Coptic Magical Papyri

I just discovered the web site of the Coptic Magical Papyri project, devoted to assembling all of the known Coptic magical texts from late antique Egypt. They have cataloged about 600 of these texts, mainly spanning the 3rd to 7th centuries AD, with a few from later centuries. Most are written on papyrus but a few were scratched onto potsherds.

The collection spans the transition from paganism to Christianity to Islam; the texts note the changes in the names of the beings evoked, but otherwise remain much the same. Of the text above they write:

on the left is a prayer attributed to the Archangel Michael (depicted at bottom right, with his two "powers"), while on the right are a series of recipes for which the prayer can be used – a curse to put someone into a coma-like state, a reconciliation spell, a spell to ensure fidelity, another to protect animals from evil sorcery, one to protect a children in childbirth, and a general ritual of protection.

In this blog post, they explore the different kinds of spells in their collection. As you would expect, healing and protection are the most common types, with a lot of overlap between them. "Unlcear" are mainly prayers, which they say are probably also protective. The most fun categores are love spells and curses, especially the curses aimed at breaking up couples or ruining their sex lives. Fascinating that they have a few spells that were supposed to give the patron a better voice; whether this was for singing or speaking is not specified.

The web site opens a door into a scholarly kingdom of magic, with links to other digital projects, conferences, printed collections, and so on. Most of these people justify themselves by saying the magical texts are great sources for social history, but it seems to me that many of them just love reading spells and incantations in arcane languages. There is no topic in this field that somebody is not investigating, from the role to scent in magical ritual to the law surrounding cursing. To give you an idea of the depth of this scholarship, consider this article:

The Greek magical papyri are full of marginalia, in which scribes make notes to themselves, or correct or add to the text, but these have generally been ignored in the past since they are almost invisible in the existing editions and translations. This article provides a detailed overview of the marginal notes in the manuscripts of the Theban Magical Library.

The project blog actually covers a wide variety of magical texts, including Aramaic incantation bowls, one of which includes this text:

By my door I sit, I, Gusnazdukt daughter of Ahat; the Babylonian (spell) I cast. In the rubbish I sit, I Gusnazdukt daughter of Ahat; the (spell) of Borsippa I cast into the crumbling earth, I whom no-one restrains.

The importance of gates of various kinds, including ordinary doorways, might be one of the "principles" of magic that I always mourn the absence of. And shouldn't there be some kind of demonic being called "I whom no-one restrains"?

Mari and its Ancient Music

Mari is an ancient city on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, now in the midst of the ongoing fighting between the US and various Muslim militias. It seems to have been founded as a city around 2900 BC, rather than having grown up from a village. 

It always had close ties to Sumer, so it was presumably founded to serve as an outpost of Sumerian trade. As you can see from this early statue of one of its leaders, its arts were in those days entirely Sumerian.

It has been the subject of significant archaeological efforts for a century, first by the French and then by a long-lasting French-Syrian collaboration. In particular, a vast trove of cuneiform tablets has been recovered, which are especially rich for the 2000 to 1759 BC period. We know, therefore, quite a lot about its history. The Louvre has a great many objects in their collection that come from the Temple of Ishtar of the 2500 to 2340 period, including these amulets.

The standard accounts of Mari's history include periods of "abandonment" followed by "refoundings." This is, in fact, what the cuneiform tablets say, but they were produced by kings for their own purposes, and I have always been dubious of this formulation. Suppose a city is "destroyed" by a conqueror. Does it really stay vacant until it is "refounded" by another king a century later? Or are people poking around the ruins the day the destroyer's army moves on, looking for houses intact enough to occupy? I think it is more likely that such a city is never actually empty, just reduced, and the "refounding" consists mainly of rebuilding the palace and chief temple and restoring the walls to a strong defensive posture. I mean, how much damage could a conqueror do to a city built almost entirely of mud brick anyway?

The first "abandonment" of Mari took place around 2600 BC. By 2500 BC it had been refounded and become the center of a large kingdom (above). But this powerful city was "destroyed" around 2300 BC by Sargon of Akkad, who comes down to us as the founder of the first empire. The Akkadians installed a military governor who gloried in the name of Shakkanakku. The Akkadian empire fell apart not long after, and the governors of Mari became independent and their descendants led the city until around 1850 BC.

(Theoretical question about history: Our earliest documents from Mesopotamia describe city states that were all largely independent, but then they start conquering each other. Did that have to be invented? Was there a more "primitive" past when you could destroy a rival village or force them to become your friends, but nobody had conceived of installing your own governor to rule over them? I wonder. But I suppose it must be true that the principles of building and maintaining an empire had to be learned over time.) 

It is when we get to the rulers who followed Shakkanakku's line that our knowledge of Mari really explodes. In this period Mari's royal palace grew into a huge and extravagant place, famous throughout Mesopotamia.

Still from this video of a 3D digital reconstruction.

Surviving fresco, c. 1760 BC, depicting a sacrificial procession.

Surviving fresco from the inner court, called in our texts the Multicolor Court. It depicts one of Mari's rulers receiving the emblems of rulership from Ishtar. We even know a story about this court. Our texts tell us that around 1800 BC a young woman named Beltum arrived at Mari from Qatna to become the principal wife of crown prince Yasmah-Addu. (To give you an idea of how well this period is documented, we have not only detailed lists of the gifts exchanged between the two royal families but a panicky-sounding letter to the palace staff ordering that suitable chambers in the palace be made ready for Beltun's imminent arrival, even if it meant kicking somebody else out.) Beltun brought with her a woman who was identified as her "mother," but from the context it seems that this meant her childhood nurse. Mari's scribes universally held this nanny to be a complete pain in the ass and recorded in detail how annoying she could be; one wrote, "if only this woman, who raised Beltum since her youth and knew her ways, could have been left behind!" One of the complaints against this nanny was that she allowed Beltum to be outside in the Multicolor Court with her singers during the heat of the day, because of which she had fallen ill.

Male harp player, c. 1800 BC

The most amazing thing to me about the court of Mari in this period is the astonishing records of the palace musicians. These numbered more than one hundred, grouped into several different "houses." We have multiple lists of them, because they were all paid, and the scribes of course kept track of every measure of barley they paid out. The main instruments of Mesopotamian music were harps, lyres, flutes, lutes, and various percussion instruments, which ranged from finger cymbals to huge bronze drums taller than a man. These big drums were so expensive and impressive that Mesopotamian rulers sometimes named years of their reigns after the installation of such a drum in a major temple. There was also singing, by choirs and solo performers.

Here's a weird detail about ancient Sumer: Sumerian included a special dialect used only by women (and goddesses), called Emesal or "thin speech." This was apparently spoken in a very high register, and female singers always sang in this dialect; we can tell which hymns were meant to be sung by women by the dialect of the text. (Incidentally it seems that the male priests of Inanna/Ishtar, who had a strange gender status you can parse as trans if you like, sang in Emesal.)

Female lute player, 2000-1600 BC

Most of the musicians in Mari were women, and the women of the best-documented houses seem to have been from noble families. Music was essential for both religious rites and royal entertainments, and it seems that the same musicians performed in both contexts. One of Mari's musical houses was that of Yasmah-Admu, who led 14 "small musicians." "Small" here seems to mean either adolescents or just apprentices. There was also the House of the Tigum – Tigum was an instrument, but we don't know what kind – which seems to have been a conservatory where girls were trained, since the list of its members included many "very small musicians."

It fascinates me to imagine all those elite young women living together in one building or set of rooms, making music. One of the girls in Yasmah-Admu's house, named Bazatum, left the house when she was married to a prominent nobleman in another city. Were these musical houses finishing schools for noble girls, where they learned how to dress and act at court by serving as musicians? Was music-making one of the accomplishments expected of noble women?

Excavations in Mari's Palace, 1930s

Mari's wonderfully documented royal line came to an end in 1759 BC, when Mari was "destroyed" by Hammurabi of Babylon. Hammurabi actually did destroy the famous palace, which was never rebuilt, althogh the city survived for another thousand years. Hammurabi must have taken some grief for this, because he had an explanation carved onto a stone pillar: he had destroyed Mari because the gods commanded him to do so in a dream.

Some of this is from Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (2022) on which more to come.

Links 2 February 2024

Maxfield Parrish, River Ascutney (1942)

Some Americans imagine that everyone in Taiwan is freaked out about a looming Chinese invasion. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, "64k people have signed up for a Facebook event asking McDonald's to allow people to order hash browns a la carte after 10:30 a.m."

Ukrainian naval drones sank the Russian missile corvette Ivanovets Wednesday night, amazing video. And on YouTube.

Hermit crabs using plastic trash instead of old shells.

Work from home is boosting strip malls, because they are well-suited for quick trips out of the house.

Meanwhile in Ukraine: "The future is now. The future is little robots making minefields. Congratulations."

Death by Numbers, a historical project digitizing and investigating London's Bills of Mortality, which contain a lot of data about deaths in the city from 1603 to 1752.

Meanwhile in Modi's India: the tomb of a Sufi saint who advocated religious tolerance, long famous as a place where Hindus and Muslims pray together, "made headlines recently after a top political leader said that he wanted to "liberate" it for just Hindus."

We might run out of sand.

Freddie deBoer, a revolutionary socialist who dislikes being called "liberal" or lumped in with Democrats, has a go at explaining what "liberal bias" really means by analyzing one NT Times article about the DEI industry. Says there is a long history of anti-DEI arguments from the left. One of his comments: "The essential case against mandatory top-down diversity efforts seems neither contrarian nor controversial to me: racism is not an administrative problem and cannot be solved on the administrative level."

New Maya royal tomb.

This week's music is Colter Wall, who has the perfect voice for country/roots music: Kate McCannon, Sleeping on the Blacktop.

Some weird new physics around superconducitivty. One day our super-intelligent AI physicists will figure out how to make verything superconducting.

New solar installations totaled more than 400 gigawatts in 2023, 1000 times more than in 2000.

Fantastic illustrations by Jean Mallard.

Pondering the Edwin Fox, a surviving, 19th-century ship that carried convicts to Australia and Chinese "Coolies" to New Zealand.

Interesting NY Times story about the student athletes who went to New College to play softball and study marketing, only to discover that they are pawns in Ron DeSantis' war on wokeness, and that the school doesn't offer majors in marketing or business. As others have noticed, none of them show any interest in the great books, "classical liberalism" curriculum the new board wants to promote. Also interesting on dumb jock vs. special snowflake tensions, which I'm sure you can all imagine.

Ferrock is a concrete substitute made mainly from steel dust and ground glass, which when heated together draw carbon dioxide from the air to make iron carbonate. If the mix contains the right amounts of fly ash (mostly silicates of oxygen, iron, and aluminum) and clay the result is a "mud" that can be poured like concrete. It seems to be stronger than concrete for some uses and resists salt better. When it is made from waste materials it is also pretty cheap, but experts caution that there is not enough waste steel dust in the world to massively scale up the process. (Quick summary, news story, scientific article)

The Escape of Lewis Lee

Lewis Lee was a light-skinned mulatto slave who was born around 1830 in Fairfax County, Virginia. He had been raised as the body servant of an old man he seems to have admired, but when that old man died he passed via inheritance to a family he did not get along with. They hired him out as a hotel waiter, giving him none of the wages he earned. As William Still wrote in his famous 1872 book about the Underground Railroad, one day in 1859 Lee decided that he had enough:

Slavery brought about many radical changes, some in one way and some in another. Lewis Lee was entirely too white for practical purposes. They tried to get him to content himself under the yoke, but he could not see the point. A man by the name of William Watkins, living near Fairfax, Virginia, claimed Lewis, having come by his title through marriage. Title or no title, Lewis thought that he would not serve him for nothing, and that he had been hoodwinked already a great while longer than he should have allowed himself to be. Watkins had managed to keep him in the dark and doing hard work on the no-pay system up to the age of twenty-five. In Lewis' opinion, it was now time to "strike out on his own hook;" he took his last look of Watkins (he was a tall, slim fellow, a farmer, and a hard drinker), and made the first step in the direction of the North. He was sure that he was about as white as anybody else, and that he had as good a right to pass for white as the white folks, so he decided to do so with a high head and a fearless front. Instead of skulking in the woods, in thickets and swamps, under cover of the darkness, he would boldly approach a hotel and call for accommodations, as any other southern gentleman. He had a little money, and he soon discovered that his color was perfectly orthodox. He said that he was "treated first-rate in Washington and Baltimore;" he could recommend both of these cities. But destitute of education, and coming among strangers, he was conscious that the shreds of slavery were still to be seen upon him. He had, moreover, no intention of disowning his origin when once he could feel safe in assuming his true status. So as he was in need of friends and material aid, he sought out the Vigilance Committee, and on close examination they had every reason to believe his story throughout, and gave him the usual benefit.

Notice the resentment at being allowed to keep none of his wages. In the 1830 to 1860 period it was common for such workers to keep part of any money they earned when hired out, which they could spend or save up toward purchasing their freedom, and this question shows up over and over in slave narratives. Abraham Lincoln made it the certerpice of his attack on slavery, which focused on the right of all workers to be paid for their labor.

Lee's owner placed an ad offering $10,000 for his return, but that ad was reprinted in an abolitionist newspaper along with a mocking poem written from Lee's point of view. Two of the seven stanzas:

Can one-fourth of my blood a slave make of me?
One your courts bind you not to respect,
Still, three fourths of my blood declares I am free,
And your claims to my service reject. . . .

You advertised me, let me advertise you,
That “JEHOVAH no attribute hath ,
Can side with oppressors,” His justice is due,
And man-stealers inherit his wrath.

Lee remained a free man in the North. But after the Civil War he settled for a while in Washington, DC, and then in 1870 he returned to Fairfax County and purchased eight acres of the plantation where he had been born, living there for the rest of his life.

William Golding, "The Spire"

The Spire (1964) is a fascinating short novel in which William Golding examined the intersection of things about whose connections I have always wondered: cathedral building, medieval Christianity, insanity, and sexuality. The remarkable thing about the book is that Golding delved mercilessly into these connections without ever being disrespectful to Christianity. The story follows the inner thoughts of one man, Dean Jocelyn, as he struggles to add a 400-foot-tall spire to his cathedral. It is a mad thing to do, everyone tells him; but he saw the spire in a vision, and, as he says, when did God ever command us to do anything reasonable?

I have long been fascinated by the way the behavior of certain medieval saints appears holy from one angle but insane from others. I tried to write such a scene into The Raven and the Crown, an anchoress whose life story can be read equally as the dawning of faith or the loss of her mind. I don't know that I succeeded, but anyway I understand the impulse that drove Golding to write this book. People say that he could see Sarum Cathedral (above) out the windows of the school where he taught for years, and he must have pondered what a crazy thing it was for people so poor in our terms to invest so much in those gigantic piles of stone.

Did it make any sense? Oh, one could offer justifications – civic and national pride, the medieval church's commitment to magnificence, the need for a place that would be the spiritual and physical center of the city – but really not. We would look at the cost and say, no thanks, much better to spend the money helping the poor or improving education or what have you. 

And yet, they are wonderful.

Are the mad? And if they are, what does it mean that the most glorious creations of a whole age are insane? Have we lost anything by choosing to invest in health care and preK rather that mad explosions of beauty? Is a rational world missing something vital that medieval people had abundantly?

Have our vast wealth and long lives failed to make us happy because we devote ourselves too much to comfort and not enough to doing the pointlessly extraordinary?

Transforming Brooklyn

Fascinating feature at the NY Times on how Williamsburg, Brooklyn went from a working-class neighborhood known for crime and ethnic strife to a booming, largely wealthy community. Above, North 6th Street in 1992, featuring an abandoned sawdust factory. 

And the same view in 2023, with an art gallery called National Sawdust and big new condominium buildings.

The change began in the 1990s Williamsburg when became the new home of the bohemians driven out of Manhattan by high prices. In 1992 one hipster said, "In the 70s, it was Soho. In the 80s, the East Village. In the 90s, it will be Williamsburg." Above, a 1991 photo of people working to turn an abandoned warehouse into The Fly Trap, a music and arts venue that hosted a lot of raves.

This was done with the cooperation of the borough authorities, who approved all of this, including the use of old, dodgey warehouses as music venues. The government also helped stage a long series of street music festivals that solidified Williamsburg's status as an art mecca. In my experience no neighborhood is ever transformed without both private initiative – from both nonprofits and businesses – and a lot of input from government. The presence of all these Bohemians drew restaurants, and by 1994 the Times food critics had noted the arrival of Williamsburg as a dining destination.

Williamsburg hosted breweries for a century, but by 1990 they had all closed, part of the gradual takover of American beer by a few enormous companies. But then we got the craft beer revival, and in 1996 Rudy Guiliani served as brewmaster for the opening of the new Brooklyn Brewery. (Honestly Rudy was a pretty good mayor before he went crazy.)  But the city modified its zoning laws to allow most of the old factory district to be converted to residential space.

Things really took off during the Bloomberg administration, 2002 to 2013. Bloomberg's people rezoned 37% of NYC and did everything they could think of to promote housing construction, which was built in NYC faster than in any older city in the country. This included 175,000 units deemed "affordable." Bloomberg also pushed the construction of the new commerical district in downtown Brooklyn, which was soon covered with high-rise buildings. During Bloomberg's time in office more than 10,000 new apartments and condomiums were built in the new downtown, and more than 4,500 in Williamsburg. From 1950 to 1980 Brooklyn lost 500,000 inhabitants, or 18.5% of its population; it has now regained all of those people and probably passed the 1950 level last year. Since the average household is smaller, that means many more units.

One of the spots that captures this history is the McCarren Park Pool, which was built to a New York scale, measuring 50 by 100m. This was built by the Works Progress Administration in 1935-1936. It eventually became a derelict site of drug deals and gang fights and was closed in 1984. During the 1990s revival various dreamers tried to bring it back to life, but no plan ever took off. 

In 2005 to 2008 it hosted concerns, especially hip hop.

Then in 2012 it was reopened as a pool.

But along with all this growth came the first complaints about "yuppification" and "gentrification". Upscale retailers like Hermes arrived downtown. Bohemians who came in the 1990s became opponents of development, trying to block new condo buildings so as to keep their neighborhoods as they were. They waged a decade-long fight to prevent the redevelopment of the old Domino Sugar factory on the waterfront, which they finally lost in 2014. Nearby music venues closed and moved to grittier spaces in other neighborhoods.

The Williamsburg waterfront in 2015.

It's a story many American cities have seen over and over: neighborhoods get run down and dangerous, which drives rents very low, which pulls in people like rave promoters and artists who need big loft spaces, which draws in hipster bars and restaurants, which draws in yuppies, which drives up housing prives and eventually drives out the music venues and the hipster bars.

But I don't think there is any realistic alternative to this. The world doesn't stand still. Yes, there is something weird about the repeated, rapid transformation of neighborhoods by capitalism and the quest for cool, but what really kills cities is for things to stay as they are. Living beings are always changing.

Lotusland

Lotusland is a remarkable, 37-acre garden in Montecito, California mostly created by mid-twentieth century Polish opera singer, Ganna Walska. 

The house, a classic of California Hispanic, was designed in 1915 by Reginald Johnson.

Part of the property was a nursery in the 1890s, and some of the older trees (like the palms at top and this dragon tree) date to that time.

The garden is structured around a series of themes: Japanese garden, 

fern garden, 

cycad garden, 

cactus garden, 

aloe garden,

water garden, and more. Seems like an amazing place. But if you go, be sure to make a reservation in advance, because admission is strictly limited. Huge photos at the garden web site.