Noted

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Straight_tusked_elephant_Eemian_landscape.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

J.M. Roberts’ 1987 Hutchinson History of the World contains this arresting sentence:

At one site in Spain the mind of what one scholar called a ‘primitive Archimedes’ has been seen at work three hundred thousand years ago, directing the removal and use of the tusks of slaughtered elephants as levers to shift the carcasses for cutting up.

The scholar seems to be archaeologist François Bordes, who had written in his 1968 book The Old Stone Age that the Acheuleans of Torralba-Ambrona had killed elephants half engulfed in mud, “and that a primitive Archimedes had the idea of using their tusks as levers for shifting their enormous bulk and making it easier to cut them up.”

From what I can understand, the evidence for butchery at these sites is now thought to be ambiguous, but it’s a striking image nonetheless.

Completely unrelated, but similarly notable: In Days With Bernard Shaw, his 1948 memoir of his friendship with George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Winsten remembers Shaw remarking, “Leonardo da Vinci ruled his notebooks in columns headed fox, wolf, bear and monkey and made notes of human faces by ticking them off in these columns.” I can’t confirm this either, but it seems worth recording.

| Art · History · Science & Math

Self-Assessment

Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, would like you to remember how he fared against the Elamites in 691:

At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane. … I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows. … I cut their throats like sheep. … My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage. … As to the sheikhs of the Chaldaeans, panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troops as they went. … They passed scalding urine and voided their excrement into their chariots.

He claimed that the Elamites lost 150,000 men. This is likely an exaggeration, but in The Might That Was Assyria (1984), H.W.F. Saggs observes that, “even if arbitrarily scaled down by a factor of as much as ten … this would still leave enormous casualties for an engagement of a few hours.”

| History

Borrowed Time

A striking detail from Martha Tyson’s Sketch of the Life of Benjamin Banneker (1854):

Whilst they were conversing his clock struck the hour, and at their request he gave an interesting account of its construction. With his imperfect tools, and with no other model than a borrowed watch, it had cost him long and patient labor to perfect it, to make the variation necessary to cause it to strike the hours, and produce a concert of correct action between the hour, the minute, and the second machinery. He confessed that its regularity in pointing out the progress of time had amply rewarded all his pains in its construction.

This seems to be at least plausibly true: In 1753, the 21-year-old Banneker, who had never seen a clock, borrowed a watch from a trader, made drawings of its workings, and designed a wooden clock of his own. Peter N. Stearns writes in Time in World History (2020), “Banneker, the son of former slaves, borrowed a watch from an acquaintance, took it apart, ultimately using this as a model to build an impressively accurate clock entirely from carved wooden pieces, and then capitalized on the notoriety of this product to set up his own repair operation.” The clock continued to operate until Banneker’s death more than half a century later.

| History · Technology

The Long View

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v25%201903/page/406/mode/2up

In 1903, David Walsh, M.D., proposed building a national monument in Hyde Park so that the greatness of the British empire might be remembered in 8,000 years.

A square pyramid 150 feet high could enclose sculptures depicting British life and serve as a mausoleum for distinguished Britons. The cost might be defrayed by public subscription.

Asked his opinion, architect Aston Webb wrote, “It sounds to me too grand to have much chance of being carried through in this material age of ours, but I wish you all success.”

| History · Oddities

Life During Wartime

A recent survey of London school children has shown that youngsters between the ages of five and seven have forgotten so many of the attributes of peacetime living that they will have a hard time adjusting themselves to normal conditions again.

Most of the children, when questioned about such things as street lights or foods like bananas, stared suspiciously at the teacher and indicated plainly that they did not believe in their existence.

— New York Times, June 1943

(Shown a seashell, one boy replied, “That’s no shell. Shells come out of guns.”)

| History · Society

Down Under

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_rotondit%C3%A9_de_la_Terre,_Image_du_monde_(cropped).jpg

How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? Do they say anything to the purpose? Or is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? Or that the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? That the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder that hanging gardens are mentioned among the seven wonders of the world, when philosophers make hanging fields, and seas, and cities, and mountains?

— Lactantius, Institutiones Divinae, 303

| History · Science & Math