Exodus

1628 BCE, and later.

There are two great stories in the Western tradition that stand somewhere between legend and history: The Flight from Egypt and the Trojan War. Both have been scholarly battlegrounds, dismissed as pure invention by some, accepted as at least partly historical by others. In the case of the Exodus story, a great many archeologists nowadays are strong skeptics. Here I summarize what I think is the best argument for the other side.

Barbara Sivertsen, in her book The Parting of the Sea, argues that the Exodus story combines oral traditions arising from two different flights from Egypt. First, she suggests that some of the story reflects events around the time of a huge volcanic explosion, the largest in the last five thousand years, which destroyed most of the island of Thera (= Santorini) in 1628 BCE. Most of the Biblical plagues fit what would have been expected in northern Egypt at the time, and in the right time sequence. A tsunami reaching the Nile delta would have contaminated water, and caused fish to die off. Frogs would have been driven from the water. Caustic ash would have stung human skin (in later recountings, “stinging like gnats” was remembered as “stinging gnats”). Insects affected by ash would have sought shelter in people’s houses. Livestock outdoors would have died from breathing ash, and humans and livestock would have developed blisters. Eventually dust in the atmosphere would have precipitated hailstorms. The arrival of the heaviest part of the dust cloud would have shrouded the land in darkness. (Locusts, however, don’t fit the volcano story, and may be an embellishment or a coincidental plague.) All these developments would have precipitated a panicked flight from Egypt on the part of Israelites, led by Moses. (Lower – i.e. Northern – Egypt at the time was ruled by charioteer Hyksos invaders.) According to the archeological evidence, the Wadi Tumilat, an oasis/caravanserai east of the Nile commonly identified as the Biblical Land of Goshen, is abandoned at this time and left uninhabited for centuries.

Other authors have suggested that the Thera eruption had some role in the exodus, but Sivertsen thinks there was also a later flight. In the mid-1400s, Egypt had a significant population of prisoners of war employed as slaves at Tell el-Da’ba, a naval base on the Mediterranean. In Sivertsen’s account, a wave of deaths of Egyptian children led Pharaoh Tuthmose III, frightened of the Israelite god, to expel a group of Israelite slaves. The pharaoh changed his mind, however, and sent an army in pursuit of the slaves along the northern shore of the Sinai. We know that in the mid-1400s, another volcanic eruption, on the Aegean island of Yalli, sent a tsunami around the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. This tsumani caught up with the Egyptian army, but missed Israelites camped further inland. The event was spectacular enough to be melded with the earlier exodus story.

A major reason for skepticism about the exodus story is that it has been very hard to find evidence for an Israelite conquest of Canaan in the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE, which is when many accounts place the exodus. But if we follow Sivertsen in putting the first exodus much earlier, and allow that the “forty years” (a conventional formula) in the wilderness was really eighty years, then there is plenty of evidence for massive invasion and destruction of cities in Canaan in the mid 1500s, at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. Israelites could have been among the invaders of Canaan. Around 1550 BCE, the city of Jericho suffered an earthquake that knocked down some of the city walls. The city then burned to the ground, and was largely abandoned subsequently.

We saw earlier on Logarithmic History that oral history can preserve detailed memories of natural catastrophes for long periods of time. At the same time information about numbers and absolute dates mostly gets lost. It will be interesting to see how Sivertsen’s work holds up in the face of further discoveries.

Alpha Beta

You’re reading this in a version of the Roman alphabet. Like every other alphabet, it traces back to Proto-Sinaitic around 1700 BCE, devised by Semitic-speakers, who worked in the turquoise mines of the Sinai peninsula under Egyptian administrators, and were familiar with Egyptian script in its hieroglyphic and cursive versions.

The proto-Sinaitic script almost certainly used the principle of acrophony to assign

phonetic values to its signs. That is to say, the initial letter of the object represented

by each sign gives that sign its phonetic value. For example, the sign 

represents water, the word for which in Semitic languages is mem, and so this sign

represents the sound m. Likewise, 

represents a house, Semitic beth, and I therefore a b.

Click to access Simons_Proto-Sinaitic_Rosetta9.pdf

To any Egyptian scribes who saw it, this script must have looked like a laughably dumbed-down version of hieroglyphs, stripping signs of their meanings, then painfully spelling out with a whole string of characters what hieroglyphs often managed in a single sign or two. (It was complicated though: Egyptian hieroglyphs combined logograms standing for a single unit of meaning, phonetic markers, and determinatives narrowing down semantic and phonetic values). In its initial stages, the Proto-Sinaitic “alphabet” of 27 to 29 characters was still tied to the words of a particular language, but the letters would change their forms and evolve away from their iconic significance as signs for water, house, and so on. Th rly lphbts hd lttrs fr cnsnnts nly, whch wrks bttr n Smtc lnggs thn n Nglsh. The Greeks, adopting the alphabet from Phoenicians, would adapt some of signs to represent vowels.

Logographic writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs were devised multiple times: in Mesopotamia, China, and Meso-America. The alphabet however, was invented just once. All the alphabets of the world derive from or were inspired by earlier alphabets tracing back to Proto-Sinaitic. Alphabetic writing, an innovation with momentous consequences, does not look like a historical inevitability.

Patriarchal Age

The time of the Biblical Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is sometimes called the Patriarchal Age. If there is a kernel of truth to the Biblical stories, the Patriarchal Age probably goes back to the early third millennium. But the concept applies more broadly. A 2015 title says it: “A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture.” This figure shows it.

The left panel shows effective population sizes based on Y chromosome DNA, transmitted down the male line. The right panel shows effective population sizes based mitochondrial DNA, transmitted down the female line. The dramatic dip on the left panel, where effective population sizes go way down in the last ten thousand years, means that there was a period, from the initial spread of major language families to near the dawn of history, where just a few men were leaving lots of descendants in the male line. This must reflect a time when polygyny – some men taking multiple wives, others not reproducing at all – was common. But this pattern probably reflects more than just polygyny. It probably also reflects a continuing advantage, carried over many generations, for some male lines of descent. In other words, back in the day, not just did Lord Y (or whoever) have many wives and many sons, but his sons, his sons’ sons. his son’s son’s sons, and so on, had many offspring. This probably implies some kind of long-term social memory, such that that the “Sons of Y” or the “House of Y” had a privileged position for many generations, perhaps celebrated by the bards.

Australian Aborigines, subjects of several posts, often have high frequencies of polygyny, but mostly don’t keep track of genealogies over the long term. Men can tell you what kin terms they apply to other people, but they mostly don’t know their ancestry past a few generations. If I’m an Aborigine, it’s enough to know that my father called some other man “brother,” to know that I call that man “father” and that man’s children my “siblings.” I don’t have to know the actual genealogy. But many Eurasian societies have been different. People can give you a line of begats stretching back many generations. For example, Kirghiz boys from a young age were expected to be able to tell you their “seven fathers”, i.e. their father, their father’s father, and so on, for seven generations. Having prominent ancestors in the male line is a form of social capital. Even very large groups may claim descent from ancestors going way back. These stories – the tribes of Israel going back to the sons of Jacob, Greek patrilineages going back to the sons of Hellen (a guy, no relation to Helen of Troy), Indian Brahmins belonging to different ancestral gotras (patrilineal clans) going back to Vedic times – must have been heavily fictionalized. But maybe not completely.

Eurasian history is often told as the story the rise of states and empires. But it’s also the story of the rise of patrilineal descent groups (and the heavy policing of female sexuality to make sure of paternity in the male line). One thing we’ll see in posts to come is how the relationship between State and Clan played out differently in different civilizations.

Memory palaces

Writing greatly facilitates the storage and transmission of information. But even before writing was invented, people had figured out several techniques for storing large volumes of information in memory.

Poetry was one such technique. Imposing explicit, regular phonological and metric patterns on words arranged in lines, on top of the normal rules of phonology and syntax that operate in prose, can greatly facilitate memorization. The illiterate speakers of Proto-Indo-European had a considerable poetic tradition, although they probably were not doing word-for-word memorization. The Indian Brahmin heirs of this tradition, however, were memorizing enormous bodies of text, in some cases memorizing multiple Bibles worth of literature forwards and backwards, syllable by syllable, just to make sure nothing was lost.

Another powerful technique for memorization exploits human spatial cognition. The “method of places,” involves associating facts to be memorized with real or imagined spatial locations. The method was known to the ancient Greeks. Matteo Ricci (d. 1610), a Jesuit in China, thought this was one of the most valuable things he could teach the Chinese. A modern introduction is Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Lynne Kelly is a scholar who argues that the transmission of large bodies of cultural information by the method of places played a central role in many non-literate societies. In traditional aboriginal Australia, the landscape was not just a collection of physical sites and associated ecological resources, but was tagged with a large body of information. Walking through the landscape, in reality or in imagination, would call forth the associated facts. At least for someone in the know. Knowledge was power. Multiple stages of initiation passed on the carefully guarded stories and esoteric knowledge associated with particular places and paths. Some of this information was about mythology and social organization, some of it was practical knowledge of the environment, well beyond what any one individual could discover in a lifetime.

Kelly also argues that in more stratified (but still non-literate) societies, people were not just tagging the landscape with facts to be remembered, but were building substantial monuments to encode important information. She makes a case that the megaliths of Neolithic Europe, and Stonehenge in its initial stages, were memory palaces, built at the behest of knowledge elites, whose social position depended on their monopolizing a store of encyclopedic information.

She makes her argument here and here.

Build like an Egyptian

You might think that with the Egyptian pyramids being famous for thousands of years (they’re the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing) there wouldn’t be much new to say about them. But you’d be wrong. The Egyptians wrote down virtually nothing about their architectural methods; they may have worked with some kind of 3-D models – the Bronze Age version of Computer-Aided Design – rather than anything like blueprints. So we haven’t really known much about how the pyramids were built. In particular, it’s been a real puzzle how they moved building blocks to near the top of the pyramid in the later stages of construction. If blocks were moved along a straight ramp up the side of the pyramid, the ramp in the last stages would have had to be a mile long, and contained as much material as the pyramid itself. It also wouldn’t have fit on the Giza plateau. Recently, Jean-Pierre Houdin, a French architect, may have figured out how the problem was solved in the case of the largest pyramid, the Great Pyramid built for King Khufu (Cheops). According to Houdin, the builders used an external ramp for the early stages of construction. But they also built a vaulted internal ramp, spiraling around inside the pyramid, and moved blocks up it for the later stages. (And the builders economized by dismantling the external ramp and using it for construction material.) Houdin revealed his theory in 2005. Both before and since then he has put a huge amount of work into understanding how the Great Pyramid was built. For example, he may also have come up with an explanation for the 150 foot-long, narrow, slanting Grand Gallery in the pyramid: it looks like it was used to run counterweights on a trolley that helped to bring up some of the heaviest stones, the granite blocks used to reinforce the King’s Chamber.

Aristos

Perhaps the most important contribution of the Aryans to later civilization was the establishment of the aristocratic pattern which survived in Europe until recent times. … An aristocrat from one [European] nation could understand the attitudes and values of an aristocrat from another nation better than he could understand those of his own lower classes. The outdoor hunting life has been an aristocratic prerogative since the dawn of European history … The aristocrat had to be a good horseman, and in fact such terms as ritter and chevalier reduce to this. It has been said that even in 19^th century England any young man of the aristocratic class would much rather have his morals aspersed than his horsemanship.

The European nobleman was strictly limited in his occupations. He could not work on the land himself without losing caste, nor could he engage in trade. The one gainful pursuit which was open to him was horse and cattle breeding. … Intellectual and artistic pursuits were regarded with some contempt, once more following the original Aryan pattern. The aristocrat might act as a patron of the arts and science, but he was not supposed to engage in either himself. Until very recent times most European aristocrats have been poorly educated, and the schools designed for them have been more interested in “character building” than in providing the students with useful knowledge or practical skills. …

The aristocrat might go into the church, especially if he was a younger son, but religiosity was frowned upon … Sex mores retained the old Aryan casualness. Aristocrats were expected to marry within their own caste to ensure the legitimacy of their descendants, but no high degree of chastity was required either before or after marriage and the use of lower-class women in casual liaisons was taken for granted. …

Gambling and heavy drinking could also be indulged in by the aristocrat without loss of caste. The only requirement was that he gamble honestly and give his gambling debts precedence over all others … To cheat at cards was an unforgiveable sin, only one degree less deadly than physical cowardice. From the time of the first Aryan invasions, the chiefs had been expected to lead their followers in battle and to risk their own persons recklessly as an example to the rest. Since the supremacy of the aristocratic group rested upon the tradition of their superior courage and pugnacity, anyone who showed himself lacking in these was regarded as a traitor to his class.

Ralph Linton. The Tree of Culture. 1956

Write and wrongs

Here’s one account of the origin of the first system of writing in Mesopotamia:

The immediate precursor of cuneiform writing was a system of tokens. These small clay objects of many shapes – cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, etc. – served as counters in the prehistoric Near East and can be traced to the Neolithic period, starting about 8000 B.C. … The development of tokens was tied to the rise of social structures, emerging with rank leadership, and coming to a climax with state formation. Also, corresponding to the increase of bureaucracy, methods of storing tokens in archives were devised. One of these storage methods employed … simple hollow clay balls in which the tokens were placed and sealed. … Accountants eventually [turned to] imprinting the shapes of the tokens on the surface of the envelopes [balls] prior to enclosing them. An envelope containing seven ovoids, for example, bore seven oval markings. The substitution of signs for tokens was a first step toward writing. Fourth millennium accountants soon realized that the tokens within the envelopes were made unnecessary by the presence of markings on the outer surface. As a result tablets … replaced the hollow envelopes filled with tokens.

Schmandt-Besserac How Writing Came about

Examples of tokens and corresponding pictographs below:

And here is Claude Lévi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques) on the original function of writing:

Writing is a strange invention. One might suppose that its emergence could not fail to bring about profound changes in the conditions of human existence, and that these transformations must of necessity be of an intellectual nature. The possession of writing vastly increases man’s ability to preserve knowledge. It can be thought of as an artificial memory, the development of which ought to lead to a clearer awareness of the past, and hence to a greater ability to organize both present and future. After eliminating all other criteria which have been put forward to distinguish between barbarism and civilization, it is tempting to retain this one at least: there are peoples with, or without, writing; the former are able to store up their past achievements and to move with ever-increasing rapidity towards the goals they have set themselves, whereas the latter, being incapable of remembering the past beyond the narrow margin of individual memory, seem bound to remain imprisoned in a fluctuating history which will always lack both a beginning and any lasting awareness of an aim.

Yet nothing we know about writing and the part it has played in man’s evolution justifies this view. … If we ask ourselves what great innovation writing was linked to, there is little we can suggest on a technical level apart from architecture. … To establish a correlation between the emergence of writing and certain characteristic features of civilization, we must look in quite a different direction. The only phenomenon with writing has always been concomitant is … the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system and their grading into castes or classes. … At the time when writing first emerged, it seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a … likely explanation of the birth of architecture. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery.

The sheep and the horses

3275 – 2986 BCE

By today’s date, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European are probably well-ensconced in their homeland, either Anatolia/the Caucasus/Northern Iran or the steppes north of the Black Sea. Nobody was writing the language down, but scholars have reconstructed a lot of it based on its daughter languages, which include English, Irish, Latin, Greek, Polish, Sanskrit, and Hittite, among many others. In 1868, August Schleicher wrote a little tale in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. Here’s his version

Avis akvāsas ka

Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat.

And the English translation

The Sheep and the Horses

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

And here’s a sound file of the tale, based on more than a century’s linguistic work post-Schleicher, read aloud by linguist Andrew Bird.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F110085834&show_artwork=true&maxheight=938&maxwidth=625

Here’s a transcription of this version

 H₂óu̯is h₁éḱu̯ōs-k^we

h₂áu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osméi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁ést, só h₁éḱu̯oms derḱt. só g^wr̥h_xúm u̯óǵ^hom u̯eǵ^hed; só méǵh₂m̥ b^hórom; só d^hǵ^hémonm̥ h₂ṓḱu b^hered. h₂óu̯is h₁ék^woi̯b^hi̯os u̯eu̯ked: “d^hǵ^hémonm̥ spéḱi̯oh₂ h₁éḱu̯oms-k^we h₂áǵeti, ḱḗr moi̯ ag^hnutor”. h₁éḱu̯ōs tu u̯eu̯kond: “ḱlud^hí, h₂ou̯ei̯! tód spéḱi̯omes, n̥sméi̯ ag^hnutór ḱḗr: d^hǵ^hémō, pótis, sē h₂áu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ g^whérmom u̯éstrom u̯ept, h₂áu̯ib^hi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁esti. tód ḱeḱluu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is h₂aǵróm b^huged.

Uruk and the empires before history

3582 – 3276 BCE

The story of the evolution of civilization in Mesopotamia used to go like this. As people settled the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the late fifth millennium BCE on they organized themselves around temples that controlled irrigation and distributed rations. From the late fourth millennium, when the written historical record begins, temples were consolidated into city states that warred with one another, until eventually they were united by Sargon of Akkad (in northern Mesopotamia), who founded the first empire in the region around 2300.

But lately it’s been looking like there might have been a whole cycle of empire formation before the invention of writing. The archeological evidence shows that one city, Uruk (home of the legendary Gilgamesh, and probably the same as the Biblical Erech) in southern Mesopotamia had grown to dwarf others in the region by the mid fourth millennium. We find Uruk artifacts over a wide area, from western Iran to northern Syria and southeast Anatolia. These might reflect trade, and probably also settlement, with the establishment of Uruk trading colonies. But at one site at least, something else was going on. Homoukar, in northern Syria, is the site of a city contemporaneous with early Uruk. In 3500 the city was destroyed by hostile forces armed with slings and clay bullets. (The attackers also wiped out what looks like an Uruk trading settlement at Hamoukar, who maybe picked the wrong side to fight on.) The evidence points to Hamoukar having been subsequently occupied by forces from Uruk. We don’t know what kind of administrative control Uruk established, if any, but this does look like long-distance imperialism. Hamoukar is more than 400 miles north of Uruk.

The advent of writing (coming up tomorrow on Logarithmic History) marks a watershed in our knowledge of the past, but we might get a distorted view of social evolution if we assume that the only empires are the ones we know about because people wrote about them. Here are other possible Empires-Before-History, supported by varying levels of evidence or speculation, that we may consider as we continue:

• Xia China (A massive flood, said to have triggered the legendary dynasty’s birth, may actually have happened, almost 4 kya)
• Mycenaean Greece (often treated as a collection of statelets, but maybe a unified state. Mycenean Greeks maybe had better roads than classical Greeks!)
• The early Aryan Kuru realm in India (known from the Vedas)
• Cahokia in the American Midwest
• Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest

In the beginning…

… specifically 4004 BCE, God created the heavens and the earth. At least that’s the conclusion of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, in 1650. Ussher’s method – counting backward from the genealogies of Biblical characters – was quite precise. Others using the same method got very similar dates. Newton, for example, calculated 4000 BCE for Genesis 1:1. Kepler came up with 3992 BCE. And according to the current Jewish calendar, Anno Mundi (AM) 1 falls on 3761 BCE, 6 October, at sunset. However precision is not the same as accuracy. Ussher’s figure missed the correct date for the Big Bang by a factor of 2.4 million.

Traditional Indian thinkers got closer. According to the Law of Manu, different orders of beings have different natural time scales. For humans, the natural scale is given by the alternation between day and night. For the ancestors, one ancestral day-and-night equals one human month. For the gods, one divine day-and-night equals one human year. For Brahma, one Brahmanical day-and-night is a pair of kalpas, where a kalpa equals 1000 Great Ages (mahayugas) of the gods. A Great Age of the gods equals 12,000 divine years, which also equals four human Ages (of different lengths). A divine year equals 360 human years. So a kalpa comes to 4.32 billion years, very close to the true age of the Earth. A pair of kalpas misses the date for the Big Bang by a factor of just 1.6.

Further calculations show that a Great Age lasts 4.32 million years. We’re now most of the way through the present Great Age. At the beginning of a Great Age, Righteousness and Truth walk on four legs, but they have progressively fewer legs to stand on as the Great Age rolls along and everything goes to pot. So maybe the message is that the whole bipedalism thing hasn’t been such a great idea; we’ve got another 426,884 years (by one reckoning) of things going downhill until the next Great Age begins, and we return to quadrupedal righteousness.

Nonetheless, in honor of Ussher, from here on dates will be given as BCE / CE, rather than “years ago.”