The Unexplained

In June, while doing some research, I took some photos of a church that is going on 200 years old with a disposable camera.  I am not much for taking pictures so don't have a better camera any longer.  This is the view, above.  This is the largest the photo will show up on this blog, but the images are clickable for a better look.   Here is an enlargement of something odd I saw by the left railing of the double doors:

Is it a ghostly figure hovering above the top step?   Who knows?  There was no one there when I snapped the shot.

A Brief Synopsis of My Books

Some may have wondered what my books are about and haven't taken the time to go to the booksellers' sites to find out.  So I thought I'd render a brief synopsis of each one here in the order that I wrote them:

The Samaritan Treasure [1990]  Short fiction collection nominated for a Minnesota Book Award.  The stories narrate the Jewish experience throughout time from ancient Israel to Regency England and the American Midwest.

The Exodus Chronicles  [2005]  In this work of nonfiction I have assembled all that was said in antiquity about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt by the ancient historians and have also included some interesting tidbits from Medieval and modern writers.  I included my own commentaries about dates and other things relative to Egypt and primary texts from this land.  Basically, this book is an "Everything you ever wanted to know about the exodus"--or was there actually more than one?

The Pharaoh's Barber [2008]  Set in the court of Thutmose III, this tale of mystery and murder is experienced through the eyes of the king's own barber, a young Canaanite captive named Levi.  Who hated the pharaoh's beautiful new wife, Satiah, enough to kill her?  More than one individual has a motive, including the members of Thutmose's own family, beginning with his first wife, Neferura, the proud and iron-willed daughter of Hatshepsut.

The Priest [2008]  Father Raphael Arnheim is a man with an unusual past, who ultimately describes himself as "the worst priest in all of Christendom".   This erotic novel shows what can happen to a man before he realizes that love is "the one true and holy thing in the universe".

Jane Austen's Thimble [2009]  A novella whose setting is London.  Andrea Beller, a young American woman, has given up on life but a diverse cast of characters and a thimble she found at Chawton, the home of her favorite novelist, help Andrea to find her way back to happiness and solve the puzzle of her identity.

Lucien Galtier-Pioneer Priest [2010]  Biography of the first priest to come to the Minnesota Territory and who built the first church.  Born in France, youthful Father Galtier struggles to survive physically and spiritually in the rough frontier towns on the Mississippi river.

More On Royal DNA

Some say "yes", some say "no" but when it comes to testing the royal mummies of Egypt, the green light still flashes "Go, go, go"!

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110427/full/472404a.html?s=news_rss

The Return of Zahi Hawass

Like the Ghost of Christmas Past.  Why?  Because "no one else can do the job".  Sigh.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/egypts-antiquities-minister-rehired-less-than-a-month-after-leaving/

Baking Old Bones

This is old news but I missed it.  It's a method for facilitating the extraction of DNA from skeletal remains.  Interesting.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2008/0201-baking_out_dna.htm

Who You Are

Many people, when talk of ancestry arises, say "I am Heinz 57 Variety", chiefly due to the melting pot called America.   But, in reality, it is simpler than that--and at the same time more complex.  Studying the world of DNA has changed my view of ancestry entirely.  We inherit two sets of genes, one from each of our parents.  These genes determine our appearance, intelligence, and other traits and we can certainly favor one parent over the other in regard to all that.  We also inherit our blood type from one or the other of our parents.   These genes or alleles are very useful when it comes to determining our recent relatives, if that is in doubt but, in a most basic sense, we are never "Heinz 57 Variety".   That's because our "ancestral" DNA never varies, even though, living in a melting pot society, the various ethnic types that contributed to who we are certainly influenced other things about us.

If you are a male, you have inherited what is called y-DNA from your father in a chain that goes back indefinitely.   This DNA can be broken down into a haplogroup and the haplogroup into sub-clades so that one can pretty well narrow down what part of the world your distant male ancestor came from.  Studying the various surnames of men who have been tested by companies such as Family Tree DNA in various haplogroups and their subclades, it is quite amazing to see how these last names which seem to belong to various ethnicities--belong to persons who are related, regardless.  That's right.  Your last name can be Bailey but you can still have the same common ancestor as a man called Goldberg.   There were times when certain areas of the globe, including the Middle East and Europe, were devastated by catastrophic diseases.  On account of them many male lines died out and it was basically a case of the survival of the fittest.  In other words, at these dreadful periods in history the progenitors, men who were able to perpetuate their y-DNA into the future, became relatively few.  Minorities, like the Jews, were hit especially hard and that is why so many Jewish men with dozens of different last names [last names can be acquired by various means and are something relatively recent in the history of Mankind] have a common ancestor.  Of course, persons who lived in distant lands like the Far East or were isolated by great bodies of water, such as the Americas or even Scandinavia usually do not fit into this picture because foreigners normally did not go there in antiquity.  Some places were simply too far, too cold, beyond great mountains, or their men had reputations of being too fierce.  But, sometimes, for certains reasons, men went far from their own lands--like the crusaders did to battle over Jerusalem.

Of course, if you are a male, you also inherited your mothers mitochondrial DNA--but you cannot pass that on to your children.  You just pass your y-DNA on to your sons.  Mitochondrial or mtDNA also has haplogroups and it is not at all rare for a man's mtDNA to come from a different part of the world than his y-DNA did.  One of the reasons is that wandering men married or at least procreated with local women.  Mitochondrial DNA is passed on from mother to daughter in an unbroken chain going back many thousands of years.  If you are a female, the haplogroup your mtDNA belongs to is your unchanging ethnicity.  This has nothing to do with religion, citizenship--or any group of which you might consider yourself a part.  It is who you are in the most basic sense.  You do not inherit y-DNA from your father if you are a female, just some of his genes.  Being a woman, if you want to know where your remote paternal ancestors come from, your father or a brother, an uncle or a male cousin, need to be tested.  Your own DNA is of no use for determining this.

The science of microbiology or DNA testing has shown that people have many more relatives everywhere than they ever imagined--and that people are more alike than they ever considered.  DNA is immune to prejudice and national chauvanism.  It does not lie.  You may have believed your great-great-grandfather came from Ireland--and that may be so--but his own ancestors might have lived in Spain.

The Foreign Wives of Thutmose III

While almost nothing of the vast treasure that must have been buried with the great warrior pharaoh, Thutmose III, survives except some items left on his mummy, three of his concubines fared much better.  Their names are obviously foreign, probably West-Semitic, and are usually written as Menhet, Menwi, and Merti.  They ended up in my mystery novel, "The Pharaoh's Barber" and I made them sisters, although their true relationship is unknown.  I also gave them the formal Semitic names of Marta, Menukhah and Manahet and the last two do seem to correspond to the nicknames given them in antiquity.  These foreign girls were buried in a rock cut tomb in what is known as the Wady Gabbanat el-Qurud, discovered in 1916 by Herbert Winlock.  The tomb had already been robbed but some of the looted artifacts were recovered and the collection is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.  Above is a diadem bearing the gazelle heads commonly worn by secondary wives or concubines instead of uraei.  Only such golden objects and those made of stone survived as damp had gotten into the tomb and disintegrated the wood and, most unfortunately, the mummies.  Winlock thought the women had probably all died at the same time, possibly of a pestilence, and that is their fate in my book.  Before that, however, Marta, a very clever and beautiful girl, does a great service to her lord, Menkheperre Thutmose.  Here is an excerpt, describing the girls' first meeting with the great man, as viewed by the pharaoh's young barber:

"The Canaanite wives wore their colorful, embroidered dresses they had brought from home but they also had some beautiful golden things upon their heads and all kinds of jewelry on their necks, wrists and ankles.  Each one had a little ring in her nostril.  Their eyes were painted like the Egyptian wives, but not so much, and they were lacking reddened lips and cheeks.  But their own blood in  their cheeks gave them the blush of roses.   Instead of sandals, the sisters wore on their feet small shoes of yellow leather.  Levi was glad to see that the scorned sisters confronted the pharaoh, whom they did not know at all, bravely, and held their thin, arched noses proudly before them."

By the way, the person doing the observing was not born in Egypt but in Asia.  Probably, he had never seen the kind of flower we westerners call a rose, but he had surely seen rock roses, which look like this:

Although my book is not really geared toward young adults, it begins where my favorite teenage novel, "Mara, daughter of the Nile", by E. J. McGraw, left off.  I am as convinced as McGraw that Hatshepsut was not a nice lady.  Ultimately, these wives must have come to mean something to the king because they were given a sumptuous burial, including the wonderful jewelry that can be seen today.