HAPPY ST. ZENOBIA DAY

Let us honor with inspired hymns the two martyrs for truth: the preachers of true devotion, Zenóbius and Zenobía; as brother and sister they lived and suffered together and through martyrdom received their incorruptible crowns.

Today the Orthodox church calendar commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Zenobia and her brother, Zenobius.

Since this is an annual event, I won't repeat the story but point you to last year's post of 31 October (I was a day late in 2007. Shame!). Their history is complex -- not to say confused -- and it's all the fault of the 10th C Byzantine monk, Symeon Metaphrastes. Click over to that post -- Zenobia: Martyr Saint of Celicia and her brother -- and see what you can make of it. A year's reflection has not made me any wiser. You might be luckier.

There are not many images of Zenobia and Zenobius -- and one icon is uglier than the other. Here they are, though, with St Eutropia, who also met a sticky end -- and the Apostle Kleopas, one of the Seventy; he of 'the road to Emmaus' fame (Luke 24:13-33). All are celebrated on 30 October.

Speaking of icons, my next post will finally get back to Queen Zenobia. I'll be publishing a new coin find with our dear queen's image. So, lots of pictures ... and back on topic: coming soon.

Mourning Zenobia Hikes

I was shocked to open my inbox and find that Zenobia Hikes had died during the night. She was only 53.

She died of complications following multiple heart surgeries.

As vice-president for student affairs at Virginia Tech, she helped shepherd the university through the days following the campus massacre on 16 April 2007.

She was a member of the group of Tech executives known as the policy group that gathered on the morning of April 16 2007 to deal with the shooting deaths of two students in a dormitory. As they were meeting, gunman Seung-Hui Cho entered a nearby hall and killed another 30 victims.

Of course, I never met her but, like millions of others, I watched her on television at the convocation held the following day. Her warmth, courage, and compassion helped rally the spirits of grieving students. And seemed to give some meaning to the madness that had happened.

Ed Spencer, interim vice-president, says, "I remember walking over to the convocation on April 17 and realizing how remarkably calm and reassuring she was, knowing what she was about to say as the moderator of ceremonies for the convocation, and we all know what an incredible job she really did for that."

And John Gray Williams, a student, remembers this: I'll never forget how inspired she made me feel when, only days after I'd met her back during my first semester here at Tech, I passed her on the Drillfield and she called out to me by name, "Oh, hello, John Gray." Really!? Did a vice president of this university of 30,000 really just remember my name? But that's how she was. If you took the time to seek her out and talk to her about any sort of student issues, she took the time to remember your name -- and the issue. She took the concerns I (and others) brought to her to heart.

Another student, Mohawk-John Woods, writes in his Live Journal, "This won't matter much to most of you non-Hokies [Virginia Tech folk], but it matters to us. Zenobia Hikes was one of the few administrators I still felt I could trust after the shooting -- and I suspect that to be true for others, too. She always worked so hard for us, and always listened."

I meant to write a blog post about her one day -- under the rubric Zenobia's Hall of Fame (21st C. AD) [sadly, I noted this morning that the link has stopped working].

I never imagined it would be a R.I.P.

But I can tell you, John Woods, her death does matter to most of us. As you said, Zenobia Hikes, you are sorely missed.


More information on this vibrant woman at In Memoriam: Dr. Zenobia Lawrence Hikes

Athenian Ladies in New York

Worshipping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens (with Update)

An exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York will soon explore the many ways in which women’s religious worship contributed not just to their personal fulfilment but to the civic identity of the leading city of the Classical Greek world as well.

Worshipping Women seeks to correct "the unremittingly bleak picture that the lives of Athenian women were highly restricted when it came to the public sphere and participation in the political process. The involvement of women in cults and festivals ... was as essential for the successful functioning of the polis as that of any member of society."

I wish them luck.

Of course, a woman's life wasn't 'unremittingly bleak' but it was certainly unremittingly patriarchal. The idea of women taking part in the public business of the polis would have seemed inherently comical to Athenian citizens (males only, of course). That's what's behind Aristophanes, in some of his surviving plays, where he chuckles, gurgles, and snorts at women pretending to take on the roles of men instead of staying at home. The women are well aware of what men think about them:

Men never speak a good word, never one, for the feminine gender,
Everyone says we're a Plague,the source of all evils to man,
war, dissension, and strife

Still, as Onassis knows, the only area in which women had any power at all was in religion. Public ritual gave a woman the only chance she had (if she were respectable) to get out of the house and even, sometimes, to mingle with men. And that made husbands nervous. Especially in Dionysus’ cult, women had an outlet for worship equal or greater to that afforded to men. In the spirit of Dionysian revelry, women could become his priestesses or 'Bacchae' simply by drinking, dancing, singing, and releasing their inhibitions.

Then, there were also women-only festivals where men were excluded. Naturally, they didn't like being excluded -- but they were stuck: such rites were sanctioned by ancestral tradition. There are anecdotes and legends about men who tried to spy on women's secret rituals. After all, they had to know. They had a right to know. Unsurprisingly, the spied-upon sometimes responded with lethal fury. But not always.

The most venerable women-only rite in Athens, the Thesmophoria, held in autumn at the time of sowing, included hurling pigs into snake-filled crevices, and strict observance of sexual abstinence. Women left their homes to set up a tent city close to the site of the public Assembly of men.

Let us now devote ourselves to the sports which the women are
accustomed to celebrate here, when time has again brought round the
mighty Mysteries of the great goddesses, the sacred days....

But all they really did at such festivals, so men feared, was give vent to their legendary potential for defiance and subversiveness. And drink undiluted wine -- as Aristophanes reported, they took an oath sworn over cups of the best rich, dark wine never to mix their wine with water!

Oh! you wanton, you tippling women, who think of nothing but wine; you are a fortune to the drinking-shops and are our ruin; for the sake of drink, you neglect both your household and your [weaving] shuttle!

Men of ancient Athens surely laughed at Aristophanes' plays and this lampooning of women, but it may have been uneasy laughter. Did they really fear that their wives were secret alcoholic nymphomanics -- adulterous, lecherous, bibulous, treacherous and garrulous to boot! All vice, in short, and the curse of their husbands.

There is but one thing in the world worse than a shameless woman,
and that's another woman.

Ladies, I offer terms...

Aristophanes finally made his peace with women. At the end of his play about the Thesmophoria, he tells the troublesome matrons:

If well and truly, your honourable sex befriend me now, I won't abuse your honourable sex from this time forth for ever.


Non-abusive banter only, I am sure, at the Onassis Cultural Center 10 December 2008 t0 9 May 2009. It may well be worth a trip to the city since Greek newspapers say that many objects will be seen for the first time in New York.

Does that mean that Ladies are usually relegated to the storerooms? Surely not.



With thanks to the blog Tropaion for this alert.

Illustrations:

Above: Statue of the Goddess Artemis,ca. 100 B.C. From Delos (found in the House of the Diadoumenos). Athens, National Archaeological Museum.

Below: A Spartan woman victor in the foot-race at the Heraean Games, ca. 460 B.C., Vatican Museum, fitting a description by Pausanias, which says that the girls competed divided into three teams according to their age. During events their hair was allowed to fall loose on their shoulders and they wore a short chiton tunic which reached down to their knees but left bare their left shoulder and breast. As in the case of male Olympic winners, the prize for them too was a wreath of wild olive as well as the right to dedicate a tablet depicting themselves at the temple of Hera.

Updated 19 December 2008:

The show has opened. See the review in the New York Times.

Caves Weren't Painted in a Day!

I've heard of artists being late with their commissions, but 15,000 years to finish a painting job seems a trifle over the top.

Scientists are revolutionising our understanding of early human societies with a more precise way of dating cave art.

In several caves in Spain -- where it had been assumed that the art all dated to the same period -- new dating techniques reveal that the paintings were done in several phases, sometimes as much as over 15,000 years (25,000 years ago to just 10,000 BCE).

The dating method involves a technique called uranium series dating. It works on any carbonate substance, such as coral or limestone, and involves measuring the balance between a uranium isotope and the form of thorium that it decays into. The process is lengthy and painstaking -- researchers must scrape off enough of the calcite crust for an accurate dating, while taking care not to harm the art underneath, or even contaminate the sample with the older limestone behind the art.

"This lets us challenge assumptions about the age of cave art," says Alistair Pike, senior lecturer in archaeological sciences at Bristol University, who has helped develop the technique.

Dr Pike and his research team spent two weeks in Spain last year testing the new method in caves, and have just returned from another fortnight's expedition to sample nine more caves, including the so called 'Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic', Altamira cave (from which come the bison above and the animals below). The elaborate works in Altamira were thought to date from around 14,000 years ago.

It may have taken Michelangelo four long years to paint his fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but his earliest predecessors spent considerably longer perfecting their own masterpieces.

Rather than being created in one session, as archaeologists previously thought, many of the works discovered across Europe were produced over hundreds of generations who added to, refreshed and painted over the original pieces of art.

In new research published by the Natural Environment Research Council's website Planet Earth, Dr Pike reports that some of the paintings were between 25,000 and 35,000 years old. The youngest paintings in the cave were 11,000 years old.

"We have found that most of these caves were not painted in one go, but the painting spanned up to 20,000 years. This goes against what the archaeologists who excavated in the caves and found archaeology for just one period.

"It is probably the case that people did not live in the caves they painted. It seems the caves they lived in were elsewhere and there was something special about the painted caves."

Given that the researchers often had to crawl through tiny fissures to take their samples, and that some of the art is virtually inaccessible except with modern spelunking equipment, I'd say that something special is a bit of an understatement.

(Left) Black and violet painted horses overlying red figures at Tito Bustillo Cave, Asturias, Spain: it's staggering to think that the horses may be separated from the red signs -- and conceivably even from each other -- by thousands of years.

When we really absorb this new information, it must also change entirely how we look at cave painting* -- and especially its puzzling mix of representational and geometric, sign-like imagery. One single explanation -- whether shamanistic hallucinations or gender-coded bursts of consciousness -- is unlikely to stretch over so many painters over such unimaginably long periods of time.

The death knell of a universal theory for the origins of art, perhaps?


* If, that is to say, these great time differences are confirmed by future work (which may not be taken for granted: I've seen too many scientific flip-flops in archaeology to be sanguine).

And, yes, I know I'm wildly off topic but this was too good to miss. My thanks once again to The Ridger at The Greenbelt , whose Monday Science Links alerted me to this exciting story, first picked up on the blog Pro-Science.

Will the Great Cleopatra Please Stand Up? (Updated)

The controversy rages on: is this Cleopatra VII in the nude, or not?

As always, there are two schools of thought on such serious matters. One school says 'Yes' and the other says 'No'. Luckily Zenobia is at hand to settle the isssue.

But, first, the story so far.

This beauty (left) is known as the Esquiline Venus, a marble statue dating to the middle of the first century AD, found in Rome in 1874 in the grounds of the imperial Lamian gardens on the Esquiline hill (hence her name). In trying to account for several peculiarities of the statue -- like her un-Roman curly hair and the Egyptian-looking rearing snake winding around the vase beside her (below right) -- the Italian historian Licinio Glori proposed to identify this Venus as Cleopatra.*

Important evidence were remarks by Appian (Civil Wars 2, 102) and Cassius Dio (51) about a "beautiful statue" of Cleopatra in the temple of Venus put on display by Julius Caesar about 46 BC, the year of the inauguration of the Temple of Venus on the Forum Iulium (remember, the Julian family believed that their house descended from Venus). Appian, writing around 150 AD adds that the statue still was visible on the spot -- "next to Venus", he says -- in his day.

The statue may originally have shown a woman binding her hair with a strip of fabric in preparation for a bath, because the remains of the little finger of her left hand are visible on the back of her head, suggesting her left arm was raised to hold her hair in place, while the right hand wound the fabric. She is, in any case, at least two removes from the original source of inspiration, a lost classical Greek bronze. As Kenneth Clark put it in his famous book on The Nude,

“...there was produced a bronze figure of a nude girl, perhaps a priestess of Isis, binding her hair, which must have been a masterpiece. It is known to us in two marble replicas, of which the more complete is the statue in Rome known as the Esquiline Venus ....

No doubt the original has been changed and elaborated by translation into marble, yet the copies have not lost the unity of the first idea. Somewhere not very far behind them is the work of [a 5th C BC] individual artist who, on the surviving evidence, must be reckoned the creator of the female nude. Not that the Esquiline girl represents an evolved notion of feminine beauty [emphasis mine]. She is short and square, with high pelvis and small breasts far apart, a stocky little peasant such as might be found still in any Mediterranean village....

But she is solidly desirable, compact, proportionate, and in fact, her proportions have been calculated on a simple mathematical scale. The unit of measurement is her head. She is seven heads tall, there is a length of one head between her breasts, one from breast to navel, and one from the navel to the division of her legs. More important than these calculations... the sculptor has discovered what we may call the plastic essentials of the female body. Breasts will become fuller, waists narrower, and hips will describe a more generous arc; but fundamentally this is the architecture of the body that will control the observations of classically minded artists till the end of the nineteenth century.

Yes, but is she Cleopatra?

Yes! she is! Now another eminent art historian, Bernard Andreae, has taken up the cudgels on Cleopatra's behalf: ** Andreae argues that 1. the statue of the Esquiline Venus is not an ordinary Venus but must be interpreted as representing an individual, and that 2. Cleopatra must be this individual.

No! she's not! "Die Venus vom Esquilin ist nicht Kleopatra", says Guy Weill Goudchaux in the very same book.**

One of the strongest arguments against the identification is that no Queen of Egypt would ever have let herself be pictured naked in public, not even if Julius Caesar had gone down on his knees and begged her. Nudity is against all norms of Egyptian decorum.

Or so we thought, until this statue of Queen Arsinoe II (3rd C BC), represented as Isis-Aphrodite, came out of the water in the harbour of Alexandria in 2000. Sculpted in black granite, the life-size headless statue appears as if wearing a diaphanous cloth held together by knots at her breast. It is a magnificent example of Graeco-Egyptian art , mingling Greek-style draped clothing and traditional pharaonic posture. Her robes fall off her shoulders so easily, the characteristic Isis knot is tied so elegantly over her half-covered breast, the cloth drapes over the navel, hips and knees so subtly that the stony dress seems almost transparent. The gown folds over her sensuous body like a wet translucent slip, casting a sheen on the hard black granite that makes it appear as voluptuous as folds of silk.

So that argument goes 'plop' in the water. While Andreae's theory gets a specific- gravity boost since he can now maintain that Cleopatra may actually be clothed in an invisible sheer garment on the model of Ptolemaic queens.

What's a perfect female nude?

The idealized nude can be traced to the Aphrodite of Cnidus by Praxiteles (330 B.C.). In this scheme of things, the Esquiline Venus is not the ideal of feminine beauty but a starting point. At only seven heads tall, she is indeed a stocky little figure. Praxiteles' Aphrodite, on the other hand, was made to accentuate these same proportions, and became the standard mathematical formula for representing the figure whether male or female

The proportions haven't changed much through the centuries:

- An average person is generally 7-and-a-half heads tall.

- An ideal figure, used when aiming for an impression of nobility or grace, is 8 heads tall.

- An heroic figure, used for depicting gods and superheroes, is eight-and-a-half heads tall (which is why giant figures sometimes look like pinheads!).

The ideal figure, then, has a noticeably smaller head -- one eighth instead of one seventh of the total height of the figure: smaller head plus longer legs make the figure appear more elegant. Longer legs are sadly lacking in the Esquiline Venus. Is she perhaps a little quirky because she is partly modelled on a real human being, not quite the divine ideal but a Cleopatra/Isis/Venus?

Even if not a fully-fledged goddess, she does not deserve Kenneth Clark's rebuke that her notion of female beauty is 'not evolved' . We are so used to see the statue reproduced from the front that perhaps we do not fully appreciate her charms.

[All the luscious photographs of the Esquiline Venus are made by Kalervo Koskimies].

Go see her yourself. You can explore her every angle in the huge new Julius Caesar show -- from 24 October to 5 April 5 2009 -- in Rome at the Chiostro del Bramante.

Caesar To Dazzle Rome Once More

Rome is celebrating one of its most famous political and military leaders, Julius Caesar (100-44 BC). A sweeping exhibition in the Chiostro del Bramante commemorates the life, times and achievements of Ancient Rome's best known figure.

The first ever exhibit to focus solely on Caesar, it showcases just about everything related to Caesar: 180 items of archaeological, artistic and cultural interest, from ancient times until the 20th century.

The Esquiline Venus is on the spot, just in case it is Cleopatra.

And what does Zenobia say? Is she modelled on Cleopatra or not?

"Maybe, decidedly maybe. There's simply no way of knowing."

But that's no reason not to think she might be.


Photo credits for the statue of Arsinoe: Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation - Photos: Christophe Gerigk.

* Cleopatra, Venere Esquilina (Rome 1955).

** Bernard Andreae, Karin Rhein, Kleopatra und die Caesaren. Katalog einer Ausstellung des Bucerius Kunst Forums, Hamburg, 28. Oktober 2006 bis 4. Februar 2007 ( Munich 2006). Reviewed by Miguel John Versluys at BMCR 28/09/2008.


Update 2 October 2008: Speaking of Arsinoe II, it looks like she might have a new home when she gets back to Alexandria (she's on a world tour at the moment, now temporarily residing in Madrid; see comment on this post by 100Swallows).

Underwater Museum for Egypt Sunken Treasures?

Evoking sails of Nile feluccas (left, lit in the distance) and the cardinal directions, the glassy, towering "four points will be like the Lighthouse of Alexandria that illuminated the ancient library and the world," said Jacques Rougerie, lead architect for the feasibility study. "I want to do the same thing with this museum."

Fiberglass tunnels would connect above-ground galleries, near the New Library of Alexandria to the underwater facility, where antiquities would be visible in their natural resting places (as in the artist's conception, bottom left) at the site of Cleopatra's now sunken palace.

The proposed museum's underwater facility will be difficult and expensive to build and is the focus of the just launched two-year feasibility study aided by the UN. But planners believe that the benefits of plunging visitors into the historical context of the objects -- on the sunken island that once held Cleopatra's palace -- will be worth the trouble. It would certainly be memorable!

Wonderful photographs and more information at the National Geographic News (with thanks to Robert Blau, via imperialrome2@yahoogroups.co.uk).

Illustration courtesy Jacques Rougerie

First Uppity Woman (Updated)

This angry-looking Neanderthal woman had pale skin, freckles, and was a fiery red-head too.

This is the first reconstruction of a female Neanderthal to be based in part on ancient DNA evidence. Anthropologists have now gone beyond fossils and are reading the actual genes of an extinct species of human.

Neanderthals appeared in Europe about 300,000 years ago but mysteriously vanished ca. 35,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of modern humans in Europe.

Meet Wilma*

Artists and scientists created Wilma (cutely named for the Flintstones character) using analysis of DNA from 43,000-year-old bones that had been cannibalized. No wonder she looks so peeved. Who wants to go down in history as a half-chewed bone?

The genes associated with pigmentation suggest that at least some Neanderthals would have had red hair, pale skin, and possibly freckles. The traits were likely more common in European Neanderthals, just as they are often seen in modern humans of European descent.

Wilma's genes showed an unknown mutation in a key gene called MC1R, also present in modern humans, said the study's lead author Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona. MC1R regulates a protein that guides the production of melanin, which pigments hair and skin and protects from UV rays.

"European [humans] have quite a lot of variation in this gene — not only red hair variants but also others," he explained, adding that humans have been in Europe for only about 40,000 years. "The Neanderthals, being there at least 400,000 [years], likely accumulated ten times more variation."

Wilma Didn't Mate with Modern Humans

Wilma's particular mutation is not known to occur in modern humans so it gives no evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Other Neanderthal enthusiasts have come to the same conclusion: Wilma didn't mix with the new guys in the neighbourhood. So, we'll have to remove the third figure in the famous cartoon (left) -- whether ascent or descent of Man or Ape.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have now sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome — genetic information passed down from mothers — of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal thigh bone found in a cave in Croatia. The sequence contains 16,565 DNA bases, or "letters," representing 13 genes, making it the longest stretch of Neanderthal DNA ever examined.

The new study shows that at least for the maternal lineage, there are no traceable genetic markers that suggest admixture of Neanderthals and modern humans.

The study author, Richard Green, points out that Neanderthals exhibited a greater number of letter substitutions than modern humans due to mutations in their mitochondrial DNA, although they seem to have undergone fewer evolutionary changes overall. The fact that so many mutations — some of which may have been harmful — persisted in the Neanderthal genome could indicate the species suffered from a limited gene pool. This might be because the Neanderthal population was smaller than that of Homo sapiens living in Europe at the time.

The researchers estimate the Neanderthal population living in Europe 38,000 years ago never reached more than 10,000 at any one time.

"If there were only a few, small bands of Neanderthals, barely hanging on, then any change to their way of life could have been enough to drive them to extinction," Green said. "One obvious change would have been the introduction of another large hominid—modern humans." And he added, "a small population size can diminish the power of natural selection to remove slightly deleterious evolutionary changes."

In short, inbreeding.

Wilma is more than just a token thigh bone.

Created for an October 2008 National Geographic magazine article, Wilma has a skeleton made from replicas of pelvis and skull bones from Neanderthal females. Copies of male Neanderthal bones — resized to female dimensions — filled in the gaps. She is thus the first full-size Neanderthal female reconstructed using the latest information from genetics, fossil evidence, and archaeology.

The shape of her eyes rings especially true: like many modern cold-adapted populations, they seem to have an extra fold of skin which produces a hooded eye appearance: in Asians the fold spreads from the nose side of the eye outward, and in NW Europeans, it spreads from the outside of the eye inward. Wilma is also chubby-cheeked: her facial padding is another cold-adapted feature.

Was her pelvis the death of her?

Meanwhile, at the University of Zurich, Marcia Ponce de León and colleagues pieced together three Neanderthal baby skeletons: one newborn from a cave in Russia and two infants aged 19 and 24 months,from a Syrian cave. In addition, the scientists reconstructed the pelvis of an adult female Neanderthal skeleton found in Israel.

By analysing the skeletons, the team found that Neanderthal babies were born with similar-size skulls to those of modern human babies. However, the shape of the face was different. Even in a newborn baby, the conspicuous protrusion of the forehead that distinguishes Neanderthals was evident.

Putting the baby and the mother together, the birthing process would have been at the limit of what was possible, and the baby's head would have had to turn by a quarter … in order to get through the narrow lower pelvis. According to the scientists, this may explain why modern humans eventually trumped Neanderthals.

Poor Wilma.

Cannibalism wouldn't have helped either!

Update: 24 September 2008

(Left) A National Geographer puts the finishing touches to Wilma's reconstruction. The October 2008 issue of National Geographic is now available on-line and it should not be missed by anyone keen on Neanderthals. From this issue:

Since 2000, some 1,500 bone fragments have been unearthed from this side gallery [of El Sidrón cave], representing the remains of at least nine Neanderthals—five young adults, two adolescents, a child of about eight, and a three-year-old toddler. All showed signs of nutritional stress in their teeth—not unusual in young Neanderthals late in their time on Earth. But a deeper desperation is etched in their bones. Antonio Rosas [of the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Madrid] picked up a recently unearthed fragment of a skull and another of a long bone of an arm, both with jagged edges.

"These fractures were— clop— made by humans," Rosas said, imitating the blow of a stone tool. "It means these fellows went after the brains and into long bones for the marrow."

In addition to the fractures, cut marks left on the bones by stone tools clearly indicate that the individuals were cannibalized. Whoever ate their flesh, and for whatever reason—starvation? ritual?—the subsequent fate of their remains bestowed upon them a distinct and marvelous kind of immortality.

See also Chris Sloan's blog, Stones, Bones 'n Things (Chris was for 12 years Art Director and Paleontology specialist at National Geographic; he's now "responsible for for keeping track of a bunch of scientists" on Society-funded projects). On his blog today, he talks about some of the pitfalls -- and pleasures -- of reconstructing how ancient people looked from their bare bones. In Wilma's case, of course, we now have added genetic information which gives real life to her skin colour and hair. He has this to say about her body reconstruction:

The model's beat up appearance and "hunting" pose is consistent with the notion that Neandertal life was rough, injuries were high, and we have no reason to believe that females did not participate in hunts, in one way or the other.

A game old girl -- beat-up but immortal: that's Wilma for you.



* First read about on Dienekes' Anthropology Blog (with interesting comments by Kosmo).

Zenobia, too, is a banker to the poor!

Yes, we really can (and not just words)

Remember the Nobel Prize in 2006 - Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below"? Those efforts were microlending: small loans to entrepreneurs - $1500, perhaps, or even less. It can turn someone's world around.*

But you had to have money to lend. Now, thanks to an organization called Kiva, you can get involved in microlending with as little as twenty-five extra dollars (twice nothing in Euro's or GBP!). For the price of a DVD or a good book or a lunch, you can help someone start on the road out of poverty.

Watch the video

Loans that change lives

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website. By enabling people to connect with and bundle personal loans to low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world, Kiva is revolutionizing the fight against global poverty. You can make a direct loan of $25 or more to an entrepreneur to purchase business-related items such as sewing machines or livestock. This can dramatically improve the life of an entrepreneur and her family, empowering them to earn their way out of poverty.

This week 19,288 lenders have made a loan.

It's on the straight and narrow too. From the New York Times:

“You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor”

“For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier. That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them.”**

A little money goes a long way

You can go to Kiva's website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business - like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent - and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.

The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back - and Kiva's loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

Although Kiva's clients have a pretty good repayment rate (currently 98.47%), you should always remember that , there are no guarantees. But that's actually one of the things that makes this so attractive (and probably so successful): if you lend out $25 and don't get it back, it's not a tragedy. And if you do - it's such a success.

Zenobia and her friends will be giving Kiva gift certificates this Christmas. How about you?


Photo of Houndjénouko ADANOU from www.Kiva.org. Born in 1967 in Tokplitomé, Togo, Mrs Adanou lives with her husband in the villge of Tékponou. The mother of five children, she manages a business of rams (buying and selling). She purchases rams and re-sells them at the Saturday market.


* Thank you Ridger of The Greenbelt for alerting me to this brilliant plan.

** Nicholas Kristof, 27 March 2007

Zeus Rains on Pagan Protest (Updated)

LATEST UPDATE (20 April 2017): 

GREEK STATE RECOGNIZES PAGANISM AS RELIGION

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece, according to the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE).
YSEE is a religious organization claiming they work to restore the indigenous religion of Hellas. The organization put out a statement saying that Greek polytheism has received legal status in Greece.
Until now, Greek Pagans did not enjoy religious freedoms such as the right to buy land in order to build houses of worship nor could Pagan priests perform marriage ceremonies.
Now the Greek State, through a decision of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, recognizes the Hellenic Religion as a “Known Religion,” according to paragraph 17, the only form of recognition for a religion in Greece. The paragraph includes the permission to build a temple as well as the right of public liturgies of any recognized religion.
- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/04/20/greek-state-recognizes-paganism-as-religion/#sthash.xcJpICgt.dpuf

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece.

Until now, Greek Pagans did not enjoy religious freedoms such as the right to buy land in order to build houses of worship nor could Pagan priests perform marriage ceremonies.

Now the Greek State, through a decision of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, recognizes the Hellenic Religion as a “Known Religion,” according to paragraph 17, the only form of recognition for a religion in Greece. The paragraph includes the permission to build a temple as well as the right of public liturgies of any recognized religion.
 
The Greek Reporter has more....

And the background to this breakthrough.

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece, according to the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE).
YSEE is a religious organization claiming they work to restore the indigenous religion of Hellas. The organization put out a statement saying that Greek polytheism has received legal status in Greece.
Until now, Greek Pagans did not enjoy religious freedoms such as the right to buy land in order to build houses of worship nor could Pagan priests perform marriage ceremonies.
Now the Greek State, through a decision of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, recognizes the Hellenic Religion as a “Known Religion,” according to paragraph 17, the only form of recognition for a religion in Greece. The paragraph includes the permission to build a temple as well as the right of public liturgies of any recognized religion.
- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/04/20/greek-state-recognizes-paganism-as-religion/#sthash.xcJpICgt.dpuf

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece, according to the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE).
YSEE is a religious organization claiming they work to restore the indigenous religion of Hellas. The organization put out a statement saying that Greek polytheism has received legal status in Greece.
Until now, Greek Pagans did not enjoy religious freedoms such as the right to buy land in order to build houses of worship nor could Pagan priests perform marriage ceremonies.
Now the Greek State, through a decision of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, recognizes the Hellenic Religion as a “Known Religion,” according to paragraph 17, the only form of recognition for a religion in Greece. The paragraph includes the permission to build a temple as well as the right of public liturgies of any recognized religion.
- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/04/20/greek-state-recognizes-paganism-as-religion/#sthash.xcJpICgt.dpuf

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece, according to the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE).
YSEE is a religious organization claiming they work to restore the indigenous religion of Hellas. The organization put out a statement saying that Greek polytheism has received legal status in Greece.
Until now, Greek Pagans did not enjoy religious freedoms such as the right to buy land in order to build houses of worship nor could Pagan priests perform marriage ceremonies.
Now the Greek State, through a decision of the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, recognizes the Hellenic Religion as a “Known Religion,” according to paragraph 17, the only form of recognition for a religion in Greece. The paragraph includes the permission to build a temple as well as the right of public liturgies of any recognized religion.
- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/04/20/greek-state-recognizes-paganism-as-religion/#sthash.xcJpICgt.dpuf

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece, according to the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE).
YSEE is a religious organization claiming they work to restore the indigenous religion of Hellas. The organization put out a statement saying that Greek polytheism has received legal status in Greece.
- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/04/20/greek-state-recognizes-paganism-as-religion/#sthash.xcJpICgt.dpuf

Greek Pagans are granted legal status as polytheism is officially a religion in Greece, according to the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE).
YSEE is a religious organization claiming they work to restore the indigenous religion of Hellas. The organization put out a statement saying that Greek polytheism has received legal status in Greece.
- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/04/20/greek-state-recognizes-paganism-as-religion/#sthash.xcJpICgt.dpuf

 
'Just as Zeus sends rain so as to grow the crops', (Aristotle, Phys. 2.8 198b), the ancient gods sent a much-needed downpour to Athens yesterday. That's the high priestess of the Olympians, Doretta Peppa (below) raising a fist perhaps in response to this mark of divine favour.


“This was the first [pagan] prayer ceremony on the Acropolis since the Parthenon was converted into a church,” [in the 5th C AD] Peppa said. "Is it a coincidence that rain started falling when the ceremony started and ended at the same time as the ceremony? I think not."

Pagans Pray at Parthenon

Thrusting their arms skywards and chanting Orphic hymns, about 200 Greek pagans made a comeback at the Acropolis yesterday. The Guardian reports

After a break of 16 centuries, Greek pagans are worshipping the ancient gods again - despite furious opposition from the Orthodox church.

Yesterday's ceremony represented a major coup for Greek polytheists whose faith, which is described by the powerful Orthodox church as a "miserable resuscitation of a degenerate dead religion", has long been banned in the country that gave birth to the gods of Mount Olympus.

This is the second public prayer meeting of the Greek pagans (who call themselves Ellenais*) in a little more than a year. I've been following the movement since last January (The Gods Revived, Pagan Revival II, More on the Pagan Revival) when they first appeared among the giant Corinthian columns of the Sanctuary of Olympian Zeus in Athens to pray for world peace (and for rain as well!). Since then, Greek Orthodox priests have redirected the venom they usually reserve for homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, masons and the barbaric Turks at these "satanic" New Ageists and fulminated against their idols.

Peppa said officials have also harassed believers in the Olympian gods. Despite this, the pagan revivalists recently won a court battle for state recognition of the ancient religion. Now, flexing their muscles, the devotees gathered yesterday at Greece's most sacred site on the Acropolis. Although the Culture Ministry forbids ceremonies of any sort at archaeological sites, the small band entered the Acropolis’s heavily guarded grounds as tourists and then persuaded guards to allow the 20-minute rite. Before the east wing of the Parthenon, they prayed to Athena, goddess of wisdom and patron of Athens:

“Oh, goddess,” high priestess Peppa said over an offering of water and olive oil, “we are ready to defend your grounds.”

Defend the Acropolis, that is, from the cultural barbarity of the New Acropolis Museum.

Last year, the government moved hundreds of sculptures from a tiny museum on the Acropolis to a Euro 129 million (US$190 m; £94m) new museum below the citadel. The building is where Greece hopes one day to display the Elgin Marbles alongside the other Parthenon sculptures. Greek officials have said the new museum will open next month, displaying some 4,000 artifacts.

"Neither the Romans nor the Ottomans or any other occupational force ever took anything from this holy site," said Yannis Kontopidis, one of the high priests who officiated over the affair.  "It's scandalous that antiquities of such value, carved in honour of Athena, should be wrested from their natural environment and moved to a new locale."

The glass and concrete edifice, designed by the Swiss-American architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with Greece's Michalis Photiadis, has divided Greeks.

Supporters praise its cavernous space and have claimed the building will offer better protection of the antiquities and a superior viewing space for spectators, who previously had to negotiate the confines of a tiny museum atop the hill.

However, opponents, including architectural purists, have argued that the new museum is in the wrong location and far too big in grandeur and scale.

Ellenais described the new glass and concrete structure as "an incredible architectural monstrosity that insults [Greece's] cultural heritage," and thus he adds the strength of the polytheists to protests against the imminent inauguration of the new Museum.

Perhaps the nationality, too, of the architect sticks in the craw of worshippers of ancient Greek gods.
Although he himself is denounced by the state church, high-priest Kontopidis declares, "Moving these sculptures to a museum that is foreign and hostile to the Greek environment is like breaking up a family.'' 

And high-priestess Peppa frets, "We believe that the structural elements of a temple should not be moved and we worry about the consequences."

What, I wondered, could those consequences possibly be?

The Delphic Oracle

Being a Classical Archaeologist, I immediately consulted the Delphic Oracle.

I asked: Has the fated time of Athens' destruction come upon it?

And the goodly Pythia responded: They should not be too much troubled in spirit; a wineskin floats on the sea.**

You can't say fairer than that!


* an acronym in Greek for "Sacred Society of Greek Ancient Religionists".

** Q247 from Joseph Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle, 1978.

Photograph of Doretta Peppa (top of post) via AP News

Photographs of the New Acropolis Museum from its website: above, Looking at the Acropolis with the cranes removing sculptures and pieces of temples through the glass walls of the Parthenon Gallery; middle, Architect's Conception of the Museum floating on a pilotis over the archaeological excavations; below, Architect's conception of the future Archaic Gallery.


Updated 28 September 2008 : I should have guessed that even a society dedicated to reviving the ancient religion would have a website ... and so it does: DODECATHEON (with information in Greek, English, French, and German). Interesting features on the Society, Hellenic religion, its journal Pantheon (in Greek only) and Greek rites -- including useful tips on how to have an Hellenic Wedding: it seems necessary to veil the bride and have a handy temple on the hill behind, which may make it hard to replicate in the diaspora.

Zenobia Survives!

Collateral Damage takes out Queen of Sweden instead.

British readers of this blog may well have already heard the news but, for those located elsewhere, the casualties in the Royal Academy of Art might come as a shock.

Last month, a ceramic sculpture -- one of five by Costa Rican artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez on display at the “Summer Exhibition 2008″ (left) -- collided with an unsteady visitor. The 9-foot/3 m.-tall piece named Christina toppled over and smashed into hundreds of pieces.

Before the fall, there were five little Frauleins Christina, Panthea, Zenobia, Semiramis and Guinevere.

We'll come back to these names in a moment, but first an eye-witness report.

Claire San Martin watched it happen and tells us, "It was an enormous crash, like pottery smashing.

"Everyone was just standing around not knowing what to do at all, and one woman in a white top, who I assume had knocked it over, was standing with her hand on her head."

The lady in white thus joins the friendly-fire brigade along with an Englishman who, in 2006, tripped over his shoelaces at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge and smashed a hefty 99lb (45kg) Qing dynasty vase. The 113 pieces of the Chinese porcelain vase have been reassembled. Christina's future fate remains unknown.

But the best (or worst) is yet to come.

The staff reacted with the stiffest of upper lips in the expected, unhurried manner: "After a while," says our star witness, "a person who was in charge of the room ran off to get help and someone came in with a dustpan and brush to clean it up."

Meanwhile, while the dust was still settling, other patrons -- who had heard the loud crash and saw the scattering pieces -- thought it was all part of the show: "They were taking pictures, " Claire continues. " I think they thought it was meant to be like that. It was quite funny."

Well, yes. This was a contemporary art exhibition. How would one know?

The Five Queens

It took me a little while to find the common denominator between Christina, Panthea, Zenobia, Semiramis and Guinevere because I think of Panthea as the beautiful mistress of Lucius Verus (about whom I've written in the 'All-Divine' Girl and Emperor Lucius Verus, I, and a second part as well). But no, the artist didn't have in mind the emperor's mistress; when the penny finally dropped, it had to be the 'Other Panthea', wife of Abradates, king of Susa.

Thus, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez had created five ceramic totems of queens: three ancient (Panthea, Zenobia, and Semiramis), one medieval (Guinevere) and one early modern (Christina of Sweden).

But not five Frauleins.

Frauleins in German means 'young ladies' or 'unmarried women' -- and that wasn't the case.

What then was the connecting thread?

Faithfulness and Chastity?

Certainly the 'Other Panthea' gets top marks in the Chastity stakes.

"Reportedly the most beautiful woman in Asia" (Xenophon, Cyropaedia 4.6), Panthea had been taken prisoner by the Persian king, Cyrus the Great. Despite attempted pimping by his vassal, Araspas, whom she virtuously rebuffed, Cyrus respected her honour and kept her inviolate. That's Cyrus in blue on the left, telling Arapas that he won't be tempted by lust but will keep his mind on his army. Hence, he's pointing to his soldiers and not looking at Panthea's bare breasts.

The great king sends Panthea back to her husband as chaste as ever. In return for this favour, Abradates surrenders himself and his troops to the conqueror. He swears loyalty to Cyrus and goes off to fight against the Egyptians on his behalf (c. 401 B.C.). When he is killed in the very first battle, Panthea stabs herself and mingles her blood with his before she dies. This was so emotional that three of her eunuchs immediately killed themselves over her body.

As dedicated readers of this blog will know, Zenobia , too, was extremely chaste:

Such was her continence, it is said, that she would not know even her own husband save for the purpose of conception. For when once she had lain with him, she would refrain until the time of menstruation to see if she were pregnant; if not, she would again grant him an opportunity of begetting children. [Hist. Aug. TT XXX 12]

However unlikely and stereotypical this story, a statement by five queens in favour of chastity would be a refreshing antidote to postmodern licentiousness; wouldn't it? Especially in a show curated by the artist Tracey Emin. My favourite Emin artwork is Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995), a tent containing the embroidered names of the various persons within this privileged category. But, hold on. Curator Emin said she was searching for works that would make her feel "excited and feverish". There was even a sign outside the gallery warning visitors that some of the exhibits “may cause offence”. The may is optimistic.

That's Emin (right) standing between the five queens -- which she called the 'star of the show' . The exhibit, when intactus, must have had, in her eyes, something titillating.

What can that be?

We must look elsewhere for the connecting thread.

Cuckolded?

The story of the legendary Guinevere, wife of King Arthur, and her love affair with Lancelot is too well known to need retelling. Guinevere, naturally, is also surpassingly beautiful and desirable, but, alas, morally lax. Whether she is forced into or conceives and engineers her extra-marital relationship with Lancelot, her faithlessness triggers the fall of Arthur and the end of the Golden Age of Camelot.

Silly cow.

But at least she didn't murder her husband.

Murder?

Semiramis, a semi-legendary Assyrian queen, is probably a dim reflection of the historical queen Shammuramat (ruled 811-808 BC), the Babylonian wife of Shamshi-Adad V. After her husband's death, she appears to have served as regent for several years for her son.

In most stories, she is the wife of King Ninus of Babylon. He became captivated by her beauty (of course!) and after her first husband conveniently committed suicide, he married her.

As they say, "Love's a bitch", so that was the first of his two biggest mistakes. The second came when Semiramis, now Queen of Babylon, convinced Ninus to make her "Regent for a Day." He did so - and on that day, she had him executed, and she seized the throne.

Clever, really.

This, of course, is only one small part of her story. On the left, Edgar Degas paints her as she dreamily builds the city of Babylon. She is often remembered as a founder of cities: the characteristic tells in the Near East were even known as 'mounds of Semiramis' and said to cover the ruins of one or another of her mighty works.

There are so many different tales told of her -- and I shall certainly write about Semiramis one day, for she is the archetypal eastern queen; and Zenobia is often compared to her. But little seems relevant to Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez's ceramic totem. Unless the artist is thinking of the inevitable rumours of Semiramis' sexual misconduct -- a long string of one-night-stands with handsome soldiers. To ensure that her power would not be threatened by any man presuming on their relationship, she had each lover killed after a night of passion.

Chastity, if I may say so, is not in the offing here.

Gutsiness?

When she abdicated the throne of Sweden, Queen Christina explained one of her reasons:*

... it is impossible for me to marry. That is the way it is for me....My temper is a mortal enemy to this horrible yoke [marriage], which I would not accept, even if I thus would become the ruler of the world. Which crime has the female sex committed to be sentenced to the harsh necessity which consists of being locked up all life either as a prisoner or a slave? I call the nuns prisoners and the married women slaves.

Although still only 29 years of age, she had occupied the throne for 23years. She had excuse enough to call it a day. Her heroic father, Gustav Adolph, had died when she was only six. Her mother, Maria Eleonora, consumed by grief, "mourned day and night, relieved only by her troupe of dwarves and hunchbacks, dancing in the candlelight".

When Christina put down her sceptre, she also abandoned the religion of her powerful father, the northern champion of Protestantism, and converted to Catholicism. Her subsequent lax observance of Catholic rituals, however, suggests this was not an overpowering preoccupation. Perhaps she just got bored of her cold and constricted homeland and hankered for the brighter lights and wider cultures of Rome. So, in 1654, disguised as a man, she left Sweden on horseback with several of her male supporters.

Her life in exile, even more than her years on the throne, showed that she was a formidable figure ... extravagant, quarrelsome, petulant, usually indiscreet and sometimes scandalous in her words and behaviour, she was an infernal nuisance to the countries she honoured by her presence. "I love the storm and fear the calm," she told France's Cardinal Mazarin ....

Yet usually she was accepted at her own valuation and fêted lavishly. When she arrived in Paris, 22,000 men paraded to greet her - "130 companies of knights and gentlemen, bedecked with swords and feathers, and mounted on gleaming horses". Two hundred thousand people lined the streets.

Typically, she rejected the elaborate dais on which she was supposed to be carried and elected to enter Paris on horseback. When she moved on to Rome, even though her reputation had been badly tarnished by the brutal execution of her erring servant, Monaldeschi, 24 cardinals assembled to greet her and the Pope sent a mountain of flowers to show his pleasure at her arrival.**

Christina entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo on horseback and dressed in the costume of an Amazon to boot. Needless to say, her arrival created a sensation. She spent most of the remaining 34 years of her life in the Eternal City occupied with court intrigues and the cultivation of mathematics and the sciences, as well as literature and the fine arts, for all of which her unisex education had given her a taste. She gathered poets, essayists, and philosophers of both sexes in her salon for "scientific discourse on all useful and agreeable, erudite and celestial subjects."

If you've got it, flaunt it

She undoubtedly had a taste for cross-dressing. When still sovereign of Sweden, she had Justus van Egmont paint her clad in full armour (1654). A champagne glass commemorating her visit to the Low Countries with two engravings cut by a diamond shows two busts of Christina, one dressed as a woman, the other as a man. The Duc de Guise described her thus:

She wears men's shoes and her voice and nearly all her actions are masculine. She loves to show off her mastery of horses, and she glories in it....

And Madame de Motteville:

She's completely extraordinary....Nearly all her action are in some way extravagant...in no way does she resemble a woman, she hasn't even the necessary modesty. She seems rough, brusque...and libertine in all she says.

This might just be one of the reasons (mightn't it?) that she remained a Fraulein -- the only Fraulein, in fact, among the Five Queens. So, what holds this diverse group of royal ladies together? Not much, I'm afraid. Artists are always doing this, mixing their periods, and picking and choosing subjects by whim, or the sound of their names.

At least, I'm sure of one thing: goodness had nothing to do it with it.

But it isn't really surprising that it was Christina that got smashed.

* A wonderful website on the life of Queen Christina is kept by Tracy Marks at Windweaver; quotations about and by Christina are from the same source, including, in her own words: the wise observation, "The soul has no gender."

** From Philip Ziegler's review of Christina, Queen of Sweden by Veronica Buckley.

Illustrations

Top Photograph RA: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty.

Emin among the Fernandez sculptures, Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Guinevere and Lancelot Together for the Last Time [book illustration of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 1911, by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, (1872-1945)

Panthea, Cyrus and Araspas, [painting by Laurent de la Hyre (1606-1656), Art Institute of Chicago]

Semiramis Building Babylon [painting by Edgar Degas, 1861; Paris, Musée d'Orsay, © photo RMN, Hervé Lewandowski]

Bottom right: Greta Garbo as Christina in the 1933 MGM film, Queen Christina (adapted from Faith Compton MacKenzie's Sybil of the North).