Relativity, postmodernism, and the ancient world

As a university physics student, I learnt that the way in which we observe an experiment ultimately determines a large portion of the experiment's outcome (this is especially true of quantum and relativistic physics).  At first, this principle seems goofy, silly, and downright unrealistic.  But eventually, with enough professorial and mathematical encouragement, the unintended impact of observation became my established world-view.

Applying this trait of physics to the real world, I reason that since everyone perceives reality differently we will all have a different experience of reality.  And because we measure/understand reality based on our experiences, the whole concept of "reality" or "the real world" quickly dissolves into an infinite spectrum of realities that can only be grouped by their commonality.  Every individual "reality" being determined, at least in part, by the observer, his or her background, ideology, and personal history.

I am not the first to see the connection between Einsteinian physics and post-modernity.  The power of observation, which is what I understand post-modernism to be, drove notable physicist/mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, to turn to philosophy and theology after the collapse of Newtonian physics in the early 1900s.  Whitehead's book Religion in the Making is well worth the read for the way it tackles comparative religious study, and if I recall correctly, one of the first books of that academic discipline.

But what, I can hear you asking, is the connection with antiquity?

I was reminded of Einstein and the importance of one's perspective when I compared two books I am currently reading: Egypt After the Pharaohs 332 BC-AD 642, and The Last Pharaohs - Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30.  The former views the Ptolemaic dynasty as a break from Egypt's pharaonic tradition while the latter sees them as a continuation of that tradition.  Both studies take into consideration the same histories, the same papyrological evidence, but their approach to the Ptolemaic kingdom differs, one from the shores of Greece and the other from the temple in Memphis.  They agree on the facts, but disagree about their interpretation and their meaning.

So, which study reflects the reality of Ptolemaic Egypt?  Well, that all depends on your perspective.

When all else fails, hit something

Anecdotes are the icing on top of the cake of history.  Much like Oreo cookies, the best cakes have double icing, and the best histories have anecdotes about anecdotes.  While the Greek papyri themselves contain many anecdotes and little histories about the people of Ptolemaic Egypt, there are a few good anecdotes about the excavation of those same papyri.  The following story, taken from Turner's Greek Papyri: An Introduction and augmented by my imagination, is my favourite anecdote about the discovery of one cash of papyri.

In my last post, I mentioned how papyri were often reused as cartonnage in human and animal mummies.  Many surviving ancient works adress the human mummification process, but the knowledge of cartonnage being used in animal mummification had been lost to us moderns.  I say "had been lost" because that all changed during a winter excavation in 1900.

On January 16, 1900 Grenfell and Hunt led a dig in search of cartonnage papyri in the Ptolemaic cemeteries on the west side of the Fayyum.  One day, their team entered the ancient village Tebtynis (modern day Umm-el-Baragat).  In hopes of unearthing human mummies, the team determined the location of an ancient tomb.

Just imagine how excited (and relieved) those first on the scene would have been.  After years of tramping through Egyptian desert searching for papyri, they were able to calculate and predict the location of a Ptolemaic cemetery.

The first workman (I like to imagine Indiana Jones) makes his way down into the crypt.  At first everything is pitch black.  As his eyes adjust to the darkness, a host of millennia-old mummies slowly become visible.  But instead of human mummies tucked neatly in sarcophagi, there standing before him where the preserved remains of crocodiles!

Lifted to the heights of euphoria only to be brought crashing to earth by reality, this workman lashed out in a primal display of emotion, and smashed the nearest crocodile to pieces.  To his surprise, the mummified creature was stuffed with papyri like a librarian's piñata.

By the end of that year's excavations, Grenfell and Hunt had found papyri in about 2% of all mummified crocodiles, which goes to show that when you are at the end of your rope and all else fails, hit something.