Bronze Age Mummies

Recall the wonderful The Mummies of Urumchi in the 1990s? The book about the dessicated remains of tall, blue-eyed people who'd died thousands of years ago, and were buried wrapped in plaid-style blankets--not in Europe, but in China--presented archaeologists with a riddle: Did Europeans migrate to China during the Bronze Age?

Apparently so, because Chinese bulldozers, preparing the ground for Chinese engineering projects over the last few decades have been uncovering more European-in-appearance mummies. Now we have The Tarim Mummies, and they are touring! Today, the exhibit opened at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana--a mere stone's throw away (assuming you have the pitching arm of a titan).  Here's the Yahoo story.The centerpiece of the exhibit--this "Beauty of Xiaohe"--has a feather in her hat, flaming red hair, and eyelashes you could paint with.

This pictures has been reprinted at several blogs, so I'll join the crowd. Far from being an anomaly, the scholarly consensus seems to be that these mummies represent a migrating people who lived north of Tibet from 2000 BC to the 4th or 5th century AD.

Professor Victor H. Mair talked to The Los Angeles Times about the mummies. (He was quoted in the Yahoo story too.) Apparently a lot of testing has not been done on the mummies-Mair suggests an examination of their stomachs is in order. CT scans and other tests are also lacking.

It's good, IMHO, that the Chinese authorities have not rushed to rip open bodies to get at every possible microbiological clue about the mummies. Sure, we'd all like to know more, but invasive tests may not be the smartest course. Given the strides that science makes decade by decade, what's invasive and destructive today may be scannable tomorrow.

Cabbages and Celts

Let's see...I had corned beef and cabbage 3 nights ago, and corned beef sandwiches at a party last night, and corned beef and cabbage and potatoes this morning, and I'll probably have the same for dinner tonight. Too much of a good thing is actually pretty satisfying.

All hail the lowly cabbage! Hated them as a kid, but now I love 'em. The Celts did too.

Wild cabbage, back in the early days, probably resembled collard greens. That prolific plant, through selective planting and breeding, gave birth to today's cabbages, cauliflower, collards, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale and kohlrabi.

Brussel sprouts are basically the buds of the plant. Broccoli and cauliflower are the flowers of the plant, inbred to extremes.

When did all this cultivation and manipulation take place? I'm not sure, and so I can't say exactly what sort of cabbage the ancient Gauls enjoyed.

The Aggie-horticulture site points out that the Latin word for cabbage is based on the Celtic word for the plant, bresic, implying that the Celts introduced the Romans to it. The white, hard-headed cabbage grows better in colder climes, so that makes sense. Gaul, Britain, and Ireland were all a lot colder than most of Italy.

Celtic Myth Podshow

"Bringing the Tales and Stories of the Ancient Celts to Your Fireside," is what the banner reads. The blog is the Celtic Myth Podshow, which I just discovered and wish I'd found sooner. Because then I'd know more about Seahenge, pictured at left. (the picture, btw, appeared in The Guardian and was taken by Michael Walter/PA). More about Seahenge in a moment. Here's what Celtic Myth Podshow offers, very briefly:

• Over 30 podcasts from 2008-2009, each reciting tales from Irish, Breton, Welsh, and other Celtic sources. Some are holiday musical programs.

• Photo and art galleries from various contributors

• A cute little button to become a fan of their Facebook site, which triggered an unstoppable avalanche of facebook pages opening up, one after the other, until I had to reboot. Don't click on that.

• The Celtic news blog mentioned in the first paragraph.

The blog offered news about the rebuilding of "Seahenge". The Seahenge site was discovered in 1998 near Holme-Next-the-Sea, is about 4000 years old, and consisted of 55 timbers in a circle--with an upturned oak tree stump in the center. The timbers have been on display at the Lynn Museum, and now the exhibit will close for 4 months so that the stump can be added.  This picture is from the museum's website.

Mary Robert Rinehart's Writing Room

Try saying that ten times in a row...Mary Robert Rinehart's writing room, Mary Robert Rinehart's writng room, Mary Robert Rinehart's robin room...nope. Can't do it.

Anyhow, this was her room in 1926. In Washington DC. Thanks to Shorpy, a wonderful collection of ye olde photos, who displayed this today.

Rinehart, the "American Agatha Christie" according to Wikipedia, would have been about 50 that year. This is a home she shared with her husband, a doctor, from the early 20s till his death in 1932. The lady wrote mysteries, and is credited with the phrase "The butler did it." She didn't actually write those words, but she wrote a bestselling mystery in which the butler, dang him, actually did do it.

For 1926, this is a pretty cool room, doncha think? There's a fan that looks a lot like the fan I bought at Home Depot recently. As for that furniture--would it be out of place on any patio today? Ferns, an exquisite lamp, sheer curtains...the only thing that dates this room is the radio. Or was it called a wireless still?

Pharaonic DNA

King Tut had a cleft palate, as did his father, Akhenaten. His mother was Akhenaten's sister. Tut suffered from Kohler's disease and clubbed feet, inherited from grandpa Amenhotep III. And he wasn't murdered.

We know all this from DNA analysis. Cool, huh?

A CT scan discovered that King Tut's leg was broken just before death, and that brain malaria most likely killed him. But it's the DNA confirmation of his paternity and maternity that settles a lot of questions.

For two years, winding up in October 2009, researchers did all sorts of tests--twice--on several royal mummies in Tutankamun's family. Ten possible near-relatives were analyzed, as well as five royal mummies from the previous century (Tut died around 1323 BC). The results are just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  (JAMA...wouldn't you assume this would be in an archaeologica or Egyptology journal? Just a thought.)

And all those theories of Marfan's disease, or a biological basis for elongated skulls and womanish curves in Akhenaten's family? No genetic evidence of any of that was found. Possibly, the portrayals of Akh & Tut & co. just reflect a passing artistic style.  It's in all the papers today, so here's a link to the Science Daily piece. I like it particularly because it ends by bringing up some of the ethical questions that come with this type of work. Who's entitlted to a right of privacy, even after death? for example.

Dumb and Frustrating

Here's a dilemma:

When otherwise nice people send you an email that's been forwarded 728 times, with all 852,639 "to" addresses still attached, advising you in 36-point font that THIS IS NOT A HOAX! and THIS WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA--IT'S REAL!!!! ... and what follows is so clearly a hoax and a pile of manure that no sensible person over eight years old could possibly believe it to be true, and Snopes and every debunking site in the f-ing world has exposed it and no one but a moron would believe that Bill Gates wants to send them a check because he's testing a new email system ... and yet the person who sent it to you is a decent person--stupid and naive, yes, but still not someone you want to insult and burn bridges between ... so what do you do?

Blog out your frustrations.

Shout out!

How exciting--my writing pal has moved fast in the last 2 months. She went from being a (sigh) writer-in-search-of-an-agent who (like me) sent over 150 queries on her fantastic book idea, wondering about the meaning of life and joining me in a weekly rant about the unfairness of the agenting world to poor, struggling authors like ourselves, to being zapped with the magic wand of a real, live, fairy god-agent! Within weeks she had a contract with a publisher and is now being mentioned in Publishers Weekly and (today) The Biographer's Craft.

Debra Ann Pawlak; remember the name.

Actually, she was two up on me to start with--she's authored two books already. The Arcadia book at left, and the Bruce Lee bio at left-left.

Still, those agents are slippery little buggers and very hard to catch.  Go, Deb!

Books Read in 2009

I got 40--who can beat that? Probably a lot of people. That's less than one a week.

Best novel (I'm slow here, playing catchup):

Yup, Kite Runner. I haven't seen the movie either. I don't know how much of this story--the culture and racism that was so well expressed in the novel--could come across in a film. But I'll get around to the movie eventually, I'm sure.

Best nonfiction would be Devil in the White City. But its only real competition was The Soloist. For some reason, other books didn't thrill me--some covered interesting topics, but the writing was pedantic; others were just dated tomes that I read as research.

Biggest disappointment: The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I have no problem with the author de-heroizing Simon Bolivar, but the story never grabbed me. Garcia Marquez, it seems, uses his prose to make points--like the tedium of a long marriage in Love in the Time of Cholera. I barely made it through that, but I appreciated his courage as a writer. I couldn't stay with The General in His Labyrinth past the middle, though--and it had such a beautiful cover!

One More Book for Moi!

Whoopee! Another tome to add to the pile (figuratively, of course. I can't afford to buy this book, even though I contributed to it.)

Latino History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (Sharpe Reference) contains articles that I wrote about Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which forced Mexico to cede California and the Southwest to the US, way back in the 1840s), and a charming little piece titled "Conquest of the Americas," in which I accomplish the amazing feat of describing centuries of bloodcurdling cruelty in 1500 words.

Yeah, I don't believe it either. But they rewrote it so many times to make it politically correct that all the really nasty stuff has been toned down. I almost wish they'd taken my name off it!

Coligny Calendar

Just in time for Christmas, here's a neat-o site about the Celtic Coligny Calendar!

That's the calendar at left, or a piece of it, which sits in a museum in Lyons, France. The calendar dates to about the first century, but many experts who've examined it think it reflects computations made a thousand years earlier.

According to this site, last October was the month of Ciallos. I'm just juvenile enough to point out the resemblence of that name to a certain pharmaceutical product, and I should be ashamed.

Ciallos is not a month that occurs every year. The Celtic calendar managed to reflect both the lunar and solar time periods, and it did this by adding extra months every few years to keep us all in sync.

We're in the month of Semiusonna now. According to the Caer Australis site I linked to earlier, this (the 24th) is the last day of the month. Christmas Day marks the beginning of Equos--in 2009, at least. But not all calendrical geeks agree with Caer Australis, I'm sure. In fact, some think the Celts began their months with the dark new moon, while others assume the month began with the full moon...or something in between.

Basically, the Celts divided the year into a dark and light half, the dark half (fall and winter) preceding the light half. The months had dark and light halves as well. All months had either 29 (unlucky) or 30 (lucky) days. It's all very complicated, but what I find interesting is that the big feasts do NOT correspond with the solstices or equinoxes (equinoxi?).

Or am I missing something?

The Archaeology of Caesar's Gaul

Just came across this webpage in BurgundyToday, which shows the sites linked to Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul--the later years, anyway.  Vercingetorix, Alexia, that sort of stuff.

I learned that three sites vie for the honor of being the site of the siege of Alesia, which surprised me. My old, dog-eared copy of Caesar's writings states unequivocaly that Alise Ste. Reine stands on old Alesai. According to Burgundy Today, two other places make that claim. Chaux-de-Crotenay is one; dunno about the other.
The Battle of Alesia, pitting Caesar (with Roman Legions) against Vercingetorix (with a loose confederation of Gaulish tribes), was the defining fight of Caesar's eight-year conquest. Many huge fights occurred before it, and other rebellions and uprisings followed, but Alesia--because of Caesar's writings--is seen as the key fight, and the one that ultimately decided the fate of Gaul. Livius.org presents a description of the fight, and I borrowed this picture of the Alise Ste. Reine site from their website.

Fired!

Hah! I can return to this blog, because my stint as a political canvasser for an environmental group ended! Yup, you can take the writer away from verbose prose, but you can't take verbosity outta the writer!

I tried; I did. And I earned money to pay for Christmas gifts. But honestly, getting fired was a relief. I was so afraid that one of those prim matrons coming out of Trader Joe's was truly going to spit on me. They wanted to, I could tell.

I used to be rude to canvassers. Never again. I will never walk by and lie and say I'll come back when I won't (one lady did, bless her, in a month of canvassing). I will never snarl and give them the evil eye. How could I have been so nasty? Maybe this month of being a (lowly) paid canvasser was karmic payback. It is hard work.

On the plus side, you get to be outside all day. You get to meet nice people often. People tell you "Good luck" and "God bless you for doing this." (usually, they tell you this just after explaining why they can't give you any money.)

One the minus end, there are all those nasty old people who growl and want to spit at you. And there's that troublesome part about talking people out of money when they've just told you they have none, that they've been laid off and are taking care of sick parents or are nearly homeless. That's where the fired part comes in. A good canvasser never gives up--a good canvasser will talk that recently laid-off person out of their last five dollars. I wimped out. I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Thanks for stopping to talk to me."

I'm so glad I got fired!

Famous Last Words of Calvino

Just finished The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, and it ends with the greatest line(s) (it's all one sentence, but a longie):

That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

Here's to forking off!

Ghostwriting Credit?

I love this Craigslist ad for a ghostwriter:

Hello, I have written a * * * * book that needs some polishing. The reviews have been positive so far, but there is still something that is missing. I would be willing to pay something, but ideally I am looking for someone that wants to beef up their resume.

Ideally? Ideal for whom?

As I read it, Bozo wants a ghostwriter to do the work for free and not get credit (because ghostwriters do not get credit by definition), and yet somehow be satisfied that they can use the gig to "beef up a resume."

Bozo finishes by stating "This book WILL BE PUBLISHED." All caps.

I'd love to know if anyone actually applied for this gig.

BTW, I did send out query #150!

Checking In

I have neglected this blog shamefully, so here's a post. I've sent 146 queries to agent for my wonderful historical novel (yes, it really is wonderful. Read the first couple of chapters to find out!) I will try to bump that total to 150 over the weekend.

A dear friend in another state has found an enthusiastic agent for her nonfiction book, after about 150 queries. It happens! She's going full-speed ahead now, so fast it's scary.

Rather than a roller coaster, though, my writing life is a pretty still, sometimes muddy river...much like this, taken near Paimpont Forest in France--one of the sections of old forest still left. Not necessarily where my novel takes place, but close. The kind of site you would have seen 2000 years ago.

October Afternoon

I'm such a lucky slob. I got to visit with an amazing 93-year-old lady, and this is the view from her living room.

No good reason to be there. I was invited along with friends and served coffee and walnut torte and ice cream. Just because at 93, this lady has learned that she can take all the time she wants to do what she wants, be it have company, cook tortes in spring pans, or sleep.

Here's something from an essay she wrote; I hope she doesn't mind that I quote this tiny bit:

We're each given our life, our own Great Adventure

our chance to learn, to accomplish deeds great and small,

some of which will matter.

Mudlarks and History

You might think (I certainly did) that in a huge city like London, any segment of riverbank was long ago picked over for the archaeological detritus that might be hidden there. Well, we're wrong. Maybe you'd like to distance yourself from me.

I'm not sure why--maybe because the Thames has not been concreted over like most well-behaved rivers--but London's river remains rich in ancient deposits, some dating back to Roman times. Treasure hunters rejoice!

If you want to muck about, though, you'll probably only be allowed to do so on the south bank. The north side of the river is the private domain of serious, if amateur, excavators . Britain issues a very limited number of licenses allowing exploration of this artifact-rich area, so the owners of those licenses have formed their own fraternity: The Society of Thames Mudlarks. This picture, from OurPastHistory.com, shows mudlarks working the shore at Southwark.

The name comes from a term that once referred to street urchins in the Victorian Age. At low tide--and tides on the Thames can drop as much as 25 feet--mudlarks go to work, many using metal detectors. They find coins, tools, and toys--like guns that actually carried a charge and may have blown off a few fingers. Most of the objects fell out of ships through the ages, and anything over 300 years old become property of the Museum of London (though the finders are rewarded).

National Geographic did a piece on the mudlarks in 2004. Last week's Time Magazine featured a fascinating "Postcard" segment about them as well (pg. 6 of the October 12, 2009 issue, or here). Go read it for a hint of the finds, all the regulations about what happens to the goodies dug out of the river mud, and for a profile of Steve Brooker, former pro skateboarder and awesome Mud God of the mudlarks. Just this year, Brooker found a ball and chain once worn (unwillingly) by a 17th-century prisoner. Here's a link to that story in the Daily Mail, which is where the picture below came from. Brooker's find is the only complete ball, chain & lock ever found.

The last paragraph of the Time piece intrigued me. Through a series of mini strokes, I read, Brooker lost large portions of his own memories about three years ago. Irretrievably. Does that have anything to do with his need to uncover history?

During the last few years of my parents' lives (they died within a week of each other, after 55 years of marriage), I became obsessed with family history and genealogy. I made connections all over the country with folks who had the same unusual last name, and found that the 200 or so people in the world who shared that name were, indeed, all related and all traced their history to a town in the Rhine Palatinate region of Germany.

Then my parents died, and I lost interest. With all the fickleness of a spoiled prom queen, I packed away the charts and notebooks and have not looked at them since. Doesn't take much analysis to figure out what was going on there, does it?

So I was curious about Brooker's loss, and how it played into his fascination with mudlarking. This entry from Antiquarian's Attic says that Brooker has been a mudlark for 12 years. I guess my attempt to read something Freudian into his passion is misdirected, but the tail of the mudlarks is still a fascinating one.

Musing on Celts and Written History

Most folks think Irish when they think Celts, and that's fine. Ireland, after all, is still the only Celtic country never conquered by Rome. When scholars and others speculate about Celtic society, they use records found in Ireland because those are the oldest available records about Celtic customs.

The earlier Celtic people of Ireland, Britain, the Iberian peninsula, France (Gaul), Switzerland, Eastern Europe, etc., did not write down their history. They considered history far too important to commit to writing. Instead, it was memorized by the educated classes--the druids--who could interpret it properly.

Buggers. Even that previous paragraph contains a ton of untestable assumptions--about the druids' roles, and the reasons that histories and beliefs were not written down, f'r instance.

Since there are some examples of these ancient tribes using Roman or Greek letters to note very mundane things--like accounting records or praises of deities--we know that the Celts used writing. Julius Caesar (not an unbiased source, IMHO) says the druids would not put their beliefs in writing for religious reasons. Unless we unearth a 2200-year-old history etching somewhere, I guess we have to settle for that explanation.

And that leaves the writings of Celtic Ireland, both pre and post Christian, to give us a clue to earlier Celtic beliefs. But the oldest existing records of ancient Irish history are still about seven centuries removed from the days of an independent, non-Romanized Gaul, and seven hundred years is A Long Time. Not to mention the geographic distance...

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but think about it. Seven hundred years ago, chances are the city/town you live in did not exist. Maybe your country did not exist. Seven hundred years ago, Europe was still recovering from the Black Death that wiped out a third to a half of its population. The Inquisition was just ramping up, so free thought was not only outre but downright suicidal. Most people in Europe were illiterate peasants who lived on the verge of starvation. How much have we changed since then? An immeasurable amount.

What's the point? Just that it seems awfully tenuous to me to speculate about the B.C. Celts and their society based on early Irish texts, such as a law code (the Brehon) first codified in 438 A.D. I'm not sure how old the oldest examples of the law code are--certainly more recent than 438--but tradition says that the laws date back to the 8th century B.C.

Tradition is very unreliable. My own family tradition handed down the story for 2 or 3 generations that a great-great-great grandfather of ours was a judge in the old country. Guess what? Someone did some Real Research and found out the tradition was completely bogus. No judges, only farmers and seed merchants. Period. So if tradition can be fictionalized within sixty or seventy years in one family, what can happen over seven centuries?

OTOH...This was a society that trained men and women to memorize long histories, we are told. And if the histories were sacred to them, would anyone dare screw them up? But OTOH...even written histories get warped over time. Every re-writing changes something very subtly, doesn't it? Language changes, and those who study this claim that it changes at a measurable rate.

I got into an argument with an engineering type person a couple of months ago about that. He was irate that language changed. He felt that someone should stop it from changing. He truly believed that was possible, and he felt that due to a lack of conscientious effort on the part of English professors, he had been cheated out of his right to comprehend and enjoy Shakespeare and Chaucer in their original words.

I thought he was crazy, though I didn't say so. Still, he grew quite heated over his points, and I can only assume that most people don't bother arguing with him often.

I digress. But this is a blog; I'm allowed.

A Previously Unknown Stone Circle Found...

...only a mile from Stonehenge! Wow. I'm ferklempt.

The archaeologists are calling it Bluestonehenge or just Bluehenge, and are pushing the idea that Stonehenge was a burial site. Perhaps, they say, Bluestonehenge is where bodies were cremated before burial at Stonehenge. I can't point to any flaws in that theory, but it does assume a lot. However...quien sabe?

After thousands of years, we learn that another stone circle was off the River Avon? This is too cool. Here's the CNN story. It seems that only the pits are left--the blue stones, from Wales, were removed about 4500 years ago and may actually be the bluestones of Stonehenge. But originally, they stood in a vast circle a mile distant.

This Chicago Tribune story gives a bit more detail--there were 25 stones in this newly-found circle, and they stood for about 500 years before being moved. After that a round ditch about 74 feet across replaced the stone circle.

It's just amazing to me that new discoveries are made at some of the most famous and studied sites on earth.

Everything You Want to Know About Druids

There are several books with the title "Druids," including a novel by Morgan Llywelyn which I sorta reviewed here. Tons o' fun.

A digression:

You know that when you read a novel, the author is allowed to Make Things Up, right? This picture, for instance, represents a lurid, fictional scene. Not Real.

With non-fiction books, the author is not supposed to Make Things Up. Some of them do, though. How can the reader beware of this practice?

Your best bet is to look at the credentials of the author.

If s/he is a university professor, chances are the information in the book is carefully researched. The author has an academic reputation to uphold, and that probably is more valuable to him or her than the success of the book.

If the author has no real credentials, and especially if the book is self-published or from a publisher you never heard of, be careful of taking the words to heart.

Digression over.

The nonfiction books with "Druid" in the title fall into two categories: those dealing with the historical, Celtic Druids, and those devoted to neo-druidism.

The two categories are completely separate. Neo-druidic books that promise to teach druidism are promoting a philosophy, religion, and lifestyle that was invented in modern times, and uses impressions of ancient druids as its inspiration--like the happy couple to the right.

Look, no one knows what ancient druids believed. They left NO written record, and the writings about them are filtered through Romans and Greeks. Those authors may have been lying, or misinformed, or faithful reporters...we don't know.

That leaves a handful of books by scholars and historians about druids. Of these, I recommend Peter Berresford Ellis' book, The Druids -- or, as Amazon bills it, A Brief History of the Druids (The Brief History). Even though it features Stonehenge on the cover (a construction that preceeds Druids and Celts by a coupla millennia), it's the most recent book that gathers together all that we can know about Druids--from archaeology (including Lindow Man), ancient writing, and Irish and Welsh traditions.

Ellis takes the position that Druids were the educated segment of society--the doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists, and yes, priests. He compares them to the Brahmins of India. He makes conjectures, sifts through the evidence. If you read a book by a different expert, s/he might have different opinions.

Druids are mysterious. They were the elite and guarded secret information. That information died with them, though.

I'm reminded of a line from the book Indeh by Eve Ball--a book about the Apache...a line I can't find right now! Dang. I hope I don't butcher the quote, but one of the Apaches who was telling his history turned to Ms. Ball and said, "You white people, you keep everthing up here in your head, and nothing in your heart."

Why didn't they write anything down? I imagine they didn't want their most sacred information being poured over by whatever enemy got their hands on a scroll, but that's my opinion.