When on Google Earth 28

Welcome, WOGErs, to my lonely, neglected history blog. Thanks to Andrea, the winner of WOGE 26, for presenting me with low-hanging fruit. Below: Something a bit more obscure. First, though, the boilerplate:

Q: What is When on Google Earth?
A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go!

Q: How do you play it?
A: Simple, you try to identify the site in the picture.

Q: Who wins?
A: The first person to correctly identify the site, including its major period of occupation, wins the game.

Q: What does the winner get?
A: The winner gets bragging rights and the chance to host the next When on Google Earth on his/her own blog!



Two very general hints, for starters:

1. This site is pre-modern.
2. This site is open and easily accessible to the public.

Janus

A happy new year to all from greater Philadelphia, where private benefactors have ensured that the local manifestation of a very old pageant will be taken to a characteristically American extreme later today.

Our Mummers have long since traded divination rituals for accordion and banjo skills, which is too bad, because most conventional predictions for the year at hand inspire more anxiety than can be assuaged by even the liveliest pavement polka.

As usual, history provides some perspective. By about AD 440, it was clear to everyone in southern France that the era of the Roman good life had drawn to a close. Salvian of Marseilles, a Christian bishop, was writing On the Government of God, which laid the blame for the miseries of the Roman people squarely at their own feet. His main theme was their failure to practice the Christian principles they professed, but he made room for some criticism of economic policy:

Who can find words to describe the enormity of our present situation? Now when the Roman commonwealth, already extinct or at least drawing its last breath in that one corner where it still seems to retain some life, is dying, strangled by the cords of taxation as if by the hands of brigands, still a great number of wealthy men are found the burden of whose taxes is borne by the poor; that is, very many rich men are found whose taxes are murdering the poor. Very many, I said: I am afraid I might more truly say all; for so few, if any, are free from this evil, that we may find practically all the rich in the category to which I have just assigned many of them.

Salvian didn't think much of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

Think a minute: the remedies recently given to some cities. What have they done but make all the rich immune and heap up the taxes of the wretched? To free the rich from their old dues they have added new burdens to those of the poor; they have enriched the wealthy by taking away their slightest obligations and afflicted the poor by multiplying their very heavy payments. The rich have thus become wealthier by the decrease of the burdens that they bore easily, while the poor are dying of the increase in taxes that they already found too great for endurance. So the vaunted remedy most unjustly exalted the one group and most unjustly killed the other; to one class it was a most accursed reward and to the other a most accursed poison. Hence I say that nothing can be more wicked than the rich who are murdering the poor by their so-called remedies, and nothing more unlucky than the poor, to whom even the general panacea brings death.

No matter how questionable the upcoming fiscal stimulus plans might be, however, they're likely to be more politically defensible than those prescribed by the leaders of Salvian's day:

What followed these calamities? Who can assay such utter folly? The few men of rank who had survived destruction demanded of the emperors circuses as the sovereign remedy for a ruined city. O that I might here and now be gifted with eloquence adequate to cope with this shocking event, that there might be at least as much virtue in my complaint as there is sorrow at its cause! Who can even decide what chiefly merits accusation in the tale, irreverence or stupidity, extravagance or insanity? ... I confess I thought you most miserable when you were suffering destruction, but I see that you are now more miserable when you demand public shows. At first I thought you had lost only your material property in the capture of your city; I did not know that you had lost also your intelligence and control of your senses. Do you then ask for theaters, and demand a circus from our emperors?

Hmm. Insanity, Salvian, or just an attempt to reassure a frightened populace that everything was returning to normal?

That said, if I'd known my tax dollars were going to pay for amusements, I'd have preferred chariot races to the 19 gazillion airings that this [expletive] commercial has received since the U.S. Congress forked our money over to Chrysler last month:



Bonus eventus to all of us in 2009.

But manly strength has force to tame the storm*

The current, holiday edition of The Economist has a good read on Fastnet Rock, the southernmost point in Ireland. Little more than a jagged hunk of slate protruding from the Atlantic, the Vikings called it Hvastann-ey ("Sharp-Toothed Island"), while its Irish name is An Charraig Aonair ("The Rock that Stands Alone"). Since 1854, it's been home to two successive lighthouses. The current one has been (sometimes just) standing against the fury of the ocean since 1903.

The chief foreman of its construction, a stonemason named James Kavanagh, was singleminded in his devotion to his duty:

He lived on the rock continuously for ten to 12 months of each year from August 1896 to June 1903, sleeping on a damp bed of rock close to the landing strip in quarters carved out of the rock face, known to this day as “Kavanagh’s hole”.

The project ultimately cost him his life:

Seven years of living in a hole in the rock, progress frustrated by maverick tides and his delayed shipments, suddenly shattered his health. Having set the last stone, he went ashore with his son (also a mason on the rock) at the end of June 1903 complaining of illness, and died of apoplexy a week later.

Kavanagh was following in the footsteps of an ancient Irish tradition. It's easy to imagine that on some wet, cold night in his cave quarters--they were probably all wet and cold--he turned a thought to the one-time residents of a similarly uncomfortable home, fifty miles to his northwest.


The monks of Skellig Michael (Irish Sceilig Mhichíl, or "Michael's rock") were seeking a different sort of light than James Kavanagh, but they were every bit as determined, and often paid the same price.

Skellig Michael and its smaller craggy sibling jut sullenly from the ocean about seven miles off the coast of County Kerry.

Even today, getting to it requires a sturdy boat and great cooperation from the weather.  In the 7th century, when men seeking God probably landed there to turn away from the world and its ephemeral distractions, it must have seemed impossibly remote.  It was perfect.

They built beehive-shaped monastic cells that afforded minimal shelter and space for one person to offer glory to God.  There was a place to listen to a brother reading from the Holy Scripture, there was a garden, and there was a place to bury those who'd finished their earthly trials and awaited Christ's return.  What more did they need?  Skellig Michael would remain the westernmost outpost of Christianity for centuries.

Occasionally, particular monks would find the relative bustle of the monastic community too great a distraction to commune effectively with God.  For them, one last option remained.

A trip down from the monastery, across the middle of the island-- known as Christ's Saddle--and another, steeper ascent to the crag's highest point would lead these pilgrims to Skellig Michael's hermitage.  There, alone in an eyrie nearly 700 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, they would drink collected rainwater and at last, one hopes, finally find the holy communion they'd sought. Modern visitors seeking a taste of their experience are cautioned by the Oxford Archaeological Guide to Ireland that "access is difficult and is recommended only for the dedicated and fit."

Those of us who are softer in body and spirit than early medieval Irish ascetics might do well to find one of the remaining men who manned Fastnet Rock before it was automated in 1989. A pint of Murphy's tastes better than rainwater, and the last keepers of Fastnet will surely be able to explain why, when the Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port of Dublin bought Skellig Michael in 1820, the first thing they did was build a pair of lighthouses.

* St. Columban's Boat Song, c. 600

Photo credits:
Fastnet Rock: 88rabbit
Skellig Michael: donapatrick

Rome Reborn project on Google Earth

It doesn't seem to be working yet, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that this is something I've been anticipating for years.

I'm already wearing out the "Check for Updates" button in Google Earth. Very exciting!

Huzzah!

Adrian Murdoch has returned to the blogosphere. I hope to be able to follow suit soon.

"Maybe Julius Caesar or other things."

There are bad ideas, and then there's this.

It's fortunate that Augustus can't spin in his grave, else there'd be an 80-meter hole forming in the Campus Martius...

"Just a few hoof-beats ahead..."

Jeff Sypeck's put up a great post placing the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia in a much wider historical context. In a very roundabout way, is it all the fault of the Huns? Perhaps not, but Jeff shows how the threads in the great tapestry can, as they so often do, lead to unexpected places.