Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

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):
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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.

Blog post 1: The Unmitigated Pedantry blog mentioned in passing today that while in medieval Europe, fortifications were built with thin stone walls which were very easy to destroy with the early, crude cannons of the 1400's. In China, on the other hand, fortresses were built with thick earthen walls lined with a thin layer of bricks, which were immune to early cannons.

Both places had access to the same kind of early artillery technology at roughly the same time, but in China, cannons were seen as a novelty of not much use. In Europe, the earliest, crudest cannons were a game changer, enabling the conquest of forts and cities without long sieges, leading to massive shifts in power as those who could afford cannons conquered their smaller, poorer neighbours, until the only nations left standing a few centuries later were countries that could afford the massive expense not just of cannons, but of building lots of all-new cannon-proof fortifications to defend their territories.

And this military transformation within Europe fed into other interacting factors to transform Western Europe from a poor backwater that was decidedly weaker than the vastly larger, more populous and far richer nations of Central and Eastern Asia, into a colossus of conquest that took over the entire world in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The question that the Pedantry blog did not address was why China built their forts so differently than Europe.

Which brings me to another blog post from last year: The Analog Antiquarian has been posting multpart essays about the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World for a while now. Sadly he is not a historian and sometimes uses old and outdated books as his sources, and I have found his novelistic approach sometimes offputting. But one thing I learned from his series a while back: archaeologists have never been able to find the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, of ancient clickbait fame ("You'll never guess what building is number six on our list of the 7 most awesome structures worth seeing in the world!").

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon seem to have never actually existed in Babylon. Although there are scholars who think something like what was described in the ancient lists did in fact exist in Nineveh. Although this just trades one mystery (where is it) for another (why did so many writers of the ancient world mix up two very distinct cities?)

But in the process of explaining the non-discovery of the Hanging Gardens by modern archaeologists, the Analog Antiquarian highlighted something I had already sort-of known: that ancient Babylon left behind very few ruins, because of its location. In the middle of a vast floodplain, quite far from any hills or mountains, with nothing but silt beneath their feet as far as they could dig, ancient Babylonians built everything, from hovels to palaces, out of mud brick. Which over the millennia, has completely eroded away into subtle mounds on the landscape, plus, sometimes, ceramic tiles that once decorated the outer layers of the walls of more elaborate buildings.

For instance, we have today a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate. The wood of the gate rotted away, and the mud brick of the walls that flanked it eroded to nothing, leaving only the ceramic tiles which adorned it and made it splendid enough to get on the original lists of World Wonders (until a later revision bumped Babylon's walls and gates to make room for the Lighthouse of Alexandria). German archaeologists dug up the tiles of the gate in the 30's, took them home, and reconstructed the gateway: today you can see it in Berlin's Pergamon Museum (Nazi funding meets colonial archaeology, sigh).

Thinky thoughts produced: China, like Babylon, is a civilization centred on floodplains (the Yellow and Yangtze rivers), where stone has to be imported and the easiest and cheapest way to build fortifications is with earth. And naturally when China's rulers expanded beyond the floodplains, they stuck to known and familiar technology, continuing to build fortifications with thick earthen walls even when stone was available. So they never had the kind of thin masonry walls that primitive cannon were useful against.

Whereas the nations of Europe are mostly not centred on vast floodplains where stone is hard to come by. Stone was the first thing they reached for when they needed to build a fireproof fortification, until cannons made such walls obsolete.