Saturday, August 11, 2007 A
"Sparring Partner"
7:10am
Was this brought about by the Friday Illo theme of "Emergency"? If these sparring partners keep at it long enough, there might be an emergency!
Saturday, August 11, 2007 B
"At the Colorful Point of Creation"
7:03pm
It is available in a quality photo lustre print
And should you care to know about the symbolism, I've included that in the gallery page.
Sunday, August 12, 2007 A
"A Flood of Knowledge"
9:17am
When Kenneth Harl lectures, the knowledge just spews forth in a torrent. I took notes on "Hammurabi's Babylon", and still missed half the lecture. (This is from his _Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations_ course from the Teaching Company.)
I will try and make sense of my scribbles, as I used to in my college days. (But I'm supplementing them with a bit of Wikipedia gleanings ;)
"Hammurabi was one of the first dynasty kings of the city-state of Babylon, and inherited the throne from his father, Sin-muballit, in 1792 BC.[1] Babylon was one of the many ancient city-states that dotted the Mesopotamian plain and waged war on each other for control of fertile agricultural land."
Harl explained the Euphrates river changed course, to the benefit of Babylon and the disadvantage of Ur. Under Hammurabi's rule, the city grew large, and "was perhaps the first city to reach a population above 200,000". It was a cultural and intellectual center of the Near East. Hammurabi was a diplomat, but also had an effective army. According to Harl, he had a technique of isolating his opponents and "knocking them off individually". Thus, he became "the first king of the Babylonian Empire, extending Babylon's control over Mesopotamia by winning a series of wars against neighboring kingdoms." Hammurabi also innovated bureaucracy with his law code.
They'd had law codes before, most recently by a Lipith Ishtar, however none of them survived intact. Hammurabi's Code is on a basalt stele now in the Louvre Museum:
"Hammurabi receiving the laws from the god Shamash" (rather like Moses with his tablets?)
It's eight feet high, or if you prefer metric: 2.25 m
The vast majority of the laws are to do with civil law, as opposed to criminal law. Their rules of inheritence and divorce were very complicated. Those sections to do with criminal law are, however, very harsh. They felt as royal justice was the final meditation, it had to be harsh, and therefore it is of the "Lex Talionus" (like punishment): an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth type. Another of its flaws was that it didn't consider the intent of the perpetrator, only the result, so accidental deaths were accorded the same judgement as premeditated murders.
Still, for its time, the code was a major accomplishment. It was created in Akkadian, not Sumerian, so all literate peoples could read it.
After Hammurabi passed his reign on, his precedessors were not able to hold the land. In 1595BC, Mursilis I (pronounced 'Merciless') sacked Babylon and later in 1540BC, the Kassites conquered Babylon, even renaming it during their rule to
"Karanduniash".
Harl also told us about the epic of Gilgamesh. The 'standard' Akkadian version of this epic poem was first edited in 1300BC,
but the version we have today was perserved by Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king who ruled from 669BC - 631BC.
It's a rambling adventure, about the responsibility of the king to his people, and involves Gilgamesh a "wild and wooly" (in Harl's words) king and his friend Enkidu. Together, they undertake dangerous quests. Gradually, Gilgamesh learns better kingship and a more refined life in general. There's even a flood tale in it that parallels (or precedes?) the Biblical one, in which a man is told to build an ark. Flood-myth.com informs us, "There actually was an archaeologically confirmed flood about 2900 BC on which the ark stories were based, but it was a local river flood, not a global deluge." But the telling of the tale apparently was relatively 'global'.
That's a summation of most of the points Harl made. If you didn't find that interesting, you might find other things I learned this weekend interesting, from the Life of Mammals series, this one on aquatic mammals.
from Wikipedia, the relative size of the Blue whale to humans
The blue whale is the hugest mammal ever. They are streamlined in motion, with any body part that could pose a resistence drag neatly tucked away. When it's time for the body part to be called into play, the male's member slips out of a slit, revealing itself to be a record twelve feet long. Paired with that are equally huge testes, each weighing a TON!
I might forget all about Babylon and Hammurabi, but when I'm old and gray, I'll still remember the twelve foot long 'dong'!
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