The Atlatl

The throwing stick was invented about 30,000 years ago. It extends the arm giving force (as range and speed) to a spear. Used widely across North and South America, it also is known from Europe, but more widely throughout Indonesia and Australia. The Aborigines call it the woomera and it can be the core of a “Swiss Army Knife” that serves many purposes.  

 

A Dog named “Moose” and his Mistress with Atlatl

The distribution of the atlatl opens discussions that can lead down intellectual rabbit holes into speculative wonderlands. It was not well-known across all of Europe and finds are centered in France. The bow-and-arrow became the dominant distance weapon in the Old World, though the atlatl continued alongside it in America. The bow was not imported to or invented in Australia. 

• The atlatl in OutdoorLife dot com 
• International Competition in 2019 
• The World Atlatl Association at BasketMaker 
• This 19^thcentury example at The British Museum shows righthandedness (which the hammer and screwdriver do not). 
• This one from Eastern Hudson’s Bay shown at Pitt Rivers Museum UK is very similar to 
• the Australian version seen on Don’s Maps here.

The word atlatl comes directly from the language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl. Nouns end in (a)tl. Cocoa is xocolatl. The jaguar is the ocelotl. The dog is the coyototl. And, yes, out there, where the gods came from is the Atlantic ocean. Make of it what you will, because the distribution of the spear thrower seems to be from West to East, across the Pacific to the Americas. The truth may be that like cotton the atlatl was imported to the Old World from the New in prehistoric times.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Art as Ordered Narrative 

The Akkadian Roots of Modern Semitic Languages 

The Living Fish Swims Under Water 

The Problem of Cultural Patrimony 

Barack Obama, American 

Electrum and the Invention of Coinage

The book was typeset in sentences. The result is a disjointed narrative, a series of unattributed assertions and contradictory generalities. Despite those and many other problems with the text and narrative, the work was intended primarily as “a comprehensive handbook on the origins of coinage.” As such, its best feature is the presentation of 179 coins organized chronologically, geographically, and by size. Overall, the book would have been greatly improved by professional editorial management.

I believe that the author made note cards from the reference books he relied on and then wrote the narrative after sorting the cards more or less by main subject. Maybe he just wrote it all off the top of his head. However it was built, the lack of craftsmanship is painfully obvious. “Gold is immutable, Electrum has the appearance of gold. The first coins were made of Electrum.” (page 9). “The use of gold and silver coinage quickly spread throughout the known world, with City-States such as Kyzikos, Phokaia and Mytilene minting Electrum trade coinages with great success.” (page 74)

Electrum and the Invention of Coinage
by Joseph Linzalone
(Dennis McMilllan Publications, 2011),
 xv + 232 pages, color illustrations,
24x15 cm (9-1/2 x 6 in), $80.

Capitalization is Germanic. “Electrum, Silver, Bronze, Copper and other metals all have been highly esteemed and valued.” (page 1) … “One Talent equaled 60 Minas. A Mina was worth 60 Shekels.” (page 3) … “An Eighth Stater of Erythrae, 1.77 g., with a Floral pattern round with pellets with a reverse of a shallow square punch is published as Sear, Greek Coins and their Values, #3462.” (page 127). The lack of italics for the title of the book is typical of other typesetting problems. Oddly enough, although the foundation of the bibliography consists of German titles, the u in Münze has no umlaut, though Muenze would have been acceptable.

The invention of coinage is a singular problem. It is easy to project ourselves on the past and assume that they were initially intended to be money and were created as a medium of indirect barter to facilitate economic calculation. Over the past 150 years, scholars have attempted half a dozen theories to explain the creation of coinage. In 1869 Ernst Curtius put forward a "religious" theory, since the word "money" stems from the temple of Juno Moneta. That these earliest known proto-coins and coins are definitely associated with the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which was excavated 40 years later, could substantiate that. Payment of mercenaries, specifically, as opposed to general commerce was the theory put forward by Robert M. Cook in 1958 ("Speculations on the Origins of Coinage," Historia, v11 1958, 257-262.)  Philip Grierson looked to the administrative needs of the early Greek city-states (Origins of Money 1970, 1976). Following Cook, Martin J. Price underscored the fact that these first coins were worth more than anything you could buy with them, and therefore, they were probably given to mercenaries as honor awards. (See "Thoughts on the Beginnings of Coinage" in Studies in Numismatic Method Presented to Philip Grierson, Cambridge, 1983). Given the intellectual ferment of archaic Hellas, those theories might all be true in some array of close context, but none of that is in this book. Linzalone cites Aristotle and Plato who posited the need for a medium of indirect barter to facilitate commerce and leaves it at that.

The author does indeed acknowledge the consequences of the commercial revolution associated with the introduction of coinage. The event coincides with the rise of democracy, as well as the birth of philosophy, formal geometry, the ascent of a mercantile class, and the mercenary army. But understanding the place of coinage in that context requires teasing out those threads, which the author never does. He merely repeats that coins (beginning with unmarked proto-coins) were money.

The author also projects into the past our atomic theory of matter. The first abstract conception of “elements”—earth, water, air, fire—came from Empedocles of Akragas c. 500 BCE. But it was not developed further until the Enlightenment and it was still argued into the 1800s, even as the periodic table was being worked out. The author misses the fact that electrum, silver, and gold were three distinct metals, as were copper, tin, and bronze. Demokritos of Abdera and others notwithstanding, lacking an atomic theory of matter, the ancients had no other way to understand electrum but to accept it as a metal in its own right, naturally occurring but capable of manufacture.

The primary strength of this work is the catalog of 179 images of proto-coins and coins, organized geographically and sorted by size. Each listing includes the weight in grams to two decimal places. Coin 1001 is an archaic proto-coin stater of Samos 17.65 grams and 17.5 mm in diameter. In every case that diameter is always the major axis of the ellipse. And most of these objects are elliptical, not the least of which is the famous Phanes coins of Ephesus. However, all of these images are reproduced at twice actual size. So, comparisons are easy. Moreover, modern technology allows the user to blow these images up even more before pixiliation and the loss of resolution. Unfortunately, except in the cases where the images were borrowed from the owners, no attributions or provenances are given; and the ones that are, give only the last auction house by name, not by sale and lot number.

In response to a request for an interview via email, Joe Linzalone wrote (verbatim): “It is a hand book filled with useful facts and information about the coinage and the issuers. Focusing thus I did not maintain a narrative story-teller stance. The book was written on request off my colleagues, in that I am the foremost dealer in Electrum, with 41 years experience. I was asked to write that my expertise would not be lost when gone.” According to Worldcat.org, the book is shelved at 14 libraries including the Library of Congress, the University of Oxford, and the University of Queensland. There, and on the shelves of private numismatists, this “comprehensive handbook” will serve as best it can.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Not Conned by Sehgal's "Coined" 

Gresham's Conjecture 

Supplies and Demands 

Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics 

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins

The Antikythera Device

The wonderfully complex mechanism that predicted eclipses, the positions of the planets, and the dates of Olympic games may have been a collaboration among Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Apollonius.  Eratosthenes was the Librarian at Alexandria. Apollonius was the best geometer of the time. Or maybe Archimedes built it himself. Although this device is singular, its intricate gearing suggests that it must have been the result of a long series of development. But all the others are lost.

 

from the Freeth Presentation at Stanford

The best citation we have to the mechanical works of Archimedes come from De Re Publica by Marcus Tullius Cicero. You can find the citation archived at “Spheres and Planaria” at NYU Math here:

https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Sphere/SphereSources.html

“Cicero (106-43 BC), De Re Publica, Book I, Sections 21-22
(In this passage Cicero writes of a discussion that takes place in 129 BC among a group of learned Romans. One of them relates an incident in 166 BC in which a Roman consul, Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, is at the home of Marcus Marcellus, the grandson of the Marcellus who conquered Syracuse in 212 BC.)
. . . he [Gallus] ordered the celestial globe to be brought out which the grandfather of Marcellus had carried off from Syracuse, when that very rich and beautiful city was taken, though he took home with him nothing else out of the great store of booty captured. Though I had heard this globe mentioned quite frequently on account of the fame of Archimedes, when I actually saw it I did not particularly admire it; for that other celestial globe, also constructed by Archimedes, which the same Marcellus placed in the temple of Virtue, is more beautiful as well as more widely known among the people. But when Gallus began to give a very learned explanation of the device, I concluded that the famous Sicilian had been endowed with greater genius that one would imagine it possible for a human being to possess. For Gallus told us that the other kind of celestial globe, which was solid and contained no hollow space, was a very early invention, the first one of that kind having been constructed by Thales of Miletus, and later marked by Eudoxus of Cnidus (a disciple of Plato, it was claimed) with the constellations and stars which are fixed in the sky. He also said that many years later Aratus, borrowing this whole arrangement and plan from Eudoxus, had described it in verse, without any knowledge of astronomy, but with considerable poetic talent. But this newer kind of globe, he said, on which were delineated the motions of the sun and moon and of those five stars which are called wanderers [the five visible planets], or, as we might say, rovers, contained more than could be shown on the solid globe, and the invention of Archimedes deserved special admiration because he had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements with their different rates of speed. And when Gallus moved the globe, it was actually true that the moon was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would actually happen, and the moon came to the point where the shadow of the earth was at the very time when the sun . . . out of the region . . .
(Translation by Clinton W. Keyes in Cicero: De Re Publica, De Legibus, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1928.)”

The Google Doodle for May 17, 2017  celebrated the 115^th anniversary of the discovery of the device.  Sponge divers found it amid the treasures of an ancient wreck. Among these are some of the finest bronze statues we have from that context.  Archeologist Valerios Stais (1857-1923) was the first to suggest that the gearing was evidence of a clockwork, but his theory was discounted at the time. The next significant studies were the work of Derek DeSolla Price.

 

PBS NOVA Presentation

Derek John De Solla Price (1922-1983) held two doctorates, one of them in the history of science. You can find 23 one-hour lectures Neolithic to Now from Yale on his honorary blog site. Also there is the full text of Babylonian Science also on his honorary blogsite.  

“Derek spent from around 1951 until about 1959 figuring out what that lump was and in a June 1959 Article in Scientific American he first announced to the mass public his theories on the device.” Price DeSolla worked with Charalampos Karakalos who used x-rays and gamma rays to create images of the 82 fragments.  They published 70-page paper, “Gears from the Greeks. The Antikythera Mechanism: A Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B. C.” in the November 1974 issue of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society New Series, 64 (7): 1–70.

 

from Epigraphy.org the lettering styles help to
place the time of construction

In our time, Dr. Anthony Freeth speaks for the team that has decoded much more of the Antikythera device.  Their papers are here:

• ISAW Papers 4 (February, 2012) The Cosmos in the Antikythera Mechanism by Tony Freeth and Alexander Jones at http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/4/
• Eclipse Prediction on the Ancient Greek AstronomicalCalculating Machine Known as the Antikythera Mechanism by Tony Freeth at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103275

You can view a 2-hour lecture delivered November 6, 2015, at Stanford.  (I did it in three sittings.) This link takes you to a lead-in article which provides links to their YouTube channel presentation (here) and Apple Store podcast. Freeth answers the basic questions: What, How, When, Where, Who, and Why.

 

Kurt Baty built a faithful LEGO model

That no other similar mechanisms are known is troubling. It is easy to underestimate how much was lost over the centuries of the slow decline of Rome. We know from other citations that the wife of the emperor Claudius was Etruscan. For her, he wrote a history of her people, perhaps in their own language. Not only is that work – the creation of the most powerful citizen of Rome – lost, so is knowledge of the language. We can read the inscriptions we have found, sounding out the letters. Except for the names of some gods such as Minerva and Mercury, and other smatterings, we know nothing. As a weapon of war, a single thermonuclear bomb, exploded 50 miles above the surface will create an electro-magnetic pulse that erases just about all of our electronic storage.  In the wake of even a “limited” nuclear exchange, the subsequent nuclear winter might force us to burn our books to keep warm. Civilization is fragile.

Also on Necessary Facts

Science in the Middle Ages  

The Purse of Eratosthenes 

Hypatia of Alexandria  

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins  

The Problem of Cultural Patrimony

From Agent Presse France 
via Al-Arabiya online here 

On February 18, 2015, news services (Reuters here) reported that a group of amateur undersea divers from Israel found 2000 gold coins from about 1000 CE, off the coast of the ancient city of Caesarea which is now in the modern state called Israel.  The coins were struck during  the Fatimid Caliphate.  Speculation by archaeologists from the Israeli Antiquities Authority included the suggestion that the coins were taxes collected for the ruling center of the time at Cairo in Egypt.  An alternate theory is that the coins came from a private merchant ship moving from port to port.  No article cited the problem of patrimony.

Fatimid dinars feature the names of the caliphs they were minted under, as well as the date and location where they were minted. "They're first-class historical documents," explains Robert Kool, curator of the IAA's Coin Department.  […] A cursory study reveals that the earliest coin from the hoard was minted in Palermo, Sicily, while the majority came from official Fatimid mints in Egypt and other parts of North Africa and date to the reigns of Caliphs al-Hakim (A.D. 996-1021) and his son al-Zahir (A.D. 1021-1036).  -- National Geographic News online here.

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) has a broad mandate.  In the past fifteen years, it has arranged with national governments around the world – chief among them, the United States of America – for the passage of laws requiring that “cultural patrimony” be returned to the country of origin.  The Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Getty Museum are among the most newsworthy victims. Several problems haunt the laws. The problem of patrimony is multidimensional. The claims of UNESCO and their allies suffer from internal contradictions because they have no objective basis in epistemology: no standard of value exists for identifying right from wrong.

First, modern nations did not exist in ancient times.  The Boston Museum returned to Turkey a statue called “The Weary Herakles” from 200 BCE. But there was no “Turkey” in 200 BCE.   They called it “Helliades” – and you need to understand what that means.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Greeks called themselves “Achaeans.”  About 400 years later, during the Hellenistic Era, they called themselves “Hellenes.”  Hellas is the modern Greek name for Greece.  But grammatically Helliades is much wider than Hellinike. 

Hellenike would be any Greek city with ties to the old homeland.  Tarentum in Italy was Taras; Naples (Napoli) was Neopolis.  Marseilles in France was Marsalla.  Benghazi in Libya was Berenike.  They were Greek cities.  Greeks built them; Greeks inhabited them.  Sicilians are not Italians.  Italy is a peninsula. Sicily is an island. They are different places.  The people of eastern Sicily are Greeks. In the west, they are Carthaginian.

However, after Alexander the Great, many cities of diverse ethnicities came into the Greek sphere. The orator Demosthenes said, “The name ‘Hellene’ no long applies to a race, but to a state of mind.”

 

Ancient Coin Collectors Guild
lobbied for the rights of private citizens

On that basis, should not every coin from Pakistan to Spain, from Egypt to England go back to Athens? In truth, as the laws are applied, coins from Greek cities of Sicily do not go back to the government museums of Greece: they go to the government museums of Italy. 

Consider the Roman Empire.  In addition to the central mint, coins were struck in what are today Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, France, and England.   Moreover, Roman legions came from all across the empire, but could be stationed anywhere.  The legion name (cognomen) could reflect where they were drawn from or where they won a battle.  We have epigraphic evidence to show that Legio IX Hispanica served in England from 65 to 120 CE. Legio III Cyrenica (modern Libya) served in what are today Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Legio III Italica was stationed in what is Regensburg for 200 years, from 165 CE.  Galba reorganized former marines into Legio I Adiutrix (“Rescuer”) in 68 AD, and stationed them in what is today Mainz.  However, for most of the second century (106 to 198) their base was in a town later known for many years as Szőny in Hungary, but which is now called Komárom on the border with the Slovak Republic.  So, when a hoard of coins found in England contains the product of a mint from Croatia to pay Roman troops from Spain, whose patrimony is it?

Second, the assumption of UNESCO and the co-operating national governments is that the national public museums have a moral right to first claim.  Private collectors are rebuked as looters of protected sites. 

Old World traditions acknowledge the ruler as the owner of all property. The king could grant a title and land to go with it because all of his realm was his to dispose of as he saw fit.  In America today, that continues as eminent domain: the state can take what it needs.  So, when a farmer in Egypt or England finds an ancient coin on his land, it is not his at all: it belongs to the national government.  (England relaxed its “treasure trove” laws; but even that granting of latitude was from the rulers down to their subjects.) The governments of Turkey, Greece, Italy claim that these artifacts were "looted" from "historic sites" but it is easy to make any place historic if other people ever lived there before you did.  Historicity is just an excuse.  In their minds, private property does not exist.

“I’ve been reading only about the Italians and Greeks 

and how they’ve succeeded,’’ said [former Turkish 

cultural official Engin] Ozgen.  “This will show the world 

that the Turks are not ignorant anymore, that they will fight 

for their past and their heritage.’’ This statue is attributed 
as a Roman copy of a lost Greek work.  
It comes from the city of Antalya in modern Turkey.
The town was founded by Attalus II of Pergamon in 180 BCE. 

 Seljuk Turks entered the area about 1500 years later. 

The Boston Museum of Fine Art returned this 
statue of "The Weary Herakles" to the city of Antalya. 

Read here.

Third, why is a museum in Rome more entitled to these artifacts than I am?  It is my patrimony as well.  And, like most Americans, I have a lot of patrimony.  In addition to the Sicilians (Greeks), my mother’s side of the family was loosely identified as “Hungarian.” However, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Croatian.  The family just moved up the river inside of a large, multi-ethnic empire in central Europe.  My maternal grandfather’s immigration records identify him as German-Hungarian.  Are not the artifacts of the legions also my cultural inheritance?

Fourth and more to the point, I cite Demosthenes above: “Hellene” is a state of mind.  UNESCO and the national governments couch their claims in the language of race, ethnicity, and genetics.  The fact of the matter is that we are creatures of intellect living in a planetary society.  Seiji Ozawa (Japanese; born in China) and Yo-Yo Ma (Chinese; born in Paris) have as much right to buy Beethoven’s belt buckle as do any of the current inhabitants of Bonn.  

Fifth, national borders are fluid.  Economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and his brother, mathematician Richard von Mises (1883-1953), were born in a town called Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Treaty of Versailles put the town in the Ukraine, where today it is called L’viv.  According to the UNESCO theory of culture, the people there lost their patrimonic right to enjoy the artifacts of one milieu, but were given the consolation prize of another matrix of icons and exemplars. 

Coin of Sinope in modern Turkey, struck about 375 BCE 


when Diogenes the Cynic was mint master.  


Accused of debasing the coinage, he moved to Athens 

and became a philosopher. 

Under the eagle's wing DIO below the dolphin, SINO. 

The test cut shows that the coin was suspected 
of being false.

The ANA measured the specific gravity and found it 

to be only 
90% pure silver, acceptable to us, 


but debased to the ancients.

Ultimately, the ideological nationalization of museums contradicts the fundamental intention of a museum.  Every leading institution seeks to own and display as broad a collection as possible. That motivation derives from the liberal Enlightenment theory of humanity.  Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I benefited from time spent at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It seemed to me then – and is still supportable today – that the entirety of human culture was housed there. 

A hundred yards away, the Natural Science Museum displayed meteorites and dinosaur fossils.  Those, too, are arguably someone else’s patrimony. One of the displays about Humans was a panel explaining Culture. I do not know if the Jivaro would be culturally enhanced by the return of their shrunken heads, or if the Inuit need another old canoe; but I certainly am better for having studied them without trekking to Peru and Alaska.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Circumference

Numismatics: History as Market

Newton versus the Counterfeiter

Accounting for Civilization