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al, originally uploaded by natalieben.

The top picture here is from the astonishing Serjilla, a wine village that seems to have just been abandoned in the 5th century. (Economic collapse or environmental change are two of the theories).

It just looks like the people upped and walked away – they might only have been gone 50 years: it’s almost spooky.

Warwick Ball (see reference) below reckons this “cafe” looks like an Australian Outback pub, and he’s right. Stick a tin roof on it, and it could still function as such.

The picture below is all that remains of the final pillar of St Simeon Stylites. (Originally about 21m.) The story goes his ascetic practices attracted so many pilgrims he started living entirely on a pole to get away from them. Unsurprisingly this only attracted more attention. So he built the pillar higher, which attracted more attention, etc …

There’s a lovely 5th-century account of his life here. Tennyson also left a (lengthy) comment on his life.

The industry that grew up around him is clearly evident in the huge church (Qal’at Sema’an), which boasts a walk-through baptism chamber at the entrance, and the town that served it, Deit Sema’an.

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al2, originally uploaded by natalieben.

This isn’t usually a photo blog, but having stirred up memories of Syria I thought I’d share a few more pics, since there’s not a lot else around about the wonderful area.

The photo on the left here is the Roman tomb, standing out in the middle of apparently nowhere, of Aemilius Reginus (the inscription is still clearly legible). The pillars stand beside a simple cave entered by steps.

I’ve only found one web reference to the name, here, in, I think, Arabic. (WHOOPS: update, just realised that this is Hebrew!) Found through this Google search. Anyone know what it says?

The picture beside it is one of the wonderful Christian pyramid tombs at al-Bara. My diary notes that this one was about 10m square, and contained a very solid undamaged sarcophagus. My textual guide, Warwick Ball (Syria: A Historical and Architectural Guide, the best book that I found) says these are 4th to 6th century AD. I’ve never seen anything like them anywhere else in the world. Has anyone?

A little more on Al-Bara.

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feline, originally uploaded by natalieben.

When I stumbled across a collection of photos from the Syrian leg of my Middle East trip, gosh, nearly six years ago now, although it seems less, I found this perfect feline to follow the Friday cat blogging tradition. I don’t remember the name of the ancient site, but know that it was one of the many neo-Hittite cities outside Aleppo.

((AN UPDATE: having dug out my diary the name of the city is Ain Dara and it is not neo-Hittite but Aramaean (1,300BC to 740BC). Goes to show you shouldn’t rely on memory.))

If you are into archaeology, Aleppo is a place that you have to go. The concentration of ancient sites around the city must be among the greatest, if not the greatest anywhere, and the state of preservation of many of them is astounding. (And Aleppo itself is brilliant: it smells of coffee and cinnamon, and the covered market really does take you back in time.)

Our guide (from the wonderful colonial-era and hardly changed – although I don’t believe there are bed-bugs now – Baron Hotel), would just wave a weary hand as another obvious tel (remains of ancient city) loomed now on the left, now on the right: “oh it is just another neo-Hittite city”. (c. 1,300BC to 700BC).

This lovely lion was on one of the few that has been (in part) excavated, and shows you what wonders must still be under the ground.

A short introduction to the Hittites.

Always nice to discover new prominent women in an unexpected area, so I was pleased to explore the story of two Indian mystics, Mahadeviyakka and Mirabai, introduced on my email book group.

Mahadeviyakka follows rather closely that path of Christian saints, of suffering for her beauty (somehow “saints” are never plain, as I’ve commented before), but she eventually becomes so with god and nature that (like many male devotees) she walked around naked, covered only by her hair, although this attracted somewhat more attention than the men got.

Her response:

“Fools, while I dress
In the Jasmine Lord’s morning light,
I cannot be shamed —
What would you have me hide under silk
and the glitter of jewels?”

Mirabai is rather nicely labelled in one essay as the rebellious Rajput. After an arranged marriage she refused to submit to her in-laws’ rule, and after her husband and then father-in-law died she set out as a wandering mystic. A solid-looking bibliography.

I’m not big on poetry, but I am rather taken with hers. Try the lovely The Wild Woman of the Forests.

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cartoon, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I was taken with this cartoon in the Winter edition of The Historian (from the Historical Association.)

It reads: “Going out to tea in the suburbs. A Pretty State of Things for 1862. (From Punch’s Almanack 1863.)

Update the wardrobe, and it would look perfectly at home in The Daily Mail, or the Telegraph or Times today.

The article that it illustrates is “Who’s afraid of the Victorian underworld?” by Andy Croll, which looks at 40 years of historiography on the topic, which first swallowed uncritically the Victorians’ own accounts of complex underground networks: “historians showed how Merthyr Tydfil, a booming Welsh iron town, possessed its very own criminal class. The ‘China’ district … was replete with its own leaders (‘Emperors’ and ‘Empresses’), kidsmen (real-life Fagans, bullies, Rodnies (juvenile offenders) and numerous ‘nymphs of the pave’ (prostitutes). (p. 30)

Then the view increasingly arose that those ‘criminals’ before the courts presented as dedicated thieves, garotters etc were simply members of the urban poor who stole when need and opportunity arose (p. 32)

Finally the approach developed that Victorian middle-class accounts told us about middle-class attitudes, but nothing more.

But now some works are trying to critically recover some “genuine” working-class material from the middle-class work. (It cites approvingly Heather Shore’s Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London, 1999.

It seems the perfect model of a classic academic pattern, or indeed a political one. Funny how those positions look familiar – you could again find them in today’s papers, matched to their varying political hues.

And lest we should feel in any way superior to those crinolined Victorians, there’s a vampire panic raging in Birmingham now. (Pace London’s garotting scare of 1862).

Although I’m not sure if any Victorian “criminal” was quite this politically sophisticated. As a metaphor for America’s impact on the world on this inauguration day it could hardly be bettered.

Catching up today with the December 24 Times Literary Supplement read a review of what sounds like a fascinating title: In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, 16th to the 18th Century, by Nelly Hanna.

I hadn’t realised that most of the Islamic world had refused for these centuries at least to accept printing, as a result of the reverence for calligraphy and the script of the Koran. Instead, according to the Bolognese scholar Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, who had been a captive of the Turks, there were 80,000 copyists employed in Baghdad alone.

While the situation in Egypt regarding printing was the same, the cheap paper available there meant even hand-copied books were within the means of the “middle class”. The review suggests that she finds female as well as male readers … definitely one to put on the to-read list.

Also interesting: Domesticity and dissent in the seventeenth-century: English women writers and the public sphere, Katharine Gillespie, Cambridge University Press 2004.