Reconsidering Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its monumental statues (moai).  For several hundred years it has captured the public's imagination because of its mind-staggering physical remoteness and the seemingly incredible feat of humans locating and colonizing the island, located 2,000 miles from the nearest island in East Polynesia:

Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island is a new book recently acquired by our library system, which I borrowed after reading that the author offered a new vision of the history of the island.  It is indeed an awesome book, which I have no doubt will become a standard reference citation, but it is probably TMI for the average reader because it examines every single detail about the history of the island, giving new emphasis to original ethnographic research conducted a century ago and debunking many modern interpretations.

"Conventional wisdom" (repeated in pop science articles and television shows) suggests as follows:

"That theory argues that Islanders let their population outgrow their home's capacity to support them.   In the quest for food they overfished the sea and destroyed soils, and in desperate religious tumoil they cut down all the trees to move statues.  Society collapsed in a fit of war and cannibalism.  When Europeans first saw Rapa Nui, it is said, they witnessed the result: a devastated land with few people, who could not have created the island's spectacular archaeological legacy." (xix)  

Thor Heyerdahl speculated and tried to prove that Rapa Nui had been colonized by white people who had crossed the Atlantic, built the South American civilizations and then continued west across the Pacific. 

The book convincingly debunks previous speculations.  The author notes for example that the population was not starving when the first Europeans arrived.  In fact, they offered food to the sailors.  They had an elaborate system for harvesting intermittent rainfall and had developed farming techniques suitable to the terrain.  The state of their society in modern times is in part a reflection of their more recent history:

"Lost in the haunting seduction of this eco-collapse theory was the true history of what the Islanders had endured at the hands of colonial imperialists.  Within a century and a half of having been found by Dutch sailors, Rapa Nui's people had been kidnapped, sold into slavery, killed off by new diseases, and removed to other islands.  They were all but extinguished.  Survivors were housed in a walled settlement, forbidden to return to their traditional homes and gardens and their sacred places, which were overrun by sheep and cattle making money for businesses half a world away.  Their history was written by outsiders who could not credit them with the abilities their monuments revealed... Those abandoned monuments were plundered and restored to make a museum for tourists... Their ancestors were an example to the world of the worst imaginable negligence, of behavior so lacking in respect for life, for the very soils that nurtured their existence, that they brought down their own future in a violent orgy of self-destruction..." (143)

An interesting book to browse.

Factoids and bon mots in "The Overstory"

This is one of the books I read during my "blogcation."  I won't offer an extensive review here, because it is already well-known, having won the Pulitzer prize back in 2019 (and shortlisted for the Booker Prize).  This is a book about trees, but it's not the book to read if you just want to learn the facts about tree communication and mycorrhizal networks; for that there are a number of excellent popular science books.  The Overstory presents nine wildly-different characters whose lives are influenced by trees, then brings all of them together in the American Pacific northwest where they participate in activism for the protection of old-growth forests.  Some will find that latter part of the novel "preachy" and the methods of the tree-huggers to be repellant, but I do admire the knowledge base about trees that Powers utilized, which I've excerpted below in a series of "factoids" and bon mots.

"Each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it... The foundress laid her eggs and died.  The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb." (81)

"... growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the [human] species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.  Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band..." (84)

"... the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language... beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters." (116)

(in preparation for winter) "Sap falls.  Cells become permeable.  Water flows out of the trunks and concentrates into anti-freeze.  The dormant life just below the bark is lined with water so pure that nothing is left to help it crystallize." (118)

"It’s a miracle,” she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antenna arrays form up into thylakoids discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious gingko.  

Too many zeros, their eyes glaze over." (124)

"She produces her loupe from her key chain and applies it to one stump to estimate the number of rings. The oldest downed trees are about eighty years. She smiles at the number, so comical, for these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years.

That’s why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres. The thing is outlandish, beyond her ability to wrap her head around. But then, as Dr. Westerford knows, the world’s outlands are everywhere, and trees like to toy with human thought like boys toy with beetles." (131)

"You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . ." (132)

"She stands in the clearing at the top of the rise, looking out over a shallow gully. Aspens everywhere, and it boggles her mind that not one of them has grown from seed. All through this part of the West, few aspens have done so in ten thousand years. Long ago, the climate changed, and an aspen’s seeds can no longer thrive here. But they propagate by root; they spread. There are aspen colonies up north where the ice sheets were, older than the sheets themselves. The motionless trees are migrating—immortal stands of aspen retreating before the latest two-mile-thick glaciers, then following them back north again." (133)

"Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all." (142)

Chlorophyll and hemoglobin are nearly identical molecules (143)

"Lit by the streetlamp in front of her house is a singular tree that once covered the earth - a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood [gingko].  A tree with sperm that must swim through droplets to fertilize the ovule." (146)

"Oak veneration at the oracle at Dodona, the druids’ groves in Britain and Gaul, Shinto sakaki worship, India’s bejeweled wishing trees, Mayan kapoks, Egyptian sycamores, the Chinese sacred ginkgo—all the branches of the world’s first religion." (215)

"La ruta nos aporto otro paso natural" is a palindrome

"In that dream, the trees laugh at them.  Save us?  What a human thing to do." (329).  [reminds me of a scene in After Yang when robot says man's question whether Yang wanted to be human is "such a human thing to ask."

"... as friendly as a retriever covered with ticks..." (415)

“The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .” (498)

"... when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows,  The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true...: (501)

"...the word tree and the word truth come from the same root." (501)

I also encountered two uncommon words that drew my attention:

"There are ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not."  To "scry" is to supernaturally predict the future by using crystal balls or other magic items.

",,, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water..."  An uncommon usage of a verb that usually denotes applying something thickly, like jam on toast.  Also used as a noun to mean "drool."  Odd usage here seems to conflate those two.

"Journey to the West"

I recently read an interesting review of The Monkey and the Monk (Univ Chicago Press, 2006) and found a copy in our library system.  The book is an abridgement (to 500 pages!) of the 16th century Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West.

It is regarded as one of the great Chinese novels, and has been described as arguably the most popular literary work in East Asia. It was widely known in English-speaking countries through the British scholar Arthur Waley's 1942 abridged translation Monkey. It is a progenitor to the Xianxia literary genre that combines martial arts with high fantasy in Ancient China.

The novel is a fictionalized and fantastic account of the pilgrimage of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who went on a 19-year journey to India in the 7th century AD to seek out and collect Buddhist scriptures...

Journey to the West has strong roots in Chinese folk religion, Chinese mythology, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoist and Buddhist folklore, and the pantheon of Taoist immortals and Buddhist bodhisattvas are still reflective of certain Chinese religious attitudes today, while being the inspiration of many modern manhwa, manhua, manga and anime series. Enduringly popular, the novel is simultaneously a comic adventure, a satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a source of spiritual reflection, and a rich allegory.

I have no doubt that this book would be an interesting read, but at my age the requisite time commitment becomes a formidable obstacle, and I've reluctantly turned the book back in.

But I do want to save (and share) the opening two pages:

And I'll retype some passages from the scans to make the keywords searchable:

"Before Chaos divided, Heaven tangled with Earth;

Formless and void - this, no human had seen.  

But when Pa Gu broke up the nebula,

Clearing began, the turbid parted from the pure.

Humaneness supreme enfolding every life

Enlightens all things that they become good..."

The text then makes mention of "cyclic time" - a fascinating concept offering echoes of perhaps the Mayan worldview?  Also that "in the order of Heaven and Earth, a single period consisted of 129,600 years."

I am fascinated by "origin stories" that peoples have created to explain the existence of the cosmos, earth, and humans.  In this classic oriental tale...

"At the end of the epoch of Xu, Heaven and Earth were obscure and all things were indistinct.  With the passing of 5,400 years, the beginning of Hai was the epoch of darkness.  This moment was named Chaos, because there were neither human beings nor the two spheres.."

Then the creation process continues.  The firmament acquires a foundation, then "the light rose up to form the sun, the moon, the stars, and the Heavenly bodies."  The earth becomes more firm, and "during the Yin epoch humans, beasts, and fowls came into being..."  Then the world is divided into four great continents...

To me this is fascinating stuff.  I am immediately reminded of the Babylonian concepts of the great depths of time and of course of the Mesoamerican Long Count.

The Black Sea deluge

Another addition to my list of recommended books, this one explaining in detail the hypothesis that an immense and abrupt irruption of water into the Black Sea from the Aegean/Mediterranean seas was responsible for major cultural disruptions and may have been the basis for the "great flood" hypothesis seen in so many cultures.

In prehistoric times what is now the Black Sea was an immense freshwater lake, fed by glacial meltwaters.  When the outflow drainage at the Bosphorus closed and when the climate changed (disappearance of glaciers, aridity of the overall watershed), the lake evaporated to a smaller size.

The schematic at right shows the approximate relative sizes and shapes of the ancient freshwater lake and the current Black Sea.  That freshwater lake was a magnet for early human civilization because of the presence of water, game, and arable land.

When the Bosphorus "opened up," the inflow of seawater was on a scale not seen anywhere in the modern world.  The Mediterranean was open to the Atlantic, and the sea level was about 500 feet higher than the lake.  When water found a crack in the Bosphorus the flow would have started as a trickle, then as the passage eroded the flow would increase exponentially.  

"Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile."  

The lake then began to rise 6" per day, and depending on the gradient, the shore would expand by as much as a mile a day - every day, without pause.  The people living on the shores of the lake would be forced to flee.

"It is hard to imagine the terror of those farmers, forced from their fields by an event they could not understand, a force of such incredible violence that it was as if the collected fury of all the gods was being hurled at them.  They fled with family, the old and the young, carrying what they could, along with fragments of the other languages, new  ideas, and new technologies gathered from around the lake."

The diaspora is detailed in several chapters of the book.

"All these people appeared in Europe shortly after the flood.  All have been described [by archaeologists] as outsiders: people who migrated from some distance... all seem to have been more culturally advanced than those [original European residents] whom they displaced.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, at that time in the middle of the sixth millennium B.C., Europe began a rapid ascent into what has been called a "Golden Age"...

The diaspora also happened in the other direction, creating enormous population changes in Anatolia and the Middle East.

"In the [Mesopotamian] epic of Gilgamesh the seven sages are credited with building the walls of Uruk and bringing the arts of civilization to the Sumerians - irrigation, farming, and the use of copper, gold, and silver.  The question of where the Sumerians came from is still unanswered."

"The oldest known written versions of the flood were committed to clay tablets over two millennia after [this flood] event in Sumerian, the language of the first known writing, a language with no known roots and no known descendants..."

The final point to make is that the story of the flood would have been passed by oral history down through dozens of generations.  Archaeologists have noted that the peoples who fled to Europe tended to settle some distance away from freshwater lakes and streams.  But those who fled to the fertile crescent would have been reminded of the great flood because their new territory was also subjected to annual flooding from the Tigris and Euphrates, which may explain why the legend was maintained there until the invention of cuneiform writing.

If you don't have time for the book, you can browse the high points at the Wikipedia page for the Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

Other interesting bits from the book:

"[King Darius I the Great] governed skillfully and managed a vast empire long before that of Alexander the Great, a regime that encompassed all the prior realms of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Ionians, Persians, and Medes, extending to the east as far as the Indus Valley, to the west into Europe, and to the south into Africa, flourishing in economy and culture."

"Apparently what had so deeply moved Smith was the realization that the [cuneiform] fragments he had assembled contained an independent version of the biblical deluge.  The heathen words told almost exactly the same story as the Hebrew narrative, right down to the selection of a survivor of the deluge through the intervention of a god, the forewarning that gave time to build a wooden ark, the refuge in it of every kind of animal, bird, and reptile, the grounding of the boat on the side of a mountain, the details of dispatching a swallow, raven, and dove to find land, the offering of a sacrifice, and the pledge that the gods would never again return the world to its primeval watery chaos."  "... after the feast one of the goddesses flung her jeweled necklace into the sky to be the sign of a covenant never again to drown the world."  "There was no doubt that the deluge described so vividly in the Gilgamesh legend had been inscribed on stone tablets long before the writing of the first books of the Old Testament."

The fact that the Mediterranean basin had once been a desert is confirmed by the discovery that the Nile River has an immensely deep central gorge (now filled with sediment) as a result of erosion when the Nile used to empty into a much lower basin.  The separation of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic occurred during the Messinian time interval between 7.2 and 5.4 million years ago.  "The transition from sea to land and back to sea had taken less than half a million years."  "Although no humans lived five million years ago, had any been present, they would have witnessed the Mediterranean desert disappearing permanently beneath a mile of salt water in a matter of a single human lifetime."

"... the Sumerians and Akkadians, and even the Greeks, did not believe in a reward after death.  Death might be postponed through a petition to a god, but  no one could escape it.  The body returned to clay, and a duplicate "phantom" entered a new abode through an aperture in the grave, leading to an immense, dark, silent, and sad netherworld where one had a torpid and gloomy existence forever."

Reposted from 2022 to accompany other posts. 

"Eden in the East" - Southeast Asia as the epicenter of prehistory

I suppose everyone is startled when they first encounter these passges in the Epic of Gilgamesh:

"What I had loaded thereon, the whole harvest of life I caused to embark upon the vessel; all my family and all my relations, The beasts of the field, the cattle of the field, the craftsmen, I made them all embark.  I entered the vessel and closed the door...

For six days and nights Wind and flood marched on, the hurricane subdued the land.  When the seventh day dawned, the hurricane was abated, the flood which had waged war like an army; the sea was stilled, the ill wind was calmed, the flood ceased. I beheld the sea, its voice was silent, And all mankind was turned into mud! As high as the roofs reached the swamp;...

I beheld the world, the horizon of sea; Twelve measures away an island emerged; Unto Mount Nitsir came the vessel, Mount Nitsir held the vessel and let it not budge... When the seventh day came, I sent forth a dove...

These words [more at the link] were inscribed onto clay tables in Ninevah centuries before the Bible was assembled.

What I didn't realize until reading Eden in the East is that there are some 500 flood myths from around the world - not just from the Middle East, but also in northern Europe, North America, China and the far East.  This book undertakes the immense task of collating the flood myths in search of a unifying hypothesis.   

I'll offer just a bare-bones thumbnail sketch.  Everyone agrees that the world has experienced marked changes in sea level since the appearance of Homo Sapiens, the most dramatic of them occurring when changes in the global climate resulted in melting of the glaciers:

The time scale in Figure 1 above goes back to 18,000 years before the present - about the time that early humans were traversing Beringia (on land or via near-shore vessels) from Asia to the Americas.  Note that early in human prehistory (10-15,000 years ago), sea levels around the world were 50-100 meters lower than their present levels.

Figure 3 above "zooms in" on the third world-wide flood about 8,000 years ago, and shows geologic evidence of that rise in regions as far apart as the Arabian Gulf, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.

Those glacial melts flooded continental shelves around the world - as for example Doggerland:

That land between GB and Europe was above water and inhabited by modern humans, and if you dredge the bottom of the North Sea, you can haul up artifacts from that era.

I bookmarked Doggerland years ago as blogworthy material, but for now I'm going to shift back to Eden in the East.  Oppenheimer notes that there was an immense low-lying coastal landmass between what is now Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam and what is now Borneo/Mayasia - the undersea area now referred to as "Sundaland."

Oppenheimer uses this area as the focus of his book, and postulates that cultural diffusion from this Sundaland may have spread to Austronesia, the Indian subcontinent, Mesopotamia, and then worldwide.

That's the big picture.  Here's a smattering of excerpted tidbits - starting with the science of the megafloods:

"Around 12,500 years ago, not long after the first flood, pottery appeared for the first time in southern Japan.  Some 1500 years later there is evidence of pots being made in China and Indo-China.  These examples of pottery making antedate any from Mesopotamia, India or the Mediterranean region by 2500-3500 years.  Stones for grinding wild cereal grains appeared in the Solomon Islands... as early as 26,000 years ago, whereas they were not apparently used in Upper Egypt and Nubia until about 14,000 years ago..." [p. 18-19]

"The third dry cold period was interrupted suddenly around 8000 years ago by an event which, although only discovered in the last decade, has been described as 'possibly the single largest flood of the [past two million years]'.  The melting Laurentide ice cap had dammed up vast volumes of fresh water in glacial lakes occupying a third of the land area of eastern Canada...  Geologists have calculated that the combined surface area of these glacial lakes... exceeded 700,000 square kilometres... Calculations of the total unfrozen water volume discharged instantly vary between 75,000 and 150,000 cubic kilometres - enough to raise the global sea-level by 20-40 centimetres instantaneously...  The centre of the ice cap that was also flushed out through the Hudson Strait, however, would have rapidly added another 5-10 metres to the sea-level..." [33-35]

"This last rapid rise in global sea-levels was presumably also responsible for breaching the Hellespont and flooding the partially desiccated Black Sea... Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman... who discovered this flood, suggest that this may  have given rise to the legend of Noah's flood.  This is possible for the Middle East, but it does not explain all the other 500 flood stories from around the rest of the world." [38]

"Southeast Asia has the highest concentration of flood myths in the world.  It is an area with few large river deltas and no recent reputation for flooding, but it lost more than 50 per cent of its landmass after the Ice Age." [62]

"... the strong likelihood of superwaves arising from the crustal strains when the Laurentide ice sheet of Canada collapsed and melted around 8000 years ago... The release of energy from the Earth's crust would have produced waves rolling across the Pacific and inundating all shores and flat hinterlands in direct line..." [107]

The excerpts above are from Part I of the book, which details the geologic events that would have produced widespread flooding. Part II shifts the focus to how the displacement of large coastal populations by the floods could have led to the diffusion of knowledge/customs/technologies from southeast Asia to other parts of the world, using new information from linguistics, anthropology, and genetics.

"I believe that Southeast Asia was the centre of innovations after the Ice Age and long-distance seeding of ideas from the region led to technological breakthroughs elsewhere.  The Austronesians may have contributed sailing technology, magic, religion, astronomy, hierarchy and concepts of kingship.  The Austro-Asiatic speaking people may have contributed the more down-to-earth skills of cereal farming, and even bronze.   A combination of all these traits was necessary for the first city-builders of Mesopotamia..." [221]

"If there were so many bad riverine floods in Mesopotamia, as the sedimentary record shows, one very bad one would not be remembered so long.  Instead the recurrent aspects would be recalled.  The myths from around the world do not usually refer to periodic river floods.  In any case most flood myths come from island Southeast Asia, which, unlike Mesopotamia, lost most of its alluvial flood-plains after the great melt when the Ice Age ended." [227]

"After 200 pages of concentrated flood myths he [Sir James Frazer] concluded that such ancient myths were widespread on every continent except Africa...  A large proportion of the Earth's surface was permanently lost to settlement and agriculture somewhere between 18,000 and 5000 years ago as a result of the sea-level rising...  Africa, with narrow continental shelves, would have been relatively spared... " [230-232]

"There is now general agreement that the stories of Noah's Flood and the floods of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians are related, although there is no agreement on the original source... There are now at least eleven related Ancient Near Eastern versions, including the two in Genesis and Berossus's account of Xisuthros.  The three Assyrian versions were committed to tablet in the seventh century BC.  This was perhaps a hundred years before the writing of the Priestly account in Genesis, but probably well after the Jehovistic account, for which a date is still under discussion.  The two surviving Babylonian accounts were written thousands of years earlier, somewhere between 1850 and 1500 BC..." [242-8]

"Frazer lists fifteen Greek flood stories in his Folklore in the Old Testament, twelve of which record a mountain landing." [258]

"A number of the Moon stories I have sketched contain the number seven.  I have suggested the lunar week as a possible origin for the use of this numeral... After one, two, and three, the number seven appears more frequently in Old World sacred texts than any other number.  This applies particularly for the Bible, the Koran, Babylonian texts and the Egyptian Book of the Dead...  Although five is a prime... the number of fingers on a hand and a half unit in the decimal system it is not more common in sacred texts than expected... [345-6]

"And did God first mould a model from blood and clay and blow into it to give it life?  Did he take the bone, Ivi, from man's side among the dark rainforest trees of Southeast Asia?.. Stories of the creation of humanity are universal.  They can be divided into two main varieties, people evolving from a totem, such as a tree or animal, and the creator fashioning man from clay.  These two archetypes have distinct distributions which overlap most dramatically in eastern Indonesia.  The merging of these two themes in that location eventually resulted in the beautiful and mysterious story of the Garden of Eden... In this chapter we trace the origin of the Genesis version of the clay-man myth from Southeast Asia... Polynesian informants insisted on the antiquity of stories stating that the first woman, who came from a bone in the man's side, was called Eevee/Ivi (the word for a bone in many eastern Polynesian languages).  Yet most of the Christian ethnographers assumed a missionary source for these stories rather than the disturbing possibility of a more ancient origin... It is likely that they were unaware of the widespread ancient distribution of the story elsewhere and thus could simply not believe their informants.  This selective bias is discussed at length by Sir James Frazer." [355-9]

"The Garden of Eden story holds a cherished place in Western literature... Yet the Genesis writers assembled this story less than three thousand years ago from a selection of fertility and immortality myths that were in common circulation at the time.  The separate elements of these myths are still to be found today in Southeast Asia and Melanesia."  [382]

"The tree of knowledge played centre stage throughout the snake's temptation of Eve.  The tree of life, however, remained in the wings unnoticed until it was nearly too late and Jehovah realised that Adam and Eve could eat from that too, and become immortal like Him.  He therefore shooed them out of the garden before they could gain immortality as well as knowledge... Frazer's view was that there were originally two trees, but that the tree of knowledge of good and evil had really been the tree of death contrasting with the tree of life.  This hypothesis may explain the verses:

'But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely  die.' (Genesis 2:16-17)

Clearly, humankind did not die on that day of the Fall, but instead became mortal." [384]

"In certain Aboriginal cultures, the Moon was regarded as a deity with the secret of immortality because it 'died' for three days every month, subsequently renewing itself during the first half of the next month." [386]

"The location of paradise has always worried Bible scholars, particularly since the lush forest description given in Genesis fits so poorly with anything we know about the environment of ancient Mesopotamia.  Rainfall may have been better 6000-7000 years ago, but nothing fits the picture of paradise as well as tropical jungles such as in Southeast Asia.  Both ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians described their respective sites as far across the water towards the rising Sun, that is in the East." [405]

This is an impressive book, extensively annotated with relevant references from the literature.  I first encountered it shortly after its publication about 20 years ago, and after being duly impressed by the scholarly writing I set it aside for a re-read "sometime in the future" (that future having arrived this year).  I think it is sometimes erroneously grouped with the fantasy books about Atlantis or ancient aliens, but the existence of the "drowned continent" of Southeast Asia is factual, and the hypotheses presented here are eminently logical.

The book has probably "too much information" for the casual reader, so for the TL;DR crowd I can recommend the final ten-page "Epilogue" as a reasonably concise summary.  I've already created a mega-post here and I'm tired of typing, but I'll close by adding several excerpts from the Epilogue:

"In their partial rejection of diffusion as the reason for these links [between diverse cultures], folklorists of the twentieth century have had to propose the only two other possible causes of similarity: chance and the inner workings of the human mind.  While chance may operate for single obvious motifs, such as the worship of the Sun, I have shown that it is statistically extremely unlikely that complex story-types, sharing from three to ten distinct motifs, could have occurred more than once.  Yet this is what would have to happen for the distribution of myths in a diagonal band across Eurasia - with Polynesia at one end and Finland at the other - to have all occurred independently.  That these were the core myths that were preserved so carefully by the Mesopotamian, Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilisations can also be no coincidence.  All the main stories in the first ten chapters of Genesis are found in this cultural band and all occur in the Far East: the watery creation, the separation of skies and earth, the creation of man from red earth, and Eve from his side, the Fall, Cain and Abel, and, of course, the flood.  With the exception of the flood, the relative paucity of evidence for these complex story-types elsewhere in the Americas and Africa not only supports diffusion as a reason for the distribution, but also argues against both chance and the 'inner workings of man's brain' for their similarities."

"If we can accept the statistical evidence of trans-continental relationships in myths, then the dating of the first written versions of the Eurasian myths becomes crucial.  We are lucky here, since the Sumerians and Babylonians were so assiduous in recording the motifs on tablets and cylinder seals.  The date bracket that comes out of such an enquiry reveals that the myths, with their religious connotations, were among the first of all written records in the third millennium BC.  Since in the majority of cases the structure and content of the Mesopotamian myths show them to be derived from earlier Eastern versions, we may suppose that the direction of diffusion was East-to-West, and that the date of diffusion may be been earlier than the beginning of the third millennium.  This means that East-West cultural links may be older than 5000 years.  Such cultural links could only have occurred if there were people in Southeast Asia to hold the stories, and that they were capable of traveling to India and Mesopotamia to transmit them... The Sumerians and Egyptians themselves wrote about the skilled wise men from the East, a fact often dismissed as the embellishment of a fertile imagination."

Reposted from 2022 to accompany some newer posts. 

"Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global"

This is one of the three best books I read in 2025 (the others being Orbital and Playground).  As the title indicates, this book elucidates in extensive but clear detail how one early proto-language radiated from the area north of the Black Sea outward toward what is now Europe and southeast into what is now the Indian subcontinent.

An analysis like this requires more than just linguistic skills.  Understanding the processes involved requires familiarity also with the anthropology of the movements of people, their occupations, their trading networks, their social behaviors, and also an understanding of archaeological findings, including DNA extracted from ancient bones. The author, Laura Spinney, is not a professional linguist, anthropologist, or archaeologist.  Instead (and presumably for the better), she is a professional science writer, able to compress immense volumes of information into a form suitable for the general public.  After reading this book, I immediately placed a request at our library for her previous work - Pale rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world.

The book is interspersed with excellent maps clarifying the locations of peoples and languages (two of which I am embedding).  I can't summarize all of the text, but here are some salient excerpts (my transcription will lack the umlauts and diacritic marks on some words):

"Now, eight billion humans speak arouind seven thousand languages.  Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian... If you include second or subsequent language-speakers, Indo-European is by far the largest language family the world has ever known... Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European." (11)

"The suggestion [in 1786] that an archaic link existed between Europe and the Orient electrified the public imagination... there was awe to be had in gazing upon Latin-Sanskrit word pairs like domus-dam (house or home), deus-deva (god), mater-mata (mother), pater-pita (father), septem-sapta (seven) and rex-raja (king).  Or in comparing the first three numbers in German (eins-zwei-drei), Greek (heis-duo-treis) and Sanskrit (ekas-dvau-trayas)..." (15)

"... when the future emperor Hadrian addressed the Senate around 100 CE, the senators mocked his Spanish accent (he was born in what is now the Spanish province of Seville).  The fragmentation of Latin was underway, but Hadrian still spoke recognisable Latin rather than an early version of Spanish..." (25)

"The catfish of the Dnieper were up to two and a half metres or over eight feet in length, and three hundred kilogrammes - over six hundred pounds - in weight... They are wels catfish, where wels, the common name of the species in German, shares a root with English 'whale'." (37)

"As in the Balkans, people used fleeces to pan for gold in those mountain streams.  It was in Georgia, in the ancient kingdom of Colchis, that the Greek mythological hero Jason found the golden fleece..." (56)

"A word meaning 'star'... shines steadily through all its descendants.  Waypoint for night travellers since all humans were African, it was known to Sogdian merchants on the camels as stare, to homebound Odysseus as aster, and to Icelanders fishing for herring after dark as stjarna." (77)

"... migrants had radiated east and west from the steppe around five thousand years ago, and in Europe their ancestry had replaced up to ninety per cent or more of the gene pool... No later movement had anything like their genetic, cultural or linguistic legacies: not the massive migrations set in train by the fall of the Western Roman Empire, not the displacements that followed the Black Death, the 1918 flu or either of the world wars.  Most European men alive today, and millions of their counterparts in Central and South Asia, carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe." (102)

"The core vocabulary of Tocharian was clearly inherited from Proto-Indo-European.  You can see that in these Tocharian B - Latin - English triplets:  pacer-pater-father, macer-mater-mother, procer-frater-brother, and ser-soror-sister.  Or in the Tocharian B words for 'cow' (keu), 'ox' (okso) and 'to milk' (Malk)." (127)

"The yearning for a better world is alive and well and as doomed to disappointment as it ever was (the word 'utopia' contains that disappointment within it, since it means 'nowhere') (140)

"Like the Greeks, the Etruscans and Italic-speakers wrote from right to left at first.  Later they went through a phase called boustrophedon or 'ox-turning', when a line written right to left alternated with one written left to right, until they plumped definitively for left to right." (146)

[note the four major rivers emptying into the Black Sea all begin with the letter D] "An Iranic word for 'river' was danu, which is the root of both Don and Danube.  Dniester comes from Danu nazdya, 'river to the front'. and Dnieper from Danu apara, 'river to the rear'.  These names were the legacy of the Scythians... One remnant of the Scythians survived, however, by retreating to the safety of the Caucasus.  Their modern descendants, the Ossetians, call 'water' don."

"Smok or Zmij, or Zmei or Zmaj, depending on which Slavic-speaking country you happen to be in, is the archetypal serpent, denier-of-life, and any resemblance you may notice to J.R.R. Tolkien's dragon Smaug is not coincidental.  Tolken was a philologist... There was actually a Proto-Indo-European word, smeuk that probably meant 'to slide' or 'glide', and if the Slavic dragon names are derived from it then they are living exhibits of taboo deformation - the phenomenon whereby taboo words [names of Gods you are not allowed to speak] are rapidly recycled through euphemism and circumlocution." (230)

Page 264 includes an interesting discussion of shibboleths (words or phrases, the pronunciation of which identify nationalities or ethnicities), which I don't have time to retype.  See also this list of shibboleths.

BTW, it's also useful to at least browse the endnotes, where I discovered that "Some Indo-European languages do without a word for 'one' entirely.  If there is only one of something, after all, you hardly need to count it.  Old Irish did have a word for 'one' (oen), but if a person wanted to say 'one cow' they would just say the word for 'cow'. 

The book concludes with this language tree:

This will not be a book for everybody.  It will delight those with a general intellectual curiosity, but will be TMI for the casual reader.  On the other hand, it's easy to skim over the parts where the details are beyond one's personal needs or interests.  For those TL;DR people, I would encourage reading the excellent "Introduction" and the equally excellent "Conclusion" chapters.  The latter closes with this observation:

"Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic 'purity' a justification used by those who want to raise walls.  Unfortunately for them, the most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants.  It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died."

James Garfield - president for only 200 days

I have a new favorite president. Before reading this book, literally the only things I knew about James Garfield were that he was featured on the 20c prexie stamp (because he was the 20th president) and that he was assassinated while in office. Now I can add the following...

He grew up in Ohio in abject poverty – a one-room log cabin with a plank floor and windowpanes made of oiled paper. When he was two years old, his father died at age 33, leaving his mother with four children to feed. She farmed the land with the aid of his 11-year-old brother and saved money so that by age four James was able to get a pair of shoes. At age sixteen he began working on the Erie and Ohio Canal, but returned home after contracting malaria. By then his mother had saved $17, which was used to send him to Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a one-building prep school. During his first year he worked as a janitor in exchange for receiving an education.

So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more – one on penmanship and the other on Virgil. (p. 23) 

From there he moved to Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated in two years. He entered state politics in Ohio, then served in the Civil War in the Union Army, after which he was elected to Congress. He did NOT want to be president. He attended a nominating convention which was hopelessly deadlocked. On the 34th ballot, some electors voted for him. He rose to protest and was told to sit down.  On the 36th ballot, he became the Republican nominee – against his will. He was described as shocked, sickened, and pale as death during the proceedings. (pp 40-46).

He never participated in the campaign which was conducted on his behalf, preferring to work and receive visitors on his 160-acre farm.

He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house…. he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room…” (p. 58) 

His campaign platform as a Republican emphasized civil rights and the welfare of the freed slaves, in which endeavor he was supported by Frederick Douglass. Voter turnout for the election was 78%, and he was elected by a narrow margin.

In the days that followed… Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring hi only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured – his time with his children, his books, and his farm – abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. (p. 64) 

The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a religious fanatic who was delusional to the point of frank psychosis. He borrowed $10 to buy a gun, used it to shoot the president not for any political or philosophical reason, but because he believed God wanted him to do it.

His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” (p. 237) 

The “insanity defense” was well established at the time. Interestingly, everyone at the time agreed that Guiteau was insane and that insane people were not liable for their actions. Everyone on the jury knew this also, but they were so angry that they basically said “he’s guilty – hang him anyway.”

Other interesting tidbits from the book: After Garfield was shot, the second physician who responded to the event was Charles Purvis, surgeon in chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital, 39 years old, one of the first black men in the U.S. to receive medical training at a university, and obviously the first ever to treat a president. (p. 140)

The White House of that era was like a slum residence, perpetually damp with rotting wood and vermin-infested walls and the odor of raw untreated sewage, situated next to a malarial tidal marsh. (p. 176)

Garfield was a Republican who embodied the party’s enthusiasm for helping immigrants, freed slaves, and impoverished people. He believed the key to improving the country lay in educating those people. (182)

It has been said that Guiteau did not kill the President – he shot him, but the doctors killed him by repeatedly probing the wound with ungloved, unwashed fingers. Guiteau used this argument in his own futile defense (“General Garfield died from malpractice.”). The bullet had lodged on the left side of his body behind the pancreas, but the attempts to find it on the right side resulted in profound septic sequelae:

One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile. (p. 196) 

He apparently developed septic emboli:

Just two weeks after the surgery, another abscess formed, this one on Garfield’s right parotid gland… the abscess had become so filled with pus that it caused his eye and cheek to swell and paralyzed his face. Finally, it ruptured, flooding Garfield’s ear canal and mouth with so much pus… that it nearly drowned him. (p. 216) 

The woefully incompetent Dr. Bliss treating him [“Ignorance is Bliss”] tried to cope with the president's rapid cachexia by feeding him intrarectally. The eventual cause of death (determined by autopsy) was hypovolemic shock following a rupture of the splenic artery (probably from a septic aneurysm).

Garfield does not get credit for any particular legislative achievements, because his time in office was too brief. Rather, his legacy is reflected in how his illness and death united the people of the country during the fractious time in the aftermath of the Civil War. And since Guiteau’s act had arisen in connection with the corrupt “spoils system” for giving out lucrative government job contracts, the popular revolt after the death led to the establishment of the civil service system. After his death, Garfield’s widow assembled his books and papers in a wing of their farmhouse, establishing the nation’s first-ever presidential library. 

The book is Destiny of the Republic. A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published by Doubleday in 2011. I'm pleased to add it to my list of recommended books.

Addendum 2016:
I am delighted to report that the superb television series American Experience has just released a program entitled "Murder of a President," about President Garfield; it is based on the book I reviewed above in 2012.  The two-hour program is playing on PBS stations around the country, and it can be viewed online here.

Reposted from 2016 because of the upcoming Netflix series Death by Lightning, which is scheduled to drop later this year.

Reposted from June because the Netflix series drops in two days.  Watched the first two episodes tonight.  They follow the history quite faithfully; it was a bit sad to watch because I know what's going to happen next.

"Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany"

This is an interesting longread about the Weimar Republic (Germany from the end of WWI until the mid-1930s).  It is a richly detailed book, and thus TMI for my personal needs, so I alternately browsed and read in depth various sections.

After WWI Germany entered a state of turbulent politics and economics.  There was civic turmoil because of internal dissension re the defeat in the war, combined with frankly chaotic economics leading to the famous hyperinflation.  Yet during this period there were major developments in lifestyle, employment (invention of typists and secretaries), fashion, sexual mores, architecture, automobiles, and design (Bauhaus). This book tries to cover as much of that as possible.  Herewith some excerpts and thoughts:

The Charleston dance was a life-changer for social interactions.  "The fact that one could dance the Charleston alone had consequences for the self-empowerment of the individual; to be able to join in solo on the dancefloor was nothing less than revolutionary." (xvii) (discussed in depth in Chapter 7)

Filmmaker Billy Wilder started his adult life as a gigolo in the dance halls of Berlin. (176)  After the war ended, Germans were crazed with the need to dance:

"Here and there two young girls dance together, sometimes even two young men; it's all the same to them.  They do it to the exotic sounds of the gramophone, which is fitted with robust needles to make it as loud as possible, and it rings out its shimmies, foxtrots and one-steps, its double foxtrots, African shimmies, java dances and polka creolas..." (180)

"The shimmy brought an unimagined freedom to the parquet.  Now people danced almost on the spot to whipped-up rhythms without touching one another... Where in the old days it would have been unthinkable to step on a dance floor without having first taken dancing classes, the new dances could only be learned by imitation..." (180) [followed by several pages of discussion of the shimmy]

"The rapturous experience of community in the ballroom grew even more intense in 1925 when the Charleston conquered the dance floors...  The Charleston turned dancers into acrobatic marionettes... The gramophone allowed people to dance at home and in the countryside... The Charleston was an uplifting dance.  It fired up the ego and inspired people to express their own emotions through dance.... The Charleston was particularly enjoyable for women.  They didn't have to be led, and were usually the more active, exuberant participants..." (186)

It was during this time period that "the weekend" was invented.  Two days off from work was revolutionary.

The cinema presented Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich, and was the top paid-for leisure activity.  "In the early 1920s most people didn't go to see a particular film, they just went to the cinema.  For that reason, many cinema owners didn't think it necessary to set a particular time for the screening to start.  Films were just shown one after the other, in any order.  People came and went... and watched for as long as they felt like it.  If the projectionist wanted to go home early he just played the film speeded up; silent films can take that.  More importantly there was no need for the audience to listen, so they made any amount of noise, chatted, applauded or commented bawdily on the action." (210)

Several chapters in the book discuss the great depression of the 1930s, when the country owed "reparations" to the West.  There were runs on the banks when hyperinflation went out of control.  Unemployment reached 30 to 40 percent of the population.  Then came the rise of the Nazis and of antisemitism.  Also major rifts developed between urban and rural populations.  There were calls for "an uprising by the countryside against the city... 

"...what one saw in the city was nothing but libertinism, women's emancipation, coarse language, and disrespectful irony...  Until the beginning of the depression these ingredients had constituted the charm of the liberal-left-wing Berlin cultural and media scene... but since optimism had fled from public life, the modernity of Berlin's cultural life seemed to have become more exclusive.  For those threatened by decline, the modern age felt less like freedom for all and more like pleasure for a few.  That intensified into the delusional claim that the modern arts were the destructive work of a corrupt elite that wanted to drive the soul out of the people  Hitler's campaign against 'degenerate art' would later be of prime importance for his success, because it included an assurance that the future volksstaat would be geared towards the taste of the people..." (316)

"... listening and looking more closely one could discern the gulfs of silence dividing society.  People liked to be among their own kind and held the rest in contempt,  Given the muddled state of things, even fewer people than usual were in a position to take anything meaningful from a discussion with people of a different opinion.  'Unity' and 'unanimity' were yearning words on everyone's lips, although there were only two ways of achieving either: through determined silence or brutal violence."  (330)

Most Germans had never learned to argue constructively.  They had been raised under the control of a Kaiser, and had done whatever they were told to do.  "When they jumped into freedom, few understood what it meant to take responsibility for oneself and consult with others in the abstract framework of democratic representation." (330)

"Opponents of the Berlin cultural scene had long asserted that it was indeed an island, but every milieu, every newspaper formed an island in itself, with its own opinion makers, whistleblowers and regular readers - an island where the opinions of outsiders were unwelcome.  Every political trend, every little party, the tiniest intellectual village had its own newspaper..  A form of the infamous 'filter bubble' or 'echo chamber' through which people can become intellectually isolated on digital networks in the present day also existed in Weimar Germany.  Reader and newspaper existed in a mutual relationship of confirmation bias; the newspaper wrote what the reader wanted to hear, and the reader stayed loyal as long as the paper didn't trouble him with unwelcome news." (332)

Three weeks after the 1933 election the members of the new Reichstag held their second meeting.  "On the agenda was Hitler's 'Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and Reich', also known as the Enabling Act.  This was intended to give the government the right to make laws independent of parliament and without regard for the constitution and constitutional rights..."  After a period of violence in the streets "the Enabling Act was passed with the necessary two-thirds majority, and democracy was abolished in an apparently democratic way."  (372)

The parallels between Weimar Germany and modern America are uncanny and deeply disturbing.  John Farrier, if you are on the acquisitions committee at your library, please advise them to consider this one.

Polio was the "autumn ghost"

So named because of its seasonality, poliomyelitis was the cause of worldwide epidemics in the 1950s.  This new book presents a detailed look at the 1952 epidemic (in which I was an unwilling participant) with a focus on its effects in Denmark.

"... until quite recently in medical history, there was no intensive care.  Seventy years ago anyone who struggled to breathe, whose heart gave out, or whose kidneys shut down would be kept comfortable and left to die.  There were no ventilators, no monitors keeping track of vital signs minute to minute, no expertise of nurses and physicians to keep critically ill patients alive, and no dedicated units in hospitals for the care of such patients... This is the story of how we got from 1952 to now."

The story in Denmark begins at Blegdam ["Blei-dahm"] Hospital in Copenhagen, created in the 1860s as a "fever hospital" for quarantine purposes in a busy port city.  Cases of cholera and various febrile illnesses arriving by ship would be sequestered here for isolation until resolution or death.  Polio patients came here for "care," but not for "treatment" - which was nonexistent.  

By 1952, some iron lungs were in use, especially in the United States, but those devices were immense, expensive, and difficult to use.  In response to a massive epidemic which was killing their children, the Danes discovered the utility of "bagging" via an endotracheal tube.  But no automated ventilators existed, so medical students were recruited to bag patients continuously, 24/7.  Chapter 13 "Student Ventilators" details the development and implementation of this policy.

Nursing care in that era "was rooted in the tradition of a life given over to the work - long shifts, residence at the hospital for life, and no marriage."  That also had to change.  Analysis of blood gases and arterial pH - never before attempted (or considered) - was also invented, as was the concept of an "intensive care unit," (a term first used in 1958).

This book will not be of interest to everyone.  It will have special meaning to current polio survivors, and should be a must-read for respiratory therapy students who want to learn about the invention of their profession and its tools.

Reposted from 2023 because today is World Polio Day (and because some U.S. states are using medieval thought processes to roll back polio immunization requirements).  If any readers of TYWKIWDBI have a post-polio syndrome (as I do), please check out the information at Post-Polio Health.

An Instance of the Fingerpost

"This is the best book I've read this year [2010].

Most reviews describe An Instance of the Fingerpost as a "historical mystery," but the mystery component is in my view a minor part of the book.  Granted, the plot does revolve around the question of who put poison in the wine bottle, but as a whodunit it would pale next to the works of classic mystery writers.  The value for me was to step right into the 17th century and get a sense of people's lives and attitudes and beliefs.

The story is told by four narrators (which, as my wife reminded me, is basically the format for Rashomon), and, as in that movie, the narrations differ on key points.  By the time I was on the third narrative, I started going back to read the first one again to compare salient points.  Doing so was not  onerous, because Pears writes in a style that's very easy to read, and despite writing about the 17th century he seems to avoid the temptation to litter the text with archaic words.

The most difficult aspect (for me, perhaps not for you) was that much of the action and motivation of the characters center on the Restoration of the English monarch in the 1660s, which I have never much understood, or frankly cared about.  But I did learn a lot about ordinary people's lives and the role of women and the birth pangs of medical science and the conflicts of religious dogma and the ethics of the time.

This is not a quick read; you're looking at some 600+ pages even if you don't flip back and forth to compare stories.  But it won't take long to figure out if you like it or not; I should think in an hour's time, after reading a chapter or two, you'll know whether or not you're going to enjoy it.

After finishing this book, I checked out another novel by this author (The Dream of Scipio), but found that one too cumbersome to follow as it shuttled between three people in different centuries; Pears is an art historian by profession and has written some mysteries about that field of study, so perhaps I should try one of those.

Those who have read the book, please feel free to chime in with your own thoughts."

Reposted from 2010 to add additional commentary:

For as long as I can remember I've been recording the titles of books I've read and given them a "grade" from 1-4+.  Those rated 3+ were worth the time and the 4+ are ones I might like to read again in the future.  Last year I posted in TYWKIWDBI a list of my 4+ rated books.

As I noted at that time in a comment, I'm reaching such an advanced age that common sense suggests that if I'm ever going to re-read the best stuff, I'd better get started.  So this summer I picked from my list this book, which I had read in 2010.  As I started the re-read I realized that there were important plot points I had forgotten, including the identity of the person who poisoned the wine bottle, and the ultimate fate of several key characters.  Which was good.

Once again I was in awe over the scholarship of the author, whose breadth and depth of knowledge about 17th century history, science, medicine,  law, ethics etc is extensive.  And again I was pleased by the style of the narration.  But once again I quickly tired of the details of 17th century royal politics and intrigue.  By the time I finished the first three sections by the "unreliable narrators" I was tempted to demote the book to a 3+.  But then I encountered the wonderful fourth section by the "truth-teller" (Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, if you want to keep track of him in the first 3 sections).  That final section sorted out all of the mysteries and puzzlements and discrepancies among the first three narrations, and I was delighted to discover anew the identity of the poisoner and the surprising fate of the principal characters.

I need to avoid any comments that might serve as spoilers, but I will append some notes I made during the second read...

Several references to the "elaboratory" of scientist Robert Boyle.  The word is now obsolete, but hints at the relation of "laboratory" and "elaborate."

A comment re a planned public dissection of a human cadaver elicits the comment that "All that will happen is that you will furnish a rarity show for any spoitty undergraduate who cares to come along and watch."  Perhaps related to the modern term "raree show" as cheap entertainment.

One character has an inflamed eye which he has been treating with ingredients he prepared himself... "What ingredients were they?"  "Dried dog excrement," he said.  "What?"  "I had it from my doctor... the king's physician... and a man of good family.  It is an infallible cure, tested through the ages.  A pedigree dog, as well.  It belongs to the warden." (p. 97)  The status of medical diagnosis and care of this period are recurrently cringeworthy.

After three characters eat at a tavern, they call for the shared pipe:  "... Wood took a sip of his drink, and called over to the serving hatch for a pipe to be brought.  Lower added his call for one as well, but I declined.  Not that I object to a little tobacco in the evening, especially when my bowels are tight, but sometimes pipes which have been overused by the general clientele of taverns do have a taste of sour spittle..." (p. 196)

"It had been a complicated case and the town was by no means convinced of her guilt.  She had killed a man whom she said had raped her, but the jury judged this a lie because she had fallen pregnant, which cannot occur without the woman taking pleasure in the act.  Normally her condition would have spared her the gallows, but she had lost the child and also any defense against the hangman.  An unfortunate outcome, which those who believed in her guilt considered divine providence." (204)  

"The old couple in charge of the house had promised us a hot bath when we introduced ourselves at midday and I was eager to take up the offer: I had not immersed since the previous autumn and felt that not only could my constitution stand it, my morale would be immeasurably lifted..." (207)

"... he knew nothing of the law and believed it to have something to do with justice.  As I had once done myself, until I studied it..." (293)                

"To gain a post worth £50 a year, a friend of mine had to lay out near £750 in bribes, all borrowed at interest, and consequently must defraud the government of more than £200 per year to live decently and pay his debts..." (318)

When asked why marriage does not appeal to her, a woman replies "To hand over my hard-earned fortune to my husband?  Be unable to do anything without his permission?  Risk being disinherited of my own money when he dies?  Oh, yes.  A wonderful dream..." (430)

"Euripides talks of Tithonus, whom Eos loved so well she begged Zeus to give him eternal life.  But mistakenly she asked not for youth as well and he suffered an eternity of decrepitude until even the cruel gods took pity on him."  The legend goes on to say that Tithonus was transformed into a cicada.

"In each generation the Messiah would be reborn, would be betrayed, would die, and be resurrected, until mankind turns away from evil, and sins no more." (845)  This is an ancient belief that is carried on in part in modern Hasidic traditions.

Here is the Wikipedia page describing and illustrating fingerposts.  The reference in the book title is to an aphorism from Francis Bacon: "When in a Search of any Nature the Understanding stands suspended, then Instances of the Fingerpost shew the true and inviolable Way in which the Question is to be decided.  These Instances afford great Light, so that the Course of the Investigation will sometimes be terminated by them.  Sometimes, indeed these Instances are found amongst that Evidence already set down."

Enough.  But in closing I will add this photo of the large-print edition I received from our library.  I should think some graphic designer or copyeditor caught hell for the design mistake...