stuff 'n other stuff

A few days ago I came across an article in the Irish Times about how a British researcher has argued that the wall of Genghis Khan is part of the Great Wall of China assemblage.

Fair enough.

Unfortunately some people have began garble this into a ‘new piece of the Great Wall has been found’.

Not so. The wall Genghis Khan has been known for yonks. Peter Fleming, while travelling with Ella Maillart in Manchuria in the 1930’s made a special trip to see it and it featured in the New York Times back in 2001.

What of course is being argued is that the wall of Genghis Khan is not a stand alone feature but part of the Great Wall complex, and being argued on the basis of some quite clever research using Google Maps and the like.

Sad to see such a use of new technology to make an interesting hypothesis totally garbled …

Someone is claiming that some ancient greek seafarers made it to New Zealand.

Well it’s possible. Extremely unlikely but possible. We know that there were Roman settlements in India – not formal settlements but groups of merchants clustered together trading with Indian merchants and that the Romans sailed to the south of India  by sailing down the Red Sea to what is now Somalia  and then turning left, relying on the Monsoon to carry them across.

This of course means that they sometimes missed and could concievably ended up shipwrecked on one of the islands of what is now Indonesia, or even on the coast of WA.

The Romans of course acquired knowledge of the sea route from the Greco-Egyptians of Ptolemaic Egypt, so the idea of oral history in Irian Jaya preserving the memory of Greek or Egyptian sailors king of interesting. Of course the impact of Christianity, and mission schools could have confused matters with Egypt becoming a synonym for ‘far away over the sea’ but we could say it’s possible. Unlikely but possible.

However in terms of historical narrative it’s worth zilch. As I wrote  along time ago on a now dead blog server while discussing the impact of the discovery of Homo Floriensis and the thinness of the evidence:

Hobbits – or the Romans invade Broome …
posted Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:55:12 -0800

Suddenly we’ve another stoush about wether homo floriensis is a new species of human being or a cretin. And why are we having this argument?

Because the sample size is so bloody small.

And because the sample size is so small we have intense arguments about the meaning of the evidence that are based on supposition and precedent. Nothing more.

To put this into context consider the following:

We know the Romans (well probably Graeco-Egyptians living in the Roman period) sailed regularly to India, and that Roman ambassadors, or merchants masquerading as ambassadors got to China in 166 probably coming via South East Asia by boat.

So it’s possible, though there’s no evidence, that the Romans traded as far as Java in search of spices, just as European traders did 1500 years later.

And it’s equally just possible, in the same way as happened to Dutch and Portugese ships, that every now and then one would be caught in a storm, blown south, and end up wrecked on the coast of WA, probably somewhere around Broome, or possibly further south.

If we found eveidence of such a wreck it would be interesting. Just that, Interesting. We already know a lot about Roman commerce. We know pepper was prized. Finding such a wreck would confirm that Roman trading ships sailed as far as what is today Indonesia, rather than relying on goods sold on at ports in India.

It would be a footnote. Homo Floriensis is not a footnote, purely because we know so little. We need more finds, more evidence before we can say either way. For now we have to suffer the clash of egos and reputations

We know (or at least we think we’re reasonably certain) that Roman ships did not sail much further than India and that any Roman merchants who ventured further afield would have sailed on other ships, and that the numbers involved were very small, such that they have left little trace in the historical record.

Equally we can guess that there will be some outliers due to ships blown of course and ending up somewhere they didn’t expect to. This does not mean that the Romans or the Greeks have discovered Australia, or New Zealand. Like Pliny’s Eskimos on the Rhine they’re an intriguing story, a happenstance, but nothing more …

From an internal email (names etc removed):

Dear %%%%%%%%%%

Letter writing and the stamp of history | Kathryn Hughes

http://gu.com/p/35jfx

Postal services are dying. Few if anyone sends letters or bills by post, and have you tried to buy adsend a postcard recently?

What’s not been discussed is the impact of the gradual attenuation of the service and what it means for the way we function …

I was surfing the web checking out cheap 7 inch tablets when I happened across this

Wholesale – Macbook Air 13.3 N450 Laptops Notebook Computer 1.67G CPU 1GB DDR2 160GB XP Systerm sample | DHgate.com.

Of course it’s not a MacBook Air – it’s essentially a netbook with XP packaged up to look like a MacBook. And it’s not just one retailer, a couple of clicks brought up this one that’s a little more blatant ….

The first typewriters were in the main women, who were paid to operate the fiendish machine and act as some sort of amanuesis, as the great man dictated his thoughts.
This of course had all sorts of implications for society, allowing young women to earn a respectable income, and leading to the rise of the secretary as the prime late twentieth century female profession.
The interesting thing about the portable typrwriter and its adoption by journalists is that they themselves used it, hence predisposing them to better, lighter machines, and portable computers such as the Tandy 100, both as note takers and machines for creating copy.
Authors probably didn’t have that imperative and were consequently less likely to adopt wordprocessors unless they were fully featured rather than elaborate note takers …

Bruthen Post Office, a photo by moncur_d on Flickr.

Wonderful example of mid twentieth century official architecture looking as if it had been transported from the English Home Counties to somewhere in the middle of Gippsland in Victoria …

As part of the ‘not just travel writers’ strand I was reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s history of typewriters over the weekend and he makes the point that in Dracula – written in 1897 – the protagonists make extensive use of typewriters and kodak cameras to document matters – and hence demonstrate the modernity of their approach by using technology …

The birth of the modern is of course marked by the long wars, where not only where there new ways of killing, but new ways of reporting the killing. Again the portable typewriter, the small format camera, allowed a change in the nature of journalism, especially when coupled with reasonably efficient communications.

The tipping point for this was perhaps the Spanish civil war where there was something resembling modern reporting with community of serious journalists such as Orwell whose despatches commanded attention as did many of the photographers of the time …

On the back of the social media withdrawal and SOPA memes have you ever searched for ‘typewriter’ on ebay?

I just did, and there’s scads of them at fairly substantial prices, meaning people must buy them, but who?

I can sort of just about see that if you had a writing hut out in the bush with no power you might keep one just in case, but a solar panel, a couple of old car batteries, an inverter and a laptop seems like a whole lot better, especially given the advantages of wordprocessing software …