Month: July 2009

Hemingway was a (crappy) Soviet spy

Modern(ish)

According to the authors of a new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Ernest Hemingway was recruited to spy for the USSR in 1941.

One of the authors, Alexander Vassiliev, is a former KGB agent who was allowed access to Stalin-era archives in the 90’s. That’s where he found out about Papa “Argo” Hemingway. He doesn’t have the original documents, though, so all we have to go on are his notes.

From the Guardian article:

Its section on the author’s secret life as a “dilettante spy” draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name “Argo”, and “repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us” when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to “give us any political information” and was never “verified in practical work”, so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade.

Apparently Hemingway also spied for the US during WWII, if that’s what you call trolling Cuban waters in his fishing boat for years trying to spot U-Boats and finding exactly one.

On the other hand he did come up with The Old Man and the Sea a few years later, so although he was a crappy spy, he at least found a way to convert it into a Nobel Prize.

Danish students find hundreds of Iron Age remains

Ancient

Students at the University of Aarhus excavating a site in Jutland have uncovered the remains of more than 200 Iron Age people thought to have been sacrificed after a battle 2000 years ago.

“This was a defeated army that was sacrificed to the lake at the time. The majority of remains are large arm and leg bones, skulls, shoulder blades and pelvises,” said Ejvind Hertz, curator from Skanderborg Museum and excavation leader.

According to Hertz, the 200 victims found so far are just a small fragment of what lies in the area, which has only been partially excavated, and estimates suggest that the figure could run to well over one thousand.

It’s an unusual find not just because of its size, but also because usually sacrificial victims were buried with their weapons. Hertz thinks that the lake site may have been dedicated to one god, then another site nearby dedicated to another god might have gotten the weapons.

Click here for a great rundown of earlier weapons finds. Interesting note: the weapons seem to have been deliberately damaged; swords were snapped into pieces and the bosses torn out of shields.

I wonder if the people were dismembered as well, hence the remains so far being specific kinds of bones rather than skeletons.

Now the original 3 week expedition has been extended another 4 weeks. Those students must be peeing their pants with excitement. JEALOUS.

Another awesome musical recreation

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Treasures

This time it’s a trumpet Bach composed for called a Lituus. His motet “O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht” is one of the last known pieces written for the instrument, and even then there was no evidence that it was still in use, no known instruments, no known Lituus players.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh didn’t have much to go on, so they devised a way to calculate the design from a general idea of its shape and the range of notes it played.

What they came up with was this:

That’s 8 and a half feet (2.7 meters) long, folks. It’s like an Alpenhorn and an Aida trumpet made a freaky baby.

It is an unwieldy instrument with a limited tonal range that is hard to play. But played well, it gives Johann Sebastian Bach’s motet a haunting feel that couldn’t be reproduced by modern instruments.

The software was originally developed by researcher Alistair Braden to improve the design of modern brass instruments.

But Dr Braden and his supervisor Professor Murray Campbell, were approached by a Swiss-based music conservatoire specialising in early music, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, to help them recreate the Lituus – even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument.

SCB gave the Edinburgh team their expert thoughts on what the Lituus may have been like in terms of the notes it produced, its tonal quality and how it might have been played.

They also provided cross-section diagrams of instruments they believed to be similar to the Lituus.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for “O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht” by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed by the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. (Fair warning: it only plays briefly at the beginning and end of this longish segment about the recreation.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/I5aHfVk_71c&w=430]

Libya’s ancient sites ravaged by looters

Ancient, Looting, Roma, Caput Mundi

Libya has some of the most extensive and well-preserved ancient Roman and Greek remains, thanks to the dry Saharan air and its political isolation. Once it opened its borders, however, especially after 2003, the looting gangs saw their chance and went to town.

Now locals shamelessly — one even goes on the record in the article — dig, chisel and plunder these once-pristine sites for a few bucks on the black market, and so far the Libyan government hasn’t even acknowledged the extent of the problem, never mind tried to solve it.

In fact, they’ve actually reduced the budgets of state antiquities departments, so fewer employees make even less money. Selling 10 Roman coins would make them more money than their monthly salaries.

But the prevailing sentiment towards the pre-Islamic sites in this fervently faithful and almost exclusively Muslim country is disinterest. Even at Leptis Magna, a sprawling, almost intact city that is the crown jewel in Libya’s Roman heritage, lackadaisical policemen monitor the occasional clutches of tourists wandering through. Locals shepherd flocks of sheep through ruins strewn with empty plastic bottles or across pebbled beaches littered with ancient pottery shards, column-heads and inscriptions.

When Donald White, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has excavated Libyan sites since the 1960s, last visited Cyrene, he came across a man hacking a marble head off of a statue with one hand while he smoked a cigarette with the other.

There is hope for the future, though. Qadafi’s son, Saif-ul-Islam, is launching a major ecotourism initiative known as “Green Mountain”. The archaeological sites are part of the program, so there’s a whole new incentive to preserve these gems.

On another note, the author of this article, Iason Athanasiadis, was arrested in Tehran on June 19th for “reasons conflicting with journalism and in relation with the recent street riots”. He was the only non-Iranian journalist to have been jailed after the election protests. According to Reporters Without Borders, he was released July 5th.

No Etruscans left in Tuscany?

Ancient, Modern(ish)

Mitochondrial DNA tests comparing modern Tuscans to the Etruscans who used to live there before the Romans sort of swallowed them up indicate no relations between the current population and the original one.

”Some people have hypothesised that the most ancient DNA sequences, those from the Etruscan era, could contain errors or have been contaminated but tests conducted with new methods exclude this,” said David Caramelli of Florence University and Guido Barbujani of Ferrara University.

”The most simple explanation is that the structure of the Tuscan population underwent important demographic changes in the first millennium before Christ,” they said.

”Immigration and forced migration have diluted the Etruscan genetic inheritance so much as to make it difficult to recognise”.

On the other hand, comparisons with Medieval Tuscans indicate a clear genetic link to today’s Tuscans, which makes sense because there hasn’t been anything like the population upheaval in the past thousand years that there was in the couple of thousand before then.

That’s not to say there are no Etruscan descendants in the region. There may be some isolated population pockets that researchers just haven’t tested yet.

The town of Murlo, for instance, has already played a role in trying to pin down where the Etruscans might have come from. It’s a small hamlet which hasn’t seen much change over the millennia, so the residents’ mitochondrial DNA was tested to see if it matched other European strains.

Turns out they share their lineage with the Near East, not Europe, as do several other Tuscan hamlets, suggesting to researchers that Herodutus might have been right that the Etruscans migrated to Italy from Lydia in what is now Turkey.

For more information on the Etruscans, check out this site. It’s not the best designed website in the world, but it’s packed with great information and images.