Monday Cup Of Links #50 - Bronze-Age Bananas, Judeo-Malayalam, Megabreweries from 2500 BC
I've done this fifty times. Here's to fifty more!
Happy Monday!
I’m at 50 weekly posts! I’m glad I’ve stuck to this for this long, though my Thursday long piece hasn’t been a thing for a while.
That’s sort of the point of Monday Cup Of Links - a short email that’s easy to read, easy to write, and keeps both of us engaged. It breaks down the mental barrier for me to write on the Substack, because it’s predictable, something I’ve done at least 50 times, and just involves a recap of all the interesting things I’ve seen in the past week.
Onto our links!
They found turmeric, banana, soybean and vanilla in the teeth of bronze-age skeletons in the Levant. There’s many ways to see how food travelled around the world historically. For instance, they found black peppercorns in the nostrils of the mummified Ramses II and realized there was probably trade with India. They also find dried/burnt seeds at sites. But perishable foods are hard to track. Banana, for instance, doesn’t have large seeds, is propagated through cuttings, and rots within a week. And it’s also hard to see when exactly a particular food came into a civilization - India has pizza now, but did it have pizza 2000 years ago? So some smart archaeologists decided to dig into skeleton teeth for food bits, and analyzed what it was. This was in two sites in Israel, one near Gaza and another near Haifa. They found some expected foods, like wheat, sesame, dates. And then they found some totally unexpected foods, like turmeric, banana, soybean, and even vanilla! This indicates there was trade between the Levant and as far away as Southeast Asia even in 2000 BC. It is known that there was trade between Mesopotamia and the west coast of India then, but going as far as Israel is new.
I actually went through this whole paper. I don’t usually read these papers in depth, but this one, I decided to. I find myself becoming interested in all these fancy archaeological methods. Besides, it’s been a while since I immersed myself in depth in anything that wasn’t baby talk or my codebase at work.There was a 5000-year-old large-scale brewery discovered in Egypt, at a site called Abydos. Mind, this isn’t your small-batch handcrafted microbrewery nonsense. This brewery produced 5000 gallons at a shot. It was the official brewery to produce wine for royal rituals. This was apparently used during the time of King Narmer, who founded the First Dynasty of Egypt….. Which means nothing to me, I realized. I don’t know anything about the history of Egypt. I know there was Tutenkhamen, Nefertiti, Hypatia, and Cleopatra, and they worshipped cats and built pyramids with mummies in them. Then there were all these grave robbers who called themselves Egyptologists. And now Egypt speaks Arabic. Cool, but I don’t know how any of that happened or what the sequence was. Which is a shame, since I spent like three hours in the Egypt section of the Met, and several more hours in the Egyptian museum in San Jose (go check it out, it’s pretty awesome). But given this is a pretty well-documented area of history, I will probably find some easy explainers on Youtube so I know my Ra from my Amun Ra.
There’s apparently a lot of languages spoken by the Jewish diaspora worldwide, and one of the fast-disappearing ones is Judeo-Malayalam, with less than 50 speakers left. The Jewish community in Cochin was once big and thriving, but there’s only a few families still left; most moved to Israel. I went to Jewtown Road as a teen, but didn’t know enough to appreciate it and was like “oh, it’s just another street with old houses”. There’s also Ladino, which is Hebrew-infused Spanish, and Judeo-Shirazi from Iran, and Kurdish Neo-Aramaic. There’s a researcher at UC Berkeley documenting these languages, with 8 hours of video, and at least 3000 words of each language. It’s all volunteer driven, so if this sounds up your alley, volunteer up!
Kerala, historically, seems like a fun place to set all kinds of interesting tales. The sheer confluence of so many varied groups of people coming to trade, with the diverse local culture sets up so much potential for interesting conflicts and resolutions.Myanmar is in the news again, and it seems to remind a lot of people of the situation in the ‘60s when the Indian diaspora in Burma were expelled and had to do the trek back to India. Indians were 10% of the Burmese population, and the population was so integrated, you had news and movies in Tamil and Telugu then, so it was not an insignificant expulsion under threat of genocide. This seems to have been a constant issue in post-colonial countries. All these former British colonies had significant Indian diaspora, who the native population often decided to hate and discriminate against and expel. It speaks to the tragic failure of the early Indian governments in using its heft to engage with these countries and create solid, lasting diplomatic relations.
This reminds me of two pieces of writingThis piece about Tamils from Burma having made Manipur their home while trekking back to India.
RK Narayan’s short story Uncle, which first appeared in the New Yorker (link needs login, and possibly a New Yorker subscription). I read it in this collection called Malgudi Landscapes, and here’s the story on Google Books. It’s missing a few pages unfortunately. It’s a story about a “Rangoon Man” who the narrator discovers is hiding some dark secrets. I love subtle stories that leave a lot unsaid in a heavy emotional situation, so I loved this story and read it over and over again. I love how this story is told through the eyes of a child and the descriptions are so vivid and have you right in the mind of a ten year old, so when the big reveals happen, you choke hard on the emotional conflicts.
And one last link that I’m throwing here really to bookmark it for my future reference. I found a website dedicated to SardarSinh Rana, who it turns out is a pretty pivotal character in the India House saga. He was one of the founders of the house, one of the funders for the scholarship that had Savarkar and others go to the UK to study law, and was the one with Madam Cama at the International Socialist Conference where the first flag of India was unfurled. He hasn’t been part of my story so far. He seemed like a background character, so I sort of ignored him, but now looking at his story with fresh eyes, I should probably contact his descendants and talk to them about him and see what exciting scenes to give him.