The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Tophets, Himera, Weird Digressions

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 Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Safety Pins

 

A copy of Aphrodite the
Warlike, perhaps the
cult statue in the temple
of Aphrodite Areia on the
Acrocorinth. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Lazy Sunday Outline with Premonitions of Mortality

 Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order. 

So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State  and a brief outline.

Postblogging Technology, January 1952, II: Niobium and Zirconium and the Flying Enterprise

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

For those in peril on the seas and skies. Captain Carlsen is back in America receiving a ticker tape parade for staying aboard the Flying Enterprise, but the people who died in the Sandspit and (first two) Elizabeth crashes are still dead, and I am sending this before the details of today's third crash at Newark Airport in three months have a chance to sink in.  

But is there something more to it? As you'll hear below, Newsweek has heard a rumour that the cargo included 50 tons of columbite ore, and columbite is a "niobate" of niobium, iron and manganese, I learn by visiting the science wing and looking it up in a geological dictionary. Niobium is, as Newsweek says, used in the "super alloys" that they use in axial jet turbine compressor blades, and in very small amounts of about 0.1%, which means that even 50 tons of ore is a lot of blades. So it would be quite a blow to aircraft production, but why would it be such a secret, and why was an ore mined in Brazil sailing from Europe? Captain Carlsen's heroics were meant to prevent the rescue tugs from making a salvage claim, and that is certainly important to the owners, but why are people treating him like a national hero? My imagination leaps to secrets so secret they even have to be kept from the British! And, because I am not an atomic physicist, to the fact that columbite contains uranium and thorium and is "radioactive to some degree." That might make it an atomic secret, which we are keeping from the British. And, of course, from day to day we are expecting the super-bomb! Put them together and I glimpse the outlines of some unguessable secret, inadvertently revealed by the half-wits of Newsweek. Sure, it is all made up in my head, but people are trying to keep secrets, they say so themselves! And just to get back to the top, three air crashes in three months at one airport, with one airplane after another just missing schools and orphanages, doesn't exactly fill me with charity for the powers that be. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Revelations of St. John of the Cross

My employer is serving fresh, hot turnover again, so if you tuned in this week to hear about the prehistory of the cubicle, I'm sorry. That would take too much organising time. Instead, we're going to go up on Mount Carmel and receive a revelation from St. John. Not the author of Revelations, notwithstanding my link, the other one. St/ John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila's disciple in the  Camelites Without Hats movement. Okay, okay, "Discalced Carmelites," which turns out to be a reference to footwear, hence "barefoot at the head," for those into New Wave science fiction. 

The story, as I have it, is that the Carmelites were one of a number of mendicant orders founded in obscurity in the 1100s, or, more likely, early 1200s. Claiming to be descended from eremitical monks living in isolation on Mount Carmel and preserving pre-Christian traditions going back to the Prophet Elijah, they plugged into a line of thinking in Christian natural philosophy that traced Plato back through the Seven Sages, some of whom studied in "the East," taken for these purposes to be Mount Carmel, and linking Greek philosophy -okay, okay, Neo-Platonism-- to the wisdom passed down from God to Adam and so on through the Hebrew tradition.

Hardly content within themselves as between raging debates over how much masochism to allow in the order, the Carmelites were thus possessed of one the weaker and more outrageous origin stories of a major Catholic institution in the age of intense controversy that followed on Luther. Cesare Baroni, one of the great names in ecclesiastical history, ruthlessly cut the cord, freeing Catholic apologists of the liability of defending the Carmelite account, at the expense of leaving the order without a history, and natural philosophy short one Christianity-friendly epistemology in the bargain.  He also, unintentionally, engaged the ongoing dispute within the community. The upshot is that a Calched Carmelite named Paolo Foscarini took indirect aim at Baroni via his colleague, Roberto Bellarmino, in an arcane, ostensibly natural philosophical debate over the nature of the solar system, but, in fact, about possession of a Carmelite church in Rome, and a clause in the Tridentine reforms pertaining to the amount of plate a church was allowed to have. The dispute then drew in a Tuscan courtier, himself no stranger to artfully fanned pseudo-controversies bridging politics, Holy Writ, and natural philosophy, named Galileo Galilei, which is where yours truly, wearing his old historian of science, came on the scene, arriving via Biagioli's Galileo, Courtier, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, the 525m high, 39km-long, 7km wide "mountain range"  along the north coast of Israel, cradling the city of Haifa and also the archaic site of Tel Dor.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1950: Achtung Panzerski!

 

(I found Gene Autry off-putting before I heard the lyrics.)

Happy My Vacation Week, everybody! Two things this week: First, this whole "Korean War" thing, and specifically the part it played in the Great American Tank Panic of the 1950s, of which I think precisely no-one who is not a tank enthusiast of the first water recalls. Second, Our Alex sends us to Dmitry Yudo's Overlord blog, where Our Host tells us about something exciting he found in the British archives, specifically, "plastic armour." The two things may or may not go together. 

Before I get into anything else, I should mention the Overlord's conclusion, which was that "plastic armour" might disappear from British archives at the end of the war because of a Top Secret rating stamped over it leading into the Burlington/Chobham armours of the 1960s that are such a fascinating and unwritten story of postwar materials science development, with its applications well beyond militariana, to include, for example, semiconductors. The problem with this fascinating thesis that mention of plastic armour stops in 1945, while the first applique composite armours following the Burlington/Chobham scheme do not appear until the 1950s. One would expect some kind of accommodation to applique schemes on, for example, the later marks of Centurion, but the cast armour turret really doesn't seem designed to take an applique plate. 

Ahem. Let's put that dangling, tantalising thought from our minds for a moment and follow the other lead, the Korean police action. 

If you're wondering about the relevance of my vacation to this, I went to see my Mom, and, in my hurry to pack up and leave on Sunday morning, continued to fail to find a book that I had stocked my library with many years ago and ignored ever since: Bruce Cummings' Korea's Place in the Sun. *As a result, I couldn't read it over the week, although I got well into Kim Stanley Robinson's 2150 AD, and there was also a distracting election in a neighbouring third world nation. 

Upon return, in the bright morning sun, Cummings of course practically jumped into my hands, which is just as well considering that the Robinson book has disappeared into the jumble. (Or I lost it on the bus. I hope I lost it on the bus.) I've been feasting on it all morning instead of running various important errands, and it makes a very useful corrective to Halberstam's Coldest Winter, a history of the Korean War that could easily be retitled Kim Il Sung: My Part In His Downfall, by Averill Harriman. 

The upshot of contemplating the history of the Korean War from the perspective of a historian of Korea rather than that of a historian of Washington office politics is that the way that the Korean War emerged from an ongoing Korean civil war turns out to be in a way that's a lot less easy to understand.

The received account, according to Halberstam, filtered through a lot of contemporary Time magazine reporting, is that the Inmun gun (that's how we professionals say "Korean People's Army") invaded the South in a concerted blitz that massively outnumbered the southern army. 

In fact, it would appear after having to tolerate provocations from the Rhee regime through 1949, the return of the large Korean contingent fighting with the PLA had given Kim Il Sung the capacity to respond to the next provocation with a counterattack. The regime wished to capture the Ongjin peninsula and the holy city of Kaesong, which apart from generalised nationalist aspirations, threatened Pyongyang with a "pincer attack," at least in the professionally paranoid minds of the northern military leadership. Generalised counterattacks along the front were envisioned, since Kim was in no position to deny any of his generals their share of glory, and, in any case, what was the worst that could happen? In particular, the 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions and 105th Armoured Brigade of the Inmum gun was set to pitch in to the South Korean 1st and 7th Divisions, guarding the direct approach to the capital. 

At this point, Cummings, although no friend of the regime, becomes downright elliptical, completely evading, for example, the notorious prison massacres carried out by the Rhee regime while speaking of the "some" who believe that there "was an element of fifth column" activity in the defending South Korean force. It is more commonly asserted, as Time proposes, that the defenders were outnumbered and lacked any antitank assets. About antitank assets it is  hard to speak clearly, considering the random assortment of equipment that the occupying Americans had left in Korea --the southerners wer certainly not short of artillery, for example; but it seems clear that the Inmun gun was outnumbered. On the other hand, it had air supremacy, something of which modern military historians attached to land forces never seem to be quick to comment upon.

The way in which mid-century land forces without air superiority consistently collapse for mysterious reasons of morale and leadership really is quite striking. But, of course, we're not here to hear about boring old Yak fighters and Ilyushin light bombers that only exist because mad air marshals want to strategically bomb nations into oblivion. (Not that that isn't a thing by Korea, but anyway.) We're here to hear about Panzer panic! American generals reduced to leading tank-hunting parties because their soft and undertrained troops have lost faith in their bazookas!

And, as the hitherto uncommented-upon marginal pictures suggest, the absolute wig-out conducted by the American armoured forces during the 1950s. I'm not going to delve too deeply into the industrial side of this story. The short design histories of the American tanks of the era discuss the manufacturers, factories, Congressional hearings and scandals that flowed from the tank panic. In instantiated terms, we have the M26 Pershing; the M41 Walker light tank; three tank designs named for General Patton, the M46, M47, M48 (Pattons); the M103 heavy tank, which never got named after anyone; and the T69,

which seems to be the only one of three different T-series prototypes to get its picture in the news. That is a lot of new tank designs for a half-decade or so! From these we get a pretty clear view of what armoured forces designers considered important in the mid-Fifties, and alas for Overlord's blog, it is not unconventional armoured schemes. 

Well, that's not entirely true, at least of the Americans. A composite fused silica armour applique was proposed for the M48. It was mainly favoured for protection against HEAT and HEP, that is, against thermal gas jet penetration modalities rather than kinetic, but at least the turret was to be manufactured of the new material, so there was considerable faith in its ability to withstand 85mm penetration. (The main Red Army kinetic-kill antitank weapons being still thought to be the 76 and 85mm guns, with the monstrous 122mm of the JS-series intended to defeat thick German wartime armours by throwing a giant blob of shell at them.) This was shelved because the contractors, "OTAC and Carnegie Institute of Technology" were hopelessly behind, and not by revelations about the existence of the T54/55's 100mm and succeeding 114mm guns. However, the fused silica armour remained in development until 1958, and might well have been dropped due to word out of Beddington/Chobham. I don't know! 

Unfortunately for Overlord, this work started in 1952, still leaving a seven year gap in which there is no particular reason for Plastic Armour to be secret. You can see the traces of a conceptual line, but I suspect that, if it were secret, it doesn't run through tank stuff, but rather the main line of Big Secrets that the military industrial complex was worrying itself over at the time. 

Boom! Like this, only with more radiation. 

So the problem that's facing the Plastic Armour guys in the mid-war years is that Plastic Armour gets more effective the faster the projectile that is fired at it; but, also, it seems unreasonably effective against the jets of high energy plasma produced by directed-explosion weapons like your bazooka: The High Explosive Anti Tank round. This raises fascinating questions of material science. The traditional explanation for how armour works is that materials can be hard but brittle; or soft but tough. Hard armour is resistant to penetration and may shatter projectiles. It is particularly good at stopping fast shells. Tough but soft materials give way before shells, but in elastic deformation --they snap back. They are good against heavy but slower-moving penetrators. Nathan Okun's much-frequented arms and armour pages give a good overview of how this traditional approach to material science.  This approach breaks down as we get microscopic. The real explanation of materials resistance to impact turns out to be all quantum mechanical (n and p crystal holes dislocating, electrons moving about). Insofar as we have a model for understanding penetration --or, for that the piston rod hitting the crankshaft-- it is all about thermal energy and conductance. 

The reason you don't go ahead and put plastic armour on tanks is probably that it degrades quickly when it is hit. It stops the first round, but is used up in doing it, probably because the shell ends up melting the the hard bits out of the tarry matric. (To explain for those who don't care to follow the link, plastic armour is chunks of road gravel embedded in a solid coal tar matrix. The gravel defeats the penetrant instead of sproinging out of the way because it is held in place by the gluey mass of the tar. the energy of penetration heats the gravel up to a zillion degrees, and the armour melts.) 

If you're going to use this scheme, you need to understand how it works, and, in particular, understand the instantaneous physics of energy conductance through these materials. Given that we're dealing with semi-conducting crystallines, I think you can see why I think that there was eventually a crossover to computing science. In the short term, however, understanding the instantaneous consequences of an explosive jet impinging on material has the more militarily important implication of allowing the design of better atom bombs. The Mark 5 atom bomb was the weapon that really made WWIII practicable, and the improvement over WWII's cumbersome makes  was entirely in terms of a more efficient arrangement of the explosives that compressed the core. The levitated pit design, first tested in 1948 and independently discovered by the British and Soviets, is often described in homely terms as giving the explosion a rolling start at compressing the core, or some such; but we need to beware of homely analogies because they often mislead us in the realm of the quantum mechanical. I'm not going to try to explain what I think is going on, because I'm frankly working mostly from intuition here, but I am going to suggest that it is science derived from HEAT penetrations of armour. 

And that, I think, is where all the thinking about armour and armour penetration has disappeared to between 1945 and 1950, only to come crashing back into the mainstream as a "peasant army" defeats the mighty Americans. 

Which, by the way, now that we understand that the Inmun gun was totally unprepared for Seoul to actually fall, and had to take a good long two weeks to reorganise and mobilise for the drive south, could easily not have happened in the first place. As it is, SCAP --and Washington-- had just enough time to organise a response that could be humiliatingly brushed aside in the drive south before securing Pusan and making a fight of it. It's also something of a comedown for us MacArthur haters --pretty much the whole world at this point, I think-- that the American Shogun actually had a pretty good handle on the situation. Perhaps accidentally, but something about generals having to be lucky before they can be smart something. 

 And speaking of American narcissists, I guess Floating Tom Hutter really has taken his last dive. Now I should probably be realistic and go buy another copy of 2150AD. 

____

*My copy of Cumming's is a Book Warehouse remaindered copy of the 2005 edition that I probably picked up before 2010, the Book Warehouse having been pretty much gone for at least that long. We're all getting old, and apparently cribbing a book out of Averill Harriman's memoirs gets you a lot more sales than carefully researching the history of Korea for an entire career.  

Postblogging Technology, January 1950, II: Isolate and Sterilise

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

As I'm stationed at the edge of the world, no gossip this time round! Except, well, you may not have heard that Sarah has come down with diphtheria just at the end of the incubation period, extending Ronnie's quarantine.  It's still a bit uncertain what's going to happen to her magazines. The books will be saved, but the magazines are cheap enough to burn? Doesn't seem like the way to stop a plague ot me, but what do I know?

The mood here in Formosa is febrile, with all eyes on Hainan Island. The crossing to Hainan is much less of a challenge to the Communists than the Strait of Formosa, but, in the end, the outcome of the fight would seem to come down more to defections on the Koumintang side than the strength of the Communists, which has everyone eyeing everyone else suspiciously. I find that my Mandarin has more of a Hakka lilt than I ever expected, which gives me a bit of an in with the old revolutionary crowd. I try to be discrete, given that a follower of Dr. Sun might turn out to be a followed of the Soongs. But the point is, I'm hearing more rumours and gossip than  you'd believe. Basically, everyone is talking to the Reds --according to everyone else.

I'm almost tempted to list everyone I've heard denounced. That way, when the Communists come, I'll be able to say, "I told you so," no matter whose sector they land in.   

Your Loving Son,
Reggie

The Bishop's Sea: The Hawk of the Atlantic

A bit of an exercise in dilettantism here, but worth it because this stuff does seem to be neglected in the historiography of the "Reconnaissance."

Some 4000 meters above sea level in the High Atlas are the springs of the Oued Sous, which falls into the Atlantic near Agadir after only a 112 mile run. The Sous is well known as the home of the Argan tree, something of a sensation in the cutthroat world of hair products for the last few years. 

Timmel mosque at the ribat of Timmel in the Nfis valley.

It was in this fertile and well-irrigated region, in the otherwise unidentified village of Igiliz, a bit more than 500km south of Casablanca, that, perhaps in 1080, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Tumart was born, in the nation of the Hargha, part of the Masmuda Confederation. His given name is something of a mystery, for he is known to history as the "Son of Delight," perhaps from his father's nickname, although  numerous Sufi saints of Morocco bear the same name.

Perhaps unlike them, Ibn Tumart climbed towards the wisdom of God, like a goat  after an argan nut, travelling first to Cordoba in al-Andalus, and later to Baghdad, in search of Islamic learning. Which he found, it is said, at the feet of al-Ghazali. (The hagiographers really aren't that helpful.)

This map, which I scraped from an online thesis on colonial
Morocco, does a good job of capturing the scale.

Be that as it may, Ibn Tumart returned to the Maghreb by ship from Alexandria in 117/18. At Igiliz, at the end of Ramadan in 1121, he preached a fiery sermon in which he pursued weighty theological issues as well as the gravely immoral Almorad practice of veiling men and unveiling women, something with reverberations for our modern, masking times. Properly wound up, he proclaimed himself the right-guided one, the Mahdi, which implied levying revolt against the Almoravid regime. Promptly decamping to the high fortress of Timmel, in the midst of the Masmuda country. His cause united six nations of the Masmuda, closing the passes from Marrakesh into the Sous anticline. 

The anticline between the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas contains not only the watersheds of the Sous, but of the Draa valley, which rises only a little to the east of the Sous, but runs at first east and then south to reach the Atlantic below Tagounite, falling into the Atlantic north of Tan-Tan, marking the former border between Morocco and the Spanish Sahara in its lower course.  At its westward bend, far inland, lies the tell identified as old Sijilmasa, and, near it, the spectacular hillfort of Jebel Mudawwar now a regular movie location.

At this time, Sijilmasa was the major northwestern terminus of the caravan trail from Ghana, and also a way station on the east-west route to southern Morocco from Tunis via Tlemcen. Although drawing itself apart from Almoravid power, it was a crucial waypoint on the trans-Saharan route to the Empire of Ghana and its gold, and the blockade was an existential threat to the Almoravids, although before the economic effects could be felt, ibn Tumart had led his tribesmen down to besiege Marrakesh and been ignominiously killed. It therefore fell to

By Walrasiad - Own work, based on Morocco relief location map
.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34733373

an Algerian named Abd al Mu-min to become the actual first Almohad caliph after extinguishing the Almoravid regime under its last leader, Reverter, Count of Barcelona, father of  Berenguer of Barcelona and of Abu-l-Hasan Ali ibn Ruburtayr. Abd al Mu-min would ultimately rule from the Guadalquivir to Cyrenaica, but he died while building a city at Agadir and an arsenal at Rabat, and so did not live to see his seapower roll back Christian conquests in the Atlantic. 

Which is my point. The timing and context of the founding of Agadir, a Moroccan porty city that lies far to the south of anywhere I would had imagined.

If you were wondering. Well, that, and I had the Almohads confused with the Almoravids.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1949,II: Fun with Uranium

As we've been hearing, during a 1 November 1949 television interview about, ironically enough, the need for more atomic secrecy, Senator Edwin Johnson's 1 told the world that America was developing a "super bomb," a thousand times more powerful than an atom bomb. It's evidently not as big a deal as that time the junior Senator from Colorado called Ingrid Bergman a floozy on the floor of the Senate, but apparently he's the guy who set the world on the path to the hydrogen bomb. Although considering that he is also known for a statement that is very hard to interpret as anything other than a threat of pre-emptive atomic war, it's not a hundred percent clear to me that the Russians would have eschewed the pursuit of  megaton-range weapons even in the absence of IVY MIKE. 

There's also Robert Barker's Aspatron to consider. (I notice that I have him as "Parker" in my precis. I'd have to (shudder) reread the Engineering article to be sure whether the error is mine or the editor's although past experience suggests that it was me. The point is that the Popular Science blurb is much more lively and lucid than the  turgid Engineering piece, so I'm going with that one.)

The story of the Aspatron occasions the question: What, exactly, were people making of Johnson's comments between November and the official announcement of the H-bomb programme on 31 January?

Postblogging Technology, October 1949, I: Land of the Pale Earth

R_. C_.,

Sangaylay Palace,

Leh,

India

Dear Father:

I hope that this reaches you before you leave for the high country, since otherwise . . . 

Well, I suppose that it would just be waiting for you when you return, and that wouldn't be that bad! I need to work on my earnest sentiments here!

Speaking of, Mrs. C.'s little ones miss her terribly, but only say that if you think it will cheer her up, as it beaks her heart to be away from them. I hope that you will be able to finish your business with the Incarnate Deity, or whatever (the nuns were strangely reticent about the details of Buddhist theology!). Ask him what it's like to be reincarnated after you've negotiated our share. And why it is that it's never a woman that's reincarnated? I'd seriously like to know. 

Reggie is looking at tables of airfields in Formosa, because he is not dumb. I'm working away at my schooling, because I'm dumber than I thought! It's not going to beat me, though. Contracts. Grr. Good thing all the fog will be gone in twenty years. (See below!)

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, 20: Green Mountain Boys

Modern Cyrene is a complex of archaeological tourist traps on the outskirts of Shahat, Libya, although you can't see that clearly here due to my increasing the scale to get Marsa Sousa in the picture.

Given Libya's current difficulties, it isn't clear to me just how many tourists the tourist traps trap, but Shahat does have an international airport. Oil, wishful thinking, archaeotourists --I have no idea. Marsa Sousa is at the other end of what's probably a fairly spectacular road, given that it climbs from sea level to 300m in fifteen kilometers. For a modern traveller, the old town is nestled in the final switchback on the way to Shahat.

The fact that the back country road goes through Shahat rather than Cyrene makes me uncomfortable in calling old Cyrene a crossroads town, but it does seem to have been quite something. The area around the ancient ruins is graced by numerous sanctuaries and a necropolis of overwhelming scope (40,000 tombs before various modern depredations). The necropolis is a bit of a focus due to its victory over various feeble systematisation efforts of a series of archaeological investigators. There's a sense that we could learn  a lot about it if we could just grapple with its sheer scale. All credit due to the sketch work of some of these guys, though! And to the modern Polish mission to Ptolemais, which has produced a major monograph summarising a century-and-a-half of half-ass efforts to cope with an overwhelming site, written by Monika Rekowska and translated by Anna Kijak. (There's a Libyan Studies?)

Modern Marj, and the old town that  may or may not be Classical
Barca. (By Smiley.toerist -
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27630656

The issue here is that Cyrene is the dominant city of the ancient Cyrenaican federal league, a distinction the site hasn't enjoyed since, inasmuch as the port city of Benghazi is so obviously the better candidate. As an upland town characteristic of periods of "managed collapse" of Mediterranean world systems, I asked last time just when and how Cyrene came to be, and what its history tells us about the Iron Age transition. This post is the result of that investigation.

Before I go to the cut, I'll note that in one sense, Cyrene is not unique. There's a very similar city, and it is in Cyrenaica, too. Barca and Ptolemaishave formed a similar pairing to Apollonia (Marsa Sousa) and Cyrene. One might be unique, but two is a pattern!

Camels, Salt, and the Rise of Islam: Some Small Reflections on a Minor Controversy on Someone Else's Blog

Westwold, British Columbia, lies in the trees at the far left. The view is from the shoulder of Highway 97C. Arable bottomland stretches to the right of the picture and beyond Westwold proper. It's quite a big piece of land, is what I'm saying.

British Columbia Highway 97 has a familiar and storied number for those who've taken long vacations on the Pacific slope, continuing the California-Washington-Oregon route number for the simple reason that it is the Canadian extension of that road. In its earliest recorded form, it follows the Okanogan River, becoming the Okanagan Trail at Osoyoos once it crosses the border and the regional spelling changes. Once into Canada, many old-time travellers on the Okanagan Trail wanted to get to the Cariboo gold fields, which requires crossing from the Okanagan- Columbia basin to the Fraser-Thompson basin at Kamloops, which happens to be where my sister and her family are now living. 

About halfway from Vernon to Kamloops,  Highway 97C runs through the unincorporated community of Westwold, which lies in a peculiar, glacial valley suspended about 200m above both river basins. Westwold is only one of three major areas of flat, arable land along the route. Since that kind of farm country is rare in British Columbia, it might seem surprisingly little-used, but it is probably too high and too cold for fruit, and back when steep climbs and bad winter weather actually mattered to travellers, it was avoided in favour of the slightly longer route running through Salmon Arm. Traditionally, Westwold was the  winter pasture of the nearby Douglas Lake Ranch. 

I could talk about this at even greater length, but really my only point would be that I was thinking about mountains and winter pasture a great deal this past week, and I travelled through Westwold three times in four days. Since the thing I wasn't doing was reading and writing towards the next postblogging installment, I thought that I would talk about something else. Specifically, a reading that bloomed over at Brad Delong's blog not incidental to my own attempts to plough through Raoul McLaughlin's Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, VIII: Return of the Dead

Bernie may be dead, but he sure can dance! It's hard to believe that this movie is 29 years old, meaning that it is separated from us by a recession, the dotcom boom, the 2008 crash, and whatever it is we've been living through since.

That, of course, was a blatant attempt to work the 2008 crash into the conversation. Niall Sharples waits until the conclusion of his book to do it.

"It is a little easier to to explain how catastrophic the end of the Bronze Age was, given the collapse of the financial markets that devastated national economies in 2008. In the Bronze Age, bronze was as important as money is today; it connected people and created a system whereby other people relied on others to provided materials that were not locally available, animals when they were needed for consumption and sexual partners necessary for the continuity of human communities. In times of crisis, the credit built up through the long-term exchange of gifts would enable people to acquire the essentials to rebuild their lives. It also provided a way of classifying and contrasting people and communities by status and identity. The complex system of exchange relationships, and indebtedness, which had been operating for over 1,000 years, was completely undermined and abandoned at the end of the Bronze Age." (Sharples, 312--13.)

I am very impressed by Niall Sharples' Social Relationships in Later Prehistory (2010), and, in my personal opinion, it would have been a barn burner if he'd gone back over it and sharpened up this point. But, of course that would be my opinion, given that my interest in the Late Bronze Age Collapse was revived by the 2008 collapse. I had a sense that this was where Sharples was going in the main text, but he waited for the conclusion to spring the analogy --if it is an analogy. There's lots of material in the main text that "hangs a lampshade" on 2008, as the kids say, or said several years ago. And then, in the conclusion, he drags out the literal lampshade. "This is what I was talking about."

Which means that it is time to forage in the communal graveyard of ideas that is academic publishing, bring to light the relics of the heroes, and expose them to celebrants of the mystery. If you don't have an epiphany, lie back and think of the polis. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, IV: Harness Racing, Equestrianship, Oxhide Ingots and Coins

Olives are the definition of the Mediterranean diet. They also need to be cured in salt or lye. This isn't very relevant to this post, but it is your weekly reminder of the importance of the primordial chemical industry to subsistence agriculture during the EIA.

So my Christmas-New Years schedule is up, and when I started this post, I had some writing time during the down weeks at the store where I am currently working, which serves the UBC community. That took some pressure off in regards to long posts, leaving me to do a progress report towards this "Sacred Spring" series, this week.

Now, of course, I do not. On the bright side, my employer has conceded that it mishandled the process of reallocating employees from two stores that have been closed for renovations. I'm sure you don't want to hear the details, and I will draw a veil over the whole embarrassing exercise by pointing at one of our competitors --a major national corporation, which paid its CEO $8.5 million in 2015-- CEOs with buyouts of $15 million and $25 million paid in the millions-- defending itself on charges by blaming middle management, and fixing the price of bread for the last decade and more by offering everyone a free $25 gift card. It's not that I don't believe that middle management at Loblaws/Weston Bread didn't realise that price coordination is wrong. That seems par for the course in an industry that can take a week and a half to realise that no stores are ordering cranberries at Christmas because of a software issue, and not because it's  a wacky thing that's happening for no reason at all that no-one can fix. It's that I no longer have five days off after New Years to write. And while the company now owes me three weeks off with pay, I have no idea when that's going to happen, or what that means for my writing "schedule."

This would be a good time to nail down the horse problem, at least.

Prevalent from 1500-1200, disappearing after 1000, and cast to be easily carried in a pack saddle. Interesting. By Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=190648

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, III: Folk of Bronze and Iron

Kaywoodie Pipes, by S. P. Franks. This link has more details, at least as long as it lasts.

Call this an evidence-marshalling post, collecting up material that will eventually be given a more coherent form in a recap post in, oh, say, 2020, along with any of my wild conjectures that do not turn out to be  hopelessly extravagant and ill-informed. (The others will be silently forgotten, of course.)

Also, call it a concession to reality: there's no way I'm getting my last techblogging post for November ready this week. Evidence-marshalling requires a light editorial hand, so this will be a brief exercise, after which I should be back at sea in no time! 

Before I go, all cryptic-like, below the fold, the evidence here will be archaeological, except insofar as I engage with an extremely bold essay on the Iguvine Tablets by John Wilkins in Malone and Stoddart, eds., Territory, Time and State. Thus this will be a discussion of sites rather than sweeping conclusions, except insofar as I succumb to the temptation to find and highlight evidence to support my notions. And, of course, since he so boldly goes out on so many limbs, of  

Oppidum Manching, (Wikipedia and pdf I just found on Academia.edu that isn't likely to be up long);

The Vix settlement and associated grave goods;

The Heuneberg;

The three associated Final Bronze Age sites of Frattesina di Rovigo, Mariconda and Montagnana in Venetia;

The Oppidum of Saint-Blaise;

The "establishment" at Mailhac in Aude (pdf);

The "proto-historic oppidum" of Roque-de-Viou;

The alpine valley of Gubbio in Umbria, Italy, which last is documented in the already-cited collection, so no convenient links. 

Also, setting himself on fire in public doesn't seem to have attracted the world's attention to Dr. Wilkins, so no handy link there.

God Speed the Plough: "About the ordering of ritual vessels, I have some knowledge; but warfare I have never studied."

Not really  a review, so much as a meditation. 

We don't really do literary histories of Anglo-Saxon England, any more. The texts are known,  their exegesis secure. It's possible to have a literary controversy over them, but what they are trying to say about the history of Anglo-Saxon England seems more-or-less settled. Mark Atherton isn't the revisionist sort --he's not even a historian-- but he definitely thinks that the texts would benefit from a more serious examination. I've flippantly played with the idea of reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles with the same attention given to the Springs and Autumns, and the title is the key quote from the Analects on the Confucian art of war. That is, accepting that Master Kong does not answer Duke Ling flippantly, a true understanding of military affairs begins with the proper ordering of ritual vessels. Get rulership (morally) right, if you want to have a large army, the Sage is bluntly explaining. 

In much of what follows, I am assuming that the "praise and blame" in the Chronicles is there, but carefully disguised, because it pertains to ecclesiastical interventions into secular politics. We wall off ritual from politics and warfare at our own risk. Says Atherton, not me!

Besides picking up Atherton's monograph on the new books carousel at the library the other night, this post is mainly inspired by the Gustafson fire north of 100 Mile House, which has left me just a little pissed with your average global warming denier, of which we have an excess in the country to our south. The night before I began writing this post, the fire prompted the evacuation of the entire town. My sister, nephew and niece had left several days earlier, but it is still an open question whether they will have a home --or even employment to return to. Even family lawyers need some kind of local economic base in which to operate. 

Anyway, global warming deniers are sometimes Americans, and Americans live in the country to the south of Canada, and on 22 August, 1138, on Cowton Moor, near Northallerton, The Most Reverend Thurstan, Archbishop of York, advancing before a caroccio carrying the Sacred Host and adorned with the sacred banners of York, Beverley and Ripon (but not of Durham), encountered David, son of Malcolm, King of Alba, Prince of Cumbria, styled Earl of Northumberland, in arms. His Grace was victorious on the day, but, on 26 September, Cardinal Alberic, Bishop of Ostia, arrived at Carlisle to negotiate a peace in which David was confirmed in Northumberland, his son, Henry, in Huntingdon and Doncaster; and the bishop of Glasgow was relieved, forever, of his suffragen dependence upon York. 

This last bit is the "proper ordering of ritual vessels" part. On any but the most superficial reading, the Archbishop's victory was punished by the King of England. Thrustan was embroiled in the York-Canterbury dispute, which, in his day, turned on the stark difference between Canterbury's twenty-odd suffragen bishops, and York's . . . much smaller number. York had, in fact, only one English subordinate, and its attempts to expand into the north Atlantic world ran into the pretensions of rival bishops [Pirate bishop! Yarr!].  Glasgow was one of Thurstan's legacy suffragens, and losing the See of St. Mungo cost him more than all the gallowglass spears in the world could extract. The question of archiepiscopal status is a question of proper ordering of ritual vessels. (To finish piling on this analogy, there's a parallel with the thesis that global warming denial is a legitimate strategy of Kulturkampf. That is, since all the proposed solutions are "liberal," it is okay for a conservative to mischievously deny the plain scientific facts.) 

Missing the Point: On The Economic Advantages of Eighteenth Century England

You will notice a "Blog Comment Follow-Up" tag this week.

And how! Anyway, this is Brad Delong quoting "the mysterious Pseudoerasmus" commenting on Robert Allen. 

I love the work of Robert Allen... steel... the Soviet Union... English agriculture. And his little book on global economic history—is there a greater marvel of illuminating concision than that?... . . . Yet I always find myself in the peculiar position of loving his work like a fan-girl and disagreeing with so much of it. In particular, I’m sceptical of his theory of the Industrial Revolution.

Allen has been advocating... [that] England’s high wages relative to its cheap energy and low capital costs biased technical innovation in favour of labour-saving equipment, and that is why it was cost-effective to industrialise in England first, before the rest of Europe (let alone Asia).... Allen’s is not a monocausal theory... but his distinctive contribution is the high-wage economy.... The theory is appealing, in part, because the technological innovations of the early Industrial Revolution were not exactly rocket science (a phrase used by Allen himself), so one wonders why they weren’t invented earlier and elsewhere. (Mokyr paraphrasing Cardwell said something like nothing invented in the early IR period would have puzzled Archimedes.) But... as Mokyr has tirelessly argued, inventions were too widespread across British society to be a matter of just the right incentives and expanding markets—and this is a point now being massively amplified by Anton Howes....

These are skillful economic historians, well-grounded in the data, and it would be the height of folly for me to say that they are wrong.

Walrus Ranching: Early Settlement of the Norse High Atlantic?

Well, finally dragged myself into the library at 3PM the other day, and that's just not going to cut it when I'm working morning shifts. I am pleased to report that I've got probably the most egregious single defence of high unemployment yet uttered by Geoffrey Crowther* of The Economist lined up for you when December, I, goes live, but that'll be next week, hopefully.

After the jump, the headline graphic is a boring table, which is boring, so I'm going to introduce this piece

 --Wait. Actually, I'm going to introduce it with an apology to Christian Keller of the University of Oslo, who has been pushing the "walrus hunters settled Iceland, Greenland and Vinland" angle since at least 2008--

Okay, I'm going to introduce this piece, as far as Google search image results goes, with some nice scenery very tenuously linked to the actual subject. Which, in case you are wondering, is the possibility of pre-871 settlement of Iceland, either a live issue in Icelandic archaeology, per the indefatigable Margret Hermanns-Audardottir, or something almost too gauche to be discussed, per everyone else, although the taboo may be breaking down. 

Look! It's the Pemberton Valley, courtesy of Pemberton Valley Lodge. It's twenty minutes past Whistler, Vancouver's favourite snow-and-snow destination (think Aspen, only more provincial), and cheaper to stay in.

The relevance here is --Okay, let's see if I can make this brief. Back in the day, people wanted to build railways across North America from the East Coast, where all the people were, to the West Coast, which is a good place to catch a boat to China. Meanwhile, on the West Coast,  people were alert to the fact that there weren't all that many good places in the mountain country that faces the North American Pacific where you can build cities and there supporting hinterlands. Yet, nevertheless, there were more prospects than railways likely to be built. So how do you make a killing on real estate? by influencing the route so that it goes through, say, Reno instead of Spokane, then buying land, not only in Reno versus Spokane, but San Francisco versus Tacoma. This is an American example, of course: for the Pemberton Valley, the issue is Vancouver on the one hand, and, ultimately, Regina versus Saskatoon --towns in Saskatchewan, if you were wondering-- on the other. (No, I'm not going to explain here: brevity.) 

So here's Google Maps.

The route traced here shows the Cariboo Road, built by Governor James Douglas of British Columbia, to service a gold rush off the map to the north. It later became the route of the first two Canadian intercontinental railways. However, I've centred the map to show an alternate route, which follows the course of the Lillooet River from the head of Harrison Lake --actually a widening of that river-- and over a mountain pass to the upper Fraser River, passing through the Pemberton Valley portion of the Lillooet on the way. This was actually Douglas' originally preferred route. built in 1862, it was quickly abandoned as impractical and replaced with the route shown, which goes up the stupendous gorge cut through the coastal mountains by the Fraser River. 

So, uhm, you gently prod me --relevance? It's simply that Douglas may have been less nuts than he seems. The early history of the Pemberton Valley is a bit obscure, but we do know that Squamish medicine women brought potatoes to the Valley, perhaps in the 1820s, and established farms there that were flourishing in 1860. Given that it was the cost of provisions in the gold fields that was driving agitation for a wagon road, it might have seemed logical to Douglas that a road connecting them with the coast should run through the largest active farming area of the period on the mainland. I'm saying "may" because, of course, this runs into the race issue. We generally don't like our First Nations actors jumping out of the box marked "noble savage" and into the one marked "early settler," a running theme on this blog that I won't pursue here because the same issues are going to come up after the jump. Douglas, embarrassed though his descendants may be to admit it, was mixed-race himself, and married a high status First Nations woman. She wasn't a Squamish --that would have been too on-the-nose-- but we shouldn't entirely exclude the possibility that someone in Douglas' circle had an interest in the Pemberton Valley. 

The question remains, on this theory, "Why Pemberton?" The answer, I think, is clear enough. Go to Google Maps yourself and zoom in, and you'll see that the valley's farmland was formed by the internal estuary of the Lillooet at the head of Lillooet Lake. This means that it was probably meadow land, and did not need to be cleared before it could be farmed. Later generations would realise that the amount of farmland in the Valley was utterly dwarfed by that in the Fraser Valley along the later route: but most of that land had to be logged, first. It's this logic, the difference between the value of forested farm land once cleared, and marginal, flooding land kept naturally unforested, which is going to play a part in the settlement-of-Iceland question.