Revealing the End Among the Dry Dust

Civilization is a tenuous construct, and this is illustrated nowhere more plainly than in Eric Cline's 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Cline demonstrates how the civilizations of that area - Egyptian, Hittite, Mitanni, Mycenaean, Ugaritic - were tied together by trade rather than isolated civilizations and how the best evidence of this trade lies in the exchanges of wealth among the elite, not only in (relative) imperishables, but also in the more fragile goods, whether worn or consumed. He further shows that there were merchants of foreign nations in the capitals of these nations, possibly for generations. The specter of imprecise archaeological chronology rears its head, but Cline handles it as well as can be expected. The source material is richer than in past decades, but all archaeology is feeding on scraps! The interconnection of the civilizations presents a clearer picture of the post-apocalyptic past, but muddies the waters of the lives of the survivors, since the equation of new pottery forms with invasion and a new population is no longer a Euclidean equation. Cline's book is informative, but written in a style too dry for the casual reader, and not technical enough for a professional. Some authors have the skill to walk the via media: in this book, Cline is not among that company.

The Doors of Perception

Oct. 21, 2010:
One of the items in the paper today (yes, I still occasionally read the dead tree daily) is the announcement that archaeologists have discovered . what may be the oldest door in Europe. The Methuselan mahogany is estimated at five thousand years old, and hails from Switzerland. The locale of the find is not surprising, since the lakes of the Helvetian Republic have revealed many archaeological treasures. The chief archaeologist, Niels Bleicher, describes the antediluvian door in somewhat effusive terms. Certainly, the door must have been sturdy to weather five millennia of environmental abuse, but I do wonder: how much of the description of ancient artifacts is in self-defense. I prefer stairs to cellar doors, and would hesitate to dismiss an artefact as insignificant due to its basic utility, but hoi polloi might well say, "Who cares? It's just a door, even if it is well-made." Yet it is the simple things of a culture that tell you the most: individually wrapped slices of synthetic cheese and unbiquitous redundant and downright insulting instructions tell you more about American culture than the the abstract of an ivory tower thesis on trash. The facile dismissal of ordinary things, although the result of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, can lead to an equally erroneous reaction of overstatement. The archaeologists, in counteracting the public dismissal, place a greater emphasis than is warranted on their discovery. Although this reaction is not restricted to antiquarians (since everyone who believes in reincarnation wants to be a king, not a catamite), it seems that the more "ordinary" the object, the greater is this tendency.

Egyptians and Astronauts

One of the blessings of living in San Francisco is the presumption of literacy, but the literacy which some possess is not what others would consider "respectable". My habit of studying Ancient Egyptian in public has highlighted this local characteristic. It would be presumptuous to expect that many citizens would display much archaeological acumen, but the sight of hieroglyphs seems to draw the "ancient astronaut" crowd.

My quarrel with this sort is not that extrahuman life exists, but that aliens must have helped the ancient civilizations, which afterwards deified them. The deification of illustrious or notorious humans as their deeds become increasingly remote from the present of the incipient worshipper has happened (the technical term is 'euhemerism'), most notably in Egypt, where the Pharaoh already possessed divine characteristics. The suggestion, however, that the Sumerians and the Egyptians received extraterrestrial aid denigrates the ingenuity of the men and women who lived at the dawn of civilization. The requirement of external help is a remnant of racial attitudes which are no longer acceptable,; since it would be impossible for non-white tribes to accomplish such mighty deeds unaided, but white aid is chronologically impossible, aliens must have helped the savages of yore.

Presentation of the aliens as a "more rational" explanation for the deeds of gods in whom no-one (including yours truly) believes is really a re-mythologizing and displacing in time those very gods. The shift from numinous or divine forces to extraterrestrial ones occurred in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century, the very era when technological progress was replacing (and in some cases threatening) the theological establishment. The fundamental characteristics, however, of contemporary systems of human thought do not change instantly, and just as the sixteenth century reformers replaced a Papal absolutism with a Biblical one, so too the congregants of technology replaced the unknown, watching God of Heaven Above with new watchers who had superior technology rather than supernatural potency. The aliens may not demand incense and burnt sacrifice, but belief in them is no dfferent than belief in elves and brownies, and the aid the (allegedly) gave no more than a modern version of the myth of Prometheus, with the added satisfaction of confirming the superiority of modern man.

Archeology, Anorexia, and Apes

I went to Carey Perloff's Luminescence Dating at the Magic Theatre at Fort Mason. I greatly enjoyed the play, but I doubt that any who had not suffered through the Classical college curriculum could appreciate the subtler references within the work.


Thumbs up to Italy, which has joined the war against stick models, along with Spain and Brazil.


There is a plague among the gorillas of Zaire, not unlike the Ebola virus which has effected the humans of that region. There are two possible disease vectors: other gorillas and fruit bats. I am inclined to believe that the latter is the true vector. Ebola acts through contaminated bodily fluids. Gorillas do not gather in large groups, which limits the effectiveness of the disease vector. Fruit bats, however, could fly between tree before perishing, and their corpses would remain in the copse from which the unfortunate primates dined.