A throne for a brave man found in Herculaneum

Alun The Past 3 Comments , , , , , ,

Excav­a­tions recently restar­ted at Her­cu­laneum. Archae­olo­gists prom­ised some spec­tac­u­lar finds when they star­ted and they already have one. The Soprin­tend­enza di Pom­pei has announced the find of a Roman period throne built in wood and ivory. Pre­vi­ously this type of throne was only known from wall paint­ings. It’s usu­ally rare to find any­thing wooden on an archae­olo­gical dig. Organic mater­i­als are quickly munched away by bac­teria. The reason this throne sur­vived is due to the way everything else in Her­cu­laneum died.

Like Pom­peii, Her­cu­laneum was in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius — but it was a lot closer. When Vesuvius erup­ted ash was thrown into the air. Some of this fell on Pom­peii. A lot fell back on Vesuvius itself caus­ing a pyro­clastic flow. A tor­rent of hot gas, ash and rock tumbled down the hill­side and scorched everything in its path — includ­ing the inhab­it­ants of Her­cu­laneum. The estim­ated tem­per­at­ure is 400°C (about 750°F). Remains have been found which sug­gests that this was hot enough to almost instantly boil vic­tims brains in their skulls. The organic mater­i­als, like wood, were car­bon­ised and dried within a couple of seconds, ster­il­ising them. Ash con­tin­ued to fall until it was almost 25 metres (90 feet) deep, ensur­ing the town was locked in its own time cap­sule. In the photo here the frag­ment looks blackened, which sug­gests that it’s one of the car­bon­ised finds.

This is why odd things have a habit of being found in Her­cu­laneum. This throne was found in the Villa of the Papyri, which got its name from the 1700 or more papyri found there when the site was excav­ated. How­ever, this throne is very odd — not just because it’s rare or high status. It also has unusual dec­or­a­tion. It has imagery related to the god Attis. Attis wasn’t your typ­ical Roman god.
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Was there such a thing as ancient “Judaism”?

Alun Life, Politics, The Past No Comments ,

This art­icle, in my mind, has put this ques­tion to rest. It is time to speak of “Judeans”, “Judean prac­tices”, and “Judean cul­ture” in the same way that we would speak of the iden­tity and prac­tices of the many other eth­nic groups or peoples that exis­ted in antiquity. The Judeans of antiquity are not a spe­cial case.

Source: Reli­gions of the Ancient Medi­ter­ranean » Was there such a thing as ancient “Juda­ism”?: Steve Mason’s recent art­icle on “Judeans” (Ioudaioi) in antiquity (Philip A. Harland)

Philip Har­land has some inter­est­ing com­ments on ancient eth­ni­city which will prove con­ten­tious in the cur­rent cli­mate. I think if you’re genu­inely inter­ested in the peoples of the Levant around two thou­sand years ago, their his­tory and their exper­i­ences then this is neces­sary. To be fair, as far as I can tell there are a good many schol­ars who have been doing that for years. Still there are also oth­ers who are look­ing to the past to con­firm mod­ern issues in ways that, any­where else in the world, would be dis­missed as anachronistic.

Religion versus Archaeology

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , , , , ,

The Red Fort
The Red Fort where faith will soon tri­umph over Archae­ology. Photo (cc) dijit­al­boy.

If you’ve been fol­low­ing my del.icio.us feed you’ll have already seen I’ve been read­ing the archae­olo­gical news com­ing out of India recently. I’ve held off com­ment­ing, because I’m not very famil­iar with Indian archae­ology. You should bear that in mind when read­ing on. I’ve also spent a few days try­ing to pull together who believes what happened when. And today I found the post ABC of Ram Sethu at E-mc^2, which says more or less the same thing. As far as I can tell the story is this:

Around 1.75 mil­lion years ago Ravana, King of Lanka was being a pest. As a bit of foresight Ravana had ensured that he was invul­ner­able to the attacks of Gods, Demons and celes­tial folk, but left out men and animal from the list. Vishnu spot­ted the loop­hole and incarn­ated as the human Rama, to get round some legal paper­work. Ravana kid­napped his wife and dur­ing the ensu­ing rum­pus Rama built a bridge to Sri Lanka.

Around 125,000 years ago geo­lo­gical action star­ted to form a bar of rocks and shoals cre­at­ing a string of islands or shal­lows between south­ern India and Sri Lanka.

Around 2000 years ago the poet Valmiki com­posed the Rāmāyaṇa, which described the events of 1.75 mil­lion. Unfor­tu­nately he neg­lected to state whether Rama was homo sapi­ens or homo erectus, which could have helped a lot.

This sets the scene for a con­tro­versy around the dredging of a chan­nel through the Ram Sethu. In 2001 the BJP, then the rul­ing party in India decided a chan­nel through the Ram Sethu might be a good thing. At moment ship­ping has to travel round Sri Lanka. A chan­nel could cut out a day’s travel so they star­ted a feas­ib­il­ity study.
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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert

Alun Politics 4 Comments , , , , , ,

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert
This review has could have been writ­ten months ago, were it not for the fact that I’ve been read­ing it with other books like Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathed­ral and cur­rently Boyer’s Reli­gion Explained. I had though it had sur­pris­ingly little atten­tion because as Smiffy said, it is poten­tially a lot more dev­ast­at­ing to the status of reli­gion than the works of Dawkins. Non­ethe­less there are a few people who haven’t got round to read­ing it who have con­cluded it’s bunk. The reason I don’t think these people have read what they con­demn is that they seem to think it’s about reli­gion. This is the sub­ject of just one chapter of the thir­teen in the book. The book is, as the sub­title states, about belief, and it’s far more inter­est­ing because of it.
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Religious Moonshine

Alun Politics No Comments ,

Selinunte, Hekatombion
The build­ing ded­ic­ated to Hekate, who helped the Greeks really under­stand the moon. Oh, it’s not that reli­gion we’re talk­ing about?

There are no exper­i­ments and tests to explain love, empathy, long­ing, the agony and ecstasy of the heart, the wild and won­der­ful cre­ativ­ity of the brain, that thing that hap­pens to you when a full moon appears above the sea and is reflec­ted in it. Sorry, but know­ing the sci­ence of why the moon shines is irrel­ev­ant to the exper­i­ence. Faith is the light of the moon above and that light in the sea, real­ity and spir­itu­al­ity, both mak­ing you trem­blingly con­scious of forces vast and bey­ond words. Imper­tin­ent sci­ent­ists can­not know what they speak of.

Yas­min Alibhai-Brown explains why she under­stands the moon far bet­ter than any­one who stud­ies it.

If you read the opin­ion piece by Yas­min Alibhai-Brown then you may well, like me agree with her. Vast areas of ques­tion­ing and study do seem to be irrel­ev­ant to her. As thought exper­i­ment lets try and altern­at­ive. Let’s pre­tend she’d spent a day read­ing about the Moon and went out­side and looked at it.

Now as well as the moon­light she’d see the Earth’s part­ner in a cos­mic waltz around the Sun through the inky depths of space. She may recog­nise that the Moon’s face was con­stant. The same tidal forces which raise and lower the sea have locked the Man in the Moon’s face forever upon his part­ner. In the face of the Moon she might see the scars of the dis­tant past, the craters being the pock­marks of ancient impacts which reveal clues as to how our own planet formed

With a little know­ledge of grav­ity she might know that there was no uni­ver­sal ‘up’ or ‘down’ and that from the per­spect­ive of someone in the anti­podes she was upside down hanging over the Moon held above it by a force which remains a mys­tery to explore. The same grav­ity which pins her to the planet is a local phe­nomenon. If she were able to travel there she’d find that she could leap to super­hu­man heights and she’d weigh just a sixth of what she had weighed. She’d have to remem­ber to pack a space­suit, because she would find no atmo­sphere on the moon, shroud­ing it in eternal silence. She might even choose to search for the foot­prints of Arm­strong and Ald­rin. Humans may have explored many places, but these are the only foot­prints of the the first people on a land­mass that sur­vive. The foot­prints of Colum­bus or Cook may have washed away on their beaches, but the vacuum of space means the boot­prints of the Apollo astro­nauts may out­live the human race. It’s a humble monu­ment to a pro­gramme of research which star­ted over two and a half thou­sand years ago when people star­ted think­ing that maybe Gods didn’t have the last word.

It doesn’t come without a cost. Asser­tion is not enough. Ques­tions have to asked and author­it­ies chal­lenged. Things which in the past were con­sidered unques­tion­able because they were divine, from the work­ings of the uni­verse to the internal work­ings of humans had to be stud­ied. The pro­cess con­tin­ues and sci­ent­ists across the world con­tinue to work to dis­prove an idea which their pre­de­cessors thought right, or never even thought to ques­tion. There are uncoun­ted hours spent on sci­ence and each one of these hours is an hour which could be spent doing some­thing else. Every hour spent search­ing for the start of the uni­verse could be an hour spent talk­ing to the Rain­bow Snake. Every hour spent cre­at­ing math­em­at­ical mod­els of storms is an hour which could have been spent pro­pi­ti­at­ing the Rain Gods. Every hour someone spends try­ing to find a cure for a can­cer is an hour that could have been spent pray­ing for a loved one not to die.

These were the costs of sci­ence in the past, and the same costs of sci­ence in the future. The Greeks sen­tenced people who ques­tioned the divine as blas­phemers. Is it time to accept that we were wrong to ques­tion whether or not people get sick because they offen­ded the Gods? Should we ask if women were cre­ated to do any­thing other than serve men? With hind­sight isn’t it wrong, dehu­man­ising and dis­respect­ful to ques­tion the majesty of the moon god­dess Hekate? I assume that it’s moon gods Yas­min Alibhai-Brown is talk­ing about because she men­tions ‘Faith is the light of the moon above…’ You’d look a bit daft with a column titled ‘What do these athe­ists under­stand of reli­gion?’ if you hadn’t thought about what you meant by religion.

Of course if we do ques­tion reli­gion then we risk dimin­ish­ing human exper­i­ence in much the same way that I’ve lessened the moon above.

Does belief in a God give you personal infallibility?

Alun Life, Politics No Comments , , ,

I’ve spent far too long try­ing to write a blog entry before delet­ing it. If you want to know what it was like, ima­gine a more poorly writ­ten ver­sion of Deny­ing Little While Affirm­ing Much at Abnor­mal Interests. Pro­fessor Mari­ot­tini seems to believe that per­sonal rev­el­a­tion has a part to play in aca­demic study of the Bible. Unfor­tu­nately his proofs of Chris­tian­ity work just as well with Islam or any other reli­gion. As Duane Smith makes clear the prob­lem isn’t what he knows, it his epi­stem­o­logy: How does he know that his rev­el­a­tions are reli­able and other people’s aren’t?

I bought this a while ago when it came out in paper­back because Sainsbury’s had it on spe­cial offer. I’ve read it, but haven’t com­men­ted on it for a few reas­ons. Partly because I seem to have bought a faulty copy. The God Delu­sion is a vicious angry screed against reli­gion, or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know because my ver­sion is, in con­trast, polite and reasoned. By and large that makes it a more dan­ger­ous book, because although I don’t think there’s any­thing par­tic­u­larly new in it, it is presen­ted well and puts for­ward both a pos­it­ive view of athe­ism and why Dawkins thinks reli­gion is a prob­lem. To the joy of the­ists though there are a couple of dis­ap­point­ing sections.

One is use of the term Neville Cham­ber­lain Athe­ist. I don’t like it. It’s inel­eg­ant. It’s used describe those who would appease rel­gious demands by equat­ing them with the Brit­ish Prime Min­is­ter who ini­tially appeased Hitler, but then took a stand and decided to take Bri­tain to war, des­pite a large num­ber of people in Par­lia­ment still favour­ing appease­ment. It’s not just the equa­tion with Neville Cham­ber­lain that I don’t think works. There’s an unspoken implic­a­tion that fun­da­ment­al­ists are sim­ilar to Nazis. I don’t think that works either. The Nazis were openly unpleas­ant people and you couldn’t be a Nazi if you belonged to cer­tain groups. Fun­da­ment­al­ists are in con­trast more insi­di­ous. They have room to police every­one in their belief sys­tem. Whether or not Dawkins is to blame for the term is uncer­tain from the book, because he also cites Michael Ruse in this sec­tion so it’s pos­sible he got the term from him. I haven’t read Ruse’s art­icle because it appeared in Play­boy and I’m not really will­ing to ask for it on inter-library loan. Orac has said some­thing sim­ilar (about Neville Cham­ber­lain, not Play­boy), and Saint Gas­ol­ine dis­agrees. Per­son­ally I’d argue that the term should be some­thing more like Tony Blair Athe­ist after someone who respects another’s beliefs des­pite the lack of evid­ence and assists them in inflict­ing dam­age on other people because of faith and polt­ical expediency.

While that was inel­eg­ant another sec­tion was truly bad. I didn’t like is the bit on God as a meme at all. He describes an exper­i­ment sim­ilar to Chinese Whis­pers. In one exper­i­ment a group of chil­dren demon­strate how to make a Chinese junk from paper by ori­gami to another group. This group then teaches a third gen­er­a­tion and so on. In another exper­i­ment one group of chil­dren draw a junk and pass the draw­ing along to a second gen­er­a­tion to copy and so on. He pre­dicts that by the time you get to the tenth gen­er­a­tion the ori­gami method will still be trans­mit­ted with high fidel­ity whilst the draw­ing will have mutu­ated. Sim­il­arly because reli­gion is an imit­ated series of prac­tices rather than an end product reli­gion too can be trans­mit­ted by a meme.

This sounds reas­on­able, or at least it did in 1999 when Dawkins first described the exper­i­ment in the pre­face to The Meme Machine. He hadn’t actu­ally run the exper­i­ment at the time but you can’t do everything. Mov­ing on to 2006 and the Junk appears again. Dawkins still hasn’t done the exper­i­ment but non­ethe­less argues from the res­ults about how cul­ture propag­ates. This both­ers me deeply because I thought that one of the things about exper­i­ments is that you need to do them. I appre­ci­ate he’s a busy man and he may not have the time. But he has chosen to write on the sub­ject. Would it be reas­on­able for me to talk about hered­ity based on my thought exper­i­ment? Would it still be reas­on­able for me to recycle the same thought exper­i­ment seven years later without doing it? If a cre­ation­ist did this they would be mocked mer­ci­lessly. Thank­fully the meme concept has abso­lutely no bear­ing on the exist­ence or oth­er­wise of gods, but it sticks out as a low point in what is oth­er­wise a very good book. I sup­pose this would at least indic­ate that I’m think­ing about his argu­ments rather than purely accept­ing them in his author­ity, which is just as well as the rest of his argu­ments are all sound and rational.

One of the sec­tions I par­tic­u­larly liked was on the Hitler was an Athe­ist / Chris­tian argu­ment. I assumed Hitler was a Chris­tian because he said so. This isn’t enough for Dawkins and here he goes much more deeply into Hitler’s beliefs and con­cludes that the evid­ence is shaky enough that you can’t be cer­tain he was a Chris­tian. He may have used Chris­tian­ity as a vehicle for his beliefs, but it wasn’t neces­sar­ily a belief he shared. This is where he demon­strates that he has a right to be indig­nant when people refer to him as a fun­da­ment­al­ist. This is much more rep­res­ent­at­ive of the thought in the book and the two points I bring up above cover around six pages of the four hun­dred and twenty in the book.

I’ll be hon­est it’s not rad­ic­ally changed my view of athe­ism, because it expresses a lot of what I thought any­way. How­ever if you live in a less atheist-friendly envir­on­ment like Texas I can see how pub­lish­ing books like this and out­ing your­self can help. While Dawkins is firmly anti-religion he is also pro-human and the world might be a bet­ter place if a few more people were like that.

Spotting Design

Alun Life, Politics 4 Comments , , , , , ,

Experimental Archaeology
Exper­i­mental Archae­ology. Photo (cc) Wessex Archae­ology.

I wish I was as good an archae­olo­gist as Michael Egnor claims to be. Egnor has recently writ­ten on the Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism from a cre­ation­ist point of view. To be hon­est I dis­agree with some of it, the words mainly, but the spaces and punc­tu­ation on the other hand seem sound. Chris­topher O’Brien has given the words far more atten­tion than they deserve, so if you want a cri­tique of the pro­pos­i­tions ((It took me half an hour to choose that word. Facts as the blog entry makes clear wouldn’t have been the right choice)) then it’s a great read. What I find dif­fi­cult is the repeated claim by cre­ation­ists that you can simply see design.

It’s a com­mon claim. When fun­da­ment­al­ists Cameron and Com­fort are notexhort­ing people to stick banana-shaped objects into their mouths they make claims like: “If you stuck a group of sci­ent­ists in a room with a paint­ing then, with noth­ing from the out­side world, they would con­clude there was a painter.” Now I don’t think they would. I can­not simply see design in com­plex objects, so are the cre­ation­ists wrong or am I thick?
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Is the Heart of the Universe is Satanic?

Alun Life, Politics No Comments , , ,

The Neuro­philo­sopher points to a web­log with a very spe­cial grip on reality.

Blogs4Brownback is a site ded­ic­ated to put­ting Sam Brown­back into the White­house. Brown­back seems to be an inter­est­ing can­did­ate adher­ing to the motto “A faith isn’t for life, it’s just for Christ­mas”. He’s moved from Meth­od­ism to Cath­oli­cism and now, if Blogs4Brownback is to be believed, he’s chas­ing the Satan­ist vote.

The clues are fairly blatant. He’s anti-abortion and pro-war clearly to curry favour with his new mas­ter who wants to see suf­fer­ing. The web­log shows him bar­ing his teeth in a satanic grin through a van­dal­ised Amer­ican flag charred with brim­stone. And now he’s arguing that chil­dren should be taught that the uni­verse revolves around Satan.

The logic is fairly simple. As Dante made clear Satan lives in the heart of Hades deep in the under­world. Blogs4Brownback add the innov­a­tion of per­vert­ing Bib­lical scrip­ture to pro­mote Satan. The Earth, they argue, is fixed and immov­able in the Bible, thus the uni­verse revolves around it. Except when it gets pudgy and goes for a run around the Sun. Brown­back is also an advoc­ate of intel­li­gent design which is a Satan-friendly form of Cre­ation­ism.

Ah no, it’s not linked from the Brown­back cam­paign site. Pre­sum­ably it’s a spoiler to blacken his name. Amus­ing though.

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