Alistair Moffat, "The Sea Peoples: the History of Celtic Britain and Ireland"

Medieval Monastery on Skellig Michael, Ireland

From my old web site:

“This is a history,” Alistair Moffat tells us, “of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence.” Right away Moffat impresses us with the beauty of his language, the power of his love for his homeland, and the imprecision of his thinking. What is a history of forgetfulness, anyway? But it is a lovely phrase and it serves as well as any other to introduce Moffat’s delightful and unusual little book. Not really a history, The Sea Peoples (2002) might be better described as an exploration across time and space. Moffat wanders the Celtic lands of Britain and Ireland, especially Wales, Cornwall, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, talking to people, describing what he sees, and relating the odd historical anecdote. The historical stories come without concern for chronology, touching on whatever catches Moffat’s interest. We get a little on the pre-Roman Britons and the pagan Irish, a little more on medieval monks, a nice chapter on the arrival of the Vikings and the formation of the half Scottish, half Viking Kingdom of the Isles, and a fair amount on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The stories are fascinating and Moffat tells them well. I learned much, especially about the revival of the Welsh language in the nineteenth century, based on dissenting chapels and hymn singing, and the history of the Scottish borders. I enjoyed almost every page, and I heartily recommend Moffat’s book.

Moffat occasionally goes in for what strikes me as excessive anti-English ranting, but without ever lying or exaggerating – given how many horrible things the English have done to the Welsh and the Irish, he hardly has to – and he also describes a few of the atrocities the Welsh and Irish have inflicted in return. He dwells in particular on the many ways lowland Scots brutalized their highland countrymen, and King James VI and I is one of the story’s worst villains. Among other sundry oppressions he punished a few rebellious clans by banning their surnames. It became a capital crime to use the name MacGregor, and several MacGregors were executed for the offense of going by their own name. Mainly, though, Moffat celebrates the land and people of Britain’s western shores. He visits a builder of traditional Irish boats, hikes the Welsh mountains while reliving the struggle against Edward I, peruses ancient crosses on the Isle of Man. He goes to Padstow to see the famous ‘Obby ‘Oss, where drunk Cornishmen tell him to get the fuck out of their town. Moffat, not the least daunted, regards this behavior as typically Celtic, and he seems pleased that the Padstow men are determined to keep their ancient festival their own.

Moffat is himself a lowland Scot with roots in the border country, and he makes his living as a producer for Scottish television. By way of a midlife crisis he has thrown himelf into Celtic nationalism, learning Gaelic and producing a series of documentaries about the Celtic lands. The book is, as I said, delightful, but I find this sort of small-country nationalism to be a deeply puzzling thing. Alistair Moffat is a citizen of the world, a resident of multi-cultural metropolis, a master of high technology and contemporary art. What, exactly, is he doing in the Hebrides, mucking around in tweed and learning a language that none of his ancestors spoke? (The Celtic element of border culture was Welsh, not Gaelic, as Moffat himself explains.) Why is he associating himself with a history of defeat and oppression, instead of celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment or the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? I don’t get it. I realize, though, that many of my fellow humans feel this sort of pull toward a small world that they can claim as their own. So I read books like Moffat’s with interest, and wonder what his obsession means.

What, exactly, is Celtic about the western fringe of Britain? Moffat devotes a lot of attention to language, and learning Gaelic has been part of his personal quest. But, as he explains, Gaelic is dying out, and he believes Irish is not far behind it on the road to extinction. Moffat spends a lot of time in Cornwall and on the Isle of Man, where the ancient languages have no more native speakers and are maintained only by a few hobbyists. Only in Wales, he says, does the native language have real strength. So while Celtic is a linguistic term, it is hard to see how language defines the culture of the region. There is history, to be sure, but what do these regions have in common historically but opposition to, and oppression by, English-speaking lowlanders? Moffat has a go at defining a Celtic view of the world, but the only things he comes up with are a love of heavy drinking, a delight in music, a fondness for flowery oratory, a tolerance for bland food, and greater-than-normal interest in sex. On such things we found our personal identities. Over them we fight wars and stage revolutions.

Everything else Moffat finds to say about “Celtic” culture seems to me to be more about pre-modern, peasant culture than anything particularly Celtic. Take, for example, Moffat’s words on how the Celts measured time:

The Celtic way of reckoning time was very different from our modern method of dividing the year into months, days, and hours. The Celtic year was arranged around four quarter-day festivals which took their cue not from the date on the calendar, but from the weather, the landscape and the behavior of animals. (31) 

Which is pretty much the way everyone in pre-modern Europe reckoned time. All Moffat says about how much the Celts love the landscape of their homes, how strongly they have clung to their tiny farms in the face of huge pressure to leave, how deeply they distrust city-based power, and so on, applies equally well to peasants just about everywhere else in the world. I often observe this about nationalists of various kinds. When pressed to name the special characteristics of their homelands, they can do no better than to describe humanity. Small country nationalism is an assertion of difference. I am not like everyone else, says the proud Welshman, Breton, Basque, or Quebecois. But the differences they point to strike me as insignificant, especially compared to the gulf that separates a modern man like Moffat from any of his ancestors born before 1850. In what sense is Alistair Moffat more like Owen Glendower than he is like me?

I think the interest of modern metropolitans in the rural nations of their ancestors grows out of dissatisfaction with the lives we live. Even for successful TV producers, the planet-wide sameness of modern society, the sterility of air-conditioned towers that separate us from the soil and the weather, and the pointlessness of so much that we do batter our souls and full us with emptiness. We are safe from disease and hunger, even tooth pain, but instead of contentment we feel loss. Surrounded by people, we feel alone. We have trouble feeling that any of the greatness around us is our own. We are strangers in the metropolis and our most pressing question is, who am I? The response of many people is to turn their backs on the broader world and immerse themselves in something small. The very smallness of these identities, their hopelessness backwardness, their legacies of defeats and conquests, makes them beacons of meaning in a world that values only celebrity and success. I am a Celt, Alistiar Moffat says to the mirror, and this answer gives him a place to stand amidst the whirl of post-industrial civilization. It is not place I can belong to, or much want to belong to, but his marvelous book gives an outsider some idea of why so many people place their hearts in this quasi-imaginary land.

October 24, 2009 

When Did the United States Have a "Common Culture"?

The big complaint right now across the anti-immigrant right is that the US has lost its "common culture."

So let me ask: when did the US have a common culture?

During the Indian Wars, or the Trail of Tears? Indians used to make up a much larger share of the people in the US than they do now, speaking a vast array of languages and practicing many different religions.

During the mass Catholic immigration of the 1800s, which spawned the Know-Nothings and other anti-Catholic movements, with millions of Protestants saying Catholics had no place in America?

When Mormons were driven out of Missouri and Illinois?

During the Civil War? We lost at least 600,000 men in a fight over whether or not slavery was part of our common culture.

During Reconstruction, when white terrorists fought against Federal troops to seize power in one southern state after another?

In the 1890s, when sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta shared the nation with the first New York City millionaires?

During the coal field wars, when miners took up arms against the bosses, who responded with machine gun fire?

During the fights over votes for women, or birth control? 

During the 1960s, when hippie values swept the country and thousands of families broke up over fights about haircuts and torn jeans? When millions marched against the Vietnam War?

When white policemen let their dogs loose on peaceful marchers for Civil Rights?

Moving on to recent decades, what is our common culture's position on abortion? Gay rights? Marijuana? Are Italian food, Chinese food, and tacos parts of our common culture, or not? What about Indian food, which we have for a majority of family birthdays in this house?

The "common culture" discourse is racist nonsense.

To me, recently arrived immigrants are the most American people. Instead of whining about unfair competition and a world rigged against them, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. They believe in working hard and saving money and getting ahead, an old American faith that has been lost by millions of the native born. They send their kids to public schools. They love democracy. They believe in the future.

To the extent that Americans have any common culture, immigrants embody it.

Dutch Art at Christie's

Jan Josefsz Van Goyen, Brussels, c. 1650 

Peter Paul Rubens, preparatory study for The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, detail, 1550s

David Teniers the Younger, The Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1635, one of at least twenty versions he painted. Love that temptress.

Gerrit Dou, The Flute Player, 1620s. Dou was Rembrant's pupil.

Links 28 November 2025

Ross Bleckner, Untitled, 1984

Cambrian Chronicles ponders all the stories of drowned lands surrounding the Irish Sea, 20-minute video. There are serious scholars who think these are 9,000-year-old memories of sea level rise. I wrote about some of these stories here.

FIRE takes the case of a man who spent 37 days in jail for a Charlie Kirk-related post.

Drone video of polar bears noodling around the old human settlement on Kolyuchin Island, 3-minute video.

Recoding America announces a pilot project for "outcomes review" in California, testing whether bills passed by the legislature really do what they are supposed to. Could be expanded to reviewing bills before they are passed.

The history of making cheap urban housing illegal.

Good Reason piece on the uproar at conservative think tanks over Tucker Carlson, anti-semitism, etc.

Drawings of London from 1873.

A Roman distance marker from Britain.

An argument against essayists using the word "we." 

A professor makes great claims for "close reading."

Three large coin hoards from the late Roman world.

Some analysis of the proposed Ukraine peace deal. (Twitter/X)

Ukrainian missile strike destroys two valuable Russian aircraft and damages a factory at the Taganrog Yuzhny Air Base. (Twitter/X, news story)

Where do Gnomes Come From?

Gnomus (lower left) in a 1555 Illustration of Mining

Word origins are a common subject of discussion in my house, and this morning we puzzled over "gnome." It sounds Greek, but I can't remember any gnomes in classical literature.

So I looked it up. Oxford has this:

Mid 17th century: from French, from modern Latin gnomus, a word used by Paracelsus as a synonym of Pygmaeus, denoting a mythical race of very small people said to inhabit parts of Ethiopia and India.

So the first use of the word gnomus is by Paracelsus (1493-1541), the famous alchemist? Interesting. As to where gnomus might come from, there are two theories: it may be related to 

gnōmē ‘thought, opinion’ (related to gignōskein ‘know’)

or to 

genomos, which could mean ‘earth-dweller’

Since some Renaissance writers used gnomus to mean a sort of earth elemental (see top), a derivation from genomos makes more sense to me.

Again via Oxford, it was a very rare word until the1910s, when its use shot up; I imagine this was about the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, who were big for a while in communist propaganda and other conspiratorial views. Then it was a rare word again until the 1960s, when there was a blip – was that more gnomes of Zurich? – then it surged in the 1980s, which was probably some combination of garden gnomes and Dungeons & Dragons.

Anyway I find it interesting that the origins of gnome trace back to Renaissance magi, vs. dwarves, who come from very old Germanic legends; I think Dungeons & Dragons preserves this distinction pretty well.

William Dalrymple, "White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India."

Another book review from my old web site, written in 2012.

 

James Kirkpatrick

I have learned more from William Dalrymple's fascinating White Mughals (2002) than anything else I have read in years. This is partly because it is set in a time and place I knew almost nothing about, but there is more. The story Dalrymple tells is one of those in which romance and family life collide with historical change, personalizing great events and casting new light on human life amidst the whirl of cultural conflict. Dalrymple draws many characters and events into his narrative, and almost always the additions add richness to his tale rather than simple heft. The book is quite long, 400 substantial pages, and it seemed even longer because of the confusing thicket of Indian and Persian names, Mughal titles, and unfamiliar institutions. But the length allows Dalrymple to depict a whole world. We see the courts of the dying Mughal empire, the lives of noble women enclosed in the zenana but still wielding great influence, the pageantry of Indian Islam, the adventure of young men come out to work for the mighty East India Company, most of them doomed to early death but the lucky survivors more likely to get very, very rich than almost any group of ambitious merchants in history.

The center of the tale is the marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident (ambassador) at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, to Khair un-Nissa, a Mughal woman of very aristocratic family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been routine for British men in India to marry Indian women, and indeed to assimilate themselves to Indian culture in other ways. We have many depictions of Englishmen in this period smoking hookahs in native costume while they watch performances of dancing girls or join the hunts of Rajahs and Mughals. Around 1800, though, this was changing. The more puritanical, nationalist, and racist attitudes of the Victorian age were taking hold among the agents of Imperial Britain, and to "go native" was seen more and more as a betrayal of Englishness and the white race. James's marriage caused a great scandal and was the subject of three formal investigations. It is largely as a result of this scandal that we know so much about James and Khair; the many English-Indian marriages of earlier times excited little comment, and so passed mostly beneath the notice of history.

Khair-un-Nissa

James Kirkpatrick had the mindset of the earlier generation. He was a great admirer of Indian culture and of Islam. When he attended the Nizam's court, he dressed as a Mughal nobleman, and he became an expert both in the languages of the court (Persian and Urdu) and in its rituals. It is hardly surprising that when he fell in love, it was with a native woman. James tried at first to keep his marriage from his English superiors, but he had arrived in India too late for his actions to avoid attracting attention. Word spread, and not in pleasant forms. The first rumors that reached Calcutta said that James had raped Khair and then bullied her family into handing her over to him. Since the Nizam of Hyderabad was a crucial English ally in their struggle to control India and keep the French out, this naturally caused great alarm. As the inquests showed, though, it was not true. Rather, it seems that James was at first the victim of a plot hatched by Khair's mother and grandmother, who allowed him to meet their beautiful young daughter and then encouraged the feelings of the two lovers, even allowing them to sleep together before they were formally wed. Why they did this is somewhat obscure, although there was no shortage of rumors. As Dalrymple reconstructs the tale, it seems that they wanted, first, to abort a match proposed for Khair by her uncle and guardian, to a man that the women thought completely unsuitable. They considered the powerful, wealthy, much-admired British resident a much better match, and so they engineered the affair. Or perhaps, as other sources have it, it was driven by Khair herself (above), who fell in love with Kirkpatrick after observing him from behind a curtain, and then as a spoiled favorite child induced her relatives to grant her will. The result of this conniving was that Khair become pregnant, and Kirkpatrick "did the right thing" by formally marrying her.

However the relationship began, it blossomed into a great love. James repeatedly risked his career by determined loyalty to Khair, and she risked her life by fidelity to him. They had two children together, and seemed to have shared much happiness before a series of tragic events got under way that I will not spoil. It is a lovely tale.

The Kirkpatrick Children

The two children were sent to be educated in England, and one of them grew up to be a famous beauty who knew Thomas Carlyle and served as the inspiration for one of his characters. George Chinnery painted the two children just as they were leaving for Britain, a famous image that now hangs in the board room of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (above). This was their last week as Indians, dressed in Mughal court finery. As soon as they boarded the ship for England they became George and Kitty Kirkpatrick and were brought up to be English, deprived of all contact with their Indian relatives and their early lives.

In telling this story Dalrymple is not interested primarily in just this one romance. Because both husband and wife were so politically important, their marriage became embroiled in the politics of the Nizam's court, and my favorite parts of the book were actually those that examined the rise and fall of ministers and the mix of ceremonial whirl and political tension that was court life in eighteenth-century India. Dalrymple wonderfully evokes the lost world of late Mughal India, with its poets, saints, warriors, sorcerers, ambitious courtiers, and powerful women who controlled events from behind the scenes. This age still had much of the flavor of medieval Persia, but it is copiously documented, so we can follow the lives of noble Hyderabadis in their own letters and proclamations, local chronicles, reports from British and French ambassadors, and many other sources. My favorite character was the wily minister Aristu Jah ("glory of Aristotle"), who guided Hyderabad through the violent storms of Indian politics at a time when many states disappeared. One of Aristu Jah's few serious mistakes was to convince his master to make war on the Maratha Confederacy, a powerful league of Hindu princes to his north. After Hyderabad was badly beaten in the war, the Maratha chief minister insisted that Aristu Jah be handed over as his prisoner. So Aristu Jah was packed off to prison in Pune, and Hyderabad had to give up much territory along the border and pay a huge indemnity. Did this stop Aristu Jah? No:

In the late summer of 1797 Aristu Jah, the former Prime Minister who had ben imprisoned in Pune for over two years, sent some extraordinary news to the Nizam: not only had he succeeded in negotiating his own release, he had managed to get the Marathas to agree to return almost all the land and fortresses that had been ceded to them after the Battle of Kharlda. They had even waived the enormous indemnity owed to them by the Nizam. So astounding was this news, and so remarkable was Aristu Jah's achievement in neogtiating it from confinement, that many of his contemporaries assumed that he could only have achieved this coup with the aid or sorcery.

Aristu Jah

Even more than the lost world of Mughal India, what Dalrymple most wants is to evoke the time when British and Indians interacted as equals, and the British were just as likely to copy native ways as to impose their own. He wants to dwell on this epoch of cooperation and mutual admiration, before the racism and rigidity of the nineteenth century divided the British and Indians from each other. Perhaps he is a bit naive about this time, and perhaps most people on both sides never felt the sort of warmth that James Kirkpatrick felt for his wife and friends. But in our multicultural age, the behavior of the eighteenth-century British in India is a better model than that of their Victorian successors.

For a historian, the story of Dalrymple's research is as fascinating as that of James and Khair. Dalrymple first heard of James and Khair from a tour guide in Hyderabad, and he learned the basics of their story from a scholar whose office was in a crumbling corner of the old British Residency, built by Kirkpatrick himself. He followed the tale through the records of the East India Company and the letters of the Kirkpatrick family. Some of the crucial letters were in a cipher that he could not break until he stumbled across a letter in which the recipient had written in the translation above the numerical code. With each discovery, his knowledge deepens and the story grows. It is a historians' romance as much as one for lovers. Let me reprint one part of the tale, as Dalrmple tells it, to give the flavor of this remarkable quest:

On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. I had forgotten to buy anything for my family, and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours' time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad's great specialty: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where promised I would find ‘booxies booxies.'

The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies', as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristrocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing, he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-‘Alam, by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick's letters. The book turnout to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa's first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts, too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the Gulzar i-Asafiya. I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources.

If only studying history were like that more often.

December 23, 2012

Sarah Maas, "A Court of Thorns and Roses"

So I finally did it, broke down and found a copy of the most famous work of modern "Romantasy." This was for two reasons: because an expert on fantasy ought to know something about what is now by far the most popular sub-genre, and because I imagined writing a mocking post about it.

But honestly it was ok. I've read many books that were far worse; in fact, in terms of fantasy novels I have read in the 2020s it might make the top ten. 

Everyone I've mentioned this project to has said something like, "Isn't that smut?" But it really isn't. There's no sex at all until page 300, and when we finally get to it, it is pretty decorous by the standards of contemporary romance. The writing is ok, with some good passages, and there are even some nice bits of fantasy. 

How to describe it?

One of the reviews quoted on the back of my recent copy says, "Sara Maas transcends the genre." But that is exactly wrong. This book wallows in its genre. Absolutely every piece of it is something you have encountered before, either in the ancient archetypes of heroism and romance, or in recent fantasy. Everything unfolds just as you know it should.

Out heroine becomes a bow hunter to feed her starving family. She is so tough and resourceful and perky that she might as well be named Katniss Everdeen. She semi-accidentally kills a faerie, and discovers that because of an ancient treaty between humans and faeries she must either die or go into faerie and replace the person she killed. So she goes into faerie. Her captor is a High Lord (of course) of vast powers and great wealth, with a fabulous mansion and a flower garden even nicer than Mr. Darcy's. When he goes into combat he transforms into a monster I could only imagine as looking exactly like the Beast from the Disney movie. When he gets aroused, he growls, and his claws show. He is amazing in every way, but of course he is under a curse. In fact the whole of Faerie is under a curse, and there is an Evil Queen mucking everything up. For dumb reasons – the weakest part of the plot, imo – the sexy High Lord cannot oppose the Evil Queen, so Katniss, I mean Feyre, has to do it for him, with the help of an ambiguous nobleman from the Night Court who is the best character.

I can't make up my mind about this persistent feminine fantasy. I suppose for most women it is harmless enough, no worse than men imagining themselves as James Bond. But, really, if you think all the time about immortal billionaire Faerie Lords so handsome they hurt your eyes, somehow both dangerous and sweet, violent and kind, serious and fun, perfect in every way except for one flaw or problem that only you the perky earth girl can resolve, can you be happy with actual existing men? I wonder.

Sarah Maas, one piece of advice: you should never make it a key element of your plot that your characters cannot solve a riddle I guessed in about a second. That just makes them look really stupid. As a veteran dungeon master I understand it is hard to create riddles that are hard to solve but still solvable, but you can do better than this.

ADDENDUM

I just flipped through the second volume of this series, A Court of Mist and Fury. The sex starts right at the beginning – Feyre and her Faerie Lord are newlyweds, after all – and is significantly more, um, throbbing. So maybe the series gets smuttier as it goes along.

Hungary's Pro-Natalism

Hungary has gone all-in on promoting births:

Since 2010, Hungary has implemented a variety of policies, including zero-interest “baby-expecting” loans and debt forgiveness for couples with children, personal income tax relief for mothers, and housing support for married couples, in an effort to reverse demographic decline. Hungary spends around 5 percent of GDP on family subsidies, and the OECD ranks Hungary among the top five OECD countries overall in public spending on family benefits.

But as you can see from the chart above, the results have been unimpressive, and they are nowhere near their goal of raising TFN back to the replacement level of 2.1. Last year Hungary recorded 127,500 deaths and 77,500 births.

On the other hand, most of those benefits are only available to married couples, and that has led to a decline in the number of children born to unwed mothers.

MAGA Macedonia

Renee Diresta:

The cleanest way to understand what’s happening on X is to go back in time to Veles, Macedonia in 2016.

A group of teenagers figured out they could make money by driving Americans to websites plastered with ads. They spun up WordPress sites, wrote clickbait headlines, and pushed links into Facebook groups and Pages.

At first they tried a mix of content: generic viral junk, memes, and politics. They worked on sensational stories about the Democrats fighting it out in the caustic 2016 primary: some Bernie things, some Hillary things.

Then they tried pro-Trump stories. The numbers went crazy.

They watched the metrics: Conservative users were more likely to click and share the links, and visit the sites. They A/B tested the headlines: Every time they made the stories a little more outrageous—“Pope Endorses Donald Trump —the engagement went up.

So they made more. Soon entire towns were getting rich.

The Macedonian teenagers didn’t care about the politics. The American right, especially the emerging MAGA ecosystem, was simply a dream customer: highly engaged, highly inflamed, and extremely willing to click through to garbage sites that paid out ad revenue. 

Happy Fibonacci Day

November 23 is Fibonacci Day, because 11/23 is the first four digits of the Fibonacci sequence.

Leonardo Bonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1240–50; nobody can explain why we know him by a nickname attested in only one medieval source) was one of the learned men who hung around the court of Emperor Frederick II. Like the rest of that circle he translated Arabic manuscripts, debated philosophy, and argued over arcane questions like "Where is the throne of God?" Some sources say he was a student of the famous astrologer/magician/physiognomist Michael Scot.

An accomplished linguist, Bonacci interviewed merchants from around the Mediterranean about their how they used mathematics. He then wrote a book in which he extolled 1) the numbering system we call Arabic numerals, and 2) the use of the abacus for calculations. He wrote that Arabic numbers are better for accounting because you can keep the digits in columns for easier addition and subtraction. Not clear how important Bonacci's book was in spreading Arabic numerals, which took centuries to take over Europe, but it can't have hurt.

The famous sequence was introduced by Bonacci in his book on the abacus as a sort of thought experiment concerning rabbits. He probably learned about it from an Arabic source, since the sequence had been known in India since the 6th century, but no surviving Arabic manuscript of the period mentions it, so that is a guess.

I find the sequence interesting because it has little practical use. It's just cool. And that is an important introduction of medieval thought, much of which was taken up with ideas just because they were interesting, without anyone wondering if Aristotelian mechanics (say) had any real-world utility. Smart people like stretching their minds, and always have.

Semiyarka and the Bronze Age Steppes

Perusing old photographs taken by the American Corona spy satellites, British archaeologists spotted this interesting pattern in eastern Kazakhstan. I have already mentioned the Corona program here before; these images are not as clear as modern satellite photos, but since they were taken in the 1960s they show a lot of stuff that has since been covered over or destroyed by modern development.

This image appears to show a community made of up walled compounds, each about 50m across. But how old was it? And who lived there?

The Brits who made this discovered reached out to authorities in Kazakhstan and organized a joint expedition to explore the site; the results of their 2018 study have been leaking out for a while, but they have now published a formal article in Antiquity.

The site is called Semiyarka, the "City of Seven Ravines," and it dates to around 1600 B.C.  It measures about 345-acres, or 145-hectares, making it one of the largest Bronze Age sites of the region. It had actually been recorded in 2000, but the people who found it did not have access to aerial imagery and did not realize its scope.

Early reports associated the site with the Andronovo Culture, which is what archaeologists call the culture of the Indo-Iranian people of the steppes, before they invaded Iran and India. But now the excavators assign it to the "Adronoid Cherkaskul Culture," which they say represents a fusion of the Andronovo culture of the Indo-Iranian interlopers with local traditions.

Some artifacts from the site. One of the main things the archaeologists found was evidence of bronze working. This fits perfectly with the Indo-European tradition; in settlements of the slightly older Sintashta Culture, centered around the southern end of the Ural Mountains, every large house had its own hearth for smelting metals.

Andronovo Bronze Axes

Andronovo Ceramics

Every piece of evidence we find on the steppes, either archaeological or genetic, further confirms the model of Indo-European migration.

Links 21 November 2025

Mosaic in the House of the Boar, Pompeii

Thirty-four years of Strandbeests, 22-minute video.

Jeremy Horpedahl, "Four charts to overcome your pessimism about how recent generations are doing economically."

Reuters says 600 Americans were fired for comments posted after Charlie Kirk's assassination.

The sea wolves of western Canada (see here) have been videotaped raiding traps set for invasive green crabs. (YouTube, CBC, NY Times) Lots of blaph about whether this means wolves "use tools," but I would put it under the category of general cleverness.

A pretentious intellectual visits Las Vegas, has a good time.

Tyler Cowen interviews Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic, lots of wild transportation talk.

People going against the status quo are more likely to be confidently wrong.

Moss spores that spent nine months in space germinated when they were brought back to earth.

Max Stirner's radical individualism, 53-minute lecture from Wes Cecil. You can think that Stirner was a narcissist but he was dead right about Marx and Engels and their worship of abstractions.

Piers Taylor celebrates "deeper and messier architecture," some interesting buildings.

A claim that the English may have gotten more intelligent, genetically, in modern times and that this explains the Industrial Revolution. Maybe people are getting smarter – there is other evidence of this – but any association with the Industrial Revolution is suspect because the authors present no comparative data from China, where a rich civilization full of smart people did not industrialize.

A strange Viking burial with scallop shells on her face. 

Study finds that Brexit reduced the GDP of the UK by 6-8%.

Sculpted reliefs of theatrical masks found at Roman site in Turkey.

New experiment shows that under one particular set of conditions, readers, including MFA students, prefer the literary output of ChatGPT over that of human authors.

Catalan artist Jaume Plensa's humanist scuptures.

Tyler Cowen on AI poetry. I find most contemporary poetry unreadable, so I would be happy to have more good stuff from any source.

Richard Hanania shreds Patrick Deneen's "post-liberal" philosophy.

New study: "Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing."

Somehow they have persuaded some Brits to run across the landscape while being hunted by baying hounds.

Nuts on the woke right copy nuts on the woke left, now with fake hate crimes (New Jersey Globe, Twitter/X)

A long past post that has gotten a bunch of views lately: Free Love, which used the catastrophic romantic experience of the Shelly/Byron circle to show that the traditional wisdom about marriage is correct.

Europe is not ready for war with Russia (Twitter/X). All this tweeter says is true, but I think he vastly overrates the threat. A force that can't take Pokrovsk is not storming into Warsaw. Yes, drones are awesome and Russia has a ton of them, but Israel just showed they're not much use against F-35s.

There are so many fiber optic lines lying across fields along the front line in Ukraine that Russian soldiers get tangled in them, in this case making the soldier unable to avoid an oncoming drone.

Lots of economists and foreign policy types are saying that the Russian economy is in terrible shape. Most do not think that it is likely to collapse, but Russia's ability to fund the war keeps decreasing and the long-term cost to the nation keeps mounting. On YouTube: Professor Gerdes, Jason Jay Smart, Nigel-Gould Davies, Perun. Text articles: Atlantic Council, Meduza. Summary from one of these speakers: "Time is no longer on Russia's side." And here is a claim from Russian media that half the nation's clothing shops have closed.

Short video showing 100 interceptions of Shahed-type drones by Wild Hornets interceptor drones.

The UC San Diego Math Scandal

Kelsey Piper at The Argument:

UCSD has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.

In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”

Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts did not even reflect profound struggles in math. Mostly, they were students whose transcripts said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.

“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus. “The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has.”

After reviewing the report on which this was based, Piper interviewed some high school math teachers about it:

“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”

The students are missing so many prerequisites that teaching them calculus is basically hopeless. And indeed, almost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.

“My exam results when I was teaching it were mostly: One student (who actually has most of the prerequisite skills) gets a five and maybe one more ekes out a three and everyone else gets ones and twos,” the teacher told me. “I wasn’t allowed to grade in a way that would hold them accountable.”

“What would happen,” I asked, “if you did grade based on their actual mastery of calculus?”

“If I was failing all the kids who weren’t doing on-level work, that would be almost all,” she told me. “The kids would all be trying to drop the class to preserve their GPAs, because that is the set of kids that cares about class rank. And if all the kids drop, they just won’t run the class at all.”

A sense that something dire is happening in American public education is widespread across the political spectrum. As Piper says, the situation at the University of California is worsened by a combination of widespread grade inflation and their decision to stop requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission. But this is far from the only sign of trouble.

Somebody needs to hold students accountable and give them appropriate grades long before they get to high school math. Sadly, nobody in the American educational system has any incentive to do that.

Politically, I think this is a particular problem for Democrats. For the past 50 years voters have generally ranked Democrats as more trustworthy on education, but that is no longer true; the combination of woke fads, excessive "equity," and passing students who have learned nothing has depressed Americans' view of public schooling and the party most associated with it.

Thomas Friedman Against "Moral Cowardice"

In the NY Times, Friedman bemoans an "epidemic of moral cowardice":

Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.

While this may seem an odd grouping, its elements have more in common than you might think. The neo-Nazis in the Republican camp want a white Christian America from sea to shining sea — empty of as much diversity as possible. The radical settlers in the West Bank want a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — empty of as many Palestinian Arabs as possible. And Hamas jihadists also want an Islamic state in Palestine from the same river to the same sea — empty of as many Israeli Jews as possible.

Those three examples have other things in common. One is they just don’t care anymore about hiding their excesses or their agendas. It’s all out there online or on YouTube. They are not embarrassed. . . .

But what really makes me sick is the third thing they have in common — how much their behavior is now excused or normalized by adjacent members of their own political communities.

The root problem is, as it always has been, dividing the world into US and THEM and insisting that we are better. The only solution is Enlightenment liberal internationalism.

The Tomb of Fu Hao

Fu Hao was a queen of the Shang Dynasty who lived around 1200 BC; her tomb was excavated in 1976. Her tomb was in the middle of a large royal cemetery but seems to have been covered over by the excavation of larger tombs nearby and thus never looted. The similarity to Tutankhamun's tomb, which was also hidden by the excavation of a grander tomb just above it, besides their having lived in the same era, has led to her sometimes being called the Chinese Tutankhamun. The tomb was identified as hers because several objects have her name on them.

Oracle bone from the reign of Wu Ding

Fu Hao is not mentioned in Chinese chronicles but she appears on several surviving oracle bones. Texts on these bones record that she was one of the three chief wives of King Wu Ding. (He had 64 in all.) The king's wives mainly came from other kingdoms, and there is a theory that Fu Hao was born on the steppes among warrior nomads. Oracle bone inscriptions are obscure, gnomic records, and this is early in the history of Chinese script, so their interpretation is very much disputed. According to the usual online sources, these oracle bones record that Fu Hao was ordered by the king to perform the oracle bone rite herself, and to sacrifice to his ancestors. Both of these tasks were usually undertaken by male priests. 

Weirder still, inscriptions describe her as commanding armies and winning a major battle over an enemy called the Tufang with whom the Shang had fought for generations. You may be thinking that this has to be some kind of misunderstanding, but Fu Hao's tomb contained 130 weapons, including the ax above. These were 1) extremely rare in the tombs of women, and 2) the same kind and quantity as found in the tombs of other generals. 

Bronze ax and jade dagger from the tomb

So, Fu Hao was quite an unusual character.

Excavating the tomb

She was buried with sixteen slaves and six dogs, which seems to be about normal for a senior queen of that era.

Love this jade phoenix.

Wikipedia lists the contents of her tomb as follows:

• 755 jade objects
• 564 bone objects (including 500 hairpins and 20 arrowheads)
• 468 bronze objects, including over 200 ritual bronze vessels, 130 weapons, 23 bells, 27 knives, 4 mirrors, and 4 tiger statues
• 63 stone objects
• 11 pottery objects
• 5 ivory objects
• 6,900 cowry shells

Quite a pile of loot. Several of the jade objects were centuries old before they went into this tomb, which nobody really understands. Were they novelty items, or were they considered the relics of a lost age of heroes? More goodies below.

Bigger Houses Cost More

Interesting chart showing how housing prices and quality have changed in the US. From 1956 to 2024 the median house nearly doubled in size, and they now have a lot more amenities. You have to love that in 1956 only 33% of houses had insulation. (Although some would have been brick, which is a decent insulator, and wooden clapboards also have some insulating value. But not nearly as much as fiberglass or foam.) The numbers of hours worked (by the median worker) per square foot is about the same.

This chart does hide some problems. Americans without children regularly complain that the market forces them to buy much bigger houses than they need, since everything in the better neighborhoods is huge. We should build more small houses. There is also the problem that in certain areas this median house would cost twice as much as in the median neighborhood, perhaps three times as much.

But one of the main drivers of rising housing costs is that we expect a lot more from a house.

Grover Cleveland for Immigration

Hey, Trump likes to talk about how great the 1890s were, so why not? This is part of Cleveland's message vetoing a bill that would have imposed a literacy test for immigrants:

A radical departure from our national policy relating to immigration is here presented. Heretofore we have welcomed all who came to us from other lands except those whose moral or physical condition or history threatened danger to our national welfare and safety. Relying upon the zealous watchfulness of our people to prevent injury to our political and social fabric, we have encouraged those coming from foreign countries to cast their lot with us and join in the development of our vast domain, securing in return a share in the blessings of American citizenship.

A century's stupendous growth, largely due to the assimilation and thrift of millions of sturdy and patriotic adopted citizens, attests the success of this generous and free-handed policy which, while guarding the people's interests, exacts from our immigrants only physical and moral soundness and a willingness and ability to work.

A contemplation of the grand results of this policy can not fail to arouse a sentiment in its defense, for however it might have been regarded as an original proposition and viewed as an experiment its accomplishments are such that if it is to be uprooted at this late day its disadvantages should be plainly apparent and the substitute adopted should be just and adequate, free from uncertainties, and guarded against difficult or oppressive administration.

It is not claimed, I believe, that the time has come for the further restriction of immigration on the ground that an excess of population overcrowds our land.

It is said, however, that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.

Not Trusting the Government

Great chart. The big decline in how much Americans trust the federal government took place during Vietnam and the Cold War, and during the early 90s recession it was as low as it is now. Interesting that it rose so much in the late 90s; more evidence that The Matrix was right and 1999 was the peak of human civilization.

Street Art and Politics

Sick of Black Lives Matter and other left-wing public art, the Trump Administration has decided to enforce a near total ban all roadway art:

The four giant pairs of glasses are simple and striking: rendered in the crosswalks of an intersection in Lubbock, Texas, in white paint, tidy inside the bounds of the crossing lines. For years, they’ve been a beloved part of the city’s quirky downtown, a testament to its native son, the rock ‘n’ roller Buddy Holly.

Are they road murals? Are they public art? Or are they a safety hazard?

Whatever they are, the streetbound specs are now verboten, a casualty of the Trump administration’s crackdown on artistic displays on the nation’s roadways. . . .

In Washington, local officials jackhammered a road mural honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Laredo, Texas, removed a road mural that criticized President Trump’s so-called border wall. And in Florida, city officials painted over a rainbow crosswalk that memorialized the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, which left 49 dead.

So much for free speech.

The good news is that the glasses can easily be repainted when Trump and Stephen Miller are gone.

Jonathan Israel, "The Radical Enlightnement"

How's this for a model of human history:

1. Hunting and Gathering
2. Agriculture and Village Life
3. Civilization: Cities, Writing, Kingdoms and Empires, Aristocracies, Religious Institutions
4. Modernity

Don't worry too much about this scheme, it's just me trying to impress on anyone who needs impressing that the onset of modernity is one of the biggest events in human history. It is also, to me, something very much in need of explaining. We had several very rich, very successful civilizations – the Roman Empire, various Chinese empires, the medieval Arab world – that did not make this leap. Something else besides a rich, stable society with impressive intellectual achievements was needed. What was it about Europe in the 1600s and 1700s that launched us on this rocket ship to the future?

Jonathan Israel's The Radical Enlightenment is a 700-page doorstop of a book arguing that the key developments of modernity were ideas. Israel does not argue very hard for this view. Mainly he assumes it, then shows you in astonishing detail how these ideas arose, developed and spread. He goes out of his way to demonstrate that these ideas were not the property of any particular social class, or any one nation, and had no particular attachment to any particular industry (e.g., global commerce) or to colonization or anything else you might care to base them on. They did have some relationship to science, but the scientific understanding of many philosophers was weak (e.g. Hobbes, Spinoza), and there was just as much if not more influence from philosophy into science as the other way around.

In Israel's world ideas arise in remarkable minds and spread to other remarkable minds, which make their own additions and spread them to yet more minds, until they mount into an intellectual tsunami that sweeps away the past and strands us on the shores of a new world. The level of detail in The Radical Enlightenment is both impressive and annoying. Here is an entirely typical sentence:

In 1651, at the University of Nassau Dillenburg, at Herborn, where Wittichius (who was then teaching there) and a young professor, Johannes Clauberg (1622-65), originally from Solingen but trained at Leiden and destined to become one of the foremost Cartesian expositors in Europe, had been quietly infiltrating Cartesian ideas into their teaching for several years, uproar ensued when the two professors openly espoused Cartesianism in the lecture room.

If you don't want to read a university-by-university, professor-by-professor account of the spread of  ideas, stay away from this book. But I will summarize it for you!

To Israel these dangerous new ideas came mainly from two sources: the worldly, skeptical writers of the Renaissance, of whom Machiavelli and Montaigne are the most prominent, and René Descartes (1596-1650). I found it odd that Israel tells us nothing about Descartes; his book begins in 1650, and since Descartes had published all his books by 1644 we are assumed to know who he was and what he said. Besides being a remarkable mathematician who demonstrated that algebraic equations and graphs are the same thing, Descartes created a philosophical system that was supposed to stand on its own, with no reference to past thinkers or to revealed theology. He seemed sometimes to be saying – though in other places he denied this – that we could only have knowledge of God or the soul by reasoning about them, using data that we could only get through our senses. As Israel shows, he made many theologians foam at the mouth with rage, and everybody from the Pope to the King of Poland tried to ban his books and forbid discussion of his ideas. But they could not be banned; they were so appealing to so many intellectuals, including some nobles and some eminent churchmen, that they spread like Covid-19 across the European world.

One of my favorite sections of The Radical Enlightenment shows a series of European princes finding out that to maintain peace in their universities, churches, and bureaucracies they must develop policies about philosophy. They had, of course, religious policies that had been shaped over the preceding century. But as confessional conflict died down, philosophical combat heated up, and one university after another was convulsed by the same "uproar" over Cartesian and other radical ideas. It is fun to imagine these weary princes wondering why they need to get involved in professorial quarrels about qualities, substances, or the infinite.

To Israel, this is where the modern world began: with these bold intellectuals who rejected all past wisdom and insisted that we must think for ourselves about everything. These thinkers attacked every kind of received religious teaching, every kind of political arrangement (why kings? why aristocrats? why Roman law?), even the fundamentals of social arrangements, with some calling for the abolition of private property and the full equality of women. Against them were arrayed what to Israel are "traditional" thinkers who imagine that authority flows from god to kings to nobles and finally to male heads of household, and that this arrangement is the only thing holding the human world together, our only bulwark against both political anarchy and moral turpitude. 

Modernity, to Israel, is what we got when Descartes, Spinoza, and their allies swept away all those assumptions. 

I say, maybe. I will elaborate on my views more below. But to get back to Israel, what does this giant book actually demonstrate?

First, he shows that these new ideas – that reason must predominate over faith or tradition, that the universe is a machine that runs on its own with no divine intervention, that miracles and magic are impossible, that inherited political arrangements are arbitrary and should be rethought – had enormous appeal. After 1650 European intellectuals mostly gave up theological combat and devoted their lives to wrangling about the new philosophy. Many described first learning about the new philosophy as a kind of awakening that changed their lives.

Second, people thought this mattered in the most profound way. This was an era when thousands of ministers, priests, professors, bureaucrats, and noblemen threw themselves into abstruse philosophical debates because they believed there was nothing more important or more exciting they could do.

Third, calling people radical, moderate or conservative had real meaning in this context. Israel shows at great length that the people most taken up with Cartesian or Spinozan philosophy were the ones most likely to question royal power, aristocratic privilege, established churches, patriarchy, and so on. Most of the people who hated the new philosophy were deeply invested in religious and political tradition; indeed their main argument against the new philosophy was to show that it undermined all the other things they held dear. In between were people who saw the power of the new ideas but tried hard to accommodate them to Christianity and the existing social order, and they were mostly political and social moderates as well.

Fourth, many attempts at creating a moderate position that acknowledged the power of reasoned analysis while preserving the essentials of Christianity failed intellectually. Many people badly wanted to do this, but their theories were always torn apart by rivals from both the radical and conservative sides.

This is all very interesting, but I am not sure it is enough to explain the modern world. Not that I dismiss ideas as forces in history; I am on record somewhere saying that the Enlightenment might be the most important event in human history. But I doubt that ideas exist only on the intellectual plane.

I think it is important to remember that radical ideas were nothing new in 1650. The ancient Greeks and Romans had all kinds of them, including people who called for the abolition of private property and the emancipation of women. Nothing about Enlightenment thinking on science or human nature was more radical than the teachings of the ancient Epicureans, who said that all morality and politics were hot air, because we are just atoms floating in the void and the best we can do is try to live pleasant lives.

Yes, some of the new radical thinkers attacked monarchy, aristocracy, and private property, but peasant rebels had been doing that for centuries. Israel himself notes that some philosophers were very interested in the Diggers and Levellers of the English Civil War.

In the ancient world radical thinking did not change the world, and the experiments of the Levellers ended after a few years. But in the 1700s radical ideas rather suddenly acquired the power to remake whole kingdoms. How?

I think, as I have argued here before, that the difference between the Europe of 1700 and the Europe of 300 BC was the discovery of the world. In 1650 Europe was no longer a peninsula on the wester edge of Asia, but the center of the globe. From its ports, ships set sail for Patagonia, Japan, Ceylon and Zanzibar, returning with cargoes of exotic goods and exotic ideas. This trade created an astonishing economic dynamism; between 1650 and 1800 European living standards greatly improved even though the population roughly doubled. The number of rich families grew by even more. All this change would, I suggest, have created huge political tensions even without new ideas.

Here is Israel on the French Revolution:

A revolution of fact which demolishes a monarchical, courtly world embedded in tradition, faith and a social order which had over many centuries determined the distribution of land, wealth, office and status seems impossible, or exceedingly implausible, without a prior revolution in ideas.

I agree. But I also say that a revolution in ideas is exceedingly implausible in a static economic world with no inputs of new knowledge and new ideas, and that in fact the Enlightenment took place in a dynamic world where new discoveries were announced every month, and that this vast expansion of knowledge and experience was the crucial difference between the revolutionary impact of the Enlightenment and the minimal impact of earlier experiments in radical thought.

If you want to read in detail about how the key ideas of the Enlightenment developed and spread, The Radical Enlightenment is the best book I know on the subject. But it is no easy read, and I think that even its vast bulk does not sustain the thesis it advances.