10-11, The Middle Ages

Number 4 in a Series on Countries Named After Peeps

We have had a lot of countries named after Jews, and a lot of countries named after citizens of the Roman Empire, with a fair amount of overlap between the two. There have also been quite a few peeps compressed into a relatively short period of time. Now there is a long stretch of time, approximately from the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity until the Age of Exploration, where only two people lived whose names feature in the names of countries today.

10. Hashim ibn 'Abd Manaf ?- 511

The only peep on the list who was never a formal member of any of the Judeao-Christo-Islamic religions, Hashim was a popular leader of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca who is said to have saved the city from famine by sending a hundred of his camels to collect grain in Syria, which he distributed freely to his fellow Meccans (the name ‘Hashim’ is related to a root meaning ‘starving’). His descendants proudly took his name, and his great-grandson founded a religion you may have heard of. The ‘Hashimi’ family name is taken now to refer to descendants of Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, and the royal families of Morocco and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan can trace their ancestry back to her.

Hashim is anecdotally said to be buried in Gaza, making him the only person a country is named after whose remains are not in an officially recognised country.

11. Domingo Félix de Guzmán 1170 –1221

A young man from a wealthy family in Old Castille, Domingo’s first recorded act of any importance was also feeding the hungry: as a student, he is said to have sold all of his possessions to buy food for the poor at a time of famine. In 1215 he founded the Order of Preachers, more commonly known as the Dominican Order – one of the two big orders of ‘friars’, distinguished from ‘monks’ in that they did not sit still in one place praying and working, but wandered about the countryside doing things. His career was the basis for one of the big pop hits of 1963-1964. 

Long before then, the first permanent European settlement inthe Americas was (re)named after him, in 1495 or 1496. The name of this city became an alternative designation for the island it was located on, which in English we call ‘Hispaniola’. The western half of the island was taken by the French, but Saint Domingue had a population that was 90% slaves which turned out to be an unviable arrangement for the colonizers, and the rebellious slaves gave their half a non-European name derived from the original Taino inhabitants . The eastern half of the island, which remained in Spanish hands most of the time until independence, is now the Dominican Republic.

6-9, Victims of the Diocletian Persecution

Number Three in a Series on Countries Named after Peeps

Around about the year 300, four people who had countries named after them were alive at the same time, during the last and most savage persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. For all of them, there is tantalisingly little information about their actual lives, as opposed to the traditions that have built up about them over the years.

6. Saint Lucy of Syracuse, ?283-304

The only woman who has a whole country named after her, and the most recent woman on the list.  She died at the age of about 21, and almost nothing concrete is known about her life. The island nation of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean is named after Saint Lucy.

7. Saint Vincent of Saragossa, ?-304

Another martyr who died young, in Valencia rather than Syracuse. Saint Vincent is the patron saint of wine-makers, and vinegar-makers, and Lisbon, as well as lending his name to the most south-westernly point of Europe. The island of Saint Vincent, the larger part of the Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, is named after him.

8. Saint Mina the Martyr, ?-309?

A soldier in the Roman army who became a wildly popular saint in Christian Egypt - and still is in the remaining Christian bits of Egypt, it seems to be the opinion of scholars that Saint Mina, or Menas, was the original for the thoroughly ahistorical Saint Christopher, or 'Christ-bearer', removed from the calendar of the Roman Catholic church in 1970, long after he gave his name to the Caribbean island of Saint Christopher, aka St. Kitts, the other half of the smallest nation where a World Cup cricket match has been played.


9. Saint Marinus, ?-366

Not to be confused with Saint Marinus, or Marinus the Monk, this Saint Marinus escaped the Diocletian persecution, became a hermit, then founded a monastery, which somehow survived for a ridiculous length of time and became the still-extant statelet of San Marino.

1-5 , Biblical Figures

Number Two in a series on Countries named after Peeps

1. Jacob son of Isaac son of Abraham

Yes, he almost certainly never really existed. And there are quite a few legendary founder figures whose names have become associated with countries in a false etymology. For instance, the derivation of  'Britain' from Brutus of Troy, 'Misr' (Egypt) from Mizraim son of Ham, and the doubly-incorrect derivation of the name of the country known in English as 'Georgia': in English, from St George (which is wrong) and in Kartvelian from 'Kartvel', an apocryphal son of Japheth (also wrong).

But I think it is quite likely that the first incarnation of the land of Israel, c.1000 BCE, was named as claimed after a legendary ancestor figure, instead of the other way around, given that the biblical accounts of its foundation have it being conquered a relatively short time before it is known by that name. I can't be sure; but I'm going to call it as a valid country named after a peep.

2. King Solomon son of David

Third king of the united kingdom of Israel, immortalised in Judeao-Christo-Islamic culture for his wisdom and fabulous wealth, whose name was given by a Spanish explorer to the Solomon Islands, sort of like Erik the Red naming Greenland 'Greenland', in hope that they would be chock full of treasure.

3. Mary mother of Jesus
You will search the roll of the United Nations in vain for a 'Santa Maria'.  No, the Blessed Virgin Mary makes this list in a rather obcure fashion. One of her many titles is 'Our Lady of the Snows', in reference to a 4th century miracle, which led a Spanish explorer to give the name 'Nuestra Señora de las Nieves' to a Caribbean island. This was gradually corrupted to 'Nevis', which is one half of the name of the nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.


 4. Jesus Christ
While going forth to conquer new lands on the southern edge of New Spain with their armies of Nahuatl auxilaries, the Spanish (again) gave a region on the Pacific coast of Central America the pious but rather unwieldy name of 'The Province of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of the World'. This has been shortened to 'The Saviour', El Salvador.

5. Thomas the Apostle
Of the many saints that have had countries named after them, the only biblical one is the Apostle Thomas, aka Doubting Thomas. A volcanic island off the coast of Africa, discovered on St. Thomas' day (December 21st) by Portuguese explorers, was given his name, and now forms one half of the nation of  Sao Tome and Principe.

Countries Named After Peeps

Number 1 in a Series

Last Saturday a bird struck the window of our living room with an almighty bang and broke its neck. It was one those pigeons with the spiky tufts on their heads that we never had in Townsville and I can first remember seeing in Alice Springs on my honeymoon. I noticed this morning that it has left a mark – it is like an eye, an arc over a circle, and the circle with enough feathery fine structure to satisfy any iridologist. Poor bird. We will have to hang somethings on strings to stop it from happening again. It will never happen again for that particular bird, though: it was killed instantly. It had beautiful iridescent feathers on its side. It was a simply amazing thing from a chemical point of view. From any reasonable point of view. Fearfully and wonderfully made, it was. Life casts so much beauty and complexity so carelessly about the world. Life is so very profligate of beauty – and of suffering. Life is so wonderful and so fearful.

I also finished my virtual ride across the Sahara last Saturday: from Oran to Lagos, roughly tracing the journey in ‘Beau Geste’ on Google Maps. It took me a little less than three years. Most all of it is paved road. It would be great to see it all in real life some day, when Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib and Boko Haram have calmed down. 

And a few days before last Saturday, I deactivated my Twitter account. We will see if I am stubborn enough to wait out the thirty days beyond which – it is written – return is impossible. I don’t think there is anything I ought to be saying that can be said in 140 characters or less. There didn’t seem to be any flow through from Youtube to Twitter followers, or vice versa, and it was making me depressed almost every day. On days when it wasn’t making me depressed, it was encouraging my troll-nature to a dangerous degree, and I kept having to bite back inflammatory things I thought of tweeting. For example I was going to take advantage of the existence of the International Date Line to cheerily tweet #IndependenceDay greetings on our 5^th of July to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Which brings me to my point, which is countries named after peeps. I thought, hmm, is there anyone else besides Simon Bolivar whose name features in the official names of more than one country? I thought perhaps Saint Dominic, but it turns out that the island of Dominica is named after the day it was discovered. I think Bolivar is the only one. But of course this got me thinking of countries named after peeps more generally, and I have put a map together, like so.

The countries in blue have names with a noun part that derives from the name of a particular individual person; the countries in cyan have names with an adjectival part that derives from the name of a particular individual person. I count 22 people who have been immortalised this way. I was going to go through them all (in chronological order) in one big post of geography pedantry jollity, but I think I will do them instead in a whole bunch of individual posts. Because having a country named after you is a pretty big deal.

Some Ruminations on 'Green Left Weekly'

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views, which is infuriating; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same voice. 

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.

The other day I was waiting for my coffee, and having already read with interest the local free paper that was lying about in numerous copies (our MP in the NSW Parliament was picked up driving at three times the legal blood alcohol limit; he has apologised profusely), I flicked instead through a copy of Green Left Weekly that someone had left lying about.

I found, on perusing this paper, that it irritated me very much less than the average copy of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, a mildly left-of-centre paper that was mild enough to endorse Tony Abbott at the last federal election. I was thinking about why this might be the case, and have come up with several reasons.

Firstly, I have a weakness for people who are passionate about things, even if they are passionate about crushing all that I hold dear. There is something stirring in seeing anyone who really believes in what they are saying get up and voice an opinion in the face of opposition.  I don’t doubt that that the writers at the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald believe what they are writing: and to an extent, perhaps, if exactly the same op-eds had appeared in a paper explicitly aimed at a leftist fringe, they would not bother me as much.

Secondly, the things that Green Left Weekly concerns itself about are mostly concrete things, and this gives it more of a sense of proportion than one finds in the mainstream media.  Overwhelmingly, the articles concerned actual people with less money in their pay packets or not, or actual trees being cut down or not. There was hardly anything about those vacuous point-scoring sort of progressive issues on which the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald spends so much of its efforts.

Thirdly, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is, like the ABC, part of the establishment, and it speaks with the condescension of the establishment towards minority views; Green Left Weekly knows it is the voice of a minority, and does not speak in this same infuriating voice.

Fourthly, another consequence of being part of the establishment left-of-centre is that the writers of Devil Bunny City Morning Herald live inside a bubble, where everyone they meet thinks the same way as they do, and they are never required to defend their tiresomely conventional views with rational argument. So their pieces are either devoid of rational argument, or employ it very badly. The writers for Green Left Weekly, being a minority, are accustomed to engaging in arguments for defending what they believe, and employing reason in doing so, and this shows in what they write. There was an article on the situation on Iraq which eschewed vitriol and hyperbole; which set out a proper argument; which employed rational thought; and which, though I disagreed with its conclusions, I thought made a better case than articles reaching the same conclusions I have read by authors on the libertarian right-of-centre.

 

The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me

I am reading Macaulay’s ‘History of England’, and my virtual bicycle trip through Google Earth Africa has brought me to Lagos. These two inputs have combined to make me inordinately cheerful.

The 17^th century was in a lot of ways not a great time in England. There was a civil war. The Great Fire of London. Plague. A vicious back and forth between religious factions that seems as pointless and horrible from this point in time as what is currently happening in Iraq. The politics of the time, which a history has necessarily to concentrate on, is a dreadful tale of people breaking promises, switching sides, inflicting abominable punishments on their enemies, failing to achieve their goals, and seeing everything they strove for broken and mocked. And yet, Macaulay is at pains to point out: at the end of the century England was vastly better off than at the beginning. Furthermore, the same was true for any twenty-year period you picked out of the chaos. People were better fed and clothed and educated at the beginning of the Civil War than at the accession of Charles I. At the Restoration than at the start of the Civil War. At the time of the Glorious Revolution than at the Restoration. People unrecorded by the historians were striving all that time to make a better life for their children, and what Macaulay calls the ‘Baconian Revolution’ had given them better tools to do it. Self-interest driving hard work. Science making hard work more effective.

I thought of this when Google Earth began to show me the outskirts of Lagos. Nobody thinks of Nigeria as a good example of a country that has been governed particularly well for the past fifty or so years. It has had a civil war. It is riven by religious conflicts. Its politicians are notoriously corrupt. And yet, the people have been getting on with things. I knew that a city of nigh twenty-million people had grown up in that time. I guess I had a vague impression of an endless formless mass of miserable slums. But from Google Earth, the thing that struck me was how much it looked like Australia. There are motorways. Vast numbers of trucks on the motorways. Endless industrial estates.  Shopping centres that when you click on the pictures show you images that don’t look that different  from shopping centres in Townsville.  Suburban streets that when you click on the pictures don’t look all that different from suburban streets in Darwin. So many icons showing the locations of educational institutions. A vast construction project where a satellite city for a quarter of a million people is being reclaimed from the ocean. Yes, I know I wouldn’t want to live there. But there are twenty million people there with opportunities unimaginably greater than those available to their grandparents.  And while all we ever heard in the rest of the world was bad news, people were getting on with things and building it. 

 There are at least a billion people in the world right now walking around with access to all of humanity’s knowledge in their pockets whose grandparents lived their whole lives as subsistence farmers a few miles from where they were born. I just went off to check my email and top of the pile was a question about chemistry from a student in the Philippines who saw my chemistry videos on Youtube. How awesome is it that I can sit here in my bathrobe and answer a question asked by someone in the Philippines?

I am bullish on humanity. I am living in the time of the greatest expansion in human happiness, human comfort, and human knowledge that has ever been. Yes, the glass is half empty. But it towers over your grandparents’ glass like a big thing towering over a much smaller thing. Like the glass and steel tower in the middle of this picture towers over the shack at the extreme bottom left. Empty your grandparent’s glass into our glass, and you won’t even be able to tell how much fuller it is.