The Sea of Grief or the Gate of Tears.

Wingstem

     In and around 30 BC when Rome conquered Egypt, the Levant, including Bethlehem and all that, Frankincense and Myrrh were a really big deal.

  They weren't some knock off trinkets that smelled nice in a Christmas stocking before oranges and tangerines became available. Frankincense and Myrrh were big pecus, Aureus up the wazoo, tech bro type money, the kind of thing you hung on your backpack to impress the girls. Even back then the easiest way to get your exotic Oriental and East African decorative accents and other products into the Roman Market was up through Red Sea to Aqaba or Suez.

  Not easy under any circumstances, and worth remembering that the Sabaeans, who were once ruled by the Queen of Sheba had a bit of a strangle hold on what the Romans called the Fauces Rubri maris, the Jaws of the Red sea which is now being called The Bab al-Mandab, Gate of Tears. 

  Yemen used to get much more rain, they were fertile, they had good land. palaces and Girl Kings. The Romans divided the Arabian Peninsular into Rocky Arabia, Deserted Arabia, and Fertile Arabia, Yemen was in Fertile Arabia. Yemen produced some of the best pr-Islamic Arab Poets.

  When the Queen of Sheba was nosing around Solomon, the Hebrew clans called the Red Sea, The Sea of Reeds. If you want to know why I'd suggest you move your mind into the past and remember that Solomon had commercial and territorial interests in the mysterious lands to his South, and Sheba had commercial and territorial interests in the mysterious lands to her North.

  Solomon was a King of territory. He reigned over land, pasture and crops, that had been given to his people by the God of the Israelites called Yahweh. Sheba was a Queen of trade routes. She reigned over safe places for traders, that meant having to know, understand and not piss off a panoply of different gods.

  Solomon understood that exotic stuff came from Teiman, which means South. South for Solomon was somewhere down there, beyond the Sea of Reeds.  When Sheba visited Solomon she knew exactly where Jerusalem was and exactly how to get her caravan safely to Jerusalem. The Israelites were more wedded to the land, when they wanted to cross water they asked God to part the waves. Sheba knew more about boats than Solomon.

 

Upset the Gods

Katydid - Bush Cricket

    "The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato."

  The Cato, Lucan mentioned here in his epic poem about the civil war between that repulsive jackass Julius Caesar and the Roman Republic whose champion was the teenage butcher Pompey the Great, was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide rather than accept the tyranny of an emperor. 

  "It's not a matter of operational security, these lies are an attempt to conceal the truth of this conflict.  What we have been told and what is the truth doesn't match. MIA and KIA numbers do not include contractors, CIA, other humint resources and local populations who as far as the US Military is concerned don't count."

  Neoconservative minds will still be arguing a collapsing of the Age of Reason as it sieves through the twentieth century into the first quarter of the twenty first century. These worthy spirits with daddy complex issues left over from the early days of agriculture can be depressing as they continue to betray the world by assuring us all that we're doomed to slow painful death unless we call up the able bodied, pump them full of testosterone, give them a gun and make them wear a uniform.

  In Lucan's poem Cato the Younger was an heroic figure who stood for Liberty and Justice for all, but the gods knew that Rome was too massive a territory for Liberty and Justice to exist.

  

Open a window on the past and cry

Jerusalem Artichoke

   Saturday. September 19. The Year 2026. A Forecast high of 94 F. The filthy rich will take their money and hide. There'll always be someone they can buy. And yes an empire dies when a secretary of defense relies on testosterone shots and judges his soldiers by the rigidity of their erections rather than their spines.

  Edward Gibbon never for one minute believed the Roman Republic would survive. His reason for thinking this was that once the Roman Republic had expanded into a massive empire, its collapse and transformation into an autocracy was the natural, inevitable result of what he called "immoderate greatness." In modern parlance "Kiss business man arse and bend over for billionaires and you loose your republic."  John Walking Stewart could have told you that when he had to run from Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore.

  Worth wondering how Gibbon might describe the world as it is today. His great history addressed the Roman Empire rather than the Roman Republic. His account began in the year 98  with the establishment of Emperors rather than elected consuls and he ended the history in 1590, a hundred and fifty years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans which happened in 1453.

  Gibbon chose the year 1590, the year the ruthlessly efficient, architectural genius Pope Sixtus V died,  because he wanted to explore how the 15th and 16th Century Popes in their efforts to rebuild the ruined City of Rome had reappraised the Roman Empire and by so doing they had allowed themselves to enter a Renaissance, they'd given themselves hopeful look into the future. Edward Gibbon went on to suggest that by 1590 Rome was no longer a shadow of the glorious past cast on Europe, indeed by 1590 Europe was marching to a new drummer that became the Age of Reason.

  The other view describes an interstitial, a between spaces, where hope exists but can't be reached until something desperate happens.   

  

Sea People

Lion Tail

   If you use Rome or the British Empire or the right footwear as your cuddle bunny, if you're tempted by Napoleon, as Hegel and many an idealist were tempted, then in your understanding of Central Authority, or Monotheism, the mistake you're about to make is what I will call the Late Bronze Age Error.

 "We got bronze belt buckles, we got bronze adzes, we got it all, look at us, nothing can stop us now!"

  In this era of today, how long have we known that Western Modernity depends upon diesel fuel. How long have we been searching the interstitial for new spaces. How often have those new spaces looked like hard work and too much change as we wait for the Sea People to reveal our tomorrow.

  We, as is our tradition, because we cannot conceive of a space without diesel, will cling to a policy of colonial extraction. These days, unless our capital city is Washington DC or London we prefer not to use soldiers to quell the resistance, it's too destructive, veteran laden and expensive. 

  The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age, which began around 1200 BC, not that long ago. Iron is stronger, lighter and cheaper than bronze, so yippee! In the Near East the Iron Age itself slowed into a greater complexity of thought, monotheistic impulses, massive building programs and other monopolistic touchy-feely-ness around 600 BC. 

  This cradle of the Near East, holds the memory of that part of humanity that describes itself as civilized, and to this day it retains a pre-nation understanding which sees itself as belonging to family. Oh sure they have the Wompom of Djacooti with his twenty three wives, fourteen yachts and a City Block in New York, while you still draw your water from the well, but if you can see your blood line running through the Wompom's veins then so what, it's like being related to Charlton Heston or Mary Pickford . 

  Be brave, read history and learn, which you can't do unless you avoid Hollywood, Madison Avenue, television  and all that which the mathematics of a beaky hat holds dear. Yes indeed! In Arabia, when petroleum was discovered in 1938, the Banu Hanifa and their Wahhabi Priests would still be floor cleaners if it wasn't for a British Colonial Officer and Cambridge man named Harry St John Bridger Philby.