All posts by mbrass

Remembering D-Day

Travels

It’s June 6, 2014.  Seventy years since the D-Day invasion.  Twenty years ago today I was a young backpacker in Bayeux, France for the fifty year anniversary of D-Day.  I didn’t intend to be there.  I had been visiting Normandy the day before.  My friend Larry and I hitched a ride in a surplus Army jeep with some Brits who were impersonating 1940’s American soldiers.  They figured out that the French police who were restricting access to the ceremonies and events might think they were official representatives if they dressed the part.  Of course, then they picked up a bunch of backpackers hitching rides.  When we came to barricades and guards the Brits would shout back at us to get down and we’d close the tarps so they couldn’t see us in the back of the jeep.  We went to a field near Sainte Mere Église with them to watch the parachute drop.  I think there was one crazy old paratrooper who wanted to jump this year.  but in ‘94 there were a whole bunch of them who wanted to show off that they could still jump out of perfectly good airplanes onto the French countryside.  Heck, nobody would even be shooting at them this time.  Piece of cake.  As we drove along, French people stood along the roads waving small American and British flags.  The town of Sainte Mere Église was the first to be liberated by the Allies on the night of June 5th.  It was a mob scene, but a happy mob scene.  It was great.  The French liked us.  We felt patriotic.  None of the old paratroopers died that day…as far as we could tell, anyway.

Hey, I had khaki shorts on. I totally look like a soldier.
Hey, I had khaki shorts on. I totally look like a soldier.

But then we returned to Paris.  Larry went on his way and I found myself in the Paris train station late on a Sunday night with no idea where to go.  I decided to take the train to Cherbourg because it was about a four hour trip.  Four hours there, four hours back.  I could sleep on the train and figure out what to do with myself when it was morning.  But that’s not how it worked out.

The train from Paris to Cherbourg at midnight was pretty empty.  What kind of fool would want to roll into town at 4 o’clock in the morning?  And everyone who needed to be in Normandy for the celebrations was already there.  I found a row of seats to myself and commenced settling my backpack and taking my contacts out.  Apparently the American contact solution attracted attention.  Pretty soon the older gentleman in the next seat started up a conversation with me.  “Do you know anything about Bayeux?  Are you going to the beaches?  Do you speak French? Because I really have no idea how I’m going to get around but I really want to be part of the D-Day celebrations.  I was too young at D-Day.  I joined up later and served in the Army at the very end of the war and during the mopping up phase.”  He handed me his card, “George Earl Pottinger.”  “Call me Earl.”  Got it.

I told him I spoke a little French and I was willing to help him out as much as I could.  Bayeux was a couple of stops before Cherbourg.  I knew from my visit the day before that there would be mobs of people and hotels would be hard to come by, but I told him to let me get a couple of hours of sleep and I’d show him around as much as possible.  Now this conversation caused another older gentleman on the train to perk up his ears.  “Did you say you speak French?  And you know something about Normandy?  I was on the beaches in 1944.  I was in the Navy.  They sent me an invitation to be at the ceremonies but I didn’t think I’d be able to make it so I never sent the forms back.  I decided to come anyway at the last minute and now I’m not sure what I’m going to do or how I’m going to get around.  My name’s Don Sullivan.”  I sent Don to sit next to Earl and told them both to wake me up when we got to Bayeux.  The whole idea of my being a tour guide in a country I knew almost nothing about was pretty funny.  But I did speak some French and I figured I could at least help them to read signs or negotiate for a hotel or something…

They woke me up as the train was pulling in to the station.  It was about 4:30.  That’s a.m.  This is not a time of day I usually see unless I haven’t gone to bed yet.  We got ourselves off the train where we picked up another traveler, Bridget, a middle-aged Englishwoman currently living in New Zealand.  She also spoke some French, so we had two veterans and two women who spoke a little French.  And no plan.  The walk from the train station showed me we had a problem already.  It was still half dark outside.  The only evidence of people was the smell of baking bread from a local bakery.  But they weren’t open yet.  We could all see that Don was not going to be able to lug his suitcase around for long.  While Earl seemed very hale, Don looked tired.  I had a big pack on my back and wasn’t thrilled with carrying it all day either.  We found a bench for Don to sit down while the rest of us looked for a hotel that might be kind enough to let us store our luggage for a few hours.  We saw a nice one near the middle of town and peeked in the door.  It was still too early for most people to be about but we ran into a television crew from NBC.  They were busy and rushing to get out to the beaches and set up for President Clinton’s speech.  We asked if they knew where the proprietor was and they told us it would probably be okay to leave our bags in the kitchen area downstairs with a note.  Totally safe, right?

Now I have to digress for a moment.  You see, the man who was obviously the news anchor told us this and, well, he was the most handsome man I have ever met in person.  With the most mellifluous voice.  And he seemed really nice.  So I’m pretty sure I would have done anything he suggested.  I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I learned about a year later when I was watching the news at my parents’ house.  Brian Williams.  I still think he might be the handsomest man who has ever read the news.  Anyway, my whole interaction with him lasted for about one minute, maybe less.  Sigh.  The NBC folks got into their vehicle and rushed off, while we tried to make enough noise at the hotel so that we might attract someone who would tell us it was actually okay to leave all of our earthly possessions in their kitchen.  Didn’t happen.  We left our stuff with a note that said the NBC guys told us it would be okay and hoped for the best.

Don, Bridget, and Earl. My Bayeux D-Day buddies.
Don, Bridget, and Earl. My Bayeux D-Day buddies.

 Finally it was time to eat breakfast.  We found a café where we met an older Welshman, his son, and son-in-law, who were headed out to the beaches for the celebrations.  The two D-Day veterans, Don and the Welshman, swapped stories.  I learned that Don had been in the Navy on a landing craft that was supposed to unload tanks to the beaches.  But one of the tanks was still chained to the landing craft and took the ramp off with it when it was unloaded.  That Navy crew was stranded on the beach for days before they were finally picked up.

When the Welshman left for the ceremony at the beaches we wandered around Bayeux.  The town was crowded with people.   We followed a crowd near the British cemetery and got to see the Queen walk by with her escort.  I took a picture of her pink hat through the crowd.  She gave a speech.  I took another picture of her hat and white glove as she got into her helicopter and flew away.  We walked around meeting people and seeing things.  It was cool.  The French really seemed to like us that week.  No one had had any sleep but it was a good day.  We found the tourist bureau and got lucky to find a hotel for Earl and Don.  They were determined to visit the beaches even if they didn’t get to see President Clinton talk there.  The beaches and the monuments and the cemeteries would still be there after the government officials were gone.  Bridget already had a place to stay in town and a plan for the rest of her visit.  In the late afternoon we gathered up our luggage, which had been kept very nicely for us and took Earl and Don to their hotel.  I hugged and kissed everyone and the nice hotel proprietor took me in his car to the train station where I went on my way to Paris and then to Nice for more backpacking adventures.

There's the queen. With her pink hat.
There’s the queen. With her pink hat.

Because of the crowds that day I didn’t get to properly see Bayeux.  I returned a couple of months later to visit the D-Day museum, the cemeteries, and, of course, the famous tapestry.  On my second visit to Bayeux I met a Dutchman who was walking the route the Allied soldiers took until they freed his town in the Netherlands.  The Europeans really liked us that summer.

But I learned one more D-Day story after I returned home.  Earl sent me a letter to let me know what happened the next day, June 7, 1994.  They did make it out to the beaches that day but Don was tired after days of walking and went off to bed early.  Earl sat in a nearby pub.  He’s a friendly guy and he started chatting up another man at the bar.  The man told Earl that he was in Normandy with his father.  The father had been in the Navy on a landing craft.  When the craft reached the beach, one of the tanks ripped the ramp off.  Earl said he had a friend with the same story.  The son called his father over and they repeated the story.  They had to go back to the hotel and wake Don.  Turns out they were both on the same landing craft, out of the thousands of ships that made the invasion.  The two men had not seen each other for fifty years but they had quite a reunion that night.

It’s a great story now.  Earl and Don met and became friends.  Don met up with an old buddy.  It’s heartwarming.  But remember the young navy men who were stranded on that beach after their landing craft went down.  They watched hell unfold and hoped to heaven there was some rescue for them.  Hoped that they wouldn’t be laying on the beach or floating in the water like so many others around them.  D-Day was the first step to the Allied victory, but they didn’t know how it would turn out then.  Most of the men who fought that day are gone now.  Don passed away in 1997.  Even the youngest World War II veterans are almost 90 years old now.  It’s a long time ago.  But it’s worth taking some time to remember them today.

Write Like an Akkadian

Bronze Age

My favorite new thing is online education.  My kids use KhanAcademy at school and at home to supplement their math education.  Sal Khan is a particular hero of mine for developing a programming module for the Day of Code.  My nine-year-old was coding up simple computer graphics like a pro.  There are many, many new online education sites and tools out there but my favorite is Coursera (coursera.org).  My husband and I have taken several classes on Coursera since we discovered it early in 2013.  He has taken a programming/algorithms class from Princeton as well as some statistics and data analysis classes from Princeton and Johns Hopkins.  I’ve taken a course about the ancient Greeks from Wesleyan University, a creative programming course from the University of London, and Archaeology courses from Brown University, Tel Aviv University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  The last was an Egyptology course in Spanish.  The course was very good but my Spanish was only just barely adequate.  I did learn some good stuff about Old Kingdom Egypt though, and it prodded me to find a good paella recipe so I’d get the exchange-student-in-Spain feel.  My twelve year old son took an internet history and technology course from the University of Michigan and has started a programming course from the University of Toronto.

It feels like we really are living in the future and I love, love, love having new opportunities to learn random things.  The classes my family and I have taken have been uniformly excellent.  Coursera has a wide array of classes on many different topics.  You can use them to learn as much or as little as you want.  If you want to just listen to lectures and never take any quizzes or do assignments, you can.  Or, you can put in maximum effort and treat it as a serious college course.  The due dates and deadlines actually help me to focus and make sure I get the work done.  I have been an independent learner for years, but the online course with deadlines gives me a much greater sense of accomplishment.  Online discussion forums and peer grading with feedback are a surprisingly effective way to have contact with fellow students.  In particular, I enjoy peer grading.  When you submit an assignment, five people give scores and feedback.  Each person who submits an assignment must also grade five other assignments.  It is fascinating to get that kind of diverse response to your own work, and equally fascinating to learn what kinds of things your fellow classmates are working on.  The best part is that only the people in the class who were serious enough to do an assignment are part of the grading process.  That weeds out anyone who was just lurking around and taking it very casually.  The people who are actually submitting and grading assignments are the most engaged students in the class.  That means the assignments are almost always well done and the comments you’ll receive on your work are both serious and helpful.

My favorite class so far has been Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets developed by Professor Sue Alcock at Brown University.  They are offering it again in a couple of weeks.  If you have any interest at all in Archaeology or the study of the past, I highly recommend this class.  There are outside assignments, but they are not especially difficult and many of them are actually fun.

Which brings me to this little project wherein I tried to learn cuneiform writing.  You know, the little wedge marks on the clay tablets made three thousand years ago by a room full of Akkadian scribes dedicated to perfecting that one task.  Well, I’m an educated sort of person.  I spent plenty of years learning to read and write.  I even have a couple of foreign languages under my belt.  I should be able to do this.  The class linked to videos of two grad students giving instruction using chopsticks and Crayola modeling clay.  It looked fun.  I was on vacation so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to easily come up with the required equipment.  But we found a great Chinese restaurant in Champaign, IL (Golden Harbor.  Order off the authentic menu.  Thank me later.) with just the right kind of disposable chopsticks.  I grabbed an extra set.  A trip to Target the next day for contact lens solution gave me the excuse to grab some clay.  Equipment procured, I worked on my tablet in the car while my husband drove across Illinois and Iowa.

I have a new appreciation for the practice that must have been required to create usable tablets.  Sure, you can learn to make wedges pretty quickly.  A little practice to get the right pressure and angle of your “stylus” and you’re pretty much there.  But take a look at the .pdf file with the Akkadian symbols and you’ll see that there are lots of wedges in some of these symbols, and you have to put them all together correctly in order to make it legible.  I messed up several times on the three characters of my first name.  I smudged out mistakes and had to re-form the clay enough times that my clay started to dry out.  When the clay begins to dry, it takes the impressions differently, which caused me to make more mistakes.  An experienced scribe would no doubt know this and adapt his pressure.  An inexperienced dolt like myself just makes impressions that can’t be deciphered.

cuneiform_pdf

Finally, I started with a new piece of clay and successfully (sort of) made the characters of my first name.  I then studied my handiwork and took a look at the characters I’d need for my last name.  They looked harder.  Rather than add my last name and risk messing up the whole tablet again, I re-read the assignment.  It said to write your name.  It didn’t mention “full name”.  So, there you go.  First name was all I could manage in a reasonable amount of time without major errors.

Now, about my name.  It’s Michelle, pronounced “Mishel” in Franco-American English, whatever my particular version of the feminized Hebrew for Michael is.  So…the cuneiform list I have doesn’t list a symbol for “sh”.  Do I use one of the symbols for an “s” syllable, maybe “sa”?  My name would then be something like “Mi-sa-el”?  That covers the American pronunciation of my name, sort of, but maybe I should go back to the name’s origin and its pronunciation in other languages.  Maybe I should use something like a guttural “cha” sound, “Mi-cha-el”.  Yes, that might be better.  Now, would that be the cuneiform symbol closest to guttural “cha” be “ka” or “ha”?  Hmmm…  Now I have to confess that I chose the symbol for “ha” over “ka” in large part because “ha” had fewer strokes in it and I felt I’d have greater success making the symbol.  Did the ancient scribes ever make this trade-off when writing names or words that weren’t in their own languages?  I like to hope they were better at their trade than I am, so they wouldn’t need to stoop so low, but who’s to say…

There you have it.  Three characters: Mi, Ha, El to make “Michelle”.

IMG_0769.JPG (3)

Not particularly good, and much larger in scale than any actual cuneiform tablet I have seen.  A real  Akkadian scribe could have put a whole peace treaty on a tablet this size (it’s about the size of my palm).  Trust me, the Kadesh treaty between Ramesses II and the Hittite King Hattusili III is about the same size as my hunk of clay.  I saw it in person in Istanbul and was shocked at how tiny it is.  Chalk that up to one more famous thing that’s much smaller in person than it seems to be in the art history books (joining the Mona Lisa, the Phaistos disk, Eiffel Tower, etc.).  I have a new appreciation for the scribal skills required to make competent tablets, an even greater appreciation for our good old alphabet, and a little bit of insight into foreign language spelling irregularities in ancient texts.

 

On “Magic”

Technology, Travels

It is somewhere between December 1906 and January 1907.  Nine year-old Charles Breasted is traveling with his parents on the Nile River from the Fourth Cataract northward toward the Third Cataract, i.e. near Dongola in present-day Sudan.  His father, the noted Near Eastern archaeologist James Henry Breasted, is exploring the area in search of ancient inscriptions and forgotten archaeological sites.

From Pioneer to the Past, by Charles Breasted, pages 193-194:

“As we drew nearer the Cataract every bend and headland revealed enchanting hidden backwaters with little crescent beaches fringed with thorn and castor bushes, and overhung by palms, acacias and tamarisks.  Occasionally, like those in the Fourth Cataract, such places sheltered little patches of soil cultivated by a few Nubians, living in wattle huts, who stared at us as we drifted past.  Except for the fact that probably none of them had ever beheld a white child before, they were never surprised to see us: for by that mysterious way in which a native in Khartoum would know of a happening in Cairo before the European had learned it from his clicking telegraph, these remote, isolated people had for days been informed our whereabouts and almost hourly progress.

We never ceased marveling at their ability to converse with one another across great stretches of water.  Again and again in places where the Nile had suddenly widened to a breadth of almost two miles, so that we would have to inquire locally regarding possible inscriptions or ruins along the farther shore, we would watch a man address a friend so far away on the opposite bank as to be a mere speck wholly out of earshot.  He would stand at the very edges of the river perhaps ten feet above its surface, and cupping his hands some four inches in front of his lips, would talk into the water at an angle of about 45º, in a loud voice but without shouting.  At intervals he would stop to listen while the distant man evidently replied in kind.  But we who stood close by heard no sound.  Presently the exchange would end, and he would tell us in a matter-of-fact way what he had learned.”

When I read this I thought it was a fascinating example of pre-industrial, pre-modern people with an unexpected grasp of the properties of the natural world.  Remember the Harry Potter books and Mr. Weasley’s fascination with non-magic technology?  He collected televisions, telephones, automobiles and other technological inventions.  He was fascinated to learn how it is that muggles, people with no magical abilities, manage to do things that wizards take for granted.  Here we have an example of “magic” in real life.  How did people in the past spread news over long distances?  How is it that the messenger sent out on a fast horse or ship from a big Roman battle would almost without exception arrive after the rumor of the events had reached Rome?  In Book VII, part 3 of Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” he writes,

“The report is quickly spread among all the states of Gaul; for, whenever a more important and remarkable event takes place, they transmit the intelligence through their lands and districts by a shout; the others take it up in succession, and pass it to their neighbors, as happened on this occasion; for the things which were done at Genabum at sunrise were heard in the territories of the Arverni before the end of the first watch, which is an extent of more than a hundred and sixty miles.”

But perhaps, like the Nile River tribes, “shouting” was a more direct and long-distance mode of communication than we think possible in our modern world.  Perhaps there are some places and times with acoustics that don’t even require shouting for a call to travel over long distances.  Would the ancients have mastered something like that?  The evidence of these “primitive” tribes living along the Nile in the early 1900’s suggests that they certainly could have.  My husband grew up on a farm in Iowa.  He recalls that on some cloudy days the sound from farms a few miles away would travel such that he could hear people who were outside speaking in normal tones.  The people along the Nile must have experimented with ways to get the sound waves to bounce along the top of the flowing river just like rocks skipping across the water so that the friend on the other side could catch them.  Today the skill is probably lost.  Who needs it when you can pick up your cell phone and call the guy in the next village?  The cell phone is a superior device, but we shouldn’t take for granted that our ancestors didn’t invent their own kinds of “magic.”

Ancient Chronology and Dark Ages – An Overview

Chronology, , ,

I am writing a book about the life of Homer.  In order to place Homer in proper historical context I start with the questions of when Homer lived and when his stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey took place.  Those questions led me into the controversy of ancient chronology.  This post is background for the New Chronology of the Bronze Age.

For several years now I’ve been convinced that the Standard Chronology for the Late Bronze Age (circa 1550 – 1200 BC) is incorrect.  Instead we should move it forward in time by about 300 years to circa 1250 – 900 BC).  My interest in the topic began when I watched a television show in the late 1990’s called “Pharaoh’s and Kings: A Biblical Quest.”  In it David Rohl, the author of a book of the same title, argues that Egyptian chronology and Biblical chronology, which should be very much in sync given the close relationship between ancient Palestine and Egypt, have been placed in an incorrect relation to each other based on the single supposed synchronism that the “Shishak” of the Bible was Pharaoh Shoshenq I.

Early Egyptologists were looking for validation of the Biblical record in archaeology.  They searched for the biblical “Shishak” and found Pharaoh Shoshenq I of the 22nd Dynasty.  The name was similar to the one in the Bible and archaeologists found a stela at Megiddo in Palestine bearing his name as well as some inscriptions at Karnak in Egypt suggesting he may have done battle in Palestine.  Interestingly, there is no record of Shoshenq I attacking Jerusalem, which is what he is supposed to have done in the Bible.  Nevertheless, based on the assumption that Shishak = Shoshenq I, Egyptologists arranged the rest of the known Egyptian king lists in chronological order.  The Hebrew Bible places Shishak during the reign of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon.  Shishak’s invasion of Palestine would have occurred around 925 BC.  Because of its detailed king lists and later synchronisms with other Near Eastern kingdoms, the Biblical timeline is generally accepted by archaeologists, at least back to the period of Saul.  If Shishak/Shoshenq I reigned around 925 B.C, then Ramesses II, the most famous king of the Late Bronze Age 19th Dynasty, must have reigned during the 13th century BC.  By many estimates that would make Ramesses II the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Continue reading Ancient Chronology and Dark Ages – An Overview →