Macarons ....

I took a Macaron-making class last month and have uploaded the photos to Facebook. The food porn is available here.

Human Sacrifice: When is a 'Tophet' a Tophet?

A study of the baby bones in the so-called Tophet at Carthage argues that they were a mix of females and males - not just first born sons - and that some were stillborn, whilst others died at a few months' old.

David Meadows has blogged the main evidence and points out the obvious (but too often ignored point) - when is a Tophet a Tophet, and when is it a child cemetery? His post is really worth reading and can be found here: Child Sacrifice at Carthage?

My view is that it's clear from ancient sources that the Carthaginians followed the Phoenicians and sacrificed humans. The extent to which they did this, and when they stopped, is unclear - but what I read into Diodorus Siculus says (20.14) is that the practise had not lapsed prior to Agathocles' invasion, but that the Carthaginians had been substituting others (foreign slaves) rather than sacrificing the sons of the elite:

They also alleged that Cronus had turned against them because, whilst in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, more recently, they had been secretly buying and raising children, and they had instead sent these to the sacrifice; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been fraudulently substituted.

The Romans sacrifices humans as officially sanctioned acts of state until the very end of the second century BC. In the early first century BC human sacrifice was outlawed, and we know of no more state-sanctioned human sacrifices - though private ones continued into the early Christian period. Earlier, human sacrifices had been considered by the Greeks before Salamis. To claim that the ancients were 'just like us' and didn't do these horrible things is naive - and attempting to re-write history.

Puppy Cuteness

Just click here - it's safe for work and cute as hell.

The Great Cheese Quest 2010

I had this idea of trying all forty something Appellation Controlee French cheeses. I'd ferret out the ones I could from various sources in London, then pop over to Paris on the Eurostar and pick up the rest. Ideally I'd also cook with them. Oh, and meet Mr Right as our eyes met over the cheese counter ... Then a producer would snap up the rights and make a movie where Meryl Streep plays me. (I'd do anything to avoid archaeology / war zones right now.)

But first the cheeses ... It's not going so well. It's not that I can't find them, it's that I can't $÷¤%£ well write about food. I can cook, I can eat, but I can't describe food. And it's a problem. Oh, and I'm convinced that most of the goat's cheeses taste the same, and are only edible when smothered in jelly or chutney. So Ms Streep is going to have some issues with this, I suspect. The recipes bit was going very well until I found myself kitchen-less (now).

In short, I have no recipes, I can't describe the cheeses, and unless I somehow manage to incorporate them in my love life, nothing to blog about them.

Luckily, I can make a few links between cheese and military history, so I'm clinging to these for dear life ...

Did you know that Greek and early Roman cheeses were soft, and strained in baskets (as in the Odyssey)? The first hard cheeses were developed by drying these out when cheese became a ration of the Roman army - soft curdy cheeses are more difficult to transport than hard one.

And whilst camembert has been around for a while - how long is a matter of dispute - it only became a popular cheese in France following the First World War. Soldiers had been given it as part of their rations, and continued to eat it when back at their homes and hearths.

The cheese illustrated below was used on battle wounds as early as the Merovingien and Caroligien periods. The mould that gives it its flavour is similar to modern anti-biotics.

So. Cheese. Good to eat. Difficult to write about. Integral part of military history.


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The Medieval Warm Period

This article is interesting as it's the first time a senior pro Global Warming scientist has admitted that the MWP could have been global (link below). The argument up until now has been that we only have evidence from the northern hemisphere, not the southern, so it was not global. The truth is that we have so little evidence from the southern hemisphere that ... well, one shouldn't really use lack of evidence to claim it didn't occur there. Lack of proof is not proof of a lack of warming.

The MWP is very well attested in terms of archaeology, particulaly in Greenland, which really was green then, and farmed. It came to an end after the Black Death in 1351 killed one in three in Europe. This is an interesting and over-looked point by climate skeptics; fewer people meant less farming (it also led to the Modern era and the end of serfdom), less farming meant more vegetation, and forests creeping back onto lands that had been fields. Surely that suggests that there could have been an element of human involvement in the earlier rising temperatures, if man's decimation can be linked to the falling temperatures at the end of the MWP?

An earlier warm period is attested in the archaeological record by finds such as Oetzi in the Alps. We know that thousands of years ago humans inhabited the lands now covered in glaciers; as the glaciers melt, we find evidence of their lives, and this would seem to contradict the argument that the Alpine glaciers have been there since the beginning of time.

Humans have always evolved to cope with climate change. One can even argue that had it not been for climate change, then the people who became the ancient Egyptians would not have moved from the once lush savannahs turning into deserts, nor settled on the banks of the Nile, nor founded what would become our first civilization. So we owe culture, writing, history, farming, music, poetry, and a thousand other delights, ultimately to ... climate change.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/textbased/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

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Jerusalem Mosaic and Street Match Up

A street just excavated in Jerusalem matches up with the Byzantine mosaic Madaba map. It's exciting as it suggests that the map is therefore accurate, and the buildings depicted must have been close in appearance.

The IAA press release in full below.


Main road of Jerusalem from the Byzantine era exposed

10 Feb 2010

Archaeological excavation in the heart of the Old City confirms the description on the Madaba Map and reveals Jerusalem's main road from the Byzantine period for the first time.

Remains of the 1,500 year old street in Jerusalem.
Photograph: Assaf Peretz, courtesy of the
Israel Antiquities Authority.


(Communicated by the IAA Spokesperson)

The Madaba Map – an ancient mosaic map in a church in Jordan from the sixth-seventh century CE, which depicted the Land of Israel in the Byzantine period, explicitly showed: the entrance to Jerusalem from the west was via a very large gate that led to a single, central thoroughfare on that side of the city.

Various evidence of the important buildings in Jerusalem that appear on the map has been uncovered over the years or has survived to this day – for example the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – but the large bustling street from the period when Jerusalem became a Christian city has not been discovered until now. The reason for this is that no archaeological excavations took place in the region due to the inconvenience it would cause in stopping traffic in such a busy central location.


Jerusalem as it appears on the Madaba Map (Photo courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority)



Now, because of the need for a thorough treatment of the infrastructure in the region, the Jerusalem Development Authority has initiated rehabilitation work and is renewing the infrastructure in this area in general, and next to the entrance to David Street (known to tourists as the stepped-street with the shops) in particular. Thus it is possible for both archaeologists and the public to catch a rare glimpse of what is going on beneath the flagstone pavement that is so familiar to us all.

From his knowledge of the Madaba Map, Dr. Ofer Sion, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, surmised that the place where the infrastructure will be replaced is where a main road passes that is known from the map. "And indeed, after removing a number of archaeological strata, at a depth of c. 4.5 m below today’s street level, much to our excitement we discovered the large flagstones that paved the street." The flagstones, more than a meter long, were found cracked from the burden of centuries. A foundation built of stone was unearthed alongside the street on which a sidewalk and a row of columns, which have not yet been revealed, were founded. According to Dr. Sion, "It is wonderful to see that David Street, which is teeming with so much life today, actually preserved the route of the noisy street from 1,500 years ago."

During the Middle Ages a very large building that faced the street was constructed on the stone foundation of the Byzantine period. In a later phase, during the Mamluk period (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries CE) elongated rooms were built inside this structure, some of which are vaulted; these were apparently used as shops and storerooms. It turns out that beneath this building – right below the street that runs between David’s Citadel and David Street and leads to the Armenian Quarter – is an enormous cistern, 8 x 12 meters and 5 meters deep, which supplied water to its occupants.

The Madaba Map is an 8 x 16 meter mosaic map that was built in a church in Madaba, Jordan and described the Land of Israel through the intimate knowledge the mosaic’s builder had of the country. The map depicts schematically all of the Land of Israel, with an emphasis on the Christian sites in it. Among other things that appear on the map are many of the churches they began to erect at this time when the city underwent a religious change from paganism to Christianity. The churches can be identified by the red roofs that are portrayed on the map.

The artifacts that were discovered in the excavations include an abundance of pottery vessels and coins and five small square bronze weights that the shopkeepers used for weighing precious metals.

The Fall of Baghdad 1258

Today in 1258 Baghdad was lost by the Abbasids to Hulagu Khan and his Mongolian forces. During the sack of the city the Great Library and its books were destroyed, although in the long run the invasion led to a flourishing of learning under the Ilkhanid Dynasty.

Image from a copy from the 1430s of the
Jami al-tawarikh(Compendium of Chronicles)
by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani
now in the BNF, Paris
[source]

Champagne Coupes Are Back?

Riedel have started making them again, and whilst flutes are better for serving champagne in the sense that the shape means that bubbles rise more slowly to the surface so preserve the 'essence' of the drinking experience ... There is something rather decadent and nicely retro about drinking champagne out of coupes. And who drinks champagne that slowly that one needs to preserve the bubbles for an hour?

I'd like some coupes, as I secretly want to build one of those pyramids of glasses one sees in old movies, then pour champagne into the top glass and see it cascade down ... (Yes, I am the girl who put her PhD to good use by trying to re-create the Ferrero Rocher pyramid from those infamous ads).

But the million dollar question is ... If champagne coupes were modelled on Marie Antoinette's breasts, then what were champagne flutes modelled on? Louis XIV's ...?

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