If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and you think it's a duck, then maybe you're just not being open-minded enough. Photo (cc) RealEstateZebra

I sent an email to the British Chiropractic Association’s enquiries email account recently.

Dear BCA,

I read with interest that the use of manipulation is documented ‘as far back as 2700-1500 BC in China and Greece.‘ Could you point me to the documentation for Greece? I’m researching the use of ancient history in justifications for complimentary medicine and I’m not familiar with any such documents. It would be helpful to know about them in my search for other medical texts.

Yours,

Alun Salt

I got a reply. There’s not a lot of evidence.

One possibility is that a fourth century BC tablet from Piraeus might show chiropractic-style treatment. The BCA’s enquiry person kindly linked to a page showing the tablet, which you can find listed as Votive relief to Asclepius, Piraeus Museum, catalogue number 405. As for documentation, I’ll quote: “Greek documents on manipulation from pre-Hippocratic times are more difficult – I don’t know of any (but that does not mean that they do not exist).”

This is interesting because the British Chiropractic Association have quietly announced the ancient history story of the decade. This even beats the Antikythera Mechanism as major news. Here’s the line:

The use of manipulation is documented as far back as 2700-1500 BC in China and Greece.

I’m not an expert on Chinese writing. I thought there was some nationalist vying with the Egyptians as to who had the oldest writing. The books I’ve found give dates of 1200 BC (Bagley 2004, p. 190) or The 14th to 11th centuries BC, with a possible predecessor around the 17th century BC (Norman 1988 p. 58). It would seem that the BCA have access to some previously unknown examples of Chinese writing, but that’s not even half the news.

They also have documentation from Greece in this 2700 BC to 1500 BC band. I don’t know of any 2700 BC writing from Greece, but there’s certainly a script known from around 1800 BC-ish. It’s not actually Greek script. That doesn’t really make an appearance till around the 8th century BC. Earlier than that you have Linear B. Linear B dates from the Mycenaean era. Deciphering Linear B is one of the great stories in ancient history, the bulk of it was done by the mathematician Michael Ventris in the early 1950s. But Linear B dates from the 15th century BC at the very oldest. That’s the 1400s BC, so it can’t be that the British Chiropractic Association is referring to. Still older, there’s Linear A.

Linear A is associated with the Minoan civilisation on Crete. It uses similar symbols to Linear B, but if the symbols have the same sounds, then it is a record of a language unlike any known language. If you want to be a big name ancient history then you could decipher it. Unless you’re too late, because this is what is so staggering about the British Chiropractic Association’s claim. It’s not simply that they may have discovered previously unknown writing in China. It’s the fact they’re able to decipher what these ancient texts means. Often early texts are tax records or similar which only exist in fragments. That these unknown texts should describe skilled medical treatments is stunning. Finding claims like casually announced on the BCA’s website is as amazing as discovering your neighbour has built a time machine in her garden shed.

An alternative, and I hesitate to bring this up because the British Chiropractic Association are notoriously litigious, is that their claim is nonsense. I’m not saying that it is because there are few organisations with the reputation for upright scientific behaviour enjoyed by the British Chiropractic Association. But purely hypothetically, let’s say that these texts didn’t exist. How would those claims get onto the website? The only way I could see would be if someone made them up. Now I’ll admit the word bogus is sailing into view. Such a claim would not be bogus, under English law, because it wouldn’t be intentionally dishonest. It could be written by someone entirely indifferent as to whether or not they were honest.

No, to find a bogus claim, what you’d have to send an email to their organisation, saying that they’re making an odd claim, have a reply back saying they don’t know of any evidence for what they claim and then find they’re still making the same claim on their webpage. That might be bogus because that would mean they are aware it’s a false claim, but still state it anyway. An exact legal opinion on the claim’s bogosity could vary depending on how expensive your lawyer is.

BUT – we know the BCA don’t make bogus claims, there’s a big court case going on defending their reputation. That’s how we know that the BCA must be sitting on one of the biggest archaeological and historical stories of the century.

If you’re interested in what is or is not a bogus claim, you might like to search for Simon Singh on Jack of Kent’s weblog.

References – ISBN links take you to Worldcat.

Bagley, R.W. (2004) ‘Anyang Writing and the Origin of the Chinese writing system’ in S.D. Houston (editor) The first writing: script invention as history and process. Cambridge University Press . pp 190-249. ISBN 0521838614

Norman, J. (1988) Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521296536

The Antikythera Mechanism. Photo (cc) Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

Some posts take quite a while to write. This is a response to Candy Minx and Martin Rundkvist who were discussing the Antikythera Mechanism back in 2006 (Antikythera, Time, A Reply to the Minx). Candy Minx thought that the Antikythera Mechanism was an expression of what was already known and embedded in a society through things like myth and ritual. Martin thought that the mechanism was far more complex, indeed needlessly complex, for an ancient society and so was something quite different to the folk astronomy of the time. Originally I planned to write a fence-sitting compromise. I thought that Candy Minx was right to an extent, there was no need for a device like this because rituals and folk observation could allow people to time the year as well as they needed. At the same time I thought that Martin was right to point out that the mechanism gave results with far more accuracy than folk astronomy needed, or would even recognise. A different sort of astronomy is visible in the Antikythera Mechanism. I didn’t blog too much about the 2006 paper because I attended a few of Mike Edmunds’ talks on the topic and heard that more would be published, which happened in 2008. Anyhow in my own fluffy and fence-sitting way I’ll now offer my compromise.

Someone with an extraordinary imagination built the Antikythera Mechanism and, if he were alive today, we wouldn’t hesitate to call him a scientist. I don’t know if the designer was in the same league as Newton or Galileo, but he was certainly the equal of Kepler, Copernicus or Brahe. It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary the device described in the 2006 paper is, but I’m going to give it a go.

If you’re the one person who hasn’t heard of the Antikythera Mechanism then Nature have a handy video introduction.

All that remains now is a collection of corroded lumps found off the island of Antikythera. The 2006 paper described what the team discovered after x-raying the lumps to read the hidden inscriptions without prizing apart the device and damaging it. Prior to this paper it was thought that the device could keep track of the Sun and the Moon. This is no small feat.

The Sun would be moving slowly against the background stars, so over the course of a year it would pass through all the signs of the zodiac. The Moon however is more complex. The Moon also moves in front of the background stars, but it only takes about 27 days to do this. It’s called the sidereal period. So you need a couple of gears to drive those two motions. But you wouldn’t really think of the sidereal period as a month. For most people the synodic period, the time between one New Moon and the next or the time between one Full Moon and the next, is a month. This is around 29½ days. Throw in extra gears for driving other displays showing eclipse cycles and it’s clearly a complex device. The original studies found evidence of epicycles, gears mounted on other gears. Add other features like displays for eclipse and lunar cycles on the back and it’s obvious you have a complicated device. The 2006 research showed that in fact it was all a bit more complicated than that.

The Moon’s movement isn’t constant. It speeds up and slows down. This is because its orbit isn’t exactly circular. Instead it’s slightly egg-shaped. The point furthest from the earth is the apogee and the point closest to the Earth is the perigee. When it’s near the apogee it travels slowly, but when it moves closer to the Earth it picks up speed until it passes perigee and then it slows down again. This is called the first lunar anomaly. The difference is noticeable by the naked eye, if you’re willing to make systematic observations. This is all simply explained by Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion. There’s small problem. Kepler used ellipses.

You can’t use elliptical gears. The point of gears is that they must have intermeshing teeth. An elliptical gear would lose contact with the driving gear as its axis changed. Instead it seems that the mechanism used two gears, one slightly off-axis from the other. The rotation was connected by a pin-and-slot arrangement, so that the one gear wouldn’t turn at quite the same rate as the other gear. The on-axis gear can then be turned reliably by the drive gears, while the motion of the moon can driven by the off-axis gear. So you have a device that can track the sidereal, synodic and anomalistic months, all while the Earth is spinning round the Sun. If that’s causing your head to spin you might want to skip the next paragraph.

There’s another problem. The lunar anomaly describes the Moon’s travel from one apogee to the next. This apogee is also rotating around the earth. If the apogee is in Aries then two and a bit years later it will be in Cancer, and another two and a bit years to move into Libra until it too has travelled through the zodiac over about nine years. So now we have a device which tracks the Moon around the Earth, and its phases and it’s variable speed and variations in that variability, while also keeping track of the Sun’s position, potential lunar and solar eclipses and intercalation cycles so you know when to stick an extra month in to keep the lunar months in step with the solar year round gears, some mounted slightly off axis to create a pseudo-sinusoidal variation using circular gears to replace ellipses. If you have funny feeling near the back of your head right now, that’s probably your brain trying to crawl out of your ears. The Antikythera Mechanism is insanely complex. Still just because it’s insanely complex, that doesn’t make it scientific.

In fact you can argue about whether or not Science existed in the ancient world. Certainly a lot of elements like testing ideas with experiments didn’t really become popular till after Galileo. On the other hand some natural philosophy of the time was based on observation. There was certainly technology which was the result of applied knowledge. With those kind of provisos a lot of ancient historians would be happy with the idea of ancient science, albeit a science different to post-Renaissance science. In this case, the sheer intense observation and calculation involved in making the Antikythera Mechanism marks it out as a work of ancient science. There’s also another factor which might make it more scientific than artistic.

To some extent the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project have been interested in hanging a name on the device. It was thought to have originated in Rhodes and sunk on its way to Rome, which would have connected it to the home city of Hipparchus, one of the great astronomers of antiquity. The 2008 paper has examined the parapegma on the mechanism and discovered it may be connected to Syracuse, home of Archimedes.

A parapegma is a calendar, usually with holes for sticking a peg into for marking the days. In the case of ancient Greece they’re interesting when they tell you what day of the month it is, because each Greek city had its own set of months. The months were usually named after religious festivals, and this was tied into local politics. That meant having your own calendar was a good way of showing your independence. The best match for the months mentioned on the mechanism is Tauromenion, modern Taormina, in Sicily. This is likely to have shared some months with Syracuse as it was re-settled from there in the fourth-century BC, so Syracuse is a strong possibility for the home of this device. Archimedes is said to have invented a planetarium according to Cicero and is thought to have written a lost book on astronomical devices. However he could not have made this device. Archimedes died in 212 BC. The Antikythera Mechanism is currently thought to date to the second half of the second century BC, but that might change. But it was very likely to have been made after Archimedes death and that’s what makes it scientific.

Art can be collaborative, or it can be personal. Science in contrast is built on cumulative knowledge. The person who invented the gearing did not have to be the person who made the astronomical observations. He didn’t even need to live in the same century as the astronomer. In fact the maker of this device might not have done either. He could have followed a kit and added his own personal touches on the casing. There’s a core to this device which, once expressed, is independent of personal vision. Archimedes didn’t have his own personal Moon which moved in a different way to everyone else’s, while an artist can have a personal interpretation of the Moon.

A reason people might think the Antikythera Mechanism is a work of art is that it’s clearly the result of a lot of imagination. Great art requires imagination, but so too does great science. It requires the kind of imagination that can look at a toolbox full of circles and see ellipses. The kind of imagination that can watch wheels turn within wheels as bodies waltz to the music of the celestial spheres. Another common factor between art and science is that great art can show a new way of looking at the world, and great science does this too. That’s why I disagree with Candy Minx when she says “Science is always playing catch up with the poets.” Science can reveal beauty too, as a visit to the Antikythera Mechanism Research Group’s homepage would show.

Freeth, T., Bitsakis, Y., Moussas, X., Seiradakis, J., Tselikas, A., Mangou, H., Zafeiropoulou, M., Hadland, R., Bate, D., Ramsey, A., Allen, M., Crawley, A., Hockley, P., Malzbender, T., Gelb, D., Ambrisco, W., & Edmunds, M. (2006). Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism Nature, 444 (7119), 587-591 DOI: 10.1038/nature05357

Freeth, T., Jones, A., Steele, J., & Bitsakis, Y. (2008). Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism Nature, 454 (7204), 614-617 DOI: 10.1038/nature07130

Arbor Low is a Neolithic stone circle and henge in the Peak District. The henge is the bank and ditch arrangement with the bank on the outside and is probably the oldest part of the monument. The current estimate is that it was built around 2500 BC. That’s a date that’s open to a lot of revision as the last published excavation was 1901-2 I think. The stone circle could be as late as 2000 BC.

There’s some odd things at Arbor Low. For example the two entrances mean that the path through the henge runs in the same direction as the Roman Road built over two millennia later. That suggests there’s some pretty deep ideas about movement embedded with the landscape. Excavations at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls have revealed possible timber posts and multiple phases for building, often much earlier and much more complex than previously thought. So why hasn’t anyone taken a mattock to the site for a century? One reason is money, but another can be seen on the east side of the monument.

Some time in the Bronze Age, a chieftain looked at the henge and decided: ‘I’m having that.’ He gathered a lot of earth, quite a bit from the henge bank, and built a round barrow to be buried in. If a tomb is a machine for remembering, then anyone who used the site after that would be reminded that here lay someone who as powerful enough to take one of the biggest, most ancient, sites in the region and make it his. These days we’d call it vandalism and egotism but because it happened over three thousand years ago it’s part of the rich palimpsest of the landscape. Yet his actions made him a target for the future.

Around the eighteenth and nineteenth century antiquarianism came into vogue. People were becoming aware that there was a long pre-biblical past and one way of finding out about it was to crack open some of the many ancient monuments that littered the landscape. The gentry would go out for a picnic at the weekend and watch, while the hired work would set about a barrow with pick-axes, spades and shovels to see if anything was in it. Which usually meant gold. There might be a few stone tools or bones, but at this time the prehistoric inhabitants were thought of as crude savages. Rather like the people out in the Empire that they were civilising. But some people took more of an interest, and one of these was Thomas Bateman.

Thomas Bateman was born in 1821, and was the son of an amateur archaeologist. His interest grew and he joined the British Archaeological Association in 1843, where he saw how to dig a barrow. The next year he dug almost forty barrows. In total he opened up over a hundred during his life. He used the techniques of his time. That’s why, since Bateman’s excavation, Arbor Low looks like someone thought what the place really needed was a giant earthwork hot-cross bun.

Bateman wasn’t a bad archaeologist for his time. On the contrary, he published his findings. Nevertheless he used the techniques of his time, and digging deep trenches across the barrow were an effective way to get at the artefacts and pottery. Stratigraphy, the idea that the layers of soil overlying a site could reveal some of the context of finds, wasn’t really recognised until the work of Pitt-Rivers and Flinders-Petrie towards the end of the nineteenth century. Bateman’s tragedy is that he had the technology, but he worked before there was a better understanding of how to use it.

Modern archaeologists are aware that not only do ideas change, but so too does the technology. Bateman’s excavations could be called vandalism, but he didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. Archaeology often investigates a site by destroying it, and that can only be done once. Today we have a permanent reminder in the Bronze Age barrow at Arbor Low, which still bears Bateman’s scars.

Foreground: The remains of Bateman's trenches across the barrow.Background: The interior of Arbor Low.

How should an exhibit be lit?

This is a development of an idea I had last year after reading a post by Christina on a visit to the National Museum in Copenhagen. In short most museums I go to seem to have much darker galleries for prehistoric material that classical material. That has to have a psychological effect, but does it also have a physiological effect? Is the difference in light enough that there’s a difference feeling to observing prehistoric material to classical material because of the room and not the content? You could also ask similar questions of European and Rest of the World exhibits. Are African exhibits in more dimly lit rooms, and if so what does this say about ‘world museums’.

It should be an easy enough question to answer; simply visit a range of museums in exotic locations with a light-meter and then number-crunch to find the answer. That’s not very efficient though. It means arranging permissions, travelling to the museums, and logging the data. It could take three or four days in terms of travel to some places to log 50 numbers. When it comes to number crunching more is better so is there a way round this? I suppose I could hire people to wander round museums for me with lightmeters, but that would be expensive and my bank is already experimenting with new shades of red to print my balance. It’d be handy if I could just find the data I want lying around the net somewhere. Regular readers will know I’ve been thinking about Flickr’s API a lot, and they won’t be surprised to hear that’s where I might have found the answer. A lot of people have been taking photos in museums and I think they could help.

It might sound bleeding obvious that all of Flickr’s photos were taken with a camera, but in the case of digital cameras Flickr can also store a lot more data. Attached to a lot of the photos is EXIF data. If you visit a photo like this one, you’ll see there’s a more properties link on the right side of the page. That takes you to a page like this one. It tells you the ISO setting, aperture and shutter speed for a photo.¹ If the camera is automatic then it will pick what it thinks are the best settings. The camera is set to manual, then the photographer is still probably going to choose what it thinks are the best settings. Therefore this gives a way to calculate relative changes in light.

For example ISO settings come from the days when people used film for photos. ISO 200 would react to light one ’stop’ faster than ISO 100. ISO 400 was one stop faster than ISO 200 and two than ISO 100. So the ISO setting will let us calculate how many stops down the film speed is. The aperture is an odd scale because it relates to the size of the aperture of the lens relative to the focal length. But it can be calculated, f/22 is a stop up from  f/16 and f/11 is another stop down and so on. The same can be said for shutter speed You can go from 1/800 to 1/400 to 1/200 and so on.

Therefore, if you fix a datum you can measure how many stops up or down from that datum a photo is from the EXIF data. This is related to the light in the image and the camera lens looking into a gallery or display is a proxy for the human eye. It’s not perfect, you’d want a lot of photos but one thing Flickr has is a LOT of photos. It also has the API, which makes it very easy to transfer the relevant meta-data into a database for interrogation.

One reason I’m interested in doing this project is that I have no idea what the result would be. It could be emphatic, ambiguous or show that I have a very selective memory when it comes to lighting. It might sound obvious that you’d want to research something you don’t know the answer to, but to gain funding you have to show a likelihood of a positive outcome – or that the methodology is at least sound. I don’t know if this is the case, so the project won’t attract funding, but the API makes it cheap. Certainly cheaper than flying on budget airlines round Europe.

In terms of publication it seems like a good fit for Internet Archaeology. Internet Archaeology is moving in steps towards open access. Given the… umm… eccentric attitude the AHRC takes to digital media, and the current economic climate that’s a difficult move they’re making. The fact they are moving to Open Access makes it one of the most attractive venues to publish in academic archaeology. In this instance a database which can link back to the source files at Flickr would fit neatly into their hyperlink-friendly model. A bit of ingenuity with the SQL queries and database fields and it should be possible to make it a useful application for further research.

The biggest problem I see at the moment is whether or not estimating relative light levels from the ISO, aperture and shutter speed will be enough to distinguish between genuine differences in lighting. There are other non-trivial questions. If photos are of the exhibits rather than the galleries, then will the artificial light negate any measurable differences? It would certainly lose darkness in the peripheral vision. How do I gather the data? Can I pull it straight from the EXIF files from any photo on the site, but would this be reasonable if the photo itself is set to copyright? Would setting up a Flickr group for the project and trying to herd in volunteers, or sticking to CC licenced photos be better?

I think I could probably set up a small-scale test of this over the autumn and then take it from there, Still, it would be helpful if someone could spot all the flaws in this plan for me, rather than leaving me to stumble into them, so feel free to leave your comments below.

1. Usually – HDR photos won’t because the have multiple exposures

There were two sites I could find and I was equidistant from both of them, so I chose Derby Silk Mill. Not everyone has a World Heritage Site on their doorstep. If I’d gone a couple of miles in the opposite direction this would have been the site posted.

Swarkestone Bridge

This is Swarkestone Bridge, the longest stone bridge in England. It crosses the river Trent and its floodplain. There’s been a crossing here since at least the fourteenth-century, but the current bridge mainly dates from the Georgian period with most of it built at the end of the eighteenth-century. It’s about a kilometre long and someone has kindly put up a video about it on YouTube.

I say mainly because often there’s damage from accidents; being a Grade I scheduled ancient monument isn’t giving the bridge that much protection and it’s common to see rebuilding going on. The bridge needs to be used as it’s still the main route from the city of Derby to Melbourne and the south of the county. A sensible solution might be to build a second bridge alongside the old bridge and have each one take traffic in one direction obly. However, it’s probably more cost-effective over the life of an individual administration to leave it to be damaged and replace it bit by bit, so in some ways it’s also a modern reconstruction of what a Georgian bridge might look like if it wasn’t rebuilt on a regular basis.

The remains of a night of soup joy.

It’s easy to overlook that ancient monuments have a life which changes in different eras. If the bridge were purely Georgian, then it wouldn’t be around in the 21st century. The idea of sectioning of areas of the modern world and declaring them to be the past gives them quite a bit of privacy. It’s common to find evidence of social activities that you wouldn’t want to share with the wider public at ancient sites. For instance the tombs I visited in Tunisia were quite deep in beer cans, which wouldn’t be something you’d want out in the open in an Islamic country. Visiting this morning I found foil, a spoon and evidence of a small fire by the side of the bridge. It was hidden amongst the undergrowth and out of sight of the local houses and pub. Clearly this is evidence of a soup party. Obviously seeing as the pub, a short distance away, serves food people wouldn’t want to be seen publicly consuming home-made soup there. The landlord would get tetchy. So instead, after a few drinks, they go the the privacy of the bridge away from the modern world and heat up small quantities of soup in a metal spoon over an open fire.

I don’t know of any archaeological studies of modern soup consumption at ancient sites, nor of extreme icing. Extreme icing is where you get the icing sugar and ice through a syringe and hypodermic needle so you can do the really fiddly bits on wedding cakes. Why someone would take a wedding cake to an ancient site is a mystery to me, but clearly they do because it’s not unusual to see the syringes and needles. I don’t know if you could get funding for that kind of archaeological research though as it’s verging on the socially useful.

A bridge too far.

If you’re a sympathiser of Bonnie Prince Charlie then Swarkestone marks the end of the road south. It was here where Jacobite forces, invading from Scotland, came to a halt. Charles Stuart had invaded promising his allies that had assurances that the English would rally to his cause. At Swarkestone he was forced to admit he’d received no such promises. His council of war voted to return to Scotland.

Derby might also mark one of the few examples of Englishness as a form of self-defence. The Scottish army camped by Kedleston Hall one its way back. Supplies are important, so someone from the army approached the hall to secure food for the 5000 soldiers. Seeing the size of the army and the potential ruin of his household it is said the lord of the manor insisted everyone turn off the lights and pretend they were out. This surely has to be a modern invention, but I do like the idea of the lord picking up a reproachful card slipped under the front door: “We called this AM/PM to pillage your hall for victuals but there was no reply. Please contact us to arrange a more convenient time. Regards, the Jacobite Rebellion.”

This is (what I hope is) the final version of the Delphi presentation. It briefly covers the ground that formed the basis for Knowing when to consult the oracle at Delphi. There’s more unpublished material, but rather than trying to produce Delphi II, I’m going to make it part of the forthcoming Calendrical Calibration paper.

There’s a new flap going through a few Science blogs following the publication Unscientific America. One chapter of the book* argues that New Atheists in general and PZ Myers in particular are damaging science communication by being outspoken atheists. Religious people will flatly reject science if they’re told by people like Myers that science and religion are incompatible, say Mooney and Kirshenbaum. There’s plenty of problems with statement. Are religious people really that fragile? There’s also the problem that Mooney believes that science and religion are compatible, though he’s never made it clear exactly what he means by compatible. I think he’s demonstrably wrong, and I’ll show that in the future. For the sake of argument I’ll concede his point. If this is the case then Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s assertion that atheism needlessly turns people off science is plausible. It’s possible Myers is having a negative effect on science communication by picking an unnecessary fight. Even so, it’s not a certainty.

I can’t remember how or when I started blogging. The earliest entries in this blog have been re-dated to later dates. The original reason was that a blog was an easy way to keep a note of what I was thinking. Lots of people start a blog, but continuation is a different matter. One of the features of blogging is you tend to read more blogs to see what other people are writing. One of the entries I read was this The proper reverence to those who have gone before. It a post on deep time, the distance back to the earliest human ancestors. It’s pretty much what Mooney and Kirshenbaum would argue against. Myers compares the two thousand years of Christian history to the time scale of Nariokotome boy and concludes that the Bible comes up short in describing the profundity of the human journey. You may agree or disagree. Mooney thinks that Myers’ defining moment was his mucking about with a cracker. Someone else in one of the comment threads thought it was him getting thrown out of a showing of Expelled. When I think of Pharyngula I think of the writing on posts like that or Niobrara Sometimes I try and put up something like that, but not often because getting it wrong frustrates me. That may change in 2010 (not the frustration, the lack of effort).

There were other early influences like Early Modern Notes and Respectful Insolence. It’s an ongoing project so other blogs come and go which have an effect, like Northstate Science. There’s also plenty of others. If you’d said in 2004 that other major influences would include a blog on the Levant or another on Military History I’d have thought you were mad. I have a particular pit of loathing for television programmes about the American Civil War. Yet in all these cases the writing by bloggers has shown me how wrong my superficial impressions about these various fields are. My use of images reflects Aydin Örstan’s work on Snail’s Tales. I don’t have his skill, so I work round that. This weblog doesn’t exist solely because of PZ Myers, but it is part of a diverse ecosystem. I’m happy it’s that way. I’d hate to be writing Pharyngula II, but this site would be a different place if Pharyngula didn’t exist. So would many others like the Digital Cuttlefish, which is another site I’d highly recommend if you’re interested in writing.

In turn I’m told this weblog has influenced others. Like any good ecosystem there’s a series of interactions in food web, and some parts are subtly connected to others in ways that are not obvious. That doesn’t mean that because my weblog exists Pharyngula is a Good Thing. I know someone two three⁺ people who deeply dislike this weblog. However, it does mean that simplistic statements about social effects are opinions rather than being remotely close to facts. It becomes even more difficult to say if you consider the public as a diverse group in their own right who may respond to the same message in different ways.

I can say that PZ Myers one of many people who has caused my writing to improve, It’s possible that if he never existed I’d still think it’s a wonderful life, but I’d need evidence for that rather than an assertion.

⁺I’m tempted to apply for membership of one of those tribes which doesn’t recognise any higher numbers and just describes them as many.

What shape did the ancient Greeks think the world was? Usually the answer is to look in philosophy texts. It’s been suggested that Thales thought the world was flat and floated on water. His (possible) pupil, Anaximander, thought the world was drum-shaped and that people lived on the of the flat sides. The drum, he said, floated in the centre of the universe. Anaximenes, the next philosopher at Miletos went back to a flat earth, floating on air. The problem was solved when Pythagoras decided the world must be round some time around the late sixth century BC. So that’s that. Or is it?

There’s a couple of problems with this. One is that the written sources aren’t the philosophers themselves. They’re later records of what other philosophers thought they said. Or what later philosophers wanted other people to think they said. There’s a question of where they got their information from. They certainly could have had access to the original writings. That might have been difficult for Pythagoras though, who was head of something like a secret society. The best sources on Pythagoras we have are from the 3rd century AD, about a eight centuries after he lived. There was also a habit in the ancient world of sticking an older philsopher’s name on your book. Like today old wisdom was often much more respected than new.

Another reason to be sceptical is that these were philosophers. They were at the cutting edge of thought, which doesn’t mean that hicks in the fields would have been up-to-date with cosmological thought, or believed it. For example Pythagoras’ idea of a round earth would be considered dangerously modern in some parts of Texas. Don “Someone has to stand up to the experts” McLeroy prefers an older text for his thought. Likewise what would your less-educated ancient Greek think?

A possible answer can be found in Herodotus’ History. In his introduction he makes it clear he was writing for a similar audience to those who listened to the epics. In this section he’s describing a raid against giant gold-digging ants in northern India, or possibly what is now Afghanistan.

Now in these parts the sun is hottest in the morning, not at midday as elsewhere, but from sunrise to the hour of market-closing. Through these hours it is much hotter than in Hellas at noon, so that men are said to sprinkle themselves with water at this time.
 
At midday the sun’s heat is nearly the same in India as elsewhere. As it goes to afternoon, the sun of India has the power of the morning sun in other lands; as day declines it becomes ever cooler, until at sunset it is exceedingly cold.

Herodotus, III.104.2-3

That doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot of discussion about how far Herodotus travelled to confirm things, but it’s clear he never visited India. Like everywhere else in the world, it’s the mid-day sun that’s the hottest.

The only way it could make sense would be if India were a lot closer to the Sun in the morning than at midday or the afternoon. India is to the east of Greece, but that would only make a difference if Herodotus was using a flat world as his model. Of course, if the world were flat, and India near the edge, then it would fry in the morning before cooling as the Sun receded through the day. Without him explicitly saying it, it would seem Herodotus is describing a flat earth. He was writing towards the end of the fifth century BC, so that would suggest that the spherical earth model hadn’t made much impact with the average person by then.

There’s no doubt philosophers were making steps forward in understanding the universe, but Herodotus shows that if you want to understand how the average Greek understood the world you need to look a bit beyond that.

There was an extremely interesting paper in a recent edition of Antiquity, Rocks, views, soils and plants at the temples of ancient Greece by Gregory J. Retallack. He’s been looking at the topographical setting of Greek temples, along with their orientations and the local geology. What he’s concluded is that if you want to understand Greek temples you need to get to grips with the local soils. Along the way he dismisses an idea which is pretty central to my thesis, so bear in mind the commentary below may be tainted with my own bias.

As it happens if I want to dismiss Retallack’s work then I’ve got quite a task. He’s examined eighty-four classical Greek temples, eighty-three in Greece and one in Paphos, Cyprus and examined the soils associated with the temples. This is an extremely good idea, and I’m surprised that someone hasn’t done it before. Geology might me easily overlooked, but soil is essential for agriculture. In the case of the development of farming in Europe it initially spread over löss soils as part of a package we call the Linearbandkeramik Culture. Retallack shows that the ancient Greeks were keenly aware of various types of soil and their properties. So looking for correlations between cults and soils is a worthwhile project.

What must then have been a large amount of work is tabulated into about a page and a half of results, though there are extensive supplementary materials. Along with the deity and the location there’s also the geology, topography, soil and vegetation. He notes that there’s no real record of climate change for Greece so the natural vegetation should be inferable from modern observations. If you’re wondering what the difference between geology and soil is, the geology refers to the bedrock and the soil is what overlays it. Bedrocks don’t uniformly underlie the same soils. From all of this he’s able to conclude that certain soils tend to be associated with certain gods.

The soil type which should come as least surprise to anyone is that Hades isn’t associated with a soil at all, but rather rock. Hades is god of the underworld, and his sanctuary at Cape Tainaron, Laconia, is in a sea cave while his sanctuary at the brilliantly named Necromanteion, Epirus, is on a rocky hill-top. What you want from Hades site is a connection with the underworld, so rocky crevices which plunge into the bowels of the earth are just the sort of thing you’re looking for. As I recall there’s a Plutonium (another brilliant name) in Hierapolis, Turkey, built over a geological fault which emits noxious gases, so that seems perfectly sound. He also attributes Persephone to rock crevices, and this is something I’m a bit more wary of.

From the table, the attribution makes sense. It also makes mythological sense. Hades abducted Persephone and took her to the underworld to be his wife. So the queen of the underworld should be associated with rock crevices. However, Persephone isn’t just associated with Hades. She was also the daughter of Demeter and with her she was a vegetation fertility goddess. She was only said to spend a third of the year with Hades. This was acknowledged by the Greeks who didn’t just make temples to Demeter but also to Demeter and Persephone. None of the temples listed by Retallack have this shared attribute in the main paper, which seems a bit odd. On the other hand there is a mention of a sacred grove of Demeter and Kore (another name for Persephone) at Cabirion, Boeotia. This might matter because often the reporting of the dedications of temples can be quite poor. I recently read a paper which attributed Temple F in Agrigento to Juno Lacinia, even though it’s been known for a century that this attribution is wrong. Names have a tendency of sticking. I don’t think this is a serious problem, but it does suggest where more research could be done.

The other factor I find problematic is that Retallack says that the idea that Greek temples faced sunrise on the feast day of their god is falsified by the data he’s collected. I can’t recall Scully saying that this was universal, though I’ll concede Richer may have. The reason I think Retallack is wrong comes from the same data in the table. Where he can discern an orientation, he divides the temples into eight categories for the eight major compass directions. If there was a random scatter then, of the forty-two temples he has directions for, you’d expect around six to face east, as opposed to any of the other seven directions. There might be a few more or less, but the chances of getting more than ten facing east by random chance are around 100-1. In fact from that sample set over half, twenty-six, face east. That doesn’t mean that an astronomical orientation was essential for a temple, but it does indicate a strong bias. Again, rather than undermining Retallack’s case, I think it potentially makes it more interesting.

If we do have a bias to point temples towards the range of sunrise, then we can start asking what’s special about the temples where there isn’t this bias. In the case of the temples in the north-east and south-east categories they may still be facing the extremes of sunrise. The temples of Apollo at Ptoon, Boeotia and Dionysos, Eretria, Euboea, the two temples from the survey which can definitely be said to face west, clearly cannot be facing sunrise. In the case of the temple of Dionysos at Eretria, the temple is on a creek floodplain, in Xeroll. If, like me you haven’t a clue was xeroll is, it’s the sort of soil associated with pastures. Retallack explains that because it’s stable and fertile with a mix of acid and alkaline earths. It’s the sort of soil you’d want for grain, associated with Demeter or the sort of grapes which the ancient Greeks used to make wine, beloved of Dionysos. Knowing that, we can see one reason why the temple was built where it was, but can also start asking other questions? Was there no suitable land in Eretria to use that would have allowed an easterly alignment? There may have been, the temple of Apollo there faced south-east. So what was the temple of Dionysos looking towards? Why wasn’t the temple dedicated to Demeter, who is associated with xerolls too? Retallack isn’t shutting down discussion but instead opening up new opportunities.

Another example would be Artemis. Temples of Artemis are associated with Xerept and Orthent soils. Xerept is a thin rocky soil and Orthent is what you get when Xerept is eroded and there’s hardly any soil at all. Retallack limits discussion to the nature of the soils themselves. That’s a shame because it is worth contrasting with Cole’s recent discussion of Artemis in her book Landscapes, gender, and ritual space. Cole says that Artemis is goddess of boundary places. She’s found in the mountains, but in the mountain passes rather than at peak sanctuaries. In the ancient Greek world the boundaries would be in the mountains and where the soil was poor. If that’s the case then the association between Artemis and Xerepts at peripheries could also make her the natural choice for Xerepts in more central locations. I’d accept that Brauron isn’t the most central location in Attica, but at the same time it’s not hugely out of the way. It’s very convenient if you travel along the coast. Despite this, Brauron was an important sanctuary for Artemis. Retallack, who states that Brauron is built on Xerept, may have opened up the possibility of explaining why the site was connected with that particular goddess.

The other way that Retallack is opening discussion is that he published his paper in Antiquity. This might seem obvious, but if you want to change the way archaeologists think about something, you have to put your ideas in a place where archaeologists will read them. Not everyone does this. My favourite example is a paper from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, ‘Stonehenge: a view from medicine‘ by Anthony M. Perks and Darlene Marie Bailey. Whether that paper is right or wrong is irrelevant, because any researcher looking for papers on Stonehenge is going to be looking in the archaeological literature. Similarly Retallack could have chosen to place his paper in a Soil Science journal where it could be seen by his colleagues. Instead it looks like he wants his work to make a difference. Kudos are due to Antiquity too, who could have simply turned down the paper as not being archaeology. Instead they’ve produced something which is clearly relevant to non-geologists and still produced the materials and diagrams of soil profiles that people who want to more closely at the work will need.

I’m not convinced it’s a universal solution for all Greek temples. In the case of somewhere like Selinunte there’s temples to (probably) Hera and a temple to Apollo and either Athena or Artemis within a few yards of each other. In the case of the many towns which had just the one temple in contrast it could well explain why they dedicated their temple to one particular deity, like Aphrodite at Akrai or Demeter at Eloro.

For another opinion on Retallack’s work, George Monbiot has beaten me by about three and a half years.

Tony Keen has been casting a critical eye over the recent ancient astronomy stories which have been making the headlines recently. I half disagree with him, but I think he asks serious questions and his conclusions certainly aren’t unfair.

First off he raises questions about the recent ‘dating the Odyssey by an eclipse’ story. I think he’s right about this, it’s really not a viable piece of work. The thing that bothers me is that while the authors say there are some major assumptions, the one they seem to have ignored is the existence of a singular Homer. If the Odyssey is a patchwork of tales then dating is futile anyway. The return of the Odysseus could be from an earlier tale. For instance it’s been noticed that the Iliad borrows some metaphors from Gilgamesh. We only know that because we have both texts, which means even if something only appears in “Homer’s” work, we can’t be sure the original author was Homer.

The other thing is that it loses some of the meaning of an eclipse. The Sun and Moon are not isolated astronomical bodies in this period. They’re divine but also entwined with activity on Earth. An eclipse of the Sun is a a sign that something is anomalous with the cosmos. This could explain how Odysseus gets to slaughter a lot of people and remain a hero. The normal rules of the universe were suspended.

It’s points to a wider problem, in that PNAS is not a minor publication, but I’d be surprised if it had passed peer-review from a classicist. If it has that’s, marvellous news for me. I’ve got plenty of ideas which really wouldn’t stand rigorous scrutiny which I’d like to shift into publication. If it hasn’t then in what sense is the journal meaningfully peer-reviewed? This is not just a problem specific to PNAS. You can flip this back to Classics/Archaeology journals too.

Now if I write this up as an article should I give a couple of examples? I have one from archaeology which says individuals are fractals without explaining how you’d calculate the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension of an individual. I’ve another classics article which says that Chaos Theory says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. This is 100% true. Neither does Delia Smith’s “How to Cook” for exactly the same reason. Neither are theological works.*

So what how do you evaluate interdisciplinary work? I think interdisciplinary peer-review is a start. I also think you have to seriously get to grips with David Whitley’s arguments for post-positivism. This is why I have a lot more time for Donald Olson’s work on re-dating Caesar’s landing in Britain.

First off it would help to have a bit of context. This work fits in with the kind of thing thing Donald Olson’s been doing for Sky and Telescope for a few years. He looks at the veracity of astronomical records of historical events and how well they fit with modern calculations. Now, I’d agree with Tony that the calendar is a mess in this period. I think there’s reason to give it some consideration though because of how Olson is connecting the loose dating with the astronomy and the tides.

In the case of the tides, the equinocital tides are unusually high, which is his starting point. It has to be before the equinox because it’s in the last days of summer, and the phases of the moon allow you to point more at some dates than others. If that was it I wouldn’t be impressed, but Olson always goes that extra step. For many people doing ‘interdisciplinary’ work it’s enough if they haven’t found something in the field outside their expertise that contradicts them. Olson in contrast actively reads round the work of historians to see if there’s independent corroboration for his work, rather than just pulling facts from the stars. That’s a big step up from “I haven’t found anything which contradicts my claims”.

I can also sympathise with Tony’s lack of astonishment at the minor shift in date. Ancient Historians are so used to not even knowing what month events occurred in that a shift of a few days is not going to uproot many long-held beliefs. In Olson’s defence I’d say that context is important here. The work is appearing in Sky and Telescope. It’s a good magazine, but it’s a hobbyist’s magazine, and that hobby is astronomy. That’s who Olson is pitching his work at. However there could be a use. Olson’s work would suggest that Collingwood’s reading of the Gallic Wars is better in this case than the reading of others. That means we have some more reason to favour Collingwood over other interpreters when looking at other Latin texts.

In the longer term I think Olson’s work can show how dicey some accepted ancient dates are. That is a problem for me, because life would be so much easier if I could pin down dates for the battles at Thermopylae and Salamis. More usefully it shows that multiple routes of interrogation are necessary if you’re serious about interdisciplinary work, rather than a simple hypothesis-test postivist approach.

*If we’re moving to citation indices in the Humanities then I can cite any non-theological piece of work. Should I cite the highest bidder? Do I hear a packet of chocolate buttons?