Little Things II: Goliath

Some time ago I wrote an article concerning two little historical theories, that might or might not be correct, but are nevertheless fascinating, because they are unconventional without being too far out. And they throw new light on some topic or event without forcing us to overthrow everything we thought we knew. I like things like that, and I always will.

It looks as if eventually I will make a series of articles like that, starting today with a second one. My topic today will be Goliath.

I do not think I have to recount the story from the Bible to you. The bit that interests me is the physical description of Goliath (from the authorized King James version, Samuel 1, chapter 17).

And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.

And he had an helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of brass.

And he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders.

And the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron: and one bearing a shield went before him.

(What is meant by a target of brass in this context? Certainly not a target for his enemies to better aim at Goliath’s back. I think it is only a weird translation. My German Bible says it was a curved sword.)

A historian immediately would notice that that is not the description of a typical Philistine warrior. How do we know? Because each time the ancient Egyptians fought wars and won them (and they won a lot, otherwise their kingdom would not have survived for more than 2000 years) they carved steles and reliefs glorifying the deeds of their king in which they depicted columns of enemy prisoners of war. These depictions were always very realistic, the enemies were not stereotyped barbarians but shown with their characteristic clothes and weapons, and, in some cases, skin colors as well. There are depictions of Philistines too and from these we can see that they were lightly armed, went barefoot and wore feather crowns instead of heavy helmets. Look here, for example. In fact, no warriors from the region at David’s time wore heavy armor.

But when you read the description in the Bible, it may still ring a bell, especially after some of the recent movies. Look at this fellow:

Looks just like Goliath, doesn’t he? It is a Greek hoplite. Helmet, greaves, heavy thrusting spear, shield, everything there. They also packed curved swords called kopis as secondary weapons. The Bible says Goliath’s body armor was in the form of a mail coat, and there were such hoplites as well, like these. Complete hoplite gear weighed up to 30kg. (By the way: In the graphic novel and movie 300 the spartan hoplites do not wear any body armor which is, historically, pure nonsense. But then again there are 1001 reasons to treat that work as a piece of complete fiction.)

Another thing is that at that period Greeks were typically larger than Palestinians, so it might have been easy for a Greek to appear like a giant to the Israelites. Additionally there seem to be narrative similarities between the Goliath story and some passages from the Iliad.

So Goliath was a hoplite, right? Well, probably not. There’s a catch. The trouble is that the hoplite armor and fighting style was only invented several hundred years after king David is estimated to have lived. Several historians have suggested that Goliath could have been a Greek hoplite but for that reason it is not very well possible. But there is another solution to the problem, which I think might be the true one.

It was developed by the archeologist Israel Finkelstein in his book David and Salomon. He reminds us that the tales of king David were passed down orally for many generations before they were recorded in writing during or after the Babylonian exile period. At that time not only did hoplites exist, it seems also some of them had found their way into Canaan as mercenaries. They were the ultimate fighting machine of the day (except for war chariots maybe). So when the Jewish scholars set out to write down the traditional stories of their people and they came across a story about a giant and terrfying enemy warrior, what would have been easier to them than give him the appearance of the most awe-inspiring type of warrior they knew?

In fact, the habit of depicting people in historical scenes in attire contemporary to the artist has always been around. Just look at the paintings of Biblical scenes from the Renaissance. They even showed Roman legionaries in medieval plate armor. This painting is an example. And it is my opinion that this deplorable habit is still around in movies, especially concerning hairstyles and makeup. Helen of Troy should not look like someone from 21st century Hollywood. She would be beautiful in ancient Greek makeup as well. Trust me!

[I just noticed there is a certain unintended irony in listing the giant Goliath as a “little thing.” Well, such is life. By the way: To see all articles in this series just click on the search key “little things”!]

Tales of War and Futility

Today I set myself the goal of showing you two certain emotions I feel when reading particular passages and books. I want to define and describe those emotions and classify the materials that evoke them. It is not too easy, as all emotions are elusive and become something different when you think hard about them, and furthermore I cannot be sure you feel them in the same way as I do.

Imagine giant nations in an endless war. Imagine mud-filled trenches meandering for hundreds or thousands of miles through desolate landscapes, filled with famished men in field-grey uniforms. Imagine giant and absurd monstrosities of concrete and iron built for killing and for survival. Imagine gun barrels longer than railway cars. Imagine dark and cramped submarines.

Imagine nations pouring millions, tens of millions of lives into the fires of this stalemate. Imagine immense bright laboratories bustling with scientists in white belted lab coats, pince-nezes on their noses or, if they are female, their blonde hair knotted in tight, neat buns, all single-mindedly working day and night to perfect nerve gasses or atomic bombs. Imagine the war never ending.

Images like that never fail to evoke emotions in me, and they might do the same for you. I have encountered them in various books and now I want to distil their essence.

They are images of conflict, and there is something enormous about it. The details may vary greatly and still achieve the same effect. The level of technology can be different, but generally something between 1910 and 1950 works best. The enemy may be just like you, they may be faceless, or they may be never shown. The images may deal with the front, or with other aspects of the war. Even if not a single soldier is shown, it can still work.

The easiest way to encounter these kind of feelings is to read the history books. After all the images I tried to decribe above are basically simplified and exaggerated descriptions of the first and second world wars with a bit of the American civil war strewn in. The horrifying tales of Verdun and of the Somme certainly do evoke comparable feelings.

But there is a problem with that. We like to read horror stories and watch horror movies because in that context we desire to feel the kind of emotions they evoke. We want to feel the thrill and in our case the trill lies in the sheer enormous magnitude of the numbers, the amount of hate, suffering and madness, and of the enormity of the machine. I tried (maybe to no avail) to include that notion in my text above by talking of millions and tens of millions, of monstrosities and of endlessness. It is called the sense of wonder and letting yourself be overwhelmed by it is usually, despite everything, a pleasurable feeling.

This is the problem! It is in principle possible to read true (or at least drawn-from-life) stories of war and atrocities like horror stories, but it is guilty pleasure. And with good reason. We tend to overlook this if the time and place of the story is far from our reality (crusades, Mongols), but the fact is that these things really happened and that they happened to real people. Some are still alive to tell the tales. If you read how 10.000 people were killed in this town, and 20.000 in the next and 25.000 in a third and you remind yourself that all these people, these fates were real, you can only read these stories with appalled dismay. The feeling of enormity remains, but it is not pleasurable any more.

In fact, if we read the stories of real atrocities in this serious manner (which is the only manner in which we should read them) we find that we do not like to read them at all. But if we want to avoid reading about them how much more must we avoid them happening—ever again!

One possible solutions to this dilemma is to take the source of the horror (the Nazis, for example) and put them in a fictional environment (thereby making their victims fictional). Alternative history scenarios do the trick nicely and they are used abundently.

There are quite a few alternate history Nazi novels, for example. I feel that there are issues about them that somewhat transcendend the topic at hand, so I will talk about them some other time. For the moment I will limit myself to mentioning the names of two examples of such novels: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Weaver by Stephen Baxter (there are hundreds more).

But you can also go a step further and sever all links with our world completely. You can take the warring nations in a different reality, a different planet, a different species. This has two advantages.

Firstly, you can ramp up the dimensions to heighten the sense of wonder. I don’t want to harp on about this point, but it is done frequently in stories. It is a somewhat cheap trick, but it sure works.

The other thing is that in the case of a foreign species on a foreign planet the reason for the described conflict is always remote. On this earth we love and hate, but whether on some planet the blues or the greens win does not matter to us (unless the author cheats and pictures one of them as evil and the others as good). In other words, their conflict is meaningless. It is futile and random.

Combined with the size of wonder feeling we are astonished how something that large can be that meaningless, astonished, even enraged over the futility and the stupidity of it.

We may also get these feeling when we consider real wars. In fact, many authors have used scenarios like the one above to make a point about the real world (Iain Banks, for one). It is probably not true for all wars, but with some of them you just cannot help thinking, “Why didn’t they just stop fighting, for god’s sake?”

Finally, I want to list a few examples which evoke these feelings in me and which were the reason of writing this article in the first place.

• The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter has two examples. One is an alternate history where the first world war never ended but was still on in the 1930s. It is hampered a bit by Baxter trying to squeeze in as many ideas of H.G. Wells as possible, but still there are some extremely impressive and chilling scenes there.
  The other one is only a short description. A future civilisation built a Dyson sphere around the sun (a habitable sphere with the radius of Venus’ orbit). On its inner surface of perpetual day, millions of earths in area, thousands of cultures are locked in endless wars. The fact that they are never described in detail or even named, that there are so many of them, that there is a vast abundance of space, and that all is built on an enormous scale heightens the feeling of meaningless to a maximum.
• Iain Banks has used images like that several times. The most prominent one may be the dead planet in Consider Phlebas, where fear of nuclear strikes made a civilization undermine their whole planet with vast tunnels filled with railroad tracks, on which their leaders would stay forever in motion, so that they could not be targeted by the bombs. Banks mentions that despite that the people of that planet were all wiped out eventually by biological warfare.
  It has to be mentioned that Banks’ book are usually full of a sense of futility, even when they are describing pleasant things. In his world of billions of populated planets, of electronic mind infinitely superior to people, of unlimited technological abilities nothing has any meaning any more. His descriptions of holocaust evoke a feeling of futility, but so do his descriptions of parties.
• TV series have done it as well. Star Trek tried several times (for example in the episode A Taste of Armageddon) but did not quite pull it off because of a lack of budget.
  But there is an impressive example in Stargate Atlantis, the episode Poisoning the Well. Here scientists of a planet develop a serum that will make them invulnerable to the alien attackers that devour them. They push on with unbreakable fanaticism, despite the fact it turns out that the serum kills half of their population. Much of the episode’s effect stems from the 1940s imagery of the planet and the fanatic hardness of the characters.

Two little things

As you probably know an ancient Middle East people, the Sumerians famously built huge temple platforms called ziggurats—towers with stairs at the sides and a shrine on top. For example this is a reconstruction image of the Ziggurat of Ur (modern-day Iraq):

Concerning ziggurats I found a fascinating little idea recently. It was stated by the late Dr. David Neiman, rabbi, archeologist and scholar, although I think it did not originate with him.

By the way: If you can spare the time, watch some of his lectures at Youtube. Despite the fact that I feel that his love of antiquity made him cast an unrealistically positive light on several things (slavery in antiquity, to name one), so this has to be taken with a grain of salt, there is a host of interesting material there.

The theory he put forward was this: He claimed that the ancestors of the Sumerians had migrated to Sumer from a mountainous region. This could be inferred from the fact that the early cuneiform symbol for “land” showed a picture of three mountains. It seems these people were used to worship their gods on mountain tops, and built their shrines and temples there.

When they later came to Sumer, which is a very flat country, it felt wrong to them to build temples on the ground. So they simply created artificial mountains and placed the temples on top of them—ziggurats.

The other one concerns the number 0. It is well known that the ancient European peoples generally had no sign for 0 in their number systems. The Greeks and Romans basically had nothing like it—they did not think it was a number at all, so why find a symbol for it? The Babylonians used a positional system to write numbers (as we do), so they had to have some kind of zero to discern, for example, 12, 120 and 102. They did so, but it was not allowed to stand alone, as pure 0. Neither did the Egyptians have it.

The first people to really understand the concept of zero, to write it and use it in calculations were Indians, and so it got into our number system, which is Indian in origin. This is all common knowledge.

Once I read in a book on the history of mathematics that the Indians were the only ones (or the first ones, anyway) to come up with a theory of zero for a special reason: The concept of nothingness (śūnyatā in Sanskrit) has been a very important idea in Indian philosophy since the earliest times. On the other hand Greek philosophers like Parmenides argued that “nothing” could not exist. They could not get their mind around the idea. The Indians did not have this trouble. They were used to 0.

I find these ideas very neat. In fact I have the strange feeling they fit together somehow. Let me try to clarify my point …

These things do not make you want to wear a tin foil helmet. They do not make you hate your neighbor. They do not make you feel you have been lied to your whole life.

Still, they are interesting. They are a little bit outside the canon of common knowledge. Outside the mainstream. You won’t find this information on Wikipedia. It’s one of the things they did not tell us. They are a little bit dubious. They might be true or they might not be, but is nice to belive they are. They do not rock your world like a flying saucer on the White House lawn but they might make you smile (or me at least). They might make you feel, in a tiny way, that the earth is a fascinating place if you lift the curtain. I will always have a place in my heart for things like these.

[I have started to make things like these into a series of articles. Here is the second one. Or just click the search key “little things”!]