Narmer Discovery

Huge discovery, possible early Narmer Pharaoh hieroglyphs discovered:

"...Based on the symbols of power and control in the carvings, Gatto and her colleagues believe the artwork came from the first part of Narmer's reign, before he unified both parts of Egypt...

Cleopatra's Tomb may be found

Cleopatra's Tomb Believed To Be At 1 Of 3 Egyptian Archaeological Sites

A find of coins bearing Cleopatra's image and a mask of Antony my point the way to the famous lover's tomb:

...Archaeologists looking for the tombs of the celebrated queen of Egypt and the Roman general will begin excavating three sites at a temple where tombs may be located, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement Wednesday.

Always the defender of all things ancient Egyptian, Zahi Hawass chimes in, attacking a recent reconstruction of Cleopatra by a British team:

...Zahi Hawass, Egypt's top archaeologist, said the Cleopatra statue and coins _ which show an attractive face _ debunk a recent theory that the queen was "quite ugly. The finds from Taposiris reflect a charm ... and indicate that Cleopatra was in no way unattractive," said Hawass, according to the statement.


The British scientists based their reconstruction on Roman coins, which may have portrayed a less than flattering image of the Queen. But I'm with Hawass on this one: Cleopatra was HOT!

Intolerant Polytheists?

Hindu Threat to Christians: Convert or Flee

Most polytheists (Wiccans, NeoPagans, and the whole unwashed mess of us) like to believe ourselves to be tolerant and accepting of other religions or spiritual beliefs (or non-beliefs). It's the monotheists who are cranky, strident, and intolerant---RIGHT?

Well, not exactly. Hinduism is the worlds largest polytheistic religion. But there's been a growing--and very troubling--thread of intolerance developing in India. The NY Times has a frightening article documenting violence and threats directed toward non-Hindus. As an example, one Christian family was terrorized by a crowd that would make the Spanish Inquisition proud:

...They were ordered to get on their knees and bow before the portrait of a Hindu preacher. They were told to turn over their Bibles, hymnals and the two brightly colored calendar images of Christ that hung on their wall. Then, Mr. Digal, 45, a Christian since childhood, was forced to watch his Hindu neighbors set the items on fire...(Mr. Digal was told)‘Embrace Hinduism, and your house will not be demolished,’...

Yikes. The sad thing is, that no matter what we believe, humans are the same all over.

Is Hatshepsut still hiding?

DNA tests to study tiny mummies from King Tut tomb

This article is about the upcoming DNA testing on two infant mummies found in King Tutankhamun's tomb. But the part that interests me the most concerns Hatshepsut. I've blogged on the discovery of her body before ( here and here). The Discovery Channel special on the testing of unidentified mummies, in the quest to find Hatshepsut's remains, was certainly interesting. But there are now some problems. The media savvy Head of Egyptian Antiquities, Zahi Hawas has not exactly been forthcoming about his results:

...He has never disclosed the full outcome of the examinations of the mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's most powerful queen and the only female pharaoh. Nor has he submitted the results for a test by second lab, as it is a common practice. This has raised concerns about the validity of the Egyptian results...

In the last year, I've been reading of increasing concern in regards to the above. The thing is, even just a careful watching of the televised special reveals some concerns. First off, a great deal of the identification relies on a scan of a supposed tooth fragment imaged in an unopened canopic box. The box has been accurately attributed as containing the organs of Hatshepsut, and the mummy id'ed as her body is missing a tooth. But that seems rather flimsy evidence. (The box remains unopened, so we don't even know if the object is indeed a tooth.) In addition, Hatshepsut has always been portrayed as rather a petite woman. Yet this mummy is large and obese. In addition, a number of mummies from the Tuthmosis line have been accurately identified, all of them having rather similar facial appearances. Although a forensic match-up was provided in the documentary, the fact is, at least to my eyes, the faces don't really match up.

We are not tokens!

After 100 Years, Tribe’s Ancestors Head Home

An amazing cultural event at the American Museum of Natural History. Seems some pot hunter of the past had desecrated and pilfered the graves of Tseycum Indians, selling the ill-gotten artifacts and remains to museums and collectors:

...With the museum’s full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week. On Monday morning, in a quiet first-floor auditorium away from the museum’s crowds, tribe members performed an emotionally charged private ceremony over the 15 sturdy plastic boxes that contained the remains. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and the tribe members and elders from related tribes prayed, spoke, wept and sang, saying they wanted to soothe their ancestors’ spirits and prepare them for a return trip from a journey that, the tribe leaders say, should never have happened at all...

Tribal leader Chief Vern Jacks said it best:

“Our people are humans; we aren’t tokens,”

Peking Man, Science, and God

Faith, science, censorship, and the search for Peking Man

Excellent review of the book "The Jesuit and the Skull", about the man who discovered 'Peking Man':

...Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955) helped uncover one of the most important scientific finds of the 20th century: Peking Man. The French scientist was working in China alongside an international team of anthropologists, geologists, and paleontologists in December 1929...

But Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, so his findings were subject to review and censorship by the Vatican:

...Not only did the Vatican censor Teilhard's groundbreaking scientific work in his own life, it continues to limit it...in 2006...documents containing the Vatican's decision to censor the French priest's work remained unavailable for review...

The book combines biography, the history of evolutionary thought, and the conflict between science and religion:

...Teilhard himself saw no contradiction between his role as a scientist and man of God. Indeed, he viewed evolution as bolstering his faith. In his "The Phenomenon of Man," censored during his lifetime, Teilhard wrote that "Man is not the centre of the universe as was naively believed in the past, but something much more beautiful - Man the ascending arrow of the great biological synthesis...

This book sounds like a must read.

Mourning Moon, the Lament of Isis

We celebrated a full moon Esbat last weekend, the Mourning Moon. I have to admit I don't attend Esbats as regularly as I should. But our High Priestess is a follower of Hecate, and the Greeks had celebrations for her at this time of year. In addition, Nov. 24th is the Egyptian 'Festival of Burning Lamps' for Isis and Osiris. Not only that, there was just a celebration for Bast. So I figured I should attend. During the ritual, I read "The Lament of Isis", from James Frazer's 'Golden Bough'. After the ritual, one of our coveners said she really liked the reading. So I've posted it here.

When Isis and her sister Nephthys found the body of the murdered Osiris, they collapsed beside him. The two Goddess then commenced with this lamentation, which was heard throughout the world, even reaching Heaven and the Underworld:

Come to thy House, Come to thy House.
Oh god On! Come to thy house, thou who has no foes.
O fair youth, come to thy house, that thou mayest see me.
O fair boy, come to thy house...

I see thee not, yet doth my heart yearn after thee and mine eyes desire thee. Come to her who loves thee, who loves thee, Unnefer, thou blessed one!

Come to thy sister, come to thy wife, to thy wife, thou whose heart stands still. Come to thy housewife. I am thy sister by the same mother, thou shalt not be far from me. Gods and men have turned their faces toward thee and weep for thee together...

I call after thee and weep, so that my cry is heard to heaven, thou hearest not my voice; yet am I thy sister, whom thou didst love on earth; thou didst love none but me, my brother! my brother!

No God or mortal ever mourned more than Isis. Even the Nile could not contain her immeasurable tears, causing the mighy river to flood for the first time. (In the lament, Isis refers to Osiris as 'Unnefer' , which means 'Good Being", a title bestowed on the kindly God.)

The words of Isis come to me whenever I recall the events surrounding the untimely death of a friend. I remember her mother crying, "I only wish I could bring her home". Everyone suffers from loss. But I feel we experience the most searing grief when someone is taken from us tragically, randomly, or prematurely. We have all felt what Isis felt: the loss of someone good and dear, taken far too soon, who is actually a part of us.

We thank and honor you, Isis, for showing us that even a Goddess can suffer tragedy. "Come to thy House" you wailed. Like us, all you wished to do was bring your loved-one home.

Day at the Museum

We (Zelda, Green Ghost, and yours truly) visited "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids" last week! The AMNH did a great job. The importance of studying, preserving, and even internalizing beliefs in these creatures was driven home.

I really enjoyed all the interpretations of Mermaids--it's remarkable how they are a nearly universal concept. The West Indian and African depiction's were the most interesting. One frequent interpretation of her has her Westernized (even with straight hair), holding a hand mirror and sporting a wrist watch! Hence, she was foreign (which meant she was well traveled and well to do, possessing knowledge of far-off places) and liked and coveted fine things. A person could encourage favor in the form of luck or material gain by presenting a gift to the Mermaid. One would wrap a comb or mirror in a fine bit of cloth, make a wish, then pitch this offering into the sea. If your gift was accepted, the Mermaid would send fortune your way. What a beautiful custom!

I also was impressed with the story of the 'Roc' (or Rukh), the giant mythical bird. The exhibit featured a snippet of text from Sir Richard Burton's translation of the epic "Tales from A Thousand and one Nights". I'm a big Burton fan, and picked up a copy of the book from the Museum Shop. Who would consider any other translation but Burton's! :)

Mythic Beasts, alive and well

Exploring the Nature of the Unnatural
A great exhibit at the AMNH in NYC, “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids” will open tomorrow and run through Jan. 6 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street; (212) 769-5100 or amnh.org. From the NYTimes article by Edward Rothstein:

...it was a brilliant curatorial idea to devote an exhibition to them. One of the remarkable things about this exhibition...is...by the end you are convinced that these creatures should find permanent dwelling places in such halls, not because they are real but because they allow us to glean something about how humanity struggles to make sense of the natural world. Adrienne Mayor, a visiting scholar in the history of science at Stanford University, explains in an accompanying video how she studied maps where the Greeks claimed to have found the remains of fallen giants and discovered that they coincided with maps of major paleontological finds...The Greeks might have found bones belonging to ancient mastodons and mammoths, which were clearly far larger than human remains but also bore a close resemblance to them...As for the cyclops, such one-eyed giants were said to live in Sicily, where the fossilized remains of ancient elephants have been found. The cast of one Sicilian skull is on display; it contains an enormous central hole where the elephant’s trunk was attached. For the Greeks, more than two millenniums ago, that might have been an imagined creature’s single eye socket. What is left unmentioned here, but still haunts, is the human persistence in creating such creatures. Out of the unknown, out of worlds barely understood, out of glimpses of flesh or bone, in one culture after another, humanity has imagined beings whose bodies are mutant composites of incompatible animals...who violate every taboo and disrupt every sense of natural order. They arise out of our imaginings, offering seductive promises and irresistible dangers, as if they were resurrected fossils from a primal human past demanding tribute — which this fascinating exhibition begins to provide...

How true! Mythical creatures have a great deal to teach us, as this exhibit well demonstrates. After the exhibit closes in January, it moves to other museums: the Field Museum in Chicago, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta.

Pyramid Wars

War of the pyramid theorists

"...some Egyptologists now argue that ancient Egypt's rural population was the group that actually built the pyramids - and that it did so not in bondage, but as a more complicated form of tribute to the pharaoh...According to Shoeab, those who contributed to the production of the pyramids were not slaves at all, but displaced persons who came to Giza during the Nile's annual flood season. Shoeab believes that the historical records found along the banks of the Nile provide the most credible theory, which says that the pharaohs provided food, shelter and sanitation in exchange for the seasonal river dwellers' work on the pyramids. The seasonal nature of the work may help to explain why the Great Pyramid of Khufu took 20 years to build. Shoeab claims it was actually considered a great honor to work on the pyramids...One should also remember that these were tombs built for gods, she says, and that in this context the pain of the task might have been understood in a similar light as the self-discipline and deprivations of Christian monastic life."

We don't believe, we dance!

An Academic View on the Right to Party

This would be something great to get a PhD in. Damn, I was a double major in college and never knew it:

From ancient Greek Bacchanalias and Roman Saturnalias to tailgating and Mardi Gras, we humans like to party. Throughout history, public revelry has had its critics. The Victorian world saw it as vulgar pageantry, the stuff of "savages" and the underclass. The academic world, for the most part, ignored it. Author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich...gives a history lesson on collective joy and explains why humanity engages in large, ceremonial celebrations and why the upper classes have tried — and often still try — to suppress it.

The link above is an interview with the author of the book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. You will also finda a lengthy excerpt:

So when the phenomenon of collective ecstasy entered the colonialist European mind, it was stained with feelings of hostility, contempt, and fear. Group ecstasy was something "others" experienced — savages or lower-class Europeans. In fact, the capacity for abandonment, for self-loss in the rhythms and emotions of the group, was a defining feature of "savagery" or otherness generally, signaling some fatal weakness of mind. As horrified witnesses of ecstatic ritual. Europeans may have learned very little about the peoples they visited (and often destroyed in the process) — their deities and traditions, their cultures and worldview. But they did learn, or imaginatively construct, something centrally important about themselves: that the essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world...

There's always someone trying to spoil the party! But, YIPPIE!, science comes to the rescue:

With the rise of the social sciences, and especially the anthropology of the 1930s and thereafter, Westerners began to view the ecstatic practices of non-Westerners in an ostensibly more open-minded way...Westerners had to concede that the ecstatic behavior found in traditional cultures was not the hallmark of savage "otherness" but the expression of a capacity that may exist...in all of us. By the 1930s, anthropologists had begun to think of the rituals of small-scale societies as functional, meaning in some sense rational.

So, dancing with wild abandon was a sensible and rational act. Just as I always suspected.

Humans are social animals, and rituals, ecstatic or otherwise, could be an expression of this sociality, a way of renewing the bonds that held a community together. In the functionalist anthropology that reached full bloom in the 1940s and '50s, many of the formerly bizarre-seeming activities of native peoples were explained in this way: as mechanisms for achieving cohesiveness and generating feelings of unity. Americans tried to achieve the same thing through patriotic and religious rituals; the "natives" simply had a different approach. But right up to our own time, even the most scientific and sympathetic observers have tended to view the ecstatic rituals of non-Western cultures with deep misgivings...

I think today there's a bit of that going on, in the current Science VS Religion wars. Some well intentioned people are forgetting we are social animals. A good number of people can find a higher meaning in science. You even can teach that! But for others, the wonders of the Cosmos are nice, yet not a source of deeper meaning. But most sure love a good party! Then again, there's always someone who wants to throw Holy water on us and pray for our souls.

(from the good folks @ Witchvox)

The Old Ways are Best

Two excellent articles via Witchvox today:

Ancient tome on herbal medicine shows new truths

This article points up the value of "oral history". It was only a few years ago that oral histories were just considered myths (heh, like 'myths' are a bad thing). Thankfully, Cultural Anthropologists, historians, and geneticists are now paying much more attention to peoples' oral traditions:

In this case, the "ancient knowledge" probably would have disappeared if not for the dogged persistence of Georg Everhard Rumphius, a mercenary with the Dutch East India Company, whose story is recounted in the Dec. 23 British Medical Journal article. In 1657, he started collecting plants on the Indonesian island of Ambon and recording their medicinal uses in a text that he illustrated himself. Thirty years later, his manuscripts burned in a fire...

But Rumphius rewrote it from memory...

...The surviving copies were essentially gathering dust in rare-book collections until a Dutch-language professor decided to translate part of the text into English...

Eric Buenz, a graduate medical student, found the text and decided to test the efficacy of some of the plants (particularly one for diarrhea). Together with a co-researcher, it was discovered that some of the plants had strongly microbicidic properties, and it may indeed work against the conditions for which it was prescribed. But leaves us with a positive note concerning cultural knowledge:

...But the larger message, he said, is that there may be more to learn from the ancients. "It should keep us somewhat humble," he said...

Many Wiccans embrace the teachings from spiritual traditions of American Indians. This article, by James T. Moore, appeared in American Daily, a staunchly Right Wing publication:

What We Can Learn From Indians

Whether living in tribes in the mountains, on the plains, in the forests, or near the coast, American Indians believed, and still do, that all mankind has a unique relationship with everything in nature, and especially with the Divine Power that created all things. The Indian didn’t, of course, call this divine entity God. The word God was foreign to him. Rather, he called it the Great Spirit. And before this article is over I think you will agree that the Great Spirit which Indians acknowledge, communicate with, honor, obey, and worship is as much, or more, of a true relationship with the Almighty than many of our so-called religious institutions preach. Even further, I think you will see how various aspects of Indian thought and attitude might help us counter the devastating, chaotic situation in our world today—and quiet some troubled hearts.

Well said. Mr. Moore recounts fondly the email exchanges and long distance friendship he had with a man named Keepshorse, a Lakota Indian. From this, he has generated a great sampling of wisdom (he calls them 'axioms'). To quote Joseph Cambell, these sure are 'myths to live by':

COOPERATION: “What could be greater than to be the Creator’s mind, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arms, hands, legs and feet here on Earth?”---Fools Crow. Lakota

VISION: “Believing people can soar beyond ordinary life.”---Fools Crow, Lakota

NATURE “We need to save those Elders who cannot speak for themselves…the trees.”---Haida Gwaii—Traditional Circle of Elders

GUIDANCE: “He walks with us along the pathways of life, and He can do for us what we could never do on our own.”---Fools Crow, Lakota

HUMILITY: “We consider ourselves superior. But we must understand that we stand somewhere between the mountain and the Ant. Somewhere and only there is a part of the creation.” --Oren Lyons, Onondaga

AWARENESS: “Words hypnotize and deceive at one time or another, but those hypnotic words cannot last long in the hearts of true warriors.” --- Barney Bush, Shawnee

RESPECT: “If I destroy you I destroy myself, if I honor you I honor myself.” ---Hunbatz Man, Mayan

PRINCIPLES: “Today, what is important for us to realize is that old sacred ways are correct, and that if we do not follow them we will be lost and without a guide.” ---Thomas Yellowtail, Crow

ENVIRONMENT: “Whenever you take anything from the earth, remember to leave an offering.”---Joe Coyhis, Stockbridge-Muncee

Moore also lists an "Indian 10 Commandments", which is also worth keeping close to our hearts. He concludes:

...I have a suspicion that the Great Spirit told the Indians the same things that God told us. And if we had followed the Creator’s advice, each in his way, much of today’s turmoil and chaos might not be happening.To paraphrase Puck: “What fools we mortals be.”

I've posted here before about certain groups of Xtian Fundamentalists recognising the need for preserving our Mother Earth. I hope I am not kidding myself, but maybe this is a sign of enlightenment among groups previously hostile to us.