last week of June isn't a good time to be thinking about the Neo-Confederate capture of American government in the Anglosphere because 70 million of us are suffering through a historic heat wave, and a major British political party's solution to the problem is to let the oil and gas industry rip.
It hasn't been terrible in British Columbia. My work week was disrupted by a heat wave, and everyone in Vancouver felt it, but it was, as these things go, a normal heat wave with cooling at night. We're seeing plenty of early signs of a food security crisis in the form of chronic and persistent shortages of seasonal crops like watermelon, asparagus, strawberries, and sweet corn, and part of that is down to weather; but it is also in large measure politics, and I guess we're back to the first paragraph.
I was away visiting last week, but I was rewarded for my time off with a five day work week followed by a single day off (yesterday). I didn't feel like high effort blogging yesterday, and there's some business to catch up, specifically Eric Cline's book about the "collapse and survival of civilisation" after the "collapse" of 1177, which struck me as fairly low effort for most of its run, until the final chapter, which was on about the IPCC's take on Climate Change and Cilizational Collapse, as the bloody Wikipedia article is titled.
(The short week is why Postblogging March 1956, II, isn't up yet. There may then be delays in July over library issues, and I still won't have an aviation magazine next week, as Aviation Week managed to fill up a whole volume with the January-February issues, and I have no idea what was going on with Flight in the spring of 1956, what with the labour trouble in the British printing industry.)
California, Pennsylvania, is in the heart of Pennsyltucky, with all that goes with it, mainly closed coal mines. (Wikipedia reports that the local Vigilant Mine once produced the largest lump of coal in the world.) It is, however, the home of Pennsylvania Western University, which is, I am devastated to report, the new name since 2022 of the California University of Pennsylvania. First they renamed the Rough Riders, and now this! At least we still have the Miami University of Ohio, right? (Right.) The United States is just so darned big that these obscure schools can be real things, although clicking through to the Wiki suggests that PennWest is on the bubble these days. Can't imagine why people in Pennsyltucky might be disgruntled about stuff.
Anyway, it's probably called "California" on the basis of a joke about how once you've made the climb out of Brownsville you're practically in California. I don't know that. I made it up, in fact. But now it's a joke on a Blogger page, so real enough for me! Actually it isn't even halfway to Wheeling, West Virginia, where the National Road reaches the Ohio.
You had to figure that a group of winsome lasses would do a version of Clementine as a slice of Americana. It's regrettably not Lana Del Ray, but check out the costuming!
The real story of the week is that I finally dragged my ass out to the library on Wednesday, cleared my account, and placed my next batch of requests Thursday morning. The other story is this stupid ass war with Iran that someone is having. The robots at ASRS have so far agreed to hand over Fortune out of all my requests. Flight and The Engineer usually take longer to surface, and Aviation Week, The Economist, and Newsweek come from PARC, the new facility on the former experimental farm at the south end of campus that was built after it was realised that "tearing all the old magazines apart and putting them online" was not actually going to happen. Ha ha, enshittification, watchagonnado. This is a pretty long walk from the holding shelves or something, which is why I expect delivery on Monday or whenever. So postblogging is next week, and given a slack week, how about some "public engagement?" Obviously no one is talking about the war any more because it's boring and we want to focus on the high cost of produce. Which, we have to admit, is related to this stupid war, but we can't do anything about the war, and we can complain that there's no out-of-season corn on the cob.
I've already put some markers down. The story of two weeks ago was the rescue of the crew of an F-15E downed over Iran, which was very reminiscent of EAGLE CLAW, which provoked a safety review of the practice of having pilots wear night vision goggles, which gave us a tiny tiny bit of light(!) on the development of night vision equipment in U.S. service, a topic which is super obscure because of physicists making terrible historians. I made a heroic effort to avoid topical references last week, and also in a Quora answer I wrote on the subject of Third Century Gothic seapower, which is such a bizarre sentence to write even though it's absolutely a thing.
So, now, what the hell, time to go all in. It's hard to stress enough how the world is getting fucked up over all of this, so some comment is surely warranted, and as far as the state of the research goes, I'm not sure I've blogged about the history since Gunther Martin's working group in Vienna promulgated the most recent of the fragments of what is probably Dexippus' Scythia Vindobonensia, they have recovered, which was 2017, per the Internet. But we all know the real reason is that ever since I talked about the subject on Quora, I've been thinking about the hapless twats who occupy the Trump White House and the Roman Emperor Valerian,
(Exactly like that)
who was captured by Shapur I some time between 257 and 260 (David S. Potter thinks that 260 is pretty secure, but I remain completely gobsmacked that the sources don't allow us to assert the year with complete confidence). Per Lactantius, Shapur treated his captive with great cruelty, while the early Muslim historian, Abu Hanifa Dinawari says the reverse. Neither historian seems impeccably credible, but there's a strong energy of Valerian effectively defecting from a hapless Rome in Dinawari's account, and that's definitely in the spirit of the times. Potter, intrestingly, points out that the story that Valerian and his troops/staff were put to work building dams in the new Roman masonry tradition. The dams traditionally associated with Valerian do survive, and how could I possibly pass up a topical aside about Harvard failing its students by omitting civil engineering from the law school curriculum?
Lana Del Rey? I'm so old I remember when "Lana Del Rey" was an ironic comment on "Lana Del Rey." But I guess she decided not to go away, and I'm grateful because that means I can post an original version of the John Denver chestnut:
Almost heaven, West Virginia/ Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River Life is old there, older than the trees Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze
The story, as I have it, is that at some vague point in the Eighteenth Century, vast numbers of Scotch-Irish migrated from, you know, Scotland or Ireland or around about there, to the crestline of the Appalachians. For it was at this clear, geographic line that they were barred from going further by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. George III by this action set himself against the westward drive of the American people that is such a large part of its essential nature, a Western drive bound up in the natural progressiveness of the American spirit, about which I can no longer even. The drive naturally soon resumed after the matter of the Revolution was dealt with, but by this time the Scotch-Irish had settled into the "Appalachians," where their Elizabethan accent persists unchanged to this day, denoting the antiquity of their origins and the oldness of their nature, as otherwise indicated by their charming habits of old time country music, square dancing, and making and consuming illegal alcohol products.
So we are sorted at work about how this humble blogger is going to be plugged into our current workplace "the retail emergency is forever" scheme:
Saturday: 6-230; Sunday, 10-6:30 "Need experienced people in the mid shift on our busiest day," until Saturday at 3PM, at which time it was changed by text message to 6-2:30: Monday, 6-2:30: Tuesday: 6-2:30: Wednesday, 1:30-10 "The DM will visit tomorrow, we need the department in good shape." It's good to be wanted at work, but if I asked you to guess what I did on Thursday, and you answered, "Managed to sleep for six hours, then sat on the couch eating stale chips and watching Youtube clips, taking a break every hour to nap," you would be right! As it turns out, I wouldn't have been able to finish it on Sunday morning, either.
And this is why this post is largely in response to things Newsweek will cover in our next installment of postblogging, which was about one quarter done Saturday afternoon when I gave up and went out for dinner.
Math time:
+
=
The point of this week's technical appendix is that some people say that British Airways ruined the British aviation industry by rejecting British planes, and some people say that British aviation ruined British aviation by forcing the Britannia on British Airways. In the spirit of the Internet these days, I'm going to present the case that it's actually "both"! And along the way I'm going to drag in some infrastructure projects of the mid-Fifties that are also having a continuing impact in a little part of the world that I like to call "the Middle East," which you probably haven't heard of. We're very geographically educational around this blog!
The rhythms of an industry devoted to hospitality are a bit at odds with a society that treats hospitality as, not unreasonably, a social thing. I have worked very hard for the last three months and skipped holiday travelling. It is time for a well-earned vacation, which started this Thursday, and in which in a world where everyone lived my life, I would have rested on Thursday and Friday and postblogged on the weekend. This is not that world, and I write from my mother's kitchen on Sunday morning, bound for Campbell River later today. (I also have a dog poking her nose in my leg, undeterred by the fact that it is still pitch black out.)
So let's talk about visitors, instead. I'm working my wage through the Cambridge Early Iron Age volume right now. Archaeology is great, and, impressively, is getting close to being able to tell stories about a very select group of Early Iron Age individuals --vase painters. There is, however, a larger argument about visitors in archaeology, namely, were there any? We have stories about Early Iron Ag visitors, and an argument that they were central to the phenomena by virtue of sharing important technologies (like vase painting). On the other hand, there is a robust counter-argument to the effect of "Show me!" Which is fair, because our stories about visitors are, just that, stories (except we can now hope, for vase painters). Stories are for poets, and, well, you know, poets.
So lets make up a story: Assur-uballit II and Thales are the same person. Just to be clear here, this is 200% unmotivated, a Robert E. Howard-level historical fiction that, if presented seriously by someone who wasn't me, I could tear apart in a million different ways. (Just to start, he was at least a generation too old.) But it sure does invent one heck of a dinner guest, and a wanderer and a rambler, as someone's poking nose reminds me I should be, too.
(For the lack of proper diacriticals I make no apologies. I'm on a laptop and a deadline here.)
This is not the post that I wanted to write today, the first day of my last vacation week of 2025. (No more paid vacations, not including statutory holidays and paid time off, until the first week of February!) To speak frankly and autobiographically about my process and the University of British Columbia Library, the Library now loans bound periodicals on a two week, indefinitely renewable basis, the same as all other loans to alumni members such as myself. Fines are no longer levied, but replacement fees are. Loans overdue, or perhaps just held over term end (I keep missing the renewal because there aren't any consequences except in May and September) are automatically deemed lost, and the replacement fee exceeds the borrower block. That was my position last week. It was my intention to return my loans last Saturday, but I missed a volume, and because of work I didn't return it until Tuesday. I put in a borrower request for the six second-half-of-1955 volumes in my postblogging series before opening on Thursday morning. These are split between a remote storage facility (PARC), with slow but operational machinery, and the on-campus ASRS facility, which, it seems increasingly clear, will never work again quickly and efficiently. It may be that holdings that were in storage before ASRS are principally affected by this, which is bad news, since both Aviation Week are, very luckily, in that category. (Otherwise they would have been lost to pilfering engineering students generations ago, like Toronto's holdings of early aviation technical journals.) Neither facility was able to meet my peremptory demands yesterday, and here we are. Fortunately, I have something to say, and not just about the bonito of Byzantium.
Specifically, the science of archaeology. James Mellaart is in the news in the summer of 1955, popularising the discovery and first year of excavation at the Bronze Age site of Beycesultan, which Mellaart identifies as the capital of the Arzawan appanage of Mira, or, more exactly, as Mira itself. There was by 1955 a longstanding discussion of the geography of Arzawa, in which the locations of the associated polities or cities of Mira, Hapalia, Wilusa, and the Seha River Land was much contested based on scant references in Egyptian and Hittite texts. If "Wilusa" suggests "Illium" to the alert reader, congratulations for picking up on the context of the debate. We now understand why Mellaart was so disappointed that, as of the publication of the Time article, his proof of the Beycesultan-Mira identity was "champagne glass-shaped vessels" and not "epigraphic evidence."
In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man.
Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age.
Detail of 1779 chorographical map of New York (including chorographical details of adjacent parts of New Jersey but evidently not those of Pennsylvania) showing the "Minisink Valley." https://minisinkvalleygenealogy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_10.html
So Braddock's Expedition is a bit confusing because American historians all talk about his two regiments, and military historians of the Nineteenth Century know that's about ten thousand men, which is a huge force by the standards of Eighteenth Century colonial warfare, and meanwhile military historians of the Eighteenth Century are, like, "what's a regiment?" It's not inaccurate, in that regiments did exist in the Eighteenth Century as political, financial and administrative elements, and the particular two battalions of the Irish Establishment that came out with Braddock belonged to single battalion regiments. American military historians are probably informed by reading about the Civil War, where, as was often the case in that era, it was found necessary to insert an additional tier in the command structure of the Age of Reason. That is, in 1755 there were so many companies per battalion, so many battalions per brigade, so many brigades per [insert tedious historiographical discussion here] division. In 1860, armies with lots of conscripts found that this wasn't enough supervision and turned the regiment into an organisational level between battalion and brigade. Conscripts, and their ROTC officers, just need more attention from more headquarters because they can't be trusted to know what they're doing on their own.
The aftermath of Braddock's Defeat is also confusing, because, we are told, a wave of Indian attacks caused settlers to abandon frontier settlements and flee eastward, with a strong subtext of a racial war against the Westward Drive, Frontier Spirit, and Manifest Destiny. And we are not told wrong, except that, with the exception of three extraordinary attacks, the trouble took place in what was then Pennsylvania's Northumberland County, now Monroe and Pike counties, or, in Eighteenth Century usage, the "Minisink Valley," which is not a valley at all, but the region north of the Delaware Water Gap cupped by the Poconos Mountains that was shared between Pennsylvania, New York, and West Jersey, as it still was. The attacks were absolutely Indian attacks, made specifically by the followers of Teedyuscung, probably a grandson of Tamanend and, if my tinfoil hat isn't fitting too tight, William Penn, with an internally Pennsylvanian objective, which was why the raiders spared New York and New Jersey, and why the raids were probably actually a pogrom, which is why almost all the attacks killed the patriarchs of the settlements raided, and probably why there's a slightly panicked subtext to Ben Franklin's reports about the refugees gathering in New Jersey. Because if they weren't leading members of these families, they were probably mostly enslaved. This was a Pennsylvanian civil war. The racial component isn't "Scotch-Irish" versus Indians, but rather a peasant's revolt.
No wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanian Assembly settled quickly in the 1758 Treaty of Easton. But before that could happen, and just to drag this preamble around to relevance, Henri Bouquet, the Swiss Protestant (that is, Francophone) favourite of the Duke of Cumberland, had arrived in Philadelphia and there formed, not to get all genealogical, one of the ancestral units of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, most easily searched, I suspect, as the 60th (American) Rifles. Per the source most recently consulted --probably Wikipedia, but I forget-- this was formed from immigrant German workingmen. Wikipedia does not note that in 1756 the Germans who were immigrating to Philadelphia were mostly coming from German Flats, far up the Mohawk, where a German-speaking community had been growing by ethnogenesis from 1719. With regards to the demographic raw material, this can only have been the free Blacks who could not exist as such in the Eighteenth Century American cosmic order. This probably explains why Bouquet didn't need to subject his riflemen to some specialised training regime to turn them into another of the mid-Eighteenth Century's many ethnically-recruited special forces.Which is usually a bit of an anachronism in that the European units that trace their tradition to the Eighteenth Century special forces have all been long since de-specialed, pipe bands apart.
The American ranger tradition is an exception, and one that, I suggest, is rooted in race, not the primeval (hah!) forest of the American frontier.
At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.)
Maryland has an NHS designation for "Historic Inns on the National Road." This is the Tomlinson Inn at Grantsville. Built around 1818. James K. Polk slept here! By Generic1139 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=21602442
All that being said, "Loch Lomond" is so popular for good reasons. "You'll take the high road/I'll take the low road" is a lyric meditation on mortality. The whole thing is genuinely affecting. It's sad that it has to be yoked to young love, Culloden, the Rising of '45, the Highland Clearances, but now in the fashion of the Internet I will turn it on its head and talk about high roads, low roads, the '45, and the National Road that the Federalists built from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Cumberland Narrows to Redstone Creek and on to Vandalia, Illinois via Wheeling, West Virginia, in way of having an argument about whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to fund "internal improvements," as opposed to lying down on the (privately built, toll-gated) freeway to die.
Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein visits Vancouver Technical High School in 1954 because one of his nephews went there and the Field-Marshal was actually a fairly normal person with a life and stuff like that.
Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993)
There's some fairly weird shit going on about Monty that doesn't speak well of WWII nerds, and one of the heights of this weirdness is the claim that he "held back" Eighth Army after Alamein because he knew that if Commonwealth forces cornered Rommel's Afrika Korps (what, there were Italians there, too? Get out of town!), the Germans would turn around and go all "Nazi supermen are our superiors" on their pasty Limey (now with bonus Antipodean content) asses. If you've a mind to refute that "thesis" with facts, you will explore the fighting after Alamein, and in particular the attempt to encircle the retreating Axis forces via an inland hook around the town of Sirte. To do that you will have to resort to the official histories, if not the archives, as no-one but an official historian could possibly care about the New Zealand Division's travails in the crusty saline bogs south of Sirte that very nearly exposed the isolated force to the Axis counterattack that didn't happen and which would have led to someone actually knowing that Eighth Army was fighting in December of 1942. If you go to Wikipedia you will learn that no less a figure than Milton has something to say about "a boggy Sirte, neither sea/Nor good dry land." And if you go to Civil Engineers in War, the special series of The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, you will get, via W. F. Fryer's "The Military Water Problem in the Western Egyptian Desert, 1940--43," a deep hydrological explanation of the roadbuilding problems discussed at some length by the official history, and otherwise apparently of interest only to the local historians of Sirte, and certainly not to the grand theorists of Classical Antiquity, which is why this post comes to tophets via a weird digression through Wilfrid Fryer's discussion of the problem of watering the Western Desert Force.
The Continental versions of Penguin Classics are allowed to have naughty covers. Ooh la la! I like the single name author credit. This is a classic, not smut!
So, anyway, it looks as though the problems at the UBC Libraries automated retrieval hub are now confined to email alerts, and I probably had my recalls waiting for me for a week the last two times I tried to get at Aviation Week, Flight, and The Engineer. I suspect this because this time around I also recalled Fortune, The Economist, and Newsweek from the PARC offsite storage facility, and got an alert for The Economist only. The upshot is that I have now all of same and might blame the need to process Aviation Week and The Engineer for being late with postblogging this week, whereas in fact it was the 31 January number of Newsweek that bogged me down yesterday. We get to hear about fallout next week!
The saving grace here is that I would be remiss in not covering something of a blockbuster development in the history of the Iron Age Mediterranean, notwithstanding that I heard about it on a political blog, and they heard about it from The Economist. (Otherwise I could talk about Forbes' Road and the Duke of Cumberland.)
Huelva from orbit, and a satellite map of Ahousaht from Google. The conjoint estuaries of the Odiel and Tinto have been progressively silting in, while in the post-glacial period Ahousat is located at the conjunction of two drowned valleys, or fjords. I do not see archaeologists going as far out on a limb as to tell us the situation of ancient Onoba ("Fortress of Baal"), but depending on the extent of the silting it might have been an estuarine island. Ahousat isn't technically an estuarine island, but there is significant outflow from the two fjords, both of which have productive watersheds in spite of their small size, due to the heavy precipitation of the region.
We do not normally think of any place on the northwest coast as flat and fertile, but Ahousaht (technically Marktosis Indian Reservation 15) is almost as close to an exception as it gets:
The Ahousaht band is actually a confederation of eight tribal entities and has 25 smaller reserves attached, all seasonal fishing and resource extraction sites.
So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week.
In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So
let's forget about all that "information industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.
I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail.
It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines.
First, a housekeeping note: There was a hitch in my techblogging process at terms' end in April, resulting in my having to return all my materials and recall them, which I have done this week. Or, rather, two hitches, as my summer holidays and stat days were all heaped up and pushed to the end of August, leaving me off from the 14th to the 31st, or possibly the 2nd of September, although I am not counting on having the first Sunday of September off work. I currently intend to get caught up on the postblogging from the 14th to the 21st and then leave for my summer road trip, unless the province is on fire by then.
Meanwhile, the icy hand of mortality, in the form of knee pain that started on my trip to Kamloops and which was exacerbated by having to run around the store for days on end covering for other peoples' vacations has reminded me that I Would Run Away to the Air, Plantation of the Atlantic, and Sacred Spring aren't writing themselves. Of the three I have no manuscript material for Sacred Spring apart from blog posts, and while I am hardly satisfied by the first two projects, Plantation is steadily progressing in my off-blog writing time and I have decades of investment in I Would Run Away, so Sacred Spring deserves a bit more attention here.
Like many other cities of Classical Greece, Argos was a synoecism of nearby towns, overshadowed by the older sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. The construction of a temple of Hera on a massive artificial terrace, deliberately built in the "Cyclopean" style of the Before Times, and convenient to the earlier cities, amidst a group of "Mycenaean" monumental graves, may be seen as a way of appropriating the prestige of the earlier foundations. I talked about it very briefly as an example of a sanctuary of a city (polis) goddess that wasn't Athena. What did not appear last time was a gruesome story out of Herodotus, which I embed in about as much of the Father of Lies as the reader is likely to tolerate since the whole thing is so evocative:
This is the Athenian story of the matter; but the Aeginetans say that the Athenians came not in one ship only; "for," they say, "even if we had had no ships of our own, we could right easily have defended ourselves against one ship, or a few more; but the truth is that they descended upon our coasts with many ships, and we yielded to them and made no fight of it at sea." But they can never show with exact plainness whether it was because they confessed themselves to be the weaker at sea‑fighting that they yielded, or because they purposed to do somewhat such as in the event they did. The Athenians then (say the Aeginetans), when no man came out to fight with them, disembarked from their ships and set about dealing with the images; and not being able to drag them from the bases they did there and then fasten them about with cords and drag them, till as they were dragged both the images together (and this I myself do not believe, yet others may) fell with the selfsame motion on their knees, and have remained so from that day. Thus, then, did the Athenians; but as for themselves, the Aeginetans say that they learnt that the Athenians p97 were about to make war upon them, and therefore they assured themselves of help from the Argives. So when the Athenians disembarked on the land of Aegina, the Argives came to aid the Aeginetans, crossing over from Epidaurus to the island privily, and then falling upon the Athenians unawares and cutting them off from their ships; and it was at this moment that the thunderstorm came upon them, and the earthquake withal.
87 This, then, is the story told by the Argives and Aeginetans, and the Athenians too acknowledge that it was only one man of them who came safe back to Attica; but the Argives say that it was they, and the Athenians say that it was divine power, that destroyed the Attic army when this one man was saved alive; albeit even this one (say the Athenians) was not saved alive but perished as here related. It would seem that he made his way to Athens and told of the mishap; and when this was known (it is said) to the wives of the men who had gone to attack Aegina, they were very wroth that he alone should be safe out of all, and they gathered round him and stabbed him with the brooch-pins of their garments, each asking him "where her man was."
88Rawlinson p294Thus was this man done to death; and this deed of their women seemed to the Athenians to be yet more dreadful than their misfortune. They could find, it is said, no other way to punish the women; but they changed their dress to the Ionian fashion; for till then the Athenian women had worn Dorian dress, very like to the Corinthian; it was changed, therefore, to the linen tunic, that so they might have no brooch-pins to use. But if the truth be told, this dress is not in its origin p99 Ionian, but Carian; for in Hellas itself all the women's dress in ancient times was the same as that which we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and Aeginetans, this was the reason of their even making a law for each of their nations that their brooch pins should be made half as long again as the measure then customary, and that brooch-pins in especial should be dedicated by their women in the temple of those goddesses; and that neither aught else Attic should be brought to the temple, nor earthenware, but that it be the law to drink there from vessels of the country.
89H & WSo then the women of Argolis and Aegina ever since that day wore brooch-pins longer than before, by reason of the feud with the Athenians, and so they did even to my time; and the enmity of the Athenians against the Aeginetans began as I have told. And now at the Thebans' call the Aeginetans came readily to the aid of the Boeotians, remembering the business of the images. The Aeginetans laying waste the seaboard of Attica, the Athenians were setting out to march against them; but there came to them an oracle from Delphi bidding them to hold their hands for thirty years after the wrong-doing of the Aeginetans, and in the thirty-first to mark out a precinct for Aeacus and begin the war with Aegina; thus should their purpose prosper; but if they sent an army against their enemies forthwith, they should indeed subdue them at the last, but in the meanwhile many should be their sufferings and many too their doings. When the Athenians heard this reported to them, they marked out for Aeacus that precinct which is p101 now set in their market-place; but they could not stomach the message that they must hold their hand for thirty years, after the foul blow dealt them by the Aeginetans.
I swear Herodotus privately identified as Carian. Anyway, we hear about Athens' long and strange conflict with Aegina, about the obsession with symbolic acts of war like the seizure of images leading to real human tragedies; another intimation that the Athenian identification with Ionia was deliberate self-fashioning; and some mythical references.
![[link to original Greek text]](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/Images/Utility/Flags/medium/Greece.gif){kind=small}
