Zenobia: Empress of the East

How to Feed a Pregnant Neanderthal

2012-02-06T17:17:00.001+01:00

200,000 years of eating for two.

It's hard to imagine what 200,000 years means in human lifetimes but, between ca. 250,000 and 40,000 years ago, the only human beings living in Europe were Neanderthals. From the Ukraine across to southern Spain, this land was their land. Then, in an archaeological flash, ca. 28,000 BP (Before Present), the world had utterly changed. Populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens were everywhere on the continent -- and the Neanderthals had entirely disappeared.

What happened?

One answer may simply be the consequence of different rates of fertility and mother-and-child mortality between Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens (AMHS). While many factors are involved, it now seems we can point an accusing finger at defects in Neanderthal nutrition. What a mother-to-be eats has possibly the greatest impact on both her survival and her fetus, as well as, of course, on the new-born and infant child later feeding at her breast.

What was the daily diet for a pregnant Neanderthal woman? Or, to put it personally, what was Wilma eating (above, read about Wilma here) when she had a bun in her oven?

Hunter-Gatherer Calories

Producing and breast-feeding offspring requires an awful lot of energy, especially in large-brained species like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Even more so when, like recent hunter-gatherers, you're physically active most of the time. When translated into calories, healthy gestation in such circumstances requires the mama-to-be to eat an extra 1750 calories per day (whereas a pregnant woman in cushy modern Europe needs only 300 extra daily calories). Neanderthal pregnant women required much, much more: their average daily caloric intake was hugely above even what is needed by modern human foragers.

So how did Wilma cope with that?

She went on hunting, I'm afraid.

A new study tells us that she was eating too much of the wrong kinds of food:*

... from the perspective of a modern fast food diet, a pregnant Neanderthal women would need to eat 10 large burgers per day (or three in the morning, three at mid-day, and four in the evening).

Wilma had to consume a whopping 5,500 calories each day. That is an enormous quantity to supply, especially for a hunter-gatherer, and very much more than was needed by the anatomically modern Homo sapiens then making their way into Europe. The difference is due to such factors as the Neanderthal's more robust and massively muscular body, higher metabolic rates, less efficient body-temperature regulation, a lifestyle of constantly pursuing large game animals in close-range encounters, and reduced sexual division of labour.

Would Wilma have been better off staying in the cave, sewing warm clothing, than going out hunting like a lioness?

For a quarter of a million years, Neanderthals -- men and women -- were highly effective hunters. Throughout this enormous period of time, the next meal depended on killing large to medium-sized land animals (red deer, ibex, roe deer, wild boar, tahr, and chamois, together with larger game such as bison, horse, rhino, and elephant). Most of the time, Neanderthals would probably have enjoyed adequate calorie and protein intake. Their highly carnivorous diet, however, lacked adequate intake of micronutrients such as vitamins A, C, and E, which means that many Neanderthal women probably had high incidences of abortions, miscarriages, and stillbirths resulting in high fetal-to-infant mortality.

This means that no matter what land mammals they would have hunted, Neanderthals would still have not been able to get the micronutrients to stay alive, especially with the metabolic needs of a pregnant Neanderthal.

This was clearly not a winning strategy, but Neanderthals weren't stupid: we have plenty of archaeological indications that they also routinely consumed other kinds of foods (plants, shellfish, and even sea mammals** -- all of which are rich in various essential nutrients not found in terrestrial mammals) when these were available. Given the cold environments of Pleistocene Europe before ca. 40,000-30,000 BP, the Neanderthals were probably doing the best they could. And that was good enough as long as the competition consisted of non-human predators such as wolves, lions, and hyenas.

It's the Demographic Payoff that counts.

Virtual reconstruction of Neanderthal child skeletons
left: age 1 week; right age 19 months

In a nutshell, the Neanderthals may have been doomed by their subsistence strategy when they were simultaneously confronted with a warming climate and the newly arriving Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens. Compared to the wider range of foods consumed by AMHS, yummy Neanderthal meals of mammal meat and organs didn't look so good. Humans need more than just calories to thrive, and none more so than pregnant women and lactating mothers, and their newborn and infants. Regardless of the protein and fat provided, the Neanderthal diet was inferior to the more diverse, greener diets of the AMHS, especially in the essential micronutrients that decrease maternal and fetus-to-infant mortality, as well as increase average life expectancy. The proof of the pudding is that fewer people would be added to the breeding stock in succeeding generations. Healthier, longer-living AMHS populations would thus, sooner or later, swamp the Neanderthals.

Neanderthals either did not or could not initiate the lifestyle changes that would have allowed them to compete demographically with the newcomers. So, our ancestors certainly weren't stronger and maybe not even smarter than Neanderthals; just hungrier.

Still, Wilma's not to blame for misjudging the effects of climate change. And a reign of a quarter of a million years in Europe is nothing to sneeze at. We should be so lucky.

* Bryan Hockett, 'The consequences of Middle Paleolithic diets on pregnant Neanderthal women', Quaternary International, 19 July 2011 (abstract available at ScienceDirect). I am especially grateful to Julien Riel-Salvatore, blogging at A Very Remote Period Indeed, for alerting me to this paper and for his incisive discussion of its significance. Other sources include B. Hockett & J.A. Haws, 'Nutritional ecology and the human demography of
Neandertal extinction', Quaternary International 137 (2005) 21–34; available online; A.W. Froehle & S.E. Churchill, 'Energetic Competition Between Neandertals and Anatomically Modern Humans' PaleoAnthropology 112, 2009.

** On plants in their diet, see 'The Raw and the Cooked: Caveman Redux'; shellfish, see 'Neanderthals Shellfishing 150,000 years ago', and 'Shellfish gathering, paleoanthropologicalstrawman'; sea mammals: Modern Is As Modern Does?'.

Illustrations

Above left: Wilma, a Neanderthal reconstruction based on both fossil anatomy and ancient DNA. Reconstruction by Kennis and Kennis, photo credit: Joe McNalley. Via National Geographic website.

Centre: Wilma, dressed-up for summer hunting. Credits as above.

Below left: from 'Childbirth was already difficult for the Neanderthals'. Photo credit: University of Zurich, via Science Centric News, 9 Sept. 2008.
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Four Passive Imperial Goddesses

2012-01-22T21:43:00.000+01:00

Ulpia Marciana

In the early second century CE, the emperors Trajan (r. 98-117) and Hadrian (r. 117-138) made four extraordinary deifications of their imperial women. Trajan started the ball rolling by deifying his beloved sister, Ulpia Marciana (left) immediately after she died in 112. Hadrian, when it was his turn, became a serial deifier. In 119, he made a goddess of Marciana’s daughter, Matidia (who was the mother of his wife), in what must have been, even then, a very rare tribute to a mother-in-law. Next in line for goddess rank was Pompeia Plotina, the dowager empress of the emperor Trajan, raised to the heavens soon after her death in 123. And, some years later, he gave goddess-hood to his own recently deceased wife, Vibia Sabina who died in 136 or 137 -- a little more than a year before her husband.

None of these women is much remembered in historical records. In fact, you'd be hard put to find a more obscure group of imperial Roman women in any equivalent period when sources are so (relatively) rich.

Does that mean that they became goddesses despite having done nothing of note?

Well, that depends.

First off, what does deification mean? Did anyone really believe that these women were divine; or was this merely the natural bunch of honours handed out to members of the imperial family? How important (or unimportant) was each individual woman to the emperors -- and, for that matter, to those who became their priestesses and worshipped them -- at least in public?

One diva after another

Vibia Sabina

A diva (a mortal woman who was declared a goddess) was different from and on a lower level than a dea (a traditional goddess), but she was nonetheless divine and immeasurably higher in ranking than any normal ex-human being. Officially consecrated by the earthly Senate, that was enough to transform her into a deity, and, most important, into a power capable of hearing and answering prayers. For that reason, priests and priestesses of the Imperial cult had no qualms about offering sacrifices to deified emperors and empresses just as they would do to any other divinity.

The worship of divae, as far as we can tell, did not differ much from the worship of divi (deified emperors). Their images were also divine in their own right, but, since women did not run the Empire, they were portrayed as more passive deities. The four new divae of the Trajanic family were models of Roman womanhood, possessing the moral worthiness and exemplary qualities that made them most helpful to their husbands or brothers. In a sense, they became the personified virtues of social propriety, modesty, piety, and loyalty.

So, were the four divae simply part of an elaborate system of sucking-up to the Imperial family, or was there something in their relationship with the people that remains difficult for us to understand?

Only two of the women were empresses — Pompeia Plotina (60s?-123), Trajan’s wife, and Vibia Sabina (85?-136/7), wife of his successor. The other two were lesser members of the imperial household — Trajan’s sister, Ulpia Marciana (48-112) and her daughter, later Hadrian’s mother-in-law, Salonia Matidia (68-119).

The question is 'why'?

Why were these quiet women deified (or any imperial women, for that matter)? Denied the pursuit of any sort of public career, and barred from membership in Rome’s assemblies, women played no official part in public life. Their power was derived solely from their relationship to powerful men.

Therein lies the rub.

In a new dissertation, Karin S. Tate (University of Saskatchewan)*, explains what she thinks happened in the imperial family early in the second century:

Under an imperial system, the family of the leading man — women included — was inevitably cast into the public eye, and shared to some extent the same bright light that shone on the pre-eminent man. Female members of the imperial house therefore possessed an exponentially greater potential for influence on the public sphere, enormous social prestige, and a public presence that was so apparent, and implied so much, that it could not be ignored. (35)

the empress Plotina

In a nutshell, the Romans found that they needed to explain the public omni-presence of women in a way that did not violate the hierarchical and patriarchal assumptions of elite Romans. Raising imperial women to the status of divae may have helped make sense of their very public presence while simultaneously supporting traditional Roman values and the idealized familial piety that could justify one-man rule.

In her detailed study, Ms Tate takes a good look at the abundant archaeological evidence for the prominence of the four divae – statues, coins, inscriptions, and buildings they constructed in Rome – and concludes that the ladies were, in fact, strikingly active in real life.

Here's what she found.

Four Passive Goddesses?

Pompeia Plotina, Ulpia Marciana, Salonia Matidia, and Vibia Sabina possessed senatorial status by birth and significant personal wealth of their own, the foundations upon which any individual’s claim to status was built in ancient Rome. All four participated in Roman life as benefactresses and advocates on behalf of their clients, possessed an intricate web of social connections, and were active as leading matrons in both social and religious spheres. They were substantial property owners, with holdings in Rome, in Italy, and in other parts of the empire. When you put all the bits of epigraphic and archaeological evidence together, while unique in their relationships with the emperors, you get a strong sense of women who were situated within Rome’s elite as wealthy and independent business women and benefactors.

The 4 public faces

The Trajanic women, alive and dead, were visually celebrated in coinage minted at Rome, and in statuary. And because these females were placed forever in the public gaze through art, just like their male relatives, the images of them that abounded in Rome inevitably became part of their public presence.

diva Matidia Augusta

None is ever connected on their coinage with 'public' virtues which imply action and authority, but rather with idealized personal virtues like Piety, Peace, Loyalty, and Chastity (a valuable trait in an empress!). They almost seem to be deified as symbols. This imaginatively tied them to the traditional past, and reinforced the idea that the emperor and his family stood for all that was truly 'Roman'.

Still, there are hints of something less passive. The eagle stamped on the reverse of some of Marciana's and Matidia's coins is a bird with strong symbolic connotations in the Roman imperial ethos: not only did the eagle represent the patron god of Rome, Jupiter, but it had close associations with the imperial cult and the eagle as a metaphor for imperial Rome became permanently associated with Rome’s ruling house. With all the thrills and spills between the early first and early second centuries, this image on divae coins emphasizes the continuance of imperial traditions as well as the connection between deification and Rome as imperial power.

Not just a pretty face

An interesting case in point is Plotina’s reported manipulation of the imperial succession after Trajan’s sudden death in 117, while he was in Syria, as it reveals some more details concerning the empress’ access to power, and the tensions this inspired. The story goes that Plotina delayed making public the news of Trajan’s death until after Hadrian’s adoption as his successor was affirmed. One account implies that Plotina engineered Hadrian’s succession, signing the adoption papers herself and delaying news of Trajan’s death until after the papers had been received by the Senate in Rome.**

Female proximity to imperial power in Rome was always fraught, but Plotina, certainly, was more than just a pretty ornament.

When she died, Hadrian praised her saying: "Though she asked much of me, she was never refused anything.”**

Sometimes, female imperials had ways of smoothing paths and it sometimes happened, too, the other way round: quid pro quo, I'd say.

* 'The deification of imperial women: second-century contexts' (Master's thesis, 2011), available for free download at the usask.ca website.

** Cassius Dio, 69.1.4; 69.10.31.

Sources

In addition to Karin Tate's thesis (above), I have used R.M. Muich, 'The worship of Roman divae: the Julio-Claudians to the Antonines', M.A., University of Florida, 2004, available for free download at the fcla.edu website.

Illustrations

Top left: bust of Ulpia Marciana. Photo credit:
Ostia, Museo Archeologico.

Next: statue of Vibia Sabina. Photo credit: Centre for Online Judaic Studies

Next: bust of Pompeia Plotina. Photo credit"Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (minor), Plotina

Lower left: posthumous coin of Salonia Matidia . Photo credit: Kaiserfrauen auf Münzen unter Hadrian.
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Zenobia's Blog

2012-01-03T18:30:00.001+01:00

In her Fifth Year

On 3 January 2007, Zenobia's blog was born and, in welcoming her, I thought of the poem by Anne Stevenson, Sylvia Plath, which asks

Poor Sylvia, could you not have been
a little smaller than a queen –
a river, not a tidal wave
engulfing all you tried to save?

This is how I still think of Zenobia and what she tried to do.

I've been writing now for five years about Zenobia and her world -- thinking about Palmyra between West and East, the third century CE, Rome and the Parthians, then the Sasanians, their roiled history, politics, and art. And thinking, always, about the incredible but true story of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who united almost the whole of the Eastern Empire under her rule and nearly succeeded in breaking free of Rome.

She will never be, to me, ever, a little smaller than a queen.

Blogging Milestones

Last month, Zenobia's blog passed two milestones:

On 18 December, Zenobia clocked up +10,000 monthly page views (rolling average) for the first time.

And then kept going -- right through Christmas -- beating her own new record every day and then leap-frogging herself to roll up 12,000 page views on three days running.

As I write, she's hovering just below 11,800 on the monthly rolling average. It's early yet. She looks set to celebrate her fifth birthday tonight with +12,000 clicks yet again.

The intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly....*

My warm thanks to all my readers.

Have a very Happy 2012.

* Octavio Paz (from his Nobel lecture, 8 December 1990)

Illustration

Palmyran funerary relief. Bust of 'Herta, daughter of Ogilu, son of Salmôi, wife of Rabel, son of Yarhai Yat' wearing her best finery (traces of gold paint on the jewellery): two medallions hang from her necklace with miniature busts in high relief of women (?) wearing crowns. This is quite a statement of status, wealth, and service to the goddesses (?). Photo credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1885,0418.1; BM 125019.
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Whose Christmas Is It Anyway? (Updated)

2011-12-13T16:09:00.003+01:00

Two gods were born on 25 December, to wit, Sol, the Invincible Sun (Sol invictus) and the ascendant Christ.

Whose day was it, really?

The 12th century Syriac bishop, Jacob bar-Salibi, had this to say:

It was a custom of the Pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day.

What the good bishop imagined was that, during the last years of paganism, the cult of Sol remained so popular that the Church Fathers could only neutralize its celebration on the [traditional] winter solstice of December 25th by setting the birthday of Christ on that very same day. In other words, they snatched the day and, sooner rather than later, Christ trumped Sol.

The great classical scholar, Franz Cumont, had no doubt that this was what had happened. In his monumental Mysteries of Mithra, he declared it "certain that the commemoration of the Nativity was set for the 25th of December, because it was at the winter solstice that the rebirth of the invincible god [Sol], the Natalis invicti [birth of the Invincible (Sun)], was celebrated. In adopting this date, which was universally distinguished by sacred festivities, the ecclesiastical authority purified in some measure the profane usages which it could not suppress." (195-196)*

This view is now almost universally accepted; but is it true?

Obviously, we don't really know the date of the birth of Jesus Christ. The gospels do not say and the early church didn't much care about his physical birth. Until the Church Fathers got around to settling such questions in the 4th century, there was a grab bag of guesses. According to St Clement of Alexandria (2nd C):

There are those who have determined [the day] of our Lord’s birth; and they say that it took place in the 28th year of Emperor Augustus, and in the 25th day of [the Egyptian month] Pachon [May 20]... Further, others say that He was born on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi [April 20 or 21].

Clement dismissed such dates out of hand. Instead, his own calculations showed that Christ was born on November 17, in the year 3 BC. A century later, a God-inspired theologian announced that Christ, the new "sun of Righteousness", was born on March 28 since the Creation began with the spring equinox (= March 25] and the Sun was created on the fourth day. So that was that (or so he thought). Before long, however, another learned priest calculated that the birth date was April 2 in the year 8 AD -- 5500 years to the day after the Creation, as he had worked it out himself. And then, of course, there were many who celebrated 8 January (Epiphany), still Christmas day in many Orthodox churches.

But no one had yet suggested December 25th.

It is only with the famous Calendar of Philocalus (a list of the early bishops of Rome and Roman festivals) written in 354 AD that we find, given for the year 336, December 25: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae, "Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea".

Flashback to 274 AD and Sol, the Invincible Sun

The Roman cult of Sol existed from the earliest history of the city until at least the time when Christianity became the exclusive State religion (380 AD). The notion that the sun was divine was in Roman eyes a matter of visible fact rather than faith. As a divinity, the sun was clearly due divine honours. He had at least four temples in Rome. We know of cult statues, as well as public feasts at one time or another on August 8th, 9th, and 22nd, October 19th - 22nd, and December 11th and December 25th.

The curious thing is that December 25th was the sole festival of Sol to fall on an astronomically significant date. Obviously the new sun is 'born' on the winter solstice when the days will start to lengthen but what exactly did the pre-Christian Romans celebrate on that date?

Enter Aurelian, conqueror of Zenobia

Obverse: Radiate bust IMP C AVRELIANVS AVG
Reverse: Sol standing, hand raised in salute, seated bound captives

Although Sol was favoured by emperors before and after Aurelian (r. 270-275 AD), there is no doubt that Aurelian intentionally elevated the sun-god to become one of the top divinities of the empire. Earlier priests of Sol had been generally from the middle ranks of Roman society, simple sacerdotes in a lower class public cult. Aurelian raised them to the level of pontifices, an office now filled by members of the senatorial elite. To be a priest of Sol was now a top prestige post.

In the year 274, to celebrate his victory over Zenobia, Aurelian inaugurated the festival of the Sun-god in Rome. The god he had in mind was Sol Invictus, "the Unconquered Sun", but the god he had in hand was Bel-Helios of Palmyra. When the emperor had destroyed Zenobia's city the previous year, he despoiled the Temple of Bel: Aurelian, we are told, removed from this temple the statue of Bel-Helios to a new home in Rome.

He built a temple for the god on the eastern Campus Martius, today between the Via del Corso and the Piazza San Silvestro (so Bel may still be lurking under the church of San Silvestro in Capite). Something of this huge temple remained on the site until at least 1629 when Giovanni Battista Mercati made this haunting etching (above left) of its ruins. The temple incorporated eight splendid porphyry columns most probably transplanted from a temple in Palmyra; three centuries later these were transported by Justinian to Constantinople, to adorn his new church of St Sophia.

Mosaic of Sol in a four-horse chariot

Aurelian established special Games in honour of Sol to be held every four years and kicked off the event with 30 chariot races. It was widely assumed [and I, too, assumed: see my post on S. Silvestro in Capite] that these games were held on December 25th. According to the Calendar of Philocalus, 30 chariot races took place on that day to celebrate the Natalis Invicti, that is, the birth of the Invictus (the 'Invincible' [One]). This feast, then, must have been the festival that the Church fathers wanted to displace with Christmas in their brilliant counter stroke against a dangerous pagan rival. Besides, there was already a pervasive use of the sun as metaphor for Christ in early Christian writings (e.g. the True Sun, Sun of Justice, etc). Christ came even closer to Sol with some of his early images resembling those of the Sun-god in his sky chariot (compare Sol above left, with Christ, below left).

It makes perfect sense. And, nowadays, there is almost unanimous agreement that this is what happened: the church hijacked Sol's birthday.

The problem is: we may have the story backwards.

So whose Christmas is it?

A recent doctoral dissertation by S.E. Hijmans at the University of Groningen (NL) takes a fresh look at whole kit and caboodle.* The new Dr Hijmans is the first to have noticed that there is absolutely no evidence to show that the Games of the Sun founded by Aurelian ever took place on December 25th. On the contrary, no feast day for Sol is mentioned on that day until 80 years later in the Calendar of 354 and, subsequently, in 362 by Julian the Apostate in his Oration to King Helios (the Sun).

In short, while the winter solstice on or around the 25th of December was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedates the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution.*

In fact, the Calendar lists a festival of Sol that was celebrated in 354 AD from 19-22 October culminating in an unparalleled 36 chariot races (instead of the standard 12 or 24 races at this time) -- an extravagance which seems to suggest not an annual festival but a rarer quadrennial event; thus, these are likely to be the Games dating back to Aurelian. Those games, first held in 274 AD and then every four years, would indeed have been celebrated in 354 (Philocalus' Calendar) and in 362 (Julian's Oration). So, if the Christians had wanted to take over Sol's most important festival, that should have been the multi-day games celebrated on 19-22 October.

But hang on a moment!

The Calendar also says that chariot races were held for the Sun on December 25th -- so which is it? Well, the calendar doesn't quite say that. It lists 30 races run that day in honour of Natalis Invicti; that is, the birth of the Invincible (or Unconquered) ....

Who?

While Invictus is a common epithet for Sol (but not only for Sol), the word is not followed by any name telling whose natalis is being honoured. Whether celebrating the birth of a god, an emperor, a hero, or even an event, a name is always given -- except this one time. This is an odd omission for a time-honoured feast.


Christ as Sol in Mausoleum M in pre-4th C necropolis under St Peter's, Vatican

In other words, the entry for December 25th in the Calendar of 354 may be a later insertion into an existing template for the calendar. While astronomically important, the date of the winter solstice is never elsewhere associated with the Sun-god. So one has to wonder if the festival for Sol on 25 December was actually quite new.

There is a real possibility that the day was not dedicated to Sol until after the bishop of Rome first celebrated Christmas on that date in 336 AD -- a pagan reaction to a Christian feast, perhaps, rather than vice versa.

If Sol were the copycat (and not the other way round), this would explain why December 25th was the only festival of Sol to fall on an astronomically significant date.

This doesn't tell us when the Natalis Invicti of December 25th entered the Roman calendar, but it does appear to have overlapped (at least after 336 AD) with the celebration of natus Christus in Betleem Judeae on the same day. The Church fathers were, of course, aware of the cosmological significance of December 25th as winter solstice. That alone may have made it the most logical date to serve as the birthdate of Christ. The sun played a role in the Roman world as a divine cosmic body and Christians could deal with the heavenly body, sol, whose cosmic nature, higher order, and reality was undeniable, without necessarily dealing with the pagan god, Sol. While they were aware that pagans called this day the birthday of Sol Invictus, this did not concern them and probably did not play any role in their choice of date for Christmas.

At the very least, this new way of looking at the evidence casts doubt on the contention that Christmas was instituted on December 25th in order to counteract a popular pagan religious festival. Christ didn't have to trump Sol after all. Sol wasn't even in play.

Enjoy your holidays with a clear conscience.

And Happy New Year to all.

Updated 22 December 2011

More images of Aurelian's Temple of the Sun in Rome discovered by Roger Pearse (Thoughts on Antiquity). Not much is left but you get a good idea of its original immensity..

* S.E. Hijmans, Sol: the Sun in the Art and Religions of Rome, diss. Groningen, 2009; esp. Chapter 9.

Main sources: S.E. Hijmans, Sol: the Sun in the Art and Religions of Rome. I have also made us of Roger Pearse's posts on Franz Cumont, Mithras and 25 December at Thoughts on Antiquity

Illustrations

Upper left: Silver disc of Sol Invictus. Roman, 3rd century AD. From Pessinus (Bala-Hissar, Asia Minor). British Museum GR 1899.12-1.2, Photo credit: Jastrow via Wikipedia

Left: Bronze figure of Sun-god, Roman, 3rd century AD. Photo credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum, GR 1865,0712.17

Centre: gold coin (aureus) of Aurelian. Photo credit: Tataryn77 via Wikipedia

Below left: Etching by Giovanni Battista Mercati of the ruins of Aurelian's Temple of the Sun in 1629, from the series Some Views and Perspectives of the Uninhabited Places of Rome. Photo: The Amica Libary

Lower left: Sol in a 4-horse chariot (quadriga), Roman mosaic in Bonn Rheinisches Landes Museum. Photo credit: petrus agricola.flickriver

Lowest left: Mosaic of or Apollo-Helios Detail of vault mosaic of Christ as Sol in the Mausoleum of the Julii. From the Mid-late 3rd century necropolis under St. Peter's in the Vatican. Photo credit: Leinad-Z via Wikipedia
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What's In A Name?

2011-12-10T17:55:00.001+01:00

O you who carries off the souls of the living, O you who cuts off shadows,
O all you gods who are over the living, come, bring you Osiris-Nesmin's soul to him*

This prayer was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics on the outer coffin (left) of a priest named Nes-Min ('He belongs to [the god] Min') who died around the year 300 BCE, was embalmed, and his mummy placed within. 'Nesmin' is a common name in this period -- not a name associated with the elite but with men of the middling sort. Let's say, the kind of men who are soon forgotten.

Now, thanks to some fine forensic work in Belgrade, this particular Nesmin will long be remembered: he's not any more an anonymous mummy or a name without a history but, once again, an individual with an identity -- and even his own 'photograph'. After all, how do you identify a person today? With a name, sex (M or F), age, place of birth, father's/mother's name, profession, race, citizenship status, and a portrait photograph.

Our Nesmin's now got it all.

But that's not how he started out. Actually, he's been hanging around Belgrade Museum since 1888, one small part of a mass of looted material that came from the necropolis of Akhmim, a town some 200 km downstream of Luxor, once known for its colossal temple dedicated to Min, god of fertility. Literally tons of illegally excavated stuff was put on the market in the 1880s and ended up scattered in museums throughout the world.

For the next 104 years, no one even bothered to read his name. He was in and out of storage, sometimes put on show but more often ignored. Not a lucky mummy, his coffin was opened and his body displayed just in time for the outbreak of World War I. When the Austro-Hungarian Danubian flotilla shelled Belgrade, they hit the museum, shattering his glass case (left). Maybe he was lucky after all: he went back into storage, broken glass and all, until the coffin was finally reopened for scientific study in 1993.

Philosophers to the rescue

In that year, Prof. Branislav Andelkovic of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, started a systemic, multidisciplinary, non-destructive research project that is still ongoing. 'The Belgrade Mummy', as it was then known, got the works: X-rays, bacteriological studies, DNA analysis, and, finally, Computerized Tomography (CT) scanning. Still, it was only in 2005 that they discovered his true name. Not all of his information was preserved on the coffin. With really good luck, a limestone stela from Akhmim, also dated ca 300 BCE (Cairo CG 22053) happens to fill in the gaps: the owner of both stela and coffin is Nesmin, son of Djedhor (father) and Chay-Hathor-Imw (mother), grandson of Wennefer, great grandson of Djedhor.

Nesmin's Identity Card

Name: Nesmin
Sex: male (confirmed by X-ray and DNA)
Date of Birth: ca 350 BCE (he was about 50 when mummified)
Place of Birth: Akhmim (confirmed by the stela)
Father's Name: Djedhor (on the stela)
Mother's Name: Chay-Hathor-Imw (both coffin and stela; an unusual name which confirms that coffin and stela belonged to the same man)
Profession: sma priest, a priest responsible for dressing the divine cult statue
Height: about 165 cm (X-ray)

And then his personal portrait

Forensic facial reproduction was used to reproduce, with the highest possible degree of accuracy, how Nesmin looked when he was alive. The 3-D digital reconstruction method began with a CT scan of Nesmin's skull. The skull's 'architecture' is the most important determinant of a person's facial features.

Once a skull model is made, a dataset for tissue depth is selected, based on Nesmin's sex, age, height, life-style and living environment. Since, even today, we don't know for certain the anthropological race of the ancient Egyptians, a more generalized tissue depth was chosen for that factor. Next, virtual pegs representing tissue-depth markers were located in crucial points of the skull. Musculature and tissue was then added and built up following these markers.

The fleshy features of the nose, lips, and eyes are also extrapolated from the skull, and the texture and colour of the skin added last. In Nesmin's case, art from the era in which he lived gave added insight into skin and eye colour as well as his 'hair style' (bald as a billiard ball) -- because Egyptian priests are shown with cleanly-shaven heads.

So, this is Nesmin's portrait as painted by computer with the important aid of human reconstruction artists. Forensic artists have to deal with a number of unknowable variations (e.g. facial fatness, ear shape, wrinkles), but the final reconstruction produces a clear enough similarity so that, if you met Nesmin coming down the street, you'd think you already knew him from somewhere, at least by sight. A little bit, perhaps, like first meeting one of your Facebook friends in person.

Nesmin's last secret

Tucked under his left arm, still literally under wraps, X-rays show a thick papyrus roll written in a fine clear hieroglyphic hand. This is Nesmin's personal copy of the Book of the Dead. The exciting project now is to unroll and translate this 'book'. Perhaps the text will contain more of the very rare prayer (top of this post) that the priest chose for his outer coffin :

Bring Osiris-Nesmin's soul to him that it may unite with his body, that his heart may be glad, that his soul may come to his body and to his heart.
Induct his soul into his body and into his heart, provide his soul with his body and with his heart.*

And this, I'd like to think, is what the Belgrade researchers may have done for him.

*Spell 191 R, Book of the Dead (translation T.G. Allen)

The major source is B. Andelkovic & J. Harker, "Identity Restored: Nesmin's Forensic Facial Reconstruction in Context", UDK7.032 (497.11) 902:004, announced on ANE-list 9 December 2011. A free download is available here: http://www.anthroserbia.org/Content/PDF/Articles/a52344c33d504835b5511c5aa6332198.pdf

Illustrations

Top left: Coffin of Nesmin on display in the Archaeological Collection of the University of Belgrade. Photo: eKapija, Belgrade

Middle: The Belgrade Museum's mummy room after the Austro-Hungarian bombardment (1914). Photo via serbianforum

Below: Phases of Nesmin's forensic facial reconstruction, frontal view and side view. Photo: Andelkovic & Harker, "Identity Restored: Nesmin's Forensic Facial Reconstruction in Context" (@link above), Fig. 1, Fig. 2 (facial reconstructions ©Joshua Harker info@joshharker.com.
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"GAIA IS A TOUGH BITCH" (Updated)

2011-11-26T12:10:00.001+01:00

A tribute to Lynn Margulis, evolutionary biologist, 1938-2011.

"Lynn Margulis is an example of somebody who didn't follow the rules and pissed a lot of people off. She had a way of looking at symbiosis which didn't fit into the popular theories and structure. In the minds of many people, she went around the powers that be and took her theories directly to the public, which annoyed them all. It particularly annoyed them because she turned out to be right."*

Why the devil is symbiosis so annoying? While other biologists believed that species only diverge from one another, she claimed that, no, species formed new composite entities by fusion and merger. She took rather a longer view.

The First Three Billion Years

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable."

I know that my readers are will be champing at the bit for Zenobia's interpretation of the "uninterpretable". But before I am led into interpretation, let's review the background.

Darwin vs Mendel

Darwin claimed that populations of organisms change gradually through time as their members are weeded out, which is his basic idea of evolution through natural selection. Mendel, who developed the rules for genetic traits passing from one generation to another, made it very clear that while those traits re-assort, they don't change over time. A white flower mated to a red flower has pink offspring, and if that pink flower is crossed with another pink flower the offspring that result are just as red or white or pink as the original parent or grandparent. The genes are simply shuffled around to come out in different combinations, but those same combinations generate exactly the same types.

Neo-Darwinism attempts to reconcile Mendelian genetics -- which says that organisms do not change with time -- with Darwinism, which claims they do. The neo-Darwinists square this circle by saying that variation originates from random mutation, defining mutation as any genetic change. Mutation was thus touted as the source of variation -- that upon which natural selection acted .

Of course, inherited variants do appear spontaneously but they have nothing to do with whether or not they're good for the organism in which they appear. It is known from many experiments that, for example, even if fruit flies are isolated completely from X rays, solar radiation, and other environmental upsets, spontaneous mutations will still occur. But the result of such mutation is always sick or dead flies. No new species of fly appears — that is the rub. Everyone agrees that such mutagens produce inherited variation. Everyone agrees that natural selection acts on this variation.

The question is: From where comes the useful variation upon which selection acts? Does natural selection operate at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all three?

In the beginning there were single cells and micro-organisms

Zoology, according to Lynn Margulis, is simply three billion years too late. Animals (including, of course, people) arrive very late on the evolutionary scene. Thus, they provide little real insight into the major sources of evolution's development.

In cell evolution, on the other hand, the great event was the appearance of the membrane-bound nucleated (eukaryotic) cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, Margulis argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them. Now, symbiosis in cell evolution is considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs.

From bacteria to bugs

For more than a billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which lack nuclei. They looked very much alike, and from the human vantage point seem boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement — indeed, almost all the interesting features of early life.

The criteria that we use for species of animals and plants and fungi simply do not apply to bacteria:

Bacteria are much more of a continuum. They drop their genes all the time. It's like going swimming in a swimming pool, going in blue-eyed and coming out brown-eyed, just because you've gulped the water. That's what bacteria do, all the time. They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.

Say you have a bacterium like Azotobacter. This is a nitrogen-fixing bacterium. It takes nitrogen out of the air and puts it into useable food. Nitrogen fixing is a big deal. It takes a lot of genes. If you put a little something like arsenium bromide in a test tube with these organisms, and put it in a refrigerator overnight, lo and behold, the next day the cells can't do this any more, they can't fix nitrogen. So by definition you have to change them from one genus to another.

I'll give you another example: E.coli. It's a normal inhabitant of the human gut. If you put a particular plasmid into E.coli, all of a sudden you have Klebsiella and not E. coli. You've changed not only the species, but the genus. It's like changing a person to a chimpanzee. Can you imagine doing that, putting a chimpanzee in the refrigerator, and getting him out the next morning, and now he's a person?

Mitochondria and More Stuff

Mitochondria are wriggly bodies that generate the energy required for metabolism. To Margulis, they looked remarkably like bacteria. There were parallel examples in all plant cells. Algae and plant cells have a second set of bodies (chloroplasts) that they use to capture incoming sunlight energy in photosynthesis. Chloroplasts, like mitochondria, bear a striking resemblance to bacteria. She became convinced that chloroplasts and mitochondria evolved from symbiotic bacteria — specifically, that they descended from cyanobacteria, the light-harnessing small organisms that abound in oceans and fresh water.

Margulis spent much of the rest of the 1960s honing her argument that symbiosis was an unrecognized major force in the evolution of cells. Needless to say, no one believed her. The manuscript in which she first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. After ten years of research, she produced a book called the Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, with additional evidence to support the theory. Even under contract, it was rejected by Academic Press. Finally, in 1970, the revised work was published by Yale University Press as Symbiosis in Cell Evolution.

Now, it is orthodox biology to argue that symbiotic events had a profound impact on the organization and complexity of many forms of life. Nucleated cells are more like tightly knit communities than single individuals. Evolution is more flexible than was once believed.

Symbiosis is a physical association between organisms, the living together of organisms of different species in the same place at the same time. From the beginning, I was curious about these unruly genes that weren't in the nucleus. The most famous of them was a cytoplasmic gene called "killer," which, in the protist Paramecium aurelia, followed certain rules of inheritance. The killer gene, after twenty years of intense work and shifting paradigmatic ideas, turns out to be in a virus inside a symbiotic bacterium. Nearly all extranuclear genes are derived from bacteria or other sorts of microbes. In the search for what genes outside the nucleus really are, I became more and more aware that they're cohabiting entities, live beings. Live small cells reside inside the larger cells.

Her contention is that "symbiogenesis" — long-term symbioses that lead to new forms of life — has occurred and is still occurring. Symbiogenesis, as she proposed, is the result of long-term living together — staying together, especially involving microbes -- and that it's the major evolutionary innovator in all lineages of larger nonbacterial organisms.

Dr Margulis argued that the eukaryotic (nucleated) cell -- which includes all the cells in the human body -- appeared because of symbiogenesis, that is, though a transformation of what started out as a parasitic infestation of one cell by another.

"The long-lasting intimacy of strangers

It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another — seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.

This hypothesis was a direct challenge to the neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species. Symbiosis, she argued, was a more important mechanism; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing.

"Gaia is a tough bitch"

Dr. Margulis was also, somewhat controversially, a supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself. She agreed with a weaker version of this theory:

In the early seventies, I was trying to align bacteria by their metabolic pathways. I noticed that all kinds of bacteria produced gases. Oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia — more than thirty different gases are given off by the bacteria whose evolutionary history I was keen to reconstruct. Why did every scientist I asked believe that atmospheric oxygen was a biological product but the other atmospheric gases — nitrogen, methane, sulfur, and so on — were not?

Lynn Margulis, wearing her National Medal of Science Award

Earth, in her view, is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems.

Cooperation or Competition

Lynn Margulis never made an issue of being a woman in science. Still, it can't be entirely coincidental that her work stressed cooperation over competition as a major factor in evolutionary history, something still difficult for men of science to handle. That may be why the "survival of the fittest" and "nature red in tooth and claw" crowds are still so dug in. The extraordinary thing, surely, is that what began as competition evolved into what is fundamentally a cooperative arrangement. That's its beauty. Of course, it doesn't show that cooperation is the norm or that cooperation is always good or that it's always possible:

The problem is NOT "competition versus cooperation". Those words are totally inappropriate for life. The language of life is metabolic chemistry. Even bankers and sports teams have to cooperate in order to compete. It's crucial to realize that it doesn't matter what team you're on, when you compete, even in sports where the term is valid, you still cooperate!

The last word in the debate, as always, belongs to Prof. Margulis:

The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it's not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it's likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people.

Lynn Margulis was not shy about expressing her opinions. Her in-your-face, take-no-prisoners stance was pugnacious and tenacious. She was impossible. She was wonderful.***

She died last week after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. More than just the world of science will miss her.

Updated 28 December 2011

Chinese Fossils Shed Light On Evolutionary Origin of Animals from Single-Cell Ancestors

From ScienceDaily news 22/12: Evidence of the single-celled ancestors of animals, dating from the interval in Earth's history just before multicellular animals appeared, has been discovered in 570 million-year-old rocks from South China.

Left: 570 million year old multicellular spore body undergoing vegetative nuclear and cell division (foreground) based on synchrotron x-ray tomographic microscopy of fossils recovered from rocks in South China. The background shows a cut surface through the rock - every grain (about 1 mm diameter) is an exceptionally preserved gooey ball of dividing cells turned to stone. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Bristol)

Lynn Margulis would have loved this news.

* W. Daniel Hillis, The Third Culture; quoted by Susan Mazur, Scoop, 16 March 2009.

** Daniel C. Dennett, on Edge.Org.

*** John Brockman, on Edge.Org.

This post is dedicated to my room-mate from my Oxford days, the immunologist Dr Dr Susan Carson.

Major sources for this post: Edge obituary 11/23/2011; the History of Evolutionary Thought, Berkeley: Lynn Margulis; Bruce Weber, Obituary, New York Times, Nov. 24, 2011; Suzan Mazur, Interview on Scoop: Lynn Margulis: Intimacy Of Strangers & Natural Selection, 16 March 2009; Astrobiology Magazine, Part II: We are all microbes, and Part III: Bacteria don't have species.

Illustrations

Top left: via Edge.org http://edge.org/conversation/lynn-margulis1938-2011

Centre: Endosymbiosis: Lynn Margulis, Berkeley.edu

Middle left: via Scoop

Lower left: Paul Hosefos/The New York Time
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The Weirdest Little Emperor of Rome

2011-11-10T14:22:00.002+01:00

My review of The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor, a new book by ancient historian and aspiring novelist Martijn Icks*, appears today in the Times Higher Education.

Here's what I wrote:

The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor

10 November 2011

Tch, the young in those days...

Judith Weingarten on whether a teenage ruler's antics were as depraved as we've been told

This is a serious, stimulating study of Elagabalus (also known as Heliogabalus), who should be ranked with the likes of Nero and Caligula in the Roman notoriety stakes. From his fevered worship of an exotic Syrian sun-god (Elagabal, from whom he got his nickname), to presiding over child sacrifices and his insatiable sexual appetites, Elagabalus is a dream to write about.** As Martijn Icks says: "Even if only a fraction of these tales is true, Elagabalus must have been one of the most intriguing and unusual characters ever to sit on the Roman throne."

But is even a fraction true? Except for his devotion to Elagabal, almost certainly not. Of course, that is no reason not to retell the stories of his sexual depravity, orgiastic rituals, male and female lovers -- we know two boyfriends by name, one of whom he "married", along with a trio of female spouses that included a Vestal Virgin -- and the fact that he wore make-up, dressed in female clothes and prostituted himself. The sources are insistent: in just four short years (AD218-222), Elagabalus turned Roman virtues upside down. He was 14 years old when he became emperor and 18 when the Praetorians murdered him and threw his body, along with that of his mother, into the sewers.

Elagabalus claimed to be Emperor Severus' grandson and the bastard son of Caracalla, who had been assassinated a year earlier, presumably by the usurper Macrinus. The boy was pushed forward as a legitimate scion of the Severan dynasty by his grandmother, the ultra-wealthy Julia Maesa (sister of Severus' wife, the recently deceased Empress Julia Domna). More Julias are at hand: Julia Soaemias, Elagabalus' mother, and Julia Mammaea, her sister and the mother of the boy who replaced Elagabalus in AD222. Icks has little time for the Gang of Julias, although literary sources are unanimous that Maesa was the real power behind the throne, and it seems certain that she was supported, first in rebellion and then in the rule of her grandsons, by senators of Libyan and Syrian origin, all Severan appointees.

It is highly unlikely that decisions made in the name of Elagabalus were actually taken by the boy. If there is one thing he did do personally (presumably besides sex), it was the worship of his Syrian sun-god. He had been the god's high priest in Syria and the cult moved with him to Rome. In AD220, the Senate voted him the title "Most magnificent priest of the invincible sun-god Elagabal", which took precedence over the time-honoured "Pontifex Maximus" (the priestly title claimed by emperors from Augustus onwards), just as the new god replaced Jupiter as head of the Roman pantheon. The emperor's role in this new religion led to gross misunderstandings and ultimately to his downfall.

Instead of representing the best of "Roman values", the emperor was an "Oriental". He wore the garb of a Syrian priest, a long-sleeved tunic down to his feet that was easily confused with female dress; and he made up his face and danced around the altar to the sound of cymbals and drums. As he was circumcised, gossips claimed that he wished to castrate himself, in further proof of Oriental effeminacy. Indeed, the list of un-Roman offences ascribed to the ruler nicknamed "the Assyrian" is almost endless. On a practical level, too, the demands of his god left him no time for state affairs. Before long, Maesa put her other grandson, Alexander Severus, into the breach. The Praetorians did the rest.

The second half of the book takes us on a tour of Elagabalus' reception through the ages. Needless to say, a sex-mad evil Oriental tyrant did not get a good press, whether dressed up by German academics ("The late revenge of the Semites on Greco-Roman culture, whose chains it had silently worn for centuries") or French psychiatrists ("As the victim of a neuropathia dominated by a quasi-unconscious exhibitionism, he would probably have ended in dementia"). But for the Decadent movement, as Icks recounts, the worm turned and Elagabalus would become an alluring androgyne and an artist: "For artist he had been! The greatest of his time and many others, without doubt."

In the 21st century, he's a strong but gentle gay guy, a Michael Jackson-like pop star, or, in the words of graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, "Heliogabolus [sic] was just a weird kid with a thing about animals and big dicks."

The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor

By Martijn Icks
I. B. Tauris, 288pp, £22.50
ISBN 9781848853621
Published 15 September 2011

*Click here for the author's webpage (in Dutch). Dr Icks follows in the literary footsteps of the greatest of Dutch novelists, Louis Couperus (1863-1923), whose decadent novel Heliogabalus (published 1905-06) imagined the rise and fall of this weirdest of emperors. Decadent, he certainly was: "the priest of the sun who desired to be a man and a woman in one, because that would make possible [his] mystical union with the androgynous deity. In the novel, the Rome of Antiquity was presented as one huge brothel. Heliogabalus desires a beautiful death, but ends up in a slaves' latrine. The emperor is portrayed as the epitome of beauty, but at the same time he enjoys the sacrifice of children -- he is simultaneously a Beauty and a Beast." [from Jacqueline Bel, "Louis Couperus, the Dutch Oscar Wilde", in (P. Liebregts, W. Tigges, eds.) Beauty and the Beast, 269.

** Zenobia has not been remiss in posting about the emperor Elagabalus either. In fact, he features in four posts, first with a focus on his mother and grandmother in 'More Uppity Women: the Four Julia's (Part III)' and 'the Four Julia's (Part III) ... Continued; and, then, an inimitable pair, 'The Curious Case of Elagabalus' Beard', and 'Hairiness Makes the Man' .
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