Robert Cioffi’s LRB review (8 May 2025; archived) of The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner describes the excavations at Wadi al-Jarf:

Wadi el-Jarf​ lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, who used it as a staging post for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in search of turquoise and copper ore. For the past 4500 years, it has lain dormant. To the untrained eye, the port is hardly visible: deep galleries carved out of limestone bluffs, the low walls of a few comb-like structures, a sandy beach, the rocky remnants of an ancient jetty. But on 12 March 2013, a team of French and Egyptian archaeologists led by Pierre Tallet discovered six fragments of papyrus in a depression near the limestone cliffs five kilometres from the shore. Hundreds of thousands of texts written on papyrus have been discovered in Egypt – ritual and religious instructions for the afterlife, works of literature, bills, contracts, tax receipts, lawsuits and orders for grain – but none as old as these. Over the next month, Tallet’s team uncovered more than a thousand fragments of papyrus. They had found, almost by accident, a first-hand account of the men who built the Great Pyramid of Giza. […]

The most enduring mystery of the pyramids is the fact of their existence. There has been serious scholarly disagreement over the number of workers, their status and how they went about their monumental task. Herodotus, who stands roughly equidistant between Khufu’s time and ours, writes that Khufu ‘drove [the Egyptians] into complete misery’, with teams of a hundred thousand men compelled to haul stones for three months at a time. As Herodotus has it, workers first built a set of steps and then used levers to fill in the gaps and produce the pyramid’s smooth sides. Four hundred years later, Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian who wrote in Greek, proposed that the stones were moved on earthen ramps, so that the pyramid seemed ‘not the slow labour of humanity, but a sudden creation of some god, set down in the surrounding sand’. The whole project, Diodorus and Herodotus agree, took twenty years. Archaeologists have found evidence – ranging from the remains of ramps to modern trials with levers and ropes – for techniques similar to those they describe, but both accounts, written two thousand years after the fact, leave much to be desired.

[Read more…]

I’m reading Nouvelle Vague by Jean Douchet, who was around at the birth of the fabled New Wave in French cinema, knew everybody, and has excellent taste — I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic (there’s a translation if you don’t read French). Along with film history, I’m picking up a lot of vocabulary; here are a couple of examples.

1) Talking about the young future Nouvelle Vague directors, Douchet writes “Ils savent donc qu’il leur faut affronter directement les règles du système pour le pénétrer … par effraction de préférence.” The word I’ve bolded was completely opaque to me; it turns out to mean ‘breaking and entering, burglary,’ but what surprised me was that it also exists in English! OED (1891 entry):

Breaking open (a house); burglary.

1840 The dwelling-place where the effraction was perpetrated.
New Monthly Magazine vol. 58 277

1868 A riot, with effraction and murder.
H. H. Milman, Annals of St. Paul’s Cathedral iv. 80

1881 Such efficient instruments of effraction that no bolts or locks could resist them.
J. Payne in translation of F. Villon, Poems (new edition) Introduction 54

The etymology is “< French effraction, as if < Latin *effractiōn-em, formed as effracted adj.”

2) Describing the period before the founding of Cahiers du cinéma, he says: “Après la disparition de La Revue du cinéma (et de son fondateur Jean Georges Auriol) et de L’Écran français, il y avait véritablement disette en la matière.” Again, the bolded word was new to me; it means ‘scarcity, shortage, dearth,’ and the etymology is a tangle — TLFi says:
[Read more…]

I’m reading Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, which I’ve had for decades but for some reason decided was appropriate reading now, and I came across this sentence describing a picnic in 1936:

But for the parked motorcars, the scene might have been New England in 1885, and you could see the women in chip hats and tight-bodiced, high-necked frocks with bustles; the men in straw boaters with dangling ribbons and adorned with side-whiskers—Doremus’s beard not clipped, but flowing like a bridal veil.

I asked my wife if she knew what a chip hat might be, but she had no more clue than I did, so I looked it up in the OED (entry revised 2021):

chip hat

Now chiefly historical.

A light hat woven or plaited from thin strips of wood, palm leaf, etc.

1723 Wears a mix’d Orange Coloured Gown, and a Chip Hat.
Stamford Mercury 2 May 211/2

1859 The wood of the White Willow has been extensively used in the manufacture of chip-hats.
W. S. Coleman, Our Woodlands 65

1966 A debonair young man..with a broad-brimmed chip hat of the kind the prisoners wove from strips of maple wood.
T. H. Raddall, Hangman’s Beach i. iv. 55

2015 This combination of chip hat, cap, light-patterned gown, and white apron..would have been typical morning dress.
Crit. Inq. vol. 41 634

Once again I am dismayed by the OED’s casual approach to crediting authors; that last citation is from Steve Hindle’s “Representing Rural Society: Labor, Leisure, and the Landscape in an Eighteenth-Century Conversation Piece” (Critical Inquiry 41:3 [Spring 2015]: 615-54). Furthermore, the full sentence reads:

As John Styles points out, this combination of chip hat, cap, light-patterned gown, and white apron over petticoat, shift, and stays would have been typical morning dress even for a duchess walking in St James’s Park in 1744, so the basic constituents of the female wardrobe portrayed in miniature by Haytley actually serve to conceal rather than convey social distinction, which would only be revealed at close quarters in the quality of the fabrics and the accessorizing.

You’d think it would have been useful to include the phrase “in 1744,” which seems important context. At any rate, now we all know what a chip hat is, and I’ve fulfilled my contractual obligation as regards the inclusion of hat-related material.

My wife and I are hopelessly addicted to Shetland; we’re currently gobbling up the ninth season and are glad that a tenth is promised. I have, of course, been following the action on my Ordnance Survey Motoring Atlas of Great Britain, and just as in this 2011 post, which focused on Dorset in the south of England, I am bowled over by the concentration of wondrous place names that strike the eye on what Wikipedia calls the eponymous archipelago off the very northern tip of Scotland. I’ll start at the southern edge of the largest island, quaintly called the Mainland: moving clockwise from Blovid, we find Geo of the Uln, Troswick Ness, Stack of the Brough, Lambhoga Head, Milburn Geo, The Taing, Pool of Virkle, Grutness, Sumburgh, Lady’s Holm, Scat Ness, Toab, Garths Ness, Siggar Ness, Fitful Head, The Nev, Wick of Shunni, Stack o’ da Noup, and Fora Ness. Further north are Mousa, Lamba Taing, Okrequoy, Bay of Fladdabister, and (my very favorite) East Voe of Quarff; westward are Fugla Stack, Ukna Skerry, West Burra, and Biargar (unknown to Google Maps). Further north are Gildarump and Quilva Taing and Papa Stour and North Nestling and Rumble; on the northernmost island Unst are Snerravoe, Spoo Ness, Orknagable, Grunka Hellier, Karne of Flouravoug, Burrafirth, Rumblings, and off the coast the famous Muckle Flugga. I’ve just scratched the surface, and I urge all aficionados of memorable toponyms to do a deep dive into Google Maps (or your preferred alternative).

As for Shetland itself, Wikipedia provides its usual farrago of factoids:

The name Shetland may derive from the Old Norse words hjalt (‘hilt’), and land (‘land’), the popular and traditional claim. Another possibility is that the first syllable is derived from the name of an ancient Celtic tribe. […]

The oldest known version of the modern name Shetland is Hetland; this may represent “Catland”, the Germanic language softening the C- to H- according to Grimm’s law […]. It occurs in a letter written by Harald, earl of Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, in ca. 1190. By 1431, the islands were being referred to as Hetland, after various intermediate transformations. It is possible that the Pictish “cat” sound contributed to this Norse name. In the 16th century, Shetland was referred to as Hjaltland.

Gradually, the Scandinavian Norn language previously spoken by the inhabitants of the islands was replaced by the Shetland dialect of Scots and Hjaltland became Ȝetland. The initial letter is the Middle Scots letter, yogh, the pronunciation of which is almost identical to the original Norn sound, /hj/. When the use of the letter yogh was discontinued, it was often replaced by the similar-looking letter z (which at the time was usually rendered with a curled tail: ⟨ʒ⟩) hence Zetland, the form used in the name of the pre-1975 county council. This is the source of the ZE postcode used for Shetland.

The Shetland dialect has its own article; you hardly hear any of it on the show, but I presume that accurately reflects the current situation, where most people speak a more generalized form of Scots.

That’s what Laura Spinney asks in the Graun, and Betteridge’s law applies as per usual — of course anything and everything can and will die, including the human species, the Earth, and the universe, but the implication of the question is “in the foreseeable future,” and the question is thus pretty silly. Happily, Spinney knows that, and the piece is for the most part a sensible discussion of more general issues:

The fact is, though, that no language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the Great. “English could of course die, just as Egyptian died,” says linguist Martin Haspelmath, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The more interesting questions are: when and how?

Predicting the future of any language is, most linguists will tell you, an exercise in speculation. The code by which we communicate is subject to so many complex and interacting forces that – until AI helps find patterns in the morass of data – we can’t do much more than guess. It doesn’t help that we can’t look very far back for precedents: Homo sapiens has been nattering for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, but we only thought of recording our pearls of wisdom about 5,000 years ago, when the Sumerians invented writing.

Still, most experts would agree on a few guiding principles. Migration is a major driver of language change, as is technology – though the two can counteract as well as amplify each other. Some predict that international migration will rise as the climate crisis intensifies, and technological renewal is speeding up, but they aren’t the only factors in the mix. Widespread literacy and schooling – both only a few hundred years old – act as brakes on linguistic evolution, by imposing common standards.

As if that wasn’t unhelpful enough, experts judge that the configuration of the linguistic landscape is terribly susceptible to black swan events – those defined by their unpredictability. The Egyptian language survived the arrival of the Greeks, the Romans and Christianity, but not that of Arabic and Islam in the seventh century AD. No one quite knows why. […]

[Read more…]

The first decade of the twentieth century was a strange, largely forgotten time. Our minds tend to jump from the comfortable traditions of what we think of as the “Victorian Age” (even when we’re not talking about Britain) to the hectic anything-goes world that followed the Great War — from Trollope and Turgenev to Ulysses and Céline. But in between came a world of misty modernism that dealt in Symbols and Heavenly Ladies and was fascinated by Bergson and Scriabin and Nietzsche and the occult, all of which was blown away by the Guns of August; in Russian literature, Andrei Bely is still remembered, but the most popular prose writer of the period, Leonid Andreev, is not. That is largely, of course, because he wasn’t as great a writer as Bely, but it’s unfair to call him a purveyor of “hysterical melodrama” and a “footnote to Russian literary history” as Stephen Hutchings does; the History of Russian Literature I reviewed here is more to the point in calling him “the first fully accomplished existentialist writer in Russian literature.” He’s uneven — I’ve quit a couple of stories in the middle — but when he’s at his best, he’s well worth reading, and one novella I can recommend is the 1906 Губернатор [The governor, tr. by Maurice Magnus as His Excellency the Governor].

There is essentially no plot, just a situation: a governor-general is obsessed by his memories of ordering a mob of protesting workers to be fired on during the revolutionary year of 1905, and awaits the assassination he (and everyone in the city) knows is coming. He doesn’t try to avoid it; quite the reverse: he insists on going out without protection and follows the same path every day. It starts (I quote the Magnus translation) “Fifteen days had passed since that memorable occurrence, and yet it filled his mind — as though Time itself had lost its ascendancy over thought and things, or else had stopped like a broken clock” and continues with a description of “that memorable occurrence”:

The affair was simple enough of itself — though sad, of course. The workmen in a suburban factory, after a three weeks’ strike, had gathered — some thousand strong — together with their women and children, their old and disabled, and had appeared before him with demands which he as Governor could not grant. And they had carried themselves impudently and defiantly; had screamed; insulted the officials — and one woman, who seemed quite beside herself, had plucked at his sleeve till the seam gave way. Then when his staff had led him back on to the balcony (he still only wanted to speak with them and pacify them) the workmen had begun to throw stones, had broken a number of windows, and wounded the Chief of Police. Then his rage got the better of him and he gave the signal with his handkerchief!

The people were so turbulent that they had to be shot at a second time; and so there were dead — forty-seven according to the count; — among them nine women and three children, singularly enough all girls!… The number of the wounded was even greater.

At the end, of course, he is assassinated (on one of his walks). In between, he thinks and remembers and thinks some more. But it’s done in such a vivid way, with well-used repetition, that the reader doesn’t get bored, and what particularly struck me is that Andreev’s governor is an obvious model for Bely’s Apollon Apollonovich in Peterburg (see this post) — not only that, but the variations on “Детки все перемерли. Детки все перемерли. Детки-детки-детки все перемерли” (“The children are all dead! The children are all dead! The children… the children… the children have all died!”) that keep ringing in his head prefigure the brilliant repetitions of phrases and sound patterns in Bely (whose novel is also set in 1905). And I suspect there may also be an influence on Tynyanov’s Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [The death of the vazir-mukhtar] (see this post). I’ll be reading more Andreev (see this post for my earlier experience with him).

Oh, and one bit that amused me: at one point a couple of workers are boozing it up in a dive (and being observed by a government spy), and one of them says plaintively “Уважаешь ты меня, Ваня?” [Do you respect me, Vanya?]. One of the first cliches I learned about Russian men is that when they get drunk, at some point they wind up asking each other that, and it gave me quite a start, and a good laugh, to run across it in such an unexpected context.

As a public service announcement, I am posting the text of a letter published in the TLS of May 9, 2025:

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.

Many languages have a range of noun classifications and, while gender is among them, this has nothing to do with femininity or masculinity. Gender has the same root as genre and genus, so, in a grammatical context, refers to the category of a noun and is usually determined by its final syllable; hence, victima is “feminine” because it ends with an “a”. English-speakers, accustomed to a mother tongue without such noun classifications, may find it difficult to divorce the idea of gender from concepts of male/female, let alone avoid the temptation to find significance in a word’s gender. But many nouns belong to a gender category at complete variance with their meaning: the Spanish word for masculinity (la masculinidad) is feminine because -idad is a feminine ending. In contrast, el feminismo (feminism) is masculine because -ismo is a masculine ending. Nor is it only in Romance languages where such discrepancies occur; like its Spanish and French counterparts, the German word for “manliness” (die Männlichkeit) is feminine.

Etymologically, all versions of the word victim derive from the Latin victima and originally referred to a living creature offered in sacrifice to a deity. While meaning and usage have broadened over time to signify someone hurt by another in some way, conflating the word victim with concepts of the feminine risks presenting women as passive and powerless.

Rory McDowall Clark
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex

Of course, the Spanish word víctima should have an accent mark, but never mind — Clark does an excellent job of spelling out what should be obvious but doesn’t seem to be. I’m sick of seeing the kind of idiotic pop-linguistic analysis typified by “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine” and am glad to see it skewered.

I was reading along in Kathryn Schulz’s (absolutely fascinating) New Yorker piece “When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas” (archived) when I was taken aback by the following:

There was Israel Zangwill, a name that I, like Cockerell, had never heard before, even though he was once the most famous Jew in the Anglophone world—a novelist whose popularity was frequently compared with that of Dickens, until the craft of fiction became less important to him than the cause of Zionism.

Zangwill forgotten? I mean, I knew he wasn’t famous any more — not up there with Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer — but I would have thought he had lingered at least faintly in cultural memory. But I read him in the ’60s, when he did still linger, and the world has moved on. And yet Abraham Caplan could write in 1918 in The American Jewish Chronicle (Vol. 4, p. 728) “Zangwill’s name was a name that somehow thrilled.”

Zangwill’s name… What the hell kind of a name is Zangwill, anyway? It wasn’t in any of my reference books, and Wikipedia says only “His father, Moses Zangwill, was from what is now Latvia.” I was briefly excited to find a reference to “The Name Zangwill: A Study in Lexicography” (American Hebrew, March 16, 1900, p. 577), but it’s described as “Satirical,” so it probably wouldn’t be much help even if I could find it online, which I can’t. However, I did find this Google Groups discussion about “how Shmuel becomes Zanvil in Yiddish,” wherein George Jochnowitz writes:

I assume the surname of Israel Zangwill is related to Zanvil. I have heard
the pronuciations Zanvil and Zaynvil (YIVO spelling), reflecting the
familiar dialect variations in Yiddish.

And Dr. Avraham Ben-Rahamiėl Qanaļ responds: “The name Zangwill is probably derived from Zanwil with confusion with the Hebrew/Aramaic word Zangevil [ginger].” Which I guess is plausible, but I’m wondering if any Hatters have further information.

I’m not usually one to joke about opaque scientific terminology — there’s usually a good reason for it, and it’s not written for the lay public anyway — but I can’t resist this:

Pattern runs on matter: The free monad monad as a module over the cofree comonad comonad

I got the link from Anatoly Vorobei, who adds: “нет, я не знаю, что это значит, и не собираюсь разбираться, если честно. Просто забавно” [No, I don’t know what it means, and I’m not about to try to figure it out, to be honest. It’s just funny]. But if you want to crack your brains on it, the paper is open access. (Oh, and the comment thread at Avva is very funny, if you read Russian.)

Jaison Jeevan Sequeira, Swathy Krishna, George van Driem, Mohammed Shafiul Mustak, and Ranajit Das have an article (in preprint, open access) called “Novel 4,400-year-old ancestral component in a tribe speaking a Dravidian language“:

Abstract

Research has shown that the present-day population on the Indian subcontinent derives its ancestry from at least three components identified with pre-Indo-Iranian agriculturalists once inhabiting the Iranian plateau, pastoralists originating from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and ancient hunter-gatherer related to the Andamanese Islanders. The present-day Indian gene pool represents a gradient of mixtures from these three sources. However, with more sequences of ancient and modern genomes and fine structure analyses, we can expect a more complex picture of ancestry to emerge. In this study, we focus on Dravidian linguistic groups to propose a fourth putative source which may have branched out from the basal Middle Eastern component that gave rise to the Iranian plateau farmer related ancestry. The Elamo-Dravidian theory and the linguistic phylogeny of the Dravidian family tree provide chronological fits for the genetic findings presented here. Our findings show a correlation between the linguistic and genetic lineages in language communities speaking Dravidian languages when they are modelled together. We suggest that this source, which we shall call ‘Proto-Dravidian’ ancestry, emerged around the dawn of the Indus Valley civilisation. This ancestry is distinct from all other sources described so far, and its plausible origin not later than 4,400 years ago on the region between the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley supports a Dravidian heartland before the arrival of Indo-European languages on the Indian subcontinent. Admixture analysis shows that this Proto-Dravidian ancestry is still carried by most modern inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent other than the tribal populations. This momentous finding underscores the importance of population-specific fine structure studies. We also recommend informed sampling strategies for biobanks and to avoid oversimplification of ancestral reconstruction. Achieving this requires interdisciplinary collaboration.

I’ll be interested to see what knowledgeable Hatters think about this. Thanks, Dinesh!