HERE WE COME A WASSELING

I don't know if you know this, but the Christmas carol started out as a dance, and then became a song. Whereas wassailing started out as a libation and then became a song and then darn near disappeared. Both traditions, caroling and wassailing,  suffered their original metamorphoses for the same reason – Puritan kill-joys.  The carol was revived and survives as a gentle Victorian anachronism.  Still, most of the music and some of the words remain recognizable.  But if somehow you could transport a 12^th century English Celtic villain into a modern wassailing, the first words out of their mouth would be the medieval equivalent of “where is the booze and the broads?”  Call it the cost of Christianity, or progress, or even just the march of time, but clearly we've lost some things in reaching the 21^st century.  And one of those some things was wassailing. Song

“Here we come a-wassailing

Among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wand'ring
So fair to be seen.”

During the 2^nd century C. E. when you the walked into any Inn or Public House in that far flung corner of the Roman Empire called Britania,  you were greeted by your fellow vandals with the phrase, “Waes hael”, or “good health”.  And your proper response would be “Drinc hael”, or “A drink to your health”.  And what the Celtic holi-poloi would be drinking might be Mead, made from fermented honey, or a fermented version of whatever else grew locally – beer in rye growing areas, or in the hilly west counties, where the Celts grew apples, hard cider.  Everybody drank these concoctions because the alcohol killed most the pathogens in the local water supply.  That's why we still call consuming alcohol, drinking. Getting bombed was just a happy side effect.

“We are not daily beggars

That beg from door to door,
But we are neighbors' children
Whom you have seen before.”

The Inn keepers kept their mixture in a large “wassail bowl” as a centerpiece on the common table, so after dinner the paying guests could use their now empty food bowls to dip themselves an after-dinner drink. It is an oddity of these original pubs that the food cost money but the drinks were free. As the food supply increased, this pricing scheme would be reversed. On special occasions, the Mead would be added to the beer or cider, which improved the flavor and the alcohol content. And so taking a holiday drink from the wassail bowl became “wassailing”.

“Good master and good mistress,

As you sit beside the fire,
Pray think of us poor children
Who wander in the mire.”

All of this was ancient enough to be a Celtic tradition long before Rome was Christian. And about a month after the winter solstice the pagan Celts were even wassailing in their fields and apple orchards. They called it in Old English La Mas Ubhal (mangled into modern English as, “lambs wool”), or as perhaps the celebration of the apple. On the Twelfth Night of Christmas (see these pages for Twelve Days of Christmas) apple farmers would lug a large milk container filled with cider and cider soaked cakes into their fields. In the dark and the cold they would build a fire, drink and eat and dance. In song the men would threaten the trees and the women would plead the tree's defense, all to encourage them to produce apples in the coming year.

“We have a little purse

Made of ratching leather skin;
We want some of your small change
To line it well within.”

It was called “An Apple Howling” or a “Luck Visit”. In Devonshire, standing under each tree, the farmers would sing “Stand fast, root! Bear well, top! Pray God send us a good howling crop: Every twig, apples big; Every bough, apples now! Hats full! caps full! Bushel-bushel-sacks full, And my pockets full, too, huzzah!” The cakes were placed in the forks of the trunk, baked apple splices were tossed into the crown, and cider splashed on the bark. It seems as if the farmers were trying to give the trees the idea of what they were supposed to produce come spring.

“Bring us out a table

And spread it with a cloth;
Bring us out a cheese,
And of your Christmas loaf.”

And then midway through the 5^th century the Anglo-Saxons defeated the native Celts at the battle of Crayford, and over the next 600 years these invaders squeezed the Celts back into the Welsh highlands and the far west counties, which, by chance, included the apple growing regions. So, wassailing in Wales and Devon became associated more with cider, while in Anglo-Saxon England, beer and ale were what filled the wassail bowls, and the post- solstice celebration morphed into a fund raising venue. Originally, the English village leaders went house to house, singing a Wassail song at each door and offering the residents a drink from their Wassail bowl. In response, the residents were expected to make a donation to the poor. Eventually, the leadership lost interest in the process and the poor themselves stepped in to fill the vacuum. You can imagine how happy the wealthy were to share their money with a bunch of dirty, young “urban types”, who came begging at their front door, something forbidden the rest of the year. Wassailing door-to-door became frowned upon, mostly by those most  able to donate.

“God bless the master of this house,

Likewise the mistress too;
And all the little children
That round the table go.”

In 1066, King Henry and his Normans conquered Anglo-Saxon England. The Normans not only brought the French words to the island, but they also brought a militant brand of Christianity. And that religion would prove to be wassailing's most determined foe. We know wassailing was still popular in 17^th Century London, because just after New Years in 1625 the anal retentive Sir John Francklyn made a notation in his account book of the one pound 6 pence he paid for “the cup”

“Love and joy come to you,

And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year.”

But after the Puritans chopped off the head of Charles I in 1649, they began to remake Britain in the their image of God. And God was it a dull, dull God they envisioned. The Puritans were suspicious of wassailing, of all that drinking and dancing in the dark, and they disapproved of peasants directly asking their “betters” for money. So laws were passed, and punishments metered out. Some who celebrated the pagan days were even burned at the stake. The impact of their moral divide survived even until the end of the 20^th century, as evidenced by the laws allowing advertising of wine and beer on television, but restricting the same for the sacrilegious “hard” liquors.  So if, at your next Christmas party you should find a wassail bowl bubbling away on the stove, dip a cup, and enjoy. It is a tiny taste of our shared pagan past, a harmless reminder that before Christianity, there was a god in every tree and every apple, as well as every soul.

"Wassail, wassail, out of the milk pail

Wassail, wassail as white as my finger nail
Wassail, wassail in snow, frost, and hail,
Wassail, wassail that never will fail.”

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BATTLE OF THE NATIVITY

I am tempted to call it a primeval struggle, drenched in antiquity, shrouded in religious fervor and destined to feed future conflict until come judgment day, whenever the heck that may  be. Except it is much simpler than that. The day after Christmas 2007, two rival gangs got into a turf dispute and started a  rumble. Somebody called the cops, who managed to separate the combatants, The Jets (AKA the Greek Orthodox Priests), and the Sharks (AKA the Armenian Apostolic Priests) were battling inside the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birth place of the Prince of Peace in Bethlehem, Israel, Palestinian Territories. And nothing about this melee has any deeper meaning.  And yet I blame the long dead French Emperor Napoleon III for the entire mess.

First, a word about all that antiquity – it does not appear to have happened where or when everybody now thinks it did - assuming it happened at all. Roman census or no census, there was no reason for a pregnant Mary to be making a 90 mile donkey ride from Nazareth, on the Galilee plain of northern Israel, to Bethlehem in the mountains just south of Jerusalem, in the west center of Israel. Being the man, Joseph was expected and qualified to speak for his entire family. He would have been the only one required to travel. But why require anybody to travel? The Romans census takers did what census takers still do today - they counted people where they were. That would be where their property was, and where their money was. Why disrupt business all across a rebellious province, in the name of counting people where they were not? It makes no sense.

And there is another problem, an archaeological problem. There is no archeology in Bethlehem from that period. The ground under today's Bethlehem contains Iron Age artifacts and Byzantine artifacts, but nothing in between, nothing from the age of Jesus. The village outside of Jerusalem did not exist on the night that Jesus was born.. However, there was another Bethlehem, “Bethlehem Ha Galilit”, Bethlehem of Galilee, just about 7 miles to the west of Nazareth. It seems far more likely that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem Ha Galilit, than in Bethlehem Judea. But because Bethlehem Ha Galilit no longer existed in the fourth century of the common era, when the Byzantine Christians came looking for Jesus' birthplace, they jumped to the wrong conclusion and picked the wrong Bethlehem. So did the followers of Islam, when they first captured the region in year 627 of the common era.  After all, Jesus is one of their prophets, too. But after this, things got really complicated.

See, after the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land in 1187 the Muslim rulers had enough respect for Christianity that they were willing to protect the Christian holy sites, and, of course, tax them. But they did not trust the Roman Catholics, who had invaded them and now made up a majority of Bethlehem Judea’s population.  So the Muslim rulers split control of the profitable tourist sites in Bethlehem Judea between the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches, in particular the church built upon the “traditional” site of the birth of Jesus. The Greek Orthodox were given control of one part of the building, the Armenian Orthodox control of another part. This allowed the Muslims rulers to play the two Christian sects one against the other, and to play them both off the Roman Catholics, who were now the poor relations in town.

And thus some calm was achieved in a region not famous for calm, at least until 1852, when a “firman” (or edict) was issued by Abdulmecit I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of the Muslim World (above). Abdulmecit issued his edict because…well, because first, in 1847 some thug stole the silver star which marked the “traditional” spot of Jesus’ birth, in the floor of the Church of the Nativity, and, more importantly, because the Sultan was weak and because Louis Napoleon III of France was a pompous political hack, who believed that he had been chosen by God to fix, first France, and then rest of the world, by making them more French.

Louis Napoleon III was elected to a ten year term as the first President of the Second Republic of France in December of 1848. He immediately started plotting to follow in his uncle’s imperial boot prints. By early in 1852 Louis had helped to restore the Vatican’s independence in Rome (which pleased French Catholic voters), but he had also insisted that the new Papal government be drawn up along “liberal” lines, to placate the liberal (meaning non-Catholic) French voters. But no Church ever likes to be lectured about liberal policies from secular politicians. Just try it some time and see.

In an attempt to placate the now angry Catholic voters, Louis III suggested that the theft of the star from the Church of the Nativity (five years earlier) proved that the Church of the Nativity was no longer “safe”, and control should be handed over to the Roman Catholic Church for protection - yet another politician declaring a crises which needed his genius to solve. This particular crises pleased Pope Pius IX., who had come to the conclusion that Czar Nicholas I of Russia was intent upon wiping out Catholicism in his country - which Nicholas was, the Czar being the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Louis' demand also pleased Abdulmecit I, because Albdulmecit had the distinct feeling that Czar Nicholas was about to invade Turkey - which he was. So,  under Abdulmecit's edict, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were now handed over the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time the edict also required the Vatican to maintain the church of the Nativity “in statu quo res errant”, or, “as it was before”. This edict is linguistically important because it popularization the Latin phrase “status quo”, so that now it a regular part of the English language.

Now, all of his life Russian Czar Nicholas I had been told that Russia was a military superpower and protector of the true faith, that faith being Russian Orthodoxy. And Nicholas was not about to allow a mere “politician”, least of all a trumped up “Bonaparte”, to usurp his regal and holy authority. Nicholas demanded the keys to the Church of the Nativity be returned to the Armenian and Greek priests, who would, he was certain, be controlled by him. And when the keys were not handed over,  he declared war on Turkey - of course, he had been planning on doing that anyway.  Britain and France then came to Turkey’s defense. And so Louis’ gambit to impress French voters led directly to the Crimean War, and 118,000 dead; of whom 20, 000 were French, and 73,000 were Russian.  And, as part of the peace treaty that ended that war, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were returned to the Greek and Armenian priests.

In his rise to power Napoleon III (above) had shamelessly played one political faction off another, and eventually abolished democracy in his own nation, created a throne for himself, invaded Algeria and Vietnam - both of which actions came back to haunt France a century later - and was finally goaded into the 1870 Franco-Prussian War,  which resulted in his humiliating defeat and the creation of Germany,  and Louis’ own overthrow and his death. This guy was the Donald Trump of 19th century French diplomacy.

The Crimean War also cost Nicholas I his life. While on campaign against Turkey he caught a chill and died of pneumonia on 2 March, 1855. The Ottoman Sultan, Abdülmecit, lived long enough to see his nation plunged into debt by that same war.  By Abdulmecit's death from tuberculosis in 1861, Turkey was flat broke. His successor was dethroned.

Amazingly, the same war left Pope Pius IX alive but very frustrated. Because France had been distracted by the Crimean War, there was no help from France when in 1860, Victor Emmanuel took control of Italy from the Catholic Church and established the modern semi-secular nation of Italy.  But Pius achieved a measure of revenge when, in 1869 he issued the decree of Papal Infallibility and declared the dogma of Immaculate Conception. Together these meant that Mary, mother of Jesus, was born without sin because the Pope said she was without sin. And the Pope was never wrong, because he said he was never wrong. Neither of these were official Roman Catholic dogma until 1869, but it has been church dogma ever since. Only two American Presidents have claimed a similar divinity. One was  Richard Nixon, and he was forced to resign, and Donald Trump, and his arrogance help ensure he was a one term President  - so claiming divinity seems to only work for religious leaders.

But, let us finally return to the Church of the Nativity on 27 December, 2007. According to the Associated Press; “....dozens of priests and cleaners came to the fortress-like church to scrub and sweep the floors, walls and rafters ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in the first week of January...  But the clean-up turned ugly after some of the {Greek) Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church's section, touching off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue...Four people, some with blood running from their faces, were slightly injured.”

Traditionally both the Orthodox and Armenian churches have recruited their priests for this sacred post in the Church of the Nativity, from tiny isolated villages scattered across Greece and the Balkans, where Christians (and Muslims) have been slaughtering each other for a thousand years. These naive young men now suddenly found themselves working in intimate contact and sharing the most precious artifacts of their faith with heretics. Nothing in their lives or their training prepared them for any kind of peaceful coexistence. Politics may make you a jackass, but religion stands a stronger chance of killing you. 

And the whole thing was Louis Napoleon III’s idea.  But try explaining that to a bunch of uneducated foreigners.

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KADESH: Technology Fails to Solve The Problem

 

I know the name of the world’s first professional horse-whisperer: Kikkuli. He was from Mitanni, in what is present day Syria. And about 1345 B.C.E. the new Hittite King Suppiliuma,  discovered Kikkui training horses in the Beqaa Valley, and hired him to modernize his army. At the time, horses were very high tech.

See, in North America the horse went extinct with its ice age compatriots the Woolly Mammoth and the giant sloth, while in EurAsia the horse survived. And the only difference between the two environments was that in EurAsia humans invented the wheel, probably because of the horse.

A wheel can reduce the energy required to drag your belongings across the ground by a factor of twenty-five, if the ground is fairly flat and not too rocky, like the steppes north of the Caspian Sea. That makes an expensive horse a reasonable investment  And a clue to the importance of the wheel for the horse is that its Proto-Indo-European root word, “kwel”, (to revolve), can be traced directly back at least 8,000 years to the grasslands right about where the archeological evidence indicates the horse was first put in front of a cart. And the first great empire to perfect the use of the horse and cart in war were the bad boys of the Bronze Age, the Hittites.

Nobody knows where the Hittites originally came from. They invaded Anatolia (central Turkey) about 3,800 years ago. They brutally conquered the real Hittites, replaced their royal family, enslaved their population, adopted much of their culture and language and even co-opted their name. These new Hittites were violent and paranoid in the extreme.

They built their new capital of Hattusa(above)  away from any major roads, and three miles from the nearest navigable river, to make it as difficult as possible on an attacker. And they cultivated a reputation for violence and vengeance, as when they sacked Babylon in 1660 B.C.E. in a sudden and brutal surprise attack. The key to their military power was their use of the chariot. And the Kings of Hattusa intended upon exploiting  that advantage.

Kikkuli, the self-billed “master horse trainer” wrote one of the first training manuals in history, four cuneiform tablets detailing a 75 day training regimen for chariot horses. Now, a dedicated chariot horse is very expensive to maintain. They have to be endlessly trained, pampered and exercised to remain in a state of readiness. And like a modern battle tank, the bronze age chariot was too fragile to travel long distances.  It had to be carried to the scene of battle. And for more than  three hundred years the competing powers of the the Middle East, Egypt and the Hitties, defined themselves by their fleets of chariots, in much the same way that later generations would use battleships, tanks and airplanes.

The function of the chariot – from the Gaelic word “carrus”, meaning a car - was to suddenly deliver the bow or spear man to within killing range of the enemy, and just as quickly withdraw him back to safety. The Hittite chariot, a “triga”, was pulled by two horses. The designers had lightened the wheels by reducing the spokes from eight to four. But they offset this weakening by moving the axle from the back to the center, stabilizing the fighting platform. They made use of the weight savings by adding a third man to the “car”; driver, a spear-or-bowman, and a shield man. Kikkuli had given the Hitties a lead on developing the chariot’s power plant. But, as any weapons’ designer can tell you, in the world of high tech, all advantages are transitory

The border between the two powers was a small city on the upper Orontes River in Syria, known as Kadesh (or Qadesh). The lands to the south were controlled by the Egyptians, ruled in 1274 B.C. by Ramsses II. He wanted to capture Kadesh and move the border further north. He was leading 37,000 infantry and almost 2,000 chariots. His army was divided into the Amun, the Ra, the Seth and the Ptah divisions of about 10,000 infantry and 500 chariots each.  And as he approached Kadesh, Ramses learned that the Hittites were still far to the north. He decided to exploit their tardiness by leading his Amun division on an overnight forced march, across the Orontes River before dawn. By  noon Ramsses had established a siege camp just north of the city, isolating Kadash from the main Hittite army. Or so he thought.

As his men were fortifying the camp, his scouts brought in two Hittite soldiers. And after some enhanced interrogation, Ramsses learned that the entire Hittite army was lurking just over the next hill. He had been duped. The following Re division was still crossing the Orontes River, while the other half of his army was still on the south bank. Ramsses barely had time to consider the scope of his predicament, when the Hittites fell upon the Re division. They were caught still in marching column and were shattered in a single chariot charge.  Twenty per cent of Pharos’s army had been destroyed in the opening moments of the battle.

Then the Hittite chariots and infantry fell upon the Amun division’s unfinished camp. They smashed through the half built defenses. Slowly the Amun infantry were constrained and slaughtered, while the Amun chariots, surrounding Ramsses, were forced to pull back.

Meanwhile still more Hittite chariots and infantry had crossed the Orontes River and were pummeling the unprepared Seth division. It looked as if Ramsses’ over confidence had destroyed his entire army.  But two things saved him. First there was his own courage. Surrounded by battered, confused and defeated men, Ramsses led his chariots on repeated counter charges against his own captured camp. And second, by accident or by design, this played into the strengths of the Egyptian chariot, which was based on a different design than the Hittite one.

The Egyptian chariot was a “biga”, and carried just two men; the driver and the spear/ bowman. This made the lighter Egyptian chariots nimble and quick. And Ramsses used that speed and maneuverability to repeatedly throw his men at the weary and now disorganized Hittite troops, while avoiding getting too close to their greater numbers.

 By late in the afternoon, after six charges, Ramsses had managed to cut down the Hittite strength, fight his way clear of the Hittite chariots, re-cross the Orontes River and rejoin what was left of his army.

It had been the biggest chariot battle in history, with 6,000 carts and some 36,000 trained horses wheeling back and forth across the plain in front of Kadesh, destroying each other. Both sides pulled back to lick their wounds.

When he got back to Egypt, Ramsses II wrote his own version of the battle on his temple walls. In this comic book story he humiliated the Hittites. But the treaty which ended the war (and this is the first international treaty we have copies of from both sides) show that Kadesh remained part of the Hittite Empire. At best Ramsses had fought the Hittites to a draw. However,…

Hittite causalities were so high that just a century after the battle of Kadesh, in about 1160 B.C.E., the strain of maintaining order tore the empire asunder. A civil war broke out in the Hittite royal family. And in the middle of the night, the mysterious Hittite rulers stripped Hattusa of all its wealth, burned the palaces and temples to their very foundations, and then faded into the dark corners of history from which they had come. There is no record of where they went, or what they became.

It was not until 1906, when German archaeologists first uncovered the city, and began reading the 30,000 soot stained cuneiform tablets which had been left behind when they burned down the great library of Hattusa.  Among the tablets were Kikkuli’s book on the care and feeding of chariot horses, and the Hittite copy of the treaty of Kadesh, and the only independent report detailing the Trojan War. And it was through those tablets that the Hittite Empire was resurrected, along with missing details of the history of humans and the horse, and the first failure of high technology to solve a problem.

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