Tag: history

Book burning in Timbuktu

I hope those savages get utterly eradicated, like we eradicated smallpox.

The Timbuktu manuscripts have become a casualty of the war in Mali. A large collection of them has been destroyed by Islamist rebels when they burned the Ahmed Baba Institute to the ground. The manuscripts were priceless world heritage and had to do with art, medicine, science, and ironically included multiple old copies of the Quran.

“The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveler Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

When European empires scrambled for Africa in the 19th century, the continent was seen as illiterate and lacking in history, memory, or literature. Its art was seen as “primitive”, partly because it lacked a written art history.

Timbuktu is a palimpsest in the sand that proves otherwise. Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa’s history from oblivion. Timbuktu is Africa’s city of books and learning that disproved racist myths about the continent. That luminous inheritance is what the Islamists have destroyed.”

UNESCO had been digitizing many of the manuscripts in the last 10 years… I just hope they got to these in time.

Video; Physicist Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries. Its legacy is tangible, with terms like algebra, algorithm and alkali all being Arabic in origin and at the very heart of modern science – there would be no modern mathematics or physics without algebra, no computers without algorithms and no chemistry without alkalis.

2022-07-15: While the savages were unfortunately not eradicated, many of the books survived.

In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40k pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture. “Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did. These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past. There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts. What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”

West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.

Word prevalences

“amicorum meorum vivorum et mortuorum”, which means “of my friends living and dead”, was popular between the years 1150 and 1240 but not at other times. And the phrase “Francis et Anglicis”, which is a form of address meaning “to French and English”, was phased out when England lost Normandy to the French in 1204.

by using the word distribution of documents with known dates as standard tree rings.

The first 100m gathering

have you ever been to an event with 100m other people? me neither. some are calling this the largest gathering in human history.

Held every 12 years at 1 of 4 places in India, the Kumbh Mela lasts nearly 2 months and is considered to be an especially auspicious time to bathe in the holy river for purification from sin. In 2001, the last time the festival took place, more than 40M people gathered in an area smaller than 20 sq km. This year, the predicted number of visitors tops 100M.

End of surprises

In the 60s and 70s anyone could get to anyplace for very little money and when they arrived, it was still not touched by globalization. There were no maps, no guidebooks, no cafes, ATMs, no forums, even no hotels. It was all surprises.

just wait another 5 years when everyone has smartphones, and no one will ever get lost again, or require the services of a local instead of staring into their device for information.

Bronze Age Collapse

the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The thing about bronze is that it requires long supply lines. To make a bronze sword in Greece, you might need tin from Cornwall and copper from Cyprus. Except for a small area in Asia Minor, tin and copper deposits don’t co-occur. The Bronze Age was therefore a time of international trade and travel. Art from the Middle East turned up in Norway and Afghanistan, that sort of thing.
2023-02-11: Evidence for a climate factor in the collapse

Here we examine the collapse of the Hittite Empire 3200 BP. The Hittites were one of the great powers in the ancient world, with an empire centered in a semi-arid region in Anatolia with political and socioeconomic interconnections throughout the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, which for a long time proved resilient despite facing regular and intersecting sociopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Examination of ring width and stable isotope records obtained from contemporary juniper trees in central Anatolia provides a high-resolution dryness record. This analysis identifies an unusually severe continuous dry period from around 1198 to 1196 (±3) BC, potentially indicating a tipping point, and signals the type of episode that can overwhelm contemporary risk-buffering practices.

Michelangelo vs Leonardo

2 of history’s most famous artists didn’t like each other at all. 2 beloved painters were each asked to create murals on opposing walls in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. There’s da Vinci: painter of “The Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” He’s established, revered and confident. In the other corner, the young upstart, Michelangelo: insecure, moody and pious. He’s finished the “David,” but has yet to paint the Sistine Chapel.

Let’s have lots of city states

with talk of secession in the air, how about turning all cities with > 1M people into their own states? this would ensure people would ask nicely for all the money flowing from the cities to other states.
2022-06-25: A dramatic example how much better city states are.

As a result of intensive political competition and experimentation among over 1000 sovereign city-states, political institutions developed to an impressive degree. For example, the level of democratic participation in many Ancient Greek states was only attained again anywhere else in the world by the developed countries in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The typical Late Classical Greek house had 250 to 330 square meters of interior space, more than the average American home today. This implies Classical Greeks urban dwellers typically enjoyed 50 to 70 square meters of residential space per capita. For comparison, in the US today, the average residential space per capita is about 75 square meters, and in France and Germany, it is 40 square meters, in the UK, it is 30 square meters, while in developing countries like Russia and China, per capita residential space is between 15 to 20 square meters.

2023-07-13: Jane Jacobs on the logic of city states

Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy, young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’”

Beard tax

A beard tax is one of several taxes introduced throughout history on men who wear beards. In 1705, Emperor Peter I of Russia instituted a beard tax to modernize the society of Russia following European models. Those who paid the tax were required to carry a “beard token”. This was a copper or silver token with a Russian Eagle on one side and on the other, the lower part of a face with nose, mouth, whiskers, and beard. It was inscribed with 2 phrases: “the beard tax has been taken” and “the beard is a superfluous burden”.