Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Aug 13, 2024The national dessert of Egypt: bread pudding made from crisp flatbread, pistachios, almonds, sultanas, spices, and rose water
City/Region: Egypt | Baghdad
Time Period: 10th-13th CenturiesOm Ali is the national dessert of Egypt, and its roots go back at least to the 10th century, when we get the base recipe for my version. I took inspiration from other medieval recipes and added the nuts, sultanas, and spices, though they would also use ingredients like camphor, chicken, poppyseeds, and musk.
I really like the flavors, and the dish is sweet without being too sweet, but the bread gives it a kind of noodle-like texture which is a bit odd. Modern versions often use dry croissants, so I won’t judge if you use them or something like phyllo or puff pastry in place of the homemade roqaq.
Take semolina or white bread and soak it in milk until saturated. Then, take half a pound of sugar, or as much as is needed for the amount of bread, crush it, and mix it with the bread. Then, take a clean and shallow pot … add the soaked bread, milk, and sugar … Return the pot to slow burning coals. When the filling is cooked and set, remove the pot from the fire, turn it out onto a wide bowl and serve, God willing.
— Kitab al-Tabikh by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, 10th Century
December 20, 2024
The Murder of Egypt’s Forgotten Queen – Shajar al-Durr & Om Ali
December 19, 2024
“A decree went out from Caesar Augustus” – The evidence for the date of the birth of Jesus
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 18 Dec 2024It’s December, with Christmas fast approaching, and I suspect that a fair few people who never think much about the Romans will hear mention of Caesar Augustus because of this verse from Luke’s Gospel. I have an appendix about this in my biography of Augustus, so thought that I would talk about how the New Testament dates the Christmas story and how well this fits with our other sources for the Ancient World.
December 15, 2024
The fall of the house of Assad
In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the fall of Syria’s dictator as the al-Assad family is finally toppled from power:
When I saw video clips of the joyful toppling of statues of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the tearing from walls of his ubiquitous portrait, I wondered what it must be like to be a dictator and see images of yourself everywhere (not that I have any ambitions myself in that direction).
Do you come to imagine, for example, that they are a manifestation of genuine popular affection for yourself, or are you like the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, of the poem by Ernesto Cardenal “Somoza Unveils a Statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium” (the fact that Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest, was a commie doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a good poet).
The Somoza of the poem is perfectly clear-sighted. He knows that people didn’t erect the statue spontaneously, out of love for him, because he knows that he himself ordered it to be erected. Nor does he think that it will be a perpetual monument to himself because he knows also that the people will tear it down as soon as they can. No, he had it erected because he knew that the people would hate it, in other words that it would humiliate them, and a humiliated people is easy to cow into submission, at least until — to use a word of slightly different zoological connotation — the worm turns. (A note to pedants before they write in: I do not think that the verb to cow has any etymological link with the female herbivore known as the cow.)
It seems to me, however, that Cardenal may have simplified a little. Such is the complexity and potential dishonesty of the human mind that a dictator would be perfectly capable of imagining that a statue of himself is a manifestation of people’s affection for him and that there are people plotting to bring down both the statue and him because they hate him. This is not totally irrational or impossible. After all, as Americans know, even in a free democracy some people love the leader and some people hate him (usually more of the latter after he has been in power for some time).
Assad junior, it seems to me, is a living refutation of Solzhenitsyn’s famous remark that Macbeth was capable of killing only a handful of people because he was motivated by no ideology, and it requires an ideology to bring about hecatombs of the Nazis or Communists. Assad junior had a self-justification for his rule, no doubt, as every ruler and dictator has and must have, but he did not really possess a full-blown ideology in Solzhenitsyn’s sense. His trajectory is worth recalling.
The son of a monstrous dictator, he seems at first to have had no inclinations in that direction himself. Among other things, he didn’t seem to have the physical attributes of a dictator, but rather of someone pliant and weak, more herbivore than carnivore, more giraffe rather lion (though giraffes can kick a lion to death). And it spoke rather well of him that he should qualify as a doctor, apparently quite genuinely so, and wish to become an ophthalmologist, to which end he studied in London, where his conduct was not that of a spoilt brat but by all accounts rather modest — laudably so, in the circumstances.
December 14, 2024
December 13, 2024
The influence of Mesopotamian cultures on ancient Greece
James Pew and Scott Miller begin their series on the history of western education by looking at the way Greek civilization was influenced by the Mesopotamian cultures who used cuneiform writing for three thousand years:
In the 19th century, three new discoveries began to militate against “the image of pure, self-contained Hellenism”. They were: “the reemergence of the ancient Near East and Egypt through the decipherment of cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing, the unearthing of Mycenaean civilization, and the recognition of an Orientalizing phase in the development of archaic Greek art”.
To sketch the significance of just one of these discoveries, what the discovery of cuneiform writing means for the history of writing and literature, we have with cuneiform not only the first writing system in human history, but also the longest running (it was in use for over 3,000 years); cuneiform texts are, at the same time, the best preserved and most numerous textual records from the ancient world by far (there are hundreds of thousands of cuneiform documents in museum archives today because the signs were inscribed on clay tablets which preserve better across time than other materials used for writing in ancient times). This complex writing system, consisting of thousands of signs, was developed first in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians and, subsequently, it was adopted by the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians in the same area. It emerged c. 3200 B.C. as a response to social and economic complexities generated by the world’s first cities: invariably, the impetus to create a writing system comes down to the need to document and track the transfer of food stuffs, material goods, temple offerings, and so forth, the administration of complex urban society. On the other hand, written literature in the form of myth, poetry and the like, are secondary developments that may follow a long time later (if at all). In centuries to follow, Mesopotamian scribes would begin to write down epic tales telling the exploits of heroic kings, such as Gilgamesh, along with hymns and prayers to the Mesopotamia gods, incantations to ward off demons and diseases, texts containing lists of known phenomena, proverbs, reports of astrological phenomena and their omens, medical and magical texts to be used by the healing expert, and many text types besides.
On the Question of Greek Borrowing from the more ancient East: This series will delve into the work of many of these cutting-edge historical scholars who follow the evidence from Orient to Occident. Academic’s like Albin Lesky, M.L. West, Walter Burkert, Margalit Finkelberg, Harald Haarmann, Daniel Ogden, Mark Griffith, and more.
It is no easy task to establish links between Greece and ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and the difficulty has to do with more than vast expanses of time and space. Typically, modern scholars of classical Greece have a tendency to “transform ‘oriental’ and ‘occidental’ into a polarity, implying antithesis and conflict”. According to Burkert, it was not until the Greeks fought back the Persian Empire that they became aware of their distinct identity (as separate from the orient). In addition, it was not until many years later, during the crusades, that “the concept and the term ‘Orient’ actually enter(ed) the languages of the West”. The reluctance on the part of many scholars to accept a universal conception of cultural development which involved “borrowing”, “loan words”, and “cultural diffusion” amongst the different ancient peoples living in both the Near East and the Aegean regions, is due to intellectual currents that first took shape in Germany over two centuries ago. In Burkert’s words, “Increasing specialization of scholarship converged with ideological protectionism, and both constructed an image of a pure, classical Greece in splendid isolation”.
It was essentially a trio of academic fads that “erected their own boundaries and collectively fractured the Orient-Greece axis”. The first was the breaking apart of theology and philology. Until well into the 18th century, “the Hebrew Bible naturally stood next to the Greek classics, and the existence of cross-connections did not present any problems”. The second was the rise of the ideology of Romantic Nationalism, “which held literature and spiritual culture to be intimately connected with an individual people, tribe, or race. Origins and organic development rather than reciprocal cultural influences became the key to understanding”. And the third was the discovery by linguistic scholars of “Indo-European”, the “common archetype” of most European languages (as well as Persian and Sanskrit).
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff offered a “scornful assessment” indicative of the faddish and far more isolated conception of ancient Greece in 1884: “the peoples and states of the Semites and the Egyptians which had been decaying for centuries and which, in spite of the antiquity of their culture, were unable to contribute anything to the Hellenes [the Greeks] other than a few manual skills, costumes, and implements of bad taste, antiquated ornaments, repulsive fetishes for even more repulsive fake divinities …” A common take at the time which would later prove to be quite incomplete. It should be noted that Romantic Nationalism, coupled with the discovery of Indo-European (which demonstrates no link between European and Semitic languages) seems to have contributed to what gave “anti-Semitism a chance”. Tragically, it was at the point when the Jews were finally being granted full legal equality in Europe when national-romantic consciousness and the rejection of orientalism helped set the stage for the escalation in Jewish persecution that eventually led to the horror of horrors: the Holocaust.
The Mesopotamians would never, as the later Greeks did c. 600 B.C., formulate an abstract concept of “nature” and analyze phenomena as having a natural developmental explanation rather than the traditional explanation (that being, e.g. the gods made it so). Thus, they would never develop philosophy or science as we think of it, and so there are certain categories of analysis and knowledge that are uniquely Greek in the ancient world. However, as the innovators of a form of agrarian society that was productive and sophisticated enough to sustain the world’s first cities, Mesopotamians needed to be able to examine and quantify time (in order to know when to plant) and so they developed the lunar calendar of 12 months, they developed the 12 double-hour day, they gave names to the observable planets and charted the night sky into constellations; They needed to be able to measure physical space and allot pieces of land to land owners, and so they created the world’s earliest form of basic geometry. The types of knowledge just named are the types of knowledge that scholars believe would have been of interest to the Greeks, and, indeed, many suspect that iron age Greeks borrowed these insights from the Babylonians. Whether the Greek story of Heracles could have been influenced by Mesopotamian hero epics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh is a more contentious — though intriguing — topic.
So, how did Greece find itself in a position to receive the baton of civilization and even to carry it further forward? Because of the great work of modern scholars, we know that an informal but early (proto) archetypal version of education (not yet organized education) begins in the Mediterranean, in archaic Greece, before the classical period. Even before this, although it is not exactly clear as to the extent, it has been determined that Bronze Age Greek cultures located around the area of the Aegean sea (also known as Aegean Civilization) – the Mycenaean on mainland Greece, the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Cyclades (also known as the Aegean Islands) – were not only in contact with each other, but also with neighboring civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and the Levant.
November 27, 2024
The Deadly Job of Royal Food Taster
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jul 23, 2024Sautéed mushrooms in a honey, long pepper, and garum glaze
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyFood tasters checking for poison aren’t around so much anymore, but it was an important job for thousands of years. But what happens when the food taster is the one adding in the poison?
Emperor Claudius found this out the hard way when he supposedly ate some of his favorite mushrooms, and then became the victim of a double-poisoning by his taster and his physician.
We can’t know for sure what Emperor Claudius’s favorite mushroom dish was, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was this. I don’t care for the texture of mushrooms, but the flavor is excellent. The sweetness from the honey, spiciness from the long pepper, and the earthiness of the mushrooms combine for a complex dish that is delicious.
Another Method for Mushrooms
Place the chopped stalks in a clean pan, adding pepper, lovage, and a little honey. Mix with garum. Add a little oil.
— Apicius de re coquinaria, 1st century
QotD: The Great Library and its competitors
One of the odder elements of the New Atheist myths about the Great Library is the strange idea that its (supposed) destruction somehow singlehandedly wiped out the (alleged) advanced scientific knowledge of the ancient world in one terrible cataclysm. It doesn’t take much thought, however, to realise this makes absolutely no sense. The idea that there was just one library in the whole of the ancient world is clearly absurd and, as the mentions of other rival libraries above have already made clear, there were of course hundreds of libraries, great and small, across the ancient world. Libraries and the communities of scholars and scribes that serviced them were established by rulers and civic worthies as the kind of prestige project that was seen as part of their role in ancient society and marked their city or territory as cultured and civilised.
The Ptolemies were not the only successors to Alexander who built a Mouseion with a library; their Seleucid rivals in Syria also built one in Antioch in the reigns of Antiochus IX Eusebes (114-95 BC) or Antiochus X Philopater (95-92 BC). Roman aristocrats and rulers also included the establishment of substantial libraries as part of their civic service. Julius Caesar had intended to establish a library next to the Forum in Rome but this was ultimately achieved after his death by Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 BC – 4 AD), a soldier, politician and scholar who retired to a life of study after the tumults of the Civil Wars. Augustus established the Palatine Library in the Temple of Apollo and founded another one in the Portus Octaviae, next to the Theatre of Marcellus at the southern end of the Field of Mars. Vespasian established one in the Temple of Peace in 70 AD, but probably the largest of the Roman libraries was that of Trajan in his new forum beside the famous column that celebrates his Dacian wars. As mentioned above, this large building probably contained around 20,000 scrolls and had two main chambers – one for Greek and the other for Latin authors. Trajan’s library also seems to have established a design and layout that would be the model for libraries for centuries: a hall with desks and tables for readers with books in niches or shelves around the walls and on a mezzanine level. Libraries also came to be established in Roman bath complexes, with a very large one at the Baths of Caracalla and another at the Baths of Diocletian.
Several of these libraries were substantial. The Library of Celsus at Ephesus was built in c. 117 AD by the son of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus in honour of his father, who had been a senator and consul in Rome, and its reconstructed facade is one of the major archaeological features of the site today. It was said to be the third largest library in the ancient world, surpassed only by the great libraries of Pergamon and Alexandria. The Great Library of Pergamon was established by the Attalid rulers of that city state and it was the true rival of the library of the Alexandrian Mouseion. It is said that the Ptolemies were so threatened by its size and the reputation of its scholars that they banned the export of papyrus to Pergamon, causing the Attalids to commission the invention of parchment as a substitute, though this is most likely a legend. What is absolutely clear, however, is that the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was unique, whether in nature or even in size, is nonsense.
The weird idea that the loss of the Great Library was some kind of singular disaster is at least partially due to the fact that none of the various other great libraries of the ancient world are known to casual readers, so it may be easy for them to assume it was somehow unique. It also seems to stem, again, from the emphasis in popular sources on the mythical immense size of its collection which, as discussed above, is based on a naive acceptance of varied and wildly exaggerated sources. Finally, it seems to stem in no small part from (yet again) Sagan’s influential but fanciful picture of the institution as a distinctively secular hub of scientific research and, by implication, technological innovation.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
November 14, 2024
Early Christianity – from ~1,000 to 40 million believers in the Roman Empire
The latest book review at Astral Codex Ten is Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity:
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
Rodney Stark was a sociologist of religion. He started off studying cults, and got his big break when the first missionaries of the Unification Church (“Moonies”) in the US let him tag along and observe their activities. After a long and successful career in academia, he turned his attention to the greatest cult of all and wrote The Rise Of Christianity. He spends much of it apologizing for not being a classical historian, but it’s fine — he’s obviously done his homework, and he hopes to bring a new, modern-religion-informed perspective to the ancient question.
So: how did early Christianity win?
October 29, 2024
QotD: The Roman Republic after the Social War
The Social War coincided with the beginning of Rome’s wars with Mithridates VI of Pontus – the last real competitor Rome had in the Mediterranean world, whose defeat and death in 63 BC marked the end of the last large state resisting Rome and the last real presence of any anti-Roman power on the Mediterranean littoral. Rome was not out of enemies, of course, but Rome’s wars in the decades that followed were either civil wars (the in-fighting between Rome’s aristocrats spiraling into civil war beginning in 87 and ending in 31) or wars of conquest by Rome against substantially weaker powers, like Caesar’s conquests in Gaul.
Mithridates’ effort against the Romans, begun in 89 relied on the assumption that the chaos of the Social War would make it possible for Mithridates to absorb Roman territory (in particular the province of Asia, which corresponds to modern western Turkey) and eventually rival Rome itself (or whatever post-Social War Italic power replaced it). That plan collapsed precisely because Rome moved so quickly to offer citizenship to their disgruntled socii; it is not hard to imagine a more stubborn Rome perhaps still winning the Social War, but at such cost that it would have had few soldiers left to send East. As it was, by 87, Mithridates was effectively doomed, poised to be assailed by one Roman army after another until his kingdom was chipped away and exhausted by Rome’s far greater resources. It was only because of Rome’s continuing domestic political dysfunction (which to be clear had been going on since at least 133 and was not a product of the expansion of citizenship) that Mithridates lasted as long as he did.
More than that, Rome’s success in this period is clearly and directly attributable to the Roman willingness to bring a wildly diverse range of Italic peoples, covering at least three religious systems, five languages and around two dozen different ethnic or tribal identities and forge that into a single cohesive military force and eventually into a single identity and citizen body. Rome’s ability to effectively manage and lead an extremely diverse coalition provided it with the resources that made the Roman Empire possible. And we should be clear here: Rome granted citizenship to the allies first; cultural assimilation only came afterwards.
Rome’s achievement in this regard stands in stark contrast to the failure of Rome’s rivals to effectively do the same. Carthage was quite good at employing large numbers of battle-hardened Iberian and Gallic mercenaries, but the speed with which Carthage’s subject states in North Africa (most notably its client kingdom, Numidia) jumped ship and joined the Romans at the first real opportunity speaks to a failure to achieve the same level of buy-in. Hannibal spent a decade and a half trying to incite a widespread revolt among Rome’s Italian allies and largely failed; the Romans managed a far more consequential revolt in Carthage’s North African territory in a single year.
And yet Carthage did still far better than Rome’s Hellenistic rivals in the East. As Taylor (op. cit.) documents, despite the vast wealth and population of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid states, they were never able to mobilize men on the scale that Rome did and whereas Rome’s allies stuck by them when the going got tough, the non-Macedonian subjects of the Ptolemies and Seleucids always had at least one eye on the door. Still worse were the Antigonids, whose core territory was larger and probably somewhat more populous than the ager Romanus (that is, the territory directly controlled by Rome), but who, despite decades of acting as the hegemon of Greece, were singularly incapable of directing the Greeks or drawing any sort of military resources or investment from them. Lest we attribute this to fractious Greeks, it seems worth noting that the Latin speaking Romans were far better at getting their Greeks (in Southern Italy and Campania) to furnish troops, ships and supplies than the Greek speaking (though ethnically Macedonian) Antigonids ever were.
In short, the Roman Republic, with its integrated communities of socii and relatively welcoming and expansionist citizenship regime (and yes, the word “relatively” there carries a lot of weight) had faced down a collection of imperial powers bent on maintaining the culture and ethnic homogeneity of their ruling class. Far from being a weakness, Rome’s opportunistic embrace of diversity had given it a decisive edge; diversity turned out to be the Romans’ “killer app”. And I should note it was not merely the Roman use of the allies as “warm bodies” or “cannon fodder” – the Romans relied on those allied communities to provide leadership (both junior officers of their own units, but also after citizenship was granted, leadership at Rome too; Gaius Marius, Cicero and Gnaeus Pompey were all from communities of former socii) and technical expertise (the Roman navy, for instance, seems to have relied quite heavily on the experienced mariners of the Greek communities in Southern Italy).
Like the famous Appian Way, Rome’s road to empire had run through not merely Romans, but Latins, Oscan-speaking Campanians, upland Samnites, Messapic-speaking Apulians and coastal Greeks. The Romans had not intended to forge a pan-Italic super-identity or to spread the Latin language or Roman culture to anyone; they had intended to set up systems to get the resources and manpower to win wars. And win wars they did. Diversity had won Rome an empire. And as we’ll see, diversity was how they would keep it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
October 20, 2024
Debunking the “Muslims saved the Graeco-Roman legacy” intellectual urban legend
In my weekly set of recommendations from Substack there was a link to A History of Mankind‘s debunking of what is described as an “intellectual urban legend”:
Among the most popular of those legends, there’s one that can be summarized as “Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten”. This a surprisingly widespread view. I’ve lived in several countries, and heard versions of this legend, often told in very simple terms over somewhat complicated drinks, from well-educated people often working in academia or the financial sector (which makes more sense than it appears — I’ve worked in the financial sector myself, and people there are highly educated as a rule).
I’ve even heard scholars (normally not Medievalists) express this view, and I’ve read views to this effect in multiple occasions. Just Google “did the arabs save graeco-roman books” and look at the top results, if you don’t believe me. Lots of well-educated people believe this, not to speak of history enthusiasts all over the Internet.
However, the truth is that Arab translators had only a modest impact on the transmission of Graeco-Roman texts to modern times. There are various reasons that explain this, but first let me provide some clarity on why Baghdad’s Medieval “House of Wisdom” — oft-cited, correctly, as the center of the Abbasid-era translation movement inasmuch as there was one — is one of history’s most misunderstood institutions.
The House of Wisdom functioned as a state library with a focus on the transcription and storage of manuscripts, and their translation to the court’s main language, Arabic. Based on a similar library patronized by the Sasanian emperors and staffed with some of its personnel from about the 8th century, the House of Wisdom employed Christian Greek speakers – very few Muslims spoke or read Greek fluently in this era and others, particularly Arabs – as well as Muslim and Zoroastrian Arabic or Syriac speakers who worked to translate and disseminate work.
[…]
Just to give a final touch of class to these absurd claims, Abu Sahl added the detail that the Greeks, dunces as they all are, forgot to actually steal many Iranian books, and simply memorized the contents before they torched them, so the actual Greek copies of Iranian greats are, by necessity, inferior versions diluted by the Greeks’ faulty memory.
Some Muslim scholars later came up with a new wrinkle that Byzantines were poor keepers of their own treasures, and their books were eaten by insects, as the bibliographer Al-Nadim (932-995) wrote in a second- or third-hand anecdote about some guy who visited Constantinople and was sad to see some ancient temple filled with neglected books, later widely quoted, and included in his Index of 987. The same Al-Nadim transmits from someone “trustworthy” that the Byzantines burned fifteen loads of books by Archimedes, which never happened.
Abdullah Ibn-abi-Zayd (922–998), a prolific North African writer on Islamic law, came up with a wrinkle for this wrinkle: that the Byzantine emperor gathered books and hid them in a secret building to prevent heresy among potential readers; and when Yahya, a prominent Bamarkid Persian in the Abbasid court, heard of the repository he asked if he could borrow the texts. The emperor agreed on the condition that they were never returned, so that they would never hurt the delicate Christian feelings of his subjects.
Others with less experience of the Christian West, like the Egyptian Arab Ibn Ridwan (988-1061), claimed that ancient sciences were forgotten there, and only survived in the Ummah because of the supreme wisdom and care displayed by Al-Mamun and their successors. Ridwan’s fable showing just how obscurantist and dumb Christians are proved particularly successful, being often retold with the kind of reverence typically reserved for hadiths:
The history of medicine begins with a brief account of the development in antiquity from Asclepius to Galen. After Galen, the community of the Christians emerged from and prevailed over the Greeks. The Christians considered it a fault to study intellectual matters and their kings cast away the care for medicine and failed to take care of its students. So its students ceased to commit themselves to the toilsome study of medicine and found reading Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works too tedious; thus, it fell into disorder and its condition worsened. Then came Oribasius, after the Christian kings’ lack of interest in the instruction [of medicine] was firmly rooted … When none of the kings any longer felt the desire to promote the teaching [of medicine] and the people found Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works on it too tedious and tended to compendia and abridgments, the most prominent Alexandrian physicians, afraid that the art would vanish altogether, asked those kings to retain the teaching [of medicine] in Alexandria and [to allow] only twenty books on medicine to be read, sixteen from Galen’s and four from Hippocrates’ works … The teaching stood on shaky ground until al-Ma’mun ‘Abd-Allah ibn-Harun al-Rashid became caliph, who revived and spread it and favored excellent physicians. But for him, medicine and other disciplines of the ancients would have been effaced and obliterated just as medicine is obliterated now from the lands of the Greeks, which had been most distinguished in this field.
I should also mention that it wasn’t just the Graeco-Romans who the Abbasid-era Muslims ripped off in bulk. The fact that Indian numerals came to be known in Europe as “Arabic” numerals, and chess was widely, and wrongly, believed to be an Arabic invention, gives an idea about the impact that Caliphate scholars had as synthesizers and popularizers of scientific knowledge.
Indeed, when the Iranian Al-Khwarizmi (780-850), head of the House of Wisdom from around 820, published the earliest Arabic text on Indian numerals, he chose a title of disarming honesty: “Addition and subtraction according to the Indian calculation”. Such honesty was rarely imitated by Al-Khwarizmi’s successors.
I think you are probably getting the gist of how the story about the Muslim salvage of Graeco-Roman antiquity came about, and was later embraced by every Atheist writer in the West, so that he or she could have nice laughs at the expense of those barbarian fools who never washed themselves, the Christians.
October 7, 2024
A grim anniversary
In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes the anniversary of the Hamas attacks along the Gaza-Israeli border that killed many Israeli civilians and led to the still-ongoing captivity for hundreds more:
One year on, Jews in the West have had time to process the primary shock of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel and the secondary shock of hateful blowback against Israel and Jews worldwide. We learned in a span of hours that where lethal antisemitism is concerned, “never again” was for us a mere objective, not a guarantee against those consumed by a mission of “again and again and again”.
But should we have been so surprised? Gaza was riddled with tunnels, their sole purpose to prepare for a war of extermination against Jews. The West’s intellectual “tunnels” have been operating in plain sight for many years. Under the aegis of “Israel Apartheid Week” and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, vicious anti-Zionism has been a campus fixture since 2001, when the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa erupted into a “festival of hate” against Jews. After decades of aggressive Israel-bashing, Palestinians have been elevated throughout western educational systems to the summit of intersectional victimhood. Those indoctrinated in this hierarchy over the last 25 years consider it a duty and a virtue to demonize Zionism as an original historical sin. October 7 popped the cork on that long-seething volcano.
Throughout the past year, we’ve seen hostage posters vandalized, Jewish schoolchildren bullied, Jewish-owned businesses attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods tormented, Jewish institutions burned and shot at. Downtowns are routinely plagued by foul-mouthed protesters shrieking mantras that call for Israel’s elimination. University campuses have tolerated long-term encampments, Judenrein except for Jews who earn their laissez-passer with a denunciation of Israel.
It’s getting worse. On Saturday in Toronto, a demonstration featured Hezbollah flags, banners extolling violence against Israel and portraits of the (recently eliminated) Hezbollah leader and arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah. Last Sunday in Montreal, a band of black-garbed protesters attacked Concordia University and smashed several downtown store windows. During a foot chase, one even threw Molotov cocktails in the direction of police, an ominous escalation.
More ominous in my opinion: Post-October 7, we saw the emergence at rallies and on western social media of the image of a Jewish star being dumped into a trash can accompanied by the words “Keep the world clean” — for years a meme favoured by Hamas, inspired by the Nazis.
The Nazis used the image and words in their propaganda to normalize the idea that Jews, like vermin, were a hygiene threat requiring drastic action to preserve the nation’s health. That such messages are tolerated in the public forum points to a growing acceptance of outright eradicationist antisemitism as a “respectable” opinion to hold, even among supposedly enlightened people in fields such as mental health, as evidenced by anti-Zionist blacklists targeting Jewish members of the profession.
October 4, 2024
QotD: Farmers and slaves in ancient Mesopotamia
In one of my favorite parts of the book [Against The Grain], Scott discusses how this shaped the character of early Near Eastern warfare. Read a typical Near Eastern victory stele, and it looks something like “Hail the glorious king Eksamplu, who campaigned against Examplestan and took 10,000 prisoners of war back to the capital”. Territorial conquest, if it happened at all, was an afterthought; what these kings really wanted was prisoners. Why? Because they didn’t even have enough subjects to farm the land they had; they were short of labor. Prisoners of war would be resettled on some arable land, given one or another legal status that basically equated to slave laborers, and so end up little different from the native-born population. The most extreme example was the massive deportation campaigns of Assyria (eg the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), but everybody did it because everybody knew their current subjects were a time-limited resources, available only until they gradually drained out into the wilderness.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
October 3, 2024
Middle East situation – “There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play”
CDR Salamander on the situation in the Middle East as we come up on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians on the border between Israel and Gaza:
Less than a week since the invasion of Israel from Gaza and the resulting pogrom that witnessed the largest one day murder, rape, kidnapping and tortures of Jews since World War Two — it is clear that Israel has decided that it was finally time to reset and repair the damage from decades of bad international theory and delusion.
There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play, one Israel has more control over, one has yet to be fully revealed to be the folly it is.
You can see the threads heading back decades earlier, but the first delusion hit its peak during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, the withdrawal from the Southern Lebanon security zone in 2000, and finished its summit with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
The delusion was that The Smartest People in the Room™ in DC, New York, Brussels, and Tel Aviv could, if they talked enough, wished enough, and said nice things to each other enough, would find a way to get the various Palestinian. Hope, wishes, and a mistaken trust in international organizations convinced Israel to give peace a chance.
Peace had a chance, and it culminated on October 7th, 2023.
Now, it appears, Israel will take the world as it is, not as it and others wished it to be. The key part of “this world” that some schools of international security affairs for decades have refused to recognize is the common, evil thread connecting them all: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Gaza
Hamas was always a proxy for Iran. It could not have been able to be the threat it was without two things: 1) Iran; 2) UN. There can be no returning to the world of October 6th, 2023.
Whatever status Gaza winds up having in the future, it will not be like the past. While there remains much hard work to be done in Gaza, the hardest military part is done. It will be pacified thoroughly, and then the really hard part — what will happen to the population and territory of Gaza — will have to be worked out.
Egypt wants nothing to do with it. The Arab nations have already let it be known they don’t want that radicalized population, and Israel cannot let another Hamas like governance take over that strip of land that points in to Israel like a dagger.
It appears that Israel is following a variation of my COA-A I posted four days after last year’s attacks. The bitter fruit of a half-century of bad theory will have to be fixed, somehow.
Lebanon
From its birth as a Shia militia boosted by Iran, Hezbollah has, even more than Hamas, been a proxy for Iran. Only vaguely connected to the Palestinian cause, it has simply become an advanced military force for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
For a year, well over 60,000 Israeli citizens have been internally displaced from their homes in Northern Israel due to unending rocket attack from Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. As they rightfully focused on the war in Gaza, (as President Lincoln advised, “One war at a time“), Israel took the blows with minimal response until the last few weeks.
The formerly Christian led government of Lebanon cannot police their own nation, and have not been able to for decades, and the UN is more of a problem than a solution, Israel will have to take steps to secure her own safety.
Like the Gaza situation, this will create problems down the road because the hostile population is not going anywhere. That is an issue for later. For now, the rockets must stop.
September 28, 2024
Lebanon is no longer a nation … it’s a parasitized husk operated by Iran’s proxies
In UnHerd, Tom McTague explains why there can be no “settlement” of the South Lebanon problem, because Lebanon ceased functioning as an independent state and is now largely controlled by Hezbollah, which means it’s indirectly controlled by Iran:
[…] A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.
The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.
Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.
By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.
With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.
Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered.
September 26, 2024
Why Three Arab Nations Lost the Six-Day War Against Israel
Real Time History
Published Jun 5, 2024In just six days in 1967 Israel managed to decisively defeat Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War. In the process they expand the territory they control with the Golan Heights, Sinai, the West Bank, and Gaza.
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