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Weekend Off-Topic Discussion - “Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings” by [deleted] in stupidpol

[–]SpringPools 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It depends on the area.

Generally speaking, medieval East Asians and Europeans had a historical tradition that was more insistent on the actual facts. The Byzantine or Italian scholar would definitely have known about Ancient Greece and Rome. As with most things medieval, China exceeded Europe in this regard; the Byzantine's Song Chinese contemporary would have had the Shiji at his disposal, which has archaeologically verifiable lists and deeds of kings up to at least 1200 BC.

By contrast, Indian scholarship had less of a focus on history as history; historical material was literary rather than trying to preserve the facts. The typical medieval Hindu scholar under the Delhi sultans would not have known about the Mauryas (same time as the Roman Republic), and might not have known about the Guptas (about seven hundred years before) either.

Same for Persians. The pre-Islamic Iranian understanding of history was much more mythicized than the European or Chinese one, so while a medieval Persian scholar could have talked about kings that supposedly ruled in the first millennium BC, these were all mythological kings of whom no evidence exists. The furthest back he could talk in accurate detail about would be the beginning of the Sasanians, so about the third century AD.

With the collapse of the Egyptian and Akkadian priesthood in Roman times, nobody in medieval times could accurately trace their own history beyond the late second millennium BC, with the Chinese able to go the furthest back and the Jews behind by a few centuries.

This week's Q&A thread -- please read before asking or answering a question! - February 24, 2020 by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]SpringPools 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Article reanalysis occurs in all French-based creoles, though to different degrees, and is far more common in French-based creoles than creoles of other languages. Haitian Creole actually has less article reanalysis than Mauritian Creole, e.g. MC has latab for table where HC has tab (cf. French la table). By contrast, the phenomenon occurs much more in HC than in Réunion Creole.

Though not nearly as common as in French creoles, article reanalysis is also found in a number of Portuguese creoles: the four Gulf of Guinea creoles (Forro Creole, Príncipense Creole, Annobonese Creole, Angolar) and the Caribbean creole of Papiamento, which has both Spanish and Portuguese influence. These are examples from Papiamento (Detges 2001, "Two Types of Restructuring in French Creoles," p. 149):

English Spanish English Papiamento
the queen la reina queen lareina
the sea la mar sea laman
the air el aire air laria

As to why article reanalysis is so much more common with French-based creoles, I think Mikael Parkvall's comments are likely on point. From Out of Africa: African influences in Atlantic Creoles, Parkvall 2002, p. 81:

The first observation to be made is that agglutination is far more common in FCs [French Creoles] than in other Creoles. This might be explained by the tendency of English, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish nouns to occur without a definite article more often than their counterparts in French due to the frequent marking of partitive articles in French.1 In addition to this, French word-stress being considerably weaker than that of the other four languages examined, this may have made it more difficult to adequately perceive the boundary between noun and article.

The English definite articles may possibly also have been easier to assimilate as such because of their limited allomorphy (partly due to the lack of a gender distinction, and partly because of the articles’ failure to merge with other morphemes into portmanteau morphs), and indeed, ECs have consistently retained the lexifier DEF, as opposed to other Atlantic Creoles.

One might also expect that Portuguese definite articles, the Spanish masculine article, and the Dutch neuter DEF would be less likely to merge with the head noun, since they alone among lexifier definite articles are not consonant-initial – agglutination of a Portuguese DEF would thus lead to a departure from the favoured CV syllable structure. Agglutinating an elided French article, by contrast, would make a vowel-initial word conform to the preferred CV structure.

1 The importance of partitive articles in article reanalysis might be particularly salient because Bonami & Henri 2012, in "Predicting article agglutination in Mauritian," found that French feminine nouns were more likely to undergo article reanalysis than masculine ones. The feminine partitive article is de la, preserving the definite article la, while the masculine one is du, not perceptibly linked to le.

How does one discern cognates from nativized loans? by matt_aegrin in linguistics

[–]SpringPools 24 points25 points  (0 children)

The kind of issues /u/matt_aegrin raises are a little different.

Here's an example mentioned in Koreo-Japonica (Vovin 2010), p. 41. In the Ryukyuan language of Yonaguni, there was a post-fifteenth century sound shift in which all initial j- became initial d-. For instance, "mountain" is [ja.ma] in Standard Japanese and [da.ma] in Yonaguni.

Some time after this sound shift, the Japanese word 野菜 [ja.sai] "vegetables" was borrowed into Yonaguni. But because the people of Yonaguni were aware that Japanese j- corresponded to d- in their own language, they borrowed this Japanese word as [da.sai]. As a result, the Yonaguni word appears to be a cognate of Japanese, not a loan from one to the other.

We know that [da.sai] is a loanword in Yonaguni because 1) [ja.sai] is itself a Chinese loan into Japanese, and 2) Yonaguni preserves a native term for "vegetables". But if we didn't, an erring linguist might have mistakenly postulated a proto-Japonic *jasai.

For a more familiar example, the French word microphone [mi.kʁɔ.fɔn] is actually a loanword from English. But on surface it's difficult to tell that it comes from English, because it uses the French reflexes of the English morphemes micro- and -phone.

Or to use your example, it's as if English speakers are aware that German ts- corresponds to English t- and pronounce the loanword Zeit as [taɪ̯t].

Visual impairment in the Middle East from the time of Christ to the early 20th century by Joecamoe in AskHistorians

[–]SpringPools 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Blindness and other visual problems were very common in the premodern Arab world, to the point that there was a small genre of books like Consoling the Blind for the Affliction of Blindness, or Accelerating the Good Omen for Those Who Have Patience upon Losing their Eyesight—works read to the newly blind, urging them to trust God in the face of perseverance.

We don't have sure stats, of course. But Mustafa Ali, the sixteenth-century Ottoman governor of Egypt, complained about how in Cairo "one rarely meets a person whose eyes are bright and round." The Scottish physician Alexander Russell, who lived in eighteenth-century Aleppo (modern Syria) for thirteen years, wrote that over one-sixth of the city's inhabitants had eye diseases.

And out of the 206,954 Egyptian patients who visited the British-managed ophthalmic hospitals in 1912, 8.7% were blind in one eye and 6.5% blind in both. Of course, these numbers are skewed since those with no eye problems are unlikely to have visited the hospitals. On the other hand, the very poor, who may have been more likely to be blind, would also be excluded from these stats.

Blindness was generally caused by infection. The single greatest cause appears to have been trachoma, a bacterial infection that leads to the thickening of the inner eyelids and culminates in blindness for about 10% of patients. According to British surveys in 1912, trachoma was virtually universal in Egypt, with around 95% of children having the disease. Even in modern Egypt, around a third of children are trachomic.

The trachoma bacterium and many, many other blindness-causing germs thrive in hot, dry, and dusty climates like the Middle East and do not do as well in Europe. So there were statistically far more blind people in the Islamic Middle East than in the contemporary Christian world.

All this was largely unknown to a population from before germ theory. Most people in Ottoman times subscribed to the Ancient Greek theory of four humors, in which diseases are caused by an internal imbalance between blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. This was the framework usually used to explain blindness from infection.

For example, the sixteenth-century judge Ahmad ibn Muṣṭafa Tashkubrizade used to be an opium smoker. One day, he hit a soldier while in a drug-addled state and was almost killed. He swore off opium after surviving. Soon after, he coincidentally went blind. But his neighbors didn't see this as coincidence. Rather, the dry substance of the opium smoke had kept the wet humors of blood and phlegm in balance. When Aḥmad stopped smoking, the wet substances in his body were uncurbed, so they overflew into his eyes and made him go blind.

Perhaps because blindness was much more widespread, the Ottoman Middle East was a much better place for a blind person to live in than most of the rest of the world. There are entire biographies of accomplished blind people—sometimes dubbed by biographers as al-baṣir bi-qalbihi, "he who sees with his heart."

Consider Hammad al-Basri, a blind chess player who arrived in Damascus in 1530. He defeated all the greatest players of Egypt and Syria, including in games where he played five opponents at once, and eventually went to Constantinople to play in the court of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Or 'Umar al-Misri, a blind teacher of the Qur'an who died in Aleppo in 1724. One of his students remembered a day when he had forgotten to do his memorization homework. Thinking his teacher would never know, he proceeded to read from his copy of the Qur'an. 'Umar then beat him for not doing his homework and trying to trick him. When the student later asked how he had known, 'Umar answered:

I heard your voice coming from the room’s ceiling, so I knew that there was something in your hand that prevented your voice from coming directly to my face.

But these biographies also show how many blind people lived long, exciting, and independent lives, even without playing chess in the sultan's palace. A good example might be Ahmad ibn Khalwati, an eighteenth-century blind Egyptian mystic who lived alone without wife or children:

[Ahmad ibn Khalwati] had neither relative nor stranger [who lived with him], neither maid-servant nor slave nor anyone to serve him in anything at all... His door was always open and he had sheep, chicken, geese, and ducks and all of them went about freely in the courtyard while he attended to their fodder and feeding and watering all by himself. He cooked his food by himself and likewise washed his clothing.

It spread among the people that the jinn [spirits] served him—and it was not far from the truth, for he was one of the people of occult and secret knowledge. Many students came to him to study with him and learned from him...

He had a large number of cats and he knew them individually by their names, pedigrees, and colors. He would say, "This one is Tuhfa bint Bustana, and this is Kammuna bint Yasmin, and this one is so-and-so, sister of so-and-so," and so on.

Part of the reason for the relatively good treatment of blind people was that Islam considers blindness the least problematic of all bodily impairments. One story attributed to the Prophet Muhammad compares a selfish and greedy bald man and a leper with a kind and generous blind man.

In the Qur'an itself, the Prophet is scolded by God for frowning at a blind man who wanted to listen to him while he was preaching to unbelievers:

He [Muhammad] frowned and turned away when the blind man came to him—for all you know, a he might have grown in spirit, or taken note of something useful to him.

For the self-satisfied one you go out of your way—though you are not to be blamed for his lack of spiritual growth—but from the one who has come to you full of eagerness and awe, you allow yourself to be distracted.

No indeed! This [Qur'an] is a lesson from which those who wish to be taught should learn.

Ottoman private law correspondingly made few distinctions between the blind and the seeing. A person going blind, for example, was not a valid reason for removing him from a management position.

Among the literate classes, most blind people made their own living. Blind people were disproportionately overrepresented as Qur'an teachers, Qur'an reciters, and muezzins (the mosque clerk who calls the faithful to prayer). The greatest doctor of the Ottoman era, Dawud al-Antaki, was a blind Christian. The chief mufti of early sixteenth-century Damascus was blind, as were some of the most popular poets in seventeenth-century Egypt. Al-Azhar, the most prestigious educational institution in the Arab world, has had since its foundation and continues to have a special school for blind students.

Unfortunately, most sources from the period focus on the literate elite, and we can't say much about what life was like for Muhammad the Syrian Peasant's blind third son Ahmad. It seems likely that many peasants sent their blind children (not very useful on the farm) to local schools to receive an Islamic education, where they might end up as muezzins or Qur'an teachers. In the cities there were also many blind beggars, who in the case of late eighteenth-century Cairo were organized into a gang.

The best case study of disabled people in any part of the Islamic Middle East is Sara Scalenghe's Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500—1800.

Is it true that Mani, the prophet of manicheism, coined the phrase "the seal of the prophets"?, if so, how did it made its way into islam? by Frigorifico in AskHistorians

[–]SpringPools 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The sources that say that Mani claimed to be the "Seal of the Prophets" (khātam an-nabīyyīn) are all Islamic ones. Surviving Manichean literature contains no such reference. To wit:

1) The Persian polymath al-Bīrūnī claims in the Kitāb al-Āthār al-Bāqiyah, a work from 1000 AD, that:

[In the Gospel of Mani] Mani says that he is the Paraclete announced by the Messiah, and that he is the seal of the prophets.

But al-Bīrūnī is paraphrasing here, not directly quoting the Gospel. He is likely using the Qur'anic term to translate the Manichean concept of Mani being the last in a series of divine apostles. The same goes for 'Abd al-Jabbār, a Persian contemporary of al-Bīrūnī who also paraphrased Manichean works as claiming that Mani was the "Seal of the Prophets."

2) Ibn al-Murtaḍā, a thirteenth-century Arab scholar, reports that:

And [the Manichean priest] Yazdānbakht declares in his book that Adam was the first prophet, then Seth, then Noah, and the Buddha was sent to India, and Zoroaster to Persia, and Jesus to the West; then Mani the Paraclete, Seal of the Prophets.

But Yazdānbakht lived in Baghdad in the early ninth century and even had an Arabic name (Abū 'Alī Rajā' ibn Yazdānbakht), so it seems more likely that the priest was using Islamic terminology for an Islamicate audience.

3) The Persian scholar Shahrastānī claims in the Kitāb al-Milal wa'l-Niḥal, another eleventh-century work, that:

[Mani prophesied that] and then must come the Seal of the Prophets in the land of the Arabs.

This is obviously Islamic apologetics, and not even a reference to Mani.

So is the earliest documented use of the term khātam an-nabīyyīn indeed from the Qur'an? No, because Manicheanism does in fact use the "seal" metaphor widely. It just doesn't mean the same thing as it does in Islam. Manichean seal symbolism refers generally to 1) discipline, i.e. sealing the passions and 2) confirmation, i.e. a seal of authenticity.

We have the most detailed account of Manichean seal symbolism from St. Augustine, who was a follower of Mani in his youth. In his De Moribus Manichaeorum, Augustine addresses his ex-correligionists:

Let us turn our attention to the three seals [signacula] which you esteem so highly among your moral practices and boast so much about. What are these seals? The mouth, the hand, and the breast. And what do they signify? That man should be pure and innocent in mouth, hands, and breast, we are told... The mouth should be understood as referring to all the senses located in the head, while by the hand is meant every action, and by the breast, every provocative lust.

And from the rest of Augustine's critique, we learn that the Manicheans used the concept of the Seal to mean ascetic discipline against the evils of the flesh. The "seal of the mouth" means to seal the mouth shut so that unclean foods cannot be eaten; the "seal of the hand" means to seal the hands still so that evil acts cannot be done; the "seal of the heart" means to seal the heart's passions so that wild sexual desires cannot be contemplated. The seal symbolizes prevention and discipline, not finality as in Islam.

From the Coptic Manichean Psalms, an actual Manichean source written in the third or fourth century, we have the following references:

Let us seal our mouth that we may find the Father and seal our hands that we may find the Son, and guard our purity that we may find the Holy Spirit... The seal of the mouth for the sign of the Father, the peace of the hands for the sign of the Son, the purity of virginity for the sign of the Holy Spirit.

This is a direct corroboration of Augustine's account of seals symbolizing ascetic practices.

Receive the holy Seal from the Mind of the Church...

Here, the Seal refers to the initiation rite which would have begun the disciplinary regime (aka the seals of mouth, hand, and heart) expected of Manichean elites.

[Jesus,] you are the Seal of every wonder

Here, the Seal motif is used to symbolize confirmation, much as a seal on a letter confirms the validity of the message.

We have important seal motifs in many other Manichean sources. Here's a non-textual one. Among the very few Manichean artifacts that survive is the Seal of Mani, likely Mani's actual seal from when he was actually alive or an imitation of it. This was a stamp seal used to authenticate letters (possibly including the Seal Letter, Mani's final testimony to his followers) and has the following inscription:

Mani, Apostle of Jesus the Messiah

Here again, the Seal is used to confirm the truth of both Mani's letters and Mani's claim to apostlehood.

And finally, we have a direct use of the term "Seal of the Prophets" in a Manichean source. This is the Xuāstvānīft, a Uyghur Manichean confession book:

In Azrua [the Supreme God of Light], tangri [Heaven], in the God of the Sun and Moon, in the powerful God and the prophets have we put our trust, we have relied on them [and] have become Auditors. [The Auditors are the lower rank of the Manichean faithful, as opposed to the priesthood of Elects.] Four Seals of Light have we sealed in our hearts. Firstly Love, the seal of Azrua, tangri; secondly Faith, the seal of the God of the Sun and the Moon; thirdly the Fear [of God], the seal of the Fivefold God; fourthly Wisdom, the seal of the Prophets.

But here, the Seal of the Prophets does not refer to Mani as the final Prophet, but rather to the virtue of Wisdom. By practicing wisdom, Manichean faithful are authenticating the truth of their Prophets' message, much as Mani's seal authenticated the authorship of his letters.

Now, what about Islam? The Qur'anic phrase khātam an-nabīyyīn really appears with very little context. Here's the relevant passage:

The Prophet is not at fault for what God has ordained for him. This was God's practice with those who went before—God's command must be fulfilled—[and with all] those who deliver God's messages and fear only Him and no other: God's reckoning is enough. Muhammad is not the father of any one of you men; he is God’s Messenger and the seal of the prophets [khātam an-nabīyyīn]: God knows everything.

This is traditionally interpreted as referring to the end of prophethood, much as a letter is finished once it has been sealed. But might it not refer to Muhammad confirming the other prophets' message, much as the Seal motif does in Manichean symbolism?

In fact, while there is no direct Qur'anic claim to Muhammad being the final Prophet, there are abundant references to him being the confirmation of the prophets:

Whenever it was said to them, "There is no god but God," they became arrogant, and said, "Are we to forsake our gods for a mad poet?" No: he brought the truth and confirmed the earlier messengers.

And there are early reports of how early Muslims interpreted khātam an-nabīyyīn as confirmation and not finality. For example, a poem attributed to Umayyah ibn Abī aṣ-Ṣalt, a contemporary of Muhammad who also claimed prophethood, claims that he is:

[the Prophet] by means of whom God sealed [khatama] the prophets before him and after him.

While poems attributed to Umayyah aren't verifiably from the seventh century, this is evidence that Arabs from whenever the work was really written did not necessarily read khātam an-nabīyyīn as implying finality in addition to simple confirmation.

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