Iman Jacob Wilkens, a Dutch economist, has a website (and a book) that shows how ancient Troy was not located in Hisarlik, Turkey, as Schliemann surmised, but outside Cambridge on the Gog Magog Hills.
The Greeks did not know that the Trojans who once lived in that area were migrants, as the collective memory of this fact was lost during the Dark Ages (1200-750 BC).
From 1180 to 1100 Hissarlik was indeed inhabited by a non-local people. They were the survivors of the greatest war of prehistory, when Troy on the Gog Magog Hills in Cambridgeshire, England, was destroyed. Here, countless bronze weapons and other remains of a major war in the late Bronze Age have been found.
The great migrations of the second millennium BC brought also Achaeans, Troy’s enemies, from regions along the Atlantic coast of the Continent to the Mediterranean where they caused the collapse of many civilisations.
The name Achaeans means Watermen or Sea People (the Gothic acha for water or stream is cognate with Latin aqua). The Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BC) confirms that Pelasgians (Sea Peoples) had settled in Greece long before his time. They founded Athens, renamed places, merged with the local population and adopted their language.
There’s also a lecture online that Mr Wilkens gave before the Herodoteans (a Cantabrigian Classics student society) in 1992.
An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the Italian government indicting a curator at the Getty Museum. (Also an article in the Chicago Tribune.)
Marion True, 56, curator for antiquities at the museum and director of the Getty Villa, is accused of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and illicit receipt of archeological items. It is also alleged that True in effect laundered goods that were purchased by a private collection and then sold to the Getty in paper transactions that created phony documentation.
The plunder of Italian treasures has gone on for many years. Despite efforts to stem it, valuable art—some of it stolen—has made its way into the hands of major museums and collectors like the Getty, authorities believe. The criminal indictment of a top curator was seen as an indication that Italian officials are taking more aggressive steps to curb such practices.
Marion True is also the director of the Getty Villa. Another article about the statue of Aphrodite mentioned.
It’s great to see that Laputan Logic is back online after a lengthy hiatus. He has a great sidebar entry with a set of links to high-quality scans of the Tabula Peutingeriana which is an early Roman roadmap. See if you can find your favorite European cities.
I ran across this interesting article [via YIVO] on how Tomas Jelinek, a Czech Jewish official, brought John Kerry news of the deaths of his paternal great uncle and aunt in the Holocaust.
Jelinek also was in New York to launch a fund-raising drive for a new $6 million senior home for Holocaust survivors in Prague, called Project Hagibor. The planned 60-bed facility aims to provide round-the-clock care for some of Prague's estimated 1,500 Holocaust survivors.
Former Czech President Vaclav Havel is behind the project.
“In the history of our country, the biggest killing of Czech citizens in one day happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau on March 8, 60 years ago,” Havel wrote in a letter of support for the project. “Entire families, including children, were killed. The only thing that made them guilty was being Jewish.”
While looking for something else, I found the Mathematics Genealogy Project website. Find out who studied with whom. I’ve always dreamed of doing something like this for linguistic academics, usually after reading some famous body’s necrology.
Ein niedriges Gebirg umzäunt, wo wir sie sahen, die Küste von Kalifornien und verhindert den Blick, in das innere zu dringen. Dasselbe hat kein vulkanisches Ansehen. Der Hafen von San Francisco, in welchem Burney (T. 1., p. 354) mit gelehrter Kritik den hafen von Sir Francis Drake erkennt, dringt durch ein enges Thor ein, nimmt Flüsse aus dem Innern auf, verzweigt sich hinter den Höhen und macht eine Halbinsel aus dem südlich des Einganges gelegenen Lande. Das Presidio und die Mission von San Francisco liegen auf diese Landzunge, die mit ihren Hügeln und Dünen das wenig günstige Feld war, welches sich zunächst unsern Untersuchungen eröffnete.
[Adalbert v. Chamisso Reise um die Welt, zweiter Teil]
A low mountain range enclosed the coast of California, wherever we saw it, and obstructed our view into the interior. It does not have a volcanic appearance. San Frasncisco Bay, in which Burney as the result of a learned investigation recognizes Sir Francis Drake's harbor, passes through a narrow gate, absorbs rivers from the interior and makes a peninsula out of the land situated south of the entrance. The presidio and the mission of San Francisco are built on this neck of land, which, with its hills and dunes, was the not very favorable field that was first open to our investigations.
[Adalbert v. Chamisso A Voyage Around the World, second part, translated by Henry Kratz]
1. For we should love the human kind, / As Jesus taught us to, / And those who don’t should be struck blind / And beaten black and blue; / I’d like to roast them in a grill / And listen to them shriek, / Then break them on the wheel until / They turned the other cheek. [via Roger Woddis “Down With Fanatics” via Michael Rosen Culture Shock via Laputan Logic.] 2. Il ne parle que du bon Dieu / A l’epoque ou Jean-sans-Terre d’Angleterre etait Roi / Dominique, notre Pere, combattit les Albigeois. [Jeannine Deckers aka the Singing Nun aka Sœur Sourire.] 3. Just lovely how the Bush administration feels about labor. [via wood s lot.]
Alberto Santos-Dumont, Wilbur and Orville Wright, or the one-time Smithsonian champion Samuel Pierpont Langley? It depends on how one frames the question.
[Addendum 12/20/03: Maciej Ceglowski has a wonderful entry on the whole who flew first thing. The Wrights’ is a fascinating story of genius invention hampered by their litigious and anti-social mood.
I believe that the Wright patent story drives home the intellectual bankruptcy of our patent system. The whole point of patents is supposed to be to encourage innovation, reward entrepreneurship, and make sure useful inventions get widely disseminated. But in this case (and in countless others, in other fields), the practical effect of patents turned out to be to hinder innovation—a patent war erupts, and ends up hamstringing truly innovative technologies, all without doing much for the inventors, who weren’t motivated by money in the first place.]
Well, there was the time I nearly drowned in the high school swimming pool under the watchful eye of one of the PE coaches. Since then, I've been wary of large bodies of water. And there was that cut-away view of a WW1 U-boot in the Deutsches Museum in München that helped to nip any ideas about joining the navy to see the world in the bud. A quick spin round the web revealed the superb Uboat dot net site. A while back, I'd bookmarked an interesting Pacific Wrecks Database site.
Just now, I was googling around the web in search of the Latin adjectival form for the city of Cairo, when I dropped in on the New Tradition website. So, what had Garry Kasparov been up to after losing to IBM's Deep Blue chess program? Obviously, lending his good name to the efforts of A. T. Fomenko (1945- ), Russian mathematician, who has proved that written history is only about 1000 years old. He had some help from N. A. Morozov (1854-1946), who had proved that written history only went back to 300 CE. I have to admit I was a little shocked to discover such a rich vein of academic psychoceramics of which I was totally unaware. The New Traditions website is hosted by Vladimir Melamed who runs Lencom Software, Inc. which sells email marketing software.
There's plenty of information around the web concerning Fomenko, Morozov, and company. Here's a choice example:
The number of inconsistencies and errors in the book is unbelievable.
Let me remind you that according to Fomenko everything in the world
history is eventually mapped to medieval Italy. He even takes great
pains to prove that the Bible actually describes Italian events
of X - XIII centuries. Fomenko undertakes some linguistic analysis
to show that Hebrew word 'Mitzraim' which is usually associated with
Egypt stands in fact for Rome, Sinai is Mt. Vesuvius, etc. His exercises
in linguistics are not just weak - they're ludicrous because this
esteemed scholar is apparently unaware of the basics of the discipline
that he is boldly calling for help.…
Fomenko is a decent mathematician though. I think that either the book is
a hoax and he's secretly laughing over the people who take it seriously,
or we just witness a peculiar case of dementia which affects only
the part of brain responsible for logical reasoning.[Vitaly Shmatikov on soc.culture.soviet]
I ran across the assumption more than once online — usually from Fomenko's compatriots — that he was writing a satire of sorts. You can judge for yourself. Here's one of his articles in English at the University of Omsk.
Dynastic stream of English kings from 640 to 1040 A.D.
(400-year period) is a duplicate (reflection) of Byzantine
dynastic stream from 378 to 830 A.D. (452-year period). These two
dynastic streams coincide after 210-year chronological shift.…
Even if the vowels of common words are not that important
(you can easily reconstruct a well-known word from the context),
the situation changes completely when combination of consonants
meaning a city, country, the name of a king, etc., appears in an
ancient text. Tens and hundreds of different variants of vowels
for one term (word) may be found, stating the "identifications"
of the biblical vowel-free names of cities, countries, and
others, made by traditional historians proceeding from the
chronological (and geographical) version of J.Scaliger and the
localization referring the biblical events to the Near East.…
Where was the land Britain which was conquered by Brutus located? In what direction his fleet cruised?
Ancient Troy located in medieval Italy; King Brutus of Britannia existed; Russia not an island. These are just some of the fantastic observations in the preceeding article. I am exhausted.
[Addendum 08/03/03: An interesting anti-Fomenko article: Who Lost the Middle Ages?.]
[Addendum 08/04/03: Mr Aitch over at Giornale Nuovo has an entry which reveals another side to the fascinating Fomenko: he's an artist.]
Laputan Logic has a nice entry summing up the evidence against the recently dismissed James son of Joseph brother of Jesus ossuary (and the Jehoash inscription, too). The previous entry is a good one on Mithras. I remember reading some historian's opinion that the reason Christianity won out over Mithraism was that the former had wider appeal because it accepted non-soldiers and women.
The other day I ran across a six pack of something called Czechvar at a local store. Sure enough investigation of the label showed it was brewed in Ceske Budejovice (AKA Budweis in the days of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire). Well, finally, the real Budweiser had made it to the States, though without its infamous name. Anheuser-Busch (the world's largest brewer by volume) has spent the last century trying to eradicate or buy out the Budvar brewery in Budweis. In the Czech Republic, Budweiser is a German adjective describing the location that a product comes from. (The Czech version of this adjective is Budejovicky.) So, it's one big intellectual property battle similar to the problem that vintners in the French Champagne appellation have with with Californian sparkling wine producers calling theirs "champagne." Funny thing is there's an older brewery in Budweis. Budejovicky Pivovar (or Budvar, a portmanteau word) was founded in 1895, but Budweiser Bürgerbrau, founded in 1795, is also brewing a Budweiser beer called Samson. The verdict on the beer in the bottle was good, but I still must travel to Budweis some day and drink a glass of draft in situ.
It seems that this May Day past was also Loyalty Day [1]. Now this isn't just some spur of the moment proclamation by President Bush. He has proclaimed both in 2002 and 2001. And the previous occupant of the White House was not above some proclaiming himself. As a matter of fact, Loyalty Day (AKA Law Day) traces back to a proclamation of President Eisenhower in 1958 and a joint resolution of Congress in 1961. The ABA lobbied long and hard to get it proclaimed an official holiday in order to combat the forces of International Communism, but few realize why the ex-Soviet Union used to parade its miltary might around on May Day. In fact, May first was proclaimed International Workers' Day in memory of a strike which took place in Chicago, on May 1, 1886, in favor of the eight-hour work day [3]. Somewhere along the way, law and loyalty became synonymous in the American plitical mind.
[1] Strange times when I agree with the Libertarians, but perhaps there is just too much government.
[2] Best know for his golfing and heart attacks.
[3] How un-American!
A while back, the print version of California Monthly had an article, by Kevin Starr (the California State Historian), that revealed the solution to the mysterious origin of the faux Drakean brass plate found in the '30s near San Quentin. Seems that George Ezra Dane and some other members of E Clampus Vitus were playing a joke on Cal's eminent history professor and fellow ECV member, Herbert Eugene Bolton. The findings were published in the California History magazine after eleven years of research. Looking around the web disclosed some great sites about Drake, the possible locations of the bay in North America where he stayed for a couple of months, and the brass plate hoax:
