by Adrian Berry
But , who has made a major study of , believes his rhymes described events in his own age and were written in semi-code to avoid angering churches and governments. One of them, compiled in 1555, ran:
The blood of the innocent will be an error at London, Burned by thunderbolts, of twenty-three, the six(es), The senile lady will lose her high position, Many more of the same sect will be slain.
Some people have claimed that this was a prediction of the Blitz of 1940, and that the ‘senile lady’ was St Paul’s Cathedral. But in Randi’s view it was Nostradamus’s righteous horror at the burning of Protestants by Bloody Mary, the only problem being that we don’t know what he meant by the ‘twenty-three’.
The victims, points out, were offered gunpowder to tie between their legs to shorten their suffering, and which exploded when the flames reached them. This would explain the ‘thunderbolts’. They were always executed in groups of six. The ‘senile lady’ is Queen Mary herself who was reputed to be mad and who, during these executions, wandered naked round her palace, falsely boasting that she bore the child of King Philip II of Spain. Protestants, of whom was secretly one, eagerly hoped for her death.
But this kind of reasoning will make no impression on those to whom prophesying is a profitable trade. has these cynical ground rules for would-be prophets:
• Make lots of predictions, and hope that some will come true. If they do, point to them with pride. Ignore the others. Be very vague and ambiguous. Definite statements can be wrong, but ‘possible’ items can always be reinterpreted. Use modifiers like these wherever possible: ‘I feel that . . .’, ‘I see a picture of . . .’ Use a lot of symbolism. Be metaphorical, using images of animals, names, initials. ‘Believers’ can fit them to many situations.
• Credit God with your success, and blame yourself for any incorrect interpretations of His divine messages. This way, detractors have to fight God.
• No matter how often you’re wrong, plough ahead. The Believers won’t notice your mistakes. Predict catastrophes. They are easily remembered and popular.
The ‘Nostradamians’ - people who exploited the rhymer after his death - are particularly fond of his verses that consist of four lines of ten syllables each, with a strong pause after the fourth syllable of each line, like this one of Randi’s:
, in his four-sided hat,
Told his strange tales in a kind of ping-pong.
Hinting at this, making guesses at that,
Too bad for him, but his forecasts were wrong.
‘In all,’ says , ‘ was a respectable physician who hated the persecutions and injustices of his day and wrote verses about them that were deliberately obscure to avoid the attention of the Catholic Inquisition in where he lived. He was ignorant of the world’s future and, contrary to popular belief, he had nothing whatever to say about or .’
Who Owns History?
The study of mankind’s past is being blotted out by new forms of one of the oldest religious taboos. The belief that the dead should not be disturbed - even after millennia - is prohibiting the study of ancient bones.
By invoking religious antecedents, ethnic and cultural tensions across the world are being given new power. In the United States, Australia and the Middle East, laws are being passed forcing anthropologists and archaeologists to return unearthed bones and artifacts of early man to aborigines and religious authorities.
‘It’s like saying a biologist can’t use a microscope any more or a chemist can’t use chemicals,’ says Israel Hershkovitz, an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University. ‘Bones were our window to the past, and now they’ve shut that window. It’s the death verdict for us.’
An article called ‘Who Owns the Past?’ in an issue of Science described the troubles of Australian scientists at La Trobe University in . They put together a record of 35,000 continuous years of human habitation in Tasmania, an epoch in which the Pacific was first colonised by migrants from Asia. Tasmanian aborigines, backed by a recent ‘heritage’ law, demanded that the entire collection be handed over to them. The scientists refused, fearing, on precedent, that the aborigines intended to throw the lot into a lake. The Tasmanian Government promptly revoked the scientists’ licence to excavate.
In Israel, where the government depends on the support of the Orthodox Jewish Party in the Knesset, the Attorney-General forced the Antiquities Authority to hand over its vast and diverse collection of skeletons from the last 5,000 years to the Religious Affairs Ministry, where they are now stored in unmarked boxes.
This figure of 5,000 years at first seemed significant because Orthodox Jews believe that man began about that time. The scientists hoped that they could dig up still older bones with impunity. But a new before the Knesset would give the religious Ministry control over all bones. ‘Israel has turned its back on the twentieth century,’ says , of Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
What is being lost is knowledge of prehistory during which global society became what it is. Only a limited amount of such information survives in written form.
We know little, for instance, of the Phoenicians, the great seafaring predecessors of the Romans, or of the Hittites, the martial civilization that defeated the forces of the otherwise all-conquering Pharaoh at the Battle of Kadesh in Syria in 1299 bc - a town that has long since vanished.
The Hittites, whose little-known empire lasted nearly a thousand years, are especially interesting because they were responsible for one tremendous technical achievement that transformed the prospects of mankind. They were the first to make their weapons from meteoritic iron, replacing the weaker bronze that was used in the Trojan War and which may explain why the empire lasted so long.
American anthropologists tell a similar tale. When , of Oregon State University at Corvallis, found some human hairs at a 12,000-year-old site in south-western Montana, he fell foul of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The hairs were not even from buried bones. They were scattered all over the site. But he was forced to return them unstudied to representatives of Indian tribes.
Knowledge of nearly all events in prehistory is now in jeopardy. It is increasingly difficult to discover how and when people first migrated from Russia to America, from China to Australia, and of the countless races who passed through the Mediterranean and fought on its shores. Everywhere the scientists dig, they are liable to arouse the fear - expressed by ultra-Orthodox Jews - that disturbing graves will ‘release vengeful spirits’. American Indians say the dead from disturbed graves ‘remain in limbo and cannot enter the spirit world’. But were they not already in the spirit world before their graves were disturbed?
Even discussion of early man is being censored. An Australian television station recently had to withdraw a documentary, ‘Out of Time, Out of Place’, after an aboriginal group claimed it was offensive.
Volcanoes and Revolutions
Can a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world topple a king and start a reign of terror? According to two French vulcanologists, and , the answer is yes.
Despite a distance of thousands of kilometres and a time lag of six years, they say the 1783 eruptions of Mount Asama in central Japan, and of Mount Laki in southern Iceland, set off the French revolution which shook the world, produced two decades of war, and led indirectly to two centuries of unrest.
Like the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the eruptions blew massive amounts of sulphurous ash into the atmosphere, partly blocking the Sun’s radiation and temporarily cooling the climate.
in 1789 was already in social chaos. Bankrupt because of a long war in America, the government, a mixture of oppression and supine weakness, was threatened by a conspiracy to organize riots financed by an ambitious duke who wanted to seize the crown. But none of this would have produced a revolution had not the country at the same time been faced with famine. The aftermath of the eruptions brought several years of cold wet weather to Europe. Two violent storms in 1788 and 1789 destroyed the harvest i
n many parts of the country, and the resulting shortage of corn was aggravated by the Finance Minister’s refusal to import corn from abroad on the grounds that the state could not afford it.
The result was an explosion of violence which reduced the corn supplies still further. In the words of the historian :
‘When the peasants of France saw wagons laden with wheat winding their way through village streets, voices were not lacking to whisper: There is corn in plenty, but it is not for you; it is for the Court, the aristocrats, the rich, who will feast in plenty while you go hungry. And forthwith the maddened people would hurl themselves on the sacks of corn and fling them into the nearest river.’
Another volcanic eruption - leading to a massive lowering of temperatures - at Tambora in Indonesia in April, 1815, may have contributed to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. This led to a massive lowering of temperatures for several years, in particular 1816 which was called the ‘year without a summer’. Torrential rains marked the outset of the Waterloo campaign, creating deep mud which for many hours prevented Napoleon from moving his guns. (Wellington’s guns, deployed earlier, were already well positioned.)
The French Revolution is one of many instances where a change of climate - allied to stupidity - was the final blow to an already precarious civilization.
The Little Ice Age, which started about ad 1400, destroyed the Scandinavian colony in Greenland. But the colonists obstinately refused to change their social system. ‘They might have survived if, instead of sticking to their ecclesiastical aristocratic society, they had moved from farming to hunting, like the Eskimos who replaced them,’ says , of Hunter College, New York.
At about the same period, the great civilization of the Mayas in Yucatan faced ever worsening droughts. , of Howard University, Washington, who has studied its downfall, said: ‘Instead of improving their agriculture, their rulers waged endless wars to acquire more arable land. This had the opposite effect to that intended, since recruiting peasants into the armies meant abandoning the land.’
The Bronze Age empire of Mesopotamia also collapsed from drought about 2000 bc. According to , of Ben Gurion University in Israel: ‘Their fall was more subtly triggered. They successfully endured two fairly short periods of drought. This gave them the false confidence that they could survive the much longer one that destroyed them.’
What lessons can be drawn for the future? A stable civilization will be immune to any but the most catastrophic climatic change. The exceptionally violent eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, for example, caused no social disasters. Only societies which behave stupidly will perish when nature turns foul.
Egypt’s White City
One of the most important lost cities of the ancient world is being brought back to life. Some 30 kilometres south-east of Port Said, archaeologists have found the relics of a cosmopolitan city surrounding a huge fortress. It is the remains of Pelusium, an imperial stronghold on the Mediterranean shore of Sinai that for some 1,200 years was the military gateway between Europe and the East.
They are working in frantic haste, since a new canal is about to cover the site, destroying it for ever, just as, in the 1960s, the building of the Aswan Dam and the creation of Lake Nasser flooded the ancient temples of Abu Simbel.
Pelusium, second only in importance to Alexandria as an Eastern city, flourished from before the time of the Ptolemies, some five centuries BC until the eighth century ad, when the Pelusiac branch of the Nile on which it stood finally silted up, and the great city fell into oblivion. This city was the natural gateway to the Orient, a fact that may explain how, in the first millennium bc, it became the earliest known source of the plague.
The prophet Ezekiel called it the ‘stronghold of Egypt’. Here , king of Persia, invaded Egypt in 525 bc, only to see his army swallowed up by a sandstorm - an experience that turned him from a wise and tolerant ruler into a tyrannical madman.
the Great passed through it in his victorious pursuit of Darius, another Persian king. So did on his way to defeat and at the Battle of Actium. So also, according to legend, did the Holy Family, fleeing from Palestine on donkeys with ’s soldiers in close pursuit. Their flight became a cornerstone of the faith of the Egyptian Copts, who built churches to mark important stages of their journey.
Three centuries later, in a mood of ruthless anger, the emperor marched through it to suppress a rebellion that had convulsed Alexandria for eight months. Having pacified that city by the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands, he collected all ancient books there and in Pelusium that explained how to mint gold and silver coins. These, says a contemporary, ‘he committed without pity to the flames, lest the opulence of the Egyptians should again inspire them with confidence to rebel against the empire’.
Pelusium remained a place of mystery after its fall until the Egyptians, having made peace with Israel, decided to irrigate the Sinai Desert with a new canal called Salaam (‘Peace’). Only now has it started to yield important remains. Excavators are amazed by the size and grandeur of the ruin. ‘It is changing everything we thought we knew,’ said their leader, . ‘In one moment we’ve altered the face of the desert.’
They have found that the central town was defended by 12 towers and walls, enclosing a fortress 20 times bigger than a modern football field. Its mud-brick walls are unique in Egyptian ruins, since they are coloured white. ‘Perhaps they mixed chalk with mud,’ said Maksoud. ‘We don’t know, because we’ve never seen anything like this.’
The place is a treasure chest of relics. It abounds with amphora, human bones, fallen columns, and coins stamped with the faces of many an ancient ruler. Diggers unearthed a worn limestone statue of a lion, his front paws crossed, and later, a coloured erotic sculpture of a smiling naked male bather that once adorned a Roman bath.
The city had all the imperial trappings, with a racecourse, public baths, and an amphitheatre complete with tiers of red-brick seats and a sea-facing circular stage of mosaic-shaped limestone bricks.
‘They called this place the island of Pelusium, but we didn’t know why until we started digging,’ said Maksoud. ‘But we now see that it would have looked like an island. To the south was a branch of the Nile, to the north the Mediterranean, and in the middle the city.’
All now that remains to be found, before Pelusium vanishes, is the Church of the Holy Family, the memorial that must have been built by the Copts to mark the flight of .
Part Two THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The Locksmith’s Daughter
Some of the millions of people who leave their homes empty during holidays worry about the ‘locksmith’s daughter’.
This is a slang name either for the legitimate key to a lock, or a way for a thief to bypass it. For, like a chain, a lock is only as strong as its weakest link.
No home owner wants to be in the position of the pompous banker in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Red-Headed League’ who boasts of the strength of the front doors to his vaults, only to find that a burglar has tunnelled his way through the back wall.
Some older mechanical locks had peculiarly vicious habits. When attacked they would defend themselves. Instead of merely making a noise like a burglar alarm, they were designed to injure intruders. They resembled the deadly serpents or other monsters who guarded hidden treasures in classical myths - or the amazing array of lethal traps that routinely confront Indiana Jones.
One such lock was the Pierce, invented in 1845, which responded to any attempts to pick it. It had a spring-driven steel barb hidden beneath the key hole. If anyone tampered with the lock, the barb would spring out, driving itself deep into the intruder’s hand.
According to an article in Focus magazine, locks are becoming more and more electronic. They will open, not to a metal key, but to the punching in of a secret password. The art of making secure locks is, in fact, becoming increasingly tied to that of making strong computerized ciphers, for the skills have much in common.
A famous puzzle that applies to both is that of the ‘Locked
Strongbox’. A secret agent called wishes to send a locked box to a confederate named whom he has never met or communicated with, and which only can open.
It sounds impossible, but it can be done. locks the box with a padlock and sends it to . , without attempting to open it, relocks the box with his own padlock and sends it back to . then removes his padlock and sends the box to a second time. can then remove his padlock and open the box.
The ingenious mathematics of this procedure is at the root of ‘public key’ ciphers in which complete strangers can communicate over the Internet without fear of eavesdroppers. Governments are increasingly terrified at the prospect, fearing that they will be unable to spy on criminals. (Until recently it was illegal in to send encrypted material by electronic mail.) An American encryption software writer was barred from exporting his system by the State Department who told him that it was a ‘munition’. To sell it abroad he would need an arms dealer’s licence.
Mechanical locks, as opposed to electronic ones, still have a strong psychological appeal. People like to hear them ‘clunk’ when they are shut. Smart cards being swiped through an electronic reader control device are distrusted -particularly when, with a soldering iron, a thief can in many cases read what is imprinted on a stolen card. One result of this is that Chubb’s new super-secure Electro smart-card device, with its key of 43 numerical digits, makes a satisfying door-clanging noise when it is operated.
The greatest danger in security is the presence of the unsuspected locksmith’s daughter. Leave the window open and the strongest door is to no avail. Gordius, king of Phrygia, thought his kingdom safe when he tied a knot of unrivalled complexity and boasted that only the man who knew how to undo it would reign over the East. the Great ‘undid it’ with a single slash of his sword.