A handsome object to be sure, the Nebra Sky Disc.

Excavated illegally in 1999 from a mound in eastern Germany the item was recovered by police in 2002 in a sting operation in which the item was to be sold off to a private collector for around US$400,000.

Being made of metal (bronze [1] inlaid with gold), a precise dating has been impossible to obtain although the patina and patterns of corrosion indicate that the item is likely to be very old and not a modern forgery. Assuming the account provided by the looters is accurate the object was discovered next to various bronze weapons which have been independently dated to 1600 BC or earlier.

But herein lies the rub. When the artefact's discoverers were convicted of looting an ancient site their appeal hinged on the argument that the disc really was a modern fake and therefore it was legal to attempt to sell it (presumably they were happier to go with a charge of attempted fraud rather than illegal antiquities trading).

The fact is that whether or not this item is genuine, nothing like it of this age has even been found in Germany, or indeed the world. If it really is 3600 years old, it will be the oldest depiction of a star map in the world. Identifying many of the stars has been difficult however experts have agreed that the cluster of seven starts perched between the sun and moon represents the Pleiades constellation.

Various theories have attempted to explain the disc's possible use in ancient astronomy. Most have viewed it as some kind of calender, the importance of the Pleiades to the map is their connection with the agricultural cycle, the constellation first appears during the early northern spring (planting season) and then disappears from sight at the time of the harvest. Much has also been made of the two strips on the edges which measure an arc of 82 degrees which is also number of degrees along the horizon which the sun travels during the winter solstice at the latitude where the disc was supposedly found.

However the latest, and for me most appealling theory of what the disc may have been used for, is that it represents the configuration of moon and Pleiades that should precede to insertion of a thirteenth month into lunar year and thus synchronise it with the solar year. This is a compelling idea because ancient calenders relied on the lunar cycles for counting the months, however lunar years of twelve moons are eleven days shorter than their solar equivalent and so need to be recalibrated every few years. According to this article, the association of a five day old crescent moon with the Pleiades constellation is an event that only happens every two to three years. Apparently this algorithm for inserting an inter-calary or "leap" month was also used in the Babylonian calender as documented in cuneiform wriiten nearly a thousand years later in a clay tablet known as the MUL.APIN.

More on lunar calenders here and here.

Note 1 - the bright green colouration of the disc is from an oxide called verdigris (Greek green) caused by the action of acetic acide on copper. It is thought that the disc originally was a vivid purple colour an effect which was achieved by rubbing the surface with rotten egg.

UPDATE: alun who is a specialist in this very subject of archeoastronomy makes some very interesting points about the problems with Hansen's theory.

The latest astronomer to work on the disc is Ralph Hansen from Hamburg who said: “I wanted to explain the thickness of the crescent on the sky disc of Nebra because it is not a new moon phase.” ... [but] If Hansen is right, the disc is irrelevant to his theory. Hansen started by looking for a specific moon phase. There's two assumptions in this. One is that the phase is accurately depicted on the disc. The other is that the phase can also be accurately identified when observing the moon. It's not the phase that I'd look for. Over the course of two years the Moon would pass by the Pleiades (in various phases) twenty-five times. The easiest phase to observe would be first sighting of the New Moon passing by the Pleiades, and here's my first problem: this method would work just as well. It would be out of step with Hansen's method, but no more inaccurate. It's a bit like the difference between an hourly bus service which leaves once an hour on the hour and one that leaves once an hour at five minutes past the hour.

Another issue is that the Moon doesn't just pass the Pleiades. It travels through the whole zodiac over twenty-nine days. What happens if, like me, you don't think the seven rivet cluster is the Pleiades? Let's say it's Praesepe in Cancer. Once again because we're talking about fixed cycles it makes no difference to the accuracy. The intercalary months would fall in different years, so this system would be out of step with Hansen's model, but no less accurate.

What you have then is a use for the disc which works just as well if the Moon phase is wrong and whatever the cluster is. Hansen's method doesn't tell us much about the disc, but says a lot about how intelligent modern astronomers are. Is knowing when to insert an extra month really an astronomical problem? I don't think so. It's a social problem, and that means that astronomical methods are inappropriate.

In the comments to his post he was asked what he thought the disc might have actually been used for.

That's difficult to answer. There might not ever be enough data to make more than a rough guess. If it dates from the Bronze Age, then I think it is most likely to be a symbol of power and prestige. It's common for magicians / shamans to wear symbols showing where their power comes from like totem animals or stars. I think this would have been a very intricate thing to make, so only a successful shaman could have worn it. This doesn't mean there isn't a complex story to explain why certain features are on the disc, but I can't see how we can find such a story from the disc alone.

But it does look similar to a part of a Siberian shamanic drum. Additionally it looks nothing like the other dramatic finds from the region which are the Golden Hats.

The reason the German team examining the disc think it's thousands of years old rather than hundreds of years old is down to an analysis of the corrosion of the surface. At the moment the team seem to be finding astronomical features in the disc that they want to see. I don't know enough about corrosion to say whether the chemists are doing the same. I would like it to be genuine, but that's not enough.

If the disc has been properly excavated then it would be easier to say things about it. Unfortunately the German team are left with the testimony of the looters. I don't envy their task in trying to prove the age of the disc.

One of the experts called by the defence in the appeal hearing, Professor Peter Schauer from Regensburg University, suggested that the disc was either a fake or possibly a shamanistic ritual object from Siberia at most only a few centuries old.

UPDATE: Bernie Molloy informs me that Einstein spent quite a lot of time at the blackboard and wrote more than he is credited for.



There's a lot more that could said about that John Hardy guy as well (more than I have time for at the moment) but for starters you could try checking this out.

Christianity was first introduced into Japan with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries at Kagoshima in 1549. It thrived for a time and the Jesuits enjoyed some influence in the court of the daimyo of Nagasaki who was baptised in 1563. At their peak, the Jesuits were able to claim upwards of 200,000 converts to the Christian faith.

The authorities in Edo (Tokyo) viewed these developments with concern. Initially they allowed the Portuguese access to the southern ports for trade but Jesuit activity and the spread of this foreign religion came to be seen as a threat to national unity. This was exacerbated by the sometimes disrespectful and insolent behaviour of certain priests towards the beliefs and practices of the established religions of Japan. Christianity by its very nature resisted the kind of syncretism and melding of traditions that had characterised Japanese religion. The Edo authorities also viewed with suspicion any social movement that might possibly inspire insurrection in the notoriously fractious and rebellious south west.

The first anti-Christian edict ordering all missionaries to the leave the country was issued in 1587. While this was generally ignored it was followed by a series of bans and proscriptions culminating in a national ban on the religion in 1614 and a total suppression after the Shimabara uprising in 1638. Christians now routinely faced torture or death for practising their religion and many abandoned it and returned to the officially sanctioned religions of Buddhism and Shintoism. But a sizable remnant took the religion underground and continued to secretly practice it whilst enshrouding it with the superficial trappings of other faiths. This group became known as kakure kirishitan or the "hidden Christians".


After Commodore Matthew Perry used gun boat diplomacy to force the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo to open its doors to trade, it was revealed that even after two hundred years of suppression there were still tens of thousands of practising Christians in Japan. Many of the rites and rituals which had been taught to them by St. Francis Xavier and the other Jesuit missionaries were still in use but having been transmitted as an oral tradition they survived only in a highly mutated form. While many Japanese Christians returned to the mainstream Catholic church after the religion was legalised in 1873, many others preferred to stay with their secret rituals which they performed in their hidden temples and private homes just as their ancestors did.

It is thought that only a few hundred kakure kirishitan remain today scattered in remote locations across Nagasaki prefecture. Most of them are now very old. On the island of Ikitsuki, the inhabitants have preserved a collection of 29 prayers which they call orasho (after the Latin word for prayer, oratio). Long ago the meaning of the recited words was lost and what remains is a chant made up of an amalgam of Latin, Portuguese, Japanese and a number of undecipherable or made up words.

Deusupaitero, hīryō, superitosantono,
Wareraga dēusu, santakurosuno onshirushio motte,
wareraga tekio nogashitamiya.
Deusupātero, hīriyo, superitosantono minaomotte,
tanomitatematsuru, anmeizō.

In the 1820s a bible was compiled which drew entirely from the collective memory of the kakure kirishitan. The book tells us

...for example, of the young Holy One debating with Buddhist priests, as 12-year-old Jesus was said to have done with the Jewish elders. Two men, Ponsha and Piroto (ie, Pontius Pilate), are told to kill all children of five and under, an echo of Herod's order. Mary gives birth in a stable, but the innkeeper who had spurned her then takes her in: in a wonderfully Japanese touch, he offers her a hot bath.

See also:

Catholic Educator's Resource Center : Kakure Kirishtan
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Japanese Martyrs
A timeline of Christianity In Japan

[1] The Japanese camera company Canon takes its name from this Japanese rendering of Kuan Yin.

Seeing that we're on the subject of Christians masquerading as Buddhists, I thought I should mention that Siddhartha Gautama (563 - 483 BC), the founder of the Buddhist religion, is also a canonised saint of the Catholic church!

While the beatification and sanctification of the Lord Buddha didn't actually happen until the 16th century, the story of his early life was quite popular in Europe during the Middle Ages where he was Christianized under the name of Josaphat, the Indian prince.

The story goes a bit like this:

Once upon a time, in the land of India there lived a brave and powerful king by the name of Abenner. After many years of fretting about having no heir to the throne, he eventually had a son named Josaphat. At the time his son's birth the king was told by a Chaldean astrologer that the infant prince would one day grow up and become a Christian holy man and give up his throne. This news greatly upset the king who was obviously most reluctant to lose his crown prince to this new religion (one which had been making steady gains ever since the pioneering work of the apostle St. Thomas). He therefore ordered that the Christian faith be banned entirely from his kingdom and he locked the prince away in the palace, providing for him every luxury imaginable so he would grow up never having any desire to come into contact with the outside world.

When Josaphat reached adulthood he found the cosseted nature of his existence unbearable and so pleaded with his father to release him from his captivity and let him go outside the palace walls. The king, who could see that his son had grown into a handsome and intelligent young man, did not wish to see him suffer needlessly and so he eventually agreed to his request. The prince quickly learnt that while the world outside was indeed a very beautiful place it was also marred by much sorrow and suffering. Josaphat came into contact with a monk by the name of Barlaam, a hermit from Senaar, who explained to him the causes of this suffering and in very little time converted him to the Christian faith.

King Abenner was, of course, most upset about this turn of events and could see that the prophesy was so very close to being fulfilled. Nevertheless he continued to try to obstruct his son's path. In one instance he attempted to have his son seduced by one of his concubines. The temptress, who was the enslaved daughter of another king, came to Josaphat and appealed to his desire to save souls from eternal damnation. In fact she was receiving her coaching directly from Satan himself so she was well versed in scripture. She promised Josaphat that she would certainly convert to Christianity if only he would just sleep with her that night

"Let this also be thy pleasure, as thou wilt. But fulfil me one other small and trivial desire of mine, if thou art in very truth minded for to save my soul. Keep company with me this one night only, and grant me to revel in thy beauty, and do thou in turn take thy fill of my comeliness. And I give thee my word, that, with daybreak, I will become a Christian, and forsake all the worship of my gods. Not only shalt thou be pardoned for this dealing, but thou shalt receive recompense from thy God because of my salvation..."

— Part XXX of Barlaam and Ioasaph by "John the Monk", translated into Greek possibly from a Georgian version sometime in the 11th century

At first this greatly inflamed the young prince's passions but eventually he managed to bring them under control (probably after a cold shower) and he was then able to resolutely reject the beautiful lady's advances. Josaphat had defeated all temptation and remained pure and committed to his new faith. The story was eventually resolved by the King who then chose to become a Christian. After his death, Josaphat ruled the kingdom for a time though having no interest in earthly matters he abdicated the throne and spent the remainder of his days with the old monk Barlaam, living as a religious recluse.


While many of the particulars of the story have changed to suit its new role as Christian hagiography, the story's Buddhist origins remain highly recognisable. Siddhartha Gautama was also a prince whose birth was accompanied with a prophecy that he would become a great holy man but not a king. He was also protected from the outside world by his father but on leaving the palace he also recognised that the world was full of suffering. He sought to pursue an ascetic life and to reach enlightenment but during this process he was subjected to many attempts to deflect him from this path. He was tempted by the demon Mara who sent his three beautiful daughters, Tanha (desire), Raga (lust), and Arati (aversion) to try to seduce him while he sat meditating under a banyan tree. After resisting these temptations, the prince attained Buddhahood at the age of thirty five.

While the exact process by which this story became adopted into Christian folklore is far from clear, it is thought that it travelled via a chain of adaptations, possibly via Manichaeism, where the Bodhisattva in Sanskrit became rendered as Bodhisav in Persian, then as Budhasaf in Arabic, Iodasaph in Georgian, Ioasaph in Greek and then finally Josaphat in Western Europe.

Can any better sport or amusement be imagined that could be obtained with an airship of the Zodiac type, endowed with a speed of 40 miles an hour for four hours, or 20 miles an hour for eight times this period, and so on in cubic proportion?

Always able to reach a desired goal, but with the ever changing wind to add an element of interest to the journey; free from dust and the dangers of the road; always able to stop and enjoy the still air. An airship of this type would combine the delights of a motor car, a balloon, a sailing yacht, an aeroplane, with the dangers of none …

It is perhaps worth while contrasting such a vessel with an aeroplane designed for the same purpose: condemned to be rushing through the air every moment of its time; never slowing, never pausing while its occupants look down on the mountain tops, or eat a quiet meal; unable to come down except where the ground has been specially prepared.

It would seem that it is to the dirigible that the ordinary family man must look for his aerial source of health and daily pleasure, and he will not be disappointed …

Then in a few short years we shall be able to alter the question and ask ''Won't you come for a cruise over beautiful country in a staunch ship, with powerful pumps, with two reliable engines, at a speed as great as you could wish, and provided with a faithful anchor by means of which you can at all times pass a night in peace, or ride the fiercest storms?'' And the whole world will answer ''Yes.''

— 'Ripping Panel', ''The future of dirigibles''. In Fred T. Jane, ed., All the World's Air-ships (Flying Annual) (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1909), 325. Image source: ibid, 171.

Found at Air Minded via here as part of the very useful History Carnival.

For more zeppelin dreaming you might like to check out my friend David Cox's 1990 short film Puppenhead which is now available for public download at the Internet Archive.

Premise: It is Berlin, 1934. The puppet maker Goethe, prepares for a performance of his clockwork knife throwing act. He is watched by a Nazi spy who waits for an opportunity to exchange the head of a puppet with a menacing replacement. At a performance in New York a battle erupts on stage between the Nazi's creation and Goethe's puppet - an ingenious contraption which has more blades than a Swiss Army knife.

It weighs in at around 57MB. Here are some stills from the movie.

(Note to Dave: have you ever considered making this film streamable via services like Google Video or YouTube?)

The funny thing is how the Iraq war actually turned out nothing like the war with Japan.

(unless, of course, you picture Bush as Hirohito rather than Roosevelt)

In the summer of that year, the sun was barely visible, it's light was pale and greatly diminished. It's rays scarcely warmed the ground below and crops failed for want of its ripening energy. Astronomers reported the news to an alarmed public that the sun's disc was blemished by a rash of sunspots, many so large as to be easily observed with an unaided eye.

The weather was strange. Instead of the long stretches of balmy days expected of summer, the countryside was being alternately deluged with torrential rains or blanketed with snow! The rains swelled the rivers and lakes which in turn burst their banks. Bridges were washed away and roads vanished under the floodwaters. Drowned animals became a common sight floating down the waterways and people began to to die of hunger as agricultural production collapsed by as much as three quarters. Grain doubled in price and then it doubled again.


As it turned out, the unusually high level of sunspot activity had nothing to do with it. The sun was not in fact dying and proper summers returned to Europe by 1819. The cause of the cold snap, now known variously as the "Famine Year", the "Year without a Summer" and "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death", was a series of volcanic eruptions, the most important of which having occurred at Mt. Tambora the previous year.

The eruption at Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (over 12,000 kilometres away from Lake Geneva) was the most violent volcanic eruption in nearly two millennia and quite possibly the most violent one to have occurred in the previous 75,000 years. It was at least four times more powerful than the famous Krakatoa and blew upwards of a 150 cubic kilometres of ash into the atmosphere. The mountain, which today stands at around 2,500 metres in height, is thought to have been at least 4,000 metres high before the eruption. Over 100,000 Indonesians perished, 10,000 from being in close proximity to the volcano and the remainder through starvation and disease.

Completely extinguished was the Kingdom of Tambora [1], a small but fiercely independent population that once lived on the slopes of the volcano. The Tamborans, whose language was described by contemporaries as similar to that spoken on the western end of neighbouring Flores and different from the other two linguistic groups on the island. They were by no means an "easygoing people" and were known to be "brusque and short-tempered". They were constantly in a state of low level conflict with their neighbours and this was something which clearly exasperated the Dutch administration in Batavia. A century before, the Dutch had exiled the reigning Rajah of Tambora to the Cape colony in South Africa [2] however, even after installing their own choice of monarch, they still found it difficult to control this troublesome people who continued to engage in struggles and intrigues against the island's other factions [3].

This all came to an end in 1815 when when Tambora exploded and the kingdom was swept away in a tide of molten rock and poisoned gas. A legend endures which seeks to explain the disaster at Tambora and the reason for the kingdom's destruction.

Apparently it was all caused by a dog.

Once upon a time, a visitor from another island came to the kingdom of Tambora.

He went to the local mosque, in the capital town of Tambora, for prayers. As it happened, the king and his retinue were there also at prayer, but the king had brought a favourite dog with him into the mosque.

The visitor was upset by this, and spoke loudly and widely against it in the town that day. Word got back to the king, and he bade the visitor to come dine with him. During the meal, unknown to the visitor, the king had the man served pieces of the dog cooked to seem like one of the courses the others were eating.

The next day, the visitor heard in town the evil the king had done, and he became very angry and denounced the king.The king heard of this, and ordered his guards to seize the visitor, take him up the mountain, and kill him on the spot. Which they did.

As they walked down, they noticed smoke started rising from the place where they committed the murder.

After two years of small low level eruptions, the mountain exploded killing everyone.

Let that be a salutary lesson to all those who wish to abuse the rules of hospitality!

[1] Recent excavations at Tambora seem to confirm that the Tamborans traded quite widely in the South East Asian region. Fragments of pottery, especially of porcelain indicate that they had trade connections as far away as Indochina.

[2] The earlier Rajah of Tambora, Abdul Basir, after spending a few years in detention in South Africa was released briefly only to be rearrested in 1713. He had been back in Sumbawa and once again engaging in activities displeasing to the Dutch authorities. This time they decided to exile him permanently and he spent the rest of his life confined to the estate of the Govenor at Capetown. During his time there, he famously produced a copy of the Koran entirely from memory and presented the book as a gift to the Govenor. It was the very first Koran in South Africa. The Dutch had a policy of restricting the spread of the Islamic religion — especially amongst the black slaves — and the book is unlikely to have ever left the grounds of the estate. The Rajah's Koran has now, unfortunately, been lost.

The Rajah's descendants never returned to Tambora and after the Rajah's death they converted to Christianity. They assumed the surnames de Haan and Sultania and joined the mainstream of Afrikaner society. Piet Retief, one of the leaders of the Afrikaner Voortrekkers, is said to have been a direct descendant of the Rajah of Tambora.

[3] Some of these details about the Kingdom of Tambora were gleaned from this collection of quotes and dispatches drawn from various historical sources about Sumbawa.

Holland really can be a windy place at times — hence all those windmills — but what are we to make of all the other wind-borne creatures that inhabit the Dutch ecosystem? For example, the beach-walking Animaris Currens Ventosa which stomps about on its twenty or so skeleton-like legs, menacingly waving its membranes at terrified picnickers.


Or the magnificent Animaris Pricipiere, a creature so regal in its appearance and yet at the same time so gentle and docile, preferring, as it does, to graze peacefully on sand crystals and salt.


And then consider the Animaris Rhinoceros, a two ton beast of burden so well suited to its role of transporting native Nederlanders across the endless reaches of the Dutch tundra. The proverbial "ship" of the strand.


Many of these creatures are scarcely known outside of this exotic country and it is remarkable to think that, even in this day and age, new species are still being discovered in this unique and largely untrammeled wilderness.

More information can be obtained from this site and more movies here.

Update: more useful information here.