Music from St. Catherine's Monastery

St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is said to be the oldest continually inhabited monastery, founded by Emperor Justinian the Great around 550AD.  It has a library that has survived the ages, perhaps because they have a document said to be signed by Mohammad himself saying that the Monastery was under his protection.  Even if it was a forgery, it seems to have been an effective forgery.

It has perhaps the most impressive collection of icons in the world.  For example, the oldest known icon of Kristos Pantokrator, dating from the 6th century:

St. Catherine's has just offered full size (or reduced size) museum quality reproductions of many of its icons:

For the first time in its 1,500-year history, Saint Catherine’s Monastery is offering certified replicas of its most famous Byzantine icons. These replicas, available in actual size and true-to-life color, allow people worldwide to own a piece of this sacred art.

This groundbreaking project is the result of a three-year collaboration between the Monastery, the Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery, and Legacy Icons. Dr. Peter Chang, President of the Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery, called the partnership a “significant milestone in our ongoing mission to support Saint Catherine’s Monastery and its invaluable contributions to Christian spirituality and global civilization.”

The first set of replicas includes some of the Monastery’s most treasured works:

• Christ Pantocrator (6th century)
• Moses and the Burning Bush (c. 13th century)
• Saint Catherine with Scenes of her Life (18th century)

You can view (and purchase, if you'd like) the reproductions here.  They look to be very high quality (to me, at least).  As the original linked article says:

These replicas are created using high-resolution scans, capturing even the tiniest details. “To be able to look into the depths of the cracks and original paint strokes with this clarity is breathtaking and we look forward to shipping these for all to appreciate,” said David DeJonge, founder of Legacy Icons. The replicas are printed on high-quality Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper and mounted on solid hardwoods, ensuring they are as authentic as possible.

A portion of the purchase goes to support the Monastery's preservation activities.  Remember, this Monastery has been working and collecting manuscripts continually for 1500 years.

Here is a recording of traditional music from the Monastery.

Satellites are revolutionizing Mayan archaeology

I'm starting to tread on The Silicon Graybeard's turf, but this is really cool:

Satellites are helping scientists spot more ancient Mayan ruins than ever before, which is no small feat considering how thick the forest is in the indigenous group's ancestral lands.

"Archeologists have mapped more Mayan sites, buildings and features in the past 10 years than we had in the past — preceding — 150 years," Brett Houk, an archaeology professor at Texas Tech University, told attendees at a NASA-led space archaeology conference Sept. 18 to which Space.com received an exclusive invite.

Archaeologists are finding these ruins faster due to better satellite technology. Using a pulsed laser technique called lidar, or light detection and ranging, satellites can peer through the dense canopy surrounding typical Mayan sites, Houk explained at the two-day livestreamed NASA and Archaeology From Space symposium.

I found the arguments in Charles Mann's 1491 to be pretty convincing that American populations were much larger than previously thought prior to Columbus' voyage.  This seems to be evidence in favor of that thesis.

Other places this technique should be easily applicable are the Amazon basin (which Mann claims hosted a very large population) and likely Cambodia/Angkor Wat.

 

CMP Update - Krag-Jorgensen Rifles

Spendy, but pretty sweet.

I mean, who ever said "Civilize them with an AR"?  But expect to spend $1200+.

Oldest photo of a First Lady

The National Portrait Gallery has acquired the oldest photo of a First Lady, an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolly Madison.  This is a very cool picture, as it captures some of her personality - people chose very formal poses back then.  No smiling.  Except for a hint of a smile from Dolly.

Quote of the Day - Cancer edition

This week's ordeals made me think of a Churchill quote - unexpectedly a quote about Sir Winston, rather than by him.  His great bete noir in Parliament was Lady Nancy Astor of the Unionist Party (Churchill led the Tory Party).  Probably the most famous Nancy Astor story is the one where, after a particularly contentious Parliamentary debate she remarked "Winston, if you were my husband I would poison your coffee" and he replied "Nancy, if you were my wife I would drink it with pleasure."  Good times, good times.

But that's not the quote, although it does come from Lady Nancy.  Churchill developed a tumor, and it was removed.  Naturally, this was front page news throughout the realm.  A week or two later, the news reported that the tumor was benign.

At this, Lady Nancy remarked that "They seem to have removed the only non-malignant part of Winston".

UPDATE 25 JUNE 2024 14:27: Dwight has more Churchill here.  Funny and interesting at the same time.

Oldest bottle of wine unearthed

Long time readers will recall that awhile back I posted about a bottle of Roman wine from around 325 AD.  Well, that discovery has just been pushed back by three centuries:

In 2019, a glass cinerary urn containing a reddish liquid was discovered in a 1st century Roman mausoleum in Carmona, southern Spain.

...

Researchers from the University of Córdoba analyzed samples of the liquid to determine its composition. They found that it had a PH 7.5, close to neutral, and contained biomarkers that are exclusive to wine. High-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) identified seven wine polyphenols all of which matched those in modern wines produced in this area of Andalucía, including dessert wines from Montilla-Moriles, sherry-type wines from Jerez, and manzanilla from Sanlúcar. 

Cool.

A day for remembering

80 years ago the Allies stormed the Atlantic Wall.

Via Chris Lynch, we see that the French High School kids in Normandy remember.

82 years ago was the battle of Midway.  The torpedo bombers sacrificed themselves almost to a man but that opened the way for the dive bombers to rip the heart out of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

106 years ago the Marines went on the assault at Belleau Woods in the Great War.  It was one of the costliest days in Marine Corps history, and took heroes like First Sergent Dan Daly to rally the men: Come on you sons of bitches!  Do you want to live forever?

 

Truly a day for remembering.  Remember them.

Google has a remembrance today, too.

Some lesbian writer.  So brave, no doubt.  So very brave.  

Hey Google - french kids spent minutes chanting U-S-A!  You might ponder what that means.

WWI U-boat sauerkraut soup

This was actually very interesting.  I'd eat that.

Battleship U.S.S. Texas afloat today

And back at dock after an extensive repair and refit.  Don't mess with Texas' battleships.

This is a very long video of this morning's short voyage.

The preserved wooden artifacts from Herculaneum

It's not just carbonized scrolls, there is a whole set of wooden items that have been uncovered at Herculaneum, the Roman city which, with Pompeii, was buried by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.  It's incredibly rare to have wooden items preserved for 2000 years, but there are a bunch.

When you consider that only a quarter of Herculaneum has been excavated, you have to wonder what else is waiting discovery.

The earliest born person ever photographed

This is just plain interesting.  The first photographs date to the 1820s and 1830s, but there were some very old people alive then, who lived through some really interesting events.  This video covers who some of these people were, and who was born the earliest.

A very literary Christmas

The Queen Of The World got me a Barnes & Noble gift card, so we went out to an actual bricks-and-mortar bookstore (do they really have those?  As it turns out, yes they do).

It was a blast, and a bit of a blast from the past.  The whole Borepatch clan would go out Christmas shopping Back In The Day, and we'd spend an inordinate amount of time in bookstores.  TQOTW and I were in the bookstore for a couple of hours.  I'd forgotten just how much better book shopping at a bookstore is, as opposed to online.

Sure, online lets you get that book you already know about instantly, no fus and no muss.  But there's no good way to browse.  Basically, online handles the known knowns, but in the store is unbeatable for unknown unknowns.

For example, I didn't know that I wanted this until I was browsing: Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams. (Williams was Glenn's wingman in the Korean War, flying combat sorties)

I also didn't know that I needed Barry Strauss' Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors From Augustus To Constantine.  I had listened to Robin Pearson interview Prof. Strauss on The History Of Byzantium podcast (you can listen at the link; recommended), and lo and behold here was the book.  Done and done.

Likewise with Tom Holland's new book Pax: War And Peace In Rome's Golden Age.  Like with Strauss, I had heard Robin interview Tom Holland on the same podcast.

I had wanted Max Miller's new cookbook, Tasting History.  We've seen Miller's videos here before (for example, Trader Vic's original Mai Tai).  Miller recreates recipes from the past, going all the way back to ancient Babylon (!).  I think the first of his videos I posted was about feeding the Roman Army.  He is entertaining and the recipes looked really interesting and now that there is a cookbook of the recipes I thought I'd get it.  We'll see if TQOTW lets me make any of these in her kitchen.

All in all, podcasters were well represented at the bookstore.  Both of Mike Duncan's books were there.  Already had both, but was happy to see that he's currently in stock.

So it was a great afternoon with The Queen Of The World (who also scored some history books - she's not just a pretty face, she's also wicked smart).  Bricks and mortar bookstores for the win.

Nikki Haley was right

The Civil War was not fought over slavery.  This is trivial to demonstrate.

Consider the Corwin Amendment:

The Corwin Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that has never been adopted, but owing to the absence of a ratification deadline, could still be adopted by the state legislatures. It would shield slavery within the states from the federal constitutional amendment process and from abolition or interference by Congress. Although the Corwin Amendment does not explicitly use the word slavery, it was designed specifically to protect slavery from federal power. The outgoing 36th United States Congress proposed the Corwin Amendment on March 2, 1861, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, with the intent of preventing that war and preserving the Union. It passed Congress but was not ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures.

Yeah, yeah - Wikipedia.  But the article plays it straight up.

So if the war was about slavery, why did both houses of Congress pass this amendment, and why did the President sign the bill, sending it to the States for ratification?  And oh by the way, Congress passed this without the Representatives from the seceding States.

And Abraham Lincoln - the "Great Emancipator" himself did not oppose the Amendment.

So the War was all about slavery, but Congress was playing 6-dimension chess or something, right?

[rolls eyes]

I'm no fan of Haley, but she is also right that the question was a liberal plant.  Her response might have been bad politics in 2023, but she is 100% correct on the facts.

But while facts are stubborn things, so is the ignorance and arrogance of the media (including the ostensibly conservative media). Remember, the history of that war as taught today is retarded.

WWII Thanksgiving from the USS Iowa

The really interesting story is how the military got so much turkey to the front lines.

Halloween in ancient Rome

As I like to say we only think of the Romans as rational and scientific because of the great architecture that has come down to us.  There was the other side of their psyche, superstitious to the extreme.  Nothing illustrates this better than the festival of Lemuria.

The Romans believed that particular rites had to be performed for the dead or the deceased's spirit would be trapped between their old body, unable to enter the afterlife.  Lemuria was designed to get rid of the year's accumulated ghosts.

Ovid provides a detailed description of the rites.  The head of the household (Pater Familius) would walk backwards through the house tossing black beans and reciting this nine times: I send these; with these beans I redeem me and mine (Haec ego mitto; his redimo meque meosque fabis). The rest of the household members would clang pots and pans and repeat Ghosts of my fathers and ancestors, be gone!  

That's not exactly in keeping with our view of them as rational and scientific.  More like "world domination with a side of Ouija Board".  Interestingly, you can buy you Lemuria swag here:

Yo Ho Ho

For my birthday, The Queen Of The World got me (among other things) a really interesting book:

Wayne Curtis' book, And A Bottle Of Rum: A History Of The New World In Ten Cocktails.  You see, I've gotten interested in (good) rums in the last year or two, and she (heck - and you) know my interest in history.  This was a twofer.

It's way more interesting than you might think.  For example, if there hadn't been rum, there very well may not have been an American Revolution.  Really.

The book charts the history from the early funky and maybe undrinkable stuff to how rum conquered the New World in the early twentieth century - and how Prohibition almost changed it into something unrecognizable.

But it ends on a high note, with Tiki drinks - particularly the Mai Tai - is a chapter that is clearly a love letter to the lost Tiki Bar era.  It's great fun, and great entertainment.  This book comes highly recommended.

And the original Trader Vic Mai Tai is nothing like what you get in a bar today, unless you seek out one of the few great old Tiki Bars that Curtis writes about.  But we do have a recipe from Trader Vic, highlighted in this excellent Tasting History video from Max Miller:

Both book and video are heartily recommended, Me Hearties.

Reading old scrolls

A couple months ago I posted about efforts to read the carbonized scrolls excavated from Herculaneum.  This is an update on that - progress is being made shockingly fast.  First up, a video that gives an easily digestible introduction to the efforts being made.

Groundbreaking efforts by the University of Kentucky team, but there are a lot of teams working toward solving the Vesuvius Challenge Prize.  This article highlights some of those efforts but essentially what has happened is that teams started with what was a brick of charcoal and found this:

There very well may be ancient lost texts that can be recovered here.

The oldest woden structure built by humans is almost half a million years old

That's longer than Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been around:

The well-preserved remains of a wooden structure that is no less than 476,000 years old, pre-dating the appearance of Homo sapiens by 100,000, have been discovered at Kalambo Falls in Zambia. Two logs were found in an interlocking position, joined by an intentionally cut notch. Early hominins whittled, shaped and stacked timbers into an unidentified structure that may have been a shelter, a raised track, a fishing platform or something else entirely.

That's really, really old.  And it's wood, not stone.

Decoding ancient scrolls from Pompeii

This sums up the problem:

The reason is that there were no printing presses in ancient and medieval times, so books had to be copied by hand.  If they weren't copied, the material would decay and the book would be lost.  Books were very expensive, which is why so few survived.

However, the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii buried an ancient library.  The scrolls blackened from the heat but are intact.  People have been using cat scanning technology to image the insides, and are now trying to apply machine learning to decode what is ink and what is not.  While we can't yet read the scrolls, it seems that some real advancement in technique is being made:

This character is harder to make out, until the reader realizes that it is curved. It is first visible when looking for the dark narrow cracks in the “cracked mud” texture. It is a handwritten lunate sigma, which looks like a ‘c’.  The field of view is 3.35 mm high. The character is aligned directly to the right of the iota and pi characters, consistent in size, orthography, line width, alignment, ink texture, ink position relative to the papyrus, etc. Like the Pi, slight stroke width variations are recognizably derived from the motion of hand writing. 

With three characters (pi, iota, sigma) we can check if this is part of a word – of course it could be two words since ancient writing generally did not include spaces between words. Using this handy list (https://kyle-p-johnson.com/assets/most-common-greek-words.txt) we find 69 instances of πισ, and none of πγσ or πτσ.

This is a long and technical post but it is a really interesting approach to unlocking actual ancient mysteries. 

 

Part of stolen ancient coin horde recovered

And the theft ring seems to have been broken up:

Four suspects in the shocking theft of a Celtic gold coin hoard from the Celtic-Roman Museum in Manching, Bavaria, have been arrested. The bad news is one of the suspects was carrying 18 gold lumps in a plastic bag at the time of his arrest. Micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis of the composition of the nuggets found they match that of the Celtic coins. Each lump amounts to four of the coins. So yes, these rats stole a historically priceless hoard of 483 Celtic coins from 100 B.C. and melted at least 70 of them down.

It was interesting how well planned the heist was, and the various skill sets in the group.  I hope they find the rest of the coins.