We tend to think that, before there was electricity and diesel engines, there were no machines at all. This is untrue: the pre-industrial world was full of machines. Some were relatively simple to build and maintain, some were master works of engineering. They were powered by running water, wind, tides, animals or people. They performed such tasks as: grinding grain, sawing wood, cutting rock, and lifting water.
The simplest flour mill: the Norse mill
For 21st century people it can be hard to ‘see’ pre-industrial machines because they don’t look like machines to us; they look like buildings. Machines were large and were not meant to be carried around; the machine was part of the building it was housed in.
A watercolor painting of a Norse mill, a building of stacked flat stones. A wooden trench leads a stream of water to the building. Part of the building is ‘cut away’ to show inside: the water flows against a small horizontal ‘wheel’ with 9 small, angled wooden ‘blades’. A vertical wooden shaft connects the wheel to two flat stone disks, one upon the other, there is a hole in the center of the top disk, above which is a ‘hopper’, a funnel-shaped wooden box; nearby sacks of flour are stacked on the stone floor. Image source: The British Land Company.
Norse mills are so called because they were brought to Britain by Norse invaders and settlers. They are also called Greek mill or click mill. It’s likely that machines of this type have been used in many parts of the world at many different times, because it’s pretty much the simplest kind of water-powered grain mill to build.
Speech worked this way from village to village across Western Europe until recently, when unwritten, rural dialects started steadily disappearing. People now know this area as home to a few “languages” like Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, but on the ground there once was basically a smudge of countless Romance “dialects” shading gradually into one another from Portugal to Italy. In each nation, the serendipities of history chose one “dialect” as a standard and enshrined it on the page…
Colonisation was motivated by the European hunger for African resources. The subsequent exploitation of the African people and the uprooting of their spiritual values by Christian missionaries would leave a permanent European stamp on the continent.
The mindset is the barbarians are backward and inferior and for their own benefit we have to uplift them and civilize them and educate them and so on.
The psychology behind it is kind of transparent. When you’ve got your boot on someone’s neck and you’re crushing them you can’t say to yourself: I’m a son of a bitch, and I’m doing it for my own benefit. So what you have to do is figure out some way of saying: I’m doing it for their benefit. And that’s a very natural position to take, when you’re beating someone with a club.
– From ‘Colonialism in 10 Minutes – The Scramble for Africa’, which is an extract from the film ‘Uganda Rising’.
It was in August 2011 that the communities of Famienkro, Koffessou-Groumania, and Timbo, located about 300 km from Abidjan, learned through the grapevine that a corporation was about to move on to their land.
A month later, on September 15, the representatives of the three villages were informed that the government had granted a concession covering a total of 11,000 ha to the Ivorian subsidiary of the Belgian corporation SIAT (Société d’investissement pour l’agriculture tropicale), for the purpose of establishing an industrial rubber plantation.
SIAT is a Belgian multinational claiming to “specialize” in tropical agriculture. In June 2013, it had some 175 000 ha under cultivation in Africa, Asia, and Europe. This powerful multinational, with capital of €31 million and a business volume of nearly €200 million, has holdings in palm oil, rubber, and grazing. SIAT’s head office is in Brussels and it is active in Belgium, Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon, Cambodia, and Côte d’Ivoire.
The communities were stunned… the government had just granted 11,000 ha to SIAT.
Furthermore, free prior informed consent by the local population is always required in such cases, especially when arable land is being granted to companies, regardless of whether they are domestic or foreign… Today, the villagers are wondering why the rule was ignored.
The King of the Andoh, His Majesty Nanan Akou Moro II, speaking through his representative Sinan Ouattara, confirmed that:
We did not give our consent to this project, whose impact on our ancestral lands, territories, and natural resources is devastating. We refuse to let our land be stolen.
For 39 years the chief of this territory, the King of the Andoh reigns over the Coblossi tribe, who live in seven villages in the vicinity of Famienkro: Koffessou-Groumania, Sérébou, Kamélésso, Assouadiè, Morokro, Lendoukro, and Kouakoukro.
At Harrow School and then Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation. As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”. In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, a crack of doubt. He realised that the local population was fighting back because of “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own,” just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”.
He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops. He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages”.
The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”. Later, he boasted of his experiences there: “That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about.”
We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the development and health of the World Wide Web (‘the Web’), and we are deeply concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (‘AMP’), a Google project that purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web.
In fact, AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google. At a scale of billions of users, this has the effect of further reinforcing Google’s dominance of the Web.
We acknowledge the problem of Web pages being slow to load…
Search engines are in a powerful position to wield influence to solve this problem. However, Google has chosen to create a premium position at the top of their search results (for articles) and a ‘lightning’ icon (for all types of content), which are only accessible to publishers that use a Google-controlled technology, served by Google from their infrastructure, on a Google URL, and placed within a Google controlled user experience.
The AMP format is not in itself, a problem, but two aspects of its implementation reinforce the position of Google as a de facto standard platform for content, as Google seeks to drive uptake of AMP with content creators:
1. Content that “opts in” to AMP and the associated hosting within Google’s domain is granted preferential search promotion, including (for news articles) a position above all other results.
2. When a user navigates from Google to a piece of content Google has recommended, they are, unwittingly, remaining within Google’s ecosystem.
We don’t want to stop Google’s development of AMP… We also applaud search engines that give ranking preference to fast-loading pages. AMP can remain one of a range of technologies that give publishers high quality options for delivering Web pages quickly and making users happy.
However, publishers should not be compelled by Google’s search dominance to put their content under a Google umbrella. The Web is not Google, and should not be just Google.
This goes along with chapter 2 of Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams (but is probably also interesting on its own).
Liverpool Town Hall
Before the Beatles, Liverpool was famous as an important port in Britain’s slave trade; it was the slave trade that built Liverpool up from an unimportant town to a thriving metropolis. A bust of a ‘blackamoor’, (a black person) symbolises the slave trade that brought Liverpool wealth and prominence.
A business card of a gun maker in Bristol, England
It incorporates an image of a British gentleman (left), an enslaved black man (right) and the coat of arms of the British Empire (top center).
Reward offered for the return of a runaway boy
A newspaper advertisement offering a reward for the return of a runaway ‘Negro Boy’. The text reads: A Negro Boy, his name Africa, by his growth feeming to be about 12 years old, he had a gray cloth Livery, the Lace mixed with black, white, and orange colors, fomewhat torn, a black large Cap, a Silver Ring in one of his ears, his hair newly clipped very clofe, fpeaks fome Englifh, Dutch, and Blacks. Run away from his Mafter the firft inftant Whofoever fhall fecure him, and give notice to Mr. Arnold (…illegible…) Barner in James Ftreet, Covent Garden, fhall have 20 s. Reward. The ad doesn’t make clear whether the boy is a slave or a free servant, but the fact that there is a reward for his return suggests he is viewed as property.
Moroz now counts nine to 12 independent evolutionary origins of the nervous system… ‘There is more than one way to make a neuron, more than one way to make a brain,’ says Moroz. In each of these evolutionary branches, a different subset of genes, proteins and molecules was blindly chosen, through random gene duplication and mutation, to take part in building a nervous system.
Early cells probably inhabited aquatic environments, such as hot springs or brine pools, that contained a mixture of dissolved minerals including some, like calcium, that threatened life. (Important biological molecules such as DNA, RNA and ATP are known to coalesce into refractory goo when exposed to calcium – similar to the scum that forms in bathtubs.) So biologists surmise that early life must have evolved ways to keep all but the lowest levels of calcium outside its cells. This protective machinery might include proteins that pump calcium atoms out of a cell, and an alarm system that goes off when calcium levels rise. Evolution later harnessed this exquisite responsiveness to calcium to signal within and between cells – to control the beating of cilia and flagella that microbes use to move, or to control the contraction of muscle cells or trigger the electric firing of neurons in organisms such as ours. By the time nervous systems began to emerge, roughly half a billion years ago, many of the critical building blocks were already set.
Even in the distant past, before modern medicine, doctors knew that learning, understanding and memory take place in the brain, because people with head injuries have problems with them, but people with injuries to other parts of the body do not.
We know what the brain looks like from dissection; a doctor will cut off the top of the skull of a dead body, remove the brain, and draw pictures of it or take photographs of it.
A human brain photographed from above. Image by Wikimedia Commons user Jensflorian, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike.A human brain seen from the side, held by a person wearing blue gloves. Image by Wikimedia Commons user Jensflorian, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike.
Particular parts of the brain are for particular mental tasks
Starting in the 1860s, doctors looked at the brains of people with particular mental difficulties, after those people had died. They found that certain mental problems go along with damage to particular parts of the brain.
A group of patients could understand spoken language just fine but could not express themselves, even though there was nothing wrong with their mouth, throat or vocal cords. It turned out that all of these patients had a lesion (a dent or a hole) at a particular location on the brain surface.
The way the cholera was brought in Haiti is that the UN took 1,280 Nepalese soldiers to train in summer 2010 in Kathmandu in the middle of a cholera epidemic. They gave them very cursory exams and a 10-day leave all over the country and then brought them back to Haiti and set them up in three bases around an area where there was rice growing and tributaries to a river. One of the bases had a septic tank that was basically dripping down into, ultimately, the Artibonite River. The first thing that happened is that a bunch of rice farmers got wiped out. They got killed. It was very clear from the start that the cholera had been brought in from a foreign source. There had been no cholera in Haiti for over a hundred years. It had been brought in from a foreign source, probably the UN, and I wrote this the day after the first case of cholera became known. It turned out that there was a mayor, in Mirebalais, in the area, who had been writing to the UN demanding that they clean up their septic tank, that the smell was becoming intolerable, that this was unhygienic, and the UN wasn’t responding to him. He finally got the attention of the press. It was very clear, because the cases of cholera were down river from the UN bases, and there were no cases up river from these bases. They immediately started saying, it’s the unhygienic internally displaced people camping in Port-au-Prince who were the source of the cholera…
Cholera is supposed to be a disease of the poor and… I think the idea is that Haitians were supposed to become pariahs in the world. They were supposed to be dirty and to have disease. It was Haitians who found it. Haitian epidemiologists collected the information about the cholera, and they put together forces with a French epidemiologist, Dr. Renaud Piarroux, who made it known to the world that the cholera happened in a very pristine area of Haiti, not in the displaced-person camps at all.
A new tractor often costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but one thing not included in that price is the right to repair it…
… you also need a software key — to fix the programs that make a tractor run properly. And farmers don’t get that key.
“You’re paying for the metal, but the electronic parts, technically you don’t own it. They do,” says Kyle Schwarting, who plants and harvests fields in southeast Nebraska.
Even a used combine like his Deere S670 can cost $200,000 or $300,000. As he lifts the side panel on this giant green harvester, he explains that the engine is basically off limits.
“Maybe a gasket or something you can fix, but everything else is computer controlled and so if it breaks down I’m really in a bad spot,” Schwarting says. He has to call the dealer.
Only dealerships have the software to make those parts work, and it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a service call. Schwarting worries about being broken down in a field, waiting for a dealer to show up with a software key. If he had that key, he could likely fix the machine himself.
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.
… in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.
The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.
– From the introduction to the book ‘Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism’ by Kwame Nkrumah, 1965.
In our world today we have an economic system that is the same pretty much everywhere, and that experts and politicians insist is unquestionably scientific and inevitable, even though (a) it’s actually brand new, historically speaking, and (b) it fails to do what any decent economic system should do: make it possible for most people to live decent lives, with adequate food and shelter and clothing and not-too-horrible work.
Given this, it’s helpful to compare economic systems from other times and places; they might be just as terrible as ours, or even worth, but even so it’s nice to get some sense of all the different systems that humans have tried out over the years!
In that spirit I present to you The Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 8-55), from both the Jewish Bible and the Christian Old Testament.
“Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.
In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property.
If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops. Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the Lord your God.
Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety. You may ask, “What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops?” I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years. While you plant during the eighth year, you will eat from the old crop and will continue to eat from it until the harvest of the ninth year comes in.
The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.
If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold. If, however, there is no one to redeem it for them but later on they prosper and acquire sufficient means to redeem it themselves, they are to determine the value for the years since they sold it and refund the balance to the one to whom they sold it; they can then go back to their own property. But if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property.
Anyone who sells a house in a walled city retains the right of redemption a full year after its sale. During that time the seller may redeem it. If it is not redeemed before a full year has passed, the house in the walled city shall belong permanently to the buyer and the buyer’s descendants. It is not to be returned in the Jubilee. But houses in villages without walls around them are to be considered as belonging to the open country. They can be redeemed, and they are to be returned in the Jubilee.
The Levites always have the right to redeem their houses in the Levitical towns, which they possess. So the property of the Levites is redeemable—that is, a house sold in any town they hold—and is to be returned in the Jubilee, because the houses in the towns of the Levites are their property among the Israelites. But the pastureland belonging to their towns must not be sold; it is their permanent possession.
If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.
If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. They are to be treated as hired workers or temporary residents among you; they are to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then they and their children are to be released, and they will go back to their own clans and to the property of their ancestors. Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God.
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
If a foreigner residing among you becomes rich and any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to the foreigner or to a member of the foreigner’s clan, they retain the right of redemption after they have sold themselves. One of their relatives may redeem them: An uncle or a cousin or any blood relative in their clan may redeem them. Or if they prosper, they may redeem themselves. They and their buyer are to count the time from the year they sold themselves up to the Year of Jubilee. The price for their release is to be based on the rate paid to a hired worker for that number of years. If many years remain, they must pay for their redemption a larger share of the price paid for them. If only a few years remain until the Year of Jubilee, they are to compute that and pay for their redemption accordingly. They are to be treated as workers hired from year to year; you must see to it that those to whom they owe service do not rule over them ruthlessly.
Even if someone is not redeemed in any of these ways, they and their children are to be released in the Year of Jubilee, for the Israelites belong to me as servants. They are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.“
If you have trouble viewing the image, skip down to the image description.
Image description:
A comic. There are four panels, each showing the same thing: a girl and an alien looking at a widescreen tv. They are sitting on a sofa in a room with pink stripy wallpaper, and are viewed from the back. On the tv screen we see a man’s head and shoulders with the word ‘NEWS’.
_____Panel 1_____
GIRL: What is this guy talking about? It doesn’t even make sense.
ALIEN: Indeed, in the 2 minutes and 48 seconds we’ve been watching this program, I’ve noted three obvious falsehoods and five logical contradictions.
_____Panel 2_____
GIRL: He seems so sincere, but how can anyone believe this stuff?
ALIEN: He seems very confident and happy in himself. Is he famous among humans?
_____Panel 3_____
GIRL: Yeah, I think he’s a politician or something like that, I’ve definitely seen him on tv before.
ALIEN: Well that explains it then. Believing this stuff has worked out very well for him. It has brought him fame and admiration from his fellow three dimensional sentient beings. Why would he ever stop?
_____Panel 4_____
GIRL: But it DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!
ALIEN: Agreed.
GIRL: People are supposed to believe things based on evidence and logic!
ALIEN: Ideally yes, but sometimes other factors enter into it.
* The included tank comes in 2 great Extra-Adorable styles, and provides the weird alien nutri-liquid your Extra-Adorable Alien Squid Monster needs to live on Planet Earth!
* Extra-Adorable Alien Squid Monster may look a little like an Earth sea creature, but is in fact a sentient being from a distant galaxy! No-one knows how it got here or what it wants!
Maya achievements in art, writing, architeture, astronomy, and mathematics rivaled those of ancient Egypt or Classical Europe. Mathematicians invented the concept of zero and place-system numerals – discoveries that eluded Greece and Rome… This enabled them to reckon the solar year more accurately than the Julian calendar used by Europe until 1582; they refined the average length of a lunar month to within 24 seconds of the figure determined by atomic clocks, and their extraordinary calculation for the synodical period of Venus was out by a mere 14 seconds per year.
Such triumphs are all the more remarkable when one considers that the Classic Maya were technically in the Stone Age. They had little or no bronze, certainly no iron, and made no practical use of the wheel, though they knew its principle. The teleological march of stone, bronze and iron means little in the Americas. It may be a useful yardstick for calibrating Europe’s past, but it’s useless for taking measure of the Maya – worse than useless, because, like all flawed premises, it blocks true understanding.
… Their astronomical discoveries, for example, were made without telescopes of any kind, but they had the theory, the record keeping, and the perseverence to refine naked-eye sightings in the crucible of time.
To suppost cities such as Tikal, the Maya developed a unique form of intensive agriculture in what are now forbidding swamps. A network of canals and raised fields… allowed large populations to survive in jungle, an achievement equaled only by the Khmer in Cambodia somewhat later. The luxuriance of the rainforest became reflected in the leafy baroque of Maya sculpture, in the fantastic regalia of their kings – jade and jaguar skin and iridescent quetzal plumes – in the illuminations of their books, and the painted roof combs of their buildings…
Only in recent years have scholars come close to decipherment of Maya writing, and they now know that it was a fully developed system combining phonetics and ideographs, as in Egyptian or Chinese. There was much the Maya might have taught us, but from the thousands of their ancient books that could have been read in the 16th century, only three survived the Spanish bonfires. One contains the astonishing astronomical data on Venus and other planets. Who can say what has been lost?
– ‘Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance in the Americas’ by Ronald Wright, p. 50-51
The image is a mash-up of public domain images: the floating islands, the lizard-person and equipment, the robot’s propellor and the sign are from Glitch, the hot air balloon is from ‘Hot air balloon’ by Purzen, the castle is from ‘Castle’ by nicubunu .
Welcome to the Fantastic Realm, where everything you imagine becomes real! Here your thoughts and dreams, and even your hopes and fears, can influence the external reality! Which, um… isn’t all that different from how things work in the human world, come to think of it.
But we have Balloon Cats! How great is that? You should come visit sometime, we get lots of humans like you coming here for a little vacation. Actually, no offense, but some of the stuff you humans think up is pretty horrible. Like that thing last week, ugh. Just… ugh. But we don’t mind! After you go the Reality Re-equilibrator cleans the whole thing up, no mess, no fuss.
Sometimes I worry about you humans in your human world. You know, thoughts in the wild can be very dangerous. And it seems like you humans just go around thinking things without even, you know, thinking about it? So I was wondering if maybe you need somewhere to practice. Here you can think up thoughts and watch them evolve. You can try them out without risking any permanent damage.
‘The Suicide of Lucretia’ by Jörg Breu the Elder, 1528; a Renaissance painting showing two scenes in ancient Rome. On the left Lucretia tells a group of Roman men, including her husband and her father, that she has been raped by King Tarquin. On the right: Lucretia lies dead on a carpet as a group of men look on.
The English word ‘republic’ comes from the Latin res publica, which literally means ‘the public’ (with ‘public’ an adjective, not a noun). From Wikipedia:
Res publica usually is something held in common by many people. For instance a park or garden in the city of Rome could either be ‘private property’ (res privata), or managed by the state, in which case it would be part of the res publica.
At some point, it’s not clear when, res publica came to mean ‘the state’ or ‘the commonwealth’. In ancient times it always meant ‘the state of Rome’ or ‘the commonwealth of Rome’ – you didn’t have to specify the ‘of Rome’ part; it was understood that Rome was the only republic / state / commonwealth worth talking about.
According its origin story, the Roman Republic was formed around 500 BC. At that time Rome was an unimportant Latin town on the bank of the river Tiber. Latin was a local language, spoken only by a few tribes in central Italy. And Latin was a spoken language, not a written one. Perhaps once in a while someone would try out using the Greco-Phoenician alphabet to carve short Latin messages onto pottery or stone, but it would be centuries before there would be longer works of Latin prose, written in ink onto scrolls of parchment.
The earliest written origin stories of the Republic came about 300 years later, but the most famous one, and the one that is still somewhat well-known today, was written by Livy sometime around 0 AD, roughly 500 years after the events it describes.
The story goes like this: Evil King Tarquin of Rome rapes an aristocratic Roman, Lucretia, probably assuming she’ll keep the attack secret out of shame. However Lucretia sends for her husband and her father, instructing them each to bring a trusted friend. When the men arrive Lucretia tells them what happened, charges them to kill Evil King Tarquin, and then commits suicide. The men are so moved by this that they not only kill the king, but abolish the monarchy altogether and replace it with a new form of government, in which power is shared among a group of people so that no one person gets too much of it.
It’s more exciting the way Livy tells it:
They found Lucretia sitting in her room prostrate with grief. As they entered, she burst into tears, and to her husband’s inquiry whether all was well, replied, “No! what can be well with a woman when her honour is lost? The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed. But it is only the body that has been violated, the soul is pure; death shall bear witness to that. But pledge me your solemn word that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. It is Sextus Tarquin, who, coming as an enemy instead of a guest, forced from me last night by brutal violence a pleasure fatal to me, and, if you are men, fatal to him.” They all successively pledged their word, and tried to console the distracted woman by turning the guilt from the victim of the outrage to the perpetrator, and urging that it is the mind that sins, not the body, and where there has been no consent there is no guilt. “It is for you,” she said, “to see that he gets his deserts; although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example.” She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her heart, and fell dying on the floor. Her father and husband raised the death-cry.
Whilst they were absorbed in grief, Brutus drew the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it, dripping with blood, in front of him, said, “By this blood – most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son – I swear, and you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his cursed wife and his whole brood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or any one else to reign in Rome.” Then he handed the knife to Collatinus and then to Lucretius and Valerius, who were all astounded at the marvel of the thing, wondering whence Brutus had acquired this new character. They swore as they were directed; all their grief changed to wrath, and they followed the lead of Brutus, who summoned them to abolish the monarchy forthwith.
This is an origin story that exemplifies the qualities that Romans living in Livy’s time considered to be the essence of Roman-ness: upright morality, stiff resolve and courage in battle, and passionate defence of freedom in the face of tyranny.
Oddly enough this story, which emphasizes Romans’ freedom-loving, tyranny-hating qualities, was written shortly after the Roman Republic officially dissolved and became the Roman Empire.
What’s perhaps even stranger is how the ancient Roman Republic has gotten folded in to the myths about the origins of the modern-day West. In a way, our ideas about the Roman Republic make up one of the origin stories of our own political ideals and institutions.
Further notes
In English ‘Lucretia’ is pronounced loo KREESH uh. In Latin (and Italian) it’s spelled ‘Lucrezia’ and pronounced something like loo CRATE zee uh.
Lucretia could be considered an early example of the Women in Refrigerators trope in fiction.
History books and Wikipedia articles sometimes treat Livy’s story of Lucretia, Tarquin and Brutus as if it were a legitimate work of history. Which is bonkers. It’s like treating Beowulf or Le Chanson de Roland or the Christian New Testament as history textbooks.
1. We started with this stunning algorithmically generated image. Look how shiny and pink it is!
A note to our vision-impaired viewers: all the images are basically random blobs of color that were generated using a computer program. Since we here at Awesome Kitten Studios couldn’t figure out how to come up with descriptions for them, we just left out the alt texts.
Image background: Park view by anarres, public domain.
So, when you asked me to help you with your research into Earth culture, this isn’t what I expected.
Oh? What did you expect?
I don’t know, I guess I would have thought you’d be doing experiments on human bodies or something. Not that you’d – I mean, not on dead bodies, I know you wouldn’t – or, I guess doing experiments on live ones would be even worse – the point I’m trying to make is, I’m sure all your experiments are 100% ethical. I hope I didn’t offend you just now. Um, sorry if I did.
It’s fine, don’t worry about it.
It’s just, walking to the park to look at clouds? It doesn’t sound very scientific. It kinda sounds more like a date, actually. Are you trying to date me? Because I think you’re really great and all, but I just don’t feel that way about you.
Noted.
OK. But lots of planets have clouds, right? Clouds aren’t just an Earth thing. So why are clouds part of your Earth research?
It’s not so much the clouds themselves, as how you humans see them.
Well how do YOU see them? I guess since you just have one eye, you can’t see depth, right?
What do you mean? I see plenty of depth, but what does that have to do with – oh, I think I understand what you’re saying. But… well, I do have one eye, I suppose, but I don’t see with it.
You can’t see?
I have other sense organs. But the eye is mostly cosmetic.
You mean it’s fake? You have a fake eye?
I wouldn’t say it’s fake – my eye serves a function, it facilitates my social interactions with humans here on Earth. Research shows that humans find it much easier to relate to an unknown being if that being has eyes, or even just one eye; it lets them know where they should look when they’re talking to you. And I’ve got to look like something. I could just manifest myself on this planet as an invisible energy flow, but then how would you talk to me?
You mean, your whole body is fake. This isn’t even your real body.
It’s real, and it’s a body, and it’s mine; but no, this isn’t how I usually look. The way I look when I’m at home is impossible to describe in your language.
Why did you decide to have tentacles and one big eye?
Why not?
What do you mean why not?
I think I look good.
You do! You do, I’m not arguing with that. It’s just, why didn’t you just make yourself look like a human? Then you wouldn’t have to deal with people freaking out because you’re, I mean, because you don’t look normal.
People would freak out quite a lot more, actually – it turns out that people find a weird-looking alien significantly less terrifying than a perfectly human-looking alien. I wouldn’t manage to successfully mimic human behaviours, and people around me would suspect that I was some sort of sinister alien spy or something like that.
That makes sense, I guess. Why don’t you make yourself look like a 12-foot-tall lizard? Because that would be kind of cool.
Lizards are perceived as untrustworthy and lacking in emotional warmth. Also humans react best to beings of a size somewhat smaller than their own; smaller is perceived as less threatening. Roughly a third to a half of human size is considered ideal.
OK, but what if you wanted to be able to shoot lasers out of your eyes – could you?
Why would I ever want to do that?
But could you? Oh my god, could you make me be able to shoot lasers out of my eyes?
Is that a hypothetical question?
I want pink lasers. That shoot out of my eyes. Hot pink, not princess pink. Please?
That would be terrible. It would be like wearing coloured glasses all the time, but even more annoying. It would be distracting for you and for those around you, and it would undoubtedly damage your vision.
Could you just make me have laser eyes for one day?
Hypothetically could I do that? Yes. Will I? No.
You’re no fun.
I’m not here to amuse you. I’m here to gather information about Earth civilization and culture.
Half a day?
No.
Will you take me up for a ride in your ship then? To make up for not giving me laser eyes even though I really really want them?
No.
Do you really think I’m still going to help you with your stupid research?
So. I tried doing that thing you told me about, but it didn’t work.
What thing?
The, you know, the thing. Halloween.
That was two weeks ago. If you want to participate in Earth festivals you have to do it on the right day you know, that’s kind of the whole point.
I did do it on the right day, October 31, or at least I tried to, but it didn’t work.
What didn’t work? Did you… oh no. Did you go trick or treating?
No.
Good! Good. Because trick or treating is just for children. Human children.
I know that! I just stayed at home and waited for the children to trick or treat me.
That… sounds appropriate, actually. What happened?
Kids came to my door and said trick or treat, and I said: there’s no treats here, so I guess you’ll just have to trick me! But they didn’t. They just stared at me and then they went away.
Oh my god, why would you do that?
You’re the one who told me how it works! On Halloween kids come to your house and either you give them a treat or they play at trick on you. I’d been looking forward to the trick all day, you know, wondering what it would be. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be nothing at all! I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s those kids who failed to follow procedure.
How old were these kids?
I don’t know. How would I know how old human kids are?
How tall were they?
About a meter.
You’re a terrible person. And you’re banned from participating in any more Earth cultural traditions. As of now. I’m banning you.
Me?! What did I do wrong?
You’re supposed to give the kids candy, wish them a happy Halloween and that’s it! Or if you don’t want to hand out treats you should just leave your lights off and not answer the door. The kids aren’t expected to actually play a trick on you.
But you said…
I know what I said, but it’s not meant to be interpreted so literally!
You lied to me! You lied to me about trick or treating.
I didn’t lie, sheesh. Trick or treating is a tradition, it’s like a story. You need to know the story to understand what Halloween is all about, but not all of it is supposed to be literally true, there are layers of reality that you have to be able to navigate.
Layers of reality? That doesn’t make any sense at all, what are you even talking about?
Oh my god, just, can you please stay away from human cultural stuff from now on? You’re not qualified to do this stuff on your own.
Fine.
I mean it! Don’t even think about doing anything Christmas-y without proper supervision.
You mean, proper supervision by someone like you? Aw. If you wanted us to spend Christmas together, you could have just said.
This is a (ridiculous, anachronistic) re-write of an actual paper written in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, who was the first person to use a telescope to look at the night sky. He published The Starry Messenger to tell the world what he had seen, or to make sure he got the credit before someone else did, depending on how cynical you are.
Venice, 1610
Guys, you are so lucky to be reading this, because the stuff I’m about to tell you? It’s just so great, I can’t even.
For real though, you should sit down, because what you’re about to read is so mind-blowingly awesome I’m afraid you’ll forget to keep supporting your weight with your leg muscles and you’ll fall over and hurt yourself, and I don’t want to be responsible for that. So. Sit down, get comfy. I’m going to tell you some stuff no-one even knew before now, and also about the amazing new instrument that revealed it to our senses.
Like stars – turns out, there are WAY MORE stars than you can even see. Like, TEN TIMES more!
And the moon – when you look at it up close (which, just fyi, I was the first person to do ever) it’s way different from what you’d expect. It’s not all smooth and silvery-shiny, it’s actually kind of bumpy and rocky and uneven.
Also: the Milky Way, and nebulas. If you want to find out what they are, stay tuned.
But the greatest thing of all: I found FOUR NEW PLANETS!!! Or moons, I’m not sure. To be honest, it’s 1610, no-one’s even sure what the difference between a moon and a planet is yet.
I observed all this great stuff just a few days ago, using the amazing OUTER SPACE SPYGLASS (does that name work? It seems a bit long, maybe I’ll change it to telescope) which I totally just invented all by myself with no help from anyone.
I mean, except God. Obviously. My awesome genius was totally illumitated by the divine light of God. It’s good to mention God in these things at least once, just to keep off the Inquisition. So, yeah. God is 100% totally on board with the outer space spyglass. It was His idea, really.
Are you ready? Buckle yourselves in, because it’s gonna be a wild ride.
Um… first, it’s “be”, not “do”, the phrase is “be my Valentine”. And second, it’s October. The next holiday coming up is Halloween, not Valentine’s Day.
Well, will you? I one or two you!
You… what?
I number-less-than-three you! It’s how humans express love for each-other.
That’s… it’s great that you’re taking an interest in Earth culture, but I think you have missed some of the, um, nuances.
Are you trying to change the subject? Because I’m not done talking about how I <3 <3 <3 you.
No, just, you know how Earth computers have keyboards on them? And… well, there's this thing called "typography", and there's this other thing called a "heart" which is actually a pretty gross body part but which some humans believe to be the seat of emotions, and, well, to be honest it's sort of hard to explain.
You don't have to explain. You are so great, I wanna Valentine you all the way past zero and into negative integers! -1, -2, -3…
As Jones pored over Sanskrit texts his mind made comparisons not just with Persian and English but also with Latin and Greek, the mainstays of an eighteenth-century university education; with Gothic, the oldest literary form of German, which he had also learned; and with Welsh, a Celtic tongue and his boyhood language which he had not forgotten. In 1786, three years after his arrival in Calcutta, Jones came to a startling conclusion… that the Sanskrit language originated from the same source as Greek and Latin, the classical languages of European civilization. He added that Persian, Celtic, and German probably belonged to the same family. European scholars were astounded. The occupants of India, long regarded as the epitome of Asian exotics, turned out to be long-lost cousins…
In the 1780s J. G. Herder proposed a theory later developed by von Humboldt and elaborated in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein, that… each particular language, generates and is enmeshed in a closed social community, or “folk,” that is at its core meaningless to an outsider. Language was seen by Herder and von Humboldt as a vessel that molded community and national identities. The brothers Grimm went out to collect “authentic” German folk tales while at the same time studying the German language, pursuing the Romantic conviction that language and folk culture were deeply related. In this setting the mysterious mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European, was regarded not just as a language but as a crucible in which Western civilization had its earliest beginnings.
After the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’, the Romantic conviction that language was a defining factor in national identity was combined with new ideas about evolution and biology. Natural selection provided a scientific theory that was hijacked by nationalists and used to rationalize why some races or “folks” rules others – some were more “fit” than others… Language, culture, and a Darwinian interpretation of race were bundled together to explain the superior biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of the northern Europeans who conducted these self-congratulatory studies. Their writings and lectures encouraged people to think of themselves as members of long-established, biological-linguistic nations, and thus were promoted widely in the new national school systems and national newspapers of the emerging nation-states of Europe. The policies that forced the Welsh (including Sir William Jones) to speak English, and the Bretons to speak French, were rooted in politicians’ need for an ancient and “pure” national heritage for each new state. The ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European soon were molded into the distant progenitors of such racial-linguistic-national stereotypes.
The name ‘Aryan’ began to be applied to them, because the authors of the oldest religious texts in Sanskrit and Persian, the ‘Rig Veda’ and ‘Avesta’, called themselves Aryans. These Aryans lived in Iran and eastward into Afghanistan-Pakistan-India. The term ‘Aryan’ should be confined only to this Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. But the ‘Vedas’ were a newly discovered source of mystical fastination in the nineteenth century and in Victorian parlors the name Aryan soon spread beyond its proper confines. Madison Grant’s ‘The Passing of the Great Race’ (1916), was a virulent warning against the thinning of superior American “Aryan” blood (by which he meant the British-Scots-Irish-German settlers of the original thirteen colonies) through interbreeding with immigrant “inferior races”, which for him included Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews – all of whom spoke Indo-European languages.
The problem of Indo-European origins… became enmeshed in nationalist and chauvinist causes, nurtured the murderous fantasy of Aryan racial superiority, and was actually pursued in archaeological excavations funded by the Nazi SS… In Russia some modern nationalist political groups and neo-Pagan movements claim a direct linkage between themselves, as Slavs, and the ancient “Aryans”. In the United States white supremacist groups refer to themselves as Aryans. There actually were Aryans in history – the composers of the ‘Rig Veda’ and the ‘Avesta’ – but they were Bronze Age tribal people who lived in Iran, Afghanistan, and the northern Indian subcontinent. It is highly doubtful that they were blonde or blue-eyed, and they had no connection with the competing racial fantasies of modern bigots.
And how did the Aryans themselves define “Aryan”? According to their own texts, they conceived of “Aryan-ness” as a religious-linguistic category… If you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The ‘Rig Veda’ made the ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require or even contemplate racial purity.
– From ‘The Horse, The Wheel, and Language; how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world’ by David W. Anthony, p 7-11.
… it is now possible to solve the central puzzle surrounding (the language) Proto-Indo-European, namely, who spoke it, where it was spoken, and when…
I believe with many others that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia… The steppes resembled the prairies of North America – a monotonous sea of grass framed under a huge, dramatic sky. A continuous belt of steppes extends from eastern Europe (between Odessa and Bucharest) to the Great Wall of China, an arid corridor running seven thousand kilometers across the center of the Eurasian continent. This enormous grassland was an effective barrier to the transmission of ideas and technologies for thousands of years… Eventually people who rode horses and herded cattle and sheep acquired the wheel, and were then able to follow their herds almost anywhere, using heavy wagons to carry their tents and supplies… after the horse was domesticated and the covered wagon invented… life became predictable and productive for the people of the Eurasian steppes. The opening of the steppe – its transformation from a hostile ecological barrier to a corridor of transcontinental communication – forever changed the dynamics of Eurasian historical development…
– From ‘The Horse, The Wheel, and Language; how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world’ by David W. Anthony, p 5-6.
Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”
– From The City of God by Augustine of Hippo, book IV chapter 4, around 426 BCE.
This comic makes use of the artwork Blockmaker engine from Glitch, a former multiplayer online computer game that released all its artworks into the public domain.
Septisphere 