Not my usual territory, but I am fascinated by space, into which I think it is vitally important humankind continue to venture and, eventually colonise.

It was one of my standby topics in the days when I wrote far too many newspaper editorials in a year: “not all eggs in one basket”, the need for adventure and frontiers, the technological spinoffs and understandings of our own planet … etc etc – can write that one in my sleep and probably sometimes did.

Consequently I was really taking by a considerably better informed post, and great debate, at Cronaca, on Space tourism: (too) risky business?

As for books, it is many years ago now that I read the Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson – terrible, clunky writing, but interesting ideas about science and society.

Courtesy of Feministe, the Internet
Women’s History Sourcebook.

From it, continuing today’s Mesopotamian theme, Herodotus on two Babylonian queens:

Many sovereigns have ruled over this city of Babylon, and lent their aid to the building of its walls and the adornment of its temples, of whom I shall make mention in my Assyrian history. Among them two were women. Of these, the earlier, called Semiramis, held the throne five generations before the later princess. She raised certain embankments well worthy of inspection, in the plain near Babylon, to control the river, which, till then, used to overflow, and flood the whole country round about.

I.185: The later of the two queens, whose name was Nitocris, a wiser princess than her predecessor, not only left behind her, as memorials of her occupancy of the throne, the works which I shall presently describe, but also, observing the great power and restless enterprise of the Medes, who had taken so large a number of cities, and among them Nineveh, and expecting to be attacked in her turn, made all possible exertions to increase the defenses of her empire.

Feministe also points to Feminist blogs, a syndicated stream of a number of blogs, inevitably of varying quality and interest, mostly from the US, but there is some good stuff in there,

… whoops, I meant serious research tool.

www.scholar.google.com

I just used it to update my bibliography of the poet Isabella Whitney.

And I’m off to the library soon to check them out – that step is still necessary, but we really are getting closer to Roland Barthes’s ideal text: “the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest … it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances”.

See my thesis here for the reference.

I know the cuneiform classes at the British Museum are popular, but I’d never really understood why. Hieroglyphs are too, but then ancient Egypt is so sexy, with so many amazing materials surviving in the Egyptian desert, and the formal hieroglyphs so nicely written in picture form even when the language ceased to be pictographic, that’s less surprising.

Then today I got the notes for the tablet, from about 2,100BC, that we’ll be using for handling in the Enlightenment gallery.

Then I learnt that the script was created by the Sumerians earlier than 3,000BC, and last used in 75AD (that we know of), for Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite and Urartian and other languages – it was the script of Mesopotamia, not just of one nation as with hieroglyphs – for a very long time indeed.

The cone-shaped peg that we’ll be handling was probably inserted in the foundation of a wall surrounding a temple. The inscription reads:
“For the god Nanna,
impetuous calf of the god An,
first-born son of the god Enil,
his lord,
Ur-Nammu,
mighty man,
King of Ur
Built this E-temen-ni-guru
For him”

I’m told Nanna, the Sumerian moon god, had a cult centre at Ur, and E-temen-ni-guru was the name of the wall which surrounded the ziggurat of the god Nanna at Ur.
The question immediately arises: why did a wall have its own name? I suspect that might be one of those without an answer.

Now here’s a good test for Google. It didn’t answer my question, but did come up with The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (including translations), a Praise Poem of Shulgi, the son of Ur-Nammu, military commander, temple builder and patron of instrumental music and a Lamentations over the destruction of Sumer and Ur”.

P.S. As with so many things that I learnt about from books, I used to pronounce “cuneiform” very oddly. I’ve now learnt it should be Q-nair-form. (The Q said just as in the letter.)

I can no longer remember what it was that I did with Ashurbanipal, but I know the teacher fell about laughing in Year Seven the first time I said it.

From yesterday’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography email:

“In 1933 [Joyce] Wethered took a job as the golf adviser at Fortnum and Mason’s. The following year the definition of an amateur golfer was changed, and on 5 March 1934 the Royal and Ancient ruled that she was not eligible to play as an amateur if she received any ‘consideration’ in connection with her appointment.

“She took advantage of her new professional status in 1935 to tour the United States and Canada, representing the John Wannamaker Company. It was reputed that the tour earned her in excess of 4000, having received a guarantee of 300 per match.

“She played at least fifty-two matches, travelling all over America from May until September, and set thirty-six new records. One of the highlights was when she played in a foursome against Bobby Jones at the East Lake country club in Atlanta. O. B. Keeler, Jones’s biographer, felt that the sight of Jones and Wethered playing in the match ‘will stand out as the prettiest picture of a lifetime in sport … the greatest match I ever witnessed’ (Keeler).”

(I’m not sure if those sums should be dollars or pounds; either way it must have been a lot of money.)

She won a total of nine national championships, married “well” and became a much-respected horticulturalist. A great character.

See also the money-making village cricketers.

… even though it is inappropriately for a ridiculously large and expensive car, for an excellent article on Salon.com on the “new Cold War” between America and Europe, a “war” of social ideologies which unfashionably, at least from the British perspective, it suggests Europe is soundly winning.

It concludes:

The rise of the European Union may in fact, as Rifkin says, represent a new phase of history, and we barely saw it coming. While the outcome of this new cold war between Europe and America is far from clear, we should feel humbled by the way it’s gone so far. The EU has succeeded so dramatically in its ambitious goals that the utopian dreamers of the last century who dared to imagine a peaceful, prosperous, united Europe seem eerily prescient now. If nothing else, it’s an object lesson in the power of vision.
“I am a democrat,” James Joyce wrote in 1916, while an entire generation of Europe’s young men were slaughtering each other in the fields of Flanders. “I’ll work and act for the social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future.” People read that and laughed bitterly. Europe seemed poisoned by mustard gas and history; America was the land of liberty, democracy and the future. Nobody’s laughing now.