History yays

[dubsartur]

Neurotypical people in similar situations often behave in similar ways, with just the names and the rationalizations varying.  Gwynne Dyer felt that debates about whether Canada should fight in Afghanistan sounded a lot like debates in 1939, 1914, and 1898.   A communications professor has written an essay on the time that radio stations deplatformed anti-Semite, pro-Nazi Father Charles Coughlin in 1938.

At first that was not a big deal since he had a newspaper and friends who were willing to print his rants about Jewish capitalist socialists.  So eventually the government turned the same weapon against him which they turned against people sharing information on contraception (and which state governments had turned against anyone criticizing slavery), banning his newspaper from the mail.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a summary of his career.

[dubsartur]

Deborah King says that Oxford will not be prosecuting recently retired Oxford University Professor Dirk Obink, who was arrested after Oxford papyri he had had exclusive access to turned up in an American private collection.  So it looks like there will be no full and open investigation.  I have heard some shady things about how Oxford and Cambridge interact with state power in the UK.

Parts of Greek and Roman Studies are deeply intertwined with the art market and all the lying and cheating and theft-for-hire that goes on there.

[dubsartur]

Hobby Lobby has now sued Dirk Obbink for the USD 7m they paid him.  They have published an email from him in 2017 where he says that he "accidentally" sold them papyri belonging to his employer and wants to pay them back, and say that the money never arrived https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/hobby-lobby-oxford.pdf

'Tis sport to have the engineer / hoist with his own petard

[dubsartur]

The publication of hundreds of moulds from 13th century Magdeburg, Germany is helping pewterers work more efficiently today https://www.billyandcharlie.com/a-surprising-mold-from-magdeburg/  Shiny!

[Jubal]

Ooh that is interesting!

Also, a recent one: Turkish archaeologists think they've found the site of Manzikert. Not looked into this enough to have any sensible thoughts on whether they're right, but it is interesting regardless:
https://www.dailysabah.com/turkey/weapons-find-points-to-seljuk-byzantine-battle-site-in-turkey/news

[dubsartur]

Archaeologists have found the first ancient warship outside of Sicilian waters at Abu Qir Bay in Egypt ("battle of Abourkir Bay" fame) https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/archaeologists-find-ancient-egyptian-warship-sunk-near-alexandria/

[Glaurung]

I think the title on this one speaks for itself: A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea.
It's a detailed, meticulous report on the results of 15 years of excavations, and the evidence that led them to this striking conclusion.

[dubsartur]

Wow, I had not heard of that one!

It seems like it is getting pushback on birdsite, but corporate social media and group blogs attracts a lot of "talking points for people with brains."  I am disturbed by the effect this has on our systems for building consensus based on testing claims, because people are speaking with their authoritative professional voice but not bothering to use those slow thoughtful ways of evaluating claims within their area of expertise.  Some of those pushbacks makes blatantly false claims about the article (no, the authors do not say Tall el-Hamman is biblical Soddom).  I hope some of those criticisms turn into actual blog posts with footnotes.

Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.

[Glaurung]

Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.

Agreed, I wouldn't normally expect an archaeological excavation to be reported in Nature, but this is very much not a normal excavation. Analysing the debris must have required expertise well outside the usual archaeological repertoire, and the conclusion seems like exactly the sort of thing that would appear in Nature if it had been found by any means other than archaeology.

[dubsartur]

Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.

Agreed, I wouldn't normally expect an archaeological excavation to be reported in Nature, but this is very much not a normal excavation. Analysing the debris must have required expertise well outside the usual archaeological repertoire, and the conclusion seems like exactly the sort of thing that would appear in Nature if it had been found by any means other than archaeology.

And it does seem like the analysis involves people from many different specialties, its not "a physicist has reinvented the field of epidemic modelling" or "a biologist has reinvented historical linguistics."

Some of the people on social media are complaining that the archaeologists are from two places on the edge of academe (Veritas International University in California and the non-accredited Trinity Southwest University in New Mexico), but almost all archaeology in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan is funded by sectarians.  That is not really any stranger than the fact that most archaeology in Denmark is funded by Danes!  Nation-states have an ideological commitment to seeing people who lived in their territory as their spiritual ancestors, and worshipers of the God of Israel have an ideological commitment to see the ancient Jews as spiritual ancestors.  And this paper seems to be independent from the archaeologists.

I may give the paper another read on the weekend but I don't have the expertise to evaluate most of the details.

[dubsartur]

Dr. Dirk Obbink has not responded to the summons in the USA, so Holiday Lobby now has the right to claim USD 7m from him.  Unfortunately, that means that there will not be a trial in a country where Oxford can't sweep uncomfortable revelations under the rug (he may still face trial in the UK). https://brentnongbri.com/2021/12/03/update-on-hobby-lobby-vs-obbink-case/ I want to know who swindled him out of the money he was paid for selling other people's papyri, and where the other missing papyri are.

[dubsartur]

For Jubal: wife-and-husband team Digital Hammurabi has a chat with an Egyptologist about a new game called Assassin's Creed: Origins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG5NmoA3rYo (he liked it)  They also have an interview with Bart Ehrman on textual criticism of the New Testament https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MtfAJsbqLA

[Jubal]

Ooh, that reminds me I was meant to be writing up my paper from the Egyptology conference in the middle of last year. I'm not sure how to turn my rather short remarks into a five thousand word minimum piece, but we'll see.

[Jubal]

This review of a book about stories and human culture is really quite funny in its utterly unrelenting brutality to the work in question:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/books/review/the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall.html

[dubsartur]

Some historians have finally come out with a response to Pinker's Better Angels: The Darker Angels of our Nature  I hope they picked 17 quantitative thinkers, some of the reviews did not focus on Pinker's many empirical, epistemological, and logical fails but on nonsense like "well, have you considered that because of population growth the absolute numbers of deaths are increasing?"

The dramatic decline in violence is obviously correct, but Pinker is not competent to show it.