Links to the Griffin Warrior

Not sure how this escaped my notice earlier, but the World of the Griffin Warrior is of course supremely fascinating, especially the battle gem.

The article in Archeology by Andrew Curry of 2019 is here, and the later news item on the trade links exemplified by Hathor is here.

A Knife as a Seal

From the collection of Durham Cathedral.

3366    n.d.
Lowick, Chapel of
Printed R.N.D. App. 135. See no. 2151 above, where Robert of St Martin uses a like sign in place of a seal. See also letter from the Rev. Dr Greenwell printed in Proc. Soc. Ant. of Newcastle , 2nd ser. vol. II, p. 95.
Size: -
Seal design: A knife with broken blade, the handle is inscribed on one side.
Inscription: signum de capella de lowic
and on the other side: de capella de lowic et de decimis de lowic totius curie et totius ville

Tally keeping at the English Exchequer

A sample was presented at the Society of Antiquaries that is part of an exchequer account.

Other forms of tallying were chirographs (a wavy cut through the word chirograph separated copies of the text) and indentures (wavy cuts on the top of the manuscript pages of the copies).

Of course, not just the king kept accounts; the Bursae of Durham, for example, is equally be worthy of study.

An Early Akkadian Historical Argument

I have often felt that the initiation rite that Gilgamesh does not pass in Tablet XI of the standard Akkadian version (right after the flood narrative of Utanapishtim) of the Epic is one of the earliest historical arguments that we have (ca 1200BC, from the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh). It is unclear to me whether the older Babylonian versions contained this section.

The context of the story is the challenge that the "Akkadian Noah" Utanapishtim gives to Gilgamesh to show that he is worthy of eternal life; he must not fall asleep for a week. Utanapishtim and his unnamed wife had earlier received, as an exception, immortality from Enlil, because they had overheard the secrets of the Gods; cf. L190ff.

(L198) [Utanapishtim said:] "Now then, who will convene the gods on your behalf,
that you may find the life that you are seeking!
Wait! You must not lie down for six days and seven nights."
soon as he [Gilgamesh] sat down (with his head) between his legs
sleep, like a fog, blew upon him. 

Gilgamesh falls asleep immediately, and Utanapishtim complains to his wife that Gilgamesh failed, but she asks for mercy, that he may wake up and return home. 

(L202) Utanapishtim said to his wife:
"Look there! The man, the youth who wanted (eternal) life!
Sleep, like a fog, blew over him."
His wife said to Utanapishtim the Faraway:
"Touch him, let the man awaken.
Let him return safely by the way he came.
Let him return to his land by the gate through which he left." 

Utanapishtim is concerned that Gilgamesh will deny falling asleep altogether, so he sets up a temporal trap, asking his wife to mark off the days on the wall and place fresh loaves of bread next to him.

(L208) Utanapishtim said to his wife:
"Mankind is deceptive, and will deceive you.
Come, bake loaves for him and keep setting them by his head
and draw on the wall each day that he lay down."
She baked his loaves and placed them by his head
and marked on the wall the day that he lay down.
The first loaf was dessicated,
the second stale, the third moist(?), the fourth turned white,
its ..., the fifth sprouted gray (mold), the sixth is still fresh. [...]"

One suspects that the earlier version had just marks on the wall, and the later version then fixed the fact that the marks show no temporal progression per se, but could be made together. This is independently interesting, if my suspicions are correct.

(L218) The seventh--suddenly he touched him and the man awoke.
Gilgamesh said to Utanapishtim:
"The very moment sleep was pouring over me
you touched me and alerted me!"

As Utanapishtim predicted, Gilgamesh tries to deny it by claiming that he ad been sleeping for just a moment (i.e. was not really asleep yet). But the evidence makes that story unsupportable.

(L222) Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:
"Look over here, Gilgamesh, count your loaves!
You should be aware of what is marked on the wall!
Your first loaf is dessicated,
the second stale, the third moist, your fourth turned white,
its ...
the fifth sprouted gray (mold), the sixth is still fresh.
The seventh--at that instant you awoke!"
Gilgamesh said to Utanapishtim the Faraway:
"O woe! What shall I do, Utanapishtim, where shall I go!
...."

As far as the translation is concerned, the problem is the rotting away of the bread. E.A. Speiser had "soggy" instead of moist.


Colophon: Tablet XI translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs, electronic version by Wolf Carnahan, line numbers according to ANECT, 3rd edition with Supplement, (pp.95-96).

Some Mamluk Details and Natural History Details

Been researching history of the Mamluks for a collaboration with some people in the Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Found some cool resources on the web:

• Reuven Amitai-Preiss' book on the Ilkhanid Mongols and the Mamluks
• An old German History of Islam

In communicating with my collaborators, I revisited the Timbersnake argument from my dissertation, and found some additional resources for that, including

• Mark Catesby's Natural History of  the Carolinas,Florida, the Bahamas etc etc with a cool depiction of a rattlesnake from volume 2, published in London in 1756.
• The travels of Linneus student Peter or Pehr Kalm of Sweden, who helped classify rattlesnakes for Linneus (as did Catesby's drawings)
• An analysis of his journal (including on rattlesnakes)
• His three volume travel journal is available here in German for the First Part. Indubitably other parts are on Archive.org as well. 

Depicting German Peasants in Poetry

I came to this topic by considering the fact that the son of Meier Helmbrecht, also called Helmbrecht, convinces his sister Gotelint, to marry his best friend among the robbers, Lämmerslint. And this struck me akin to the Muslim girls who would go off, sixteen years old, from London and Vienna, to Syria to marry ISIS warriors.

So I decided to re-acquaint myself with Meier Helmbrecht, leading to this English translation of both Helmbrecht and Hartmann von Aue's Poor Heinrich by Clair Hayden Bell, of the University of California, in 1931.

In the introduction, Bell furthermore discussed the works of the Austrian ministerials Seifried Helbing, who left us some fifteen poems (e.g. Kleiner Lucidarius, described here) and Reinmar von Zweter's poems. The Austrian ministerials benefitted from the relative peace and the excellent soil along the Danube river.

These two belong together so tightly that Reinmars and Seifried are at times neighbors in a manuscript.

Another fellow who belongs into this group is Ottackar von Steiermark, in the mind of Theodor Ritter von Karajan.

Bell also mentions Hugo von Trimberg, who wrote the famous didactic Medieval poem Der Renner, "welches die größte didaktische Dichtung des deutschen Mittelalters darstellt", which he wrote while in charge of the School of the priory St Gangolf. That text is available via Medaevium.de for the 14th century,  Von Trimberg is interesting as he received no university training and was a married man with a large family.

When did Husband start to mean spouse?

As Daniel Walker Howe observes in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) (p. 34). Oxford University Press 2007.

So many and varied were the aspects of farm labor that unmarried farmers were exceedingly rare; to operate a farm household took both a man and woman. And so the word “husband,” originally meaning “farmer,” came to mean “married man.”

That statement is a bit timeless in the way it is cast here. When exactly is that transition to be placed?

One way to approach that problem is to see how the word is used in various early Bible editions. In Tynsdale's New Testament from 1525, for example, there are 17 occurrences of "husband" in the sense of spouse (9 times "husband", and 16 times "husbande", with John 4:18 exhibiting both spellings). The NT part of the Wycliff Bible from 1395 spells the word "hosebonde" (30 times) or "hosebondis"  (11 times)---which is the earliest English Bible translation that is easily accessible.

Switching to literature then, if we look at Chaucer's Canterbury Tale, for example the Prologue of the Wife of Bath, which probably dates from 1396, we find also:

For, lordynges, sithI twelf yeer was of age \\
Thonked be God, that is eterne on lyve \\
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve
(vv4ff)

Similarly, in the metric Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which was written between 1260 and 1300, the phrase is also attested (vv.11,300-11,303).

Euere lokede þis burgeis · wan hii were vorþ idriue ·*
Prestles hom was wel wo · þat hii nere issriue ·*
Roberd of caumpedene · þat hosebonde was on ·*
Vor he was a lute clerc · he ssrof hom echon ·*.

Given that we are now back in Middle English, I think the statement as made is misleading; the change in the meaning of the word had happened at least 500 years before the start of the era covered in Howe's book.