For Iraq's priceless heritage bombing was the least of it's troubles.

Our Heritage Is Finished At the National Museum of Antiquities, where priceless artifacts had been wrapped in foam and secured in windowless storage rooms to protect them against U.S. bombs, an army of looters perpetrated what war did not: They smashed hundreds of irreplaceable treasures, including Sumerian clay pots, Assyrian marble carvings, Babylonian statues and a massive stone tablet with intricate cuneiform writing.

As employees returned today to survey the damage at one of the world's greatest repositories of artifacts, they encountered devastation that defied their worst expectations. The floor was covered with shards of broken pottery. An extensive card catalog of every item the museum owns, some of which date back 5,000 years, was destroyed. A cavernous storeroom housing thousands of unclassified pieces was ransacked so badly that an archaeologist predicted it would be impossible to repair many of the items.

"Our heritage is finished," lamented Nabhal Amin, the museum's deputy director, as she surveyed a Sumerian tablet that had been cracked in two. "Why did they do this? Why? Why?" [More]

Deputy Director Nabhal Amin and her husband walk through the Baghdad museum. "If there were five American soldiers at the door, everything would have been fine," Amin said. Museum workers mourn plunder

The plundering that has descended upon this ancient city has invaded what amounts to the storehouse of civilization's cradle.

Gone from the National Museum of Iraq is an ornate animal-covered cosmetics container from Nimrud. Gone is a finely carved tusk decorated with Assyrian and Syro-Phoenician designs. Gone is the head of an Egyptian sphinx with traces of gold leaf.

All taken by the hordes of marauding thieves who in recent days swept through the museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Gone as well, grieving museum workers said Saturday, is a delicate golden bull's head that fronts a harp dating to Sumerian rulers more than 4,000 years ago. The piece had been discovered at the Royal Cemetery at Ur, reputedly the birthplace of Abraham.

Leafing through an old catalog in the trashed storeroom, Mahsin Hassan, a museum official, toted up the losses. "They took gold pieces, small pieces, very important pieces," Hassan said. "They took from all subjects, from prehistory to Islamic history." [More]



Hey, "Stuff happens".

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"


Well, any way, at least the Ministry of Oil building is safe.

See also:
Looters steal Iraq's heritage
Plundered, relics from the dawn of civilisation

A four-thousand-year-old gourd fragment found on the Peruvian coast may push back the appearance of ancient Andean religion by a thousand years. Archaeological teams from the Proyecto Arqueológico Norte Chico were conducting surface collections of looted cemeteries in Norte Chico, a region some 120 miles north of Lima, when they found the painted and incised fragment, once part of a gourd bowl. It features a fanged creature with splayed feet whose left arm appears to end in a snake's head and whose right hand holds a staff.

This figure appears to be the earliest depiction of the Staff God, interpreted as the principle deity of the Formative Period Chavín culture (ca. 1000-200 B.C.). Over the course of the following millennium, the Staff God appears in various manifestations in many Andean cultures, and reappears during the Wari and Tiwanaku empires of A.D. 600 to 1000.


[link]

Gourd vessels were very important in ancient Peruvian society. Long before they invented ceramics (around 3600 BC) they grew and used gourds for everything from carrying water in them to eating dinner out of them. Finding fragments of these gourd receptacles (even ones from a later period such as this one) is a relatively rare thing.

Scientists have announced that they have sequenced the SARS virus. SARS is thought to be caused by a type of virus called a coronavirus which has an irregular shape but with 'crown-like' appearance. Most human coronaviruses do not grow in cultured cells and so relatively little is known about them. Fortunately, SARS has been able to be successfully cultivated in primate cells.

Labs crack killer's code Scientists have worked out the genetic sequence of the virus that is thought to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The code supports the idea that the disease leapt from animals into humans - and should help to refine a diagnostic test.

Over the weekend, two research groups separately revealed the complete genetic make-up of the suspected SARS virus, called a coronavirus. The flu-like disease has infected an estimated 3,169 people and killed 144 since November last year.

The sequence suggests that the coronavirus is "far from anything known before", says Herbert Schmitz of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany. Although it is more than 75% identical to known animal and human viruses in some regions, it diverges widely in others.

This is what the SARS virus looks like



And here's that sequence that they've been talking about. Let me hum a few bars for you.

ctacccagga aaagccaacc aacctcgatc tcttgtagat ctgttctcta aacgaacttt aaaatctgtg tagctgtcgc tcggctgcat gcctagtgca cctacgcagt ataaacaata ataaatttta ctgtcgttga caagaaacga gtaactcgtc cctcttctgc agactgctta cggtttcgtc cgtgttgcag tcgatcatca gcatacctag gtttcgtccg ggtgtgaccg aaaggtaaga tggagagcct tgttcttggt gtcaacgaga aaacacacgt ccaactcagt ttgcctgtcc ttcaggttag agacgtgcta gtgcgtggct tcggggactc tgtggaagag gccctatcgg aggcacgtga acacctcaaa aatggcactt gtggtctagt agagctggaa aaaggcgtac tgccccagct tgaacagccc tatgtgttca ttaaacgttc tgatgcctta agcaccaatc acggccacaa ggtcgttgag ctggttgcag aaatggacgg cattcagtac ggtcgtagcg gtataacact gggagtactc gtgccacatg tgggcgaaac cccaattgca taccgcaatg ttcttcttcg taagaacggt aataagggag ccggtggtca tagctatggc atcgatctaa agtcttatga cttaggtgac gagcttggca ctgatcccat tgaagattat gaacaaaact ggaacactaa gcatggcagt ggtgcactcc gtgaactcac tcgtgagctc aatggaggtg cagtcactcg ctatgtcgac aacaatttct gtggcccaga tgggtaccct cttgattgca tcaaagattt tctcgcacgc gcgggcaagt caatgtgcac tctttccgaa caacttgatt acatcgagtc gaagagaggt gtctactgct gccgtgacca tgagcatgaa attgcctggt tcactgagcg ctctgataag agctacgagc accagacacc cttcgaaatt aagagtgcca agaaatttga cactttcaaa ggggaatgcc caaagtttgt gtttcctctt aactcaaaag tcaaagtcat tcaaccacgt gttgaaaaga aaaagactga gggtttcatg gggcgtatac gctctgtgta ccctgttgca tctccacagg agtgtaacaa tatgcacttg tctaccttga tgaaatgtaa tcattgcgat gaagtttcat ggcagacgtg cgactttctg aaagccactt gtgaacattg tggcactgaa aatttagtta ttgaaggacc tactacatgt gggtacctac ctactaatgc tgtagtgaaa atgccatgtc ctgcctgtca agacccagag...

Catchy isn't it? See also:

Coronaviruses - the cause of SARS

Adding to my list of uncanny parallels between the Jehoash Insciption and the James Ossuary stories is this one:

On the Jehoash Inscription: Hershel Shanks, editor of the Washington-based Biblical Archaeology Review, said the tablet, if authentic, would be "visual, tactile evidence that reaches across 2,800 years."

On the James Ossuary: Beneath his soft-spoken, scholarly manner, a slightly awestruck tone underlies Shanks' words..."To me, the ossuary provides a visual and tactile bridge over 2,000 years".

This featured image is a 61-centimeter pan-sharpened image of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt, collected by QuickBird on February 2, 2002. The Great Pyramid is estimated to have been built circa 2650 B.C., and was erected as a tomb for the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty. Upon the completion of its construction, the Great Pyramid stood 145.75 meters (481 feet) high, and over the millennia has lost approximately 10 meters (30 feet) off the top. It stood as the tallest structure on Earth for more than 43 centuries.

To help make sense of the surrounding structures, take a look at this map of the Giza plateau area.

The satellite image is from Digital Globe which has lots of other interesting aerial photos. Thanks to Scott for making me aware of this site.

Fortunata means "lucky"



Receipt of sale:

"Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor, has bought the girl Fortunata, by nationality a Diablintian (from near Jublains in France), for 600 denarii¹. She is warranted healthy and not liable to run away ..."

[More]




Here we have a slave of a slave buying himself a slave in first century² Roman Britain.

This receipt for the purchase, discovered in London in 1996, was originally written on a wax writing tablet using a stylus. The wax has long since vanished but because the scribe had been so heavy handed, the text has been preserved scratched into the wooden backing board.

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¹ - 600 dinarii at the time was the equivalent of two years wages for a Roman soldier or in today's money, according to the Torygraph, enough to buy a rilly cool little sports car!
² - But we could tell that already just from a quick glance at the script, right, Readers? After all, we're all expert paleographers now.

The foreignness of the French Timeliness, as may been seen from this and the previous post, is not exactly Laputan Logic's strong suit. Nevertheless, I think this one is still topical.

Long after the acrimoniousness of the "debates" in the UN Security Council pre the Iraq invasion, there still seems to be quite a bit of enduring resentment in the United States against the French nation and its people. "Freedom Fries" remain defiantly on sale at the Capitol Hill cafeteria and the word "french" has entered the American punditocracy's lexicon as an epithet for the lowest kind of untrustworthiness, a bit like that English word welsh (see also my entry on Welsh and Walloon).

It wasn't always this way. Let's face it, without France's friendship during the American War of Independence (declaring war on Britain in 1778 and committing so much in the way of resources that they effectively bankrupted their economy in the process), Americans would be speaking English right now. Then, of course, there was the Statue of Liberty, a gift of international friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and in celebration of the centenary of that independence. And what Great American Novelist worth his salt would have missed the opportunity to waste his youth and brain cells in the cafes and bars of Paris in the early 20th century? American and French mutual mistrust of the British virtually guaranteed that the two great nations were to maintain a warm regard for each other, one that was to last for the good part of two centuries.

But those days are long gone now. America is now in the process of de-Frenchifying (de-frenchfrying?) itself and its language although the latter may be a little harder to pull off than some would like. Being myself of a nation which also has a long and proud history of friendship with the United States (but one with the distinction of having thoughtlessly thrown itself into every major war and/or quagmire that the US has found itself in since WWII), I thought I'd best do my bit in the cause of this new and very just linguistic war against the hateful Gauls.

The first point I'd like to make is that the French are foreigners. Using this obvious fact as a starting point, I wondered whether perhaps the English word "foreign" might even be derived from the word "french" by some route. Alas, this was far too naive, the word "foreign", unsurprisingly in retrospect, actually pertains to the concept of the "outside world". It comes to us from Late Latin via Old French and is closely related to the word "forest", i.e. "somewhere out there, out in the wilderness".

But while the word for foreigner itself didn't yield anything promising, I did discover that the word French or rather its precursor Frank turns out to be the quintessential word for foreigner in many of the world's languages. This coinage dates back to the Crusades, a time when floods of ideologically-crazed young Europeans washed up on the shores of the Levant egged on by popes, ambitious princes, mad monks and Venetian merchants. The bemused locals, when confronted by these Christian liberators, lumped them all under the name of the biggest group, "the Franks" and the name stuck good. Centuries later when the Western hoards once again swarmed out Europe, this time into the Orient, Arab and Persian traders had already introduced this useful term to Africa, India and South-East Asia (where, in the latter case, Islam was seen as a very welcome antidote to Christian missionary zeal).

So here then without any further adieu, is a survey of "the French as foreigners" in a number of the world's languages¹.

Arabic	faranj
Aramaic	frang
Cambodian	farang
Ethiopian	fa'ra'nj
Greek	frangos
Hindi	firangi
Malay	barang (foreign goods)
Malayalam	farangi
Persian	farangg
Samoan	palangi
Tamil	pirangi
Thai	farang
Turkish	ifrangi
Vietnamese	pha-rang

So take that, you primates capitulards et toujours en quete de fromages!!

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This table was collated from information from this article from the LINGUIST mailing list. While the conclusion is reached that the Samoan word palangi is not really connected to farang, this article claims a connection to the Malay word barang or "foreign goods" but then denies a link to farang from there (by the way, the title of this piece is "lingua franca"). ¹ - This word does have one teensy weensy disadvantage of being a collective term which refers to all Westerners, which includes, unfortunately, Americans

Another thing I found out from the LINGUIST article: Greek text written in Latin characters is called frangovlakhika (the spelling of this term has been rendered for your reading convenience into frangovlakhika). See the Welsh post for more information about the meaning of Vlak.

Susanowo [the mythical progenitor of the Japanese Imperial Family] then descended from Heaven and proceeded to the headwaters of the River Hi in the province of Izumo. There he heard the sound of weeping and went in search of it. He found an old man and an old woman. Between them was a young girl whom they were caressing and lamenting over. Susanowo asked them, "Who are you, and why do you lament?" The man answered, "I am an earthly deity named Ashinazuchi. My wife's name is Tenazuchi. This girl is our daughter Kushinada. We weep because once we had eight daughters, but year after year an eight-forked serpent has been devouring them and now the time approaches for this last girl to be devoured. She has no means of escape, and thus we grieve." Susanowo said, "If this is so, will you give me your daughter?" He answered, "I will comply and present her to you."

Susanowo then changed Kushinada into a multitudinous and close-toothed comb, which he stuck in the knot of his hair. Next he had Ashinazuchi and Tenazuchi brew some eight-fold refined liquor and make eight platforms, on each of which to set a tub filled with liquor. Thus he awaited the serpent's coming, and, as expected, it eventually appeared. It had eight heads and eight tails, its eyes were red like winter cherries, and on its back fir and cryptomeria trees grew. As it crawled it extended over a space of eight hills and eight valleys. When it came and found the liquor, each head drank up one tub, and it became drunk and fell asleep. Then Susanowo drew his ten-span sword and chopped the serpent into small pieces. When he came to the tail, the edge of his sword was slightly nicked, so he split open the tail and examined it. Inside was a sword. this is the sword that is called Kusanagi ["Grass Mower," one of the three imperial regalia]. Susanowo said, "This is a divine sword. How can I presume to keep it myself? So he gave it up to the heavenly deities.

Yamata-no-Orochi excerpted from Religion, Politics, & Yamato Creation Myths

After the battle, Susanowo gives the sword to his sister Amaterasu, as he feels he is unworthy of the sword. The sword is known as the Murakumo-no-tsurugi, (lit. Sword of gathering clouds of heaven). It belongs to the insignia of the Imperial House of Japan.

As otherworldly as all this sounds, the origin of the tale of Yamata-no-Orochi and the sword is believed to be utterly down-to-earth. Specifically, it is thought to stem from the itinerant groups of men skilled in the ways of making fine steel from iron-rich sand who, long, long ago worked deep in western Honshu's wooded mountains.

To make this prized metal (from which the finest blades were fashioned) required enormous quantities of water and wood, as well as a large group of experts led by one known as the murage.

Among these, some specialized in excavating ditches and sluices on the slopes down which vast amounts of water were channeled with iron-sand-rich soil to separate the mineral from the dirt by exploiting their different specific gravities.

Others chopped trees and burned wood to make charcoal, while some built the specialized clay tatara smelters – 3 meters long by 1 meter wide and high – into which 10 tons of iron sand would be poured over three days, heated with 12 tons of charcoal at more than 1,400 degrees, to yield some 3 tons of steel. Of this, about half was the prized tama-hagane from which Japan's famed swords are made, a steel distinctly different from its Western and Chinese counterparts made from iron ore.

With such prodigious quantities of fuel required, these groups of steelmakers constantly had to be on the move, as their smelters' appetites left entire mountainsides stripped of timber and streams polluted with runoff.

For villagers, these roaming steelmakers were a serious threat to their livelihood, both by denying them fuel and loading streams with mud that ruined their fishing and fouled their paddies. Hence the theory is that the monster, Yamata-no-Orochi, represented tatara steelmakers – its burning red eyes being their fiery smelters and its bleeding body the muddied streams flowing from the mountains where they worked. [...]

As early as the 13th century, during the Kamakura Period (1183-1333), when the samurai class started to rule the nation, Japanese swords were recognized as superior to any made elsewhere in the world. Indeed, according to the late historical novelist Ryotaro Shiba, during the Muromachi Period (1392-1573) Japan's most popular exports to Ming Dynasty China were these fearsome weapons. In his travelogue, "Satetsu no Michi (The Road of Iron Sand)," Shiba says this was because although metal casting was common in China at that time, steelmaking was virtually unknown.

However, with the introduction to Japan of matchlocks, bows and spears during the 16th-century Warring States Period, swords became more symbolic of the samurai rather than their prime tools of combat. To preserve this symbolic aura, the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98) ordered that no one but members of the samurai class could possess a sword. And to ensure his edict was observed, he launched "sword hunts" aimed primarily at reducing the danger from the many farmers' uprisings. As well, however, it also served to further entrench the ruling class, called bushi (samurai), by turning the swords into their spiritual emblem throughout the Edo Period (1603-1867).

Weapons of Wonder by MASARU FUJIMOTO The Japan Times (free registration required)

The Small Santiago Tablet (length: 319mm, width: 122mm)

Introduction In 1864, the French lay missionary Eugène Eyraud – the first known non-Polynesian resident of Earth's most isolated inhabited island, Easter Island or Rapanui – reported in a letter to his superior that he had seen there "in all the houses" hundreds of tablets and staffs incised with thousands of hieroglyphic figures. Two years later, only a small handful of these incised artefacts were left. Most rongorongo, as the unique objects were subsequently called, had by then been burnt, hidden away in caves, or deftly cannibalized for boat planks, fishing lines, or honorific skeins of human hair. The few Rapanui survivors of recent slave raids and contagions evidently no longer feared the objects' erstwhile tapu or sacred prohibition.

When Eugène Eyraud died of tuberculosis on Rapanui four years later in 1868, his fellow missionaries there, who had arrived only in 1866, knew nothing of the existence of incised tablets and staffs on the island. Rongorongo comprised the Easter Islanders' best-kept secret. Rapanui's rongorongo script comprises one of the world's most fascinating writing systems. This is principally because rongorongo is Oceania's only indigenous script that predates the twentieth century and because it represents one of the world's most eloquent graphic expressions...

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While plenty have claimed to be able to read it (including the author of the quote above, Steven Roger Fischer), the Rongorongo script of Easter Island remains undeciphered to this day.

The Easter Island Tablets by Jacques B.M. Guy

Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Rapanui, with its statues and with its unique writing system (known as Rongo­rongo), has provided such fertile breeding ground for various crackpot theories, from sunken continents to alien visitors, that a short introduction is necessary.

...

What Then, Do We Know?

Very little. We will probably never know what the tablets mean: too few have survived. Let us then be content with the little of which we can be sure.

Each tablet was prepared before carving. Shallow grooves were cut lengthwise, probably using an adze with a blade of shell or of obsidian. They are 10 to 15mm wide, and can be clearly seen in a photo pp.64­65 of Catherine and Michel Orliac's excellent little book. The signs themselves were engraved in those grooves, probably with shark teeth or obsidian flakes, as oral tradition has it.

Of the 21 tablets we have, three bear almost exactly the same hieroglyphic text. A fourth one, called "Tahua" or "The Oar" bears only part of that text, and in a very different, more lapidary, style. Indeed this tablet is an oar made of European ash, as were used in the British navy two centuries ago. At the earliest, it could date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, at the latest, from the end of the nineteenth. There must therefore have been then literate Easter Islanders, because this "Oar" is not a mere copy. It looks like a compilation, a digest of earlier texts, lost, except for its beginning, found on those other three tablets (see "On a Fragment of the Tahua Tablet" in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, December 1985).

The overwhelming majority of the hieroglyphs are anthropomorphic. They are little figures, facing you, or sideways; standing with dangling arms; or sitting with their legs sometimes stretched, sometimes crossed; with a hand up, or down, or turned to the mouth; some hold a staff, some a shield, some a barbed string. Some sport two bulging eyes (or are they ears, or coils of hair?); some a huge hooked nose with three hairs on it; some have the body of a bird. The writing often looks like an animated cartoon. You can see the same little fellow repeated in slightly different postures. One tablet shows the same figure in three successive postures, sitting sideways, playing, it seems, with a top. Or is it a potter at the wheel? A jeweller with a drill, making shell beads?



There are also many zoomorphic figures, birds especially, fish and lizards less often. The most frequent figure looks very much like the frigate bird, which happens to have been the object of a cult, as it was associated with Make­Make, the supreme god.

When you compare the tablets which bear the same text, when you analyze repeated groups of signs, you realize that writing must have followed rules. The scribe could choose to link a sign to the next, but not in any old way. You could either carve a mannikin standing, arms dangling, followed by some other sign, or the same mannikin holding that sign with one hand. You could either carve a simple sign (a leg, a crescent) separate from the next, or rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and carve the next sign on top of it.

All we can reasonably hope to decipher some day is some two to three lines of the tablet commonly called "Mamari". You can clearly see that they have to do with the moon. We happen to have several versions of the ancient lunar calendar of Easter Island. The most interesting was collected by William Thomson in 1886, whose report was published by the American National Museum in 1889, in a monograph "Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island". Thanks to Thomson, we know for instance that the night called "kokore tahi" corresponded to 27 November 1886. Using an almanac of 1886 or astronomical software, we can match his list against the actual phases of the moon at the time of his stay on Easter Island, and use this comparison as a key to deciphering the hieroglyphs of the calendar (see " The lunar calendar of Tablet Mamari", Journal de la Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1990). Thomson also collected the names of the months with the corresponding dates in our calendar. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck, the traditional Easter Island year corresponding to 1885­1886 happened to have 13 months, whereas all other authors reported only 12 months. By calculating the dates of the phases of the moon in 1885 and 1886 we can reconstruct this ancient calendar and, to a certain extent, how it worked, and when the extra month ("embolismic month" in technical jargon) had to be inserted (see "A propos des mois de l'ancien calendrier pascuan", Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1992). Some day, perhaps, someone will discover a tablet the hieroglyphs of which are the names of the months, or which contains the rules for deciding when this thirteenth embolismic month was to be inserted.

I have mentioned failed attempts at decipherment. Many have claimed that the Easter Island hieroglyphs are the spit image of the writing of this or that extinct civilization, from India to the Andes, and made the Easter Islanders their descendants. First, this is untrue. The Easter Island hieroglyphs have a distinct style, unique in the world. Second, this is downright silly. There are not a million different ways of drawing a "mannikin standing", a "fish", a "staff", a "bow", an "arrow". Ask a four­year old to draw you a "man with a stick" and compare that with the hieroglyphs of Easter Island. You are sure to find a few that look very much like that "man with a stick". Does that make the child an heir to the ancient Easter Islanders?

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A segment of the Santiago Staff with part of lines 4 and 5 clearly visible

When I look at these riotous dancing figures, I can't help being reminded a little of the subway graffiti of Keith Haring (gallery).


Enlargement showing fine details of the middle of lines 3 to 7, verso of the Small Santiago Tablet.

For more information the Easter Island script, rongorongo.org is the best collection of resources available anywhere on the web. The site includes the full corpus of texts for the language, a catalogue of symbols and photographs of all existing inscriptions.