Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Here at last is the third, very long, final part of my three part takedown of Incunabula's viral thread from early September.

To recap: there was a thread on Twitter by Incunabula that went viral last month. In James Burke-ian Connections style, Incunabula said that "Cheese ?? is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles." The history in that thread ranges from over simplified and inaccurate, through simply wrong, to a disingenuous lie. Today I'm mostly covering the part about "snails" aka Phoenicians, alphabets, and how printing would never have taken off if Gutenberg had used a syllabary or a logosyllabic script instead of an alphabet. Which is built on a lie.

Part one: cheese and Christianity/mostly over simplified and inaccurate. Part two: underwear/simply wrong. The original viral thread that I am laboriously beating to death.

( Read more... )

Yes, I know this thinky is not about snails/underwear either. I'll get to that, I promise.

You remember the story that was all over the news last week about how a comet/asteroid had blown up 3500 years ago over Tell el-Hamman on the shore of the Dead Sea, destroying the city, and this was covered as the source of the biblical legend of Sodom?

Well, buckle your seatbelts, it's going to get bumpy. The article in question, "A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea" was published in Nature Scientific Reports (*not* Nature itself, as was often misreported). Nature Scientific Reports is Nature's far less prestigious open access counterpart. The article says it's based on fifteen years of annual excavations, which in the world of archaeology is quite a lot: someone must be very well funded.

The owner of the Slacktivist blog noticed this line in the opening section of the article: (the excavation project is) "under the aegis of the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University, Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, NM." Both of those schools are bible colleges. Trinity Southwest is proudly unaccredited. Veritas International is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (ie, an association of bible schools that wanted to be able to say they were accredited).

Trinity started out as an in-person seminary in Oklahoma in the 80's. After moving to New Mexico and becoming a distance learning school, they affiliated with an unnamed overseas "internationally-known Bible college and seminary," then declared themselves a university in the early 90's. Although primarily doing distance learning, they say they offer in person classes as well. However, they have no campus: what physical locations they have are scattered along Journal Center Boulevard in Albuquerque. Their website is pretty minimal. Their library doesn't get a dedicated section on the website and just barely a mention in the student catalog that it exists. They do have their own press, though. And, they offer tours of the Holy Land for $4000 to see the sights, or $5000 if you also want to visit their archaeological dig at Sodom. Stuff they dig up at "Sodom" (aka Tell el-Hamman) goes on display in their very own archaeological museum in Albuquerque.

Veritas was founded as a seminary in 2008, and only decided to call themselves a university in 2017. Veritas's campus, as best I can tell from perusing the catalog, is one building, and their library has all of 4,000 paper books (unsurprisingly, the website gives a lot more emphasis to their digital resources). Library users are asked to bring their own computers, so the library doesn't really have terminals. They offer several doctor of divinity degrees, but just one PhD program: in biblical archaeology.

The websites of both of these schools are at pains to put their best face on and pretend that they are real institutions worthy of the name university despite not actually being anything like that. Trinity's campus is scattered, but there is no map in the student catalog or anywhere on the website showing where things are. While I think they don't actually offer in person classes except in a very minimal way, they do claim to have several physical resources and in person classrooms, and since those are not all in one place, there needs to be a map. But posting it to their site would be too much an admission of just how small and inconsequential they are. In the same vein, their catalog doesn't seem to differentiate between distance learning courses and actual in person classes. I think it's safe to say that they don't have many full time faculty other, perhaps, than a gaggle of distant adjuncts tasked with interacting with the distant learners who have been paying $250-ish per credit hour to support fifteen years of excavations in "Sodom."

Neither school provides basic academic information like the number of instructors or the number of students anywhere I could find. Also, unsurprisingly, neither school's website has a single word to say about COVID that I saw.

But, wait: there is more. The Tell el-Hamman paper has a very long list of authors. Only the last, Phillip J. Silvia, works at Trinity Southwest; all but one of the rest are affiliated with real universities, or else with real research laboratories. What's up with that? Turns out there's a second fly-by-night organization here, the "Comet Research Group." They get called out in the paper's acknowledgements for funding the research (as opposed to the excavations) behind the paper, and Allen West, the second to last author of the paper, is one of the CRG's founders.

The CRG is all about finding evidence that ancient comet/asteroid impacts caused local or global catastrophes. Before the Tell el-Hamman paper, they made a splash a few years ago with a proposal that the Younger Dryas, a thousand year cold snap that happened right at the end of the last ice age, was caused not by a shutdown of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, as is usually thought by ancient climate researchers, but by the impact on Earth of a swarm of cometary fragments, Shoemaker–Levy 9-style, that caused widespread destruction, a nuclear winter that extended the ice age by a thousand years, mass extinctions of megafauna, population collapse of early humans in the Americas, and so forth.

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been taken seriously by climate and ice age researchers who investigated its claims and found them mostly without merit. The only thing that seems to have come out of it is that there's a spike in platinum residue in sediment layers that are deemed to mark the start of the YD, in some locations, and that platinum could point to an asteroid or comet impact happening somewhere near the start of the YD... but the layers being pointed to as marking the start of the YD are not all the same age, there is no agreement that these identified layers are all in fact indicators of the start of the YD, the signs being found in those layers that are supposedly evidence of an impact, other than platinum, are all very debatable, and so on.

What's odd is that the CRG has not responded to the criticism and critique of their hypothesis by the scientific community in the usual way (going back to the drawing board, trying to find new evidence, pruning away some of the more extreme claims in their hypothesis and saying surely we can agree on this part, etc), but rather by refusing to share their samples and data with people who they deem to be "on the other side" of the debate. Much more about that here, and on Mark Boslough's twitter (see below).

The long list of CRG "scientists and members" on their website includes co-authors of papers who have otherwise had nothing to do with the CRG, as well as people who were not asked if they minded being listed as CRG members, and when they found out they'd been so listed, were upset at being included. Very classy.

And finally, one of the co-founders of CRG, Allen West, is not actually an academic, does not actually have an advanced degree, and has in the past, under a different name, been convicted of selling fraudulent water studies to California municipalities despite not being a geologist. So, a con artist passing as an academic and geologist who befriended the other co-founders, became infected with their obsession with cometary impacts, and proceeded to reinvent himself as a cometary impact specialist.

An earlier version of the Tell el-Hamman paper appeared a few years ago. That paper, "The 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization" was a conference presentation at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The ASOR (now called American Society of Overseas Research because someone realized their old name was racist, but they still publish a bulletin and hold an annual conference under their old name because, hey, still racists) dates back to 1900, when they were called the American School of Oriental Study and Research in Palestine. In short, they are the big leagues in the small (and sometimes dubious) field of biblical archaeology.

The ASOR presentation was by just 4 authors: Silvia and Steven Collins are both faculty at Trinity Southwest University. Ted Bunch is co-founder of the Comet Research Group, and finally Malcolm Lecompte, odd man out, is an emeritus faculty member at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Lecompte has a website: he does not list the ASOR paper in his vita.

Looking at all that, it seems that the CRG, an organization devoted to proving that comets killed the mammoths and extirpated our distant ancestors 13,000 years ago, is Very Good Friends with a bunch of young earth creationist "archaeologists." But the CRG seems to have a rather Trump/Republican approach to science: declare your dubious findings as proven, then label anyone who disagrees as an enemy and refuse to cooperate with them. So, maybe not such strange bedfellows after all.

There's a lot more about the Tell el-Hamman paper's shoddy research and dubious claims to be found in Mark Boslough's twitter account (Boslough is an *actual* asteroid impact researcher). (Boslough is just one of many who are tearing their hair out over the paper, thanks to Robin Reid for bringing his twitter threads to my attention). Unfortunately Boslough has been posting his thoughts in several short threads, and not always remembering to link them together. Here's a starting point, but you may not always get continuation links (I ended up going to his main feed and scrolling down to find the next thread, but I started at a different point and he may have gone back and fixed things since then).

And this concludes our journey into the realm of fake science getting published in real journals and covered as legitimate.

Eurocentric history tends to be very self-congratulatory. "(European guy) invented (arguably very important technology)," and "(historical change of import) happened because of (thing european or Greco-Roman people did)." It gets very tiresome, especially when the technology in question was actually invented hundreds or thousands of years earlier, far outside of the Euro-Greco-Roman sphere.

Today's example: a thread by Incunabula on Twitter. In James Burke-ian Connections style, he says that "Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓." Sigh. Burke's "Connections" blew my mind when I was eight. Because I was too young to notice how a shallow, facile and simplified, all white, mostly male narrative was being constructed from a far richer and larger history.

Today I'm tackling two of Incunabula's five things: cheese (parchment) and Christianity (the adoption of the codex). My primary source for most of what follows is an online version of "The Birth of the Codex" by Colin Roberts and T C Skeat, supplemented by Wikipedia and lots of blog posts/articles found via google. The online version of Birth of the Codex includes (in green and red text) incomplete edits and updates of the original book

1. "Cheese" (aka, parchment/vellum):
( Read more... )
How much did Christianity's extremely early and wholehearted embrace of codexes have to do with the switch from scrolls to codexes? Not a lot. Christians were a tiny minority in a vast empire until well into the 3rd century. By the time Christianity became a major force in the empire (~300 AD), the switch to codexes was already underway. Clearly the rise of Christianity to the empire's official religion in the 4th century greatly accelerated the transition, but the evidence doesn't point to Christians being the starter of the trend.