Occam's Razor and the Throttled Lion of Nineveh

This morning I slept in and snuck into my Foundations of Ancient History lecture over half an hour late.

It was a representative of Near Eastern Archaeology who was lecturing this time, and he quickly went over the archaeologists responsible for digging at Susa (where the Code of Hammurabi was found as part of 2nd-century-B.C.(?) loot) and at Çatal Hüyük. When I came in, he also mentioned the relief of the lion-hunt at Nineveh, presumably the one which T. and I quickly but thoroughly enjoyed looking at in the British Museum some five years ago. Heinrich Schliemann was mentioned and, surprisingly enough, there was no verbal hopping with rage. Indeed he suggested that the concept of stratigraphy, and of the information which may be gleaned from observing the contents of the layers relative to each other, was then not yet developed. On the other hand he stated that any archaeological dig in fact involves the destruction of that which it studies.

Another point on which I am inclined to be more critical than he is with regard to reconstructing ruins. For example, though it may be presumptive to find fault, the fakeness of the Gate of Ishtar in the Pergamon Museum gets on my nerves; and I found Saddam Hussein's government's reconstructions of ancient sites in Iraq butt-ugly because they were turned into huge blocks of characterless, unworn, glaringly indistinguished mudbrick. A proper ruin has gravitas — just like a proper painting, which if it was indeed painted 300 or 400 years ago should have a patina to make one wonder if our common ancestor was in fact a dark-dwelling mole. I (let's say partly; it was an unfinished fragment) wrote an essay on Sir Arthur Evans for my Classical Archaeology course at UBC, and I vaguely recall that he had reconstructions built at Knossos, to help along the publicity and funding, much like what is theoretically organized at Pompeii except that a wall recently collapsed due to improper maintenance, etc. I was willing to overlook it there, going from the premise that Evans is one of the protagonists of archaeology and thus worthy of greater critical latitude, but still.

Aside from that the professor had a great deal to say about matters political, which upon the hearing I took with a large grain of salt, but whose essential impulse was not, I think, unadmirable.

In this context, and also out of admiration for a goodly quantity of hard work, he mentioned an exhibition which came to the Pergamon Museum until late August. Max von Oppenheim had founded a Vorderasiatisches Museum and it was filled with statues from a monumental dig at Tell Halaf. A firebomb struck during World War II; the firefighters came, and it seems that the impact of cold water on hot basalt stone is explosive in its effects. So in 2001 a team began to painstakingly set together the 27,000 fragments.

"Das 27'000-Teile-Puzzle" (Basler Zeitung, orig. Tages-Anzeiger, February 3, 2011)

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In Greek we were at the speech lab, where the computers cooperated, and so we listened to a dialogue being read out. Some words were easy to understand and I took a great deal of pains to figure out the meanings of the words as typed out in our textbook. But at times the sounds of the words and syllables shifted like will-o'-the-wisps, so that one time I would understand them perfectly and another time encounter gibberish. Before that I extracted my trusty dictionary and looked up the definite and indefinite articles as well as the conjugations of εχω and ειμαι. Not much has changed over the centuries, compared to what one would expect; on the other hand, I've difficulty recalling the Ancient Greek plural articles, which were generally given to my Ancient Greek class.

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There is a vote on the extension of our student transit ticket arrangement being held by the student body. The prices are to be raised in the following years, but it sounded like they weren't negotiable, so I took to the ballot-box and voted in favour.

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Besides I walked to the Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology to discover the sheet which is to advertise the times and dates of a work course; I didn't see one, so will email the professor again. On the way back I passed the Kenyan embassy and, much to my amusement, the smaller home to the Lesotho mission tucked beside it.

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Then I went to a history seminar where we traipsed over a library and had to write a statement about why archaeology interests us. It was embarrassing particularly because I'm not sure if my interest in it isn't kind of lame and fanciful (though nice), like saying "When I grow up I want to be an astronaut." Certainly not something which one wants to expand on to an adult expert. Besides the class was overstuffed in the little villa. I felt guilty because I was not supposed to be there, according to the formal rules, at which a great deal of winking is done by students and docents alike. I guess I'll hope for the best.

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Lastly I decided to stick around for an Introduction to Theoretical Philosophy. I was peeved when a surprisingly vast horde of us (young and old, students and guest auditors) was locked out of the room until after the hour. Given the institution of the "academic quarter," classes begin and end cum tempore, a quarter hour off from the stated time, so there were some ten minutes left until class began. But I had been lolling around on my feet for a long time and was eager for a seat inside the hall.

First of all we were told through a passage from Kant that philosophy is not the reading of the ideas of another, but the practice and personal application of reason on our own — the philosophy past is the rubble upon which we construct our own ideas. Then there was a long and repetitious excursion through Philosophy's FAQs, and the professor underlined that philosophers barely ever agree on anything, even as to who among them constitutes a proper philosopher. Then he said, with quotations from Karl Jaspers and a nod to Schopenhauer, that man becomes aware of himself as he reflects on the world around him, and that the portion of the world upon which he does not reflect does not exist for him. And so on and so forth.

I was hungry and grumpy; ensconced in a kind of superior eyrie at the summit of the lecture hall; and very much inclined to reflect on the world through an oneiristic (if the word exists) lens — which is to say have a nap; but I want to give the lecturer and lectures more of a chance. The philosophers intended to appear in this course: e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates(?), St. Thomas of Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, and Derrida. The course should generally be good for showing off — 'empirical' and 'Occam's razor' and 'straw man argument' are a start in terms of preexisting knowledge, and 'normative' would be too if I remembered what precisely it means or felt like consulting a dictionary; but there is no reason to settle!

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P.S.: The wording "throttled lion" is cribbed from my sister.