An excellent piece in today’s Observer, Death before dishonour, about honour killings in a variety of cultures, and among communities that have brought those cultures to Britain.

I started to count up the number of countries around the world in which such attitudes (if not always carried to these extremes) prevail, but it was so depressing that I had to stop. (When I lived in Thailand I learnt the lovely Thai proverb: “Having a daughter is like having a toilet in your front yard.”)

Then again, looked at the other way, there are quite a number of countries where such attitudes used to prevail but from which they have almost entirely been banished. The Observer makes the point that: “Not so long ago, British women could be locked in mental asylums for getting pregnant out of wedlock; in living memory in the UK, it was preferable to have a daughter who was mad than one who was bad.” (And there were also the horrific Magdalene laundries in Ireland, about which Joni Mitchell wrote.

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.