No Waiting....

Four Berbers:

Four Berbers, No Waiting, Get It? Oh, Tee hee...

Brave Men There Were Before Agamemnon, Not a Few...

From a small museum in Utica, near Tunis:

That is:

D(is) M(anibus)
Iulius
Pullus
miles
c(ohortis) I F(laviae) A(frorum)
comilito
nes eo fec(erunt)
v(ixit) a(nnos) XXII

In English:

To the divine shades.
Julius
Pullus,
a soldier
of the First Flavian Cohort of Africans.
His fellow sol-
diers made this for him.
He lived 22 years.

Or "C I f a" might be "Centuratio I Fecit Annorum", i.e., "He served out one year as a centurion." Thanks to Michael and Pedar for translating; Michael adds: "The Latin is a bit shaky, especially eo, which would normally be ei (dative ei rather than ablative eo)."

The carving is obviously somewhat unstudied. And it is a rough, unfinished piece of stone. I.e., a labor of love, soldiers to a soldier.

Thanks also to Pedar also for making sure I didn't overlook it.

Dowry Baskets: I've Always Wondered

Recognize this?


It's a dowry basket, as offered in a shop window in a Souq in (I believe) Gafsa in Tunis--there's a whole window full of them, and more in the shops next door. The guy fills it with goodies for his beloved (gold is always acceptable, I am told).

Which brings up an issue that has always puzzled me: since it is the males who are pursuers and women the pursued, why is it the woman who typically brings the dowry? Apparently the best answer I have so far is: not always.

Debriefing Memo: Tunisia #3 (Carthage)

I'm a little late posting on this, but then I'm a little late in finding out. That is--all this stuff about how the Romans destroyed Carthage and then salted the earth so nothing would never grow there again. Turns out it is in urban legend, in the classical-Latin sense of the term. Well, okay, so they "destroyed" it, more or less, but that was in 146 BC, and within a couple of generations it was back--refounded, to become a major metropolis in the Roman empire. The ones who finally did it in were the Muslims, in 698 AD, as part of their epoch-making conquest of North Africa. But by that time, Carthage had pretty much collapsed of its own senescence, and administering the quietus was almost an afterthought.

And that stuff about salt: never happened. apparently. A false conclusion to "a series of misunderstandings," as Wiki says (with a learned citation). Or, as I heard elsewhere, a fantasy cooked up by an early modern German scholar who wanted to fit it into a pattern of Biblical correctness (the Wiki, by the way, is remarkably thorough: somebody put a lot of love into it).

One way or another, it survives today as a first-class archaeological site. Well: not so elegant or ambitious as Pergamom or the Parthenon, but with lots of stones to kick from the Romans and also from their Carthaginian predecessors.

Afterthought: seeing Phoenician Carthage made me reflect again on the "irony" (as I thought it was) that the Phoenicians who, after all, gave us the alphabet, shoud have left no literary culture behind. But I had it wrong again, or so it seems. Evidently the Phoenicians did have a literary culture (evidently there are references in surviving texts). But this part the Romans did destroy. So I was wrong about the Phoenicians. But we are still left with the fact that the progenitor of all writing comes into the modern age mute.

Debriefing Memo: Tunisia #2 (Tunisia Reading)

I usually try to read up on a country before I visit there, but on Tunisia, I didn't do so well. Okay, so I was grading exams. But more than that--I simply couldn't find enough stuff that caught my fancy. Amazon does offer a biography of Tunisia's great postwar leader under the title of Habib Bourguiba: The Tragedy of Longevity (used copies starting at $65) but it is just not the sort of tagline that thrills the blood. I did read one academic study on the lives of Tunisian women--interesting as a powers-of-the-weak yarn about how women in a man's world use cunning and the advantage of interior line to outwit their overlords. I also read one so-bad-it-was-good travelogue by that very model of British Imperial arrogance and presumption, Norman Douglas. Douglas never met an off-white-person whom he didn't find scheming, shifty and gullible, but he's fascinating as an example of his kind, and actually kind of fun when he reports on sites that I walk over myself.

Beyond that, my main efforts went into expanding my knowledge (or perhaps just reducing my ignorance) about the Arab world more generally. And this line of inquiry led me to one of the most extraordinary finds since I don't know when: The Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldûn. The cover of the paperback bills it as "The Classic Islamic History of the World." A literate Tunisian acquaintance describes the author as "the first sociologist." Either of these is at least minimally adequate, but neither is enough. The fact is, Ibn Khaldûn is one of the world's great polymaths: he seems to have learned everything available in his world (14th Century). More, he seems to have fashioned an informed judgment on everything, characteristically supported with reasons, many of which survive the test of time (example: at the very beginning, he offers his account of why the Biblical story of Moses cannot possibly be true--his reasoning would do credit to an academic archaeologist in the 21th Century).

Ibn Khaldûn made most of his career outside of Tunisia (he traveled a lot) but he was born in Tunis, and there is a statue of him on the edge of the New Town, just outside the Souq. A cynic would identify it as proof that the Tunisians don't have much else to brag about. But that is unkind; Ibn Khaldûn is a force of nature, and I can't imagine why I never heard of him before.

More modest but worthwhile in different ways are two books by modern scribblers. The more polished and professional is Hugh Kennedy The Great Arab Conquests, about the Seventh-Century explosion that catapulted Muslims from obscurity in the desert onto the center of the world stage. Kennedy is a total pro, but in a way that's the problem. He spends perhaps a third of the book lamenting the inadequacy of the sources. This is intellectually honest, but it means he has less of a story to tell than he, or we, would want. Still, shorter Hugh Kennedy: it's not so much that the Arabs "won" as that their opponents had "lost." Plague had decimated the Mediterranean world just a century or so before, and old, corrupt, inefficient governments were tottering everywhere.

Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted has the opposite problem. Seeing as how it bears the subtitle of "A History of the World through Islamic Eyes," I suppose I could hardly expect to find it anything except incomplete and superficial. But that is quite the problem. Any story can be told in 10 pages or 10 million pages, depending on how you choose your level of abstration. The trouble here is that Ansary doesn't seem to understand his own limitations or, worse, assumes that the reader will not. So it is an irritating read; nevertheless, I stuck it out, for her did tell me a bit I didn't know, and did bring together a number of disparate threads into a (mostly) coherent narrative.

[Idle afterthought: as proof that ambition in scope is no excuse, compare (invidiously) Ansary to Ibn Khaldûn, supra.]

That about does it for my Tunisia reading so far. I realize in retrospect that I might have broadened the search set if I had understood that what I was studying was not Tunisia so much as Carthage--the remnants of the old pre-Roman (and, later, the Roman) civilization. This would have opened me up to, e.g., biographies of Hannibal, or chunks of Livy. Or perhaps Sallust, of whom, I admit, I had only the vaguest knowledge before (can you say "Jugurthine"? No? Well, neither could I until last week). Ah well, it may not be too late; a copy of Susan Raven's Rome in Africa is winging its way to me even now as we speak. More anon.

Afterthought: It isn't quite my primary interest, but I note that there is also a fair amount of Wold War II history in Tunisia--not least the Kasserine Pass, venue for the first great encounter between American forces and Rommel's Panzers. Apparently there is quite a literature on this topic alone including, not least, Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn. Okay, it goes onto the list.

What're Ya Doin', Holdin' Up the Hotel?

Sign from a brochure in a Tunisian hotel room:

For keeping the hotel standing, we kindly ask you not to use the balcony for drying laundry.

[Or for a bunch of other things we are too stuffy and inhibited to name].

Debriefing Memo: Tunisia #1

ADRIAN	Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen.
GONZALO	Not since widow Dido's time.
ANTONIO	Widow! a pox o' that! How came that widow in? widow Dido!
SEBASTIAN	What if he had said 'widower AEneas' too? Good Lord, how you take it!
ADRIAN	'Widow Dido' said you? you make me study of that: she was of Carthage, not of Tunis.
GONZALO	This Tunis, sir, was Carthage.
ADRIAN	Carthage?
GONZALO	I assure you, Carthage.

--Shakespeare, The Tempest, II, i

Tunisia, by my count, enters world history on just three occasions. One, when the "widow Dido" leapt onto a funeral pyre to console herself for the loss of her lover. Two,when it served as incubator for a sect of dissident Muslims who became the Fatimid dynasty and founded Cairo. And three, when it served as the venue for the making of Star Wars. For Tunisia, this paucity of history can only be a blessing.

Put the point the other way around, modern Tunisia enjoys one of the greatest of possible advantages for anyone who wants to construct a functioning state: no oil. Take a look at Fielding's The World's Most Dangerous Places and you will find way more than you will want to know about oil-rich Lybia (just east of Tunis) and resource-rich Algeria (just west). And there is little Tunisia, thinly disguised as a prostate gland, tucked snugly between--a vale of modesty (as they say) between two mountains of conceit.

I don't want to glamorize here: Tunis' quality-of-life statistics are nowhere near what you'd get from Denmark or Japan. And there are way too many 20-foot-tall pictures of the Darth Vader wannabee who holds the life-tenure post of leader. But walk the streets of Tunis, or Sfax or Sousse--or smaller places, like the farm towns in the north--and you get the feel of a polity tht is mostly stable, tolerant, and determined to keep on keepin' on. You could do better, but you could do a whole lot worse.

Tunisia

We're off to Tunisia to look at Roman ruins (we want to say "Carthage," but I guess we are a couple of thousand years late). Little or no posting until about June 8. Here's a Google map:

I'm going to turn off comments for the duration--no disrespect to my small but sturdy band of commentators, but only to guarantee against spam.

Obscure Parting Shot: My friend Taxmom weighs in to report,""We've decided that if our cul-de-sac is the Mediterranean, we are Carthage, and the mailboxes represent the Pillars of Hercules."

No, I have no idea...