The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the Alexandrian scholar Callimachus (ca. 305-240 BCE) and other classical writers list the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great accomplishments and tourist attractions of known civilization at the time. All are within a 1000 x 1300 square-mile-area in the Eastern Mediterranean.

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
• The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• The Colossus of Rhodes
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria

Although the pyramid of Giza is the only wonder still in existence today, we know the locations of all the wonders except the hanging gardens of Babylon. (I discuss the pyramid of Giza in two posts from August 2014.)

Dr. Stephanie Dalley, Research Fellow (retired) in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, published the Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Oxford: Oxford University Press) in 2013 and wrote and hosted the TV show for the series, Secrets of the Dead, "The Lost Gardens of Babylon," in 2014. She has uncovered evidence that would place the hanging gardens not in Babylon, present-day Hillah in central Iraq, but a little over three hundred miles to the north in war-ravaged Mosul.

Ever one for the figurative properties of language, I learned that her deduction is based in part on the metaphorical use of a word in the Assyrian cuneiform writings of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BCE). The word refers to the distinctive spiral markings of the date palm to describe Sennacherib's feat of engineering, the so-called Archimedean screw.

Along with a sophisticated system of canals and aqueducts, the screw, turned by men or animals, raised an estimated 300 tons of water a day from the Euphrates to the hanging gardens, which, like the city walls, were about forty feet above river level.

Until now, we had thought that Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287-212 BCE) discovered the screw, which makes it possible to lift water, grain, and the like mechanically and in quantity from lower to higher ground. Now, thanks to Dr. Dalley, we are thinking that a king from 400 years earlier dreamed up this machine by musing on the spiral pattern on the date trees growing in his garden.

Tempest in a Teapot

In my post of April 18, 2015, I leveled a criticism at Helena Hamerow for a footnote in her book, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England, and another at myself, for inexact wording that did not fully explain the uses of the moldboard plow in agriculture. If we are going to understand our history, we need to be specific and exact about the technological advances that shaped it.

Well, Hamerow returns to the moldboard plow later on in her book. (And serves me right for writing a post on a book I hadn't finished yet.) She says, "The greater frequency of certain arable weeds indicates . . . that heavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period, something which could not have been readily achieved without the use of heavy ploughs pulled by teams of oxen . . . This implies the use of mouldboards and strip fields . . . At Drayton (Oxfordshire), 'broad, parallel stripes of clayey material'--dated archaeomagnetically to the Late Saxon period--were recognized as representing furrows created by a moldboard plough, producing 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'"

Too boring for you? Sorry, but I needed to exonerate Hamerow and set the record straight.

The Ice Palace

My new heroine, Rosalie, readily told me several things about herself, and I think she could do that because she is "born," so to say, to live out the story I am creating for her. (My old heroine, Mrs. Shepard, would not even tell me her first name.)

Rosalie was born in Michigan, moved to Washington, D.C., with her parents and sister, and graduated from a good women's college nearby. In 1950, she applied for a job in the diplomatic corps and ended up working for Edmond A Gullion, the U.S. Chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Saigon.

Soon after she moves to Saigon and finds an apartment near her office in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, Rosalie's parents are killed by a drunk driver in a head-on car crash in Washington, D.C. Rosalie returns home for the funerals and takes her sister Penelope, known as Pen, back to Saigon with her. Pen is only 19, not independent enough to live by herself in the states.

Do you hate it when fiction writers start talking about their characters as real people? Me, too. But I'm pretty sure it's an authentic experience, and in this case I'm going to take it as a good sign. Rosalie is going to help me tell her story.

Rosalie spent her early years in Michigan, where it was snowy and icy in winter and hot and muggy in summer. Now she lives in Saigon, where the summer monsoon season takes the weather to a whole new, tropical, level of hot and muggy.

In one scene I am thinking about, she feels especially hot and sticky, so she imagines an ice palace like the people in her home town in Charlevoix used to build in the winter. She thinks about dressing for the cold, stomping on the floor to pack it down, and putting the ice blocks into place for the foundation. Later, in her mind, she walks around inside the ice palace until she becomes deliciously chilled.

I looked up Ice Palace in Wikipedia and came up with this wonderful old bit of Russian history. In 1739 to 1740, during a particularly cold winter in St. Petersburg, the Empress Anna Ivanova (1693-1740) was celebrating Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire. She called for an ice palace to be built. She ordered a prince, now widowed, who had angered her by marrying a woman of a different faith, to become one of her court jesters and an ugly maidservant to become the other; the two were married.

On the wedding night, the empress sealed the newlyweds up in a bedchamber in the ice palace. The couple would have died overnight of the cold, except that the bride had managed to trade her pearl necklace for a guard's sheepskin coat.

According to the Wikipedia article, we know that the architect was Pyotr Yeropkin and the construction manager was Georg Kraft, and we still have Kraft's detailed description of the ice palace (only in Russian, as far as I can see).

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to tell the story in the book I am writing about Rosalie. So I am regaling you with it here.

Mansion

In the novel I've been working on, my heroine lives in 1940 London in a mansion block of flats. That is, if I can be said to be working on something involving ten years of research, many fits and starts, a partial outline, and one first chapter.

The word "mansion" has its root in the Latin word manere, to remain. In later Latin (my source is vague on the point of how much later, but I'm going to guess that the time is after 410 CE, when the Romans left England), mansio came to mean a place to stay during a journey.

Every twelve miles or so--the distance an ox-drawn cart can cover in a day--a large wayside inn or mansio provided food, lodging, and respite for the animals. Sometimes it also served as a government checkpoint, requiring travelers to show proper identification and pay road taxes. At least six sites have been identified as mansions in Great Britain; for one, the excavated mansion at Godmanchester on Ermine Street near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

In Old French and late Middle English, mansion took on an additional meaning, a large, impressive house for an important person. The French word for house, maison, comes from mansion.

Lately, on a kind of journey of my own, if you will allow a lame play on words to help me tie this post together, I gave up on the novel I was working on and created a new heroine. I thought, what if I have somehow constrained myself with the old story and that is why I am having so much trouble moving forward? What if I set the work aside, or even pretend I've finished it and learned everything I can from it, and move on to something I can outline and write?

So I've started a story about a young woman, Rosalie, who, in 1952, works as a secretary in Saigon for the Military Assistance and Advisory Group, MAAG--I. This team of officers and enlisted men from Army, Navy, and Air Force, established in late 1950 under Brigadier General Francis G. Brink, supervises our handing over of World-War-Two-surplus weapons, trucks, and airplanes to the French Expeditionary Corps: the United States' first involvement in Viet Nam.

The French requested our aid in early 1950 and the MAAG--I is President Truman's response to that request. But, in fact, the French are working at cross-purposes with us. They do not want to build a nation resistant to Communism; they simply want to take Indochina back as a colonial power. Yes, this is the theme of Graham Greene's the Quiet American: the old theme of American innocence and naiveté up against European greed and corruption.

Except that, in my story (and in fact) the corruption has now spread to the Americans as well. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) helps the French restore the opium trade to finance covert ops. On a visit to the United States to attend a conference on Southeast Asian affairs, General Brink tells a friend at a party that he is worried about his own safety: he knows too much about what is going on in Saigon. On June 24, 1952, while sitting at his desk in the Pentagon, he shoots himself three times in the chest with a revolver. The coroner rules his death a suicide brought on by depression.

My story begins here, as Rosalie and the Army Chief Warrant Officer Tom try to figure out why General Brink was murdered and what to do about it.

"Serves You Right"

A favorite saying in my family: "Well, it serves you right!" I should never have posted a criticism on a book I hadn't finished. (See my post from April 18, 2015, "The Moldboard Plow," which referred  back to another post from August 3, 2013, "Monticello Soup.")

On page 127 of Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012), Hamerow clarifies the uses of the moldboard plow: "[H]eavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period . . . . This implies the use of moldboards and strip fields, direct evidence for which is slowly but surely increasing. At Drayton (Oxfordshire), 'broad, parallel stripes of clayey material'--dated archaeomagnetically to the Late Saxon period--were recognized as representing furrows created by a moldboard plough, producing in section 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'

She cites another archaeologist, Booth, but I will spare you the details, just as I spared you the [sic]s that should have accompanied the English words, "moldboard plough."

Don't care about moldboard plows or agricultural technology? Or me annotating myself? Fine. Blame it all on Thomas Jefferson.

"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

Right now I go to two churches, depending on who can give me a ride to church on Sunday. Christ Church, a liturgical Episcopal church, is my "old" church and Nexus Portland, a non-denominational Christian church, is my "new" church.

In either church, we might, on any given Sunday, sing one of the hymns I love, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." It is Hymn 686 in the Hymnal (1982), found in pews in every Episcopal Church as well as, most likely, every other Protestant church; and it is a favorite also of Julianne's, Nexus's pastor's wife, who performs our music and includes at least one old hymn among the new praise and worship selections we sing.

Jeff Taylor and Buddy Greene give a lovely performance of the song in a youtube video, in case you want to listen to or remind yourself of the song.

Robert Robinson (1735 to 1790) wrote the lyrics for "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" in 1757, when he was 22 years old. He was a wild young man, given to drinking and mocking the Lord. In maturity he became a Baptist minister. Late in life--at least by his own lights--he wandered into sin again.

In researching the hymn, I ran a cross a charming story sometimes told about it. One day, Robert Robinson was riding in a stagecoach with a young woman he did not know. She began humming, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" and told him what a comfort the song had been for her.

He replied, "I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then." She told him that the streams of mercy were still flowing and he returned to a state of grace.

The Moldboard Plow

One of the books I am reading right now is called Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012) by Helena Hamerow, Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University. Reading? Well, in truth, it's pretty dry, and I am in fact skimming it.

At any rate, a footnote on p. 90, says, "To gain maximum yields from bread wheat, the crop must be kept dry; for this, the ridge and furrow achieved by the use of a moldboard plough was needed (see Banham 2010)."

Now the moldboard plow (American spelling, vs. English spelling plough) appears in Small Talk in my post, "Monticello Soup," August 3, 2013. There I said "With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain."

Not bad, as far as it goes, and, like Banham, my explanation does mention that a moldboard plow helps keep the seed dry. But, first, Jefferson may have invented a moldboard plow that worked well in Albemarle County, but he certainly did not invent the moldboard plow, and my writing does not make that clear enough. And, second, the moldboard plow does more than keep the seed dry or let you plow hilly soil more easily, and my writing hints at that, but again does not make it clear.

The moldboard plow also helps, as Wikipedia remarks in the entry Plough, to "grow crops . . . in less fertile areas" by bringing nutrients to the surface, burying weeds, and incorporating the remains of the previous harvest.

The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, Machine Age, and Computer Age seem monumental to us, and so they are, but earlier ground-breaking technology (sorry, couldn't resist a joke in the midst of stating the obvious) in agriculture, warfare, industry, knowledge, and other fields is what we have built on.

And speaking of Internet research and book research, both of which I do a lot of, it drives me crazy when an explanation of technology is not exact and complete--because often, being a poet rather than a physicist, I cannot tell the difference. But, when I start to pick the words apart and get at the meaning, the explanation does not hold, and I have yet another loose end to try and find more details on.