The Riding Clans

Of the Anglo-Scottish borders

When most people think of Scottish clans, they think of the Gaelic Highlanders such as the MacDonalds and Camerons and MacGregors. But there was an entirely separate clan system outside of the Highlands, and it was not Gaelic at all. The “riding clans” or “Border reivers” were tribes of thieves and raiders along both sides of the Anglo-Scottish Border from around the years 1300-1600.

Just like the Highlanders, the Borderers were organized into clans led by chiefs. These clans survived through cattle-raiding, waged blood feuds with each other, and commemorated the deeds of their heroes in song. However, the songs in question were in Scots or Northumbrian English rather than Gaelic. Some people refer to these Border clans as “families” or “names” in order to arbitrarily distinguish them from Highland clans, but they were explicitly referred to as “clans” in Scottish legal documents during their own era.

 

It is clear from the names of the clans themselves that they were not of Gaelic origin. Border clans have names like Maxwell, Johnstone, Armstrong and Nixon, none of which carry any hint of Gaelic.

 

This is interesting in historical terms because so many people see clans, clan chiefs, cattle-raiding and blood-feuding as Gaelic or “Celtic” characteristics, yet all these things thrived along the Border among people who were not Gaelic at all. Clan systems develop when central government is weak, ineffective and/or distrusted, leading people to band together for protection. They are not a defining feature of “Celticness” or “Gaelicness.”

 

Historical Wonders – The Parthenon

 

There are many remnants of the past strewn across the world – wonders created by historical emperors, kings and religious leaders.  These often monumental structures are built to act as a legacy for the rulers or to gain glory for the people of the kingdom in which they are constructed.  The Parthenon, in Athens, is one such wonder, built by the Greek leader Pericles to honor the Goddess Athena and mark Athens as one of the greatest cities in the ancient world.  It is a wonder of engineering that cost a fortune and took more than 15 years to complete.  The Parthenon is widely considered to be the most important surviving structure of Greece’s history.

Construction on this massive temple was begun in 447 BCE though it would not be fully complete until 432 BCE.  At the time 

of its building, the Athenian Empire was a major power with an advanced fleet that ruled the world of the Mediterranean.  The Parthenon was built atop the Acropolis that rests in the center of Athens, towering over the surrounding city in all its glory.

To build the Parthenon, the quarries of Athens were worked constantly.  Giant marble blocks were carved from the ground and transformed into the many pieces which would eventually make up the great temple.  The interior of the Parthenon once held another marvel – a great golden, ivory and bejeweled statue of Athena – though this has since been lost to time.  A frieze of masterful craftsmanship once circled the interior of the temple, depicting scenes of Greek history and mythology.  But this was damaged and broken and much of what remained was taken to British museums that, unfortunately, refuse to return it to Greece.

Historically, the Parthenon was used by many different civilizations over the years, as new empires came, conquered and then eventually left again.  It was the site of a Christian church during the 5th century AD and later a mosque in the mid-1400s. 

Preservation of the Parthenon has not been the best.  Weathering and age have taken their toll, but so too did an explosion within the temple’s interior that irreparably damaged much of the temple’s structure and the famous frieze.  In 1975 a program was begun to help restore it to its former grandeur and many other countries came to Greece’s aid to help fix this wondrous building.  Restoration has been a long and arduous process, 

however, in an effort to get every detail as perfect as possible as well as to enhance the infrastructure and protect the Parthenon from future natural threats such as earthquakes.

It is unfortunate that so much of the temple has been damaged, though it is rare that such ancient sites survive untouched.  If restoration efforts continue successfully, we may once again have the opportunity to look upon a Parthenon that at least mirrors the magnificence of its past and gives us a feeling of the awe that Greeks must have felt as this massive holy building.

Warrior Monks

In Asia and Europe

 

Most people familiar with the phrase “warrior monks” probably associate it with Asia. Specifically they would be most likely to think of either Japanese “sohei” or Shaolin monks, neither of which actually fit the phrase all that well.

Why? Because the sohei of Japan were really monks in name only. The large and very powerful Tendai Buddhist temples would hire professional warriors- men who would have been called samurai in any other context- in order to help them throw their weight around in the power politics of that era. These men would shave their heads and throw monkish robes on over their armor, but nobody expected them to really think like monks or live like monks.

 

Similarly, the Shaolin Temple was a major land-holder, so it maintained an armed militia to protect its property and its political interests. It also encouraged large numbers of itinerant martial artists to stay at subsidiary shrines in the vicinity of the temple, just so there would be a lot of trained fighters around in case of trouble. Because the Chinese imperial government was sometimes not strong enough to ensure national security, it would ask the Shaolin Temple to lend it some troops every now and then. These men were “monks” in a sense, in that they were attached to the temple and were under some sort of religious vow. But they were primarily armed security guards employed by the temple, not true monastic contemplatives.

 

Europe, however, had a tradition of knights who were truly both warriors and monks. The Hospitallers, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights and other lesser orders were highly disciplined religious organizations as well as military organizations. The knights in these orders were actually expected to live the full monastic lifestyle of poverty, chastity and obedience- although they unquestionably became wealthy and corrupt over time.

 

Roman Police vs. Roman Gladiators

 

In a somewhat ludicrous mix of the past and the present, Rome is seeing clashes in the streets between modern day police and ancient Roman gladiators.  The Italian city is known for its famous Coliseum, and one of the ways that people make money in the city is to dress up in gladiator costumes and pose for pictures with the tourists who come to see it.  This practice has been going on for many years, though recently it has come under fire from the government.

Officials are saying that the gladiators are engaging in unethical behavior, often offering to take pictures with tourists before informing them that there’s a charge involved.  In one particular incident an unaware tourist took a picture of a gladiator and was threatened when he didn’t cough up more than $100 for the privilege.  There are also several other reported cases of the gladiators attempting to charge visitors $50 or more and getting angry if the tourists resist.  Other complaints against the gladiators consist of not having permits and stalking tourists. 

In their defense, the gladiators say that dressing up and taking the pictures is the way 

they’ve been making their living for many years now, and that they’ve only recently come under attack.  This is contrary to many other attractions in Rome, where gladiators are still allowed to ply their trade unmolested.  To make matters even more complicated, tourists often side with the gladiators and cheer them on when police try to run them off.

Recently, with their employment under threat, the gladiators marched and staged a protest outside of the Coliseum.  This led to a few scuffles between gladiators and police, though thankfully no one was disemboweled.

The question of whether the gladiators should be allowed to continue is a serious one, especially given the serious charges which have been leveled against them.  Still, the powers-that-be have stated that if the actors will obey the rules, get permits and stop harassing tourists, they can stay.

Dinosaur Size Result Of Egg-Laying?

A new theory as to the immense size of dinosaurs (unseen since their extinction) may be in the fact that they were egg-layers.

The largest animal on the planet happens to be a mammal; the blue whale. Of course, on land the largest animal is significantly smaller; a the African elephant. For anyone that has grown up with a keen interest in the wild kingdom, there’s always been a mystery surrounding big animals. For instance, how is it that our largest animal today is still only a hundredth the size of some of the largest animals several hundred million years ago? To be sure, it adds to the allure of dinosaurs that nature no longer seems to suffer anything so grand in size. To explain why that may be, University of Zurich zoologist Daryl Codron studies the dinosaur’s egg.

Egg-laying creatures have some of the largest size discrepancies in nature, the difference between a new-born specimen and a fully-grown adult. According to Codron’s article, published in Nature, dinosaur eggs would produce very small young, some being only 2,500th the size they will be when fully grown. By comparison, the largest discrepancy among mammals today is 1 to 25, about a thousandth that of a large dinosaur. Dinosaur eggs could get large, some being as big as small refrigerator, but it’s still much smaller than their fully grown adult size. The problem lies within an egg’s structure. After a certain point the egg is so big, and the shell is so thick, that it cannot absorb the necessary oxygen and other gasses to sustain the embryo inside. As a result, dinosaur young were comparatively very small….at first.

As Codron explains in Nature, “When the young of large animals start out small, they must grow through a large size range before reaching adulthood, and compete with species of many different sizes as they do so.” As a result, dinosaurs were likely to have evolved in a way that would allow them to grow quickly. With so much competition among smaller and mid-sized dinosaurs, it was evolutionarily advantageous to grow bigger than the competition. Thus, dinosaurs would start small, and grow to be bigger than those competing dinosaurs around them. Other species, then, would grow even bigger to compete. Think of it like a game of hand-over, which each species growing larger to out-pace and out-compete the others. Inevitably the world ended up with a lot of very large animals roaming its surface.

The problem came with the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary and the famous “asteroid collision”, which is still the dominant theory of the dinosaur extinction. Such large creatures were unable to adapt to such dramatic changes in climate brought on by the impact, and so died off about 65 million years ago. However, in 65 million years one would think we might see the pattern repeating. The difference? Mammals don’t lay eggs.

The Varangian Guard

Loyal Viking Warriors

 

Ancient Rome's “Praetorian Guard” was an excellent example of what no emperor would ever want in his imperial guard- an elite and ruthless fighting force perfectly willing to overthrow emperors at will for its own ends. Of course, Rome eventually fell, but it was succeeded (in the eastern regions of what had previously been the Roman Empire) by the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople.

The Byzantine Emperors needed bodyguards too, so they created their own elite guard force, the Varangian Guard. But the Varangians were different. Varangian Guardsmen were Vikings and Saxons, warriors with well-established traditions of extreme loyalty to their own chieftains. This loyalty was transferred to the Byzantine Emperor, and in all the years of their service to the Byzantines, there was only one instance of the Varangians interfering with the imperial succession.

 

This is especially remarkable when you consider that the Varangians stood to profit greatly whenever an emperor died. According to tradition, any Varangian guard was allowed to go to the treasury when the emperor died and run off with all the gold and treasure he could carry. Many of them even became wealthy men as a result, but they don't seem to have ever abused the privilege. They could have easily just killed the emperor themselves and set up a new one of their own choosing, which is something the Praetorian Guard used to do all the time. But they never did so, and the only misbehavior they were generally guilty of was drinking too much. The Varangians, it seems, were a cut above!

 

 

 

Fire use 300,000 years older than initially believed

 

One of the most important debates among anthropologists studying the progression of man since the dawn of time is when man’s predecessors managed to first control fire.  The manipulation of fire was an event that altered evolution significantly and is widely considered to be the most important invention in history.  By understanding when fire came about, significant clues can be obtained that relate to many other aspects of how we, as a species, developed and came to be what we are today.  Now, new discoveries have been made which put a much earlier date on fire usage among our human ancestors.

This new evidence consists of ashes from campfire which were embedded in ancient sediment discovered at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.  This site is a former habitation of Homo erectus, which are predecessors to our own species of Homo sapiens.  Wonderwerk Cave is famous for being one of the oldest known sites of Homo habitation, with more than 2 millions years of artifacts and evidence to show for it.

The ashes were found to contain plant and bone matter, meaning that the fire was used actively for something, most likely cooking.  Tests date the ashes at around one million years ago.  This pushes back the solid evidence of fire-making in history by more than 300,000 years than what has been previously discovered.

Aside from helping to date fire through direct physical evidence, this find is important in other ways.  It can be used as an example of how to locate more of these finds and perhaps pinpoint the usage of fire more accurately.  This will result in a snowball of information, such as when cooking first appeared for modern man and when the resulting increase in brain size may have occurred.  Also, control of fire meant mastery over the darkness that came with night, another key factor in Homo sapiens’ development.

Despite the evidence, some doubt has been raised concerning this new evidence.  Most of the dissenting voices come from scientists who believe that fire mastery could not be more than 400,000 years old.  They seek to find when fire was in use on a regular basis and are concerned that this example may be but one isolated incident.  Hopefully, more of these finds will appear and this mystery will be unraveled, shedding some light on the darkness of our unknown past.

Weathermen

The dangers of uniformity

 

Last week I wrote about the Baader-Meinhof gang, and this week I'm writing about the Weathermen. These two groups were never connected, and Baader-Meinhof was much more murderous, but they did have some things in common. These include fanaticism and a complete lack of humor or perspective, but those are really just symptoms. What these two groups really had in common was uniformity of thought.

Before the Weathermen went underground, they lived in collective houses together and engaged in lots of Maoist-style “self-criticism.” This is where you get up in front of the group and rip yourself to shreds for whatever ideological deviations you might have been guilty of before discovering the One True Way. The Japanese Red Army did the same, and regularly murdered members who deviated just a little too far. The Weathermen were not as bad, but the emphasis on ideological uniformity was still there.

 

As an activist with the Occupy Movement, one thing that often strikes me is that no two Occupiers ever seem to agree completely about anything. This is a very healthy thing if you ask me, at least in comparison to groups like the Weathermen or Baader-Meinhof. I can't imagine a group of Occupiers getting together for a self-criticism session like that- people would just walk out rather than go along with it. The history of leftist terrorism should be a sobering reminder to any radical activist of the dangers of group-think and conformity in the name of any cause. These groups were destructive, tiny and totally ineffective. They ruined a lot of lives, and what did they achieve? This is one part of history that should be remembered and not repeated!

 

 

War remains one of the biggest threats to history

 

The records of the past are constantly under threat, whether it come from people burning books, those who try to rewrite the past or archaeological sites that get caught in the crossfire of petty wars.  Many historical locations, especially those of a more distant past, were built as fortresses originally and thus make perfect places for soldiers to hide during their fights.  This often brings buildings which are thousands of years old under fire from guns and artillery.  The latest archaeological wonder to come under siege is the city of Timbuktu, located in northern Mali.

Mali has been a hotbed of violent activity as of late.  A coup recently overthrew the government and for many months there have been skirmishes in the north between government troops and separatists who have been attempting to establish their own independent state.  When the coup hit Mali, forces in the form of Tuareg rebels and Islamic fighters took control of Timbuktu.

It may seem like a small matter when compared with the number of people who have lost their lives in these conflicts and the massive 

starvation which is occurring in Africa right now, but preservation of such historical sites is still important in the long run.  Long after the people have gone, there must still be the evidence to prove they were once there.  Timbuktu is an important part of both African and Islamic history and keeping it intact is essential to the maintaining of both groups’ identities.

Timbuktu has many mosques and cemeteries that date back as far as the 5th century, as well as a 

collection of irreplaceable Islamic manuscripts that number in the hundreds-of-thousands.  Many of the manuscripts have already been destroyed, though efforts by scholars have been underway for some time to record them for prosperity.

The site has already come in danger due to neglect and now that militant factions have taken hold, there are risks of important artifacts being destroyed for political or religious reasons.  Rebel interference may further hamper the efforts of scholars to record the important manuscripts, resulting in a potentially catastrophic loss of history.

Ancient plant brought back to life

 

The Russian discovery of a cache of ancient seeds several years ago was nothing much to be excited about at the time.  These seeds, encased more than 120 feet below the earth’s surface, were found in an area known for fossil remains.  What is astounding, however, is that these particular seeds were preserved well enough for scientists to germinate them and grow them into healthy plants.  After more than 32,000 years, flora from an unknown period of history was restored to life.

Scientists are understandably excited about their accomplishment.  The previous record-holder for this type of procedure was a 2000-year-old date palm.  That beats out the previous record by several millennia.  Furthermore, the newly created plants managed to flower and produce their own seeds, creating a second generation and the assurance that this ancient plant will continue to exist in the modern world.

Bringing these plants back to life is a remarkable opportunity to learn a great deal about the past first-hand.  If more seeds can be found in similar underground environments, there’s no telling what sorts of plants may emerge from the darkness.  If the same technologies can be applied to other forms of living matter in the future, then there’s virtually no limit to what we may be able to recreate.

The knowledge and ability to perform such feats of science is growing rapidly and perhaps may extend to animal remains some day.  Maybe even the fossils of ancient human predecessors can eventually be revived.  The amount of information that could be gained by making life anew is endless.  We could finally begin to understand ourselves as a species by looking at where we came from, both in terms of the life that existed then and the forms of our ancestors.

Currently, scientists are trying to replicate the process with the seeds and assure that it can be done again and again.  Hopefully, they will be successful and we can start down a new road towards knowledge and understanding of our world.

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