From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1999 #314 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Tuesday, November 9 1999 Volume 1999 : Number 314 Re: ane michugas ane Re: The Purple Fleece ane Re: dendrochonology ane Best products: ? Better results: please! ane NWS links ane Conf.: "Ancient Studies -- New Technology: The World Wide Web and Scholarly Research, Communication, and Publication in Ancient Byzantine, and Medieval Studies" ane notes and news from Egypt Re: ane Unicode is here [was: transliteration] ane Aegean Dendrochronology Project ane Ulu Burun Dendro Date ane Dissertation to HTML ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 06:57:11 -0400 From: "Peter T. Daniels" Subject: Re: ane michugas Well, you won't find it on the quarterly posting of the scope of ANE List ... Donald R. Vance wrote: > > Excuse me? Says who? > > On 11/6/99 5:08 AM, Peter T. Daniels, with the address of > grammatim@worldnet.att.net, did pen the following: > > -snip- > > > >Prescriptive grammar has no place on ANE List. - -- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 08:04:30 -0500 From: Steve Berlant Subject: ane Re: The Purple Fleece Having read Morris Silver’s attempt to “economically” link gold and the Golden Fleece to the purple dye (murex) and dyed cloth, I could not help but chuckle, for the real questions Mr. Silver should have answered were the most important ones, and the very ones he left hanging: (1) Why was the Golden Fleece associated with a sacred tree and a serpent? (2) What did Jason learn from Cheiron, the Centaur, to whom he reportedly apprenticed?; (3) What is the significance of Jason wearing only one “magical” sandal?; and (4) Why was purple dye and cloth so prized in antiquity, especially by rulers?. The answers to all these questions survives as a relic of fungal folk lore of the greatest antiquity in, of all places, the following German children's verse: Ein Mannlein steht in Walde (A manikin stands in the wood) Ganz still und stumm. (Stock still and mute) Er hat von lauter Purpur (HE HAS OF PURPLE PURE ) Ein Mantlein um. (A MANTLE AROUND HIM) Sag' wer mag das Mannlein sein (Say, who may the manikin be ) Das da steht auf einem Bein? (WHO STANDS THERE ON ONE LEG?) Gluckspilz! Fliegenpilz! (Happiness mushroom! Fly agaric!) (For the relationship between this poem and prehistoric anthropoid figurines, see my paper "The Prehistoric Practice of Personifying Sacred Mushrooms" forthcoming in the Fall/Winter issue of The Journal of Prehistoric Religion). Why was purple dye and cloth so prized in antiquity by rulers? Purple and crimson were royal colors because the caps of entheogenic A. muscariae are often dark red, and the caps of equally entheogenic psilocybes are characterized by their tendency to turn blue or purple when they are touched. These mushrooms have the strange ability of making people who ingest them believe they are divine, and classical period kings were descendants of prehistoric herbalistic,shamanic priest-kings who first came to believe that they were divine after they had ingested such caps. Hence these kings often wore red or purple mantles as a way of identifying themselves as incarnations of the spirits of the deities they believed dwelled first in these mushrooms and later in themselves; (i.e., because of a deeply, psychologically rooted principle of sympathetic magic that attributed the effect a food had on a person to the reincarnation of the food’s spirit in the person). Why was the Golden Fleece associated with a sacred tree? In addition to the typically red A. muscaria caps, a relatively rare A. muscaria variety has a bright yellow cap, which was thus depicted and allegorized as golden. But regardless of the color of an A. muscaria’s cap, it will grow from a primordium that is covered with white, bioluminescent studs on or intimately associated typically with conifers, and occasionally with oaks. Consequently, A. muscaria primordia were often depicted and spoken of metaphorically in antiquity as a little sheep lying curled up next to trees. For instance, the Rig Veda says of Soma "The Soma rests in his well appointed birthplace. The hide is of bull, the dress of sheep," referring to the red cap of an A. muscaria underlying the primordium’s white studs. (Wasson, Soma: Magic Mushroom of Immortality.) The ram in the Mycenaean terra cotta vessel (cf. Melena 1987a: 407)” Mr. Silver depicts in his essay is thus neither all white, as it should logically be, nor all purple: it is white punctuated by purple because it was intended to metaphorize the studded red and white A. muscaria primordium as a ram — just as Vedic priests had metaphorized their bull-god Soma as having the hide of bull and the dress of sheep. In other words, Mr. Silver's ram is a graphic depiction of the same figurative terminology that caused a mycologist to name a close, relative of the A. muscaria the Amanita floccocephala < Latin “floccus” ‘wool” and New Latin “cephala” ‘head’. (BTW, I believe it was Indra who was said to raise sacred, purple cattle, of all things, for the same reasons). With respect to the association the fleece had with trees, Mr. Silver points out that in Hittite myth: " . . . the god who disappears [Telipinu] the kursa of a sheep is hanging from an evergreen tree [eyantree or pole] filled with all good things like 'sheep's fat, (abundance of) grain, (wild) animals, and wine, cattle and sheep, long lifetime, and progeny'" Clearly, the eyantree is a symbol of wealth/prosperity (Westbrook and Woodard 1990: 649). (Recall that in one version of the Argonaut Epos the Golden Fleece is draped over an (evergreen?) oak tree [Ap.R. 4.12225].)” The evergreen here is in fact a prototypal form of the Christmas tree which today has hanging from it, not a luminous fleece or apples, but little glowing typically red, white, blue and gold balls, all symbolizing the round, bioluminescent, A. muscaria primordia and mature mushrooms caps which once underpinned all pagan stories of sacred trees.(The sheepskin is today perhaps represented by the white mat that usually lies under the tree). Such trees was anciently worshiped as the earthly abodes of the ingestible spirits of tree deities and, thus, the source of all good things. But today, instead of yielding fat, (abundance of) grain, (wild) animals, and wine, cattle and sheep, such trees yield VCRs, CD players, cell phones. Why was the Golden Fleece associated with a serpent? As I pointed out on several occasions, most recently with respect to the significance of the serpent in the Allegory of the Fall, serpents were anciently symbolic of poisons and, particularly, those that could induce spiritual rebirth, like the ego death and spiritual rebirth that accompanies the ingestion of entheogenic mushrooms. These rebirths were the source of divine knowledge that underpinned the Divine Right of Kings. Hence serpents were intimately associated with and symbolic of many kings, like Kekrops, Erectheus and Egyptian kings, who wore the uraeus. The picture of Jason being disgorged by serpent in front of a tree bearing the Golden Fleece (c. 480) in Mr. Silver’s essay is thus actually a picture of Jason being spiritually reborn from a serpent — i.e., as a king — under a sacred tree that bore the wooly, bioluminescent, A. muscaria primordium as a fleece, in a Greek analogue of the phenomenon the Hebrews attempted to deprecate in The Allegory of the Fall. It is therefore not coincidental that sheepskins came down through history as symbols of knowledge. (5) What is the significance of Jason’s wearing only one sandal? As Mr. Silver also noted, “the single bronze sandal symbol of Hecate[served as the] magical sign of the ability to descend into the underworld." The significance of this single sandal, single legs, single feet and their associations with the underworld is that entheogenic mushrooms were depicted as early as the Upper Paleolithic period as one legged, one footed deities, for the obvious reasons stated in the above children’s tale. Thus ancient sculptures of a single foot are found in many parts of Greece, (see Bjorn and Forsen, A Prehistoric Foot from Argolis Journal Prehistoric Religion ???), and a single foot came down through history figuring prominently in many of the worlds legends and artworks. (4) What did Jason learn from Cheiron, the Centaur to whom he reportedly apprenticed? I’ll defer to Robert Graves’ forward to His Greek Myths for the answer to this question: "Since revising The Greek Myths in 1958, I have had second thoughts about the drunken god Dionysus, about the Centaurs with their contradictory reputation for wisdom and misdemeanour, and about the nature of divine ambrosia and nectar. These subjects are closely related, because the Centaurs worshipped Dionysus, whose wild autumnal feast was called `the Ambrosia'. I no longer believe that when his Maenads ran raging around the countryside, tearing animals or children in pieces and boasted afterwards of travelling to India and back, they had intoxicated themselves solely on wine or ivyale. The evidence, summarized in my What Food the Centaurs Ate (Steps: Cassell & Co., 1958, pp.319343) suggests that Satyrs (goattotem tribesemen), Centaurs (horse-totem tribesmen), and their Maenad womenfolk, used these brews to wash down mouthfuls of a far stronger drug: namely a raw mushroom, amanita muscaria . . .” In other words, the wisdom of Centaurs was attributed to the affinity they had for fruits of what the Bible calls Trees of Knowledge — i.e, A. muscariae. Now, as for the real, hidden meaning of the Allegory of the Golden Fleece, it can be now found in the following enigma Mr. Silver mentions: “Jason himself is directly associated with purple by Pindar. After his father had been deposed as king, Jason was spirited away"swathed in purple" and handed over to the centaur Cheiro_n for rearing (Pi. Pi. 4.11315; see Appendix 2.d). Jason's royal birth and his claims to kingship at Iolkos might explain the purple. Yet Pindar (N. 4.54) and other early sources including Pherekydes and a Hesiod fragment say that, Akastos, son of Pelias, became the king at Iolcos. Matthew (1977: 2056) notes this discrepancy and surmises that it is possible that in the early versions Jason had no claim to the throne at all, but was a mere adventurer or the instrument of an oracle ... Certainly, no source earlier than Pindar (P. 109ff) states explicitly that Jason had a legitimate claim. ... Such a situation would be in keeping with the tradition that Jason did not remain there. If Pelias was not a usurper and if Jason had no claim to the throne, then Jason "swathed in purple" may well be a clue to the nature of his commission.” In fact, Jason “commission” was to search for himself and, thereby recognize that he was both divine and royal. The Golden Fleece is then recognizable as an allegorized search for the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge, which would allow Jason to recognize that his was the Divine Right of Kings,thereby giving him the spiritual basis to reclaim his kingdom. That fruit was actually given to him as a drug by Medea, and the rest of the story is mainly padding. Finally, Mark Odegard wrote: “The oftmentioned story of using a sheepskin to capture fine alluvial gold (gold dust presumably) seems plausible enough, but the red fleece of the Hittites, and the golden sheep of Helios, and as some of the ancients insisted, the golden sheep (instead of apples) of the Hesperides, introduces additional questions. Are we talking about Murux purple? Or are we talking about gold? Or are we speaking of sheep with white wool that dyes to a beautiful purple, and makes cloth worth its weight in gold?” It’s very, very difficult to teach people who tend to take symbols and allegories literally how to think mytho-poetically, like Greek poets and wordsmiths did. Suffice it to say, though, that the fleece, the golden apples and Adam’s and Eve’s apple were clearly equivalent: all three represented the entheogenic mushroom A. muscaria that grew on sacred trees which were known in antiquity as Trees of Knowledge and Trees of Life. In fact, the Greek word for the golden fleece "krusomallon" is cognate with malista “above all”, and was derived alliteratively using the same root that yielded IE words for good, bad and apples (m + vowel+ l) , for reasons I pointed out in the earlier in the ane thread on apples. Regards, Steve Berlant Societas Hermeneuticas Swarthmore Ave. Box 101 Swarthmore, PA 19081 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 07:17:18 -0600 From: Jeff Blakely Subject: ane Re: dendrochonology Hi John Charles Deaton asked: > I was not aware that a complete sequence of tree rings going back to the >fourteenth century BC had been established. Could someone tell me how far >back the current state of Dendrochronology has been able to give year dates? Probably the most accessible article is Kuniholm et al, "Anatolian tree rings and the absolute chronology of the eastern Mediterranean, 2220-718 BC," Nature 381 (27 June 1996), pp. 780-783. See references there to the world wide growth anomaly of 1628-1621 BC, which was isolated in a dendrochronological sequence that extends back from today some 10,000 years and more. For that see M. G. L. Baillie, A Slice through Time: Dendrochronology and Precision Dating (London: Batsford, 1995). These data are further examined and extended in a book entitled something like From Moses to Arthur (maybe From the Exodus to Arthur), also by Baillie about 1998. Here his dendrochronological materials are good, but his stretch into the biblical chronology and other things can only be described "incredible" Jeff jblakely@facstaff.wisc.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 19:23:14 +0200 From: Naccache Subject: ane Best products: ? Better results: please! On Sun, 07 Nov 1999 Jonathan Lewinsohn wrote: >... Those willing to invest in the best products >shall and will produce better results, ... Dear Jonathan, I am not picking on you, just taking this opportunity to raise two points important for the enjoyment of those of us receiving ANE-digest. 1 - Following your message, my digest had lost all formatting, and became very hard to read! (I use Eudora, like many people). You are not the only one guilty, it is happening nearly daily. Please, all of you, use a product that does not mess up the digests. 2 - Furthermore, appended to your message were 8 K (!) that had no information content (the message you quoted had just been posted, and your program/product sent your message in TWO copies). Again, you are not the only one guilty. For an outstanding illustration of space-wasting, check out Digest 306 in the archives (note that this masterpiece was achieved without even the benefit of double copies! but then, Digest 306 was mainly contributed to by some of the posters most regularly guilty of this minor sin -tickle, tickle ;-) So, my plea to all guilty posters, please don't be afraid to rein in your spontaneity, and give it the few seconds it takes to clean up your postings, whatever product you use, Thanks very much in advance, Albert (aka Abu Nidal/Ousama Ben Laden/Saddam Hussein) Naccache Beirut, Lebanon anaccash@nidal.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 19:03:41 +0100 From: "Reinhard G.Lehmann" Subject: ane NWS links The Northwest Semitic Linkpage is updated now. Maybe you take a look at: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/link.html and tell me what's going wrong or what to do better. reinhard g.lehmann - -- ***************************************** Reinhard G. Lehmann Lecturer for Classical Hebrew and Old Aramaic Johannes-Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz D - 55099 Mainz tel: +49 - 6131 - 39 3284 mailto:lehmann@mail.uni-mainz.de look at http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/link.html ***************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 14:14:55 -0500 From: "Charles E. Jones" Subject: ane Conf.: "Ancient Studies -- New Technology: The World Wide Web and Scholarly Research, Communication, and Publication in Ancient Byzantine, and Medieval Studies" Forwarded on behalf of the undersigned, to whom responses and inquiries should be directed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Please submit abstracts, and pass along the word to colleagues you know who might be interested. Thanks. "Ancient Studies -- New Technology: The World Wide Web and Scholarly Research, Communication, and Publication in Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval Studies" Dates: December 8-10, 2000 Location: Salve Regina University, Newport, RI Conveners: Michael DiMaio, Salve Regina University Ralph Mathisen, University of South Carolina Thomas Martin, College of the Holy Cross Prospectus: Classical, Medieval, and Byzantine scholars have long relied on academic symposia and printed media to disseminate the fruits of their research. In the last two decades, the Internet and the World Wide Web have made new forms of publication possible. Electronic journals have been founded, such as the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Academic websites, including De Imperatoribus Romanis, Perseus, Diotima, ORB, Lacus Curtius, the Stoa, and the Medieval Sourcebook, provide wide audiences with primary materials, scholarly studies, and access to other resources. Search engines like Argos have been developed to help navigate the rapidly multiplying opportunities of this new medium. On the other hand, the Internet has not yet established itself altogether successfully as a medium of scholarly communication, because systems for validating and endorsing the material published --peer review-- have lagged behind delivery. This conference will address how this deficiency can be remedied. Participants are invited to discuss how best future web sites may be developed in the fields of Classical, Medieval, and Byzantine studies, how existing web sites may be validated by peer review, how electronic publications may recognize and adopt appropriate standards, how electronic resources may integrate vertically to address specialist and non-specialist audiences simultaneously, and how the many facilities and resources of the Internet may become known to the audiences which can benefit from them. Interested participants should please send a 500-word abstract of the presentation they propose, to Ralph Mathisen, , no later than April 1, 2000. Individual presentations at the conference will be limited to twenty minutes. Text will be made available on the Web in advance of the conference. The conveners will also entertain suggestions for roundtables and panel discussions: please send queries to the address above, as soon as possible. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 16:26:16 -0700 From: Eugene Cruz-Uribe Subject: ane notes and news from Egypt I have recently returned from a month of travel in Egypt while working on a project dealing with Demotic graffiti. I thought I would pass on a few tidbits for everyone that may be interested. 1) Kent Weeks' Theban Mapping Project is going full steam ahead (with the able support of Ted Brock) and they are planning to have it available in time to sell at the ICE conference in Cairo in March. The initial version will be a CD rom. What Ted showed me so far is quite impressive. 2) While in Akhmim, the chief inspector allowed me and Dr. Adel Farid into the magazine where we got to look at a new trilingual stela found near Gebel Sheikh Haridi earlier this spring. It seems Christopher Kirby was working at a temple site and after he finished his field season, the Inspectorate continued work and found the 1.5 meter high limestone stela on the floor of the small temple. The inscription says it is supposed to be a trilingual inscription, but only the hieroglyphic and demotic versions were carved. The lunette has a winged Behdet and the king making an offering to a group of deities. The text dates to year 5, 2nd month of inundation of Ptolemy, son of Ptolemy and Arsinoe (=Ptolemy III). Unfortuantely we were not allowed to copy the text or to take photographs. The stela is scheduled to be published by Yahyah (sp?) el Masri. He has resisted approaches from several scholars to assist on working on the text. 3) I had the chance to visit Bahariya Oasis and try and see the "Valley of the Mummies" of recent TV - National geographic fame. The site is off limits to everyone, though the chief inspector did let us see the 5 mummies that they have removed to a room in the back part of the Antiquities Office in town. The mummies are not bad for Roman period mummies, but maybe not worth the hoopla. For permission to see any of these items you need to contact Zahi Hawass prior to going out to Bahariya. To see from a distance the "Valley of the Mummies" the best way is to go out to the temple of Alexander the Great (ruins thereof), lokk about 1 1/2 kilometers to the west and you will see a hut on a hill and that is where the Roman cemetary is located. What I found much more interesting was the 4 foot statue of Bes which the local antiquities people found in a small temple dedicated to Bes located in town. While in Cairo Zahi Hawass did give a public lecture at the ARCE offices. It was quite a impressive. He informed all that they will be digging again soon and he wants to expand the excavations to include some sort of regional survey. He slides of the mmmies were (naturally) quite good. 4) When I arrived in Cairo at the beginning of October there was a report in Cairo Today that the cemetary of Ain Umm Debadib in Kharga oasis had been attacked by tomb robbers. Since I was planning to visit that site, I was most concerned. The site is located about 30 kilometers north of Kharga City just below the northern escarpment of Kharga Oasis. Indeed, tomb robbers had plundered the entire cemetary located up on the cliffs east of the town and fort. Mummy wrappings and many pieces of mummies are scattered all over the hill side. Every single tomb in the cliffs (about 20-30) was cleaned out. 5) While visiting with the French team excavating at Douch and manawir in the southern end of Kharga Oasis, I had a great conversation with Peter Dils. He informed me that the stone temple at Tarakwa (about 15 km, north of Kharga City) had been plundered. I had visited the site in 1995 and discovered that the temple and gateway were intact and buried to the roof line with only the very top most roof blocks intact. recently robbers took a back hoe to the site and removed all of the inscribed blocks simply by shoveling them out and dumping the uniscribed items in a pile nearby. Dils mentioned that Fakhry had described the temple in an article, but I d nothave that reference. If anyone can pass on to me this reference by Fakhry, I would appreciate it. More to come. ECU ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 20:38:48 -0500 From: Tim -Shemayah- Phillips Subject: Re: ane Unicode is here [was: transliteration] Waaaaa waaa ---talk like that will be a sure ticket to the recycle bin when you leave this earth. Please, Bill, forgive him for he knows not what he says!!! ;-) Just kidding John!! ;-) I believe the whole idea of unicode is that it is supposed to be platform independent, unlike truetype, adobe, or whatever. It is to be a more Open affair that should appeal Linux folks, and has enough bits to allow the cuneiform instead of transliteration if desired. If there is a Hebrew Unicode font quickly adopted by OS providers then it will probably become the standard following a path of least resistence. Actually I think I can produce Unicode fonts now (Jack K. probably knows this too) in programs like Fontographer, although I haven't tried. Be optimistic. MicroSoftly yours, Tim Phillips John McKendry wrote: > laura@rconnect.com wrote: > > > > In the coming months (when W2000 is released), > > Unicode should *finally* become useable in email. > > > I would venture to guess that I am not the only reader of this > list who does not use Windows, any flavor, and does not want > to be forced to use it in the future. I use Linux because it is > technically superior to any Microsoft product, it is free, and > it does not engage in the practice of forcing its users to pursue > an endless path of mandatory multi-hundred-dollar upgrades to new, > unstable, misfeature-rich software every few years. Given that the > audience for this list is heavily weighted toward the academic, it's > my guess that there are a number of readers using some flavor of unix, > Macintosh, or non-Microsoft products such as Eudora. > > > It can be used with web documents, however, > > provided you have the latest-greatest of Netscape > > and Internet Explorer (you need the *free* font, > > Lucida Sans Unicode, to make it work tho'). > > Neither Netscape not Internet Explorer is available for > the non-Intel-based versions of Linux. More to the point, email is > supposed to be text, readable from a command line without recourse > to any sort of high-falutin' graphics capability. Web documents are > wonderful things, but they belong in Web browser windows, not in email. > > > Even today, were I to put my mind to it, I could > > transcribe *any* page from Daniels and Bright's > > _The World's Writing Systems_ using only the basic, > > off-the-rack Windows software I have on this > > platform, and slap it up onto a web page. > > > Indeed, and you could mail it to anyone else who uses the same basic > off-the-rack Windows software. And when you upgrade to Windows 2000 > and Office 2000, you will be able to do even more wonderful things > and share them with even fewer people. > Actually, I understand that Unicode is not Microsoft-specific, and that > some day, Unicode-capable mail readers may be as common as dirt. Even > if that happens, and even if the Ugaritic Cuneiform working group, for > instance, picks up the pace of its work and produces a standard, there > will still be those of us who would benefit from a good uniform system > of transliteration. > Or am I the only one on this list who's not planning to install Windows > 2000 the day it's released? > > -John McKendry > > -- > No Microsoft products were used to create or send this message. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 22:32:06 -0500 From: "Dr. Michael Fuller & Neathery Fuller" Subject: ane Aegean Dendrochronology Project This is a response to John Charles Deaton's question about Dendrochronology. The best place to start is at the website of http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/ajatext.html I am surprised that Peter (Kuniholm) has emerged to add his perspective. Best wishes. Michael ________________________________________ Michael and Neathery Fuller Directors American Excavations at Tell Tuneinir http://www.stlcc.cc.mo.us/fv/tuneinir National Board Member of the Archaeological Institute of America http://www.stlcc.cc.mo.us/fv/users/mfuller/aia ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 22:57:59 -0500 From: Peter James <100735.1765@compuserve.com> Subject: ane Ulu Burun Dendro Date Michael Fuller wrote: <> Strictly speaking there is no "dendrochronological date" for the Ulu Burun shipwreck - at least not in the sense that most people might imagine. If your house is burnt down and someone later tries to date either its destruction or when you built it , using radiocarbon or dendrochronology, then some very strange results could arise. Dendrochronology certainly cannot give a date for the first event - the burning of the house, only a terminus post quem with an unknown period of time to be subtracted from it. Both methods date the years when particular tree rings grew. And a house (or boat for that matter) may be burnt or sunk many years after it was built (or even used). The dates given by radiocarbon (for wood) and dendrochronology will of course be nearer the date of construction, but even with timbers deliberately cut for incorporation in a structure, time needs to be allowed for seasoning, and if bark wood is not present, then an unknown number of years for the continuing growth of the tree after those particular annual rings grew. These are relatively minor problems with dating wood constructions in the ANE, where timber was reused on a massive scale and used possibly even a number of times in different buildings. Peter Kuniholm's work on Anatolian dendrochronology has shown this repeatedly. Of course ships will be somewhat different, but there are analogies to the above caveats about timber buildings. One assumes that boats would have been built with freshly cut timbers - purpose cut, as it were. Still, there is always the possibility that good, ready cut timbers might have been salvaged from an old boat simply to save time and resources. These are unknowns, but to date the construction of a boat, or rather find a terminus post quem for its building, then obviously the best wood to use from a ancient shipwreck would be the timbers from which the boat itself is made. Given that, what do we actually have from Ulu Burun in terms of a dendro date? There is no date for the ship as such, but for a piece of wood found on the boat. In his article in Nature (381, p. 782), Peter Kuniholm stated that "wood found as part of the cargo... has a last preserved tree-ring of 1316 BC." No further detail was given, and the sample has yet to be formally published (as far as I know). Further information can be gleaned from informal, interim reports by Kuniholm and others. In his 1996 newsletter he stated that the "last ring at Ulu Burun is 1315 B.C.. I do not think that we are missing any rings on the exterior. Since the shipwreck is a time-capsule, a date for the wood dunnage on board helps date all the rather more glamorous cargo items from half a doen civilizations or more." Despite Kuniholm's confidence that there were no missing rings on the exterior, after three years of the piece of wood drying out, further rings were detected - actually, an additional nine, bringing the date down to 1305 BC within his Anatolian dendro sequence. This is, near enough, the date reported on the Ulu Burun website (1306 BC), and it is unlikely that it will come down any further. Still, one cannot take seriously the belief (hope) that there are no further rings missing from the exterior, especially after this proved to be wrong from the initial assessment. No bark has been reported present, so the truth is that an utterly unknown number of rings may have been trimmed from the exterior of the sample. Turning to the sample itself, as anyone can ascertain from the Ulu Burun website, the wood in question is "a small piece of presumably fresh-cut firewood or dunnage". Again, the choice of words here is rather hopeful. I burn wood on an open fire, which I collect from skips - the best stuff available is roof timbers from the houses in this area which were built around 1901. I daresay the rings in those timbers go well back into the 19th century. Admittedly this is a comment from a modern urban environment, but then many archaeologists seem to be out of touch with the real world, be it ancient or modern. In the ancient world, even though supplies of timber might have been more accessible (in certain countries), wood was still a precious rescource - albeit for fuel, building, sculpture or whatever. The best wood for construction might be well seasoned timbers (over a few years), but the best wood for burning, as anyone who has lit a fire knows is "rubbish" wood that has been lying around in a dry place for as long as possible. Most green, or freshly cut wood, produces masses of acrid, steamy smoke. If I were collecting fire-wood for a ship voyage (presumably to be lit inside some kind of container) I would not select "freshly-cut firewood". Apart from the difficulty of lighting it on deck, one would end up with a very smokey barbecue. I would collect my wood from the equivalent of ancient skips. If there are any ethnographers, foresters, old seadogs or carpenters on the group I would appreciate feedback to tell me whether I am talking nonsense or not. As to the second possibility, that the wood was "dunnage", the OED definition is "mats, brushwood, gratings, etc., stowed under or among cargo to prevent moisture and chafing." Again, the idea that "freshly-cut" wood would be used to soak up moisture seems silly. Any old bits of wood would do, and the older and drier the better. In short, whether it was used for firewood or dunnage, the Ulu Burun wood sample was a piece of scrap wood or "rubbish". For either purpose one does not use good wood that could be used for something else. So there we have it. There is not a dendrochronological date for the Ulu Burun shipwreck, but there is a date for a piece of scrap (possibly very old) wood which was found on board. Why Kuniholm did not date an actual timber from the ship itself I have yet to fathom. Now lets turn to the dating itself. The most detailed report on the sample comes from a paper by Malcolm H. Weiner, "The Absolute Chronology of Late Helladic IIIA2", in M. S. Balmuth & R. H. Tykot (eds): Sardinian and Aegean Chronology: Proceedings of the International Colloquium 'Sardinian Stratigraphy and Mediterranean Chronology, Tufts University, March 17-19, 1995 (Studies in Sardinian Archaeology V - Oxbow Books), pp. 309-319. Weiner funds Kuniholm's laboratory so has access to information from the horse's mouth, as it were. While Weiner himself seems to be delighted with the date, and was using it to moderate LHIIIA2 chronology, the following facts emerge from his paper. The sample in question is of a "badly-twisted piece of cedar, about six inches in diameter and over four feet long." As a cautionary note Weiner cites Kuniholm (1997): "any dates from a sampling of only two timbers must be treated with caution, especially when the wood is cedar which can often have eccentric growth characteristics." There is then a mysterious aside in (Weiner's) brackets: "(The other timber is not of direct chronological relevance.)" What other timber? Returning to the timber that has been broadcast, Weiner continues: "The timber in question is particularly twisted and gnarled, and thus is unable to provide a conclusive computer-generated statistical match with the Anatolian master Bronze-Iron Age chronology, although the match (by Student's t-score, Trend coefficient and D-score) which results in 1305 BC as the year of the last observable ring is superior to that for any other relevant year. The microscopic visual fit is convincing, however (Kuniholm & Steele, per comm.). Thus there is a high likelihood that the last observable ring represents the year 1305 BC." Well, blind me with science! For the uninitiated the above means that the Ulu Burun "shipwreck" date is not a proper dendrochronological date at all, as far as I understand it. Dendrochronology is a statistical method, which depends on having good enough samples to match patterns of annual growth (thick and thin) against an already established sequence. In this case we have a *particularly* poor sample, The sample was not good enough to run it through the computer using the usual statistical tests (such as those mentioned by Weiner). Instead it seems that it was matched to the overall Anatolian sequence by eye ("the microscopic visual fit"). But matched, or compared, to what? It doesn't take a leap of imagination to imagine that since the cargo of the ship contained objects from the late 14th century (such as the famous Nefertiti object) that that is where Kuniholm's team looked for a comparison in the sequence - to use Weiner's words, in the "relevant years". On what criteria were other years (or centuries) deemed irrelevant? Several years after word went out that the Ulu Burun shipwreck had been dated by dendrochronology there is still no formal publication to judge from. I hasten to add that as far as I know Kuniholm's dendro matching is only reliable for Anatolian trees (pine and a few other species) and that he does not have a sequence for this period for cedars from Anatolia. In the case of the Ulu Burun piece of scrap wood we have no idea where it was picked up. As an analogy that field archaeologists may appreciate, think about the problem of dealing with a piece of undiagnostic pottery (no handle, no rim, no decoration) which is unprovenanced. Under the microscope a thin section might show that the fabric is very similar to that of the Roman period, for example. But that does not mean that you have dated that sherd scientifically to the Roman period, even though you might have reasons to want that as an answer. To conclude, there is no dendrochronological date for the Ulu Burun shipwreck. Rather, an unprovenanced piece of scrap wood, so twisted and gnarled that it cannot be subjected to the normal computer tests, has been matched by eye (and backed up by unpublished statistical calculations) to fit a possibly preconceived date within the sequence of completely different species of tree. There I rest my case until a formal publication of the result is available - when I will stand corrected and apologise if I have misunderstood something. Returning to Michael Fuller's post I do not, at present, see a problem for Walter Simmons' chronology from the Ulu Burun shipwreck. Though I don't want to enter into discussion of it, Simmons' chronology can easily be disproved on other grounds, e.g. stratigraphy or Egyptian genealogies. If Simmons looked seriously at the Egyptian genealogical material, for example, he should soon convince himself that you cannot shorten chronology by such an amount as he is trying. On the other hand, all is not well with the conventional chronology. I hope my comments above have not seemed too critical of the work of Peter Kuniholm and his team. I sincerely believe that they, ultimately, have the key to ANE chronology. I am also pleased that they the only LBA samples from Anatolia which they have fully published certainly support a lowering of chronology. I refer here to the result of 1101 + 1 BC as a terminus post quem for the construction of the last phase of the Hiittite Empire Gateway at Tille Höyük. On the conventional dating the Hittite Empire ended c. 1200/1175, so I take Kuniholm's result as strong support for the case argued in Centuries of Darkness by myself and my colleagues. (There we argued for a date around 950 BC.) With apologies for the length of this post, Peter James ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 20:54:50 -0800 From: "David Maltsberger" Subject: ane Dissertation to HTML Does anyone know of quick way to convert a text file such as a dissertation (in this case Word 98) into html, including automatically changing footnotes to hyperlinks? Surely there is a routine available (or so I hope). I have always thought that dissertations would be far more useful posted than languishing on the hard drive. Of course, that may be ego talking...Any suggestions appreciated. David Maltsberger North Vancouver BC ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1999 #314 **************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html