"Proto" by Laura Spinney

The fascinating story of how Proto-Indo-European became the ancestor of the languages, including English, Greek and Urdu, spoken by half the people in the world. 

The Yamnaya were a small group of herders on the Eurasian steppes around 3000 BC. This book brings together the linguistic, archaeological and DNA (and sometimes mythological) evidence to show how their culture, their language and their genes spread out across Europe and Asia. We learn about the Hittites and the Corded Ware people, about how Latin came to dominate Italy, about how loan words can tell us when the Roma, travelling from India to Europe, arrived in Persia and when they left. We learn about the puzzle about the constancy of the Irish gene pool. The triumph of the Yamnaya is not necessarily a story of conquest and genocide - their grave goods suggest they were essentially peaceful. The wholesale genetic replacement of indigenous populations might have been achieved because they were herders who lived with their animals and therefore had acquired a degree of immunity to epidemic diseases such as Bubonic Plague so that their germs might have done the killing for them. 

Each chapter deals with a major section of the PIE language group, such as Indo-Iranian, or Baltic and Slavic, and is preceded by a map showing the distribution of these languages. These were interesting but what was really needed was arrows to show how these languages had spread.

My favourite bits were when we were given words in different languages - some living, some dead, some reconstructed - so that we could see the similarities. The author then went on to show how these words could give us clues about the technologies of the speakers' cultures so you can make deductions about how, for example, chariots spread. 

My least favourite thing about this book was the dating. She essentially uses four methods: giving dates, quoting centuries, saying how long ago something was from the present, and stating how many years separated an event from another, already referenced, event. This leaves the reader doing sums in their head, to try to place all these things onto some common timeline. I understand that this might help the narrative flow better but I found this very confusing. The single timeline as the back of the book was too little too late.

I know that it is fashionable to pepper one's narrative with snippets of modern-day anecdotes, in which one talks about the linguist or archaeologist who made the discoveries she is about to explain, but I found these a slightly irritating distraction. 

But overall this was a fascinating and brilliant enlightenment of prehistory.

Selected quotes:

• “One view ... is that language ... was invented in the deserts of south-eastern Africa around eighty thousand years ago, perhaps by a group of children ... playing a game.” (Introduction)
• “Hotspots of linguistic diversity coincide with hot spots of biodiversity, because these regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages, who don't need to stray.” (Introduction)
• “On average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers.”  (Introduction)
• “Indo-European is ... the best documented and in many ways the best understood of all the world's language families, but it also drags the most outdated intellectual baggage behind it. It's like the star patient of a tail-coated nineteenth century doctor, hauled out woozily for public display, underwear slipping off its shoulder, feted and abused in equal measure.”  (Introduction)
• “Languages broadly reflect the cultures with which they are associated, because people tend to have more words for the things that matter to them.”  (Introduction)
• “Migration ... drives a wedge between dialects and brings them into contact with different languages.” (Introduction)
• “Genes and languages are transmitted differently.”  (Introduction)
• “Water rolled over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.” (Ch 1)
• “People who spoke of wheels and wagons could not have lived before 3500 BCE, when that technology was invented.” (Ch 2)
• “Most European men alive today ... carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe.” (Ch 3)
• “Groups of Indians who speak languages descended from Sanskrit today typically carry more steppe ancestry than those who speak non-Indo-European languages. ... The traditional guardians of the holy texts, the Brahmins have more steppe ancestry than other social groups.” (Ch 6) 
• “The percentage of the Globe population defined as international migrants has remained stable since 1960, at about three per cent. Refugees ... on average ... account for ... ten per cent ... of that three per cent.” (Conclusion)
• “Richard the Lionheart ... probably could not speak English. His mother tongue was Occitan.” (Conclusion)
• “Elizabeth the First ... helped English do away with the double negative ... and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.” (Conclusion)
• “Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. ... The most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.”  (Conclusion)
• “The past is a lighthouse not a port. (Russian proverb)” (Conclusion)

Fascinating and enlightening.

June 2025; 275 pages

Published by William Collins in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"Crypt" by Alice Roberts

“Osteoarchaeology, paleopathology and now archaeogenomics are transforming our understanding of the past.” (Epilogue) In this fascinating and utterly readable book, Professor Alice Roberts shows how the study of ancient skeletons can mesh with the sequencing of DNA and, where available, historic documents to give us new insights into our human past.

This book is a sequel to Ancestors, which focused on BC, and Buried which considered the first millennium AD. This book studies burials from 1002 AD until 1545. But as well as learning about archaeology and history and bony anatomy, I also learned about how archaeologists can work out where a skeleton grew up from the balance of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth, a great deal about leprosy - who knew you can catch it from an armadillo? - 

The first chapter analyses skeletons found in Oxford that appear to have been buried after being violently killed. Are they the bodies of people killed on Saint Brice's day (13th Nov) in 1002 after Ethelred the Unready called for a massacre of Danes? The second investigates the graveyard of a mediaeval leper hospital and asks whether leper hospitals originated in pre-Conquest England. Chapter 3 tells the story of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket and asks whether a skeleton discovered in 1888 could belong to him. Chapter 4 is surprised by a high incidence of Paget's Disease in a single churchyard. Chapter 5 traces, through osteoarchaeology, the prehistoric lineage of the bacterium responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and Bubonic Plague. Chapter 6 considers bone deformities in the skeletons of those drowned when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose sank and Chapter 7 asks whether syphilis found in the skeleton of a mediaeval anchoress can tell us whether the disease came to Europe from the New World in the wake of Columbus.

Seven fascinating stories. History, prehistory, science and even some maths, all told in an engaging style (with some very poor puns, see selected quotes). What's not to like?

Selected quotes:

• “It shows the potential for aDNA from fishbones - which everyone had previously thought would be dead in the water.” (Ch 1)
• “Archaeology explores the past from the ground up, not the top down.” (Ch 2)
• “Henry arranged to have his son, Henry Junior, crowned in preparation, so that he could immediately step into his father's clogs when he popped them.” (Ch 3)
• “Some diseases kill so quickly, there are no traces lift on bones.” (Ch 5)

July 2024; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Alexandria: The Quest of the Lost City" by Edmund Richardson

 This is a wonderful story about a private in the East India Company in India in 1827 who deserts and reinvents himself as explorer Charles Masson. He has multiple adventures before becoming besotted with the idea that Bagram, near Kabul in Afghanistan, is the site of Alexandria-Under-the-Mountains, one of the many lost cities founded by Alexander the Great (he had previously stumbled across the site of the Harappan civilisation, but doesn't seem to have been impressed). His journeys included the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and the man-made caves behind them, Gholghola, the City of Screams (made by the wind passing through its pinnacles) which was destroyed by Genghis Khan, and a 'dead dragon'. His researches include the translation of an unknown Indian script and the discovery of "the very earliest dateable image of the Buddha which has ever been found" (Ch 6), a work of art with clear Greek influences. When his past caught up with him he was blackmailed into spying for the East India Company on his friends, the rulers of Kabul; he later became involved in the loot-fuelled British invasion of that country, then, suspected as a double agent, a British prisoner, until finally he escaped from India just as the British hubris caught up with them and they were slaughtered while retreating from Kabul in the winter of 1841 - 1842.

It is an incredibly romantic story, full of action, and would make a superb film. As well as the exotic location and the multiple story of survival despite incredible hardships, it is people with larger-than-life characters:

• James Lewis/ Charles Masson himself. He repeatedly reinvented his own story.
• Josiah Harlan, an American fantasist, traveller, and spy, who claimed to have been created Prince of Ghor (Ch 14)
• Joseph Wolff, a fanatical preacher. "He was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind. He had spent years wandering ... preaching all the way. Every day, he had become grumpier and more dogmatic." After annoying one party of Afghans they stripped him so he had to walk into Kabul naked. "Even when fully clothed, Wolff was a remarkable sight. ... Naked, he quite baffled the thesaurus."  (Ch 4)
• Henry Pottinger, the East Indian Company's resident in Bhuj: "Think back to the most easily irritated person you have ever met. Double their sensitivity. You might now be coming close to Pottinger. If you left him alone in a room for a few minutes, he would probably be nursing a lifelong grudge against the sofa and two of the floorboards by the time you returned." (Ch 6)
• "treasure-hunting Transylvanian Johann Martin Honigberger ... liked quoting Cicero, practising homeopathy, and smashing things." (Ch 6)
• Dost Mohammed, a ruler of Kabul, spent years "drinking his courtiers under the table" before becoming abstemious and banning alcohol. He has a proverbial reputation as a just ruler. (Ch 6)

It is also a chronicle of the shame of colonialism. Some incidents recounted are even more sickening than the comprehensive condemnation in The Anarchy by Willaim Dalrymple:

• "East India House was loot made manifest." (Ch 12)
• "'One or two little bits of smashery took place,' laughed one officer. 'It is perfectly annoying to see a lot of those fellows come screeching after you that they have been looted. This generally happens during the first or second day you enter a place'." (Ch 15)
• Loveday, a political officer, enslaved Indians to work on building his palace, one of whom displeased him and was savaged by Loveday's bulldogs, later dying  of his injuries. "He was proud of 'blowing from a gun' one local chief ... Loveday slid up the greasy pole like a man born to the art ... Loveday proved to be a world-class looter." (Ch 15)
• It's not just British imperialism that was evil. Alexander the Great massacred all the men of military age and enslaved all other inhabitants at both Tyre and Gaza. He looted and burned Persepolis. (Ch 20)

Selected quotes:

• "When Lewis was a teenager, the British economy was teetering on the brink of collapse. London's streets filled up with the newly homeless. ... The government responded with a sympathy which has marked British attitudes to the poor for centuries: they announced a plan to execute the protesters." (Ch 1)
• "When you walk into a room full of strangers, there's a precious moment when you can become whoever you want to be." (Ch 2)
• "The Pashtuns say that when God created the world he had a heap of rocks left over, out of which he made Afghanistan." (Ch 3) This reminded me of a similar quote about the founding of Montenegro, as found in The Venetian Empire by Jan Morris.
• "Alexander [the Great] travelled far. But stories about him have travelled even further. There is an Icelandic Alexander Saga and an Armenian epic, a Balinese poem and a French romance." (Ch 7)
• "Then the assassins came for Masson. One night, a sudden noise pulled him from sleep. He blinked awake and stumbled to the door. Men with knives were running up the stairs." (Ch 9)
• "The people of Malana are proud of their ancestor, Alexander the Great. The family business is no longer world conquest, but the cultivation of some of the most potent marijuana on earth." (Ch 11)
• "He was still convinced ... that the East India Company cared; that a thoroughly amoral, capitalist empire could also be kind." (Ch 12)
• "When it rained, the lower town flooded, and the poor waded through the shit of the rich." (Ch 15)
• "The Parsis had arrived in India from Persia over a thousand years earlier. They brought with them stories about Alexander: fearful tales, legends of a violent, ruthless king, who brought nothing but death and destruction in his wake." (Ch 20)
• "Heinrich Schliemann loved a tall tale even more than Charles Masson did. Today, schollars are divided between those who think he was a liar, and those who think he was a 'pathological liar'." (Ch 21)
• "Evans is another of history's great archaeological stars ... It is rarely mentioned that many of his craftsmen worked two shifts: the first, restoring Minoan antiquities, and the second, faking Minoan antiquities." (Ch 21)

This is an absolutely brilliant book. The hero is incredible, his adventures page-turning, and the cast of characters beautifully drawn. In addition, it is very well written. 

September 2022; 261 pages

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"First Light" by Peter Ackroyd

 An astronomer works nights in an observatory in Dorset. Nearby an archaeologist with a crippled wife excavates a tumulus around which strange shapes flit. A retired TV comedian whose act is based upon the innocent malapropisms of his wife seeks a cottage he remembers. And are the local yokels comical or sinister?

It is written in the past tense, head-hopping between the PoVs of a number of characters in very short chapters.

In some ways this is typical of much of Ackroyd's work: normal life encounters a supernatural element. There are some extravagant, almost Dickensian characters (the city-living representative from the government who pretends to be wildly enthusiastic about everything as a PR technique was my favourite) and the exuberance of the portrayal more than compensated for the stereotyping (of, for example, the farmer, the camp antique dealer, and the comedian). There were some jokes. But the plot seemed very hackneyed: archaeologists disturb ancient and occult powers; it reminded me of the ancient TV show 'Raven' starring Phil Daniels but also of countless similar novels. And the prose was sometimes very dense. Given the Dorset connection I wondered whether John Cowper Powys (eg Wolf Solent) or Thomas Hardy had been influences.

Some memorable moments:

• "Everything has to end ... All we're doing is waiting for the end." (Ch 32)
• "They say that suffering is noble. But it's not. It's a mean thing. A petty thing. It crushes the meaning from you." (Ch 32)
• "I was dazzled by my own madness, like a man upon an operating table who looks up and sees the lights at the same moment as he shrieks with pain." (Ch 45)
• "But everything was left unsaid. There were avenues of silence down which they walked by mutual consent" (Ch 48)

March 2021; 328 pages

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

Other novels by the prolific and talented Peter Ackroyd include: 

• The Clerkenwell Tales
• The Lambs of London
• The Fall of Troy (also based on archaeology)
• Milton in America
• Hawksmoor (one of his earliest, and still my favourite)
• The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
• Chatterton
• The House of Doctor Dee

He also writes some pretty brilliant biographies including:

• Wilkie Collins
• Blake
• Dickens

"In the Footsteps of Orpheus" by R F Paget

This books was written in 1967 about amateur archaeologist's Paget's own excavations of tunnels at Baiae, near Naples. He concludes that these are the tunnels on which Vergil based the visit to the underworld of Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid. Certainly Aeneas is said to have visited Cuma, to visit the Sibyl there, and Lake Avernus; both of these locations are enormously close to Baiae. Peget concludes that the tunnels he excavated were used in Orphic rites in which a suppliant was led to an underground river (identified as the Styx) fed by thermal springs.

It's a fascinating theory marred, as so often in the work of non-academics, by fleshing out facts with flights of fancy. Thus towards the end Paget reconstructs a suppliants journey from the account of a ceremony at another Oracle, as if it applied to these tunnels. Leaps of faith include:

• "we and everyone that we have taken down the Oracle, has immediately recognised the Entrance to Tartarus, the River Styx and the Gates of Ivory and of Horn, just as they were described by Vergil" (p 159)
• “The speech of Anchises proves the Vergil was a devout Orphic.” (p 157)
• “We just knew we were sitting on the banks of the River Styx. We both drank some of the water, and found it was potable." (p 114)

One of the most serious flaws is that he uses Homer Odyssey as if it recounted a real voyage by a real man and further assumes that it is evidence of Odysseus visiting Baiae in his voyage to the Underworld. Paget ignores or is unaware of the body of work that places the land of the dead in Homer outside the Pillars of Hercules, ie in the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean (eg Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford). He assumes that the Perpetual Mist of which Homer speaks is in fact fumes from the volcanically active region around Naples. He then goes on to use this purported voyage as a dating reference.

Another flaw with Paget's book is that he tends to divorce the archaeology, with its measurements and angles and careful descriptions, with the interpretation. I would have liked to have seen the evidence for each Vergilian reference to be linked with the archaeological evidence.

These weaknesses perhaps explain why Paget's discoveries, which should have been historic, are more or less unknown.

The thesis in this book needs to be treated with extreme caution , but it is full of fascinating ideas.

June 2020; 199 pages

Also read:

• Virgil's Aeneid by David Ross
• The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble, a work of fiction in which the narrator studies Virgil and travels to Naples

"Pompeii" by Mary Beard

The archaeological evidence from the city of Pompeii, buried for two thousand years by an eruption of neighbouring volcano Vesuvius, is assessed to provide evidence for daily life in the Roman world. The main message from this book is that the Romans weren't as homogenous as they are normally portrayed and that individuality reigned. How they did things in this city does not necessarily tell you how they did things elsewhere. What happened at the time that Pompeii was buried does not necessarily reflect what happened during the other many centuries of Roman Republic and subsequently Empire. And what one citizen or slave does is not the same as how another lives their life.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of narrative about the disaster. I suppose this has been covered elsewhere but it is the tabloid stuff. And I am not that interested in archaeology. So some of this book was rather hard going.

Nevertheless, there are some fascinating moments:

• "The hint of 'officer class' prejudices in many modern archaeologists who have so confidently equated social mobility and the rise of new money with revolution or decline." (Introduction)
• "Pompeii stood at the heart of a region - known, then and now, as Campania - where, long before the Romans came to dominate, indigenous peoples speaking the native Oscan language rubbed shoulders with Greek settlers." (C 1)
• "The town of Baiae, across the Bay from Pompeii, had become by the first century BCE a byword for an upmarket, hedonistic resort." (C 1)
• "It is hard to belive that all those Pompeians whoi lived in a single room above their shop, with not always adequate lavatory facilities, never found it convenient simply to piss in the streets." (C 2)
• "For us, it is the rich who visit restaurants, the poor who cook economically at home. At Pompeii, it was the poor who ate out [because they didn't have kitchens]." (C 2)
• In Pompeii, as in other early modern cities, "the mansions of the rich rubbed shoulders" with shops and workshops. (C 2)
• "If by 'poverty' we mean 'destitution', then there were very few poor in the ancient world: for the simple reason that destitution was the first step on a fast track to death." (C 3)
• "A tombstone from Rome ... includes the following piquant observation: 'wine, sex and baths ruin our bodies, but they are the stuff of life'" (C 7)
• "The conventions of bathing brought everyone down to size. Bathing naked, or nearly naked ... the poor were in principle no different from the wealthy - possibly healthier and of finer physique." (C 7). I related this to Acts of Undressing by Barbara Brownie.
• "The emperor Hadrian ... was visiting the baths one day (for even emperors might bathe in public ...) he noticed a retired soldier rubbing his back against the wall ... the man explained that he could not afford a slave to rub him down. So Hadrian gave him some slaves and the cost of their maintenance. Returning on a later occasion, he found a whole group of men rubbing their backs on the wall. ... He suggested they should rub each other." (C 7)
• "The hot tubs in the bathing suite itself must have been a seething mass of bacteria ... Roman medical writer Celsus offers the sensible advice not to go to the baths with a fresh wound ('it normally leads to gangrene')" (C 7)
• "The repeated slaughter of animals by humans to gods was an emblem of the hierarchy of the cosmos, with humans in the middle between beasts on the one hand and the divine on the other." (C 9)
• "In the 1760s, the Temple of Isis was among the first buildings fully excavated on the site ... Exotic and a little bit sinister, it gave Mozart, who visited Pompeii in 1769, ideas for the Magic Flute." (C 9)

A comprehensive study. October 2019; 316 pages

Books to check out
Satyrica by Petronius

"Under Another Sky" by Charlotte Higgins

The author and her boyfriend travel around England, Wales and Scotland to see the ruins of the Romans; the narrative includes stories of the characters who were also fascinated by the traces of Roman Britain. Her journey is geographical but also chronological: she starts in Kent where Julius Caesar landed, moving to Colchester and London, she ends back in East Anglia (“We drive through the outskirts of the town [Great Yarmouth], past endless rows of static caravans poised for occupation by those with a taste for the bleak.”; C 12) with relics of the departure of the Romans in or around AD 408.

I learned many interesting things:

• The first record of Kent, Cantium, is in a book by Diodorus Siculus written in the 1st century BC. (C 1)
• Romans weren't the first road builders! A road in Shropshire thought to be Roman was found to have wooden foundations dated to the second century BC (C 1)
• The first image of Britannia is found on a relief panel on a building in the city of Aphrodisias in modern Turkey. (C 1)
• Shakespeare's Cymbeline is based on the real Iron Age King Cunobelinus. (C 2)
• “The borders of Londonium still, more or less, mark the borders of the City of London, because the Roman walls became the mediaeval city’s boundaries, entered and exited by those long-perished portals that have a ghostly presence through their mediaeval names: Cripplegate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Bishops Gate, Aldgate, Ludgate. All these were Roman gates; only the seventh, Moorgate, was a medieval newcomer.” (C 3)
• London’s Roman forum, near where Fenchurch Street crosses Gracechurch Street included a three-storey basilica “which was the biggest building this side of the Alps” (C 3)
• The early Anglo-Saxons abandoned London and settled in “Croydon, Battersea, Tulse Hill, Kingston, Upper Norwood.” (C 3)
• “The colour of sunlight gleaming off a sword will change, depending on whether it's a warm sky or not.” (C 4, quoting Rosemary Sutcliff)
• At Hadrian’s wall inscriptions mentioned the word ‘cervesa’ (usually translated as Celtic beer) “which is surely the ancestor of the Spanish cerveza.” (C 7)
• The English mountains the Pennines were so named because they were likened to the Italian Appenines in a forged Roman manuscript which was believed to be authentic for many years. (C 7)
• “Dido builds herself a funeral pyre, takes Aeneas’s sword, which he has left behind him, and stabs herself ... It is a cruelly symbolic suicide, penetrated by her lover’s weapon.” (C 11)

I was particularly interested in those who were interested in Roman Britain.

• Archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler seemed to rely on his wife to do more of the unsung management of his archaeological digs. She was quoted by a newspaper as saying "she had always endeavoured to be a part of the shadow behind her husband.” (C 5) Meanwhile Mortimer enjoyed multiple affairs. He was returning from one foreign dig to which he had taken his latest girlfriend when, in a railway carriage, he read his wife's obituary in the newspaper.
• Poet Wilfred Owen as a lad in Shropshire used to cycle to the Roman ruins at Wroxeter to search for coins. 
• R G Collingwood made his name as a major philosopher but he was also a keen academic archaeologist. When he was living near Coniston he met Arthur Ransome whose Swallows and Amazons tales were based on boating adventures with Collingwood's family. Collingwood offered Ransome his savings when Ransome was sued by Lord Alfred Doublas over the former's biography of Orcar Wilde. Wilfred Owen visited here as well.

An interesting selection of anecdotes about Roman Britain.

October 2019; 230 pages

"Man and the Sun" by Jacquette Hawkes

This book was written in 1962 and is a reasonably authoritative layman's guide to the relationship between man and the sun. She starts off discussing the science and how the sun drives life on Earth but her main interest lies in the realm of myth. Thus she considers the prehistoric representations of sun gods, finding solar disks in burials on Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge, before considering solar gods in the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Incas and Aztecs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and the followers of Mithras and Christ.

There are many interesting points she made although she sometimes allows her cultural biases to show (for example when condemning the Aztecs for their practice of human sacrifice). Often her writing is vigorous and she has a way with metaphor that can coin a memorable phrase (“We stand before the chimpanzee’s cage thinking, each one of us, there but for the grace of God swing I.”) Occasionally this can stray into the use of language for reinforcing bias, such as when she describes Neanderthals [I assume] as "less able types of human being". There is sometimes a statement made baldly without any evidence but which she clearly considers fact: “As the individual self-consciousness increased and the conscious and intellectual mind grew further apart from the unconscious, there was an equivalent tendency to set a single male divinity outside and above nature, the world being his creation, sometimes his creation as Logos, the most intellectual of conceptions. It is not easy to distinguish sharply between transcendental and immanent gods.”

This is a book of its time but it is well-written and very readable.

Interesting moments:

• “At two thousand million miles from the Sun its light is still strong enough to allow the reading of fine print - were there readers on Uranus, which orbits at about this distance.”
• “Plants can feed on pure carbon dioxide ... The leaf wantoning in the air is eating away as steadily as a sheep in a field.”
• “It is an all but universally recognised attribute of the inspired person to have bright-shining eyes.”
• “There are people who have developed religious ideas that allow them to be as light-hearted and guilt-free as many of the South Sea Islanders, or as grim and guilt-ridden as the Calvinists, who rejoice in simplicity like the Quakers or in grandeur like the Roman Catholics ... Yet always ... we are inclined to think of the religion shaping the faithful instead of the faithful shaping the religion.” 
• “Satan, Prince of Darkness, and his followers can hardly be distinguished from Ahriman and his demon host.”
• “No more than a bird can build its nest exclusively with its own feathers could the Christian leaders build a faith, rites and church without picking up all manner of extraneous material from the Graeco-Roman environment.”
• Leonardo da Vinci said that “whoever evokes authority for his reasoning is using not his intelligence that his memory.”

February 2019; 240 pages

"The Decipherment of Linear B" by John Chadwick

This is the classic story of how in 1952 an architect, Michael Ventris, working part-time, deciphered the inscriptions on some clay tablets found in Crete, and later in mainland Greece, to show that they were written in a syllabic script based on a pre-classical Greece. It is thus a mix of archaeology, philology,and code-breaking. The triumph was all the greater because, as Chadwick points out, a cryptanalyst at least knows what language the code was written in whilst the prevailing view at the time was that these tablets were written in almost any language rather than Greek!

The book details how Ventris worked on the code, how he overcame doubt and triumphed. The story is telescoped into a few short years because Ventris was killed in a road traffic accident on the A1 in 1956. The author collaborated with Ventris immediately after Ventris had made the first breakthrough so this is, as much as any book can be, an insider's point of view. And what makes it wonderful is that it is written in the beautifully understated style of the 1950s, grey, academic and bloodless.

And yet, something of the excitement of dry, grey, bloodless, academic research can be seen. The first words are: "The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature" (p 1). The story of the breaking of the code is likened to nuclear fission: "finally there comes a point when the experimenter feels solid ground beneath his feet: his hypotheses cohere, and fragments of sense emerge from their camouflage. The code 'breaks'. Perhaps this is best defined as the point where the likely leads appear faster than they can be followed up. It is like the initiation of a chain-reaction in atomic physics; once the critical threshold is passed, the reaction propagates itself. Only in the simplest experiments or codes does it complete itself with explosive violence." (p 67)

An interesting story about the emergence of ideas from liminality.

July 2016; 157 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God