Grand unified books thread

[CountDeMoney]

These books are both in the public domain, but they have been given new prefaces by senior staff members of Paradox Development Studio. Both books are available in the Apple iBookstore now: The Art of War and The Prince.

That's gold, Jerry.  Gold!

[Savonarola]

I've been reading the Griffith translation of the Samaveda.  In one of the hymns Indra is described as "Everwaxing."  It took me a minute to realize the translator meant "Wax" in the sense of growing and that the ancient Aryans weren't actually praising their deity for his overactive sebaceous glands.

[Barrister]

I'm reading Prime Minister Stephen Harper's A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs & the Rise of Professional Hockey

It's very good book about the early history of Professional Hockey and the death of Amateur sports in Canada.

I'm only half-way through, but enjoying it.

Problem is, of course, is that Harper isn't much of a writer.  It's very workmanlike stuff.  Thankfully the story he's telling is interesting enough to make it worthwhile.

From me the novelty is reading the story from the point of view of Toronto instead of Montreal, that's a first.

I'm reading the French translation, it's a very good translation. One of the best I've come across.

Ah.  I've never read anything about the early history of hockey, so it's all new to me.

Is the French translation by Harper himself?  Or did he get someone else to do it.

[The Brain]

Bought Marius B. Jansen's The Making Of Modern Japan. 1600 to 2000. Anyone read it?

Finished it. I found it reasonably good, but I am not an expert on the Edo period, Meiji, Taisho or Showa.

A few minor things: some proof reading misses, some minor repeating of points, and not always great attention to detail (Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1989?).

[Savonarola]

The Samaveda

This is one of the four Vedas texts (along with the Rigveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda.)  It consists of much shorter hymns than the Rigveda; and they're much more closely tied to the Soma ritual (some even describe the steps for making Soma.)  As in the Rigveda Indra and Agni (god of fire) are the major deities; other gods make an occasional appearance (curiously Vishnu is a Vedic deity, but appears to be only of minor importance.)  Generally a god or Soma is praised in each individual hymn.

Sam A. Veda would make a great name for a hard boiled detective in an Indian inspired pulp novel. 

[Capetan Mihali]

So having read that, where do you stand on the "what is soma" debate?  Ephedra?  Amanita mushrooms?  It seems like the main split is between people who think it was basically a hallucinogen and those who think it was basically a stimulant.

[Savonarola]

So having read that, where do you stand on the "what is soma" debate?  Ephedra?  Amanita mushrooms?  It seems like the main split is between people who think it was basically a hallucinogen and those who think it was basically a stimulant.

I think you'd be a lot more qualified to answer that than I am.   

While there's a lot in both the Rigveda and the Samaveda that details how Soma is made, there's very little that says what it does.  It's supposed to convey ecstasy and make man's heart glad, but there's no reference to it conferring shamanic powers, so a hallucinogenic seems unlikely.  At the same time ephedra is a pretty mild stimulant; it's hard to believe they would consider that an ecstasy or that they would make such an elaborate ritual around it.

Indra is supposed to have conquered 100 Dasa forts in the ecstasies of Soma; maybe it's a type of spinach. 

[Queequeg]

Wouldn't plain old Mary J make sense?  We have extensive evidence that it was cultivated by the Proto Indo-Europeans and successive steppe peoples. 

[Savonarola]

Wouldn't plain old Mary J make sense?  We have extensive evidence that it was cultivated by the Proto Indo-Europeans and successive steppe peoples.

It could be, I'm not at all an expert, but then Soma shouldn't have become lost.  Also, if that's the case, they had an unusual method of preparing it (grinding it, boiling it in milk and then straining it.)

[Savonarola]

Story of Wenamun

This is a fragment from a now lost longer work about a priest of Amon who travels around the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the New Kingdom.  Wenamun, a priest, goes to Babylon where he's robbed, but the authorities do nothing and treat him insolently.  He requests a tribute of wood for a temple of Amun, which was given for free in ages past, but now the King demands payment for it.  Then he's blown off course to Cyprus where he's almost killed by a mob, but the queen saves him where the text breaks off.

Some scholars think that this is supposed to be filled with irony; and it does play out a bit like Candide.  Maybe the Egyptians found some bitter humor in Egypt's reduced role in world affairs at the collapse of the New Kingdom.

[Malthus]

Story of Wenamun

This is a fragment from a now lost longer work about a priest of Amon who travels around the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the New Kingdom.  Wenamun, a priest, goes to Babylon where he's robbed, but the authorities do nothing and treat him insolently.  He requests a tribute of wood for a temple of Amun, which was given for free in ages past, but now the King demands payment for it.  Then he's blown off course to Cyprus where he's almost killed by a mob, but the queen saves him where the text breaks off.

Some scholars think that this is supposed to be filled with irony; and it does play out a bit like Candide.  Maybe the Egyptians found some bitter humor in Egypt's reduced role in world affairs at the collapse of the New Kingdom.

Wenamun was (allegedly) robbed in a place called Dor, not Babylon.

How do I know this? I spent a season as a volunteer excavating the site (now Tel Dor, in Israel) and it is pretty well the only literary mention of the place! 

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like an interesting book.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00HVYG0MU/geneexpressio-20

Humanity on the Edge of History
By Razib Khan • February 4, 2014 • 600 Words

...

After reading Peter Bellwood's First Migrants, I am now tempted to coin a phrase: "Nothing in history makes sense except in light of demography." This is obviously too strong a phraseology, but if the methods of modern statistical genetics are correct in the peculiar inferences they're making, then we do need to rewrite the history books to a great extent. Or at least expand the purview of what we consider history, and how we understand what archaeology is telling us. For example, Africa is often represented in the public imagination as the ur-continent: unchanging, everlasting, primal. But the results we see from genetics, the relative similarity of populations from Nigeria to the South Africa's Eastern Cape, and the minimal impact of the ancient hunter-gatherers on the ancestral variation of these people, attest to recent and revolutionary changes in the character of the population of the African continent, which belies its static perception. This recent paper, as well as Luca Pagani's result on admixture within Ethiopia, implies that demography has wrought drastic change among the non-Bantu people of eastern and southern Africa, pushing them to the margins of history. To put it more starkly: when the pyramids of Egypt were being built the vast continent to the south would have been unrecognizable in terms of its human geography to a physical anthropologist.

And this is not just a feature of Africa. In First Migrants the author recounts a personal communication from a scholar who has assembled unpublished data on the skeletal remains and ancient DNA from a community in northern Vietnam ~4,000 years ago. This seems to have have a frontier agricultural settlement, on the edge of rice culture. While the majority of individuals exhibited the body type and skull form of modern Asians, a minority manifested what the author terms "Austro-Melanesian" physical attributes. And critically, the ancient mtDNA haplogroups break down in the exact same ratios as the morphological remains, with a majority shared with modern Northeast Asians, but a minority of a type limited to Southeast Asia, and usually inferred to suggest common heritage with the peoples of Australasia and South Asia.

What the researcher above captured was a snapshot in time, freezing a moment which was transitory, as the ancient substrate of Southeast Asia was absorbed into the advancing wave of farmers. One could go on in this vein. We know so much more than we did in the past, and not to be hyperbolic, but some of what we know suspect resembles Conan the Barbarian more than the wildest imaginings of prehistorians of the past generation. But that's one of the great things about scholarship: it can confound pedestrian expectations. And on occasion which captures the ineffable aspects of truth obscured should astound us.

[Grey Fox]

I'm reading Prime Minister Stephen Harper's A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs & the Rise of Professional Hockey

It's very good book about the early history of Professional Hockey and the death of Amateur sports in Canada.

I'm only half-way through, but enjoying it.

Problem is, of course, is that Harper isn't much of a writer.  It's very workmanlike stuff.  Thankfully the story he's telling is interesting enough to make it worthwhile.

From me the novelty is reading the story from the point of view of Toronto instead of Montreal, that's a first.

I'm reading the French translation, it's a very good translation. One of the best I've come across.

Ah.  I've never read anything about the early history of hockey, so it's all new to me.

Is the French translation by Harper himself?  Or did he get someone else to do it.

Someone did it, forgot the name but iirc it's a woman. It's translated for European release, so sometimes I am infuriated at the terms beings used.

I've taken a break from the book. There is only so much game by game explanation of 1910 Toronto hockey I can take.

If you enjoy Harper's book try this :

Putting a Roof on Winter: Hockey's Rise from Sport to Spectacle

KNIGHTS OF WINTER: Hockey in British Columbia: 1895-1911

1913: The Year They Invented The Future Of Hockey

I have not read the 3rd one, never seen in stock before.

[The Minsky Moment]

Looks like an interesting book.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00HVYG0MU/geneexpressio-20

Humanity on the Edge of History
By Razib Khan • February 4, 2014 • 600 Words

We know so much more than we did in the past, and not to be hyperbolic, but some of what we know suspect resembles Conan the Barbarian more than the wildest imaginings of prehistorians of the past generation

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean but it sure sounds silly.
As to the apparent premise of the book, it would not be suprising to learn that Neolithic era migrations had significant demographic impacts, as one would presume that the earlier populations were relatively diffuse and small in number.

[Admiral Yi]

Picked up A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings.

The writing itself is not that to give me a woodie, but I was prepared for much worse, having some experience with the fantasy genre.