Lost in Translation...

From the Guardian.co.uk: Charlotte Higgins "On Culture" blog The oddest classical etymologies ever? Saturday 4 April 2009 In Glasgow, at the joint conference of the Classical Association/Classical Association of Scotland, the Guardian's rather timely leader in praise of Cicero (in this morning's paper) has not gone unnoticed. I ran into Professor Mary Beard during the conference coffee break – who last night was bigging up Cicero as antiquity's greatest wit. She noted archly that Cicero was, in her view, rather an unpleasant man. A great man, but a thoroughly nasty one. I suspect we can expect Beard to air her views more fully on her brilliant blog. Anyway, over at Comment is Free (the bit of our network where leaders live), there's a bit of Ciceronian discussion underway already. And, if it's not too much of a personal plug (OK, it probably is) – I'm on the BBC2 programme we mention (Yes We Can: The Lost Art of Oratory). The show is worth watching – and not because of me! There are some great contributors, including Bill Clinton and Gore Vidal. Finally, if you are suddenly feeling desperate to learn or brush up your Latin, here is a useful page of links and resources, hosted by the brilliant Iris Project, a charity that aims to get Latin teaching into state schools. It's nice and short, so I reproduce the full text of the leader here (rest of article).

"Fires of Vesuvius" by Mary Beard

Historian Mary Beard has a new book on the market, fascinating in its approach to telling us (average readers) what archaeology can - and cannot - tell us, even in this day of modern technological miracles and analysis. From The St. Petersburg Times Review: In 'Fires of Vesuvius' by Mary Beard, Pompeii's ruins have much to tell By David Walton, Special to the Times In print: Sunday, January 4, 2009 “Everything is not as it may at first seem," historian Mary Beard says of today's Pompeii, the Roman city buried by volcanic ash in an eruption of Mount Vesuvius on Aug. 27, 79 CE. The destruction of Pompeii is one of the best-remembered incidents from ancient history, not just for its drama, but also because an entire city "frozen in time" offers a unique glimpse into everyday life in the ancient world. Graffiti is still on the walls, bodies still in the postures of dying. But, as Beard points out in her wonderfully comprehensive The Fires of Vesuvius, Pompeii has two histories, one that ended with the eruption, another that began with the excavation. Throughout the 19th century people dug, reconstructed, speculated and theorized and, as millions today do, toured the site. Beard's book is, first of all, an excellent account of what the ruins of Pompeii can and cannot tell us. Archaeologists can now determine from preserved seeds and pollen exactly what plants grew in Pompeii's gardens. They can measure the plaque on the victims' teeth. Yet we cannot be sure what the upstairs rooms of houses were used for, or for certain where people slept. Nor can we assume that objects were in their ordinary locations. Rather than a city frozen in time, Pompeii was, Beard says, a city in flight — evidenced by the comparatively few bodies found. Especially misleading is the "austere modernist aesthetic, uncluttered, even uncomfortably empty," of reconstructed homes. Furniture and doors were burned away, leaving only bone hinges, bronze fittings and outlines of furnishings. Early visitors entered Pompeii through its cemeteries, which by Roman custom were outside the city. Victorian visitors were entering a city of the dead. We today enter through a Visitor Center — but the distinction goes beyond commercialism. For Beard, drawing on the latest archaeological findings, Pompeii is a living city. David Walton is a writer in Pittsburgh.

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The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found By Mary Beard Harvard University Press, 360 pages, $26.95

The Hind of Hinds

From Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History: A Study in traditions and Realities (1946).

The work she cited is Woman and the State on the Eve of Islam (1941), by Nabia Abbott (1897-1981), the first woman invited to the staff at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago in 1933, where she worked for the next 30 years until her retirement in 1963:

The love of power and strife that motivated Zenobia likewise characterized women of Arabia in the Islamic age. With a fury that may fairly be described as tigerish, women waged holy wars for and against the faith proclaimed by Mohammed. While the Prophet was still alive, one of his fiercest foes was a woman of a great clan called Hind, Hind al-Hunud, “the Hind of Hinds.” [I seriously doubt any of these women "loved" power and strife so much that it was their primary motivation in life!  This sounds to me like a woman brain-washed by the overwhelming sexist rubbish of the time, just after WWII, a massive exercise in testerone that resulted in the deaths of 50 million (or more) people world wide.]

According to Nabia Abbott, in an article on “Woman and the State on the Eve of Islam,” Hind al-Hunud lived in the kingdom of Kindah, founded in the fifth century A.D. She sprang from a people known as the Quraish, who had long been dominant at Mecca, the great city of the Prophet.

Tradition depicts her “as a woman holding to the heathen practices of Arabia, a wife whose virtue was not above suspicion, a mind that was quick to decisive actions.”

One of the heathen traditions to which she adhered was the cult of the Lady of Victory. Its function was to incite patriotism and lash patriots into ferocious fighting. The Lady of Victory was a woman of high social standing about whom the feminine cult members, likewise of high rank, gathered in the pavilion sacred to the local or tribal deity, within sight of the warriors whom they stirred to martial fervor by their war songs which they accompanied on their lutes. Around the Lady of Victory and her retinue the battle raged until it was lost or won.

In an armed contest between the Quraish and the forces of Mohammed, several of Hind al-Hunud’s relatives were engaged. That battle occurred at Badr. Her father, her uncle, and a brother were slain. But her husband, Abu Sifyan, survived and, with him, she prepared to wreak vengeance. When the time for the assault was ready, she as the Lady of Victory took her position in a sacred pavilion with fourteen or fifteen aristocratic women at her side. In the presence of these women the men were expected to fight, win or die. This time the Quraish were victors. The story then runs to the effect that, standing on a rock, among the corpses of the foe, the Hind of Hinds “exultantly flaunted in the face of the fallen enemy the general victory and her personal revenge, in spontaneous satirical verse which drew answer from the women of Mohammed’s party and later from Hassan ibn Thabit.”
Despite this triumph, the Hind of Hind’s husband afterward surrendered the city of Makkah to Mohammed. For that offense she wanted to kill her mate. But her husband defended himself by appealing to his people with the cry: “O people, become Moslems and be saved!” It was not long until Hind al-Hunud had to accept the Prophet’s religion herself. And her step-daughter, Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan, married Mohammed, as did other women, to forward their political designs or his, at least in part.

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You can find Beard's Woman as Force in History transcribed in full here.  Make what you wish of the Marxist line, which I believe is pure bullshit, but thanks to their organization's volunteer(s) for transcribing this book for publication online. See also: Distinguished Women of Past and Present Nubian Queens in the Nile Valley and Afro-Asiatic Cultural History, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (page 6, under "Lady of Victory Cult")

See The Hind of Hinds, February 29, 2008, Goddesschess blog.