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Tale of Two Shoes
"There are only two detectives for whom I have felt, in my own capacity as hunter-of-men, any deeply underlying sympathy . . . transcending racial idiosyncrasies and overleaping barriers of space and time. . . . These two, strangely enough, present the weird contrast of unreality, of fantasm and fact. One has achieved luminous fame between the boards of books; the other as kin to a veritable policeman. . . . I refer, of course, to those imperishables---Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, London, and Mr. Ellery Queen of West 87th Street, New York City."
---from 30 Years on the Trail
---by Dr. Max Pejchar*
*Ed. Note: Viennese police-consultant.
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1. OPERATION
INSPECTOR RICHARD QUEEN'S alter ego, which was in startling contrast with his ordinarily spry and practical old manner, often prompted him to utter didactic remarks on the general subject of criminology. These professorial dicta were habitually addressed to his son and partner-in-crime-detection, Ellery Queen, in moments when they browsed before their living-room fire, alone except for the slippery shadow of Djuna, the wraith-like gypsy lad who served their domestic needs.
"The first five minutes are the most important," the old man would say severely, "remember that." It was his favorite theme. "The first five minutes can save you a heap of trouble."
And Ellery, reared from boyhood on a diet of detectival advice, would grunt and suck his pipe and stare into the fire, wondering how often a detective was fortunate enough to be on the scene of a crime within three hundred seconds of its commission.
Here he would put his doubt into words, and the old man would nod sadly and agree---yes, it wasn't very often that such luck came one's way. By the time the investigator reached the scene the trail was cold, very cold. Then one did what one could to atone for the unsympathetic tardiness of fate. Djuna, hand me my stuff! . . .
Ellery Queen was no more the fatalist than he was the determinist, or pragmatist, or realist. His sole compromise with isms and ologies was an implicit belief in the gospel of the intellect, which has assumed many names and many endings through the history of thought. Here he swung wide of the fundamental professionalism of Inspector Queen. He despised the institution of police informers as beneath the dignity of original thinking; he pooh-poohed police methods of detection with their clumsy limitations---the limitations of any rule plagued organization. "I'm one with Kant at least to this extent," he liked to say, "that pure reason is the highest good of the human hodge-podge. For what one mind can conceive another mind can fathom . . ."
This was his philosophy in its simplest terms. He was very near to abandoning his faith during the investigation of Abigail Doorn's murder. Perhaps for the first time in his sharply uncompromising intellectual career, doubt assailed him. Not doubt of his philosophy, which had proved itself many times over in former cases, but doubt of his mental capacity to unravel what another mind had conceived. Of course he was an egoist---"bobbing my head vigorously with Descartes and Fichte," he used to remark . . . but for once in the extraordinary labyrinth of events surrounding the Doorn case he had overlooked fate, that troublesome trespasser on the private property of self-determination.
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FIVE PAST TEN
They've gone now, and I'm alone at last. I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won't waste a single moment of it. I shan't sleep it away. I won't dream it away either. I mustn't, because every moment of it will be far too precious.
I want to try to remember everything, just as it was, just as it happened. I've had nearly eighteen years of yesterdays and tomorrows, and tonight I must remember as many of them as I can. I want tonight to be long, as long as my life, not filled with fleeting dreams that rush me on towards dawn.
Tonight, more than any other night of my life, I want to feel alive.
* * *
Charlie is taking me by the hand, leading me because he knows I don't want to go. I've never worn a collar before and it's choking me. My boots are strange and heavy on my feet. My heart is heavy too, because I dread what I am going to. Charlie has told me often how terrible this school-place is: about Mr. Munnings and his raging tempers and the long whipping cane he hangs on the wall above his desk.
Big Joe doesn't have to go to school and I don't think that's fair at all. He's much older than me. He's even older than Charlie and he's never been to school. He stays at home with Mother, and sits up in his tree singing Oranges and Lemons, and laughing. Big Joe is always happy, always laughing. I wish I could be happy like him. I wish I could be at home like him. I don't want to go with Charlie. I don't want to go to school.
I look back, over my shoulder, hoping for a reprieve, hoping that Mother will come running after me and take me home. But she doesn't come and she doesn't come, and school and Mr . Munnings and his cane are getting closer with every step.
"Piggyback?" says Charlie. He sees my eyes full of tears and knows how it is. Charlie always knows how it is. He's three years older than me, so he's done everything and knows everything. He's strong, too, and very good at piggybacks. So I hop up and cling on tight, crying behind my closed eyes, trying not to whimper out loud. But I cannot hold back my sobbing for long because I know that this morning is not the beginning of anything --- not new and exciting as Mother says it is --- but rather the end of my beginning. Clinging on round Charlie's neck I know that I am living the last moments of my carefree time, that I will not be the same person when I come home this afternoon.
I open my eyes and see a dead crow hanging from thefence, his beak open. Was he shot, shot in mid-scream, as he began to sing, his raucous tune scarcely begun? He sways, his feathers still catching the wind even in death, his family and friends cawing in their grief and anger from the high elm trees above us. I am not sorry for him. It could be him that drove away my robin and emptied her nest of her eggs. My eggs. Five of them there had been, live and warm under my fingers. I remember I took them out one by one and laid them in the palm of my hand. I wanted them for my tin, to blow them like Charlie did and lay them in cotton wool with my blackbird's eggs and my pigeon's eggs. I would have taken them. But something made me draw back, made me hesitate. The robin was watching me from Father's rose bush, her black and beady eyes unblinking, begging me.
Father was in that bird s eyes. Under the rose bush, deep down, buried in the damp and wormy earth were all his precious things. Mother had put his pipe in first. Then Charlie laid his hobnail boots side by side, curled into each other, sleeping. Big Joe knelt down and covered the boots in Father's old scarf.
"Your turn, Tommo," Mother said. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was holding the gloves he'd worn the morning he died. I remembered picking one of them up. I knew what they did not know, what I could never tell them.
Mother helped me to do it in the end, so that Father's gloves lay there on top of his scarf, palms uppermost, thumbs touching. I felt those hands willing me not to do it, willing me to think again, not to take the eggs, not to take what was not mine. So I didn't do it. Instead I watched them grow, saw the first scrawny skeletal stirrings, the nest of gaping, begging beaks, the frenzied screeching at feeding time; witnessed too late from my bedroom window the last of the early-morning massacre, the parent robins watching like me, distraught and helpless, while the marauding crows made off skywards cackling, their murderous deed done. I don't like crows. I 've never liked crows. That crow hanging there on the fence got what he deserved. That's what I think.
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モーパーゴの兵士ピースフルが今年の青少年読書感想文全国コンクール高等学校の部の課題図書の1冊になっているらしい。
どうせなら、原文で読んで欲しいものだ。
ボブ・ディランの名曲"Blowin' In The Wind"の邦題は「風に吹かれて」だ。
この邦題に納得がいかない。
なぜ納得がいかないか。"Blowin'"が飽くまで能動態であって受動態ではないからだ。
拙訳を披露すると、「風に揺れながら」もしくは「風の中で揺れて」だ。
"be in motion due to some air or water current"
"blow"はこのような意味を持つが、これに対して「吹かれて」の訳は、"in motion"の部分を充分に表現しきれていない。
もし「吹かれて」と訳すなら、原文は"Blow'd By The Wind"でなければならない。
（こんな英語が慣用的なのかどうかは別として）
Words Without Bordersで紹介されたジョスラン・デュプレの「黒き頁岩」が気になる。
この作品はフランスの雑誌『La Nouvelle Revue Francaise(ラ・ヌーベル・ルビュ・
フランセーズ)』の2008年1月号(N°584)に掲載されたものらしい。
同サイトの英訳(by Paul Curtis Daw(ポール・カーティス・ドー))を読んで興味を持った
ので、原文を読んで見たいと思い、日本のアマゾンを探してみたが、日本では
La Nouvelle Revue Francaiseを取り扱っていない模様。
仕方なく、フランスのアマゾンを探したところ、すぐに見つかったので、買おうと思ったが、
送料が10,99～13EUR(約1,900～2,200円)かかるので、思いとどまった。
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目次
序章 六本木ヒルズ
第一章 武人の風雪
第二章 西国の風雲
第三章 二人の歳月
断章 山川草木・旅順紀行
第四章 旅順という山塊
終章 戦いすんで
あとがき
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序章 六本木ヒルズ
麻布上屋敷
六本木ヒルズという東京の街は、未来都市の模型を突然ここに持ってきて据えたような集落である。銀色の壁面をまぶしく湾曲させた、五十四階建ての巨大な森タワーが丘の上にそびえ、その周辺に、四十階建てのレジデンスと呼ばれる高級マンションをはじめ高層建築の群れが林立して、遠近法で描いたビュッフェの絵のような垂直の景観をつくりだしている。
そこに人々 のことを、ヒルズ族というのだそうだ。舗石が初秋の陽をはねかえす緩やかな斜面を、乳母車をおして下りてくる中年婦人のすがたもこの街の点景というところか。彼女が愛児とともに散策の足をはこぶ先は、「毛利庭園」である。それはビルの窓が覗きこむ擂鉢の底に、澄んだ水を溜めた「毛利池」とわずかな躑躅の群落を配した小公園だ。
入り口の表示板には「六本木ヒルズの緑のシンボルとして『空』と『緑』を感じられる日本庭園を作庭いたしました。この庭園では、古くからの地形を活かして池や流れを造るほか、クスノキ・サクラなど９本の既存の樹木を残して、春はサクラ、秋はモミジと季節の変化を楽しめる回遊式の庭園としました。平成十五年四月 六本木六丁目地区市街地再開発組合」とある。
毛利池の広さほどの空が真っ青な透明のドームとなって、頭上を覆っている。やはり庭園内に立つ別の表示板が、庭園のいわれを説明する。
「この地は、吉良庭討入りに加わった元赤穂藩士四十七人のうちの十人が預けられた長門長府藩毛利家麻布日ヶ窪上屋敷の一部である。中国地方の戦国大名毛利元就の孫に当たる秀元を初代とする毛利家は、現在の山口県下関市に藩庁を置いた外様大名(三万六千二百石)である」
この説明は誤りで、毛利本家は三十六万九千石、萩に本城をおき萩藩と称した。初代藩主は元就の曾孫にあたる秀就である。
現在の山口県下関市長府に城下をおいた長府藩（初代藩主秀元）は毛利の支藩であり、その長府藩の上屋敷が、麻布のここにあった。文化九年(一八一二)の『武鑑』では毛利甲斐守の公称石高を五万石余としてある。
今の麻布十番通り一帯は、徳川家康が江戸に城地を定めた当時からひらけた町だが、麻布台を下りた日ヶ窪あたりは、その名のとおり陽射しのわるい湿地帯のような場所だった。
「毛利庭園」の表示板には、さらに赤穂義士のことが書かれているので、ついでに読んでおこう。
元禄十五年(一七〇二)十二月十五日、藩主綱元は、家老田代要人を請取人として江戸詰諸藩士三百余人を、大目付仙石伯耆守邸(現在の港区虎ノ門二丁目八)に遣わした。
岡嶋八十右衛門常樹
吉田沢右衛門兼貞
武林唯七隆重
倉橋伝助武幸
間新六光風
村松喜兵衛秀直
杉野十平次次房
勝田新左衛門武尭
前原伊助宗房
小野寺幸右衛門秀富
の十人が日ヶ窪の江戸屋敷に収容された。
長府藩にお預けとなった赤穂義士十人が、この屋敷の裏門より送りこまれたとき、藩主毛利甲斐守綱元は在府中だった。ただちに屋敷内の長屋を急づくりの牢屋に仕立てて義士たちを入れ、あくまでも罪人として厳重に収檻した。
編年体の公式長府藩史『毛利家乗』では、受け入れ前半のいきさつを省略して、「日に饋ルニ盛饌ヲ以テス。必ず二膳アリ」と豪華な食事を供したとしているが、最初は粗末な一汁一菜しか与えなかった。
同じ義士を預かった大名でも熊本の細川綱利は、義士を仏子の鑑として優遇し、彼らを牢ではなく藩邸の座敷に収容した。毎日のご馳走ぜめに義士たちが音を上げたという。それにくらべて毛利氏のひどい仕打ちが江戸庶民の不評をかった。
「何等の冷酷、何等の無同情、武士の情も何もあったものではない。それで侠熱なる江戸っ子は非常に憤慨した」(福本誠『元禄快挙真相録』)
悪評に気づいて長府藩が義士のあつかいを変えたという話は、長府藩みずからが別に書き遺した資料に裏付けられている。
『毛利家乗』に収録された赤穂浪人預り一件の末尾に「遺臣等ヲ我ガ邸ニ看護スルヨリ幕裁ヲ受クルマデノ事実ハ別ニ赤穂浪人御預記ニ詳悉セリ」と、付記している。
その『赤穂浪人御預記』は下関市立長府図書館が所蔵する。
長州藩の義士にたいする冷遇を、後世におよんでも侮蔑をもって語る史家が少なくない。しかし長府藩みずからが、その状況を詳細な「事実」として記録したことの意味、そして二百数十年にわたる面従腹背の姿勢が、幕末の倒幕運動となって噴き出したことに思いを届かせる人はいないようだ。
関ヶ原で西軍の総大将となり、敗戦後、徳川に煮え湯をのまされたことへの屈折と卑屈な体質が、長く毛利氏の対幕姿勢に反映したのである。
幕府にむける怨嗟の視線が、幕府の警戒心を刺激した。ささいなことに因縁をつけられ、取りつぶしになるのではないかという密かな恐怖心を、毛利氏はいつもただよわせていた。
一、浪人に爪楊枝を与えてもよろしいか。
一、毛抜きを所望しているが与えてもよろしいか。
一、扇を所望しているが与えてもよろしいか。
一、発病したとき医者に診せてもよろしいか。
・・・・・・・・・・・・。
卑屈にそんなことを一々伺ったことが、細部にわたって『赤穂浪人御預記』に記録されている。やがて元禄十六年(一七〇三)二月四日「幕府、赤穂ノ遺臣ニ死ヲ賜フ。我ガ藩士進藤某等、コレガ死ヲ介ス」とあって、義士たちの自刃の実況を詳細に記録している。
岡嶋、吉田、武林といった順で切腹の座について。介錯人には五人の藩士が選ばれた。つまり一人で二人ずつを介錯した。
司馬遼太郎氏は、乃木希典のことを書いた『殉死』で、そのことを、「元禄のころの長府毛利家は士風がよほどおとろえていたのか、江戸詰めで剣を使える者がすくなく、浪士の切腹にあたってそれを介錯---首を落す---ことができる者はわずか五人しかいなかった」と云っている。
介錯人五人と聞いて、「士風がよほどおとろえていた」と即断し、地方の小藩の士風を嘲笑するのはどうであろうか。このとき伊予松山藩も預かった十人の義士を、五人の藩士が介錯している。では松山藩の士風もよほどおとろえていたことになるのか。
この日、長府藩邸で三番目に切腹の座についた武林唯七を介錯した藩士は、はじめての経験で動転したのか、手許が狂って一撃に失敗した。
「イマダ死セズ。顔色自若、即チ起キテ介者ヲ顧ミテ曰ク。徐ニセヨト。声イマダ了ラザルニ首隕ツ」
『毛利家乗』では、簡潔ではあるが隠さずこのように記録した。司馬さんの餌食にされても仕方がない場面だ。『殉死』は文中これを参考にして、悲惨な介錯の状況を次のように再現する。
榊は唯七の背後にまわり、唯七が腹に短刀を突き入れるや、あわただしく太刀をふりおろした。しかし太刀は唯七の頭蓋の下辺に激しくあたったのみで刃が跳ねかえり、落とせなかった。唯七は前に倒れ、しかし起きあがり、血みどろのまま姿勢を正し、「お静かに」と、榊に注意した。二度目の太刀で唯七の首が落ちた。
司馬さんは『殉死』の冒頭あたりで、「この書きものを、小説として書くのではなく」といっているが、長府藩士が介錯に失敗する情景は、みごとな想像力でできあがった手練の描写である。
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Table of Contents
List of Maps
Introduction
Sumer
The Straits of Trade
Camels, Perfumes, and Prophets
The Baghdad-Canton Express
The Taste of Trade and the Captives of Trade
The Disease of Trade
Da Gama's Urge
A World Encompassed
The Coming of Corporations
Transplants
The Triumph and Tragedy of Free Trade
What Henry Bessemer Wrought
Collapse
The Battle of Seattle
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
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1
SUMER
The messages we receive from [the] remote past were neither intended for us, nor chosen by us, but are the casual relics of climate, geography, and human activity. They, too, remind us of the whimsical dimensions of our knowledge and the mysterious limits of our powers of discovery.---Daniel Boorstin
Sometime around 3000 BC, a tribe of herders attacked a small community of Sumerian farmers at harvest-time. From a safe distance, the attackers used slingshots, spears, and arrows that allowed them to achieve surprise. The farmers responded by closing in on their attackers with maces. The maces---a rounded stone attached to the end of a stout stick, designed to bash in the head of an opponent---was the first weapon specifically intended for use solely against fellow humans. (Animals had thick, angulated skulls that were rarely presented at an ideal angle to mace wielders.) Capable of crushing a man's fragile, round skull whether he was coming toward an attacker or running away, the mace proved especially effective.
There was nothing unusual about an attack at harvest time; the herders' goats and sheep were highly sensitive to disease and the vagaries of climate, and thus the nomadic tribe's survival required frequent raids to take grain from its more reliably provisioned crop-growing neighbors. In this particular battle, the herders wore a strange, shiny piece of headgear that seemed to partially protect them. Hard, direct mace blows, once lethal, now merely stunned, and many blows simply glanced off the headgear's smooth surface. This protective advantage radically changed the tactical balance of power between the two sides, enabling the herders to devastate the defending farmers.
After the attack, the surviving farmers examined the headgear from the few fallen herders. These "helmets" contained a sheet, one-eighth inch thick, of a wondrous new orange material fitted over a leather head cover. The farmers had never seen copper before, since none was produced in the flat alluvial land between the Tigris and Euphrates. Their nomadic rivals had in fact obtained the metal from traders who lived near its source hundreds of miles to the west, in the Sinai Desert. It was not long before Sumerian farmers obtained their own supplies, enabling them to devise more lethal spiked copper-headed maces, to which the herders responded with thicker helmets. Thus was born the arms race, which to this day relies on exotic metals obtained through commerce.
How did these farmers and herders obtain the copper for their helmets, and how was this trade conducted over the hundreds of miles between their farms and pastures and the copper mines? Paleoanthropologists believe that the best place to begin is about sixty to eighty thousand years ago, when the first genetically modern populations of humans in Africa began to develop more complex tools, pierce shells (presumably used in necklaces), and produce abstract images with pieces of red ochre. About fifty thousand years ago, small numbers of them probably migrated via Palestine into the Fertile Crescent and Europe. At some point prior to this trek, language developed, enabling more complex, uniquely "human" behavior: adroitly carved animal bone and antler tools, cave paintings and sculpture, and refined missile technologies, such as the atlatl, a specially crafted stick used to improve the range and accuracy of the spear. These increasingly sophisticated skills probably made possible yet another activity characteristic of modern humans: long-distance trade in the new weapons, tools, and knickknacks.
Historians, on the other hand, traditionally start with Herodotus's description, written around 430 BC, of the "silent trade" between the Carthaginians and "a race of men who live in a part of Libya beyond the Pillars of Hercules" (the Straits of Gibraltar), most likely today's west Africans:
On reaching this country, [the Carthaginians] unload their goods, arrange them tidily along the beach, and then, returning to their boats, raise a smoke. Seeing the smoke, the natives come down to the beach, place on the ground a certain quantity of gold in exchange for the goods, and go off again to a distance. The Carthaginians then come ashore and take a look at the gold; and if they think it represents a fair price for their wares, they collect it and go away; if, on the other hand, it seems too little, they go back aboard and wait, and the natives come and add to the gold until they are satisfied. There is perfect honesty on both sides; the Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals in value what they have offered for sale, and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been taken away.Alas, Herodotus's description of the decorum displayed on each side has an aroma of myth. Yet he probably got right the basic scenario right. On some unrecorded occasion deep in prehistory, a man, or several men, initiated early long-distance trade by setting out on the water in boats.
Hunger most likely got man into those primitive craft. Twenty thousand years ago, northern Europe resembled modern Lapland: a cold, uncultivated panorama dotted with fewer and smaller trees than are there today. Europe's first Homo sapiens, probably fresh from wiping out their Neanderthal rivals, subsisted primarily on large game, particularly reindeer. Even under ideal circumstances, hunting these fleet animals with spear or bow and arrow is an uncertain enterprise. The reindeer, however, had a weakness that mankind would mercilessly exploit: it swam poorly. While afloat, it is uniquely vulnerable, moving slowly with its antlers held high as it struggles to keep its nose above water. At some point, a Stone-Age genius, realized the enormous hunting advantage he would gain by being able to glide over the water's surface, and built the first boat. Once the easily overtaken and slaughtered prey had been hauled aboard, getting its carcass back to the tribal camp would have been far easier by boat than on land. It would not have taken long for mankind to apply this advantage to other goods.
Cave paintings and scattered maritime remains suggest that boats first appeared in northern Europe around fifteen thousand years ago. These early watercraft were made from animal skins sewed over rigid frames (most often antler horns) and were used for both hunting and transport, most commonly with a paddler in the rear and a weapon-bearing hunter or passenger in front. It is no accident that the reindeer-bone sewing needle appears simultaneously in the archeological record, since it is necessary for the manufacture of sewn-skin vessels. These first boats predate the more "primitive" dugout canoe, for the cold, steppe-like vista of northern Europe could not grow trees wide enough to accommodate a fur-clad hunter.
Only the most durable remnants, mainly stone tools, survive to provide hints about the nature of the earliest long-range commerce. One of the earliest commodities traded by boat must have been obsidian, a black volcanic rock (actually, a glass) that is a favorite of landscapers and gardeners around the world. Prehistoric man valued it not for its aesthetic properties, but rather because it was easily chipped into razor-sharp, if fragile, cutting tools and weapons. The historical value of obsidian lies in two facts: first, it is produced in only a handful of volcanic sites, and second, with the use of sophisticated atomic fingerprinting techniques, individual samples can be traced back to their original volcanic sources.
Obsidian flakes dating to over twelve thousand years ago found in the Francthi Cave in mainland Greece originated from the volcano on the island of Melos, one hundred miles offshore. These artifacts must have been carried in watercraft, yet there are no archaeological remains, literary fragments, or even oral traditions that inform us just how the obsidian got from Melos to the mainland. Were these flakes conveyed by merchants who traded them for local products, or were they simply retrieved by expeditions from the mainland communities who valued them?
Obsidian atomic fingerprints have been used to examine flows of the material through regions as disparate as the Fertile Crescent and the Yucatan. In the Middle East, the researcher Colin Renfrew matched up sites with sources dating from around 6000 BC. The amount of obsidian measured at each excavation site fell off dramatically with distance from its source, strongly suggesting that this was a result of trade. For example, all the stone blades found in the Mesopotamian sites came from one of two sites in Armenia. At a site 250 miles away from its volcanic source, about 50 percent of all of the chipped stone found was obsidian, whereas at a second site five hundred miles away from the source, only 2 percent of the chipped stone was obsidian.
These Stone-Age obsidian routes put into modern perspective the costs of prehistoric commerce. Transporting a load of obsidian between Armenia and Mesopotamia was the prehistoric equivalent of sending a family Christmas package from Boston to Washington, DC. But instead of paying a few dollars and handing the package over to a brown-clad clerk, this ancient shipment consumed two months (including the return trip) of a single trader's labor---very roughly, about $5,000 to $10,000 in current value.
With the advent of agriculture, this new maritime technology spread to settled farmers, who adopted the skin-and-frame design for river travel. A pattern of commerce commenced that would remain unchanged for thousands of years: traders from advanced farming communities would transport grain, farm animals, and basic manufactured items such as cloth and tools downriver to exchange for the wares, mainly animal skins, of the hunter-gatherers. Archeologists usually find the remains of these prehistoric markets on small, unforested river islands. This is no coincidence; these locations not only took advantage of boat transport but also minimized the odds of a successful ambush.
Axe and adze (chisel) blades, dating to about 5000 BC, survive as the main evidence of this Stone-Age waterborne commerce. Archaeologists have identified Balkan quarries as the source of the ax and blade material, fragments of which are found all the way from the mouth of the Danube at the Black Sea to the Baltic and North seas. These durable stone artifacts, found far from their identifiably unique sources, attest to a lively long-distance exchange in a rich multitude of goods.
Water transport is by its nature cheaper and more efficient than land carriage. A draft horse can carry about two hundred pounds on its back. With the help of a wagon and a good road, it can pull four thousand pounds. With the same energy expenditure, the same animal can draw as many as sixty thousand pounds along a canal towpath, a load that could be managed by small ancient sailing ships.
Herodotus also described similar sewn-skin vessels carrying wine "stored in casks made of the wood of the palm-tree." The ships were "round, like a shield," made of hide, and propelled by two Armenian merchants down the Euphrates to Babylon. Here, then, is the direct descendant of the earliest cargo ship used in maritime trade, a vessel relatively round in shape---and thus slow---so as to accommodate the most weight with the smallest crew and the minimal amount of building material. (By contrast, warships since ancient times have been narrow and fast, with smaller carrying capacities.)
The largest of these boats carried about fourteen tons and came equipped with several donkeys, so that at journey's end the wood frames could be scrapped and the precious skins packed up and carried back to Armenia on the beasts. Herodotus explains:
It is quite impossible to paddle the boats upstream because of the strength of the current, and that is why they are constructed of hide instead of wood. Back in Armenia with their donkeys, the men build another lot of boats to the same design.After returning to Armenia, the farmers would refit the skins over new frames and load the boats with fresh cargo, and the several-month journey to bartering centers would begin anew. No doubt, the Stone Age hunter-gatherers and farmers of northern Europe also paddled their goods downstream and packed their craft upstream in similar fashion.
Such were the likely beginnings of trade. Yet out of the desire to attack (or defend) territory was born one of the earliest and most enduring motifs of its history---the exchange of grain from advanced farming communities living in alluvial areas for metals, generally found in less fertile locales.
Around six thousand years ago, man figured out how to purify the abundant copper ore found just below the layers of the pure metal of the first virgin mines. Not long after, the Ergani mines in mountainous Anatolia (modern-day Asian Turkey) began shipping copper to the early settlements at Uruk (in what is now southern Iraq, about a hundred miles west of Basra). The Euphrates River connected Ergani and Uruk, and although the vessels of the day could easily float several tons of copper downstream to Uruk in a few weeks, the transport of hundreds of tons of grain to Anatolia, against the current, would have been much more problematic.
Later Mesopotamian civilizations took advantage of more favorably placed Persian Gulf mineral sources. The appearance of written records just before 3000 B.C. offers fleeting glimpses of a massive copper-grain trade that flourished along this route. The land of milk and honey from the ancient Sumerian creation myths was a place known as "Dilmun," celebrated for its wealth and probably located in modern-day Bahrain. Its prosperity, however, did not come from its relatively fertile soil, but rather from its strategic position as a trading post for copper produced in the land of Magan, in what is today Oman, just outside the Persian Gulf's entrance at the Strait of Hormuz.
Not far from modern-day Qal'at al-Bahrain, the archaeological excavation of ancient Dilmun's likely location has yielded a treasure trove of Bronze Age objects. The site covers only about fifty acres but contained a population of about 5,000, likely far more than could have been supported by the city's agricultural hinterland. Cuneiform texts record that small shipments, usually consisting of a few tons of barley, began to travel down the Gulf towards Dilmun and Magan around 2800 B.C. By the end of the millennium, these grain cargoes increased to as much as several hundred tons per shipload. At an astonishingly early point, history affords an ancient equivalent of Las Vegas-a large population living in relatively barren surroundings whose very survival depended upon large amounts of food imported from hundreds of miles away.
Dilmun's excavation provides a tantalizing, and oft times highly personal, window on what the Sumerian Persian Gulf grain-copper trade might have looked like. The town sat on an island and was supplied with a generous spring issuing what the ancients called "sweet," or fresh, water. By 2000 B.C., its city walls enclosed an area almost the size of the biggest Mesopotamian city, Ur. In its center sat a municipal square, one end of which opened on the sea gate; at the other end stood a building filled with seals and scales, almost certainly a customs house. Piled high around the square would have been huge baskets of barley and dates from the banks of the Tigris, while the more precious cargo-Mesopotamian cloth as well as ivory and ingots of copper bound for Ur-stood just outside the customs house, guarded by nervous sailors while their officers argued, bribed, and cajoled the officials inside.
If the year was 1800 B.C., these ingots would likely have been bound for the warehouses of Ea-nasir, the largest copper merchant in Ur, where archaeologists have discovered a large cache of clay tablets detailing this strategic trade. One tablet records a shipment of twenty tons of the metal, while another bears the complaint of a client, one Nanni: You said, "I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin." That is what you said, but you have not done so; you offered bad ingots to my messenger saying "Take it or leave it." Who am I that you should treat me so? Are we not both gentlemen?"
The curiosity and drive of the first metal craftsmen who produced the copper in Ea-nasir's warehouses must have been remarkable. The process in which sulfur, oxygen, chlorine, or carbonate, depending on the type of ore, are removed from it to yield the pure metal-smelting-first saw the light of day in approximately 3500 B.C. The metallurgists of the Fertile Crescent soon began mixing their local copper with an exotic imported metal, tin. Not only was the new hammered copper/tin alloy as hard and durable as that of the previous copper/arsenic and copper/antimony alloys, but it melted at a much lower temperature than pure copper. Better yet, it did not bubble and was thus easily cast.
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Table Of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Contemporary Italian Philosophy: The Confrontation between Religious and Secular Thought
Maurizio Pagano
Part 1. Marking the Borders: Historical Legacies
1. The Desire for Eternal Life: The Platonic Roots of Western Political Science and Its Ethical and Theological Consequences
Carlo Sini
2. Philosophy, Poetry, and Dreaming
Sergio Givone
3. Christianity and Nihilism
Vincenzo Vitiello
4. Philosophy and Christian Theology Today: A Hermeneutic Circularity as Fact and Task
Giovanni Ferretti
5. Ontology of Actuality
Gianni Vattimo
Part 2. Crossing the Borders: Current Thematizations
6. Metaphysics of Thinking, Metaphysics of Being
Virgilio Melchiorre
7. The Truth of Existence and the Sacred (ethos anthropo daimon)
Mario Ruggenini
8. Transcendental without Illusion: Or, The Absence of the Third Person
Marco Maria Olivetti
9. Finitude and Responsibility: For an Ethics of the Finite in the Time of Risk
Salvatore Natoli
10. Praise of Modesty
Pier Aldo Rovatti
Part 3. Opening the Borders: The Appeal of the World
11. Logics of Delusion
Remo Bodei
12. Toward a Symbolic of Sexual Difference
Luisa Muraro
13. On Virtue
Emanuele Severino
14. Two Concepts of Utopia and the Idea of Global Justice
Salvatore Veca
15. The World and the West Today: The Problem of a Global Public Sphere
Giacomo Marramao
16. Names of Place: Border
Massimo Cacciari
Selected Bibliography
About the Editors
Contributors
Index
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