Time as an anachronism

Alun The Past 4 Comments , , , , ,

I’m writ­ing up a paper, and because it’s one I haven’t actu­ally fin­ished yet I quite like it. It ties up some loose ends with pro­ject. It also adds some­thing new to ancient polit­ics without hav­ing to con­tra­dict a lot of people. It’s been going quite well so I’ve star­ted writ­ing up the Intro­duc­tion and I must have been slightly on auto­matic because I’ve run smack into the ques­tion “What is Time?” A lot of people much more intel­li­gent than me have been banging their heads against this prob­lem for mil­len­nia, so I’ll be doing well to solve it in a couple of para­graphs. I think for my work I’ve man­aged to tighten the prob­lem into two smal­ler ques­tions. Is the mod­ern exper­i­ence of time as a largely object­ive pas­sage of dur­a­tion ana­chron­istic when you look at the ancient world?

Plato in the Tim­aeus 38c says:

Where­fore, as a con­sequence of this reas­on­ing and design on the part of God, with a view to the gen­er­a­tion of Time, the sun and moon and five other stars, which bear the appel­la­tion of “plan­ets,” came into exist­ence for the determ­in­ing and pre­serving of the num­bers of Time.
trans. Perseus Pro­ject CC licenced BY-SA



This means that Plato saw the plan­ets as cre­at­ing time. This is the inverse of how we think of time, because we think time would exist any­way and that time is some­thing that plan­ets move in. So do we need a rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent men­tal model for how ancient people though about time? I’m not sure. For a counter-argument here’s a bit of Clouds by Arist­phanes. Strep­si­ades is bothered about his debts and how he can­not afford to pay them back. He goes to Socrates, to teach him how to think:

Socrates
Do you, your­self, first find out and state what you wish.

Strep­si­ades
You have heard a thou­sand times what I wish. About the interest; so that I may pay no one.

Soc.
Come then, wrap your­self up, and hav­ing given your mind play with sub­tilty, revolve your affairs by little and little, rightly dis­tin­guish­ing and examining.

Strep.
Ah me, unhappy man!

Soc.
Keep quiet; and if you be puzzled in any one of your con­cep­tions, leave it and go; and then set your mind in motion again, and lock it up.

Strep.
(in great glee). O dearest little Socrates!

Soc.
What, old man?

Strep.
I have got a device for cheat­ing them of the interest.

Soc.
Exhibit it.

Strep.
Now tell me this, pray; if I were to pur­chase a Thes­salian witch, and draw down the moon by night, and then shut it up, as if it were a mir­ror, in a round crest-case, and then care­fully keep it–

Soc.
What good, pray, would this do you?

Strep.
What? If the moon were to rise no longer any­where, I should not pay the interest.

Soc.
Why so, pray?

Strep.
Because the money is lent out by the month.

trans. Perseus Pro­ject CC licenced BY-SA



In ancient Greece a month was a lun­ation, the period of time from one New Moon to the next. By remov­ing the moon Strep­si­ades removes months. This seems to back up Plato’s ideas about plan­ets gen­er­at­ing time (the Sun and Moon were πλάνητες ἀστέρες, plan­etes asters or wan­der­ing stars, in the ancient world). But the joke only works if the solu­tion is non­sense. Pulling down the moon is a daft idea, but is the idea that months would cease to have mean­ing too? The Romans lived per­fectly well without lunar months.

Hero­dotus (II.4.1), writ­ing around the same period, was clear that lunar months weren’t good ways to track time.

But as to human affairs, this was the account in which they all agreed: the Egyp­tians, they said, were the first men who reckoned by years and made the year con­sist of twelve divi­sions of the sea­sons. They dis­covered this from the stars (so they said). And their reck­on­ing is, to my mind, a juster one than that of the Greeks; for the Greeks add an inter­cal­ary month every other year, so that the sea­sons agree; but the Egyp­tians, reck­on­ing thirty days to each of the twelve months, add five days in every year over and above the total, and thus the com­pleted circle of sea­sons is made to agree with the cal­en­dar.
trans. Perseus Pro­ject CC licenced BY-SA



From this it looks like time is quant­at­ive. For example if today is Tues­day, then even if it feels like a Monday it can’t be Monday because Monday + 1 day = Tues­day. I think this can­not be purely the case for ancient Greece though.

For example McClus­key (2000:18) and Pritch­ett (2001) both note that the cal­en­dar can pause or skip days. The same is true for months. To keep the Greek cal­en­dar in line with the sea­sons they didn’t insert an extra day every so often, they inser­ted a whole month as Hero­dotus says above. You end up try­ing to match months against sea­sons and sea­sons have qual­it­ies. These days in the UK we say Spring starts on March 21. In real­ity Spring starts when the weather improves. Spring can come earlier or later. If you’re in a soci­ety that doesn’t recog­nise a fixed num­ber of days in a solar year, like ancient Greece, then the qual­ity of the days become import­ant. The cal­en­dar is used to reg­u­late reli­gious acts and if a cer­tain fest­ival is sup­posed to be at the start of Spring and the flowers or anim­als asso­ci­ated with the fest­ival are not yet out then it’s not the right day and the cal­en­dar needs to be corrected.

While the Greeks shared com­mon reli­gious beliefs, on the details they were fiercely inde­pend­ent. In this period tak­ing part in a reli­gious event was a polit­ical state­ment about belong­ing to a polis, a city-state. Non-citizens did not have the right to par­ti­cip­ate in the events in the same way as a cit­izen. So if reli­gion was used to define us from them and the cal­en­dar was a reli­gious tool, then a neut­ral object­ive count is not good enough. They wanted to be able to have their own dis­tinct­ive calendrical cycle. I think that’ll be some­thing I need to cla­rify. It’s not that the Greeks couldn’t make an accur­ate cal­en­dar. It’s that, for the job they wanted it to do, a less pre­cise cal­en­dar was bet­ter.

Where does that leave Hero­dotus? Clearly the Greeks weren’t stu­pid and if Hero­dotus knew that a three-hundred and sixty-five day cycle made sense, you can be sure many in his audi­ence did too. But Hero­dotus had his own axe to grind.

Hero­dotus was writ­ing towards the end of the fifth cen­tury BC. Athens and Sparta had been rivals for dec­ades con­test­ing the power vacuum cre­ated by the defeat of Per­sia. Hero­dotus wrote about the Per­sian War, not his own time. His aim was to recall a Pan­hel­lenic glory shared by all Greeks. A three-hundred and sixty-five day cycle wouldn’t inher­ently dis­solve all intra-Hellenic dif­fer­ences but it would social bonds between the Greeks. I don’t think it was a con­scious polit­ical state­ment, but I think the com­ment on the Egyp­tian cal­en­dar reflec­ted the Pan­hel­lenic ideals you find else­where in the His­tory.

Every so often someone will tell me ‘there’s no such thing as ancient sci­ence’. Usu­ally when I’m asso­ci­ated with the Centre for Inter­dis­cip­lin­ary Sci­ence. They’re right. Sci­ence is a mod­ern social con­struct that doesn’t fit neatly on to the ancient world. On the other hand it is a con­veni­ent label for attempts to pro­duce gen­er­al­ised explan­a­tions and prac­tices, without imme­di­ate recourse to super­nat­ural beings, estab­lished with at least the attempt of a pre­tence at rational jus­ti­fic­a­tion. And it’s good enough for the much cleverer people who write the vari­ous volumes in Routledge’s Sci­ences of Antiquity series. But I agree with the idea that if you’re not aware of the dif­fer­ence, it’s some­thing that will come back to bite you. In the same way, I’m not sure that the way we think about Time can applied back to the past. The dif­fi­culty is that it’s such a slip­pery sub­ject I don’t know if I always have a grasp about how I think about Time in the present.

Bib­li­o­graphy

McClus­key, S.C., 2000. The Incon­stant Moon: Lunar Astro­nom­ies in Dif­fer­ent Cul­tures. Archae­oastro­nomy, 15, p.14–31.

Pritch­ett, W.K., 2001. Athenian Cal­en­dars and Ekklesias, J C Gieben.

Topography as a navigational tool

Alun The Past No Comments , , ,

This is a quote that I read and then for­got where in the attic I’d left the book. Whenever I found the book I’d then dis­cover Delphi was’t in the index and, as vir­tual worlds are not a pri­or­ity for me, I’d put down again with the inten­tion to return to it later. Finally it’s all come together.

The con­trast between uphill and down­hill views has a rather won­der­ful side-effect, which is quite rel­ev­ant to the design and exper­i­ence of vir­tual worlds. Delphi is a one-sided site in which you are never dis­or­i­ent­ated. Down­hill is south­ward, facing the val­ley and the Gulf of Cor­inth and the warm Greek sun. Uphill is north­ward, facing the tower­ing gray cliffs of Mount Parnas­sus. There is no con­fu­sion in Delphi today, just as there was none two thou­sand years agom for a tour­ist try­ing to find the sta­dium high up on the north end of town, If you climb uphill with the sun at your back you will inev­it­ably arrive at the sta­dium. You will be at an elev­a­tion 400 feet higher than the ath­letes’ gym­nas­ium in the lower town. Think about how you might incor­por­ate a slope into the topo­graphy of your vir­tual site so that your vis­it­ors have a con­stant reminder of the logic of the lay­out, that there is an uphill side.

O’Neill, R. & Muir, E. 1998. >Web Developer.com Guide to Cre­at­ing 3D Worlds. New York: Wiley & Sons.

(pp. 22–23)

Look­ing uphill to the Temple of Apollo, Delphi

It’s never too early for wine?

Alun Science, The Past 4 Comments , , , , , ,

It’s nice when things con­nect. There was a press release last week on the earli­est known winery being found in Armenia. The paper is Chem­ical evid­ence for wine pro­duc­tion around 4000 BCE in the Late Chal­co­lithic Near East­ern high­lands. Alas, it’s not Open Access so if you want to read it can you can’t use a lib­rary or blag a copy it’ll be expens­ive. It was covered in other blogs, so I wouldn’t nor­mally men­tion it.

Mean­while another release has come out about some genetic work on grapes in PNAS. I found this while work­ing on AoB Blog. Genetic struc­ture and domest­ic­a­tion his­tory of the grape is open access, but you’ll have to do a search on the title as the DOI isn’t work­ing (as I write this). This dates the domest­ic­a­tion of grapes to no later than 5,000 years ago — and the likely centre of domest­ic­a­tion is the region between the Black Sea and Caspian Seas.

After much fid­dling about I’ve man­aged to set up a map on AoB Blog show­ing where the winery is. You can decide for your­self if the two approaches are com­ing to the same loc­a­tion for the ori­gin of wine.

Solving a mystery with a mystery?

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 3 Comments , , , , , ,

I’ve had a look at the paper Dynam­ics of Wind Set­down at Suez and the East­ern Nile Delta. As far as I can tell it’s a bit of a mixed bag. I’m not sub­mit­ting this to ResearchB­log­ging, because half of it I can­not reas­on­ably cri­tique, but the other half is poor. So poor I’ve left this overnight before post­ing, because I thought I was being unfair, but I might be too kind.

To start with the bet­ter part, Drews and Han pro­pose that wind set­down could leave a clear route across a body of water that, if it had happened in 1250BC, would have allowed Israel­ites to escape from Egypt. It would require sev­eral hours of a steady wind at around 28m/s, but accord­ing to the mod­els it could clear leave clear mud­flats. My ini­tial response is scep­tical because if a lot of things then many more things could hap­pen. The inclu­sion of the report by Major-General Tul­loch is there­fore very import­ant, because it means that Drew and Han can show that this effect can hap­pen. That’s import­ant because then, regard­less of whether or not the dis­cus­sion is rel­ev­ant to the Exodus, Drew and Han have found some­thing that may be useful.

The idea that the Exodus was assisted by wind set­down is not new. Doron Nof pub­lished a few papers on this in the 1990s. It’s not com­mon, but there seem to be enough reports to sug­gest that it can hap­pen on shal­low bod­ies of water around the Nile Delta.

I’m see no reason to dis­agree with the phys­ics. Sadly I also see no point in dis­agree­ing with the phys­ics, because no mat­ter how good the phys­ics and mod­el­ing is, the his­tory is bad.

As far as the his­tory goes, the authors state: “The present study treats the Exodus 14 nar­rat­ive as an inter­est­ing and ancient story of uncer­tain ori­gin.” I’m not sure it does. They men­tion Moses crossed the Red Sea in Exodus 14, and that’s as far as the his­tor­ical dis­cus­sion goes. That’s not a prob­lem if the aim of the paper is to exam­ine wind set­down effects in the 19th cen­tury on Lake Man­zala, but it’s eccent­ric to ignore the his­tory if you’re attempt­ing to solve a his­tor­ical prob­lem and Exodus is a huge problem.

The biggest prob­lem is whether or not the Exodus happened. There is no archae­olo­gical evid­ence for the Exodus and the evid­ence points to Israel and Judah form­ing from Canaan­ite king­doms. I don’t see that as a ter­minal prob­lem for the Drew and Han paper — if they’re inter­ested in wind set­down gen­er­ic­ally — but it surely mer­its a men­tion? So if the Exodus didn’t hap­pen, then why is it interesting?

It’s inter­est­ing because even if it didn’t hap­pen around 1300BC, it’s a story that the Israel­ites told about their ori­gins in the sixth and fifth cen­tur­ies BC. Whether or not those beliefs about what happened seven hun­dred years earlier are accur­ate is another mat­ter. This isn’t an error unique to Drew and Han. There are ancient his­tor­i­ans who treat Thucy­dides as a source of bank­able facts about Greece in the eighth and sev­enth cen­tur­ies BC, des­pite these stor­ies being later ration­al­isa­tions about why things were the way things were. There’s a great paper by Moses Fin­ley on the Tro­jan War about how much ‘his­tory’ is roman­ti­cised events. There are all sorts of ques­tions that arise from this. Why did the Israel­ites por­tray them­selves as out­siders? What does it tell us about rela­tion­ships between the Jews and the self-identified nat­ive peoples? What does it say about rela­tions with Egypt at the time of writing?

Without pay­ing any atten­tion to the his­tor­ical con­text the ensu­ing dis­cus­sion becomes worth­less. Drew and Han move cross­ing of the Exodus to Lake Tanis. What his­tor­ical reason is there for this? As far as I can tell none. The reason they seem to move the cross­ing to Lake Tanis is that if they do so, their effect works. From a his­tor­ical per­spect­ive the argu­ment is “If we assume the cross­ing occurred in 1250BC at Lake Tanis, then we can con­clude the most likely place for the cross­ing was Lake Tanis in 1250BC.” In real­ity they could be right, but if they are why is this not reflec­ted in the his­tory? What was the situ­ation 700 years later? If small wind set­down events were com­mon, could these be an inspir­a­tion for a big event? Whatever this paper explains, it does not explain how the Israel­ites got the story of their cross­ing of the Red Sea. As far as examin­ing a sup­posed his­tor­ical event goes, the paper is wholly inadequate.

Des­pite that should the paper have been accep­ted for pub­lic­a­tion? I’m not sure. If the journal were the Pub­lic Lib­rary of His­tory then def­in­itely not. If how­ever the met­eor­o­lo­gical mod­el­ing is sound, and it con­trib­utes to the under­stand­ing of mod­ern wind set­down, then the world is a bet­ter place for hav­ing the paper pub­lished. If it’s only value is the dis­cus­sion of a his­tor­ical event with no con­sid­er­a­tion of the his­tor­ical con­text then it’s an oddity. It simply replaces a phys­ical mys­tery with another his­tor­ical mys­tery. If you’re inter­ested in the Exodus as a his­tor­ical event then that’s no answer at all, in which case why write the paper?

When I want to read about ser­i­ous bib­lical schol­ar­ship my first stop is Abnor­mal Interests by Duane Smith. He has a post on the sub­ject .

You too can have an ass like Cleopatra

Alun Politics, The Past 9 Comments , , ,

@Simon_Perry on Twit­ter has poin­ted out a web­site of someone who’s a rather aggress­ive sales­man. I’ve had to hand in my Ped­antry badge that I earned in the cub scouts because my first reac­tion was that the cham­pagne vin­egar in this facecream isn’t likely to be nat­ural. This is miss­ing the point because as far as I can tell noth­ing sold by Totally Nat­ural Skin­care is totally nat­ural. But there is a gem among the junk.

Skimmed milk product by Totally Natural Skincare

Cleo­pat­ras bath milk
Used by Cleo­patra, except she used asses milk! A beau­ti­ful sooth­ing and relax­ing bath milk which nour­ishes the skin and releases its floral oils and cocoa but­ter in the warmth of the bath leav­ing you smooth as silk. This Bath milk also con­tains our own rose petal soap. thus cleanses as well as moisturising.

As sales pitches go “Used by Cleo­patra, except she used asses milk!” is a clas­sic — and not just because the product includes cocoa (from the Amer­icas). You need to think about what bathing in asses milk means.


Amanda Bar­rie gives the defin­it­ive per­form­ance of Cleo­patra in Carry on Cleo

To be hon­est, I don’t know where the idea that Cleo­patra bathed in asses’ milk came from. There’s no con­tem­por­ary source that I know of that says it. Pliny the Elder writ­ing around a cen­tury later said that women bathed their cheeks in it seven times a day to remove wrinkles. The key bit is “Pop­paea hoc Ner­onis prin­cipis instituit, bal­nearum quoque solia sic tem­per­ans…” Nat­ural His­tory 28.183. Pliny says that Pop­paea, wife of Nero first did this, and even filled her bath-tubs with the milk.

Nero was not fondly remembered by the Roman élite after he died, and neither was Pop­paea. By say­ing that Pop­paea intro­duced the prac­tice, Pliny is not just say­ing it’s some­thing that extremely vain people would do. Nero and Pop­paea were con­sidered moral dregs. The fact that Pop­paea used whole baths of the stuff high­lights her extra­vag­ant and waste­ful nature. Even though the élites were wealthy, the pur­suit and flaunt­ing of wealth on per­sonal effects was con­sidered effem­in­ate and unRo­man. Instead Romans were sup­posed to flash their cash by put­ting on events for the the people, or build­ing pub­lic works. If as part of those works, they had to have grand vil­las and employ the best sculptors to fur­nish them, then that was the way life went.

Cas­sius Dio (62.28) was scath­ing of Poppaea’s pur­suit of luxury:

The extremes of lux­ury indulged in by this Sabina (Pop­paea) O will indic­ate in the briefest terms. She cause gil­ded shoes to be put on the mules that drew her and caused five hun­dred asses that had recently foaled to be milked daily that she might bathe in their milk. For she bestowed the greatest pains on the beauty and bril­liancy of her per­son, and this is why, when she noticed in a mir­ror one day that her appear­ance was not comely, she prayed that she might die before she passed her prime.

So if Pop­paea inven­ted the milk bath, why is it asso­ci­ated with Cleopatra?

Egypt was wealthy because of its agri­cul­ture. It was pres­ti­gi­ous due to the antiquity of its civil­isa­tion. So the Romans had to find a flaw in Egypt to jus­tify their rule. The flaw was in the moral char­ac­ter of its rulers. By say­ing Cleo­patra bathed in asses milk, the later authors were say­ing some­thing about the cor­rupt nature of the last of the Pharaohs. By asso­ci­ation Mark Anthony’s rela­tion­ship with Cleo­patra sul­lied him. Bathing in asses milk might have said some­thing about Cleopatra’s beauty, but it was some­thing along the lines of “She was beau­ti­ful, just like a pros­ti­tute with plenty of make-up.”

So while Totally Nat­ural Skin­care aren’t say­ing this product isn’t exactly the same as used by Cleo­patra, they’re imply­ing it’ll have the same effect. Buy their products and you too can be just like an ancient whore.

Incid­ent­ally, if you’ve ever thought that bathing in asses’ milk doesn’t sound prac­tical, you’re prob­ably right. Seneca writ­ing in the Con­tro­ver­siae recor­ded that brothels stank. Not just because of the cos­met­ics, but also from the cheap per­fume used to try and hide the smell.

Is ‘religion’ one of the hard historical archaeological problems?

Alun Featured, The Past 5 Comments , , , , ,

Michael E. Smith lays down an inter­est­ing chal­lenge at Pub­lish­ing Archae­ology: What are the hard prob­lems in Archae­ology? What ques­tions haven’t archae­olo­gists answered and aren’t likely to answer any time soon? A couple of ideas come to mind. I’ll start with the easier prob­lem to express.

Is an ancient his­tory or archae­ology of reli­gion a sens­ible project?

I’ve got an interest in ancient sci­ence, but one of the things most people research­ing ancient sci­ence would agree that sci­ence in the ancient world didn’t really exist. There’s some­thing that’s a more sys­tem­atic inquiry about nature, but some­thing like nat­ural philo­sophy would be a bet­ter descrip­tion for the clas­sical world. I’m not sure that the same term would work for other soci­et­ies because philo­sophy car­ries a lot of bag­gage too. So when aca­dem­ics talk about ancient sci­ence, there’s this under­cur­rent that we’re not talk­ing about sci­ence. Ancient sci­ence is not the same as mod­ern science.

I’ve got an interest in ancient reli­gion too. I’m not so inter­ested in the con­tent as such, more reli­gion in a socio-political con­text. That’s some­thing you can say that makes sense to mod­ern people. If you said the same thing in the ancient world they’d think you were mad. It’d be a bit like say­ing you’re inter­ested in fish, but only the ones that live in water. In the ancient world it was accep­ted that reli­gion was entwined with civic life. There’s a second prob­lem that what we call reli­gion has developed from its ancient roots.
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East is East?

Alun Digital Academia, Politics, Science, The Past 2 Comments , , , , , ,

Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples

ResearchBlogging.orgI’m not plan­ning to blog a lot on the Astro­nom­ical Ori­ent­a­tion of Ancient Greek Temples as is openly access­ible. Your com­ments are going to carry a lot more weight there than here. But I’ll try and keep track of what other people are say­ing else­where. I’m expect­ing this to be the first paper of a devel­op­ing argu­ment, so I’ll need to see what people identify as prob­lems and address them. There’s two com­ments in the Times today which I think neatly high­light one of the issues. One is from Efro­syni Bout­si­kas and the other from Mary Beard.

Bout­si­kas’ objec­tion is inter­est­ing. I wanted a com­par­ison data set to exam­ine for Greece and the only one I know of that’s pub­lished is Retallack’s in Antiquity. To be hon­est it’s not entirely fair to use Retallack’s data as he wasn’t that con­cerned with astro­nomy. Instead he was look­ing at geo­mor­pho­logy, and I think he has some really inter­est­ing res­ults. Now Bout­si­kas has her own sur­vey, which she did spe­cific­ally with archae­oastro­nomy in mind. That’s why I’m inter­ested when she says of 107 temples in Greece only 58% faced east. That might cause me some prob­lems and here’s why.

First we need three vari­ables. n is the num­ber of temples. That’s 107. p is the prob­ab­il­ity and event will hap­pen, and q the prob­ab­il­ity it won’t. p+q = 1 because some­thing has to either hap­pen or not hap­pen. So what value is p? It depends on what Bout­si­kas means by east. If she means the east­ern half of the hori­zon, then p is 0.5 and so is q. By pure chance we’d expect np temples to face east. That’s 53.5. In her sur­vey 62 temples faced east. That’s more than chance, so I’m right yes? Not so fast.

There’s never going to be exactly 53.5 temples facing east. Around 19 times out of twenty 20 there’ll be 53.5 plus or minus two stand­ard devi­ations. If you want the chance of a false pos­it­ive to be lower than 1 in a 100, then you need 53.5 plus or minus three stand­ard devi­ations. The stand­ard devi­ation (σ) for this kind of dis­tri­bu­tion is cal­cu­lated by the formula:

σ = √npq

If we want the one in twenty con­fid­ence that means

σ = √(107 × 0.5 × 0.5) = 5.2

So 19 times out of 20 you might expect to find between 43.1 and 63.9 temples facing east. The res­ult of 62 is inside this range, so there’s noth­ing sig­ni­fic­ant. How do I explain that? I’m not sure I can. I can’t say what time period her temples come from. If she’s looked at Bronze Age sites and Roman sites in Greece then we’re not com­par­ing like with like and it’s pos­sible that when we com­pare temples built in the archaic and clas­sical peri­ods as they were in Sicily then we’ll have more of a match. Another pos­sib­il­ity is that I’m simply wrong.

But this depends on Bout­si­kas mean­ing east­ern half of the hori­zon when she says east. I use dif­fer­ent defin­i­tions of east for dif­fer­ent tests and make clear which are which in the paper because it makes a dif­fer­ence. If Bout­si­kas has put her temples into four cat­egor­ies, north, east, south and west, then east means east­ern quarter of the sky and the equa­tions turn out differently.

np = 107 × 0.25 = 26.75 temples
σ = √(107 × 0.25 × 0.75) = 4.48

If east is the east­ern quarter then 19 times out of twenty at most we would expect at most 35.71 temples. By chance there’s be over 40.19 temples in the sample less than 1 time out of 100. 62 temples would be over seven stand­ard devi­ations away from the expec­ted res­ult. If that’s by chance it’s an amaz­ing freak res­ult. It means I can’t respond to Boutsikas’s claims until I can see the data to ana­lyse, so I know what east means. She might have proven my paper wrong, or else proven it very right. How can that be when only just over half of the temples face east?

Ima­gine you’re at a casino. Someone is spin­ning the roul­ette wheel. Half the time it lands on the num­bers 0–9 and the other half it lands on another num­ber. It doesn’t mat­ter than you can’t pre­dict exactly where the next ball will land. In the long term that casino will lose money because some­thing is affect­ing the wheel. This isn’t about hav­ing a hard and fast law for astro­nom­ical align­ments. It’s about whether or not a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber of temples are aligned to the sun. If you’re going say that there is or isn’t a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber, first you have to know what a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber would look like. Typ­ic­ally in the social sci­ences that would np +/- 2σ. I prefer np +/- 3σ because I’m mak­ing claims which people might not be com­fort­able with, so it’s reas­on­able I should provide stronger evidence.

If I am right that doesn’t mean Bout­si­kas’ and Retallack’s sur­veys can be junked. In fact it means the oppos­ite. In Retallack’s case he’s show­ing there’s a clear cor­rel­a­tion between the ded­ic­a­tion of a temple and the soil type it’s built in. Now if there’s a gen­eral rule that Greek temples face east, the temples which don’t become more inter­est­ing because then you can ask “What’s spe­cial about those temples? Why were they built that way?” It’s the same for Bout­si­kas’ data. If there’s noth­ing spe­cial about the align­ments then temples which don’t face east are noth­ing spe­cial. If, using this method, her data shows a tend­ency for east­ern align­ments then she has a data set with plenty of inter­est­ing temples that could tell us some­thing about Greek reli­gion. For instance it could high­light where a local cult was doing some­thing spe­cial that you wouldn’t find else­where in Greece.

Clearly Bout­si­kas’ objec­tion is ser­i­ous and I’ll need to con­sider it care­fully, but in this case it could be a case of cross-wired. I don’t think she’d seen my art­icle when she talked to the Times because I hadn’t emailed it to her till last night. We’ve both been work­ing on sim­ilar top­ics and so could have come to the same con­clu­sions. If we been talk­ing with each other then there could have been a bit of fric­tion if we saw our ideas in each other’s theses. She’s been put on the spot react­ing to a paper which she prob­ably hasn’t read, but she’s clearly an expert in the sub­ject because of her own research. She’ll go where her research takes her and I’ll go with mine. The reporter has picked up on that con­fu­sion. Does that leave him in the dog house? Def­in­itely not.

I’m really pleased with the way Mark Hende­r­son has writ­ten this up. It’s not his job to preach my won­der­ful­ness, it’s to report on how this research fits in with other research. Get­ting the quotes from Efro­syni Bout­si­kas was bril­liant because it shows there’s cur­rently two mod­els which come to oppos­ite con­clu­sions. As we both pub­lish more those mod­els will get fleshed out and adapt. Which one will be accep­ted? Hers? Mine? Some kind of hybrid, or even neither? It’s not just about get­ting the right answer. At the moment we might not even agree on what the right answer will look like. Which brings me to Mary Beard’s piece.

I think it’s great com­ment­ary. I think she’s spot on when she rejects the idea of a mod­ern astro­nomy in the ancient world. I would quibble with her reject­ing astro­nomy for the rhythms of day and night. That sounds astro­nom­ical to me and there’s also evid­ence the sea­sons were import­ant. I think she might be try­ing to emphas­ise the import­ance of cos­mo­lo­gical fea­tures, in the sense of nat­ural order, rather than strict obser­va­tion. The only real puzzle is that she’s say­ing that there’s it’s obvi­ous that Greek temples align east-west when in the column next to her Efro­syni Bout­si­kas is say­ing they obvi­ously don’t. This is a bit of an inter­dis­cip­lin­ary gap.

From the out­side you might expect archae­olo­gists and clas­si­cists to talk to each other. They’re deal­ing with the same people in the same time period. In real­ity this doesn’t always hap­pen. A few years back the Roman Archae­ology Con­fer­ence, the big con­fer­ence for Roman archae­olo­gists held once every couple of years was sched­uled oppos­ite the Clas­sical Asso­ci­ation con­fer­ence. The two sides don’t always talk to each other. In the past few years Bout­si­kas has been pub­lish­ing on her work. Ioan­nis Lir­itzis and Helena Vassiliou have been arguing that Greek temples were aligned towards or away from aurorae or stars. This is hav­ing no impact amongst clas­si­cists. Equally I can’t just turn around and say “Greek temples ten­ded to face east” because all the research­ers who dis­agree could ask “How do you know?” It’s obvi­ous doesn’t work as an aca­demic response, even though I agree with Mary Beard. I don’t ima­gine that would be her response in an aca­demic forum. But what she’s done is she’s very help­fully shown that if I want to talk to clas­si­cists then show why I think I have some­thing to talk about.

That’s why I’ve had to write this paper. I want to write more, but the first ques­tion any­one can ask is “How do you know that’s not just a chance res­ult?” That’s why I developed this method. I wanted some­thing simple and effect­ive. The reason I put it in PLoS One is that it also has to be access­ible. I’m plan­ning to write more art­icles for spe­cial­ist journ­als, but people read­ing those will need access to my data and my meth­od­o­logy. That needs to be avail­able to clas­si­cists, archae­olo­gists, astro­nomers and any­one else with an interest.

You can read the ori­ginal research for free and down­load it at PLoS One. If you leave com­ments there then they’ll be seen by every­one else who exam­ines the paper. If you’d like to blog about the paper there’s a col­lec­tion of pho­tos from Sicily at Flickr with a Cre­at­ive Com­mons licence.

Salt, A. (2009). The Astro­nom­ical Ori­ent­a­tion of Ancient Greek Temples PLoS ONE, 4 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007903

Why PLoS?

Alun Digital Academia, Politics, Science, The Past 7 Comments , , , , , , ,

I’ve pub­lished a paper with PLoS One which should be out today. The most com­mon ques­tion I’ve been asked so far is: Why there? I’m apply­ing for jobs in Archae­ology and Ancient His­tory, so why would I want to pub­lish in an online journal that hardly any­one in those fields has heard of? Surely pub­lish­ing in one of the big journ­als would be bet­ter? Here’s a few reasons.

  1. It’s fast.
    The paper was sub­mit­ted on the 8th of Septem­ber and I got the accept­ance, sub­ject to revi­sions on the 30th of Septem­ber. I wouldn’t be quite so happy if it had been rejec­ted, but you have to be pre­pared for that. The faster there’s a decision the quicker you can work on the revi­sions or else re-write for another journal. The rapid response means that I can cite the data in this paper in other papers imme­di­ately rather than delay­ing writ­ing about fur­ther work.
  2. It’s access­ible.
    Research might be inter­dis­cip­lin­ary, but not so many journ­als are. For this paper the altern­at­ives would be pub­lic­a­tion in spe­cial­ist archae­oastro­nomy, clas­sics, archae­ology or astro­nomy journ­als. I can do that and will do that in the future, but writ­ing for those journ­als means writ­ing for those spe­cific audi­ences. If they’re subscription-based they also lock out a large pro­por­tion of the poten­tial audi­ence. If an astro­nomer is in a uni­ver­sity without a clas­sics depart­ment then it’s going to be hard for him to get a copy of the paper. Like­wise many uni­ver­sit­ies don’t carry archae­oastro­nomy journ­als. PLoS One gives me a plat­form to intro­duce the work and then I can pub­lish tailored art­icles devel­op­ing ideas in the spe­cial­ist journals.
  3. It opens con­ver­sa­tion.
    You can com­ment on the paper. So too can any­one else. This is par­tic­u­larly handy for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work. I’m hop­ing the con­ver­sa­tion doesn’t end with this one paper. The article-based met­rics will included some of cita­tion search. Hope­fully in a couple of years people read­ing this paper will be able to see where they can find cri­ti­cisms and devel­op­ments in other papers. That’s amaz­ingly use­ful for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work where sub­sequent papers could be in journ­als in a vari­ety of disciplines.

I’ve decided some form of open-access is essen­tial for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work. The paper stands or falls on whether or not the bino­mial dis­tri­bu­tion is the right tool for the task. That means for aca­demic hon­esty I have to sub­mit it to a journal where the I can be reas­on­ably sure it will be scru­tin­ised by people famil­iar with basic stat­ist­ics. Sci­ent­ists might laugh at that as the math­em­at­ics in the paper is very simple. I think any clas­si­cist could fol­low it, but some could quite reas­on­ably be wary of it. Is it stat­ist­ical sleight-of-hand? They can read any com­ments left by stat­ist­i­cians or astro­nomers and judge how con­fid­ent they should be in the find­ings. Like­wise people unfa­mil­iar with the Greek mater­ial can read the clas­si­cists’ and archae­olo­gists’ com­ments and see if the human aspect of the research is sound.

It’s also import­ant for me because I might learn some­thing, and indeed I did. This is a bet­ter paper post-review than it was when I sub­mit­ted it. I’ve re-thought how I pro­cess some of the data and that will have a pos­it­ive on the next pro­ject I do.

After going through the pro­cess I’m impressed with PLoS. I think I hit every bump in the sub­mis­sion pro­cess, most of it due to the order­ing of the paper being dif­fer­ent to how I would nor­mally write it. Still, the every­one was very help­ful along the way. If you’re a recent PhD or grad stu­dent with a need to put out some pub­lic­a­tions, I’d recom­mend pub­lish­ing with PLoS One. Of course I’m writ­ing this before I’ve seen how the paper has been received, so you can check on my art­icle met­rics your­self to see if it’s being read or else sunk into obscurity.

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