New Discoveries of Ancient Women Warriors, or Old Bones Revisited
Earlier this week, a news item about the discovery of an ancient woman warrior appeared in my news feed.* Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://bit.ly/2N25WHJ.
The story will sound familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to this kind of thing in recent years:
Russian archaeologists discovered the remains in what is now Siberia in 1988. Dated from the early 6th century BCE, they were so well-preserved that is was possible to see the wart on the young warrior’s face. (And by young, I mean twelve or thirteen years old. Which probably didn’t seem as young to the ancient Scythians as it does to us.) But partial mummification had not preserved what are politely described as “secondary sexual characteristics”. Since the warrior was buried with a full array of weapons—an axe, a three-foot-long birch bow and a quiver full of arrows—the archaeologists deemed the remains to be male. Because thirty years ago, weapons were also considered a secondary sexual characteristic.
Recently, the archaeologists were given the opportunity have the remains subjected to paleogenetic analysis, what you and I know as DNA testing, which revealed the young warrior to be a girl. Holy Birka Woman, Batman!
This re-thinking of an existing discovery is not an isolated case in the three years since since discovery that the Birka man was, in fact, the Birka woman. Scholars are beginning to ask more complicated questions about gender and remains. And as a result, there have been several new discoveries as a result of using techniques of forensic anthropology to consider what we know about existing remains. (Here are a couple of links to stories that appeared in my feed in recent months: https://bit.ly/2KD7OFM and https://bit.ly/3eV8kN2)
I suspect that in coming years we are going to see more instances of possible women warriors as these technologies and new questions are applied to new discoveries and existing remains. At a minimum, we can no longer assume that sword means male, because that would be a phallus-y.**
*Google alerts are a wonderful thing.
**Sorry, but I’ve wanted to use that pun for at least two years now. Just groan and move on.
* * *
Today’s news from 1928: Members of the League of Nations council were so distracted by women staff members who attended a session without stockings (a new and apparently shocking fashion) that they stopped working on an anti-war pact to pass a rule forbidding it.
Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic
When I started looking at the possibility of writing about Sigrid Schultz last April, what I knew about the Weimar Republic could be summed up in Peter Gay’s assertion in his classic Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider* that the Weimar spirit is embodied in “Gropius’ buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs.” **
To the extent that we think about the Weimar Republic at all, many of us see it through the lens of the Lost Generation. (Think Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which morphed into the musical Cabaret.) And in fact, Weimar Berlin was the darker counterpart of interwar Paris. It is the city of Expressionist art, Dada-ism, modernism, The Three Penny Opera, political satire, subversive cabaret, and sexual freedoms. With the (well-earned) reputation of being the most licentious city in Europe, Berlin drew an international community of artists, political dissidents, journalists, and intellectuals, not to mention stray members of the Lost Generation engaged in what a later generation would term “finding themselves. ”
But that is only one side of the story. And maybe not the most important one. It didn’t take me long to learn that the Weimar Republic in general and Weimar Berlin in particular were defined by more than sex, drugs, and cabaret. Born in revolution, it was a period of enormous social and political creativity. It was also a period marked by growing economic crisis, recurring political crises (internal and external), constant political intrigue, occasional political assassinations, attempted coups, labor unrest, and regular street violence between supporters of different political view points.
The Weimar republic only lasted from 1919 through 1933. It is easy to overlook it as pause between the two world wars. But the more I read about it, the more important it seems. I’ll keep you posted.
*I’m not going to review this one beyond saying that it is well worth reading if you want to know more about modernism and Weimar and you aren’t bothered by the application of Freudian theory to an entire culture. If you are looking for a broader picture, as I was (and am), I strongly recommend Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, which combines economic, political and social history in complex and thought-provoking ways. As you can see, another book stuffed full of sticky tabs, always a good measure of how useful I find a particular volume to be:
**I suspect that Marlene Dietrich’s songs are going to be the sound track for this book.
The Enemy of All Mankind
Several years ago, I read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I never reviewed it here on the Margins, though a large sticky note on the inside cover listing a number of thought-provoking questions suggests that I intended to.*
As far as I was concerned, it was kick-in-the-head brilliant. So when Johnson’s most recent book, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power and History’s First Global Manhunt, appeared on a list for review for Shelf Awareness for Readers, I raised my hand and said “Pick me! Pick me!”
I’ve got to say that while Enemy of All Mankind is an excellent book, it did not blow me away the way The Ghost Map did. In all fairness to Johnson, that may be because I know a fair amount about a number of topics he deals with. Someone less familiar with the Sea People,** the Mughal empire, the Indian Ocean trade, and the British East India Company might well enjoy the same sense of jaw-dropping revelation that I felt reading The Ghost Map.
Nonetheless, Enemy of All Mankind*** is well-worth the read. Johnson makes a compelling case that a single (admittedly brutal) attack on an Indian treasure ship by seventeenth century British pirate Henry Every played a critical role in shaping the global economy.
The story at the heart of the book could be the basis for a thriller: Henry Every leads a mutiny on a British trading ship. Once captured, he and his fellow mutineers turn pirate and sail to the Gulf of Aden where Indian ships carrying Muslim pilgrims to and from the hajj to Mecca present fat targets. The pirates attack and seize a rich ship (which may or may not have had a Mughal princess as a passenger) and subsequently become the objects of a global manhunt. And though his crew is captured and hung, Every is never found.
As he did in The Ghost Map, Johnson uses his core story as a springboard for discussing bigger issues. He outlines the history of piracy, beginning in ancient Egypt, and explains why pirates caught the public imagination in seventeenth century Britain. **** He traces the rise of the Mughal Empire in India, succession struggles within the Mughal dynasty, the lives of women in the Mughal court, and the economics of the hajj pilgrimage. He explains the economic base of the British East India Company, it’s shaky position in seventeenth century India, and the changing treatment of pirates in the British court system. Finally, Johnson pulls all his threads together in a rigged courtroom scene in which not only Every’s crews but Britain’s international reputation were on trial.
Johnson ends Enemy of All Mankind ends with an open-ended discussion of what might have happened to Every. A satisfying conclusion to a story with as many questions as answers.
*Not now, however. I’ve read enough about epidemics in recent weeks and my guess is that you have, too. Maybe I’ll circle back to it in happier times.
**A topic that has been on my future blog post list for several years. Perhaps its day has come.
***A legal term that referred to pirates because their crimes typically occurred outside the jurisdiction of any given state. Since then it has been applied to other types of criminals, including slave traders, professional assassins and war criminals.
**** Hint: The new invention of the popular press created a mass audience and then need to amuse it. In the absence of other nationally known figures, pirates were the pop stars of the period.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers