Conversations (ABC) Academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was imprisoned for 804 days in an Iranian prison after being arrested at the airport as she was leaving a conference. In Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s freedom fight she talks about her long period of imprisonment, initially in solitary confinement, and then in a series of women’s prisons. She conveyed so well the crushing nothingness of solitary confinement, and her bewilderment at not being able to speak the language and feeling completely cut off from the outside world. The bravery of some of her fellow prisoners in reaching out to her is amazing, as it put all of them in great danger.
The Rest Is History Episode 386 The Fall of the Aztecs 3: The City of Gold. Backtracking a bit, Dominic and Tom reiterate that we really don’t know what Malinche’s role is all this. She hated the Atzecs, and certainly historian Camilla Townsend plays up her agency. We can’t trust the Spanish diaries because everything is written to protect their own actions. Because they’re “cos-playing the Greeks and Romans”, everything is filtered through a classical lens. Certainly Cortez has no idea what he’s facing- is he brave, or crazy? On his trip inland he crosses over the borders of the Tlaxcalans who, unusually among the surrounding tribes, did not pay tribute to Montezuma. They attacked Cortez but his revenge attack at night was violent and ultimately effective. He’s in effect marketing his power here, and after three weeks the Tlaxcalans welcome him into their city where they wine and dine them. The Tlaxcalans recruit the Spaniards, rather than the other way around, and together they go off to sack the Tlaxcalan’s enemies the Cholulas, then they turn towards Mexico. They stop above the valley, marvelling at the city which dwarfs Seville. They are getting mixed messages from the Aztecs: they give them presents but then say that Montezuma is too busy to see them. On 8 November the Spaniards clatter along the causeway with the Tlaxcalan’s (Montezuma’s enemies) and are met by Montezuma himself. It’s implausible that Montezuma would have just given in – this is probably Spanish rationalization after the event. Montezuma puts them up, although there’s no mention of what happened to all the Tlaxcalans. The Spanish really don’t know whether they’re guests or prisoners.
History in the Bible. I’m preparing for the Christmas service at our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, where I’ll be considering the historical context in which the nativity story takes place. I’ve been listening to my Rome podcasts for some years now (as you know) and so I’ve been looking at King Herod and the political situation in Judea for my presentation. In 2.19 What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us? Australian podcaster Garry Stevens looks at the context into which Jesus was born. King Herod the Great died in 4BC, which is a bit inconvenient for numbering the years supposedly from the birth of Christ (BC/AD in the old nomenclature). For the past 60 years the Romans had dominated the Mediterranean, introducing Greek culture and social systems. The elimination of pirates by Pompey meant that ship transport could become more important, thus drawing Judea into the Roman economic system. Under the patronage of the Romans, Herod the Great supplanted the squabbling Maccabean rulers in 37 BCE to construct a kingdom about the same size as the old kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with territories in Syria that had never been part of the old Hebrew remit. Thus, the subjects were both Gentile and Jewish. The Romans were pious, and because they recognized that their own Pantheon was borrowed, they accepted the presence of other religions. However, they would not tolerate human sacrifice, insurrection or the suspicion of private (as distinct from public) assemblies – all of which the early Christians challenged (at least symbolically), I guess. At the time of St Paul, the Roman Empire numbered about 50-60 million people, 4-5 million of which were Jews. About 1/2 million of these Jews (or 10% of the total population) of these lived in Judea. As a point of comparison about 7 million live in Israel today. The Romans gave an overarching political structure, but the Jews had their own structures beneath them. It was a theocratic rule. The temple, which Herod reconstructed, was more like a clubhouse than a synagogue, acting as a place of communal meeting and teaching. Prayer was not a feature of Judaism until medieval times.
This was interesting, so I went back to Episode 2.17 Recovering the Bible Up until about 1850 there had not really been much progress in biblical revelation since medieval times. The archeological jigsaw had been reassembled, but there had been no new discoveries of manuscripts. But then came a slew of discoveries: Tischendorf’s discovery of the mid-4th century Codex Sinaiticus at a Syrian monastery at Mt Sinai in 1844; Ethiopian parabiblical books in the 1880s, then the Books of Peter in a monk’s grave bringing a whole new testimony of Christian diversity in the early years. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 12 caves near Qumran in the West Bank – whole scrolls, not just fragments. Discoveries were on hold during the Arab-Israel War, and the last cave wasn’t explored until 2017. The scrolls comprised Old Testament Books, para-biblical texts and sectarian (probably Essene) texts, all Jewish rather than New Testament. The scrolls are significant for their quantity (1000); their antiquity from the early roman empire; and for their contribution to a new aspect of Judaism.
Episode 2.18 Modern Debates: Scandal of the Dead Sea Scrolls looks at the 40-year blockage of access by Catholic conservatives, who sat on the discoveries and would not allow other researchers to see them. The scrolls were discovered in Qumran Cave when it is was under Jordanian rule. Jordan instituted an international panel and sent the scrolls to the Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem. As Edmund Wilson reported in the New Yorker in 1955, when controversy arose over interpretation and authorship, the cabal on the panel battened down the hatches and stopped publishing, took the scrolls to Paris and refused access to all other researchers. In 1969 the Jordanian government became impatient with the delay, but after the Israeli war, renewed support was offered to Robert De Vaux, one of the original discovers. Publication continued at a glacial pace until in 1991 Huntington Library published its microfilms, finally pushing the cabal to release their own. Once they were published, it showed that Jesus was just one of many messianic figures at the time.
History Extra 1950s Britain: Everything you wanted to know. This episode features Alwyn Turner. I was born in the 50s but am only really aware of the 1960s onwards. This podcast argues that all the changes that blossomed in the 1960s (Carnaby Street, Beatles etc) were budding during the 1950s. During that decade the average age of the population was in the 30s, but their politicians were all old men with an average age in the 70s. Food rationing continued until the 1950s but the English diet was beginning to change with Elizabeth David beginning to publish her cookbooks which drew on European food tastes. The Goons started in 1951 and were a real marker between the ‘youth’ who loved them and the older generation who didn’t find them funny at all (Hmm. I don’t find them funny either). It was a decade of low unemployment, the introduction of the NHS, slum clearance and the introduction of new technology (TV, fridges, washing machines). With the Suez Crisis, Britain realized that now US was calling the shots, and that UK didn’t control their own foreign policy any more.
99% Invisible Long Strange Tape is about the history of the cassette tape. Who would have thunk you could have a whole podcast episode on cassettes? Well, Marc Masters has a whole book about cassettes called High Bias. In this episode he talks about the group The Grateful Dead, whose live shows were different every time, thereby attracting a whole cadre of taping fans who would swap tapes of the shows among themselves. At first they smuggled in reel-to-reel recorders, but once cassettes came along and the Grateful Dead realized they couldn’t stop people taping, they embraced it. Although cassettes have been largely superseded today, they are still popular in U.S. prisons. Visitors are allowed to bring in see-through cassettes, but not CDs because CDs could be broken and fashioned into weapons. (Ironically, you’re allowed to bring in a can of ring-pull tuna- as if THAT couldn’t be made a weapon). Streaming is starting to be allowed, but only songs with a PG rating. How sickening- a 14 year old can be imprisoned for life without parole, but as a 40 year old he can only download PG songs.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 