Category: Ancient History

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Q is for Queen

Depiction of Queen Puabi in a 1900 textbook on the British excavations in Mesopotamia. Puabi was mis-translated as Shub-Ad but did earn the title Queen in this graphic.

Notable queens are rare in ancient history. Kings, emperors, and pharaohs fill the pages of history with battle deeds, law-making, and public works. Queens get barely a mention. Yet every Sargon and Ramses had a goal to produce offspring. Male leaders all married, multiple times, to create alliances with surrounding territories. There were plenty of queens, even if we don’t know much about them. I found five worthy of discussion.

Queens presuppose the existing of kings. Kings led successful armies, trade delegations, and public works projects. Queens were usually only the mother of the heir, although a smart king would rely on his queen for much more–to act in his absence, to guide children to become future leaders, and to help address needs of the population. Every now and then, she’d put on armor; every now and then, she would rule if the king died and the heir was too young.

Most ancient cultures had multiple gods, and while one was King above others, there was also a Queen. Yahweh originally had a wife–Asherah. Jesus had a mother who was Queen of Heaven.

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O is for Oncology

Offering to the Egyptian deity, Imhotep, god of medicine and architecture. Painting by Ernest Board, 1912.

There is no treatment…

From an Egyptian medical text @1600 BCE describing removal of breast cancer tumor.

As a disease of the cells, cancer is likely the oldest disease on Earth. Oncology is the study of cancer, of tumors specifically, since tumors are how cancer shouts Hey, I’m here! to the body. Cancerous tumors have been found on fossils, both dinosaurs and fish from earlier ages. As soon as there were cellular life forms, there must have been cancer.

Before I go any further, F#CK Cancer. Though it’s not really cancer’s fault, that’s just what it is. It’s part of the natural world, and Mother Nature makes the rules, not me. Even so, F#CK Cancer.

I don’t know any Egyptian swear words, so I can’t translate that into hieroglyphics for you. But the Egyptians knew about cancer, as did the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese. Other than finding skeletons with tumors, what we know now about what they knew then comes from what they wrote. And what they wrote shows that this scourge of our modern health system has been a scourge since they put up stone towers and started figuring out how to make bread.

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N is for Numbers

Blackadder: Right Baldrick, let’s try again shall we? This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more beans, what do I have?
Baldrick: Some beans.
Blackadder: Yes… and no. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So how many are there?
Baldrick: Three.
Blackadder: What?
Baldrick: …and that one.
Blackadder: Three and that one.  Let’s try again shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?
Baldrick: A very small casserole.

Blackadder episode, “Head”
Student geometry problem in Babylonian cuneiform @1500 BCE. Photo by Rama in the Louvre.

Yes, dear readers, there will be math today. I know you can do it. I know you can run intellectual circles around Baldrick.

The definitive work on this topic is The History of Mathematics by Merzbach and Boyer, which is already in a Third Edition, even though not much has changed for the Egyptians and Sumerians, who used what we’d consider basic counting systems to construct giant pyramids. Mainly, Merzbach and Boyer have added a “Logic and Computing” and “Recent Trends” chapters at the end. Remember when Computer Science was about logic and not Belarussians creating algorithms to stuff your social media full of outrage porn? How quaint!

Anyway, I digress. Today, I want to describe how different cultures approached numbers–not specifically whether they were smart enough to figure out Fermat’s theorem or Poincare’s theory–but how we as humans figured out what Baldrick apparently couldn’t. Thinking about math is hard, but we’ll also see that there are harder and easier ways to do it.

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