The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Towards an Economic History of the Trojan Women

 

"That the topless towers be burnt/And men recall that face,/Move gently if move you must/In this lonely place./She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,/That nobody looks; her feet/Practice a tinker shuffle,/Picked up on a street./(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/Her mind moves upon silence."

In spite of a good faith (says I, and would I lie?) effort, I woke up this morning, the last day of my vacation, without the spring numbers of The Economist, Flight, or Aviation Week. (Or Fortune, for what it's worth.) The library informs me that the situation is now remedied for Aviation Week, but it's a bit late to start working on April postblogging at this point! Oh, well. For a change I still have a full week of the month left. 

Fortunately, I am still digesting Robert Morrissey, and that Dark Knight guy has a movie out about Helen of Troy and her supporting cast. You might have heard about it. You might have seen Eric Cline dining out over it. You might have heard that the Late Bronze Age Collapse is in the news.

As usual, the Iron Age Revival of the State isn't in the news. Helen wasn't dancing the next morning. It might not be poetry to match widening gyres, but they still say that women's work is never done.

Gathering the Bones, XXV: Iron, Butchery, And An Ecotone

 

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.")

Gathering the Bones XXIII: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Manifest Destiny, and The Reality of 19% Grades

 

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.

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXV: Company's Calling

 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.)

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Believing Because It Is Absurd

 

I did the Axial Age five years ago from the perspective of the relationship between religion and technological change. Let's come at the issue of learning, literature, scripts, and the problem of finding the "there," there. 

Wikipedia's article on the individual it designates as Siddharta Guatama is entitled "The Buddha."  in Buddhist theology, Prince Siddharta is one of a number of soteriological figures designated as "Bodhisattvas." I hesitate to refer to him as the first among equals, but that's the sense of the concept that I am going with, and one of the most important things that distinguish him from other Buddhist saviour figures is that he is considered to be a historical figure, "a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE." One of the odder things about this conversation is that their is a tradition that places his life a century before Ashoka, who is fairly firmly dated to c. 250. Given that archaeologists have suggested that the picture of the state of civilisation in this region in the biographical stories of the Buddha more nearly fits 350BC than 550BC, you would think that the conversation would take this tradition more seriously. The introduction goes on to point out that the Buddha is first attested in c. 250, but this turns out to depend on the Ashokan attribution of the Lumbini Pillar, which refers to the Emperor in the third person and past tense, undermining the dating claim. It was also a discovery of  notorious fraud Anton Fuhrer. As a practical matter, the Buddha's existence is first affirmatively asserted in Greco-Roman literature by Clement of Alexandria. One would think that he would be a fascinating figure in early Christian Alexandria, well worth discussion.  

If, however, the Buddha lived in "the 6th or 5th century BCE," he was contemporary with . . . well, here's another level of difficulty. Per no less an authority than Plato, this was the age of Zoroaster, but Wikipedia, intending to present the consensus of scholarship, or as close to such as can be achieved, puts Zoroaster at 1500BC. The argument is that the Avestas (not attested before c.1200AD) have linguistic parallels with Vedic literature, and on the argument that the Indo-European languages arrived in India about 1500BC, this must be Zoroaster's flourit, not withstanding the authority of Plato and various etymological problems, of which the historian of technology must insist on the claim that "Zarathustra" means "Manager of Camels," and that camels were domesticated once and for all during the Iron Age. To this (non-)contemporary we add Laozi, almost certainly a fictional character and unlikely at best to have been a pre-Confucian figure if real, but certainly claimed as such in the Daoist tradition, and the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and let's not even get started on them! 

It seems as though arguing about the historicity and dates of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Laozi in the same breath is a bad thing to do. It is weird that the traditional historical dates of the spread of Indo-European should be on the same level, but they are, and at the end of the day we launch into yet another realm of mystery by noting that these contested claims of contemporaneity (and more besides, as the Wikipedia account shoehorns in Jainism and "Second Temple Judaism") are in service of Karl Jasper's axial age, which cannot be better summarised than as this . . . 

But in the Iron Age. 

The Frauds of James Mellaart: A Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955, I

 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." 

Rural Crime Watch Area; Or, A Vacation Post for 2025

 

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. 

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, XXXI: The End of Migration?

Oh no, demonetisation!

 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.)

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXX: In The House of the Sea Lion

 The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):

(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientist on John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)

Time to say goodbye to migration in history?

This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In  my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade. 

The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Wood For Greeks

 In the relatively small genre of modern scholarly syntheses of Classical literature and current (as of writing) archaeology on some specific subject, timber is actually pretty well treated, though it turns out there's a bit of a controversy behind this.

This is a "Garden pavilion celebrating the origins of Classical architecture, designed by Gervase Jackson-Stops with Ian Kerby" www.follies.uk, July 2008." I'd like to give credit where credit is due, but the link has been redirected to some nice service offering body paint. The source from which I scraped the photo is Philip Steadman's Cabinet of Curiosities (as of date of access, https://www.philipsteadman.com/blog/greek-temples-made-of-wood/). Steadman explains that Jackson-Stops actually started work on two architectural follies in the gardens of the former Horton House, Northamptonshire, upon his 1973 purchase of the property, but does not date or otherwise attribute this very striking photograph of what a timber/wattle-and-daub precursor to a Classical Greek temple might have looked like. The columns, considering that they are made of untrimmed tree trunks, are especially striking. (And seem abundantly supported by the evidence.) Wiki gives Jackson-Stops' dates as 1947--1995, but the look of the photo, to my eye, is closer to the 1970s than the 1990s. 

Steadman blogs on architectural history and this entry covers the Classical evidence that the first generation of Greek sanctuaries were made of timber (Classical authors say so!) and more specifically that the forms, and in particular many decorative elements are skueomorphs of elements of the timber construction. This was the point at which architectural historians of the "late 19th Century" found an opportunity to stand up for the honour of Classical Antiquity and deny the legacy of an age of primitive construction methods preceding the Classical Age of Marble. Exactly how far one might want to push this is a question for someone who wants to push. I mention because it might explain why the modern conversation occasionally sounds a bit tentative. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVIII: Quotidian Huelva

 Let's round up this quotidian technology-reconstructed-from-debitage (and other garbage) thing. 

I have it on the good authority of Carolina Lopez-Ruiz that in the early Antique period, Gadir (Cadiz) issued coins with tuna emblems. But then I said to myself, "That's what Google Image Search is for!"

Who's the cutest fishy fellow? Who? She also mentions its reputation as a prodigious exporter of ancient Roman fish sauce, but I don't know if I want to make anything of that because everyone talks about garum and it seems like maybe it was some kind of byproduct industry? It's not like oily fish  are hard to preserve, at least within a reasonable timeframe, and we have plenty of evidence of the Phoenicians moving fish, in the form of storage amphorae recovered from shipwrecks. I feel like I might be accused of monomania, but let's talk about "Tartessia" and marine resources, and not purple dye.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Ahousat/Huelva

 Let's see how far we can push this. 

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.

The Early Iron Age Rise of the State, XXVI: Yet Another Questionable Historical Comparison

 

Whatever else can be said about making an analogy between the coming of iron to the Mediterranean basin sometime between when we want to say that the Late Bronze Age collapsed (1171BC?) and when the classical age began (490BC?) and to the Northwest coast, we can at least be very sure of things like when iron came to northern Vancouver Island, what locations were inhabited and the languages spoken there, and the tribal ethnicity claimed by the grandchildren of the people who first encountered iron (to be maximally careful).

 The modern band councils are the Kwakuitl Nation of Fort Rupert, a suburb of Vancouver, which chooses to use an older rendering of the ethnic name Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, understandably enough in my opinion but I'm just an old fart, and the Namgis Nation of Alert Bay, also speakers of Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw and perhaps a bit indifferent to the larger tribal identification. Of perhaps more importance is the traditional territories of the two nations, which are, respectively, spread along Quatsino Sound on the west coast, and the extended estuary of the Nimpkish River on the east coast of the Island. Both nations may be described as "migratory" in that they moved through their respective territories harvesting seasonal abundances in various littoral environments, and both had "capitals," at Quatsino in the narrows of that Inlet, which is a flat and fertile landscape suitable for camus beds, a rarity in the region; and on Alert Bay, where unlike on the more fluvial terrains of this very wet part of the world, you didn't have to worry about waking up to find your bed floating out to sea. Both peoples commanded passages across the island, respectively the narrows between Coal Harbour and Port Hardy, and the long portage up the Zeballos River and down the Nimpkish, ultimately from the bight of Nootka Sound, commanded from Nuchulnath-speaking Ahousat. 

In contrast it is necessary to speak with great caution about the earliest phases of the Iron Age in the Mediterranean, in part because so much of it is so implausible. That is, we  have been waiting for evidence that the earliest region affected by Phoenician connections was the southwest of Spain at the other end of the Mediterranean from the territory of these Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian cities; and that the influence of Greek culture was first wielded (in the Iron Age) by one or both of the classical cities of the island of Euboea off the coast of Boeotia, cities which, afterwards, receded into obscurity as second-, or third-rate powers by Greek standards. 

Nevertheless, with centuries of archaeology under our belts by this point, we are unable to reject the priority of Huelva   or ignore the wide dispersal of Archaic Euboean pottery. Reversing my way into the question, I propose to problematise it by invoking the Northwest comparison.

Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

A Vacation Week Short That Is Also A Sacred Spring Contribution: Hurrians, Mitanni, and Owning Land

 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. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Fall and Revival

 

Iron Age sheep shears, found at Flag Fen

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. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXIII: Buttons

 

The Heraion of Argive Hera at Prosymna

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."

 88 Rawlinson 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.

 89 H & 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. 

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, XXXI: Queen of Victory

 

John Byrne, "Goblin Queen" (From a story by Chris Claremont)

Good news! My employer has been persuaded that "But I don't wanna!" is not an adequate argument against the labour code requirement that I get an extra day off to celebrate the birthday of our undying Queen-Empress.That's next week; this week I celebrated it with lots of overtime instead, so I am going to pluck another low-hanging fruit before engaging with postblogging next week. 

So the story here is that the Indo-European languages emerge into the light with The Proclamation of Anittas, a unique document on Old Hittite extant in an early as well as late-Kingdom copies, anchoring the  use of the Hittite tongue to a c. 1600BC central Anatolian context.  And I am engaged here in the fun and low-stakes enterprise of arguing that this is not only the oldest Indo-European, but the source of the language family. Today we're going to go a bit further and single out an individual:  Puduhepa, the Queen of the Night.