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“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1819, comparing Xenophon’s work favourably with the “mysticisms” and “whimsies” of Plato’s dialogues. More recently, many philosophers have taken the opposite view; a typical verdict is that of Terence Irwin in 1974, who described Xenophon as a “retired general” who presented “ordinary conversations.” The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics.
Both Jefferson and Irwin were right in identifying the characteristics of Xenophon’s depiction of his teacher—his overwhelming concern with providing practical advice for living a good life, and for managing relationships with family and friends. But both missed Xenophon’s lively wit, and his use of the dialogue form to put Socrates in conversation with Athenians, both friends and family and more public figures whose identity adds some spice to the discussion. Xenophon depicts a Socrates who offers pragmatic solutions to the difficulties his Athenian friends face, from Socrates’ own son’s rows with his mother to his friend Crito’s difficulties with vexatious lawsuits targeting his wealth. Where Plato shows Socrates leaving his conversation partners numbed and distressed by their recognition of their ignorance, as if attacked by a stingray, Xenophon takes more care to show how Socrates moved friends and students on from the discomfort of that initial learning moment. He offers practical solutions and friendly encouragement, whether persuading warring brothers to support each other or finding a way in which a friend can support the extended family taking refuge in his home. His advice is underpinned by an ethical commitment to creating and maintaining community.
It is not that Xenophon’s Socrates is afraid to show the over-confident the limits of their capabilities; while he offers encouragement and practical advice on personal and business matters, he rebukes those who want power and prestige without first doing their homework. His Socrates demonstrates to the young Glaucon that he needs to be much better informed about the facts and figures of Athenian civic and military resources before he proposes policy to his fellow citizens in Athens or seeks elected office. Socrates’ forensic uncovering of the young man’s ignorance of practical matters is sharpened for readers who recognise that this is Plato’s brother, depicted in his Republic as an acute interlocutor, able to follow Socrates’ most intellectually demanding arguments. In the conversation Xenophon presents, Glaucon is reduced to mumbling one excuse after another:
“Then first tell us,” said Socrates, “what the city’s land and naval forces are, and then those of our enemies.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that just off the top of my head.”
“Well, if you have some notes of it, please fetch them,” said Socrates. “I would be really glad to hear what they say.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I haven’t yet made any notes either.”
(Memorabilia 3.6.9)
Xenophon might be making a very ordinary claim here, that good leadership decision-making rests on a firm grasp of practical detail. But it gains depth when read against Plato’s argument in the Republic for handing over political leadership to philosopher kings, trained in theoretical disciplines. Xenophon argues that rule should be grounded from the bottom up; he is a firm believer in transferable skills, and that the ability to manage a household might equip someone to lead an army or their city.
Xenophon does not leave Glaucon quite as discomfited as Socrates’ interlocutors in Platonic dialogues become, such as the Euthyphro where the titular character hurries away rather than go through another round of being disabused of his opinions. He shows how Socrates moves on from the low point of the realisation of ignorance and starts to rebuild his interlocutors’ self-confidence, now underpinned by knowledge and self-awareness. Socrates offers Glaucon a careful recommendation for developing his management skills and gaining credibility before returning to public debates as a more impressive contributor. With another student, Euthydemus, Socrates switches from the argumentative mode familiar from Plato’s work—the Socratic “elenchus” or refutation—to exhortation and encouragement, as teacher and student become more familiar with each other and learn together cooperatively.
“Responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust.”
One reason that Xenophon was motivated to show a Socrates who encouraged his students to make useful contributions to public life was to rebut critics who presented him—not entirely without cause—as the teacher of some of the leaders of the brutal regime of the Thirty, which briefly overthrew Athens’ democracy after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon insists that these former students had abandoned Socrates’ teaching in favour of an aggressive pursuit of power.
Xenophon recognised the usefulness of a wide range of practical experience. A businessman might well make a useful general. But he makes Socrates insist that leaders must show practical knowledge and analytical skills in order to persuade others to follow them and to deliver successful outcomes, whether in business or in battle. The combination of knowledge and skill, which his students label basilikē technē, the “royal art”,” is an essential attribute of leadership. By responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust. In a contemporary context where trust in leaders and educators alike is low, perhaps there is a powerful and accessible case for the role of expertise in government and society, which Xenophon makes through his memories of Socrates’ conversations.
Featured image: “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David via The Met (public domain)
Enlarge / Archaeologists have discovered the first physical evidence of the so-called "gold of honor" ceremony in Ancient Egypt, in which the severed hands of defeated foes were presented to the Pharaoh in exchange for a collar of golden beads. (credit: J. Gresky et al., 2023/CC BY 4.0)
There is evidence that ancient Egyptian soldiers would sever the right hands of foes and present them to the Pharaoh. That evidence comes in the form of tomb inscriptions of prominent warriors, as well as inscriptions and iconography on temple reliefs. Archaeologists have now discovered the first physical evidence of such a trophy-taking practice, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The severed right hands of 12 individuals were excavated from pits within a courtyard of a 15th Dynasty palace in northeastern Egypt.
The 15th Dynasty (circa 1640-1530 BCE) rulers were known as Hyksos ("rulers of foreign lands"), although they did not control all of Egypt from their seat of power in the city of Avaris—the pharaohs of the 16th and 17th Dynasties ruled from Thebes during the same time period. Historians disagree about whether the Hyksos came to Egypt as invaders or gradually settled in the Nile Delta before rising to power. But by the late 17th Dynasty, the Hyksos and the pharaohs were at war, leading to the former's defeat by Ahmose I, who founded the 18th Dynasty.
But the Hyksos nonetheless left their mark on Egyptian culture in the form of certain technological advances and customs, including the practice of presenting the severed right hands of defeated foes in a so-called "gold of honor" ceremony in exchange for a collar of golden beads. Per the authors, the Egyptians seem to have adopted the custom during Ahmose I's reign at the latest, based on a relief showing a pile of hands in his temple in Abydos. Tomb inscriptions and temple reliefs from the 18th to the 20th Dynasties "consistently depict hand counts on the battlefield following major battles," the authors wrote. However, there was no physical evidence of the custom beyond iconographic and literary sources—until now.
I discuss my recent book The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2023) on the New Books Network with Dave O’Brien (audio)
Dave has now generously discussed all the books in this series:
Foucault’s Last Decade, 21 September 2016
Foucault: The Birth of Power, 6 November 2017
The Early Foucault, 11 February 2022
we also discussed Shakespearean Territories, 18 December 2020
Many thanks Dave!
More information on all the Foucault books, discussions, reviews and research updates here.
The Polity books page is here.
stuartelden
A short excerpt from the coda of The Archaeology of Foucault is available open access at The Montréal Review.
It discusses Foucault’s tributes to Jean Hyppolite and the visits to SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and 1972.
Thanks to publicity staff at Polity for making this possible, and the editor Tony Tsonchev for the invitation to include something.
More details on the book at the Polity website.
I also did an interview on the book for the New Books Network this week, which the host Dave O’Brien says will be available next week. [update: now available here]
stuartelden
Science and archeology journalist, Andrew Lawler, has made a name for himself writing unique and compelling books on somewhat unconventional subjects. His first book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, explored the cultural history of the domesticated chicken and how it spread across the globe. — Read the rest
Last month, Newcastle University archaeologists suggested that this rather phallic object above is a 2,000-year-old Roman dildo. The 16 cm object—dug up at the Roman fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland, England—was also thought to be a darning tool for sewing or possibly even a pestle. — Read the rest
Ironton, a late 19th century shipwreck, has been located in NOAA's Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
In 1894, a schooner barge called Ironton collided with a Great Lakes freighter called Ohio in Lake Huron's infamous "Shipwreck Alley." Ohio's wreck was found in 2017 by an expedition organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Now the same team has announced its discovery of the wreck of the 191-foot Ironton nearly 130 years after its sinking, so well-preserved in the frigid waters of the Great Lakes that its three masts are still standing, and its rigging is still attached. Its discovery could help resolve unanswered questions about the ship's final hours.
Schooner barges like Ironton were part of a fleet that helped transport wheat, coal, corn, lumber, and iron ore across the Great Lakes region, towed by steamers. At 12:30 am on September 26, 1984, Ironton and another schooner, Moonlight, were being towed unladen across Lake Huron by the steamer Charles J. Kershaw when the steamer's engine failed. The weather was rough, and strong winds pushed the two schooners perilously close to the disabled steamer. Fearing a collision, Moonlight's crew cut Ironton's tow line, setting Ironton adrift.
Captain Peter Girard and his crew tried to regain control of the ship, but the wind blew them onto a head-on collision course with the Ohio, which was carrying 1,000 tons of grain. According to the account of surviving crew member William Wooley, it was too dark to spot the Ohio until it was too late, and Ironton struck the steamer with its starboard bow, tearing a 12-foot wide hole in Ohio's hull.
Enlarge / Map of the known corridors and rooms inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Evidence of a secret corridor was detected in 2016 behind the famed chevron blocks on the north face (h). Another mysterious large void (i) was discovered in 2017—a possible hidden chamber. (credit: Procureur et al., 2023)
In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century."
As we've reported previously, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez really put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.
There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector, allowing scientists to calculate the particle's energy and trajectory. It's similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers in a pyramid would show up in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.
A recent excavation at the ancient city of Megiddo, Israel, has unearthed new evidence that one particular type of brain surgery dates back to at least the late Bronze Age.
Archaeologists know that people have practiced cranial trephination, a medical procedure that involves cutting a hole in the skull, for thousands of years. They’ve turned up evidence that ancient civilizations across the globe, from South America to Africa and beyond, performed the surgery.
“You have to be in a pretty dire place to have a hole cut in your head.”
Rachel Kalisher, PhD candidate at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, led an analysis of the excavated remains of two upper-class brothers who lived in Megiddo around the 15th century BCE.
She found that not long before one of the brothers died, he had undergone a specific type of cranial surgery called angular notched trephination. The procedure involves cutting the scalp, using an instrument with a sharp beveled edge to carve four intersecting lines in the skull, and using leverage to make a square-shaped hole.
The trephination is the earliest example of its kind found in the Ancient Near East, Kalisher says.
“We have evidence that trephination has been this universal, widespread type of surgery for thousands of years,” Kalisher says. “But in the Near East, we don’t see it so often—there are only about a dozen examples of trephination in this entire region. My hope is that adding more examples to the scholarly record will deepen our field’s understanding of medical care and cultural dynamics in ancient cities in this area.”
Coauthor Israel Finkelstein, who serves as director of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa, says that 4,000 years ago, Megiddo stood at and controlled part of the Via Maris, an important land route that connected Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. As a result, the city had become one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan cities in the region by about the 19th century BCE, with an impressive skyline of palaces, temples, fortifications, and gates.
“It’s hard to overstate Megiddo’s cultural and economic importance in the late Bronze Age,” Finkelstein says.
According to Kalisher, the two brothers whose bones she analyzed came from a domestic area directly adjacent to Megiddo’s late Bronze Age palace, suggesting that the pair were elite members of society and possibly even royals themselves. Many other facts bear that out: The brothers were buried with fine Cypriot pottery and other valuable possessions, and as the trephination demonstrates, they received treatment that likely wouldn’t have been accessible to most citizens of Megiddo.
“These brothers were obviously living with some pretty intense pathological circumstances that, in this time, would have been tough to endure without wealth and status,” Kalisher says. “If you’re elite, maybe you don’t have to work as much. If you’re elite, maybe you can eat a special diet. If you’re elite, maybe you’re able to survive a severe illness longer because you have access to care.”
In her analysis, Kalisher spotted several skeletal abnormalities in both brothers. The older brother had an additional cranial suture and an extra molar in one corner of his mouth, suggesting he may have had a congenital syndrome such as Cleidocranial dysplasia. Both of the brothers’ bones show minor evidence of sustained iron deficiency anemia in childhood, which could have affected their development.
Those developmental irregularities could explain why the brothers died young, one in his teens or early 20s and the other sometime between his 20s and 40s. But Kalisher says it’s more likely that the two ultimately succumbed to an infectious disease. A third of one brother’s skeleton, and half of the other brother’s, shows porosity, legions, and signs of previous inflammation in the membrane covering the bones—which together suggest they had systemic, sustained cases of an infectious disease like tuberculosis or leprosy.
Kalisher says that while some skeletal evidence points to leprosy, it’s tough to deduce cases of leprosy using bones alone. She’s currently working with researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to conduct DNA analyses of specific lesions in the bones. If they find bacterial DNA consistent with leprosy, these brothers will be among the earliest documented examples of leprosy in the world.
“Leprosy can spread within family units, not just because of the close proximity but also because your susceptibility to the disease is influenced by your genetic landscape,” Kalisher says. “At the same time, leprosy is hard to identify because it affects the bones in stages, which might not happen in the same order or with the same severity for everyone. It’s hard for us to say for sure whether these brothers had leprosy or some other infectious disease.”
It’s also difficult to know, Kalisher says, whether it was the disease, the congenital conditions, or something else that prompted one brother to undergo cranial surgery. But there’s one thing she does know: If the angular notched trephination was meant to keep him alive, it didn’t succeed. He died shortly after the surgery—within days, hours, or perhaps even minutes.
Despite all the evidence of trephination uncovered over the last 200 years, Kalisher says, there’s still much archaeologists don’t know. It’s not clear, for example, why some trephinations are round—suggesting the use of some sort of analog drill—and some are square or triangular. Nor is it clear how common the procedure was in each region, or what ancient peoples were even trying to treat. (Doctors today perform a similar procedure, called a craniotomy, to relieve pressure in the brain.)
Kalisher is pursuing a follow-up research project that will investigate trephination across multiple regions and time periods, which she hopes will shed more light on ancient medical practices.
“You have to be in a pretty dire place to have a hole cut in your head,” Kalisher says. “I’m interested in what we can learn from looking across the scientific literature at every example of trephination in antiquity, comparing and contrasting the circumstances of each person who had the surgery done.”
Aside from enriching colleagues’ understanding of early trephinations, Kalisher says she hopes her analysis also shows the general public that ancient societies didn’t necessarily live by “survival of the fittest” principles, as many might imagine.
“In antiquity, there was a lot more tolerance and a lot more care than people might think,” Kalisher says. “We have evidence literally from the time of Neanderthals that people have provided care for one another, even in challenging circumstances. I’m not trying to say it was all kumbaya—there were sex- and class-based divisions. But in the past, people were still people.”
The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE. Additional coauthors are from the University at Albany, the W.F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, and the University of Innsbruck.
The Shmunis Family Foundation funded the study’s associated excavation.
Source: Brown University
The post Skeletal brothers shed light on ancient brain surgery appeared first on Futurity.
Enlarge / This artist's conception shows how Neanderthals might have faced down the mammoth task of butchering a freshly-killed elephant. (credit: Benoit Clarys, courtesy of Schoeningen Project)
Two recent studies of Neanderthal archaeological sites (one on the coast of Portugal and one in central Germany) demonstrate yet again that our extinct cousins were smarter and more adaptable than we’ve often given them credit for. One study found that Neanderthals living on the coast of Portugal 90,000 years ago roasted brown crabs—a meal that’s still a delicacy on the Iberian coast today. The other showed that 125,000 years ago, large groups of Neanderthals came together to take down enormous Ice Age elephants in what’s now central Germany.
Individually, both discoveries are fascinating glimpses into the lives of a species that's hauntingly similar to our own. But to really understand the most important thing these Neanderthal diet discoveries tell us, we have to look at them together. Together, they show that Neanderthals in different parts of Europe had distinct cultures and ways of life—at least as diverse as the cultures that now occupy the same lands.
On the Iberian coast 90,000 years ago, groups of Neanderthals living in the Gruta de Figueira Brava cave spent their summers catching brown crabs in tide pools along the nearby shore, then feasting on crab roasted over hot coals back in the cave.
Since this ancient object was first discovered thirty years ago, archaeologists have thought it to be a darning tool to sew up holes in fabric. Now though, archaeologists suspect that it's a 2,000-year-old Roman dildo. The 16 cm phallus was dug up at the Roman fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland, England. — Read the rest
My brother Nicholas David, who has died aged 85, was a leading figure in the field of ethnoarchaeology who undertook important research in west Africa and became professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Calgary.
Long after he retired in 2002 Nic continued to receive funding to carry out his research. He developed and maintained a website about the people of the Sukur in the Mandara mountains of Cameroon, and he contributed to adding the Sukur cultural landscape to the Unesco World Heritage list. In 2014, when Sukur was attacked by Boko Haram, Nic set up the Boko Haram Victims fund and website.
Continue reading...Over the last month I have made some progress on a few different aspects of this project.
The main task in Paris was continuing working through the boxes of Georges Dumézil’s courses, held at the Collège de France archives. I’ve now done a quick first pass through all the courses he delivered there, and then went back to the less complete materials for his courses at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). I’d already looked at some of those before, when editing Mitra-Varuna, as that book was first delivered as a course. His handwriting remains exceptionally difficult to read, and his course materials are very messy, with lots of crossing out and marginal additions – including some on scraps of paper pasted onto the main sheets. It would be difficult, I think, to work out the order he presented things in the class. It seems to me there are good reasons, beyond his smaller audience, why these have not been edited for publication. But there are some benefits to his way of working. For one, unlike Foucault, he dates things quite precisely, and makes notes of when material has been removed to be used elsewhere. When sent letters he often adds the date he received them, and/or completes incomplete dating by the writers. In his books he often gives quite precise indications of when he first delivered material, and it does seem much, possibly most, of what he published developed from teaching. There are also a lot of additional materials in the teaching boxes – offprints, some correspondence, reading notes, etc. Some of these are interesting and make some connections I hadn’t thought about before.
I also worked through most of the first of two boxes of material relating to the administration of his courses, this one relating to the EPHE. These are something of a treasure trove of small details, with an ability to track who attended classes, and various bits of correspondence with those students. He also often indicates who attended lectures as notes on his course manuscripts. After previously reading reports of the large audiences for Foucault and Barthes, these numbers are often very small indeed. But there are some interesting names.
Various things, along with the strikes on 19th January, when the archive was closed, meant that I didn’t get to work through the second of these two boxes, relating to the Collège de France teaching, in any detail. That will be the first thing on my list when I am next back in Paris. There are also some boxes relating to Dumézil’s teaching outside of France, which I also plan to work through on a later visit.
While in the archive I try to resist following interesting lines of inquiry that the materials suggest, or even locating texts they mention, but just take down details on what is there. I make lots of notes to follow up on some things, and return to these periodically. Some lead down some long paths that would have taken up far too much time in the archive, but are interesting to explore when the archive is closed. For example, a letter to Dumézil from the Bollingen foundation, leading to a bursary for Mircea Eliade, led me to look into the funding, which came from the fortunes of Paul Mellon. The foundation was initially set up to support Carl Jung’s English translations, which opened up the question of the links between Eliade and Jung and the Eranos circle, the connection to an early French Heidegger translator, Dumézil’s trip to Peru, and the link, obliquely, to Henri Lefebvre’s friend Norbert Guterman. A rabbit hole that became a warren. Lots of paths to follow here.
I also spent a lot of time at the Bibliothèque nationale, but this time exclusively at the modern Mitterand site. There I filled in some gaps in my record of Émile Benveniste’s early teaching. The records for the EPHE are easy to access on Gallica, but the Annuaire du Collège de France only has limited coverage there, and the British Library copies don’t go back before the war. At the BnF, the 1930s and 1940s issues I wanted to look at are only on microfilm, which is a pain – unlike the British Library, the machines are not linked to computers, so it’s not possible to export images. But the records are worth digging through. As I knew from Foucault’s courses, and the work I’d done on Dumézil, the titles of courses are preannounced, and then there are, usually, reports on their content at the end of the academic year. Benveniste was elected to a chair in 1937, but only taught for two years before the war, and then not again until 1944-45 after the Liberation. As he was Jewish, he left France before the German invasion. I already had seen the records for the post-war period, where he taught until his stroke in 1969. Material from his final courses has been published as Last Lectures. Going through the old issues of the Annuaire was worthwhile, not just for the first two years he taught after his election, but also some other teaching he did there, and for some other information I found. All this will be really useful as I work in more detail on his publications, and I hope at some point with his archive.
I also did some more work on Barthes’s lecture courses, and his occasional use of Benveniste there and in his published writings. I think my notes on this are now a comprehensive survey, though I’m not sure it adds up to more than that. I also spent some time working through Lacan’s limited references to Benveniste. For knowing where to look, I am grateful to Dany Nobus, who particularly alerted me to the useful Index des noms propres et titres d’ouvrages dans l’ensemble des séminaires de Jacques Lacan, by Guy Le Gaufey and others. A couple of the references to Benveniste are in as-yet unpublished seminars, for which there are various unauthorised transcripts online, so it’s good news that the legal problems have been addressed, and the slow publication of the remaining seminars is starting up again. As I’ve previously mentioned, Seminar XIV, La Logique du fantasme was published recently.
I’ve also worked through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Dumézil in A Thousand Plateaus, which is interesting though brief, though a bit misleading in its stark oppositions. More useful for its critical approach is Derrida’s engagement with Benveniste, especially in the hospitality and death penalty lectures, and on the question of testimony. Only parts of the testimony material are published so far, so this might be something to revisit when those lectures are published, as I imagine they are the next in the series – or perhaps to consult the manuscripts at IMEC or Irvine.
While in Paris I did some other stuff at the Mitterand site, following up on several references to things which are not easy to find in the UK. Some of these concerned some of the more obscure sources for the story of Paul Pelliot, the publications of Robert Gauthiot and related studies to the early writings of Benveniste. While I’m not sure how much I will do with the discussions of Barthes, Lacan and Derrida’s use on Benveniste, I do think there will be something on the Pelliot, Gauthiot, Meillet and Benveniste connections. I also went back to the Musée Guimet when in Paris, now with a better idea of what I was looking at. Only a little of the material Pelliot brought back is on display, but it was interesting to see at least some of his haul.
Shortly after I got home, I had the good news of the acceptance of a piece I wrote over the summer on “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”. The minor revisions are now done, and the piece is in production with Journal of the History of Ideas. Since initially finishing that piece in September, along with a couple of other pieces still out to review, it’s been good to take a bit of distance from Foucault, after his work being the focus of my research for most of the last decade. But before Christmas I did write a review of Elisabetta Basso’s excellent Young Foucault: The Lille manuscripts on psychopathology, phenomenology, and anthropology, 1952–1955, translated by Marie Satya McDonough (Columbia University Press, 2022) in The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. The review is unfortunately behind a paywall, so I posted some key excerpts on this blog, and I’m happy to share the full review if you email me. I have agreed to write a chapter on “Foucault and structuralism” for a major collection, but that’s not due for eighteen months so I have plenty of time to think about that. I think these are likely to be the last pieces on Foucault for a while.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications, including the reedition of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna. There is a lot more about the Foucault work here. The final volume, The Archaeology of Foucault, is now out in the UK, with the rest of the world to follow shortly.
stuartelden
Enlarge / Sample illustration from an Egyptian Book of the Dead—not the newly discovered papyrus—depicting the "weighing of the heart." (credit: Public domain)
Archaeologists have confirmed that a papyrus scroll discovered at the Saqquara necropolis site near Cairo last year does indeed contain texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead—the first time a complete papyrus has been found in a century, according to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt. The scroll has been dubbed the "Waziri papyrus." It is currently being translated into Arabic.
Fans of the 1999 film The Mummy know that the Egyptian Book of the Dead plays a key role in bringing the cursed high priest Imhotep back to terrorize the living. The reality is naturally quite different: notably, there is not one magical copy of the Book of the Dead, as depicted in the film; there were many versions over the centuries, all unique, with the choice of spells often tailored to the specific needs of deceased royals and (later) high-ranking members of Egyptian society.
These "books" were actually collections of funerary texts and spells to help the deceased on their journey through the underworld (Duat)—not to bring people back from the dead—and they are not holy texts like the Bible or Qur-an. They were originally painted onto objects or written on the walls of burial chambers. Over time, illustrations were added and spells were also inscribed on the interior of coffins or the linen shrouds used to wrap the deceased.
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