WAR AS EDUCATION

 

I hate to admit it but that the effete, arrogant, pompous, intellectual, asthmatic and snobbish Frenchman Marcel Proust (above)  was right about at least two things - first, when he observed that “We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history”, and second that “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

Both of those profound insights struck me again recently when I stumbled upon an article in the  archeology magazine "Antiquity", which illuminated a forgotten memory of the work of a quiet rock hound named Gerald Clark Bond. It may seem a complicated train of events, but please bear with me, while I try to explain how my mind works. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Professor Bond collected and cataloged rocks from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Bermuda. This may have once seemed an esoteric pursuit, but in that seemingly meaningless me'lange of bottom cores, which Professor Bond drilled through,  were thin layers of limestone pebbles,  which had nothing to do with the ocean floor nor the great rivers which dumped their detritus onto the Continental Shelf in that region.

How did they get thousands of miles south and hundreds of miles off shore into of the Atlantic Ocean?  Professor Bond concluded the only delivery method that made sense was that an ancient glacier had ground against limestone cliffs, scrapping off pebbles and holding them trapped in its grip.

When the glacier then calved icebergs into the Atlantic, these floated south until they melted, and then dropped their limestone pebbles into the abyss. With extraordinary perseverance, Professor Bond matched those pebbles with a specific limestone cliff along the Canadian coast. And when other rocks from the same drill cores were identified as coming from nearby areas to those cliffs, the professor's suspicions were confirmed, and with it a way to measure climate change. 

More pebbles in a given core layer indicated more melting ice bergs, which hinted at warmer temperatures and rising sea levels.  Fewer pebbles thus meant cooling seas, and more water locked up as ice in glaciers.  What was amazing to Professor Bond was that there have been eight cooling periods, now called Bond Events, since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. 

Bond Events come in roughly 1,500 year intervals, giving an almost respiratory aspect to our planet's atmosphere. And like a smoker who develops a cough, the deposits on the sea floor, as well as ice cores drilled in Greenland and the Antarctic have recorded the increasing impact of humans burning fossil fuels on our planet's health, from wood fires to coal to oil. But they also record something else, equally as ominous.

See, when the weather cooled for Bond Event Seven -about ten thousand years ago - it seems that humans responded with the invention of agriculture.

Bond Event Four occurred about six thousand years ago, and it seems humans responded with the domestication of sheep and the invention of bronze. 

And Bond Event Three, which came four thousand years ago, brought on the collapse of great empires in Asia and Egypt, and, of more interest to this story,  in an act of war at a crossing of a slow, meandering river about 80 miles northeast of Berlin, Germany.

The river is the somnambulist Tollense (above). For more than ten thousand years, beginning in its namesake lake, the Tollense  has followed a sinuous 58 mile course through forests and bogs, winding this way and twisting that, as it hesitantly approaches the Peene River, which winds another 30 miles to the Baltic Sea just below the island of Usedom. 

In the peat bogs lining its banks and the mud of it's bottom, the Tollense has preserved for the last 3,200 years a record of one day, an example of humanity and inhumanity, and a desperate battle for survival in the high summer of  about 1250 BC.

The invaders were from the forests and mountains to the south, and were members of the Unetice culture. They were armed with bronze daggers, spear heads and hand axes. They were adorned with engraved bronze bracelets and wooden shields, and their robes were held together with bronze pins. They came mounted on horses, which ate millet, which did not grow this far north. That suggests rations, which suggests an organized raiding party, perhaps what would one day be called an army.

The Frisian villages close to the Baltic coast were the likely target of the Unetice. The Frisians buried their dead in stone crypts, and prayed to the earth god Inguz, who drove his chariot across the sky as easily as he dived beneath the sea. The villagers enjoyed probably the best diet in Europe, with plenty of surf and turf. They fished in the lakes and the sea from long plank canoes and hunted the forests with curved bows. They raised cattle corralled behind their village palisades. But their weapons and tools were stone axes and baseball bat like wooden clubs. 

The bronze age was late in coming to the Frisian Baltic coast. Copper and tin had to be heated to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit before they would form bronze, and that takes a lot of wood, and a knowledge of ceramics. A culture cannot afford that technology unless it has something to sell. And it was not until recently that these proto-Scandinavian tribes had organized and improved the production of their “metallum sudaticum”, amber. 

With each successive Bond Event, with each successive glacier pulse, the level of the Baltic Sea rose and then fell, Over and over great coastal pine forests grew, matured and were then drowned in the Baltic basin.  And with each storm tide more fossilized pine tree sap from those long dead forests washed up on the sandy Baltic beaches as amber.

Villagers gathered the amber in hand held nets, then carved it into beads, rings, bracelets or even Venus religious figures (above), and then traded them southward, up the "Amber Road" that reached all the way to Rome and Egypt.  On the return trip traders brought ceramics, bonze rings and gold pins. But few weapons.

By 3,400 years ago the Amber Road was a well established trade route, increasing the wealth of the villages on the namesake lake of the Tollense river, where Baltic amber could pause, be collected and worked, before moving on.  And the wealth of these artisans, fishermen, farmers and herders, 

attracted the interest of the Unetice forest peoples to the south and east. 

After a generation or two of escalating raids , about 4,125 years ago, shortly after the summer solstice, perhaps a thousand occupants of the scattered Frisian villages along the Tollense valley decided to gather their tools and their children and flee north, beyond the reach of the raiders. 

The logical place to rally the farmers was on the western bank of the Tollense, where a 10 foot wide causeway (above), had been built and maintained for over some 300 years,  about 7 miles south from where the Tollense' river joined with the Peene River. 

For a wooden causeway to have been maintained for so long (above), the western bank must have been a traditional gathering place, perhaps with religious connotations.  

It seems likely the Frisians waited for the indecisive or the cautious to join up. Perhaps the old were too slow.  But it seems the farmers and herders were slow in discovering the causeway  across the river and bogs represented a bottleneck in their line of retreat.  Because it was here the raiders with their bronze axes fell upon the famers and herders with their stone arrow heads and wooden clubs.

The first indication of the death along the Tollense saw daylight in 1996, when a human femur  surfaced. Jutting from the base of its ball joint was a stone arrow head (above).  Rarely does archeology find such conclusive proof of a murder. Early excavations uncovered more human bones and wooden clubs. 

When the raiders were seen approaching, the livestock, the elderly, the women and children were sent downstream, with a small escort of the best fighters. But the majority of the Frisian men stayed behind, sacrificed to delay the attackers at the causeway.   

In 2007 massive excavations were begun, and have continue up and down the valley.  By 2018, after the bones of at least 100 individuals had been uncovered, it was estimated at least 5,000 men were caught in this battle, mostly young men of draft age - between 20 and 40 years old. The estimated death toll ranges from 750 to a thousand souls. 

Most of the bones carry injuries inflicted shortly before death; broken faces, damaged skulls, bronze arrow heads embedded in arm and leg bones , even one penetrating a skull (above).  One fractured thigh bone was discovered displaying an injury still commonly suffered by horseback riders. 

A genetic sample of the bones uncovered so far show that none of the adults possessed the thymine nucleotide which would have allowed them to digest the lactose in cows' milk, something which only developed in European humans some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. In addition, five horse skeletons have been found, with bronze bridle fittings, hinting at an officer class among the invaders.  

The fighting at the causeway was desperate, with bodies left along the riverbank, and no quarter given.  The Frisians stone daggers and wooden clubs killed some of the first attackers, but the heavier bronze swords allowed the Unetice warriors to maim from a greater distance, and for longer.  Gradually the invaders cut down the outnumbered defenders. 

As with all battles before firearms, once the shield wall was broken the slaughter truly began. Running for their lives, the Frisians were struck down from behind, or, if they turned to fight, they were overwhelmed. Many of the bones show the cutting slices of bronze swords - although no bronze swords or axes were left on the field. The bodies lay were they fell, later being stripped of any metal of value, as the pursuers murdered their way up the valley toward the Peene.

Using ground penetrating radar to locate likely dig sites (above),  a mass of human bones were found  downstream a mile north of the causeway site. It seems the bodies were left unclaimed and unattended until a storm washed them downstream to a bend in the Tollense, where the current buried and preserved about 140 bodies in the mud and peat (above), "... like an ancient memento left between the pages of a forgotten diary". 

The wounded and crippled Frisians left behind were dispatched, often with a quick and brutal club blow to the head (above). We do not know yet how far down the valley the slaughter continued.  Nor do we have any accounts of the battle. Written history of this region would not begin until the old high German runic inscriptions carved 800 years later. 

But we can safely assume the Uentice and Frisian story tellers (above) sang about the honor and courage of those who fought, and the sacrifices of the brave men who died along the ancient banks of the Tollense. And we know the battle of the Tollense Valley had a major impact on the lives of people in the region. But, why in God's name were these young men murdering each other? Was it amber or gold? Was it slavery or freedom? Was it fish or faith? 

We have known for a hundred years that shortly after this battle, that we did not know about until recently, the people of northern Europe no longer lived in scattered settlements. Within a generation they began building fortified settlements (above), living safely behind walls with their animals and commuting daily to and from their farms outside.  And it seems logical to believe this change was all because of a 3,000 year old battle which we were ignorant of until 25 years ago.

Marcel Proust (above) began his most famous work, with the following words; "I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive... in some inanimate object...until the day...when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice...We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. "

But Proust wrote something else, while confined and working for three years in what would become in 1922 his death bed (above). "Remembrance of things past", he wrote, "is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”  The same can be said of the warriors of the Tollense valley. 

The latest thinking by the archeologists digging along the banks of the Tollense is that the battle was not a war but a robbery on a large party of traders.  Academics will likely argue the issue for decades, But to call it a war or a robbery is a game of semantics. Three thousand years after the event such definitions have little meaning.

Whatever the reality along the Tollense 3,000 years ago, we can be certain the elders of the Uentice and the Frisians both sang of the honor and courage displayed by the participants. But their religion, their nations, their cultures, their languages, their  homes, their hatred and their love, all they murdered and died for has long since turned to dust. They no longer matter. They are all dead and gone. Until we dig them up.

Excavated, they live again,  because we choose to make them live. We choose to resurrect their bones and recreate their world in our minds and our hearts. And in doing so, we recreate our own world. As Proust put it, "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

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UNDER PRESSURE cutting diamonds

 

I bet the the man who actually first laid eyes on the legendary jewel was not Frederick Wells (above). It seems unlikely that in South Africa in 1905 a white man would have been at the dig’s face, where the danger of a cave in was greatest.

Still, the legend has it that Frederick spotted the rock embedded in the stone wall just above his head (above, reenactment), reached up and pried what he first thought was glass out of the stone with his pen knife. And if that seems as unlikely to you as it does to me, we should both remember that everything about this particular rock is unlikely.

The nursery where this carbon crystal grew was an odd place. First, the surface above it had to have been stable for 1 to 3 billion years – maybe three fourths of the age of our planet. And for all of that time 90 to 120 miles below this stable surface the temperature had to be a constant 1,000 degrees centigrade, and the pressure about 653,000 pounds per square inch. The longer a carbon crystal remains under that pressure and temperature, the larger the crystal grows. And this one grew to weigh one and a half pounds. 

There are only a few spots in the earth where the temperature and pressure has remained consistent for so long; beneath the Canadian Shield, beneath Russian Siberia, beneath the Baltic Shield, beneath the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent,  beneath the Brazilian Shield, beneath northwest Australia, Beneath West and South Africa.

The heat allows the molecular bonds of carbon atoms to become plastic, while the immense pressure squeezes them into an eight sided crystal. Over eons such carbon crystals grow slowly and they must be fairly common in regions of the mantle where the carbon bonds with water. But then something unlikely happens. The earth burps.

If one of these carbon crystals rises to the surface slowly, over years or even decades, the atoms binding its carbon molecules together return to their fail-safe state, which is graphite – pencil lead. 

For carbon to remain a crystal, it must reach the surface in a burst, over no more than a few minutes. To travel from the nursery to the surface, then, the stone must reach speeds of several hundred miles an hour. Supersonic.

Such a speed can only be reached if the capping pressure is suddenly punctured by a narrow fissure, at which point the temperature and pressure produces a powerful volcanic explosion at the surface. For that to happen is unlikely. But over four billion years unlikely becomes inevitable.

The first European who “owned” the surface above this particular jewel was a white immigrant farmer named Cornelis Minnaar.  His farm was in the southern part of Africa, north of the River Valaal, 25 miles east of the city of Pretoria (Tshwane).  The Boers, as these Dutch transplants called them selves, had made the trek to this region to avoid the British, who were intent on stealing their colony. 

In 1861 Cornelis sold a section of his land to his brother, Roelof , who in 1896, sold an even smaller part to Willem Prinsloo (above) who was just starting a family. The sale price was 570 English pounds, and it was William who owned the land when another Dutchman named Fabricus arrived looking for buried treasure.

Being experienced in this sort of thing, Fabricus first inquired as to where the Prinsloo households had dug their “sanitary pits”. This was a euphemism for the holes used to bury the products of your outhouse, politely known as “night soil”. Why dig a hole when a hole had already been dug? Because it was easier to break the surface. But since nothing unusual had been found in the sanitary pits, Fabricus assumed he would have to look elsewhere. 

Once he had located some “virgin dirt”, he scrapped away the thin red top soil, and then hacked his way through ten feet of yellow limestone gravel (above), the bi-product of primordial coral reefs...

...before reaching a blue slate gravel (above) peppered with tiny red garnets. This rock was called Kimberlite.  And when he saw it, Fabricus realized he had struck pay dirt

Fabricius was working for an Englishman named Henry Ward, who had paid for the option to search on Prisloo’s land.  But Ward didn’t have the money to make the buy, and besides William Prisloo (above) was not interested in selling to an Englishman, since it looked like war was about to break out between the Boers and the English. 

Which it did.  Two of them, in fact.  After the second war was finally settled in 1904 – The British won – Ward now sold out his options to Thomas Major Cullinan.  

By then Willem Prinsloo was dead. So Thomas Cullinan (above) made an offer to William’s widow, Maria Prisloo.  Broke and defeated, she sold the farm for 52,000 pounds. Not a bad profit.

Cullinan and partners named their new venture "The Premier Mine". Production started at the end of April 1903, and in a year 2,000 people, mostly local Africans were blasting, chopping, digging and hauling blue Kimberlite out of the open pit. They were looking for diamonds.

Most diamond mines start out as open pits. A Kimberlite Pipe is famously “carrot shaped”, wide at the top, narrow towards the bottom. And after less than a year of digging, on 25 January, 1905, this new mine is credited with producing the largest gem quality diamond ever found.  

Diamonds are not rare, but gem quality diamonds are. On average two hundred tons of ore must be culled for every 1 caret of gem diamond, (there are 141.7 carets in every ounce) and only one out of every five million diamonds weighs two carets or above. 

The one and one half pound diamond Mr. Wells claimed to have pulled out of the rock face that January afternoon, was rated at 3,106 carets. In the name of good publicity, it was named after Mr, Cullinan.

After a nondescript voyage to England via the royal mail in an unmarked plain brown box, The Cullinan, as it was now known, was presented to King Edward VII. He asked as many experts as he could find - geologists, gemologists and even the physicists Sir William Cookes (above) -  how to cut this hunk of rock so it would be as pleasing and valuable as possible.

Cookes noted that around a small black spot in the interior of the stone the colors were very vivid, changing and rotating round that black spot.  "These observations indicated internal strain…there was a milky, opaque mass, of a brown color, with flakes of what looked like iron oxide trapped as the crystal formed around it.  There were four cleavage planes of great smoothness and regularity.” At issue was how to turn this indescribably rare nondescript lump into something indescribably rare and beautiful.

Diamonds had been known by Europeans since the tenth century, but it was not until the 17th century that they became popular amongst the aristocracy, not until the first “Brilliant Cut” by Italian jeweler Jules Mazarin, really showed the beauty that was hiding inside. His diamonds sparkled with 17 facets, or faces, each one reflecting light back out at the viewer. By 1900 the skill of the diamond cutter had increased the possible reflections to 57 facets.

The general consensuses was that the best cutter for this job was Joseph Asscher (above), ironically another Dutchman. He studied the Cullinan for six months in his shop in Amsterdam, surrounded by a small crowd of bankers, experts and royal representatives, laying out a plan of attack.

As the London Evening News reported in mid-January, of 1908, “…a special model of the diamond in clay was made…It was cut into pieces to give an idea of what would happen if the genuine stone were treated in the same way. After several experiments a definite plan was arrived at…”

Finally, on Monday, 10 February, 1908, at 2:45 pm, Joseph was ready. Surrounded by a small crowd of anxious interested third parties, Joseph poised his hammer over the chisel (above), the blade of which was lodged against the precise point which he had calculated the first strike had to be made. If he missed, or struck a glancing blow, the one-of-a-kind diamond worth a million pounds would be rendered damaged and might end up being worth a few thousand. Joseph drew a breath, and sharply struck the chisel….which cracked apart against the diamond.

Immediately Joseph ordered the room cleared, except for the notary republic for the bankers, who were financing this entire thing. Joseph checked the Cullinan and found it, thankfully, undamaged. He checked his tools (above), re-examined his plans and announced a week's delay while he fashioned a new, larger, chisel. And recovered his neve.

So it was that on 17 February, 1908, alone in the room with the diamond and the notary, Joseph lined his hammer up for a second time over The Cullinan. He struck the precise strong blow, directly above the dark inclusion...

...And the diamond fell apart into three perfectly clear pieces. Despite legends to the contrary, Joseph did not faint. He did, however, drink a glass of Champagne.  Eventually the Cullinan was cut into nine large stones (above)....

....and 96 smaller diamonds, so many that it took 8 months just to polish them all. 

And if you ever get to the Tower of London, you might make a note that the Crown Jewels of England on display there, (including the Queen Mother's broach, above)   might be literally billions of years old, but they have only been in the English royal families’ possession for a little over a hundred years. And they will always be a testament to the creation of timeless beauty under pressure.

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