How Much Did It Cost?
It's been the kind of writing day where I chase peripheral ideas, as easily distracted as a puppy that sees its own wagging tail--though hopefully more productive.* A section on the nature of queenship led me first into the Japanese Shogunate and then into the double bind of women's voices in politics. Several (hopefully) fascinating footnotes later, I found myself calculating how much a reward of 25,000 German marks in 1914 would be worth today. It is not an easy question. And ultimately there is no right answer because there is more than one way to measure value.
The easiest to understand (and the one I tend to fall back on because it usually works best for my purposes) is the changes over time in the cost of a "bundle" of goods--the idea behind the Consumer Price Index. Even this is tricky if you are looking at changes over a long period of time because the items in the bundle themselves change. Cars replace carriages, for example.
But changes in simple purchasing power are not the only way to measure the relative value of money. For example, you could measure the cost of an important project (say the Erie Canal or the Great Wall of China in terms of its opportunity cost.**
If this is a rabbit hole you are inclined to go down, I refer you to my tool of choice for historical currency conversion: https://www.measuringworth.com/ Measuring Worth not only includes handy-dandy currency calculators, but an excellent essay on the different measures of worth and what I suspect are very useful tutorials that would keep me from flailing around the site in search of answers. It won't help you figure out how much it cost to build the Great Wall of China, but it's the on-line place to go if you need to know the relative value of the wages of someone who helped build the Erie Canal.
And now, if you will excuse me, I've left a Dutch political cartoonist with a price on his head--worth somewhere between $146,000 and $2,980,000--and I need to get him safely to Britain before someone collects it.
*I'm at a point where I need to be more like a cat staking out a mouse hole--focused and patient. Not that I've ever seen a cat do this outside of cartoons and early twentieth children's books. But I digress. Again.
**Though realistically, you probably can't measure the cost of the Great Wall of China since many of those costs happened outside the monetary economy, and it's not clear what the monetary equivalent of the coin of the day was, etc. There are times when the answer is simply "lots".
Was She Or Wasn’t She?
If you've been hanging out in the on-line places where history and science--and, occasionally, the history of science--intersect over the last week or so,* you've read articles with tiles that are variations on "a female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics"--the title of the scholarly article that first appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology on September 8.
Illustration by Evald Hansen based on the original plan of the grave by excavator Hjalmar Stolpe, published in 1889
Here's the short version: Ever since the discovery of the so-called "Birka warrior" in Sweden in the late 1880s, scholars have believed that it was the grave of a male Viking warrior, based on the fact that the body was buried with all the accoutrements of a Viking warrior.** It turns out that the bones told a different story. Earlier this year, Swedish bioarcheaologist Anna Kjellström examined the skeletal remains and found that the pelvic bones and jaw indicated that the body was that of a woman. Traditional archaeologists pushed back hard, suggesting among other things that some bones from another body had gotten jumbled up with those of the warrior who was laid to rest in such splendor. (Apparently this is not unknown in ancient graves.) No such luck. DNA tests proved that the bones all belong to one warrior and she was a woman.
Like much of the history world, I've been fascinated with the story since it first appeared on my Google alerts.*** But I had no intention of writing a blog post about this until last night when a new report showed up in my in-basket. The Birka burial has been considered a model example of a Viking warrior burial for more than a hundred years. Some researchers are now taking the position that since the Birka warrior doesn't show signs of battle injuries she probably wasn't a warrior at all.# Maybe, for instance, she was the wife of a Viking warrior, buried with all his stuff because he died overseas.## I am not an archaeologist, but this sounds to me like someone stretching really, really far to keep the girls out of the Viking clubhouse.
This is exactly the kind of stuff that has been making me nuts over the last year, reading scholars twist themselves into knots trying to prove that individual women warriors 1) didn't exist, 2)weren't really warriors, 3)were metaphors for [fill in the blank] resistance against [fill in the blank] or 4)the creation of male homoerotic fantasies because obviously a women with a sword (especially one wearing pants) is a penis symbol. (Hey, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.)
Archaeologist Marianne Moen from the University of Oslo brings a note of reason to the discussion, saying that is important not to hold women to a different standard than men when assessing comparable weapons placed in their grave.### In short, the Birka find “was a warrior grave until it was sexed as female. Now a lot of people would like to call it something else. That is where the danger lies here.”
I have not read either the original report or the rebuttals in detail, though you can bet I will when I get to chapter eight, which will deal with Viking sword maidens, female samurais, etc.--in November, knock wood.
In the meantime, here are links to the original report and a good article on the debates surrounding it for anyone who wants to get a headstart:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23308/full
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/skeleton-ignites-debate-over-whether-women-were-viking-warriors
*And I know some of you do because many of you have sent me links to articles related to the topic of this blog post. I've tried to thank you individually, but in case I missed anyone, let me thank all of you here. I LOVE getting leads to blog topics or info about women warriors from y'all.
**But no horned helmet. The horned helmet made its first known appearance in 1876 in the debut performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle. How many costume designers can claim to have created an image with such an impact?
***Alongside news about the latest exploits of many women's sports teams. Go Warriors!
# Apparently the Birka warrior is not unique in this, but all the other remains without battle injuries have historically been deemed warriors.
##That sound you hear is my teeth grinding.
###Different standard--just another way of saying double standard.
The Blackbird Sings
Several weeks ago My Own True Love and I had the pleasure of hearing a musician* play the oud and talk about its role in the multi-cultural mixing pot that was Islamic Spain. I sat and nodded my head in agreement as he talked about the spread of the oud through the Islamic world, and the transformation of oud first to lute then to guitar.** When he mentioned Ziryab, one of my favorite figures from the golden age of Islam, my head nodded even faster. This is the way blog posts are born.
Ziryab, nicknamed "the Blackbird" because of his sweet voice and dark complexion, was a trendsetter and fashion arbiter in the ninth century--the medieval Islamic equivalent of Beau Brummel.***
He was a freed slave who began his career as the talented student of a prominent Baghdad musician and composer, Ishaq al-Mawsili. Ziryab was so successful that many preferred the student to the teacher. Al-Mawsili appears to have been unaware of his student's popularity until the caliph, Harun al-Rashid,**** asked if him if he had any particularly promising students. The teacher proudly introduced Ziryab, saying he might be a famous musician one day. The caliph was so taken with Ziryab's music that al-Mawsili decided Baghdad wasn't big enough for the two of them. He gave Ziryab two choices: leave town immediately (at al-Mawsili's expense) or suffer his teacher's enmity.
Ziryab chose the all-expenses paid tour of the Islamic world.
In 822 CE, he arrived at the Islamic court of Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain. He brought with him the latest styles from Baghdad, which was the political and cultural center of the civilized world.
The ruler of Cordoba, 'Abd al-Rahman III, was determined to bring Muslim Spain into the ninth century. He welcomed Ziryab to his court, and gave him an official position as court musician, unofficial influence, a handsome salary, and furnished mansion.
In his role as court musician, Ziryab introduced the oud, turned it into the lute, founded a music conservatory and wrote songs that were performed in Andalusia for generations. He introduced new instruments and new forms of musical composition.
In his role as cultural ambassador from Baghdad, he changed the way Spain lived. He introduced the idea of wearing different fabrics in different seasons. He transformed personal hygiene, introducing soap, toothpaste, and better ways to clean clothes. (All already familiar in Baghdad.) He introduced new dishes, including asparagus, the idea of serving meals in courses, and the concept of the tablecloth. He is even given credit for bringing the game of chess to Spain.
Ziryab died in 857 CE, after 35 years of helping Cordoba (and ultimately Europe as a whole) clean up its act.
*His name is Ronnie Malley. If you're in the Chicago area and interested in world music, he's worth keeping an eye on. I'll make it easy: http://www.ronniemalley.com
**In all fairness, not all musicologists agree that the guitar had its roots in Muslim Spain. I find their arguments unconvincing. But then, I would.
***For those of you who haven't spent a lot of time, in Regency England, Beau Brummell was for a brief time the undisputed ruler of high society as a result of his impeccable taste in clothing, his biting wit, and his friendship with the Prince of Wales, the actual ruler.
****I first encountered Harun al-Raschid while reading the Arabian Nights as a nerdy child. In many of the stories, he disguised himself and wandered about his city at night, and then trapped his subjects with the information he learned while incognito. As a child I was indignant at the unfairness of his justice, even while acknowledging that it was, in fact, just. (Children understand abuse of power even when they don't know the term.) Imagine my surprise when I learned that he was a real, much-admired, historical figure.