The Temple at Garni, Armenia

The wonderful little classical building was either a temple or a tomb, and it may have been built in 77, 115 or 175 CE, by either an independent Armenian king or one who had been appointed by the Romans. And that is the relatively certain knowledge about it.

After the Armenians converted to Christianity in the 4th century, they destroyed almost all the pagan monuments in the country. For unknown reasons, this was spared; to my mind this is strong evidence that it was in fact a royal tomb.

The tomb/temple stood until 1679 when it was destroyed in a truly terrible earthquake. This photograph of the ruins was published in 1918.

In the 1960s Armenian archaeologists and politicians got to thinking that since the building had been largely left alone since its collapse, and many of the pieces were still obviously lying around on the site, they could rebuild it. So they did. You can see that for missing pieces they used unmatching stone, so you can tell the difference. Narratives I have found online say it is "almost entirely" original, but staring at photographs I get the impression that a good quarter of the fabric is modern. Since the building was built in the most traditional form for a Greek temple, there was no difficulty sorting out which pieces were what.

But anyway it is a very cool building. I tend to think that more ruined structures should be rebuilt, when there is sufficient knowledge to do so accurately.

Viking Sails

Claire Eamer:

In 1989, workers repairing the roof of a medieval church in Trondenes in northern Norway found pieces of 600-year-old woolen sailcloth stuffed into the attic. While it dates from about three centuries after the height of the Vikings’ dominance, it belongs to the same sailing tradition. Chemists, historians, textile experts, and archaeologists have pored over the chunk of fabric. They learned it was a variation of wadmal, the basic woolen cloth woven for everyday use throughout the North Atlantic region, from Viking days right through the Middle Ages. The wool itself came from northern European short-tailed sheep—the kind the Vikings kept. Jørgensen says their unusual coat was a key element in making woolen sails.

The sheep are double-coated, with an outer coat of long, strong guard hairs and a soft, warm inner coat. Both kinds of fiber showed up in the old sail. To create a strong fabric, the weaver used the coarse outer hairs in the sail’s warp (vertical fibers on a traditional warp-weighted loom). The weft (horizontal fibers) came from the soft inner coat that fluffs out a bit, filling the gaps in the weave. The finished material was “fulled”—that is, treated to shrink it slightly and tighten the fabric.

But that wasn’t the whole secret of a windproof woolen sail. Analysis showed that the sail fragment was soaked with resinous material. After centuries crammed between the joists of the old church, it was almost as stiff as the boards that protected it. That goopy stuff proved to be crucial to making a functional woolen sail.

Eamer sought out Amy Lightfoot, who lives on a remote Norwegian island and has made several woolen sails based on the Trondenes cloth. Eamer couldn't get to Lightfoot or reach her by phone, but Lightfoot did send a letter describing her work:

An important step, she wrote, was recreating the resinous goo found in the old sail. She smeared her sails with a combination of fir tar, fish oil, and sheep tallow—all easily available 600 years ago. It worked. Her sails repel water and have substantial wind resistance.

But they need a mind-boggling quantity of wool. Based on her first sail, Lightfoot estimated that a 100-square-meter sail (about one-quarter the size of a basketball court and big enough for a 30-meter longship) used two tonnes of fleece, the annual production of about 700 sheep. Researchers at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, calculated that by the mid-11th century, the Viking fleet—fishing boats, coastal traders, cargo ships, and longships—carried roughly one million square meters of sail, requiring the equivalent of all the wool produced in one year by about two million sheep.

The amount of wool working is just as mind-boggling as the amount of wool. “It’s actually more time-consuming to produce the textiles than to produce the boat,” Lightfoot said in a 2009 documentary about woolen sails. Building a boat might take two skilled boatbuilders a couple of weeks, she estimated, but creating its sail would take two skilled women a year.

Twisting rope is another very time-consuming task just as essential for a finished ship as the hull.

Conflicts of Interest in Iceland and in General

Suppose you heard about a major leak of data from a Panamanian law firm that specialized in setting up offshore shell companies to help rich clients hide their assets. Would your first thought be, "That's going to cause a political crisis in Iceland"?

And yet that is what is happening. The data from Mossack Fonseca reveal that the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir, control a shell company called Wintris that owned bonds issued by Icelandic banks. (The money was really hers, but he was for a time listed as half owner of the company.) The most important thing Gunnlaugsson has done in his seven years in politics has been work on Iceland's response to the banking crisis of 2008-2009, which hit Iceland as hard as anywhere in the world. Gunnlaugsson never disclosed his financial interest in the banks. Which certainly sounds like cause for scandal. On the other hand:

While Wintris was shielded from some of this turmoil, it had invested in bonds issued by three Icelandic banks and was owed more than 500m Icelandic króna (£2.8m) when they all collapsed. Only a small fraction of that sum is likely to be recovered.

Revelations from the Panama Papers about Gunnlaugsson and Pálsdóttir’s offshore activities are awkward for Iceland’s prime minister, who has made a name for himself defending the collapse of his country’s financial system against the demands of foreign creditors, whom he has repeatedly characterised as “vultures”.

He has dismissed suggestions that his wife’s ownership of Wintris compromised him as prime minister. On the contrary, he suggested, his consistently tough approach to foreign creditors, including Wintris, demonstrated that his wife’s financial interests had never affected his decision-making.

As the story stands now, it seems that when he voted for Iceland's decision not to bail out foreign investors in its banks, and then defended that position as PM, Gunnlaugsson was acting very much against the interests of his offshore company. Moreover, when Iceland's tax office began investigating whether wealthy Icelanders were using offshore companies to avoid taxes, Gunnlaugsson supported them, even though, he says, he "always assumed" that this would turn up evidence of his and his wife's offshore investments. So far he has not been accused of avoiding taxes, and he insists he never has.

I think it was foolish for Gunnlaugsson to act on the banking crisis without disclosing his investments, but what else has he done wrong? On the contrary, to me he seems to have acted with great integrity in defending the national interest of Iceland as he saw it. Or perhaps his political ambition is greater than his greed, but really that is all we can ever ask of politicians. I can't see anything corrupt about his actions.

This is a point that bears emphasizing. Reformers and agitators routinely assert that nobody with a financial interest in political matters can possibly act in a non-corrupt way. Viz, Hillary takes money from oil and gas executives, therefore she is in the pay of the oil interests and will do their bidding. Or, more broadly, politicians support foreign wars because they are in the pay of the defense companies or the Saudi royal family. One should never discount the power of simple corruption, but in my reading it is not a big part of politics in the U.S., Britain, or other places I know well. Which is not to say that there is no corruption, only that it is much more complex and subtle than cash paid for favors. Nor does it exclude acting against the interests of wealthy backers; the most corrupt American politician of my lifetime was probably Lyndon Johnson, who may also have been the one who did the most for poor people.

People are complex. Politics, which is millions of people acting together, is insanely complex. To evaluate politicians simply according to who gives them money is foolishly simplistic.

What Polarization Really Means

The latest in social science:

The current debate over the extent of polarization in the American mass public focuses on the extent to which partisans’ policy preferences have moved. Whereas “maximalists” claim that partisans’views on policies have become more extreme over time (Abramowitz 2010), “minimalists” (Fiorina and Abrams 2009) contend that the majority of Americans remain centrist, and that what little centrifugal movement has occurred reflects sorting, i.e., the increased association between partisanship and ideology. We argue in favor of an alternative definition of polarization, based on the classic concept of social distance (Bogardus 1947). Using data from a variety of sources, we demonstrate that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents. We also find that partisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes. The more plausible account lies in the nature of political campaigns; exposure to messages attacking the out-group reinforces partisans’ biased views of their opponents.

So Republicans and Democrats aren’t really more different than they used to be, they just hate each other more.

Spring Equinox at Horseshoe Mesa, Arizona

Horseshoe Mesa in Arizona contains an impressive array of ancient Indian petroglyphs. It has recently been confirmed that one rock face there is carved in a way that marks the equinox; at noon the "shadow dagger" at upper right cuts through a spiral design.

This not a very big rock face, and very few people can see this phenomenon at one time. But this is not unusual among American Indians. Many North American petroglyphs were carved by lone men or women, sometimes as part of vision quests or other personal acts. I wonder if this particular equinox sign was the personal creation of one person, perhaps a shaman, for use in a personal ritual tied to his or her own visions.

The Changing Office Workforce

This snippet on the changing workforce at law firms set me thinking:

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, law firms employed about 90,000 more lawyers and about 80,000 more paralegals in 2014 than at the start of the survey in 2001. At the same time, law firms shed 180,000 to 190,000 legal secretaries, other legal support workers and their supervisors.

These changes have swept through my corporate America; in my own firm nobody, not even the CEO, has his or her own secretary. The number of people with undefined office help or "clerical" jobs has declined everywhere. This is partly because certain old-fashioned tasks (especially typing and filing) have become partially obsolete. But on the other hand there is still lots of menial stuff that has to be done. Viz., whenever we send in a major proposal for a government contract somebody has to check to make sure that everything on the list (financial forms, testimonials, affidavits swearing that we haven't bribed anyone) is actually in the envelope. This used to be done by somebody with a clerical job; now it is done by a "marketing professional." These marketing people work on proposals and other marketing efforts, laying out and editing documents, pulling together the data needed for the financial forms, setting the schedule and sending invites for phone meetings among the people working on the proposal, etc. These people all have college degrees. So while some old-fashioned office tasks have disappeared, others have been taken over by low-ranking "professional" people with BA's. Other tasks have migrated even higher up the chain. In my office we all make our own travel arrangements and our own coffee, even senior engineers whose time is theoretically worth several dollars a minute. Since I began serving as a project manager I have been constantly amazed by the amount of semi-menial clerical work that our system requires of me, things like setting up files (computer files) for all the project correspondence, making phone calls to check on late payments, setting up conference calls, typing up minutes from meetings, scanning documents, etc.

I cannot believe that this is the most productive possible arrangement of office work. I am certain that thousands of Americans without advanced degrees could do the administrative part of my job better than I can. But the system seems to be discarding more and more such workers. This has to be a major drag on the productivity of professionals everywhere, while simultaneously wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs once held by high school graduates.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Updated)

Amusing little story in a rationalist vein, I think by the same person who writes Slate Star Codex.

Etruscan Inscription from Poggio Colla

Italian archaeologists excavating an Etruscan Temple at Poggio Colla in Tuscany have uncovered a large stone slab bearing an Etruscan inscription. The find dates to around 500 BCE.

The excavators called the inscription "lengthy," but actually it is only 70 characters, which tells you a lot about why it has been so hard to translate the language. The alphabet was derived from Greek and is well understood, but the language is unlike any other. At least this new text is not another funerary inscription like most Etruscan writing; we have plenty of those. From them experts have mastered many words for family relationships (son of, wife of, etc.) but not much else.

For fun, the most famous pieces of Etruscan writing. This is the gold tablets of Pyrgi, which record a religious dedication in a bilingual text, Etruscan and Phoenician.

The longest Etruscan text is the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the linen book of Zagreb. Written around 250 BCE, this somehow ended up being used to wrap an Egyptian mummy. That mummy was purchased in Alexandria in 1848 and taken to Zagreb, where somebody unwrapped it and noticed the strange lettering on the linen strips. They were taken to Vienna, where a Teutonic expert – one imagines a scholarly gnome dwelling in the dark basement of some vast museum, his desk surrounded by mountains of books and manuscripts– recognized the language as Etruscan and put the strips in their proper order. The text contains about 1200 words. It is mostly untranslated, but dates and the names of gods have been recognized, so it is thought to be a ritual calendar and collection of prayers.

And of course the famous model liver, with a text explaining how lesions in the various parts of the organ should be interpreted. To the Romans the most striking thing about the Etruscans was their obsession with augury, so this seems a fitting artifact to survive from their civilization.

Dust Devil on Mars

Photograph by the Opportunity rover.

Is Mental Illness More Common than it Used to Be?

Clayton Cramer, in a recent book about mental illness:

Urbanization may not simply have been a factor in making Americans more wary of their mentally ill neighbors; it may have increased mental illness rates as well. While we do not know if this was true in the eighteenth century, some recent studies suggest that being born or growing up in an urban area increases one’s risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses. in the twentieth century, comparison of insanity rates revealed that urban areas had much higher rates of mental hospital admissions for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – almost twice as high for New York City compared to the rest of New York State…older statistical examinations of mental hospital admissions argue that at least in the period from 1840 to 1940, while mental hospitalizations increased (because of increased availability) there was no large and obvious increase in insanity. A more recent study of mental illness data shows, much more persuasively, that psychosis rates rose quite dramatically between 1807 and 1961 in the United States, England and Wales, Ireland, and the Canadian Atlantic provinces. A study of Buckinghamshire, England shows more than a ten-fold increase in psychosis rates from the beginning of the seventeenth century to 1986. In 1764, Thomas Hancock left 600 pounds to the City of Boston to build a mental hospital for the inhabitants of Massachusetts. The city declined to accept the gift on the grounds that there were not enough insane persons to justify building such a facility. Massachusetts had a population between 188,000 and 235,000 in 1764; if the population of the time suffered the same schizophrenia rates as today, that would mean that there were about 2000 schizophrenics in the province. Even accounting for the greater tolerance of small town life for the mentally ill, this lends credence to Torrey and Miller’s claim of rising psychosis rates. Urban life today is not the same as urban life then, and even the scale of what constitutes “urban” is dramatically different – but it is an intriguing possibility that the increased rates of mental illness at the close of the Colonial period were the results of urbanization.

Irish immigration may also have played a role in the increasing development of mental hospitals in America. It was widely believed in the 1830s that Irish immigrants were disproportionately present among the insane. More recent analysis shows that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ireland’s rates of insanity were twice or more than that of the United States, England, and Wales. Irish immigrants were also over-represented in insane asylums in the United States, England, Australia and Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.

Immigrants are still over-represented among the mentally ill; nobody is sure if this is because mentally ill people are more likely to emigrate or because emigration is a very stressful act.

Understanding mental illness in a cross cultural way is very difficult, because cultures understand and react to mental illness so differently. So perhaps it would be better express this finding by saying, not that more people are crazy, but that more people find it impossible to function in our society than in past societies.

But is that true? As even this little paragraph shows, different studies have produced widely varying numbers.

Is it even possible to compare rates of mental illness between different cultures? I absolutely do not think that mental illness is an invention of modern society; all of the cultures I know anything about recognize that people can be crazy. Some cultures think madness can be divine and have a habit of seeking spiritual meaning in the utterances of madmen and madwomen, but although they may consult crazy shamans and priests about the will of the gods they don't ask them to help arrange marriages for their children. But there certainly is a wide variance in what is defined as a serious mental illness. Plus, in the medieval world lunatics (as they were called) were mostly cared for by their families, and nobody bothered to count them.

So knowing whether mental illness has increased is a hard problem, perhaps unsolvable. On the other hand it seems undeniable that we perceive mental illness to be a much bigger problem than anyone before the nineteenth century did. Why is that? It could be because nobody thought about mental illness as a problem, just as nobody thought about how to achieve full equality of the sexes as a problem. Or it could be another side effect of our conquering hunger; when mass starvation was a regular occurrence, paranoia and excessive sadness did not seem like much to worry about.

At any rate, we have a problem with mental illness that seems to be a side-effect of modernity. As to why that should be, that is another hard problem. I can think of several possible causes: environmental poisons such as lead, urbanization, disease, separation from the natural world (people who grow up on farms have much healthier immune systems), the general increase in the complexity of economic and social life, the rapid pace of change; or, on the other hand, a changing definition of what life is all about that makes things like depression much bigger deals than they used to be.

It is something to ponder, when we consider the march of history; if we have made so much progress, why are we crazier than ever before?

Vulcans for Hillary

I didn't bother to read this story, but the headline got my attention:

The rallying cry for Clinton supporters: Logic not emotion

The former secretary of state has been criticized for having a “passion gap,” but her campaign stops are filled with people excited for non-excitability and thrilled by wonkiness.

Monreale: Paradise in Stone

The Cathedral of Monreale is is one of the great legacies of Norman Sicily. It was begun in 1174 by William II, in response to one of those jurisdictional disputes that loom so large in medieval history:

The cathedral was built by William II after the English archbishop of Palermo sought, with the solid backing of the Pope, to assert his authority over the king by refusing to honor his father's wishes to be buried at Cefalù, instead interring him at Palermo Cathedral. William II immediately set about building a bigger and more artistically inspired cathedral, appointing his own archbishop, and making his cathedral the royal pantheon.

This temple to God and the Norman kings was consecrated in 1182, just eight years after construction began, and it was essentially complete by the time of William's death in 1189. The overall form, as you can see, is nothing special, and the portico is a Baroque addition.

But the apse has some lovely decoration.

Two sets of medieval bronze doors survive.

And the interior is a spectacular wonder. Craftsmen – some local, some imported from Constantinople – covered the walls with golden mosaics. The total area of the mosaics is about 7,000 square meters (exact counts vary), which is 75,000 square feet or 1.75 acres.

The two sides show stories from the Old and New Testaments.

William II offers the church to the Virgin.

More pictures of the mosaics here.

The cathedral also has a wonderful Cosmati pavement floor.

But to me the greatest glory of the cathedral is the cloister, all that remains of the attached Benedictine monastery.

There are 216 pairs of columns; alternately decorated and plain; of the decorated, no two are alike.

This image brings out the Moorish influence that was a major part of the unique Sicilian architectural style.

The capitals are a riot of sculptural invention.

There is a saying, Who visits Sicily without seeing Monreale arrives a donkey and leaves a beast.

Zaha Hadid's Legacy

I will mark the passing of celebrity architect Zaha Hadid by calling attention back to this post on her appalling service to the tyrannical rulers of Azerbaijan.

Francis Towne

Francis Towne (1739-1816) was a British watercolor landscape painter and teacher. Although he was reasonably successful in his lifetime, he has been much more highly regarded in the past century than he ever was before. (On Lake Como, 1780)

Towne was born into a minor London commercial family, and when he showed aptitude for art his parents apprenticed him to a coach painter. Towne did mainly coach painting and the like until around 1770, when he began to concentrate on landscape painting. He left London and moved to Exeter, where he found the scenery more appealing and the cost of living easier to bear (On the Dart).

Towne traveled to Italy in 1780-81, where he loved the landscape and the ruins and developed his mature, somewhat mystical style. (Sepulchre on the Road between Rome and the Ponte Normentara, 1780)

A Bridge between Florence and Bologna, 1780.

The Claudian Aqueduct, Rome, 1780

Evening on Lake Maggiore, 1780.

Back in Britain Towne painted many copies of his views of Rome for sale and painted the scenery of England and Wales in the same style. Abberdeola, North Wales, 1783.

Dunkerswell Abbey, 1783.

View of the Rhydaer. Towne tried to get elected to the Royal Society but failed; he lacked patronage and his work was not fashionable enough to succeed without it. So he had a nice enough but far from magnificent career and then died.

After his death his work was largely forgotten. Ryland Water, 1786.

But then in the early 20th century Towne was rediscovered by collector Paul Oppé, who acquired many of Towne's best works very cheaply. Oppé and others created a revival of interest in Towne, which not coincidentally made the paintings they had acquired worth a lot, and many were purchased by museums. The Yale Center for British Art has several. (Windermere at Sunset.)

In our own time critics routinely hale Towne as a "great" artist, and I find these delightful. View in Burrowdale of Eagle Crag.

Point Rosee: Another Viking Site in North America?

Using infrared satellite images, "space archaeologist" Sarah Parcak searched the coast of eastern Canada for sites that might be related to the Vikings. She identified several possible targets, including one in Newfoundland called Point Rosee. Above is one of the much-manipulated images Parcak used, showing vaguely rectangular shadows.

Test excavations on the site have turned up turf walls and evidence of iron making using local bog ore. That rules out Indians, and I am not sure why whalers (who used these coasts in the sixteenth century) would want to make poor-quality iron. More intensive excavations are coming, so we ought to know soon if this is really the second Viking site in North America. Given the amount of activity west of Greenland hinted at in the Vinland Saga and other sources, there certainly ought to be more than one such site.