Briefly Noted: The Last Station

In 1908, Leo Tolstoy wrote a letter titled A Letter to a Hinduin Free Hindustan and a young Mohandas Gandhi reprinted this letter in his South African paper. Russia’s most prominent Christian pacifist had a profound influence on Gandhiji’s non-violent philosophy. In Russia, young men and women lived in Tolstoyan farms practicing celibacy and vegetarianism. He was considered a saint.
The final days of Tolstoy’s life was not peaceful; he was at war with his wife of 48 years. These final days are the subject of the 2009 biopic The Last Station. The Tolstoyans, led by Vladimir Chertkov, wanted to put all his writings in the public domain, a move opposed by Sofiya Tolstoy concerned about what will happen to her.

In despair, Tolstoy left their country home, Yasnaya Polyana, on Oct. 28, 1910, taking to the road in the middle of the night, putting 48 years of marriage behind him. He died soon thereafter in a remote railway station, with his wife outside begging to be let in. She was turned away by Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s disciple and close friend, who suggested that any glimpse of her would hasten her husband’s end. Chertkov relented only when Tolstoy was in a coma, at the point of death.[The Tolstoys’ War]

Helen Mirren (Sofiya), Christopher Plummer (Tolstoy) and Paul Giamatti (Chertkov) have put such soul into the characters which makes this a recommended movie.

Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

A new award — Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction — will be awarded on June 19th at the Borders Book Festival. Sarah Dunant, one of the finalists, explains why Historical fiction is the genre of the moment.

Toni Morrison’s astonishing imagination enriched our understanding of slavery. Sarah Waters’s gay adventures rewrote the sexual history of the Victorians, while my own trilogy on the Italian Renaissance told through the experiences of women could not have been conceived, let alone written, even 20 years ago, such was the lack of documentary evidence.

But there is more to this new flowering than good stories. Historical fiction, like history itself, always tells us as much about the time it is written as the period it is writing about. And right now there are huge questions to be asked about the renewed power of religion. It informs global politics, dominates international security, influences social and scientific policies in countries as big as America and spawns a new intellectual war between believers and those out to ignite a new secular revolution.

Suddenly, history has a great deal to offer us when it comes to penetrating “otherness”. And when understanding how belief can be so powerful that it changes attitudes towards death, suicide, even murder, history is a potent tool. It was only a few centuries ago that Europe was consumed by religious wars, and faith both oppressed and brought comfort and meaning in times of brutal poverty and inequality. How far did the threat of Hell or the promises of pleasures in Heaven dictate behaviour then? How and when did the adrenalin of fervour turn to violence? And how did the word of God become the rights of men rather than women or children, imposing a straitjacket on human sexuality bound to end in hypocrisy and abuse? Having spent the past ten years deep within Renaissance Italy, it sometimes feels to me as if I have been learning as much about the present as the past.[Historical fiction is the genre of the moment]

Searching for the Historical Jesus (2)

For the faithful, the Bible is the word of God; for the historian it is not since there are major discrepancies among gospels. For example, the genealogy of Jesus differs among the gospels of Mathew and Luke. Also in Mark, the followers don’t recognize him as the Messiah until much later while in John, it is right from the beginning. There is no agreement even on which day he actually died. Mark says one thing and John says something else.
Can we know for sure if the gospels contain the sayings of Jesus? We can’t be sure since the gospels disagree there too. In John for example, Jesus asserts his divinity, which he never does in the synoptic gospels. But then isn’t it possible that the anonymous authors of the gospels re-contextualized the messages and edited them to suit their needs? Isn’t it sufficient that Jesus’s theology of the Kingdom of God, was something prevalent in that period?
If the Gospel writers changed words — the historian would argue — would they differ radically in important events like the trial of Jesus by Pilate or the words he uttered during crucifixion or the post-death events? In Mark he asks the Father why he was forsaken while in Luke he asks his killers be forgiven.
The believer would then say that even though there are some differences, they all agree on where Jesus lived, preached and how he died. The historian would posit that there is no eyewitness account of Jesus outside the gospels. The first Jewish reference appears in Josephus, six decades later; the first Roman reference almost nine decades later in Pliny.
How do you resolve this dispute? You can get some answers by organizing a debate between a non-believer and a believer. And that’s what happened at the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in April of this year where Dr. Craig Evans and Dr. Bart Ehrman debated on questions like ” are the gospels historically reliable?” and “Do the gospels contain eyewitness tradition?”. You can see the entire debate here and read few accounts here and here.
OT: Recently Glenn Beck displayed his unfathomable knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While many experts pointed out that he was an idiot, one blogger came to Beck’s defense.

Searching for the Historical Jesus

To find if there was a historical Jesus, scholars who study the gospels apply a number of techniques to sift through theology and miracles to find if there is a kernel of truth. Thomas Sheehan’s Historical Jesus is an excellent introduction to the methodology.
Since searching for this Historical Jesus a popular topic, a large number of books are still published each month. Adam Gopnik at New Yorker has a wonderful article which summarizes the current state of affairs in this field.

Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. [WHAT DID JESUS DO?]

One of the points Gopnik makes is that the four canonical gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. If you go to the church in Niranam, a small village in Southern Kerala, there is a board which tells you that the church was found by St. Thomas in 52 C.E. If Thomas came to Kerala at that time, he would not have known about the four canonical gospels. Even if he had known about Mark or the source Q, he would have known a different Yeshua. For example, in Mark there is no virgin birth or resurrection; those came in later gospels.

Faking Noah's Ark

A major breaking news few days back was the “discovery” of “Noah’s Ark.” Yes, that Noah’s Ark. It was discovered by Turkish and Chinese Evangelicals on top of Mount Ararat in Turkey. For years many explorers, who literally believe in the Bible, have searched for it in Turkey and it was even featured on PBS.
Finally the lucky ones were the Noah’s Ark Ministries from Hong Kong and their partner The Media Evangelism.

The team said it had recovered wooden specimens from a structure on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey that carbon dating proved was 4800 years old, around the same time the ark is said to have been afloat.
“It’s not 100 per cent that it is Noah’s Ark but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it,” said Yeung Wing-cheung, a Hong Kong documentary filmmaker and member of the 15-strong team from Noah’s Ark Ministries International.
The structure had several compartments, some with wooden beams, which were believed to house animals, he said. [Noah’s Ark ‘found’ in Turkey]

An artifact from a story, recycled from a Sumerian epic, discovered by a group of people who want to “advance the Kingdom of God.”; What could go wrong? Especially when the same group runs a theme park by the same name.
It is bad when one of your team members think that a group of local Kurdish men hauled the wood from the Black Sea area to Mt. Ararat to stage a hoax. It is a disaster when members of Creation Institute want to stay away from you. So it is not surprising when scholars dismiss the story, here and here and here and here. And now the Turkish authorities are investigating
Adam Rutherford at The Guardian writes about these artificial relics.

It seems to me that the physical aspects of Christianity are so much less interesting than the intellectual. Did Jesus exist? No one knows. And while I understand the import of his actual existence and more significantly his gory death, what’s far more fascinating is that billions of people believe in him. Did Noah’s ark exist? No. But there are diluvian myths in many cultures and religion, and that’s interesting. The problem with relics is that they are fundamentally silly, and that limits discourse to the absurd. [A pain in the ark]

Rigging Elections in 472 BCE

Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir was declared the winner of the recent elections — elections in which there were widespread allegations of fraud. One of the videos which surfaced on the Internet appeared to show election officials stuffing ballot boxes. In 472 BCE, there was no YouTube, but we have evidence of possible vote rigging in Athens.

A cache of almost 200 ostraka has been found down a well in Athens, each with the name “Themistocles” written on them (in a limited number of hands; they’re pictured at the top of this post). It’s a clear hint that the system was manipulable. “Get your Themistocles ostrakon here” someone must have been shouting — or, given the illiteracy of much of the Athenian people, “Get your Cimon ostrakon here” — and you actually got a Themistocles ostrakon, without realising it.[WBLG: A three-cornered election: the ancient Athenian solution]

Looking for Punt

Some time in the 15th century BCE, the female Pharoah Hatshepsut sent ships to a place called Punt. But we don’t know where that place is, even now.

So elusive is the answer that, since the mid-19th century, a procession of scholars have, like erudite dart-throwers, stippled the map of the Red Sea area with their often strongly argued proposals for where Punt lay. (Refer to map at right throughout this article.) Syria. Sinai. Southern Arabia. Eastern Sudan. Northern Ethiopia. Somalia. Kenya. Each was Punt, insists this or that Egyptologist. New papers continue to appear regularly that try to put this question to bed once and for all. So far, all have failed.[NOVA | Building Pharaoh’s Ship | Where Is Punt? | PBS]

To resolve this issue, scientists are turning to two people who may know the answer: two mummified baboons in the British Museum

The team is conducting oxygen isotope tests on the preserved hairs of the baboons. Oxygen isotopes act as a ‘signal’ that can tell scientists where an animal is from.
To aid in narrowing down the location of Punt the team is also performing oxygen isotope tests on samples of modern day baboons from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique. If the oxygen isotope signatures of these baboons match their ancient counterparts the team will know where Punt was.[Mummified Baboons in British Museum May Reveal Location of the Land of Punt | Heritage Key]

Update (April 26): The Baboons have spoken. They say Punt was the land between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Two Books on the Crusades

After 9/11, when President Bush used the word “crusade” in one of his speeches, it raised red flags in Europe. Why do those battles — ones which Christians eventually lost — still important? There were two books on this topic and both WSJ and The New York Times had reviews.

What comes through clearly is that the “remembered” history of the Crusades might better be called an imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades “have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion.” Mr. Phillips, a professor of history at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only “shadows of the crusades, not true shapes.”[Book Review: Holy Warriors and The Crusades – WSJ.com]

Also it was not just Christians against Muslims

Phillips concentrates on the seven “official” crusades, from 1095 to the final disastrous campaigns of Louis IX (St. Louis) of France in 1248-54 and 1270, but he also describes the fiasco of the so-called Children’s Crusade as well as the horrifying Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southwest France. As he notes, “holy war” was as often as not waged against coreligionists: Catholics against Cathars, Sunnis against Shiites. In the rigid, polarized mentality of the holy warrior, any deviation can signify a dangerous otherness. This is the best recent history of the Crusades; it is also an astute depiction of a frightening cast of mind.[Book Review – ‘Holy Warriors – A Modern History of the Crusades,’ by Jonathan Phillips – Review – NYTimes.com]

Why read Historical Fiction?

Author, historian and chair of the award’s judges Alistair Moffat said that writers like Robert Harris on ancient Rome or Hilary Mantel on 1520s England were “far better at conveying what life was like than some university history lecturers”.
“They are giving history back its stories,” he said. “The best way to understand the past is often to read a novelist rather than an historian. We need to know where we came from, what kind of people our ancestors were … What people in the past believed – such as the absolute certainty about heaven and hell in the Middle Ages – is every bit as important in telling us what they were like as what they left behind in the historical record.”[Booker rivals clash again on Walter Scott prize shortlist | Books | guardian.co.uk]

Among the recent historical fiction I read, The Bellini Card did not impress as much as as The Snake Stone or The Janissary Tree. The Martyr was well written and was a good introduction to Elizabethan England. After reading 50 pages of The Sheen on the Silk, realized that this book is not for me.
Any recommendations?
Update: One book I can recommend is Gore Vidal’s Creation. The main character travels to India and meets Mahavira and Buddha and goes to China and learns from Confucius. Fascinating read.

Pictish writing?

Like the ancestors of Indians, the ancestors of Scots also left a sequence of symbols. For example, “One symbol looks like a dog’s head, for example, while others look like horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, weapons and crosses.” Like the Harappan symbols these ancient Scottish symbols — known as Pictish — has not be deciphered. The questions are the same? Do they even encode a language? If they don’t encode a language what were they trying to convey?
To analyze the script, the researchers applied Shannon entropy “to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.”

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.
Although Lee and his team have not yet deciphered the Pictish language, some of the symbols provide intriguing clues. [New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered]

Now does having order, direction and non-randomness indicate that it is a language? Last year there was a paper which calculated the conditional entropy of the Indus script

The new study compared a well-known compilation of Indus texts with linguistic and nonlinguistic samples. The researchers performed calculations on present-day texts of English; texts of the Sumerian language spoken in Mesopotamia during the time of the Indus civilization; texts in Old Tamil, a Dravidian language originating in southern India that some scholars have hypothesized is related to the Indus script; and ancient Sanskrit, one of the earliest members of the Indo-European language family. In each case the authors calculated the conditional entropy, or randomness, of the symbols’ order.
They then repeated the calculations for samples of symbols that are not spoken languages: one in which the placement of symbols was completely random; another in which the placement of symbols followed a strict hierarchy; DNA sequences from the human genome; bacterial protein sequences; and an artificially created linguistic system, the computer programming language Fortran.
Results showed that the Indus inscriptions fell in the middle of the spoken languages and differed from any of the nonlinguistic systems[Indus Script Encodes Language, Reveals New Study Of Ancient Symbols]

Statistical analysis can only show that the symbols had an order. But can this be assumed to be a spoken language? This methodology has been questioned.

The trouble with this form of argument is that it’s heavily dependent on the particular combination of statistical measure and comparison sets that we choose. And the argument becomes especially unconvincing when there’s an obvious alternative choice of comparison set — generated by a simple random process — that would fall squarely on the side of the line that allegedly identifies “written language”. [Pictish writing?]

It could represent a language or a set of ordered symbols to represent a personal seal or something to mark the goods. Since it was created by humans it probably meant something to the person who created it and the person who saw it. While we know the Indus seals were used in an economic context in some cases, it is not clear what the Pictish seals convey.