Aethiopians

Neither the Greeks nor, as far as I'm aware, any of the ancient people had anything like racism as we know it today, which didn't stop neighbours killing each other from time to time, but they never did it based on colour of skin. You had to be a Hellene to contest the Olympics, but that's only because you needed to be a member of the club. Romans didn't get to join either (unless you were an Emperor capable of executing the Judges of the Games, in which case they might see things your way). In fact of all the other peoples of the word, the Greeks had an especial respect for the Egyptians, in cause of their ancient culture.

To the Greeks, if you came from Africa, then you were either an Egyptian, or an Aethiopian. Aethiopian was their catch-all term for an African.

You might be surprised to hear there were Africans in the Greek lands. Here's an example:


I'm afraid it's not very clear from my poor photography, but this exhibit from the British Museum shows a boy, almost certainly a slave, holding a boot, and the features are African. (The funny shape at his back is a bird). The odds are very good this boy was passed along in the slave markets until he found himself working in Athens.

For some reason I don't understand, the Aethiopians had been an enemy of Hellas stretching back to the Trojan War. The bards sang in the great epic Aethiopis that Memnon, the hero-king of Aethiopia, brought a contingent to fight for the Trojans. Memnon slew Antilochus and was such a warrior that no one could touch him until he was brought down by Achilles himself. Memnon's skill and courage was so great that Zeus granted him immortality. The Greeks had no problem with someone of dark skin being beloved of the Gods and a hero.

Unfortunately Aethiopis has been lost, but it's part of the Trojan cycle and if we had it, it would almost certainly put some of the Iliad in a different light.

More recently, Herodotus recorded that a band of Aethiopians fought for the Great King of Persia when he invaded Hellas. Here's a good example of that:


This is an Aethiopian warrior in the army of Xerxes. You can tell because he's wearing trousers, very much Persian dress. The vase is dated 460-440BC, twenty or so years after the invasion.

Western Digital MyBook Sucks

I am not normally a negative person, so when I say that the Western Digital MyBook network storage system is a revolting piece of vile, slimy bat poo with no redeeming features, you should take it to mean this is a product you wish to avoid.

The cause of my strong emotion is that I bought one of these things a year ago to use for network backup storage and, while it is certainly true that they lied when they said the box has gigabit network connectivitity -- you could inscribe cuneiform on a clay tablet faster than this thing writes -- it did actually manage to accept backups.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when it stopped working, which I didn't notice until yesterday because I don't check backups every day.

I have just spent the last 24 hours struggling to work out what's wrong. With mere days before I go on hols, and then disappear for three weeks leaving my wife to look after the girls, there are better things I could have spent my time doing, but coming from my background I am most unwilling to leave any computer without a working backup system.

As near as I can tell, either the processor or the network circuitry, which has always been marginal, has degraded to the point it's physically incapable of keeping up with the data flow, at which point the controlling software spuriously reports the disk is full, which causes the backup software to bomb out.

So the odds are pretty good that some time tomorrow I'll be buying a new network storage system, and it won't be Western Digital.

3 sleeps until Gary et familia goes on holiday

We're going to be spending a week in the Whitsunday Islands of the Great Barrier Reef before I head off to the US. There's little or no internet where we'll be, so don't be surprised if I disappear for a while. Still a couple of days to go before I disappear, but I'll probably forget to post anything in the crisis of packing so this is the only notice.

A few days after I'm back, I get on a big plane and fly Sydney to Los Angeles to Chicago to Indianapolis without a break. I can't tell you how much I am not looking forward to spending 26+ hours traveling. The only compensation is that the joy of meeting the people at the other end exceeds the pain of the flights.

The world's longest family tree

I was fascinated to see the world's longest family tree has been updated. The tree is the descendants of Confucius. Since Confucius died about 10 years before Socrates was born, this is an incredibly long time ago, almost 2,500 years. There's nothing in the western world to match it. As far as I'm aware the oldest tree in the west is for the intimately connected European royal families, who can be traced back to the Dark Ages but no further. I'm pretty sure there's no Roman whose descendants can be traced, and certainly no Greek. The reason the Confucius tree is known is his descendants were honoured and ennobled by successive generations of Emperors for so long that there are good records.

Of course, after 83 generations the amount of Confucius DNA in each of those people is a tiny fraction: 1 part in 2⁸³ in fact. Since the number of base pairs in human DNA is "only" about 3 billion, which is a mere 2³², that means the amount of surviving Confucius DNA is effectively zero for all but those of direct male lineage. They of course will have the same Y chromosome.

The King's Messengers

Here's an excerpt from Herodotus, Book 8, section 98. Xerxes, the Great King of Persia has just been beaten at the Battle of Salamis and wants to call home...

"...Xerxes dispatched a courier to Persia with the news of his defeat. No mortal thing travels faster than these Persian couriers. The whole idea is a Persian invention, and works like this: riders are stationed along the road, equal in number to the number of days the journey takes - a man and a horse for each day. Nothing stops these couriers from covering their allotted stage in the quickest possible time - neither snow, rain, heat, nor darkness. The first, at the end of his stage, passes his dispatch to the second, the second to the third, and so on down the line, as in the Greek torch race which is held in honour of Hephaestus. The Persian word for this form of post is aggareion."

Which today we would translate as the King's Messengers. The Great Kings used this system to manage their empire, the largest the world had yet seen. A road system maintained at state expense ensured the couriers could get from one end of the empire to the other very quickly, the most famous route being the Royal Road, which stretched from the capital Susa, in what is now Iran, to Ephesus on the west coast of what is now Turkey. (Actually the Royal Road stopped at Sardis, but Ephesus was only a short extra hop).

If you think of the road system as the backbone, the King's Messengers as the network transport layer, the dispatches as data packets, and the staging posts as routers, then the Persian system is like a very early, very manual version of the internet.

US readers might have noticed something familiar in the quote from Herodotus. The unofficial motto of the US Postal Service is Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Compare it to: Nothing stops these couriers from covering their allotted stage in the quickest possible time - neither snow, rain, heat, nor darkness.

That's right. The US postal creed comes direct from this verse of Herodotus.