Scorpio and the Precession of the Equinox

Sun sign astrology labels me a Scorpio, which is cool. However, right now, the sun is in Virgo. 

Ephemeris for 22 October 2018
for Austin, Texas 200 meters ASL
(US Naval Observatory)

Even astronomers mark the ecliptic and note the peripoint of Aries, which was the first day of Spring about 2000 years ago when all of this was laid down in the Roman West.  (The sun was already moving into Pisces, giving rise to other myths.) Now, it is the peripoint of Aquarius. It takes about 22,500 years for the stars to come full circle, as seen from the Earth. (Relativity, known even to the Greeks, lets us talk about it that way, from our arbitrarily chosen but very convenient inertial frame of reference.). It is intriguing to suggest that the Sphinx of Egypt is really very much older than our academics tell us; and it was built when the first day of spring was in Leo. 

Claws extend into Libra
(Texas hill country scorpion flikr John Morton)

 Modern astrologers never face the problem of Libra. Before the Romans, what we call Libra was really the claws of the Scorpion. But the Romans liked 12: 12 gods of Olympus, 12 ounces the pound, 12 inches to the foot, 12 sestertii to the denarius.  (Yes, denarius means “tenth.” They had to adjust their monetary system to pay for winning all those wars.) So, they made 12 months out of the Lunar year of 13 and gave each one a Zodiac sign.  (“…. 13.37 sidereal months, but about 12.37 synodic months, occur in a Gregorian year.” saith Wikipedia.)

 

Gold stater of Croesus (Kroisos) of Lydia c. 550 BCE
(Harlan Berk Gemini III Auction)
Lion confronts Bull.
The symbology is variously debated
but the symbols are obvious.

Originally, the ancients of Sumer recognized three constellations along the path of the sun and the moon—the three that actually look like what they are: the Lion, the Scorpion, and the Bull. (They also knew the Giant, Orion. O-names for heroes and gods are surprisingly common across many ancient cultures. But that is another story…)

Previously on Necessary Facts

Turn Left at Orion 

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins  

Burnham’s Celestial Handbook 

Science in the Middle Ages 

AKKADIAN ROOTS OF MODERN SEMITIC LANGUAGES

Dated at 2360 BCE, Sargon of Akkad eclipsed the Sumerian kingdoms along the Tigris and Euphrates. In Akkadian SALIMUM ALLAKUM means “peace will come.” Today, even among Turkic peoples of central Asia, the common Arabic greeting has been adopted into the local culture as one word: SALOMALEIKUM–“peace be upon you.”  It is nearly the same in Kyrgyzstan, the first western neighbor of China: ASALAMU ALEYKUM (two words).  But those are not native to those Turkic people, either.  They inherited them when they adopted the Muslim religion of the Arabs, who were and are Semitic. 

 

A Grammar of Akkadian (Second Edition)
by John Huehnergard, Einsenbruns, 2005.

The word for “seven” in Akkadian is SEBE.  It has not changed much in over 4000 years. The Indo-Europeans found it convenient. The word “number” comes from “name-bearer” and these early peoples, Semitic and Indo-European, shared a margin where the Hittites met the Akkadians. The earlier Sumerians had their own merchant colonies within Hittite cities and it was the Sumerians who invented the naming of quantities.  Everyone else stopped with “one, two, many.” When the Akkadians conquered Sumeria, they adopted the cuneiform script and much else that went with it.  The Akkadians borrowed words from the Sumerians, also a common occurrence, among them those for Crown, Palace, and Scribe. 

Dog was KALBUM like the modern “Caleb” a man’s name in the Bible or “kalib” in modern Arabic. 

House was BITUM like the later root “beth” as in Bethlehem or Elizabeth. It is seen the second letter of our alphabet: Beta from the Phoenician letter which was a pictograph of a house.  Their letters were called Ox, House, Camel, Delta, … as in modern Hebrew:  Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth.

The common Arabic man’s name HABIB (beloved) is found in the Akkadian word KABTUM.  Like the Indo-European languages, the Semitic have a tie from the aspirated Ha to the harsher (velar) Ka. We see it in Latin, Spanish and Italian CARA which are the English WHORE and German HURE with French in the middle with CHER.  K-H is also found in words common to Finnish and Hungarian. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Accounting for Civilization 

Language and Thought: As You Think,So You Speak  

Profits and Benefits in ForeignLanguages   

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma  

Isma'il Abu Taqiyya: Making Big Money in 1600  

Accounting for Civilization

The work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat demonstrates from empirical historical evidence that civilization began with accounting. The first writing began with records of promises and debts.

While not a circulating medium of indirect barter, the early artifacts of accounting nonetheless bear the essential elements of money, showing value and naming the guarantor. Moreover, in a long foreshadowing to the modern era, these earliest tokens functioned more like drafts and promissory notes. When the debt was paid, the recording instrument was discarded. Thus, archeologists found them in refuse pits and middens.

That was one reason that these intriguing evidences of commerce were overlooked. Archeologists brought with them an implicit mindset at once modern (of course), but also, more primitive than that of Jarmo c. 8000 BC: they thought that the media of commerce would be treated like gold treasure and silver coins.

These little clay objects were given scant attention by museums. When art history professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat queried and visited museums for their oldest ceramics, she was surprised to be shown these little bullets, pyramids, cones, and disks. Most were uncatalogued. After a few years of puzzling over them, the truth dawned on her: these were tokens. And they – not pictographs – were the true origin of writing.
Pictographs did, indeed, antedate cuneiform. However, the pictographs themselves show much epistemic development, representing abstractions such as “food” rather than only concretes such as “bread.” As many pictographs mimicked tokens, it was clear that the clay promises came first. The clay tokens show a long development of their own, from simple representations such as “sheep” and “wheat” to differentiations of kind and measure, as well as to manufactured goods such as beer and cloth.

She published her findings first in a large two-volume corpus, Before Writing (University of Texas Press, 1992). The core of that narrative and the essential illustrations were condensed into a popular paperback, How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996). Focusing even more narrowly on the power of these tokens to enable the creation of civilization, she produced a children’s book, The History of Counting (Morrow Jr., 1999).

Before these tokens, there were no large numbers such as 4, 5, 6, and 7. Today, we accept decimal tallying on our ten digits as “natural” but it surely was not. The first representations of “five” were "three passed one“ and "three one one.” Our modern languages still hint of that earlier time, as in French three is big (trois/tres) or in Hungarian big follows three (nagy/negy). Slavic languages still carry the old Indo-European singular-dual-plural grammar for 1-2-many. (Other languages have other divisions; none at root speaks distinctly of four, five, and six.)

Numeracy is not natural and was invented for commerce and from that came literacy.  What was counted was farm goods owed, i.e., debts – economic, financial, fiduciary, commercial, exchanges.

The barrier to understanding this is easy to show. The broad mainstream of intellectuals across all academic disciplines holds business in low regard. That is obvious by inspection. In the festschrift The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Open Court, 1974), Nobel laureate neurologist Sir John Carew Eccles outlined Popper’s theory of objective knowledge. We have sensora; and we have words for our perceptions. A third world also exists, the writings about our perceptions. This was before Schmandt-Besserat’s discoveries, of course, but resting on the earlier work of Sir Leonard Wooley, Eccles wrote:

“There is undoubtedly a feeling of bathos in the uses to which this marvellous discovery was put initially. Mostly it was used for business documents, contracts, inventories, deeds of sale! But also it was used for Royal inscriptions and at a later stage for recording religious texts.”

In this view only its use by the king (note the capital letter) and priests could elevate writing from the common clay of commerce.

But writing supersedes even this. In truth, as Denise Schmandt-Besserat shows most recently in When Writing Met Art (University of Texas Press, 2007), pre-literate art was illiterate. The ordered narratives which we accept as normal in art – Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, or Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks – had their origins in the nicely ordered spatial vocabulary of cuneiform inventories and Sumerian contracts.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Money is Speech

Art as Ordered Narrative

Debt: The Seed of Civilization