Great Caesar's Ghost! It's the New Year Again!

It's a remarkable thing, this celebration of the New Year. It's not like things are suddenly far better or far worse just because the calendar ticks over and we add one to the year. It's more of a functional thing these days, as the record-keeping and data-crunching changes one of the four digits in the year and we keep going one day at a time.

The recognition of a New Year, however, despite Dick Clark's longevity to the contrary, is not at all a new thing. Ancient people recognized a new year. The Babylonians, who knew a thing or two about astronomy, marked the first New Moon after the Vernal Equinox. This was not long into spring, which was a time of renewal of crops and planting and all manner of other survival-minded things. 

The Romans, not wanting to seem inferior, followed in those footsteps, so much so that they marked the new year in spring as well — which, by our way of thinking, is nowhere near January 1. (I challenge you to find a part of the planet that has its January 1 in the middle of spring.)

But the Romans, ever wanting to improve, began to play around with the calendar, with this and that emperor moving things along ever so slightly, in the middle of naming buildings and statuary after themselves. Soon, it was all out of whack.

Leave it to Julius Caesar to fix things. (He fixed a lot of other things as well, among them the whole of Roman law and the border with Gaul &151; after he got through with the Gauls, they didn't need a border anymore.)

Caesar declared that January 1 was the start of the new year. This was just fine, if you look at things in a certain way, as Caesar often did, because January celebrated Janus, the god of beginnings. So the first day of January began the new year. (Caesar's moving the beginning of the new year meant that one year had 445 days in it, but that's beside the point.)

With the passing of the Roman Empire came the Dark Ages, and the ignoring of the celebration of New Year, for a few hundred years, at least. But things got back on track in the Middle Ages, and we've been celebrating the beginning of each new year ever since — even if it's in the middle of winter (or summer, in the Southern Hemisphere). One exception to this, of course, would be the British Empire, which took until 1751, when the Empire was beginning to be on its way out, that the beginning of the year shifted from March 1 to the more commonly used January 1. 

Other cultures, mainly Eastern, still celebrate the New Year on other days. Western tradition, however, has the vast majority of New Year's celebrations on the first day of January. Caesar would be proud.

Ancient Ill Will Set in Stone

Enmity can survive through the ages.

That's the message from the discoverers of an ancient Greek text filled with a curse against, not the king or any figure of authority, but a common grocer. Seems one of the people living in the city of Antioch along about 1,700 years ago had a grudge against a certain Babylas, so much that it resulted in a curse being set in stone — in this case, a tablet with cuneiform carved into it.

We don't have the carver's name (or even initials), so we can't trace the curse back to the source, but we do know — thanks to the efforts of a translator who worked for two years (because of the fragility of the tablet) — what the curse said:

"O thunder-and-lightning-hurling Iao, strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer. As you struck the chariot of Pharaoh, so strike his [Babylas'] offensiveness."

You have to love the directness of the language: straight appeal to the god-like figure (in this case, the Greek word for Yahweh, Iao) and then the reference to one of the Old Testament's signature events, the death of the Pharaoh in the un-parting of the Red Sea. This guy is not messing around.

But he's just getting warmed up.

The text goes on thus:

"O thunder—and-lightning-hurling Iao, as you cut down the firstborn of Egypt, cut down his [livestock?] as much as..."

Sadly, just as the writer was getting warmed up, his carving knife broke or his efforts were interrupted by war or a family dispute or something similar — or, the more likely occurrence, he wrote as much as he liked but what we have is what has survived down through the years.

Still, it's powerful stuff, at least in the asking. He's obviously winding up again with the second hit from above, the reference to thunder and lightning raining down on the suggested target of Iao's wrath. He's also gone back to the Exodus again and brought in the killing of the firstborn sons of all Egypt. This is the thing that eventually unhardened the Pharaoh's heart enough for him to let the Israelites go, at least for a time, before pursuing them into the path of the Red Sea.

The guy who did the translating, a staffer at the University of Washington, said he hadn't encountered a curse of a grocer before. There's a first time for everything, apparently. 

Also lost to the sands of time is the result of this ancient man's imploring. Did Babylas, whoever he was, suffer the slings and lightning bolts of outraged Iao? Who knows. It wasn't written down — or at least it hasn't been found yet.

Ancient People, Modern Beds

We tend to think of the bed as a (historically speaking) relatively recent innovation. Not even close.

Try 77,000 years ago.

That's the figure put forth by a group of archaeologists at a dig in South Africa. At a place called Sibudu, these scientists have discovered very, very old mats of grass and plants on the floor of a rock shelter. The people who crafted these beds covered them with wild quince leaves, which are naturally insect-repellent — further evidence that these were the Stone Age equivalent of bedrolls. (This theory is not as far-fetched as it sounds — certain indigenous people in Africa use these leaves for the same purpose.)

So the warriors of old weren't as rough-and-ready as we once thought. What's the big deal? Well, for the previous oldest bedding on record, you'll have to add about 37,000 years. We're talking way back in history for this new find.

The archaeologists found layer upon layer of bedding, suggesting that the people who once slept there did so repeatedly, either in sustained or in annual periods of time.

Now, we certainly don't have evidence of four-poster frames keeping that bedding off the ground. No, the bed-shaped collections of grass and leaves were certainly found lying on the ground. But the point is that the people who reclined on these "mats" were not lying on the ground. They were lying on something that made their sleep a bit more sound, thanks not only to the slight cushion and bit of warmth provided by the material but also the insect-free nature of the rest and recovery time.

The scientists discovered, in further evidence that this settlement wasn't a one-off, evidence of burned-off bedding. The wild quince kept certain pests away, to be sure, but the cave would have been home to a large number of species, any one of which would have found the bedding as appetizing as the people. When a mat had deteriorated enough to be unusable, the "residents" responded by crafting a new mat, not changing their address. 

German Experts Defuse WWII Bomb in Rhine

Allied bombers targeted Koblenz, Germany, in 1944 and 1945, as part of a total drop of nearly 2 million tons of bombs on the country in an effort to target the industries that were making the weapons and the machines and otherwise the armed forces and their war effort. The bombing efforts were so successful in and around Koblenz that not much of the city was left after the war &#151 except of 1.0-ton unexploded bomb, of course.

Like much of the country, Koblenz was site of a rebuilding effort after the end of the war. Now a pleasant city near the place where the Mosel River and the Rhine River meet up, Koblenz was nonetheless in the crosshairs of the bomb squad yet again recently, except this time it was to finish the job started by the British plane that dropped a bomb nearly 60 years ago.

Seems the bomb fell in the Rhine River, with nary an explosion to be had. The river being rather deep, it proved a good hiding place for this little ordnance number (undoubtedly not the first or last of its kind). In fact, the bomb, the largest aerial mine discovered so far, was found in 16 inches of water, surrounded by hundreds of sandbags, revealed by recent drops in water levels in the wake of a particularly dry German November.

The government wanted to get rid of it, of course, but on their own terms, so they ordered a mass evacuation of about 45,000 people in a 1.1-mile radius around the bomb's final resting place. The places targeted for evacuation included hospitals, shopping centers, and even a prison. (The government took special care with the inhabitants of that residence hall.)

The bomb squad had a particularly tough time because the explosives housed with the detonator were adept at reacting with water over time. Why the bomb hadn't yet gone off couldn't immediately be told, probably because the focus had been entirely on the defusal process.

In the end, the bomb didn't go off and everyone was able to go back to their normal lives — which is certainly something that didn't happen in the mid-1940s.