'Jordan Codices' just another fake from the souk

There are few subjects on which the media is more carelessly gullible than ancient archaeology. Reporters trained to check claims and counter-claims as a matter of dull, daily course, fall time after time for publicity-seeking pretenders, or fund-starved chancers claiming to have discovered the authentic face of Julius Caesar or lost bits of the Bible story.

And so, to no surprise at all, it came to pass with the lead tablets the size of credit cards proclaimed as biblical secrets by the BBC and almost everybody else last week.

Yes, of course I know how facts can spoil a good story but please.

How hard could it have been to find the people who knew that these objects were just one tiny part of the massive fake-mountains of the middle east?

That means people who know about Greek inscriptions (we still have them) and not enthusiasts for Christian entertainment.

Peter Thonemann in the TLS this week explains briefly and patiently why.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter: You do not seem to grasp the fact that all of life is fake.

Some deceptions are more deceptive than others, but there is nothing that, when examined minutely enough, will not turn out to be a hoax.

For example, you keep shrinking this box, but I have been taught polite manners, so I am not going to mention it.

Here is a sensational article: [Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa, By NICHOLAS WADE New York Times. An analysis implies that modern language originated only once, in southern Africa, a surprising finding.]

Clayton Burns Location Vancouver

This is a clear and compelling article by Nicholas Wade. Perhaps the deepest mystery of language is that it is such a decisive tool, yet still so elusive. So opaque to explication.

As elementary a subject as the borderlands (badlands) between grammar and rhetoric will probably remain undefined forever, despite the force that could theoretically be applied from semantics and the philosophy of language.

Hawthorne in \"The Scarlet Letter\" employs Result and Manner clause clusters (and Manner and Result) at key points of the narrative--for example, in realizing the symbolic value of the scarlet letter itself, yet we have no linguistic description of adverbial clause clustering that fully brings out its cognitive implications: If we see repeated clusters of Reason and Result in the Oxford Companion to Cosmology so as to imprint the rhetorical topic of invention of Cause and Effect into the text, we might infer that an Oxford Rhetoric of Science and Medicine based on its Paperback Reference resources would promote not only explanatory power in students, but also the ability to perceive patterns in research.

Under \"Baryonic dark matter\" (under \"dark matter\"): \"This conclusion is directly affirmed by studies of galaxy clusters, because in the process of their formation the ambient gas gets heated up to such temperatures (typically tens of millions of degrees) that it emits brightly in *X-rays, and can easily be detected by satellites such as *XMM-Newton and *Chandra.\"

The manner in which linguistics and philosophy of language professors think about and write about language is often trivial to the point of extinction. (See Language Log). They should be required to undertake a program of reading in texts such as Mark Ashcraft's great \"Cognition,\" the Oxford Companion to Cosmology, and the COBUILD English Grammar, so as to break the bounds of their vanishingly tiny \"mind-set.\"

Still, they might not be able to do so with good effect: \"Whether or not the Universe is truly infinite in extent is something we will never know, because the finite *age of the Universe and the finite *speed of light restrict our knowledge to the *observable Universe\" (\"open Universe\").

In \"event horizon\": \"However, if the Universe is accelerating, objects far enough away from us will be receding so swiftly that their light can never reach us, even if the Universe becomes infinitely old.\"

Conditional and Result clusters are just as intriguing as Reason and Result. Do we have programs for teaching counterfactuals, for example, or do we just assume the language (even if there are more than 150 counterfactuals in \"Great Expectations\" alone)?

An equally sensitive index to the poverty of thought about language is the international fake English industry--Kaplan, College Board, IELTS. Probably larger than Wal-Mart in revenues every year.

A third index--beyond adverbial subordination and Kaplanesque (Washington Post) buffoonery in English--is to be found in lyric poetry. If we were to ask a philosopher of language or a linguistics professor to explain William Blake's \"The Sick Rose,\" we would get a remarkably distorted account. Just as in M.H. Abrams's inept take in his symbol entry in his glossary of literary terms.
There is no reason we cannot assimilate fossil light.

But the far reaches of language will never approach us.

An excellent project for The TLS would be to review in total Oxford Paperback Reference--Science and Medicine (at least a dozen of the volumes). Biomedicine, for example.