This is an exceptional review not necessarily about the exhibition but some of the current thinking emerging about the role of the Silk Road on Western History. I suggest reading it. Here's the clincher:

[T]he critical intellectual shortcoming of the exhibition is that with Baghdad, the Silk Road seems to come to a prematurely celebratory end. Why, instead of dealing with the development of Arab shipping in a final gallery, didn’t the show follow a narrative, visible on one of its maps, leading past Baghdad and to the port of Venice? By extending the history another few centuries, we would have seen how the Silk Road led to a fertilization of Western thinking, not just with the discoveries of Islamic scientists but also with a variety of philosophical and religious perspectives that proved influential over the course of centuries. We know how deeply affected Marco Polo was by the Silk Road in the 13th century: he passed that enthusiasm on.

This would have helped the exhibition make a more cogent contribution to Western cultural self-understanding. It would have also helped explain why, once European shipping and exploration took off in the late Renaissance, the overland Silk Road route became more and more a commercial backwater, leading to centuries of cultural and political decline, whose effects are still being felt.

After my first trip across the Silk Road in 2003 I began to devour, wholesale, as much scholarship on it as I possibly could. And one thing that became very clear early on was that the official narrative of the Silk Road wasn't anything close to the reality. Sadly, it has been extremely slow going. (I now have an extensive library--at least two hundred books and countless scholarly articles relating to the subject. And growing.) Most of the scholarship is either at least a century old, or in Russian, German and French--of which I only speak one. (The Russian scholarship suffers from the Marxist dialectic, as well.) And yet I found a lot of truth in the old saw, 'read an old book and learn something new.' Even before I read Beckwith's book my ideas had shifted drastically towards his own. His book was a much appreciated validation of my own.

More after the jump.

Every year on this date I am reminded of how lucky I was to meet Cpl. Ed Neidemier. It was my junior year at the University of Houston. I'd been assigned a project by my American Military History professor to interview an American veteran. Many people found veterans of the Second World War, Vietnam, Korea and one or two from Desert Storm. I'd always had a fascination for World War One, and wanted to meet an American veteran of that conflict. So, an early fall day, a day not unlike today, when the air had a nip of cold in it and only a wisp of high cirrus clouds I drove from Houston to Dallas to meet Cpl. Ed. He was in his early nineties at the time but his eyes were still a crystal blue and while his hands were soft with the years his handshake was firm.

Sadly, I lost my notes from the interview several years ago. But I still remember much. He was a supply clerk. He drove a horse drawn wagon from a supply depot to the front lines, which were moving up when he arrived in France. He spoke of the sounds of artillery in the night, "like Zeus' own thunderstorm," he called it. He spoke of the time when he stole a pair of boots for an African-American soldier who's shoes had deteriorated 'in the muck of mud and rotting flesh.' He spoke of how afraid he was before the war, being a German farm boy from Iowa--who's first language was German--and how he enlisted as a 17 year old. A year before he was legally allowed to. He spoke of how moved and saddened he was when he shipped out of New York City, looking out at the Statue of Liberty wondering if he would ever see home again.

He spoke of the days after the Armistice Day when he 'puttered around the trenches' and traded a German soldier a few dollars for his Mauser. He showed me the gun. As I held it in my hands I wondered how many men it had killed. He told me what it was like to return home in or around 1919-1920. The parades, the euphoria, the joy. But through it all, he always said, "it was the greatest time of my life. Both bad and good. Horrible and awesome."

I believe there is only a handful of World War One veterans left in the world, and the few that are left are French. All the American soldiers of World War One have died. So have the British soldiers. I don't know about the Germans or the Russians or any of the other nations which fought in the war. The war fades, the hundredth anniversary of its beginning is right around the corner. Memories fade.

But my image of Cpl. Ed doesn't. Perhaps some small part of the cataclysm, or suicide of Western Civilization, as it has often been called, remains within me. Cpl. Ed's blue eyes certainly do.

Tom Kington | Rome | October 13

The Guardian - Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5

History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

Sainshand, Mongolia | August 1

BBC - Rare Buddhist treasures, not seen for more than 70 years, have been unearthed in the Gobi Desert.

The historic artefacts were buried in the 1930s during Mongolia's Communist purge, when hundreds of monasteries were looted and destroyed.

Since winning the Booker prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy has put fiction on hold to become a global dissenter against repression, economic 'progress' - and dams. Tim Adams discovers the roots of her political passion

The Observer, By Tim Adams, July 12

Arundhati Roy has two voices. The first, dramatically personal and playful, was the one in which she wrote her extraordinary debut novel, The God of Small Things, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in rural Kerala. The second voice is flatter and angrier, more urban and distrustful of the quirks of the individual. She describes it as "writing from the heart of the crowd". It is this voice that she has used exclusively in the 12 years since her novel was published, in four collections of non-fiction - the latest of which, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, was published last week.

Roy, now 47, describes the difference between the two voices as the difference between "dancing and walking". It is a long while since Roy's writing has danced. She says she pedestrianised her imagination not out of choice, not at all, but because there seemed nothing else to do. "If I could," she says, "I would love to spend all my time writing fiction. With the non-fiction I wrote one book that I wanted to write and three more that I didn't."

Back in May of 2007, then in November of 2007 and finally in December of 2007 I asked if any readers knew anything about the great An Lu-shan rebellion that nearly brought down the T'ang Dynasty of 8th century China. I've continued to follow the academic literature on the subject. There are now two new books discussing the subject, one at length and another that makes some riveting connections between An Lu-shan's rebellion and other events occurring all over the Eurasian landmass at the time.

NYRB, By Timothy Snyder, July 16

Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.

"Look What You Made Me Do"

Caesar, Hitler, Nixon - War, Racism, Hatred - Alcohol, Mysogyny, Conformity

Seamless trinities...
One needn't ever drink a drop of alcohol to serve in it's churches...
Just as one needn't ever hit women to perpetuate ever worse to them...
Or as one needn't necessarily exit conventional reality to reject the convention.

Seamless subjects. Addiction: money, ego, power, sex, drugs, food, adrenalin, violence, drugs, fear, hatred, guns, vanity, games, the very creative imperative itself -addiction alone makes an endless daisy chain of seamlessly related subjects. They continue on through Blame and Guilt, and Control. Subjects of enthrallment, helpless captivity. It's a necessary convenience to limit the moment's topic. In such isolation, the seamlessness of the chain is not a foregone understanding though, not at all, quite the opposite. It is not a given understanding that to talk of one is to talk of 'them' all... As it should be; that isn't necessarily true, or false.

The St. Petersburg Times has a three part series on the Church of Scientology.

Mark C. "Marty" Rathbun left the Church of Scientology staff in late 2004, ending a 27-year career that saw him rise to be a top lieutenant to Miscavige in the organization. For the past four years, he has lived a low-profile life in Texas. Some speculated he had died.

In February, Rathbun posted an Internet message announcing he was available to counsel other disaffected Scientologists.

"Having dug myself out of the dark pit where many who leave the church land," he wrote, "I began lending a hand to others similarly situated."

...will absolutely take place july 8 at 4:05.06...

"They can't all be carrying arrows, can they?" So go the apocryphal words of Roman general and triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus in 53BC at the Battle of Carrhae as he pointed at the large camel train with the Parthian army (Frank Holt, my Roman Republic history professor at the University of Houston told me this story back in 1991.) Crassus' son had just died fighting a detachment of Parthians a few miles south of Carrhae, the modern Harran. Crassus ordered them to form a large square, hold their shields aloft, better to guard against the Parthian arrows. They were surrounded.

Parthian cavalry ran circles around the Romans all day long. Sometimes the Romans would sally forth to attack the Parthians only to have them retreat. And then the Parthians would return: arrows falling, falling, falling, all day long. The entire camel train of the Parthians given over to arrows supporting a force of 1,000 heavy cavalry and 9,000 of the Parthian's traditional light cavalry. Crassus had horrible luck. They were all carrying arrows. And it was the light cavalry which did him down.

More after the jump.

A funny thing always happens when I post on linguistics. First, I should confess to having a very rudimentary basis in linguistics. So I am always surprised when people PM me, or email me or even comment in such posts and I wanted to pass on this very interesting PM and website:

Actually the Japanese and the Turks were very friendly neighbors prior to their separate migrations. They share a number of cultural traits, similar toilets, and fold away futon beds, for example. Japanese are always very welcome in Turkey due to this ancient connection. Given your interest in languages, you might like to wrap your mind around this concept. The Japanese have always had trouble with our Latin and Greek derived vocabulary, which shares an agglutinated morpheme structure with their mother tongue. For some reason, though their language scholars noticed years ago that they could transliterate Latin and Greek directly into Kanji compounds, they never wrote more than a few. I happened to notice it, too, and set about transliterating thousands of words for the purpose of instruction. The strange thing is that while my students had no problem with it, the Japanese "linguists" the PhD types, tell me it is difficult for them, so they don't believe students can do it.

About a week ago there was a brief discussion about Turkish grammatical usage, which was followed by a briefer discussion about the origins of Turkish. During the extensive research I did for my book one of the most compelling stories was that of the great Turkish migration from an area around the Orkhon Valley in modern-day Mongolia to Anatolia. During the course of my research a mapping out of the Turkish language family helped put the migration into perspective. I'm one of those who believe that Turkish shares a common ancestor with the Altaic languages. A few examples are in order. Korean is an Altaic language (so is Japanese, but they hate being lumped in with the Koreans and vice-versa). Korean shares an agglutinative nature like that in Turkish, but as I recall, vowel harmony is not much of a component. I think the agglutination of Korean is the hardest single hurdle for a Westerner Native English speaker to overcome in learning the language. (It's really quite bizarre for our minds to understand the concept.) The alphabet is a cinch. Once learned you can never, ever, under any circumstances mispronounce or misspell a word, unlike English spelling! Cough? Doughnut? Ha!

Indulge me a short personal observation: I really dig the vowel harmony. There is this wonderful introductory intonation in Turkish when a conversation begins that is lovely to the ears. It isn't sing-song. And I haven't thought out the right analogy or metaphor yet. Regardless, I can't believe I missed this in 2007, but then again, I was a mess.

More after the jump.

I picked up a copy of Lord John Julius Norwich's "Byzantium, the Decline and Fall" yesterday. I read the first volume many years ago in hardcover got sidetracked, missed the middle volume and only picked up the abridged "A Short History of Byzantium" a few years later so as to complete the story. (I have also read Gibbon's magesterial "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" but you don't expect me to carry around all six volumes of that do you, especially now that I need to get new clothes?) So, I was reading a passage about the siege of Durrazzo by the Normans in October 1081. And I stumbled across this wonderful anecdote about Robert Guiscard's wife, who led the right wing during the siege and when the battle threatened to become a rout in favor of the Byzantine relievers, shamed the Norman men back into the fight:

Sichelgaita needs some explanation. She was cast in a Wagnerian mould: in her we come face to face with the closest approximation in history to a Valkyrie. A woman of immense build and herculean physical strength, she hardly ever left her husband's side--least of all in battle, one of her favorite occupations. At such moments, charging magnificently into the fray, her long blond hair streaming out from beneath her helmet, deafening friend and foe alike with huge shouts of encouragement or imprecation she must have looked--even if she did not altogether sound--worthy to take her place among the daughters of Wotan: beside Waltraute, or Grimgerda, or even Brunhilde herself.

If you've ever seen a Wagnerian opera the picture Norwich paints is just spot on. I can only imagine what the Byzantine troops at Durazzo thought of her?

Yesterday I looked at a map of Marco Polo's travels. Ever one to be fascinated by what the great Venetian accomplished (although what Ibn Battuta did was even greater in my opinion), I noted something I'd never before taken into account. Marco Polo's forward journey is etched into my memory like the day of my first kiss. (Really, I am that much of a history geek!) Jerusalem, Baghdad, Persia, across the Karakorum, down the Tarim Basin and across a great swathe of China to Xanadu, just north of Beijing? I know the route by heart; have read the first third of his book repeatedly. (I've read the whole thing, once, but have referred to the first third multiple times.) The only part of his return journey that interested me was the question of theft that occurred in Trebizond--today's Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. Polo doesn't mention the theft in his book, only in his will. Curious, yes? I do wonder what exactly was stolen and why? However, it's not tangential to my main point.

What I noticed yesterday was that my journey from Singapore to Chennai through the Straits of Malacca and a journey into Sumatra, then down the East Coast of India and up the West across the Arabian Sea to Muscat is almost an identical match to Marco's return journey. Would that I could head across to Hormuz, up through Persia with one of the Great Khan's solid gold passports to deliver a Mongol Princess to the Persian Khan! Alas, Iran is off limits for budgetary reasons. And what with my exhaustion really bearing down on me and with the possibility of a flat in Istanbul I've decided to fly out on Tuesday. Yeah, yeah, I know. Short visit to Oman and all that. And what about Yemen? Simply put: I don't have it in me to either enjoy Yemen or do it right. But fret not: I'll return in October or November when it is cooler. In the interim I'll hopefully cajole and convince my father to join me. He's been rather diffident about the suggestions I've made so far, but I've a feeling dangling the 'Galapagos of the Arabian Sea,' i.e. the isle of Socotra and the Dragon Blood Trees, out there like the proverbial carrot might well do the trick!

But more to the point: it's been summer for me for over a year now. I'm sick of heat. I'm sick of dust. I'm sick of sand. I need cool weather, besides it's Spring in Istanbul and I need a vacation. What could be better than that?

This post may come across as a bit pretentious, but here goes. One thought that has never been far from my mind on this journey has been the structure of the book that will emerge once the journey is complete. One idea that I've pondered has been a travel memoir based on the structure of an epic poem, e.g. the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid and perhaps Paradise Lost. Dante's Divine Comedy doesn't quite work as it doesn't have all the pieces that the Aeneid has, which is in my opinion is the pinnacle of the Western Epic. Then again I love Latin and had the worst time with the Greek aorist--but really slid right into the Latin subjunctive.

I digress.

Structure has bedeviled me at every turn during the composition of my first book, which is very near to completion. It bedevils me even now. I worry all to often that the structure of the narrative isn't good enough, not right, not chronologically proper. It's a bit too late now. I didn't try to be cute or creative and do something terribly original. I'm not a confident enough writer for that. I followed a fairly obvious pattern of back and forth, back and forth like a swing rocking on a porch. So, we'll see.

More after the jump.

(The following is a short, informal, speculative essay that I've written for a class I'm currently taking)

Technology is often poorly understood and narrowly defined as the artifacts built by humans and used to serve their needs. But this definition does not address the widespread adoption of technology among non-human organisms, the subjectivity inherent in any such artifacts or systems, and the unique characteristics of human technology that appear to differentiate us from the Earth’s other inhabitants.

Technology is the means by which an organism or group of organisms enhance their control over the external environment and improve their perceived chance of survival. Some aspects of this broad and preliminary definition require further explanation. Improved control tends to happen by either internalizing what was once external or crafting tools to interface with external environments. More advanced tool users—such as humans—often do the former, while less advanced species tend toward the latter. The word “perceived” is used because the actual effects of any technology are not necessarily to prolong life or aid in survival. All that matters is that the adopting organism, culture, or species believe this to be true. An excellent example would be lead-lined cups adopted as part of a religious ritual and drunk from daily with the expectation that a god or gods would be pleased.

If you are like me, you probably find Hindu mythology bewildering. I mean, how many gods are there? I had a discussion in Calicut and asked just this question.

Sanjiv was the first to answer, saying,"there is one, Brahman. All others are incarnations of the 'one,' or the 'absolute.' Perhaps, I thought to myself, we might say in the West, a 'singularity.'

Brahman, as I was later to discover has no attributes, for he is nirguna, or immanent (to use one of my favorite words), as opposed to the other gods of the Hindu pantheon who are saguna, with attributes.

Not to be confused with Brahman, Brahma is the creator. He only acts in the creation of the cosmos (which if I am correct, has been created and destroyed several times already). When he is not busy creating he is meditating. His wife is Saraswati, the goddess of learning and he is often depicted riding a swan. I imagine his swan and wife are both very bored most of the time, as he seems rather an absentee landlord. But, he does have four heads! And Brahma is also the first member of the Hindu Trinity, or Trimurti.

More after the jump.

In The Ascent of Money , Niall Ferguson traces the evolution of money and demonstrates that financial history is the essential back-story behind all history.

This is a blockbuster. It's likely going to have a profound effect on how a whole lot of people come to see the credit crisis. For example, it shows how the Enron scam and subsequent bankruptcy was based on off the books bad debt, and how this is the same problem that now affects the financial system.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

The pictures of vanity and part two of the same article the oxford project.

it was a long time ago, and yet not so long ago...

Yes, this is certainly an odd post from someone in Bangkok. Fear not, I'll report on the King's birthday tomorrow. But right now I want to talk about my favorite historian, Herodotus and his near contemporary Thucydides. I picked up what is probably my sixth or seventh copy of Herodotus' 'Histories' while in Chiang Mai, with the express purpose of picking up a copy of Thucydides work as well. I wasn't so lucky with finding Thucydides. I looked in all the second hand book stores from Luang Prabang to Saigon and had no luck. Alas, yesterday I was searching for a used Indonesia Lonely Planet and what did I find? Thucydides' 'The Peloponnesian War.' Now I can begin what I've long wanted to do: read both books at the same time and compare and contrast them, with the ultimate goal of deciding, at least in my opinion, who was the better historian.

Makes me smile to be able to be a history geek again.

I've visited a lot of places in my life. Many of them which failed to live up to the hype people ascribe to them. But Angkor Wat is not one of those place. It is every bit as amazing, special, huge, stupendous and indescribable as it is billed to be. Absolutely stunning.

First, the size: it has the distinction of being the world's largest religious structure. And damn, it is big. One can buy one day, three day and week long passes to the site. It's that big.

And you know what, it was so big I am a bit exhausted. So, I'll let the photos speak for themselves. Start from here and work your way forward. I've upload about 50+ new photos.

Now, excuse me, I've got to go rustle up a bus ticket to Bangkok. More on Angkor Wat later.

Today is Armistice Day. That's what it was originally called. Ninety years ago today on the eleventh hour of the day the 'war to end all wars' ended.

I cannot help but to think of Ed Nedemier, a corn-fed and raised farm boy from Iowa, who, in 1917 was shipped off to France to fight the boche. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty as he left the harbor in New York, he told me he "feared I would never return." He did. He raised children. Worked as a farmer, a factory worker and a newspaper printing press foreman until he retired. He watched his children have children of their own, and then he watched his children's children have children. Then he watched his children die, one in a war in which the one he waged was supposed to prevent.

In our nearly two hour long interview (it was in 1993 and it was for an undergraduate history project) Ed marveled me with stories of the Western Front, the stench of the trenches, the sounds of the German artillery and the whistles that officers used to signify an advance. Ed was well into his nineties by then. He had lied about his age and enlisted a year younger than was allowed at the time. His hands were wrinkled and worn from years of work, but still they were soft and gentle. He was a tall man. At one point in his life he was 6'1". But age had run its course and he stood before me stooped, gray, bespectacled but still his mind was sharp as ever. At one point he brought out a 1917 Mauser. "I bought it from a German for one dollar," he told me. The gun was in mint condition and he said he had always wondered how many men it had killed.

Ed had one goal at that late point in his life: to be the last American WWI veteran. To that end he sent out a monthly newsletter to all the remaining WWI veterans living in America. "It keeps my mind busy and that keeps me alive," he told me. He always sent me a copy (and I have them in storage even now.) We also maintained a correspondence for a few years, even while I was living in Korea. But at some point the letters stop coming and I knew why. Fate is ever cruel and did not grant him his last wish.

But I remember Ed. I can see his smile even today as I traipse around another of our twentieth century battlefields, trying to discover the life and death of my uncle. I remember Ed's beaming pride in a younger, kinder America and I miss him even now.

Today, we remember Ed, and millions of others in France, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Germany and Russia who fell on the battlefield or lived long lives afterwards. And today I remember Ed, for his warmth, simple pride and his memories.