Alun Salt / Flickr

The Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi. Nothing to see here.

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a paper for a couple of years. Every so often Stephen Hawking will announce that contact with an extra-terrestrial civilisation would be a Very Bad Thing. Therefore silence, or as close to it as possible is a good idea. It’s not just Stephen Hawking, many other people agree. Hawking makes the point that contact from Europe to other regions hasn’t gone well for the natives since 1492. I think this is a better argument than “Aliens are scary”, but I think he’s using the wrong analogy. There is room for a paper that takes another view. There’s a couple of reasons I haven’t pushed on with it.

The main reason is that I’ve not been clear about where the paper could be published. Ok, Hawking hasn’t published his belief as a paper either, but he’s a famous physicist. Famous physicists are presumed not only to be experts on Physics, but all sciences, pseudosciences, etc. I can’t claim this expertise. If I’m going to say anything meaningful I should at least have it scrutinised. This is the second problem. It would be weird if my position were unequivocally correct, particularly as we have no data at all on extra-terrestrial contact — unless you consider the Mars nano-bacteria that were announced and then dismissed as a trial run. I could rely on reviewers to pick up obvious errors or blind spots, but there’s surely a better way to fix problems before submitting to a journal with some collaboration.

I am part of a group of people who were applying to have a blog hosted somewhere. I think that’s very likely to not happen. I’ve been quiet here, partly because of a broken arm and partly with a pile up of work that I need to sort through because it’s been delayed by my arm. It’s a shame because the site has a big audience, but maybe not too big a shame as this site has a quality audience. What I’m interested in now is if a collaborative or even massively collaborative paper could be written and how could it work.

Before even discussing tools there’s an issue over direction. As I said at the start, I think Stephen Hawking is wrong. You might think he’s right. He may even be right even if the method he got there was wrong. One of the inspirations for this approach is Timothy Gowers’ collaborative approach to solving mathematical problems. He pulled together a group of people to tackle a problem for a couple of years that he alone could not solve. The problem was solved in seven weeks by a method that came as a surprise to him. I can see how that can demonstrably work. In the case of this paper, the sample is zero, and the result is (expected to be) a counter-opinion. Without a reality check is it possible to write such a paper with open collaboration?

Alan Cann has used another method. He put up a paper for open peer review. I think it was a clever idea and I could do the same. My worry here is that some of the analogies will be outside my period and I think there could be very good and insightful comments from people who say, “No, you’ve got this wrong. You should be looking at…” In my opinion this makes the paper better and it’s worth author credit. If you give the person credit then to an extent you torpedo the claim that the paper is pre-reviewed because to some extent it’s self-reviewed.

I’m trying to think of a workable solution, and you’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong about this too.

I think I should put up the first draft of the paper, probably on Google Docs. I prefer DokuWiki, but leaving it open for comments and editing could leave it wrecked. For the people who leave substantial comments which can be positive or negative, but also indicate a direction to go forward with the paper, I offer co-authorship. I close the paper from public view and we write and re-write until it’s ready to go to a journal that’s either OA or happy to have an arXiv pre-print up. The gamble here is that enough people will see the call to review the first draft that it generates a sensible amount of feedback to improve it.

Ideally, I’d like to have a system that can re-used so that I can use it for general history or archaeology papers as well as odd ones like this. The reason for choosing this topic as the test subject is that it’s doesn’t matter that much to me if it gets massively delayed and it will very neatly highlight some areas where I am emphatically not an expert and that collaboration could be useful.

Sound at Stonehenge

I’m currently working with a group of bloggers on a site to be launched somewhere in the next few months. I’m not sure where yet. One of the features of the site is an informal rule that we won’t comment on news till at least seven days have passed from making the headlines. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

We’re all busy. Chasing the news is work and takes time. If we get stopped before we can finish it could be a while before we pick up the story again. In the meantime hot news has become old cold news and the key points have already been said a dozen times by everyone else. The post gets spiked and the time is wasted. Intentionally planning for a longer cycle changes how you approach a story and gives you not just the story to analyse but also the reaction too. In the case of the Stonehenge acoustics story the reaction is more interesting than the base story itself.

As a reminder Stephen Waller presented a talk at a meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver. In it he proposed that the design of Stonehenge was related to auditory interference patterns between the sound of two flutes being played. Andy Burnham points out the obvious problem in his comment.

“Waller rigged two flutes to an air pump so they played the same note continuously” OK, fine, so how on earth is this relevant to the practicalities of an ancient society? In order to get strong, static cancellations in the sound you would need equal and unvarying sound pressure levels from each instrument, and for the sources to be from the same two points in space. How precisely would two flute players do this in practice without an air pump? ie having to take breaths and carry on this trick for any length of time. This is utter nonsense.

Andy Burnham is pretty much gold in this thread. In reaction to the idea this sound could be achieved by circular breathing, he also adds:

I don’t thin circular breathing is the answer — it’s pretty difficult on low resistance wind instruments such as the flute. Didgeridoos and suchlike won’t exhibit this effect — you need a high frequency pure tone — as close to a sine wave as possible — ie a flute. Bagpipes wouldn’t work either, unless someone invented some sort of ‘flute bagpipes’. A reedy bagpipe sound is rich in harmonics. The harmonic frequencies from the two instruments won’t create standing wave cancellations in the same places in space as the fundamental tones, so you won’t get same strong cancellation effect. And as I said you also need two fixed amplitudes and closely fixed point sources for the effect to work.

Sound is a difficult subject for archaeologists. Flutes or pipes seem likely, as to drums, but the closest prehistoric musical instruments, that I know archaeologists have found, are lurs from Denmark. These date to around the 8th century BC and survived because they were bronze, not organic material like wood or bone. You can see them in the logo for Lurpak butter. It’s been a while since I’ve read about this, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t now something older known. There are a couple of candidates for bone flutes that are older, this is the most promising artefact, but I don’t know how widely accepted they are yet.

Even though there’s scant evidence for music in the Neolithic and Bronze Age British Isles, it’s an odd leap to say it didn’t exist. Music in some form seems to be a constant in human society, so this is where a minimalist approach breaks down. But it’s not just musical instruments that are missing. I suspect a lot of Stonehenge is missing too.
Bits of it have broken off and it’s easy to spot where stones were missing but refilling these gaps, as many reconstructions do, doesn’t go far enough for me. The stones are the skeleton of Stonehenge. We don’t know if they were the whole body. We do know that the skeleton was a lot of work. The hard sarsen stones are crafted like wood, with tenon and mortice joints. Archaeologists currently believe that the bluestones were transported from far Wales. In light of this what else would have been at a living Stonehenge?

If you visit places of worship in modern times, there’s a bit more than stone. There’s wooden seats, often decorated rather than plain. The walls are painted, windows often decorated. It’s not unusual to find holy books n plush velvet cushions and textiles dyed in striking colours drawing the eye here and there. We also know textiles were used in Neolithic and Bronze Age times. So after the thousands of man-hours shaping the stones, how likely is it that Gareth turned to Shane and said: “That’s that done. No point in wasting time decorating it with tartans or drapes. That’ll just be tedious and gaudy.”?

Once you add textiles into Stonehenge the acoustic and visual properties change. There are many arguments that “If you look out of this gap you can see this star,” but you can’t if Blodwyn’s nifty ethnic rug is in the way. As scientists archaeologists need a minimalist model of Stonehenge as a foundation to build on, but this minimalist model is an unfinished work. It’s a tool to build an idea of what Stonehenge looked like on. If you’re going to say that it’s the finished model and we don’t need textiles, then all reconstructions should show anyone there naked because there’s no evidence for the clothes people wore there either.

As Andy Burnham pointed out, Steven Waller’s approach misses the practical use of Stonehenge by ancient peoples, and in this case adding people into the past makes Waller’s proposal either unworkable or an astonishing Jenga tower of special pleading. It’s safe to say I’m unconvinced, but I’ve not been too impressed with some of the reactions to the story either. “Crank’ seemed a common opinion, If Steven Waller were a crank then by presenting his work at a scientific conference he’s still closer to professional practice than archaeologists who issue a press release now before a talk in a few months time.

In fact a browse of his website shows he’s not likely to be a crank, just terribly unaware of the differences in approach between US and UK prehistory.

The bulk of his work is on rock art at American petroglyph sites. The acoustics of rock art in the US is a new field, but producing some interesting results. Some archaeologists are finding archaeoacoustics much more intriguing than, to pick a random example, archaeoastronomy. But American prehistory is different to British prehistory. They have a richer rock art record, especially in the southwest. They also have ethnographic records and research that can help connect meaning to symbols. It’s not perfect, and I’d like to debunk one interpretation of a site this summer, but it’s very very different to the limited things we can say about rock art here. It means that Waller’s American work can rely on cultural information that we simply don’t have here. What is accepted by US archaeologists about US sites is extremely speculative when applied to UK sites.

Very few people have commented on work around archaeoacoustics in general in relation to this story. A few commenters have mentioned Deveraux’s work, but mainly the thrust has been this story must be debunked. I don’t think for a moment archaeologists have consciously decided the outsider must be expelled, but I wonder if an eagerness to portray this as nonsense indicates something more. Subconsciously does rejecting Waller as nonsense and the opposite of what you do mentally reaffirm that your own theories must therefore by default be sound reasoning?

For something more positive about how sound can be explored in archaeology, Alan Boyle has written an interesting piece on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

Achill-henge. Photo by Seequinn

It’s good to see Achill-henge being picked up by the BBC. This is a story that’s been around for a while. I think RTÉ’s video report is accessible worldwide. The BBC just has a webpage that’s an introduction to the story. You can also listen to the radio programme (worldwide I think) with the relevant segment at 6m04s.

It’s not a bad story, but from an archaeological point of view it misses the most interesting things. Firstly building this ertsatz archaeological site may have damaged a real site. Usually before construction there will be test digs to check the construction won’t destroy something of historical importance. Achill is an extremely sensitive archaeological site. There’s a long running field school there because it has such a rich archaeological record. If you’re a fan of prehistoric remains, it seems a bit mad to risk destroying one to make a copy.

The second thing is the template chosen for the site. It’s Stonehenge. It’s a shoddy Stonehenge as anyone who’s been there could tell you, but it’s clearly a ring of trilithons. You don’t get those in Ireland. There’s a romantic ideal that the prehistoric British Isles were all Celtic but, as we learn more about sites, it’s becoming clear that there are distinctive differences in traditions around the islands.

Tomnaverie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack

This is Tomnaverie Recumbent Stone Circle. The recumbent bit is the low stone in the middle, flanked by two tall stones. There’s plenty of stone circles like this around Aberdeenshire, but you don’t get so many of them anywhere else. There is a possible astronomical alignment. These circles tend to be set up so that the summer full moon appears to roll across the top of the recumbent stone every 18 years or so, due to the way the Moon’s orbit wobbles.

Drombeg Recumbent Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter

This is Drombeg Recumbent Stone Circle. It’s compact and tidy, but the tallest stones are on the opposite side to the recumbent stone. This is more typical of Irish circles. The tall stones can be seen as a deliberate a portal for entry. The astronomical alignments are different for Irish circles. They tend to be facing south-westish and this could be an alignment to winter solstice sunset.

Even though they look similar, these stone circles could be telling us very different things about belief. If we trust the patterns emerging from studying groups of monuments, not just the ones we like, then they’re almost opposites. The key event in Scotland seems to happen with the Moon in summer. In Ireland they’re looking to the Sun in winter.

There’s an ongoing argument about whether summer sunrise or winter sunset was more important at Stonehenge. I favour winter sunset, but to some extent this is just as reflective of how you view prehistoric life as it is about the data. In addition there’s plenty of evidence showing that Stonehenge was repeatedly remodelled, including a possible shift from lunar to solar alignments.

In any event whatever the tradition was at Stonehenge it’s a massive leap to think what happened there was reflective of beliefs across the Irish Sea. Stonehenge is so embedded as an iconic brand for prehistoric archaeology in the British Isles, that British prehistory is now colonising perceptions of what a prehistoric Ireland would look like.

I don’t know to what extent that’s a good thing. Modern states are recent inventions, and some archaeologists will cringe at the idea of a prehistoric Ireland or UK. Recognising modern boundaries don’t apply to the past is a sensible feature. At the same time an appealing common past does risk losing some of what makes places locally distinctive.

Photos:
Achill-henge. Photo by Seequin. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC licence.
Tomnaverie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.
Drombeg Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY licence.

That doesn’t make sense I know. There are a lot of people who haven’t heard of Hevelius, but if you have heard of Hevelius, then the idea that people haven’t heard of him seems nonsense because his work is everywhere in astronomy.

Scutum in the Uranographia by Hevelius. Source: Wikipedia.

Everyone’s happy that most constellations are ancient, but what is less well-known is that not every star was in a constellation. There were gaps between constellations filled with faint and boring stars. These were called αμορφοι amorphoi or unformed stars by the Greeks. This is no good if you want to do science, because things like comets don’t stick to the interesting parts of the sky. That’s why mapping was so important in the Renaissance. In the case of Hevelius, his maps were so useful that he formed seven constellations that stay with us to this day.

I’ll admit constellations like Lacerta or Vulpecula aren’t famous constellations, but he was working with the haps between constellations. The fact that his charts were made of constellations visible in Europe shows he was working in a highly competitive space.

It’s easy to take this kind of work for granted. The output can be seen as an uncontested fact, but Thony’s post put’s Hevelius’s work into the context of its time including the often intense scientific rivalry between astronomer defending personal and national status.

The also shows that while with hindsight it seems obvious that telescopes would bring more accurate measurements, at any given time in history it’s not always obvious that new technology is The Next Big Thing, it could be a distraction or Expensive Dead End.

Loss of HMS Victory, 4 October 1744 by Peter Monamy

The HMS Victory (not that one) is set to be recovered according to the BBC and many other sites. You could say speed. Archaeology is an enormously inefficient of robbing graves. These days archaeologists can take years to study one barrow (an earth mound marking a burial) while in the 18th century aristocrats used to go on picnics and have the workmen open up one or two in an afternoon for gold.

There is a deeper reason.

Archaeologists are so slow because they want to say something about the people who live there. There’s a great Paul Bahn line: Archaeology is not about finding things, it’s about finding things out. Obviously finding things out is easier if you find artefacts with people and that’s why sudden disasters are great from an archaeological point of view.

It doesn’t stop a disaster site effectively being a grave. If you’re genuinely interested in finding out about people, it’s would be odd if you didn’t give a damn about their grave. Digging up a site is effectively destroying it.* If you’re going to do that you’ll want to go slowly and make sure that the story you can tell about this person’s life is a better memorial than the one he or she already has.

The news stories this weekend are all about finding the ship, along with a brief mention of the up to £500 million value of gold on board. What they don’t mention is that the UK government has sanctioned the recovery in exchange for 20% of that. Is the government more interested in the treasure, or has it developed a keen interest in archaeology so that, as Lord Lingfield says: “We hope it will give a unique insight into the world of the mid-18th century Royal Navy.”

The answer can be found in this story from October 2011 in the Daily Mail.

Odyssey said yesterday the UK government was ‘desperately looking for new sources of income’ and was urging it to find more British wrecks. It is also investigating HMS Sussex, lost off Gibraltar with 10 tons of gold in 1694, and HMS Victory, a precursor to Nelson’s flagship.

There are thousands of deserted medieval villages in the UK. In the 21st century the biggest defence any burials in them have have against feeding bankers is that the financial payoff of cracking them open is too low.

*Not hyperbolae. It’s recognised by professional archaeologists then if you dig up something it’s not going to be there for someone else to dig. +Kris Hirst collects quotes on her site, and a great one from Kent Flannery is: “Archeology is the only branch of anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them.”

There’s a checklist from the Apollo XIII mission owned(?) by Jim Lovell. It’s an interesting puzzle from an astro-heritage point of view and something I’ve not given any thought to at all. In fact there’s two puzzles. One is legal ownership and the other is what heritage value does it have and neither question is connected much. The only connection I see is that if there is no heritage value then people won’t get worked up too much about the ownership.

Jim Lovell discovers he got back to Earth safely thanks to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Photo: NASA.

I get the impression NASA would have been within their rights to claim ownership, but if they allowed astronauts to keep mementos, then that’s their mistake. I’m surprised that a checklist with crucial calculations was discarded from a failed mission, but I don’t know the exact circumstances of how Jim Lovell got to keep it, but it seems NASA wasn’t that heritage aware at the time.

At the same time I don’t know what heritage value it has. Heritage value isn’t the same as historical or archaeological value. While the calculations are historically important, is the paper that holds them necessary to understand the history of the trip?

What I can see is that there’s a big emotional hit with the artefact. Seeing the authentic artefact puts you vicariously in a position of being in deep trouble in deep space. The emotional value is nothing to be sneered at. It’s part of being human and it’s going to play a part in discussions whether you directly address it or not. A sensible conclusion is going to have to deal with the emotional and experiential side of the checklist.

For those who think the answer is obvious, this is tax-payer funded material therefore the tax-payer owns it, here’s another puzzle. Suppose an Apollo astronaut gets paid to endorse Moon Juice a new fizzy sugar-laden drink. The only reason he is getting the job is because tax-payers funded him to go to the moon. Does that mean that the tax-payers should get the fee and not the astronaut? It’s not an exact analogy, this is a material artefact. Yet if it’s an artefact that was going to be discarded by NASA it wrong for an astronaut to own it, or is it a better solution that nobody owns it? Should Mitchell’s camera have been left on the Moon where no one could access it?

I don’t see an obvious answer that satisfies everyone. Another good piece by +Amy Shira Teitel.

The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank

This has been on my ‘to-blog-about’ list for years. On the one side there’s the artistic effect, which you can debate. I get the impression HDR is a personal taste, so telling people it’s the right or wrong way seems pointless to me. In my view my early HDR stuff was poor. In particular it was often over-saturated so I could see what was happening (I have odd colour vision). These days if I can can do something I want without HDR I will, and I find adjusting the white and black points is often enough for what I want, but when it isn’t a light touch in Photomatix can make a big and subtle difference

The other side is that it can have practical uses in something like archaeology. I have seen too many photos of pitch-black church interiors. HDR can provide a much better impression of what the human eye sees than the limited dynamic range of a camera because you can expose the shot for a wider range of light and shadow. The alternative is to bring a massive lighting rig along with you, and that’s not practical.

I know some people think this is bad because it’s manipulating the photograph and therefore not a ‘true record’. They’re right it isn’t ‘true’. But the auto function on a camera isn’t neutral. It makes its own judgements on what the settings should be. The difference is that these settings are often hidden from the user when they’re made, so it’s harder to see what assumptions are being built in. Just because you can’t see the manipulation of settings happening doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

I don’t ever see the same angst about reality in archaeological illustration though. I think a lot of archaeologists will laugh if you say the camera never lies, but I think there’s a bias to believing that cameras can be neutral. Maybe with photos looking so much closer to reality we subconsciously insist deviations from reality are flaws not art.

So first up, I still think it’s a bad title. Not because it’s smug, but because the book is the opposite. It’s warm, endearing and very human. The author is also extremely well-placed to write the book because there was indeed a rash of planets discovered, and he was the guy who assembled the team responsible for them, including Quaoar, Sedna, Xena and the moon Gabrielle which are now officially named Eris and Dysnomia. Basically if it’s a distant body in the solar system that I’ve heard of, it’s likely that Mike Brown discovered it.

This could have so easily been a book purely about number-crunching, programming and extremely faint dots on photographic slides. He’s also included a lot about his family life, especially the birth of his daughter. A quick skim of the reviews on Amazon show that some people hate this. They have an opinion that Science is pure logic devoid of emotion. I blame Spock. In contrast I think it’s very important. It shows how science is a human activity. The removal of Pluto from the planets wasn’t done in isolation, it was part of a very human desire to explore.

The importance of humanity’s relationship to planets comes through very early. More or less straight away he points out that people recognised planets long before they had professional astronomers. He also notices that there’s very little evidence of planetshock the first time a planet was discovered since ancient times. If you’d asked me before I read this book I would have said it was Uranus that was the first planet discovered since antiquity in 1781. I would have been wrong.

Though planets were so deeply embedded into many aspects of everyday life, there is no recording of the public reaction to the first and most significant shock to the word planet. In the sixteenth century the idea began to spread that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the universe and that the earth and the planets revolved around it. Suddenly, the wanderers were in disarray. Instead of the sun and the moon and the other planets revolving around the earth, five of them (the planets) went around one of them (the sun), while the seventh (the moon) went around the earth. The earth, like five of the wanderers, also went around the sun.

Once you have a heliocentric system Earth has to be a planet. I’m kicking myself for not realising that. With hindsight it’s obvious, though you can see why the discovery of Earth as a planet wasn’t a big trauma in itself. He also tackles the minor planets like Ceres and Pallas and their quiet demotion into asteroids.

None of this is done with a sense of “how stupid people were for not knowing this”. Instead I get a sense that Mike Brown believes that people were using the word planet in a way that was useful to them at the time. Likewise with more recent astronomers he’s happy to give credit to their work. Where he has been able to go further he’s acknowledged that he has had the benefit of living at a time with techniques like computer analysis that weren’t available to earlier astronomers. At one point he argues that Clyde Tombaugh could have seen Eris, were it not for Eris being at the far point of its orbit.

He also tackles the controversy over the discovery of Haumea. At the time I got the vague impression that a slow team of astronomers had missed a planet in their data and, when it was publicly released, another team analysed the data and found it. Neither side of the dispute claim that’s what happened, so I was utterly wrong there. Mike Brown explains why he delayed announcing the discovery of Haumea. At the top of the post I said Sedna was bigger than Pluto. It isn’t. Its much more shiny, and that’s why it was thought to be bigger. Mike Brown’s team were taking nine months from discovery to publication and it was when the codename for the planet was released that it was discoverable in a Google search on some telescope logs. This also explains why Xena was rush announced and partly my confusion over exactly what was and was not discovered.

The book closes with the vote in Prague to say there are eight planets in the solar system. From what I heard of the meeting the event was chaotic, so he does an excellent job finding a narrative to follow. It also explains the awful ‘dwarf planet’ term. The first vote was to demote Pluto to a ‘dwarf planet’ which is not a planet. It makes no sense until he then says there was an amendment to call the 8 planets ‘classical planets’, which is another awful term. If that second vote had passed then Pluto would have been smuggled back as a planet. So the reason we have ‘dwarf planets’ that are not planets is a botched job at a compromise.

He also argues that the definition of a planet itself doesn’t matter that much. The definition, he argues, isn’t about what is a planet, more an explanation of why Pluto isn’t a planet — even if it’s a bad explanation. Instead he argues that concepts are more important rather than definitions that wannabe lawyers can wrestle with.

The language is accessible. You’re not going to be able to discover your own planet after reading this book, but you’ll have a better impression of what life is like when researching. For example there’s this:

Looking at vastly more sky than anyone else had ever looked at for large objects out in the Kuiper belt was so immensely exciting that I could hardly contain myself. I knew that there would be big discoveries, and having new pictures come in night after night after night with only a break for the full moon kept everything at a constant peak. I talked to my friends about new planets. I thought about names for new planets. I gave lectures about the possibility of new planets. I did everything I could, except find new planets.

I think that failure to make any progress on what you’re sure is an exciting project is familiar to most researchers.

With the IAU’s poor handling of Pluto, it’s easy to see how this could have been a dreadful book. I still think the title is going to put a lot of people off. Is it really going to appeal to Plutophiles? That’s a shame because inside the covers is one of the most likeable books I’ve read for a long while. It’s definitely worth a read when the paperback comes out.

You can read some of the book in excerpts at Mike Brown’s blog.

The Bible. Photo by Patrick Feller.

There’s a kerfuffle over a new translation of the Bible into Jamaican Patois that has helped throw what bothers me about the British Prime Minister, David Cameron’s, embrace of Christian values into sharp relief.

David Cameron has recently given a speech celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Some of this I like. For example:

…[T]he King James Bible has bequeathed a body of language that permeates every aspect of our culture and heritage from everyday phrases to our greatest works of literature, music and art. We live and breathe the language of the King James Bible, sometimes without even realising it.

It depends on how pedantic you want to be about this to say how true it is. There’s evidence that some common phrases attributed to the KJV are much older in some variants. Likewise I was going to give The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak Matthew 26:41 and Mark 14:38 as an example of something very biblical that often appears in secular speech, but if you follow those links you’ll see I’ve modernised it a bit. For example in Mark the phrase is actually: The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak.. Now you’d have to be an utter curmudgeon to deny that the King James Bible popularised the phrase, but equally translations move on because languages move on.

David Cameron picks another evocative phrase:

One of my favourites is the line “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” It is a brilliant summation of the profound sense that there is more to life, that we are imperfect, that we get things wrong, that we should strive to see beyond our own perspective. The key word is darkly – profoundly loaded, with many shades of meaning. I feel the power is lost in some more literal translations.

The New International Version says: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror”

The Good News Bible: “What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror”

They feel not just a bit less special but dry and cold, and don’t quite have the same magic and meaning.

The criticism of the Jamaican Bible is perhaps the opposite. Bishop Alvin Bailey, at the Portmore Holiness Church of God near Kingston, says: “I don’t think the Patois words can effectively communicate what the English words have communicated. Even those (Patois) words that we would want to use to fully explain what was in the original, are words that are vulgar.”

I’m not sure this is a fair criticism. Here’s the same verse in three translations See if you can guess which one is the KJV verse.

1. My lover tried to unlatch the door, and my heart thrilled within me.
2. My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my heart was moved for him.
3. My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

The passage is from the Song of Solomon 5:4.* One translation is — I’ll grant you — profoundly loaded, perhaps imparting a meaning that isn’t immediately obvious from the two other ‘literal’ translations. But I also think in modern terms it might be considered vulgar. When you look at what is in the Bible, I’m stuck wondering what vulgarity Patois inflicts that isn’t already there. I think something overlooked is the power of a translation.

I thought the first full translation of the Bible in the British Isles was William Morgan’s Welsh Bible, used to turn the Welsh away from Catholicism. I was wrong. A quick skim through Wikipedia shows me the Bishops’ Bible beat it by twenty years, and while the Geneva Bible wasn’t actually translated into English in the British Isles, it’s still an immensely important translation in the history of England. In these cases translation is a political and often rebellious act. The Geneva Bible was a Protestant translation and gave them a Bible with which to fight the Latin of Catholicism. The Bishops’ Bible was officially sanctioned so it’s hard to call it rebellious, but even so it was a Protestant Bible at a time when England was an enemy of strong Catholic power in Europe.

Translating a Bible into Jamaican Patois is a subtle, but strong, statement that current Christian authority has failed, at least to some degree. So what does a supporting an established translation against new versions mean? In the UK the government is sending an official Bible with a foreword by political heavyweight⁺ Michael Gove. The media concentrated on the predictable complaint by the National Secular Society and atheists, but even Christians are aware that official religions can take dissent badly. The pretence is that ethics are derived from the Bible, but as Conservapedia is showing, people make Bibles to suit their ethics.

While I can see there are aesthetic merits to various translations, in this case elevating one translation and disparaging others carries a big political payload, even if the judgement is aesthetic. It might be possible to turn the book of Habakkuk into a thrilling page turner, but it would probably involve some extremely loose translation. But is any church leader likely to say: “My favourite book is Jeffrey Archer’s translation of Habakkuk. It’s hugely inaccurate, but it’s gripping from start to end!”? It seems unlikely you can divorce aesthetics from truth unless you live in what Kelvin Holdsworth called a theologically neutral society.

Photo: Joshua 18, Abandoned Bible by Patrick Feller. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY licence.

* It’s well worth reading the biblical commentary for classic lines like: By the “door” is meant the door of her heart, which was in a great measure shut against Christ, through the prevalence of corruption; and the “hole” in it shows that it was not entirely shut up…

+ Or paperweight if you prefer.

The book is based on a real event. Ephialtes established the Athenian democracy (if you ignore Cleisthenes), and then was killed a few days after by xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (I just realised, this would be a big spoiler). This, as Gary Corby points out in his author’s note, is in a few lines of the Constitution of the Athenians — which we’ll say was written by Aristotle because a discussion of the authorship would be tedious, inconclusive and utterly irrelevant to the point.

The book opens quickly.

A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud. I stopped and stood there like a fool, astonished to see him lying where I was about to step. He lay facedown in the dirt, arms spread wide, with an arrow protruding out his back. He’d been shot through the heart.

It was obvious he was dead, but I knelt down and touched him anyway, perhaps because I needed to assure myself that he was real. The body was warm to my touch. The blood that stained my fingertips, from where I had touched his wound, was slippery and wet but already beginning to dry in the heat, and the small cloud of dust his fall had raised made my nose itch as it settled.

It doesn’t normally rain corpses, so where had this one come from? I looked up. There was a ledge above me, and another to the left. The one directly above was the Rock of the Areopagus, home to the council chambers of our elder statesmen. The other to the left, but much farther away, was the Acropolis. There was no doubt about it; this man had fallen from the political heights.

The opening chapter is available as a Kindle sample, which you can use with Kindle for PC or Mac if you don’t have a Kindle, and it’s a fair sample of both the best and worst of the book. At its best, which is most of it, the action runs smoothly. Sometimes though there is a thud as novel pauses to dump some information. Even then it can work well. When Nicolaos, the protagonist, is trying to work out who inherits the victim’s estate there’s a good route into pulling apart what can be head-spinningly complex Athenian law. Sometimes the story has to stop to explain a historical point, which then launches the characters again. Once or twice there is a bump when the novel turns into a history lesson for a short while for no apparent reason, but these points are very rare and brief so the tale can pick up the pace again.

The main characters are well-rounded. There’s shades of grey in the Athenians and not just the guilty and the innocent. The appearance of Socrates is popular among many readers though I would have been happy to see him knocked off by the murderer.* NS Gill said that “although Corby’s vision of ancient Athens is nowhere near mine, little of it could be positively refuted.” I agree. Corby’s view is more rose-tinted than mine, but his version still has warts that are rarely seen in popular portrayals of the city. This is not something I thought was bad, just different.

It also raises a question of how much historical accuracy is important to a historical novel. I think limitations in a story are important, because a story without obstacles isn’t much of a story. Reality is a good source for obstacles, so historical accuracy helps. At the same time this is a story, and a slavish adherence to historical sources at the expense of the narrative is not a good thing in my opinion. For that reason while there might be one or two things in the book I’d query it’s not enough to matter. They’re forgotten after a page. A day after finishing the book only one possible problem remains. Getting the detail right could make it a lot harder to keep the plot moving. It’d also put him well ahead of hundreds of classicists, so he’d have even more people thinking something was amiss.

The only thing that really jarred might be down to me getting the Kindle version. There were too many donkeys. A few times a character would scratch his donkey. The only other possible reading would be that he was speaking with an American accent and scratching his posterior. He has talked about voice recently and posted a good argument for colloquialisms in historical novels. However, as all the recent films in the cinema and popular television programmes have conclusively shown, ancient Greeks and Romans spoke English with an RP accent. Slightly more seriously, the occasional word in American was a far bigger problem for me in pulling me out of the story than anything Gary Corby wrote. This really wasn’t that much of a problem. I don’t know if the paperback has an English variant.

A missed opportunity for the Kindle version was a lack of links to the Glossary. It could have been handy to have links through to the Glossary in the text to find out what a krater was if you didn’t know. A link through to the publisher’s site and Gary Corby’s weblog at the end of the book would also be a good idea.

In the author’s note Corby explains where ideas came from and what was real and what was not. He takes a more generous view than me about how much history can be trusted. As he also notes the period he’s writing about isn’t really historical, it’s proto-historical. However, there are plenty of classicists who take Thucydides as a reliable source for the foundation of the Sicilian colonies three hundred years before his time, so Corby’s acceptance of history isn’t simply credulous. It’s just different, and again for a novelist this is probably better because it adds restrictions on what can and cannot be done, pushing for creative and not obvious solutions to problems.

This is probably the big attraction of the book for me. Because it’s not Athens the way I see it, the story isn’t always obvious. At the same time it’s not wilfully obscure. The solution doesn’t appear thanks to a secret tip-off that he pulls out as a Deus ex machina at the end. It’s not in plain sight, but it’s plausible.

It’s also fun, and that’s what I want from a novel.

*Likewise, my big complaint about HBO’s Rome was they didn’t kill Cicero soon enough for my liking. Damn this historical accuracy.