Gen Eds, Language and Cultures: Pause

I have a half baked post on Spanish Language and Cultures. Where I'm stuck are the fundamental stories, practices, and rituals of other cultures. I'm sure there's a book out there to fill in that gap. The idea was to provide:

• some basic language phrases in these languages
• some basic cultural characteristics, using Erin Meyer's The Culture Map
• and some basic cultural identity markers like I mentioned above

Since I do not have a ready made source for those stories, since the fall semester is approaching rapidly, and since it will take quite some energy to proceed. I'm going to pause the series here for now. Perhaps I will return to it.

On a personal note, Joanne Solis-Walker told me about Duolingo a week ago Tuesday and I have been eating it up with Spanish. Why didn't I know this resource existed 7 years ago when I needed it??! I'm blazing a trail on it. I'm sure I'm more than 37%, but that's what it is telling me right now. Onward!

So I will continue this series privately, moving forward to learn the languages I was going to cover. Here is the probable order: 1) Spanish (now), 2) French (next), 3) German (gap-filler), 4) Russian, 5) Chinese, 6) Arabic, 7) then maybe Hindi.

In the meantime, I may do philosophy classics on Wednesdays. We'll see.

Gen Eds LC4: How to Learn a Language

1. I have dabbled in a number of languages over the years. I consider English the only language I am really fluent in. My spoken German is not horrible. Mi Español es horible. Perhaps I could order a meal in French.

As far as written languages are concerned, with enough time I can read German, French, and Spanish, as far as living languages are considered. I am good at biblical Greek. I can make my way well enough in Latin and Hebrew. Aramaic is close enough to Hebrew that I could take a shot.

As far as languages I have studied but remain fully incompetent at, there is Akkadian and Sanskrit. I have started Arabic, Coptic, and Ethiopic. I know a few phrases in several other languages.

So I have some experience at least at starting to learn languages (I have colleagues that far surpass me). How would I recommend going about learning a language?

Learning Style
2. A question you will want to ask early on is, "What kind of a learner am I?" For example, do I remember best by hearing? Do I remember best by seeing? Do I learn best by speaking? Do I remember best when I understand why? How do I best learn stuff?

Frankly, you're pretty much going to need to do all of these if you're going to learn a language. There is the question of writing or speaking. Why am I learning this language? To go on vacation? To become a spy or work for the NSA? Am I just wanting to read scholarship in other languages?

Google Translate leaves me speechless. Yes, it often comes up with weird stuff from the perspective of native speakers. But, dang, if this stuff had existed when my brain was young.

If you are visiting a country that speaks another language, it makes sense to get some basic pleasantries down. It's really common courtesy and you will get a lot more cooperation if you can say "Please" and "Thank you." The arrogance of many an American overseas who expect everyone to speak English and conform to their expectations is embarrassing. No, we don't put ketchup on our "fries" here. Go home if you can't deal with it. You're the foreigner here.

I personally do not learn well merely by sound. You can tell me verbally a hundred times and it means nothing. In one ear and out the other. I have to see the words written down and hear them. Then I need to speak it. And my rate of learning increases exponentially if I understand the structure of the language.

The best learning software these days has you listen, repeat back, read, and write. That gets you to a certain point in learning the language. Beyond that, you need to engage the real stuff. You need to engage people who really speak the language. In the end, you really need an immersion experience in a country where that language is the language.

3. Not everyone will be able to learn another language proficiently, although everyone can try. I've known of missionaries who struggled with a sense of defeat because they were not able to master the language of the people. In the future, a person probably should not go as a missionary to a country whose language they cannot learn. Never say never, of course.

There is a strong temptation not to immerse oneself even when you are in a country that speaks a foreign language. If you are there with family, the temptation is to speak English at home and only speak the other language when you have to in public. This is death to language learning.

Being on an English speaking military base or being in a business context where you have a translator is almost like not even being in the country. Certainly forget about really learning the language. This is not immersion.

I spent two months in Germany in 95. I was alone and so had no native English speakers to speak to. My German friends would only speak English to me if I broke down, which I did very often. I had learned German for reading and no doubt they wondered if I knew any German at all. (By the way, I believe some Asian countries used to teach English in this way, which is why I suspect some Asians in the past used to receive the same reaction as my German friends to me).

But at some point in those two months I reached some sort of critical mass so that more and more of the conversation was in German. A highlight of one stay in Germany was when I gave a ride to a Dutch hitchhiker and it took a few minutes for us both to realize that neither of us was actually German.

It is my personal opinion--to which I welcome correction from experts--that having an ear for music is a great help in language learning.

A Basic Learning Sequence
4. Let me set out a basic sequence for learning a language to speak:

• Learn the alphabet
• Learn the basic conversation phrases
• Understand the type of language--how does it work?
• Learn 1000 words.
• Go through a basic software package on it.
• Start going through a grammar.
• Start listening to native speakers on radio and/or internet. 
• Read the Bible in that language.
• Start having immersion experiences in a relevant country.

More on these in a moment.

5. For the academy, most languages are taught for reading and they are taught in a compressed, grammatical manner. I learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in order to read texts. Accordingly, I did not learn conversational tidbits. My learning of German and French was similarly first to be able to read scholarly books. So there was no conversational German or French in my graduate, one semester courses in these languages. It was memorizing grammatical tables.

You sometimes hear people mock this approach to learning ancient Greek or another language. "If I could only learn it like I learned English or some other language," I have heard. I actually think this response itself lacks understanding. How many years did it take you to learn English--sixteen to get to the English level that the Greek New Testament is at? And the child's brain is far more spongy than our brains the older we get. I hate my 50 year old brain more every day.

The fact of the matter is, the way dead languages and languages for scholarship are traditionally taught is the fastest way to cram in those languages for reading. If someone ever comes up with a conversational way to learn ancient Greek, let's see how many years it takes you to get as far as a concentrated grammar class can get in two semesters. It's called grammar, baby.

1. Alphabets
6. So let's say you really want to learn a language. You want to speak and read it.

The first step I would take in learning a language is the alphabet. For most European languages, this step is a cinch. I was surprised when I first learned that Spanish and German have letters that are not in the English alphabet. At the beginning, I naively thought that all languages have the same letters and sounds and that it's just that some languages write them differently.

Not so!

• Spanish has the ñ (enye), which is pronounced with an "ny" sound. Spanish and French also have letters with accents on top. Some English speakers get annoyed, "What's the difference, it's an e?" Well, él means "he" in Spanish, while el means "the." Just because you don't know enough to tell the difference doesn't mean they don't.
• German has the umlaut letters (ä, ö, ü). We have difficulty hearing these sounds that are completely obvious to a native speaker. My wife had a prolonged exchange with a bus driver in Tübingen, Germany, trying to get to Bühl. "Bool?" she said. "Was?" he said. "Bool?" she said? "Was?" he said. "Bool?" she said. "Ah, Bühl," he said. "Ja, wir fahren nach Bühl."

 7. Of course the further away on the branches of Indo-European languages you get, the more likely that the "script" will be different.

• The Greek alphabet is not too difficult because many of the letters look similar. Others we learned in math and science: α, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η, θ, ι, κ, λ, μ, ν, ξ, ο, π, ρ, σ, τ, υ, φ, χ, ψ, ω.
• The Russian alphabet was based in part on the Greek alphabet: а, б, в, г, д, е, ё, ж, з, и, й, к, л, м, н, о, п, р, с, т, у, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ, ъ, ы, ь, э, ю, я.
• The Hindi alphabet hangs its letters from a line: क, ख, ग, घ, ङ, च, छ, ज, झ, ञ, ट, ठ, ड, ढ, ण, त, थ, द, ध, ऩ, प, फ, ब, भ, म, य, र, ऱ, ल, ळ, ऴ, व, श, ष, स, ह

The Semitic languages get a little more complicated because they sometimes have one form of a letter for the beginning of a word, another for the middle of a word, and yet another for the end of a word.

• The Hebrew alphabet is: א,ב,ג,ד,ה,ו,ז,ח,ט,י,כ,ל,מ,נ,ס,ע,פ,צ,ק,ר,ש,ת. Hebrew is different from the other languages above in that it reads from right to left and, in a book, from back to front (by English reckoning).
• The Arabic alphabet is:
    ا ,ب ,ت ,ث ,ج ,ح ,خ ,د ,ذ ,ر ,ز ,س ,ش ,ص ,ض ,ط ,ظ ع , غ ,ف ,ق ,ك ,ل ,م ,ن ,ه ,و ,ى Like the Hebrew alphabet, you read from right to left.

8. One of the challenges of Chinese is that it does not really have an alphabet. Rather, as an analytic language, it puts together individual bits of meaning. There are over 100,000 variations of its characters, but if you know about 2600 of them, you know over 98% of what you would need in everyday language.

Interestingly, different Chinese languages pronounce the characters differently. So someone who speaks Mandarin and someone who speaks Cantonese would not be able to understand each other's spoken language, but they might be able to understand each other if they wrote down what they were saying.

2. Basic Phrases
9. As I go through the various languages and cultures in this series, here are the conversational phrases we will learn:

• Hello and Goodbye
• Good morning, afternoon, evening, and night
• Yes and no
• How are you?
• Please, thank you, sorry, excuse me, you're welcome
• My name is... Pleased to meet you.
• I don't speak ____. Do you speak English?
• I do not understand.
• I would like...
• Where is...
• How much?
• I am ...

3. Type of Language
10. At some point, if you are going to get serious about learning the language, you will need to know how it works. This relates to the previous post. Is it basically a matter of learning words and putting them in the right order (analytic)? Great. Then learning vocabulary is going to be the big deal.

Is it an inflected language that changes the endings? Oh boy, you're probably going to need to memorize some charts. Is it an agglutinating language? Then you'll need to learn a lot of meaning bits that get stuck inside words.

Vocabulary
11. I hate to say it but you're just going to have to learn some words to get a language. This is where I am at with several languages. If you don't have a critical mass of words, you're not going to understand much. I wish I could say I was the master.

There are no end of flash cards, ranging from apps you can download to your phone to the old traditional box of 1000 that I have tried to use. A word a day seems puny, as it would take three years to get through the stack, but it's better than nothing. Sometimes I take these flash cards on long car trips. Barron's AP Test study tools have boxes more along the lines of 500 words.

When I'm in a foreign country, I usually learn vocabulary intensively. As I encounter words or want to use a word, I write it down and then review my vocabulary for the day in the evenings. A journey of a 1000 words begins with the first flashcard. In theory, you could have a "Spanish day" here where you try to think of the Spanish words you would say.

Software
12. There are tons of free apps you can download. Then there are the conversational CDs you can buy. If you are going to a country for a week's vacation, why not listen through one of the conversational series in preparation?

If you are more serious, there is Rosetta Stone and other tools like Babbel. I find Rosetta annoyingly repetitive. But it will reward the plodder.

Grammar
13. At some point you will want to buy a serious grammar of the language. How do you make a past tense? How do you make a future tense? This is when you are getting serious about learning the language.

Immersion
14. Start reading a book like the Bible in the language you are learning. Your familiarity with the content will help accelerate your understanding. I have found that I can more easily understand a sermon in a foreign language than I can the radio. This is because of the common church language I share with the preacher. You can probably find sermons online in your language of choice.

My friend Norm Wilson listens for hours on end to French and Spanish radio. With the internet, we can listen to all the real speakers of a target language that we want.

Of course you will eventually want to go there. Try not to speak English while you're there. Try to think in the new language. A moment of crowning significance will be when you dream in the new language!

Next Week: Cultures 5: Spanish and Spanish Cultures
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This is the fourth post in a series called, "World Language and Culture." This is the fourth series in an overall project called Gen Eds in a Nutshell. The other series so far include 1) philosophy, 2) world history, and 3) a math and science series, which is a little over half-way.

Thus far in the Language and Culture series are:

• World Language and Culture Overview
• Culture Classification
• The Languages of the World

Gen Eds LC3: The Languages of the World

By Erkumbulant - Own work
CC BY-SA 4.0

This is the third post in a series called, "World Language and Culture." This is the fourth series in an overall project called Gen Eds in a Nutshell. The other series so far include 1) philosophy, 2) world history, and 3) a math and science series, which is a little over half-way.

Thus far in the Language and Culture series are:

• World Language and Culture Overview
• Culture Classification

1. Linguistics is the study of how language works. One fascinating area within linguistics is "comparative" linguistics, where we compare languages to each other. In fact, languages cluster together like various species belong together in families and have a common history.

There are three predominant types of language: analytic, inflected, and agglutinative. English is mostly an analytic language, which is a language where each word gives you a single bit of meaning and the letters of each word are not changed. [1] The order in which the words come is very important for the meaning. For example, "Ken hit the ball" means something quite different from "The ball hit Ken," even though the words are exactly the same.

Chinese would be an even better example of an analytic language, because English still has traces of changing the letters at the end of its words.

Most languages in the European stream are inflected (also called "fusional") languages. An inflected language changes the endings and forms of words to tell you the specifics of what the word is doing. [2] These endings usually reflect more than one implication for meaning. They also make it such that the order the words come in is less important.

Take the following sentence in Latin: amo manducare panem, "I love to eat bread." While the word amo means "I love," the ending o is what tells you it is I love. If it were amas, it would mean "You (singular) love. The ending tells you both that the subject of love is singular and "I." Similarly with the other words, a change of the ending changes the meaning.

Meanwhile, you could put the words in any other order and the sentence would still be "I love to eat bread." manducare amo panem, panem manducare amo, amo panem manducare, manducare panem amo, panem amo manducare--all of these orderings translate as "I love to eat bread," although the word that is emphasized in each case varies a little.

The final major type of language is agglutinative. [3] Like inflected languages, they vary the letters within a word to change the meaning. The difference is that each change only reflects on bit of meaning. Words in Turkish are thus like a string of beads, with each bead in the word telling you one bit of meaning.

2. By one reckoning, the ten most spoken languages in the world are:

• Chinese
• Spanish
• English
• Hindi
• Arabic
• Portuguese
• Bengali
• Russian
• Japanese
• Punjabi

See also this article. In terms of the number of countries where a particular language is spoken, the top five are: 1) English, 2) Arabic, 3) French, 4) Chinese, and 5) Spanish. It seems to me that if you could learn seven languages and wanted to be able to cover as much of the globe as possible, these are the ones to learn:

• English is spoken in 101 countries. It is the third most native language in the world. It will open the door to you in North America, India and Pakistan, and in much of Africa. It seems to me that, from a strategic perspective, it is the most valuable language to know currently in the world.
• I would secondly suggest Chinese. It is the language spoken by the greatest number of people in the world and knowing Chinese opens the most doors in east Asia.
• Thirdly I suggest Spanish, the second most spoken language in the world. Spanish directly opens up almost all of South America and Latin America. Since I am not putting Portuguese on my list of top six, Spanish is close enough at least to help in Brazil and Portugal.
• Next I suggest Arabic. It is the fifth most spoken language, spoken in 60 countries, and will open up the Middle East and to some extent countries like Turkey and parts of north Africa.
• I feel like Russian needs to be on this list because of the sheer geographical area that it covers, even though it is eighth on the most spoken list. 
• Strategically speaking, French would be on this list. It's not because most people speak French as a primary language. It is because French opens up to you the rest of Africa.
• Hindi really deserves to be much higher up on this list because it is not less than the fourth most spoken language, perhaps even the second. It is related to other languages that are also in the top 10: Bengali and Punjabi. The only reason I have put it seventh is because English is the official language of India and Pakistan, so it is less important if the goal is to be able to cover the most territory with the fewest languages.

There are over 7100 languages in the world currently, half of which will die out by the end of the century. Globalization has taken once isolated peoples and connected people in ways that make smaller languages less spoken.

Indo-European Languages
3. If you look at the chart at the top, over 46% of the world's speakers speak an "Indo-European" language. This is a family of languages that originated around 3400BC in the area around present day Ukraine. Some of this traveling band headed southeast to the region of India. Some went southwest into Greece and Italy. Others stayed put or headed east into Russia. Still others went west into Germany.

One of the earliest known branches of this happy family were the Hittites, who lived in Anatolia (Turkey) around 1800BC. They are mentioned in Genesis 23.

Eastern
In India, Sanskrit is the oldest known representative of this group of language. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Punjabi, some of the most spoken languages in the world by population, are direct descendants of Sanskrit.

Persian languages are also descendant from this western branch of Indo-European. Today, descendants of this branch include Farsi, Kurdish, and Pashto.

A more recent descendant of this western branch are the Slavic languages. These include Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbo-Croatian.

Western
4. The oldest branch in the west was ancient Greek, which of course is the ancestor of modern Greek. In Italy, Latin is another ancient descendant. From Latin come the five Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian.

The Celtic tribes made their way from Galatia in Turkey before the New Testament to Gaul of Roman fame, to the British Isles. Scottish, Welsh, and Irish are all descendants.

Lastly, there are the Germanic languages that occupied central and northern Europe. The northern Teutonic languages spread to what is now Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian lands. The western Germanic tribes became German, Dutch, Frisian, and of course English.

When the French Normans took over England in 1066, The Germanic Anglo-Saxon base of the language was invaded by French.

Semitic Languages
5. Because of my knowledge base, I'll turn to the Semitic languages next. These are primarily Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Aramaic.

The oldest versions of these language was the East Semitic Akkadian, which was the business language of the oldest Babylonian and Assyrian empires. At the time of Israel's captivity, however, Aramaic had become the "lingua franca."

In the West, there was Hebrew, Canaanite, and Phoenician. An older northwest Semitic language was Ugaritic. In the South, Ethiopic would eventually become Amharic and Tigrinya today.

Arabic, another southern Semitic language, is by far the most spoken Semitic language today. Aramaic is barely spoken and dying, but is still known in Iraq and Syria. Hebrew was reinvented as a language when Israel was refounded in 1948.

Sino-Tibetan Languages

6. After the Indo-European languages, more people speak a language from this group than any other. However, Chinese is the primary example. Other languages include Tibetan and Burmese.

Altaic and Isolated Languages
7. Perhaps most of the languages of the world are spoken by a small group of people without clear relationship to others. Japanese, for example, seems to stand mostly on its own, although Chinese has influenced it. Some suggest it may be part of an "Altaic" family, but this is far from agreed.

On the other hand, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Mongolian are thought to relate to this family of agglutinative languages. This group of languages lies across a horizontal line in the middle of Asia, with one branch stretching up eastern Europe.

Next Week: Cultures 4: How to Learn a Language

[1] English does change some letters. "Book" is different from "books." "Walk" is a little different from "walks." In that sense it is really a mixed type rather than a purely analytic type.

[2] In general, languages that have more than one bit of meaning per word are called "synthetic" as opposed to "analytic."

[3] Another type is "polysynthetic," where words can be quite long because they incorporate many meaning bits, including diverse parts of speech.

Gen Eds LC2: Culture Classification

This is the second post in a series called, "World Language and Culture." This is the fourth series in an overall project called Gen Eds in a Nutshell. The other series so far include 1) philosophy, 2) world history, and 3) a math and science series, which is a little over half-way.

Thus far in this current series are:

• World Language and Culture Overview

1. Today's goal is to provide a framework for describing the various cultures of the world. The series on world history was primarily "diachronic." That is to say, it looked back in time and focused on cause-effect relationships over time. This series is primarily "synchronic." It aims to look at the current languages and cultures of the world at this present moment. [1]

Meaning is a function of minds. The world knows matter and energy, cause and effect. But significance is for God and humanity.

We share many things in common as humans, which suggests that there will be some matters of common significance among all people across time. Some of these include love, justice, loyalty, ambition, pleasure, and family. Christians believe that God has assigned a significance to these for all the universe.

On the other end of the spectrum is individual personality. Among us are extroverts and introverts. There are those who act more on their intuitions or on what they can see. There are some who act more on what makes sense to them and others who do more what they feel. Finally, there are those who like to leave things open-ended and those who delight in finishing what they start.

There is no right and wrong when it comes to these personality preferences. A person is not better because they prefer to be around other people, versus those who need time along. Each personality has its strengths and weaknesses.

2. Culture is like the personality of a group of people as a whole in a particular place and time. Again, there is no right or wrong culture, although no doubt each has its strengths and weaknesses. To say this is not at all to say that there is no right and wrong. It is to say that there are a lot of variations among cultures that are not a matter of right and wrong. [2]

In this series I propose to use seven categories in order to categorize the different cultures of the world. These categories are:

1. Language--what are the dominant languages of a particular culture 
2. Identifying stories, symbols, and rituals, and beliefs. N. T. Wright calls these the four components of a worldview.
3. Social structure--I am going to pack into this category a number of features, such as ethics and/or racial composition, class systems, and whether a culture tends to be more hierarchical or egalitarian.
4. Group structure--In this category I will cover family structure, as well as whether a culture tends to be more individualistic or collectivist. Also, how is gender and age treated?
5. Economic structure--how does a culture handle money and resources
6. Communication--Is a culture more implicit or explicit in its communication? Does it tend to give principles or the big picture first or the details and concrete specifics?
7. Operating mode--This gets at some of the hot versus cold culture dynamics. Is a culture more relationship or task oriented? Is it more linear and time-conscious or flexible and laid back? Is it focused more on being or doing?
8. Moral focus--Here I am applying Jonathan Haidt's six moral categories in The Righteous Mind. These include a) care/harm, b) fairness/injustice, c) loyalty/betrayal, d) authority/subversion, e) sanctity/defilement, and f) liberty/oppression. [3]

3. It is important to recognize that the meaning of many actions and words is completely cultural. To raise a middle finger is quite significant in the United States, and we have exported this action around the world. However, there are still places in the world where this action has no meaning whatsoever.

What is considered modest is extremely cultural and sometimes even subcultural. A woman without a veil would be immodest in a number of Arab countries, while a woman without a top might not be considered immodest in some parts of the world. It is hard for us to imagine that such values could differ because they are so fundamental to our culture, but these are learned values, not innate.

Living in another person's shoes is one path on the road to enlightenment. This is true both of people in our own culture and people in other cultures. Hopefully this series will help us on this journey to see ourselves more clearly because we can see ourselves as we appear to others outside our context.

Next Week: The Languages of the World

[1] See another attempt to present how culture works here.

[2] Most of the rhetoric on absolutism and relativism is very superficial. On the one hand, people often blur epistemological absolutes (which have to do with truth) and moral absolutes (which have to do with ethics). Additionally, a false alternative is typically posed between either believing in truth (absolutes) or not believing in truth (relativism).

Absolutism, properly defined, means no exceptions. By contrast, most moral norms are universal with exceptions, which is neither relativism nor absolutism. All people consider some matters of morality relative (we used to call them "convictions"). Nihilism is the proper term for a disbelief in morality altogether.

All that is to say is that most of the tired rhetoric you hear on this subject is overly simplistic and generally a mess of bad thinking.

[3] This last one actually is distributed among the others, but I thought it was worth singling out.

Gen Eds LC1: World Language and Culture Overview

1. A little over a year ago, I started a series called, Gen Eds in a Nutshell. To be honest, it has been a humbling series, to realize how much I don't know. It didn't take me too long to wander through philosophy, because I've written a philosophy textbook and taught philosophy for years.

I started a Friday math and science series. I'm over half-way through it. I've decided to take my time in the home stretch and read some books I've been wanting to read as I finish it. I'm trying to come to grips with having a 50 year old brain. It's not pretty.

Then last week I finished a world history series. It was far more challenging than I thought it was going to be.

So I'm a little surprised to find myself starting this post at 10 at night. I had read material from another book thinking I would be posting some summaries from it. But it lifted my spirits to make this post instead.

2. The next topic I had in mind for the series is "World Language and Culture." Part of a general education is usually some sort of intercultural experience. Although it is often not practical, an ideal liberal arts education would involve learning another language. The purpose of such learning in large part is to become more aware of yourself.

Americans in particular tend to be incredibly culturally ignorant. We assume we are smarter and better than everyone else in the world. We assume not only that other cultures do things the wrong way but that people who are different from us in our own country are stupid. At worst, we dub our cultural blindspots "Christian" and then assign a negative spiritual connotation to other cultures for not being like we are.

We go on a mission trip for a few days and think we have mastered another culture. Maybe we live on a base in another country and think we therefore know a culture we only encountered on our own terms and in our own language. While people in other cultures in the world often know several languages, we can hardly speak English correctly. Little do we know how those elsewhere often joke about much we think we know about them when we know almost nothing about them.

When I lived in England for three years, there were constant jokes about how shallow (and loud) Americans were. When my family was in Germany, an Ethiopian asked my wife at a laundromat, "Why is it that I know so much about your country, and you know almost nothing about mine?" Of course these jokes slowed down considerably after Bush invaded Iraq.

Basically, we would do well to be forced to live somewhere else for a year, be forced to learn their language and do things their way. It would end a lot of the foolishness going on in politics right now. I won't be able to capture the benefit of knowing world languages and cultures here. But I'll do what I can.

3. In the other series, I've tried to capture the subject in ten general headings. Here's my map for at least the next 10 weeks. With history, these ended up expanding to multiple posts on each. I have arranged them somewhat in order of my familiarity (meaning I'll have to study more the further down the list we go). Chinese is actually the language spoken by most people on the planet, so if I went in that order, it would be much closer to the top. Similarly, three languages in the Indian region are in the top ten languages spoken in the world.

Here is my outline for the next weeks:

• Culture Classification
• Mapping World Languages
• English-Speaking Cultures
• Spanish-Speaking Cultures
• European Language Cultures
• Russian and Slavic Language Cultures
• Semitic Language Cultures
• Indian Language Cultures
• Asian Language Cultures
• African Language Cultures

Gen Eds 11: The First Humans

The end of my world history posts! And only after ten months.

This is part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. The series consists of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. This is the final post in the world history part:

• World History Overview
• From 9-11 to the Present
• From the Cold War to the Millennium
• From Waterloo to World War II
• 5a. The French Revolution
• 5b. The Enlightenment to the American Revolution
• 5c. From Cromwell to the First Industrial Revolution
• 6a. Reformation and Scientific Revolution 
• 6b. The Renaissance and a New World
• 7a. Church Schisms in the Middle Ages
• 7b. Kings Rising in the Middle Ages
• 7c. Medieval Arabia, India, China, and South America
• 8a. The Roman Empire
• 8b. The Roman Republic
• 9a. Greeks and the Hellenistic Age
• 9b. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians
• 10a. Ancient India
• 10b. Ancient China
• 10c. Ancient Egypt
• 10d. Ancient Mesopotamia

___________________________
1. The last post began to delve into some sensitive waters. An Archbishop named James Ussher in 1650 suggested that God created the world in 4004BC. This date fits with a fairly literal reading of the chronologies in Genesis.

However, in my last post I gave some dates from mainstream archaeology that go back further than 4000BC. Archaeologists date the walled city of Jericho back as far as 8500BC and Çatalhöyük as far back as 7000BC. These dates would require at the very least for the genealogies of Genesis to be significantly incomplete.

2. On the one hand, the fingerprints of history in Genesis coincide extremely well with the history of Mesopotamia from the previous post. We have Abraham at the time of Hammurabi. We trace him back to Ur in Sumer. And in the area of Sumer we have the beginnings of civilization. This is the area from which the ziggurat arose, like the Tower of Babel. There is evidence of a devastating flood in this area. Even Genesis points to the Garden of Eden being in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates (Gen. 2:14).

These breadcrumbs point back to about the same time as Ussher in the right region. The birth of human history is exactly where Genesis locates it--in Mesopotamia around the fourth millennium BC.

3. According to our previous post, human "history" began with the beginning of writing in the late 3000s BC in the area of Sumer. However, the current state of archaeology wants us to push back further, back to an "agricultural revolution" around 10,000BC. The current state of paleontology, which goes back beyond that point, wants to push back even further. How are we to fit these dates with the Bible?

In the last two decades, genetics has caused us even more problems. The mapping of the human genome, according to the current state of research, suggests that a common female and common male ancestor might have lived somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 years ago in Africa. But not at the same time. [1] The current estimate is that "The DNA in current humans could not have come from a pool of fewer than approximately 10,000 humans." [2]

These theories of course are probably not in anything like their final form. We are in a dialog between Scripture and science, between possible interpretations of the Bible and possible interpretations of science. For example, John Walton's proposition is that perhaps Adam and Eve were royal representatives for a community of early humanity at some point in our early history. [3]

According to one theory, all humanity can be traced to East Africa about 70,000 years ago. According to current theory, Homo sapiens left Africa about then. So following Walton's theory, we might speculate that Adam and Eve ruled the Homo sapiens of East Africa some time before 70,000 years ago.

This of course is speculation, a discussion that hasn't hardly even started. For many, it is a conversation that should never start.

4. My goal in the rest of this post is simply to sketch out what seems to be the current dominant timeline for humanity among experts in this area at large, to do with as you will. My dates are based on Yuval Noah Harari's book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It is a clearly secular book.

According to the current theory, a female ape had two daughters 6 million years ago. One would become the progenitor of all chimpanzees The other would become the mother of all humanity.

In this theory, about 2.5 million years ago, the genus Homo originated. This is not Homo sapiens or human beings as we are. These were animals in our genus, just as a lion and a tiger are in the same genus Panthera. According to the theory, this new genus Homo emerged from a genus of apes called Australopithecus.

Again, the current theory sees Homo sapiens emerging as a new species in Africa about 150,000 years ago. There were other "humans" around in the world at that time: Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisova. According to DNA, about 1-4 percent of Middle Eastern and European DNA is Neanderthal, and about six percent of Aboriginal Australian is Denisovan DNA.

So these "humans" would have intermingled a little, perhaps until as recently as 50,000 years ago. Neanderthals may have lasted until 30,000 years ago.

The success of these broader humans was the use of fire, going back as far as 300,000BC according to the current theory. Because humans could cook their food, they could eat all the needed food for a day in an hour, as opposed to the five hours of chewing raw food that chimpanzees need to do a day.

They were not particularly spectacular in comparison to other predators out there. In fact, some speculate that tools may have developed so that humans could break into bone to eat after the more skilled predators were done eating off all the meat from a kill.

There are no longer any other humans other than Homo sapiens. We apparently eliminated the others, according to the "Replacement" theory.

5. Some then suggest that the real point of origin for humanity as we know it took place about 70,000 years ago in East Africa. Yuval Harari calls this moment the "Cognitive Revolution." According to the current theory, some Homo sapiens had left Africa about 100,000BC for the Middle East, but they had not managed to compete against the Neanderthals, who actually had bigger brains.

But something changes in between 70,000 and 30,000BC, on this theory. Harari calls this chapter, "The Tree of Knowledge." Unlike Neanderthals, so the conjecture goes, Sapiens trade over long distances. Sapiens can coordinate with larger groups than small bands. Most importantly, Sapiens can imagine--they can construct realities like founding stories and legal fictions. They can not only talk about what is. They can talk about what could be.

6. In this theory, these Sapiens were all hunter-gatherers. They did not live in any one fixed location. They traveled to find food where they could. They ate on the spot what they could.

The next revolution, according to Harari, is the "Agricultural Revolution." This is when Sapiens transitioned from being a mostly hunter-gatherer species to becoming a farming species. In one place he mentions 12,000BC, but in another he suggests 9500-8500BC.

"Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000BC; peas and lentils around 8000BC; olive trees by 5000BC; horses by 4000BC; and gravevines in 3500BC" (77). "By 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over" (77-78). "By the first century AD the vast majority of people throughout most of the world were agriculturalists" (78).

The rest is history. Agriculture tied down people to locations. Locations prepared the way for cities. Cities expanded the number of people in one place. Once the number moves into the hundreds, we need writing. We need bureaucracy. We need administration. We need collective imagination. We need to control violence. We need to organize warfare.

Here endeth world history.

Next Week: Chapters 1-8 of Sapiens

[1] E.g., Sequencing Y Chromosomes Resolves Discrepancy in Time to Common Ancestor of Males versus Females

[2] Both Tremper Longman III (vi) and Scot McKnight pass this idea along (xi) in Adam and Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. These are faith-filled biblical scholars who believe in the inspiration of Scripture but also feel the need to take science seriously in the name of truth. See also the faith-filled scientist, Francis Collins, The Language of God.

[3] The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate.

Gen Eds 10d: Ancient Mesopotamia

Ziggurat at Ur

This is the fourth and final post in the Classical Civilizations" unit of my World History series. The first three were India, China, and Egypt.

This is part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. The series consists of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. So far in the world history section:

• World History Overview
• From 9-11 to the Present
• From the Cold War to the Millennium
• From Waterloo to World War II
• 5a. The French Revolution
• 5b. The Enlightenment to the American Revolution
• 5c. From Cromwell to the First Industrial Revolution
• 6a. Reformation and Scientific Revolution 
• 6b. The Renaissance and a New World
• 7a. Church Schisms in the Middle Ages
• 7b. Kings Rising in the Middle Ages
• 7c. Medieval Arabia, India, China, and South America
• 8a. The Roman Empire
• 8b. The Roman Republic
• 9a. Greeks and the Hellenistic Age
• 9b. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians
• 10a. Ancient India
• 10b. Ancient China
• 10c. Ancient Egypt

___________________________
1. It is hard to believe, but we have finally hit the dawn of human history. The oldest walled village of which we know is Jericho, around 8500BC by most reckonings. [1] Perhaps there were only a few hundred inhabitants but it represented a movement that began to take place in the region--the formation of cities.

In this scenario, we humans had not really started farming until around 12,000BC, making the shift from being hunters to being farmers. When you farm, you are stuck to one place. People collect in one place. In 7000BC, the largest city may have been in Turkey, Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. It may have numbered between 5000 and 10,000.

But the first empire was in "Mesopotamia," "between the rivers" of the Tigris and Euphrates, modern day Iraq. Egypt united its lower and upper regions into a united kingdom around 3100BC, as we have seen. But the first empire was at Akkad around 2250BC, the empire of Sargon the Great. This area saw dominant kingdoms and empires for some 4000 years from the time of the Sumerians in lower Mesopotamia to the fall of the Babylonians to the Persians in 539.

2. We might say that humanity crossed the line from the pre-historic to the historic during the Uruk period (4100-2900BC) in Mesopotamia. These are the Sumerians, who called themselves, "black headed people." This area, Sumer, is the biblical area known as "Shinar" in Genesis 11:1.

The city of Uruk, perhaps founded somewhere around 4500BC, seems to be the place where writing really began to develop. At first this writing was a partial script--it was not created to write poetry but to keep count of cattle and taxes. [2] Writing develops to facilitate trading.

cuneiform

The form of writing is cuneiform. Cuneiform largely consisted of lines with triangles at the top. The Sumerians would also develop the 24 hour day and the idea of 360 degrees for a circle.

In Uruk, the cylinder seal was also used as far as we know for the first time, giving authority a reach beyond the presence of the king, a guarantee that you were reading something that was truly from the king. Kings ruled cities at this point, and cities conquered other cities. Empire does not as yet exist, only kings ruling individual cities and networks of cities with some kings more powerful than others (cf. Gen. 14:1-2).

The ziggurat also develops at Uruk. This will become the pyramid in Egypt. The Mayans, Incas and Aztecs also had their versions, making us wonder if there was contact of some sort across these continents. The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is perhaps a ziggurat of sorts. In the earliest days, kings were probably priests. Only later would the royal authority be sometimes detached from the religious authority.

Gilgamesh was a legendary king of Uruk, and we know him best from the Mesopotamian flood story, The Gilgamesh Epic. Gilgamesh was thus the Uruk version of Noah. The epic itself was not written down until sometime between 2100 and 1400BC, but this still qualifies it as the oldest human epic.

3. Uruk was not however the first city of the area. Eridu was perhaps founded in 5400BC and the Sumerians considered it the oldest city in the world. It was a city thought by the Sumerians to have predated the flood. This period before Uruk and writing is called the Ubaid period (6500-3800BC). This is the period right before the Bronze Age, often called the Calcolithic or Copper Age.

We have long associated this region with the Garden of Eden, and Genesis mentions the Tigris and Euphrates as two of four rivers in the area of the Garden (Gen. 2:14).

The city of Ur, from which Abraham originated (cf. Gen. 11:31; Josh. 24:2), was another Sumerian city dating from around 3800BC. The oldest wheels were discovered at Ur, on a four wheeled wagon. The kinds of tools that developed in the late 3000s in the Copper and Bronze Age were almost needed to make wheels.

The last period of Sumerian history ended in 1750BC with the third dynasty of Ur. Most famous in this period is Ur-Nammu, who created a law that foreshadowed the more famous law of Hammurabi.

4. Prior to the end of Sumerian history, the Akkadian empire began with Sargon the Great in the year 2334. This is the world's first real empire because it included multiple peoples over a vaster area of land than ever before. The Akkadians, unlike the Sumerians, were a Semitic people. Sargon ruled from Akkad.

The Akkadian language is often considered significant for Old Testament scholars. It is the oldest known Semitic language and thus is in the same family as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, not to mention Babylonian and Assyrian.

5. The city of Babylon was founded centuries before its most famous king from this period, Hammurabi (1792-50BC). His famous law Code of Hammurabi set down case law whose impact we can see in the Law of Moses. The "law of retribution," for example (the lex talonis) is found there, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" (ca. 1776BC).

The Amraphel of Genesis 14:1 has letters strikingly similar to Hammurabi, given that Semitic languages are centered in the consonants rather than the vowels. It is thus no surprise that Abraham is generally dated to about this period of history.

Hammurabi and Abraham were during the Middle Bronze Period (2119-1700). It was probably in this period (ca. 1900) that the city of Ashur was founded, which would be the center of the old Assyrian kingdom. Other cities in that area included Nimrud and Nineveh.

Also during this time was the thriving of the city of Ugarit, in northern Palestine (ca. 1900). Ugaritic is also a Semitic language of great significance in Old Testament studies. Ugaritic literature gives us significant insights into the cultural and literary context of the Old Testament (e.g., what Leviathan might be in Job 41:4).

6. In the middle of the second millennium BC, the Hittites and then the Kassites would rule this area. The Hittites conquered the region in 1595BC. They are mentioned in Genesis (e.g., 23). In the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100BC), the Kassites would come south and conquer the area.

The Kassites have left us the Amarna letters from the 1300s BC, which were sent to Egypt and refer to the Hittites and others. Around 1100BC, the Enuma Elish we have was written down, although it undoubtedly is much earlier. Found in the library at Nineveh, it gives us the Babylonian creation story.

The juncture between the Bronze and the Iron Age, which is happening in the late 1000s BC, is the juncture where Israel is struggling with the Philistines. Israel is a bronze culture; the Philistines use iron. The Trojan War is a bronze war, and thus also dates to this general time.

Next Post in Series: History 11: The First Humans

[1] A book I have found fascinating in writing this post is Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 2015). The question of fitting the dates normally assumed by archaeologists and a very literal reading of Genesis is a controversial one. However, ancient chronologies were not necessarily exhaustive and we can assume that God's purposes in the genealogies of Genesis were much broader than to give us an exhaustive account of the names. The purpose of such lists at the time was to assure us of the ancientness of the lineage and its origins in God's creation of humanity.

[2] Harari, Sapiens, 122-24.

Friday Gen Eds MS13: Electromagnetism

This is the thirteenth post in the math/science part of my "Gen Eds in a Nutshell" series. The Gen Ed series consists of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. I've already done the subject of philosophy, and I'm on the home stretch through the world history subject on Wednesdays. I'm combining the last two on math and science into one series on Fridays.

Thus far in the math/science subjects:

• Math/Science Overview
• Basic Types of Numbers
• The Atom and Quantum Physics
• The Periodic Table
• Molecules and Ions
• Chemical Reactions
• The Basic Tools of Algebra
• Heat and Thermodynamics
• Basic Geometry and Trigonometry
• The Basics of Calculus
• The Physics of Motion
• The Forces of Motion

______________________________
1. In the winter, I will often touch my wife's arm before I kiss her goodnight, because I have given her a shocking kiss more than once. The reason is that I have built up a static charge somehow. It could be my shoes rubbing against the carpet. When it is warmer, the moisture in the air is greater and such charges disperse more easily. But when it is colder, there is less moisture and the charge is vented on my unsuspecting wife serving as a conductor.

A conductor is a material through which electrons move easily. An insulator is a material through which electrons do not move easily. The flow of electrons through a conductor is called current, and this channeling of electrons is electricity. Benjamin Franklin famously demonstrated in 1752 that lightning was a form of electricity, using a kite in a thunderstorm.

Current, Voltage, Resistance
2. The flow of current is measured by how many electrons are passing any given point in a certain amount of time (technically, how much charge is passing that point). The amount of electrons is measured in coulombs. [1] One coulomb is the charge equivalent of 6.2 x 10¹⁸ electrons.

One coulomb of charge moving past a given point in a second is called one ampere. It makes sense that as a current moves through things one by one, the same amount of current goes through each thing, if it doesn't get branched off. Let's say there is a circuit that starts with a power source (like a battery) and goes through a wire and several things (e.g., a light bulb, a heater, etc) but it does so one at a time and never branches off until the wire comes back finally to the power source. We call this a series circuit because the current goes "around" (circuit) through all the elements one by one.

In this case, the amount of "amps" going through each element in that circuit will be the same.

3. The moving charge of electrons always emerges from the power source at its "negative" pole. It thus returns into the source at the "positive" side. Electricity thus flows from negative to positive in a circuit. It is pushed out of the source by an "electromotive force" or EMF. We call the amount of work done by that force on each coulomb of charge a volt. Voltage is thus the work done per coulomb in a circuit.

Unlike current, each element in a series circuit absorbs a certain amount of work. So while every element of a circuit will have the same number of amps, each element in a circuit absorbs some of the work from the electrons. The volts used by each element thus add up to the total voltage at the power source in a series circuit. [2]

4. We might say that each element in the circuit thus provides a certain resistance to the voltage. Without any such resistance, we would have a short circuit and the power source might burn up. The amount of current going through an element is proportional to the amount of work done on that element. That is to say, the more work done on the element, the more current going through it.

This relationship is captured in a law called Ohm's law [3] If E is the voltage and I is the current, then E = I x R, where R is the resistance of an individual element in a circuit. The unit of resistance in electricity is called the ohm and it is the amount of resistance afforded by something that only allows one amp of current to flow through when one volt of force is applied.

So since the current is the same throughout a series circuit and the voltage is the total difference in work done between the poles of a power source, the total resistance in a circuit adds up just like the total voltage does. The total resistance of a series circuit is the sum of all the individual resistances.

5. Power is the amount of work done in a certain amount of time. Electrical power is measured in watts. From every day life, we know that a 100 watt light bulb burns brighter than a 60 watt one. Power equals the voltage times the current, or P = E x I (where E is the voltage and I is the current). So the higher the voltage, the higher the power exerted. The higher the current, the higher the power exerted. And of course if both the voltage and the current are higher, the power exerted is all the higher.

6. I mentioned the rules for series circuits above. As series circuit is one in which there is a single flow of the current. It does not branch at any point. Accordingly, the current is the same throughout. The resistance adds up per element to make up the total resistance. Similarly, the voltage drop across each element adds up to the total voltage in the circuit.

In a parallel circuit, the current branches at some point, perhaps at several points. In this case, it is the voltage that is the same across every branch. Meanwhile, it is the current in each branch that adds up to the total. [4]

The current in each branch depends on the resistance in each branch. As far as the total resistance, it goes down when resistance is added to individual branches, meaning that the total amperage will go up. You can find the current or resistance in any branch using some variation of the E = I x R formula.

Finding the total current or resistance in a parallel circuit is more complicated. If you find the reciprocal (one over x) of the resistance in a branch, then add them together, then take the reciprocal of that sum, you will have the total resistance of the circuit. You can then use the voltage and the total resistance to find the total current.

7. I have assumed that the circuits we have been talking about have been direct current (DC). Direct current is the kind of current that might come from a battery. In a battery, a chemical reaction is used to create the electromotive force that pushes current through a circuit. Direct current is current that is constant, constant in its voltage and amperage unless something interferes with the circuit somehow.

However, the current that comes from a wall plate is alternating current (AC). This is current that alternates between a positive and negative voltage (usually 110 volts), usually at about 60 Hertz or 60 back and forth alternations per second. Another way to think of alternating current is that the flow of current alternates directions.

Alternating current is used because it is more easy to manipulate--for example, to change voltages. It is also easier to generate high voltages in AC rather than in DC. Since high voltage is more suitable for transferring electricity over longer distances, modern societies generate high voltages in AC and then distribute that electricity to local communities where transformers then reduce the voltage and distribute it to houses. Individual devices may then convert the AC to DC so that the device can function.

Magnetism and Induction
8. Most of us know what a magnet is. You can use one to pick up metal. You might touch a screw to a magnet and it will temporarily become magnetized. Then it will stay on your screwdriver more easily. A compass works because the earth has a certain magnetic field. The metal on the compass will turn toward the north pole.

In the early 1800s, a relationship was discovered between electricity and magnetism. When current runs through something, a magnetic field is created around it. Similarly, if a magnet is moved around a conductor, it can generate a current. The rotation of a magnetic field generated by electricity is the cornerstone of the electric motor.

9. Here are some basic facts about magnetism. Magnetic lines form closed loops, the smallest loops possible. Magnetic lines pass through everything, although they can be directed. Like magnetic polarity repels; opposites attract.

10. By coiling a wire around a conductor, you can create an electromagnetic field by running current through the wire. The "left hand rule" expresses how this works. If you picture wrapping your left hand in the way that the wire is wrapped around, then your thumb will point toward what will become the north pole of the artificial magnet (magnetic fields go from north pole out in a closed loop only to re-enter the magnet at its south pole).

By the same token, if you point your left thumb in the direction of the current in a wire (current moves from negative to positive), your fingers will curl in the direction the magnetic field created around the wire moves.

11. Inductance is the property of a circuit that opposes any change of current. When current changes, creating a magnetic field, a counter EMF is created that opposes that change. This is Lenz's Law: "The voltage induced in a circuit by changing current always opposes the change causing it." This is a parallel to Newton's third law. When current is decreasing, inductance wants to maintain it. When current is increasing, inductance wants to resist it.

The unit of inductance is the henry. 1 henry is the amount of inductance that yields one volt when the current is changing at the rate of 1 ampere per second. The symbol for inductance is L.

Induction is the actual creation of a voltage, which requires motion. Inductance does not require current flow. Induction does. Induction is the action of inducing a voltage when current is changing in a circuit.

Charges and Capacitance
12. Coulomb's Law is the analogy to Newton's Law of Gravitation and tells us how to calculate the force of a charge on another charge. The equation looks quite the same!

F_e = k(q₁q₂)/r²    [5]

Any one charge (e.g., q₁) creates a field that travels through space. Any other charge then reacts wit that field, while the initial charge is similarly acted on by the other charge. The main difference between gravity and the electromagnetic force is that the force of gravity only accumulates, while charges are positive and negative and thus can cancel each other out.

13. Capacitance refers to the capacity of two separated plates to retain a certain charge, almost like a battery. Such plates often have some sort of insulator in between them, called a dielectric. The unit of capacitance is a farad. 1 farad is the capacity to store one coulomb of charge when one volt of potential exists across a capacitor.

So C (capacitance) = Q (charge)/E (voltage).

Capacitance is directly proportional to plate area. The bigger the area, the bigger the capacity for storing charge. It is inversely proportional to plate spacing. The bigger the gap, the less the capacity for storing charge.

A vacuum in between the two plates suggests the least capacitance for two plates, so when a vaccuum or air is the "dialectric" between two plates, we say the dialectric constant is 1. Other insulators between the two plates increase capacitance. Pure water, for example, increases capacitance by 81 times!

The equations for calculating capacitance in a circuit are exactly the same as the formulas for resistance and inductance.

Maxwell's Equations
The most fundamental principles of electromagnetism were captured by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) in the mid-1800s. In his famous four equations, he captured and built on the work of others before him like Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836).

1. Gauss' law for electric fields is named after Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and basically says that an electric charge produces an electric field passing through any closed surface around it and that the amount of electric flux passing through that closed surface is proportional to the total charge contained within that surface.

In another form, this law suggests that electric charge is repelled by positive charge and attracted to negative charge.

2. Gauss' law for magnetic fields is closely related to the previous law. It amounts to saying that the total magnetic flux passing through any closed surface is zero.

3. Maxwell's third equation is Faraday's Law, which we have described above but not named. Faraday's law states that a magnetic field passing through a surface induces an electromagnetic force at the boundary of that surface, and a changing magnetic field induces an electric current.

4. Maxwell's fourth equation is the Ampere-Maxwell equation, which we have also encountered above but did not name. An electric current generates a magnetic field.

Next Post: Math/Science 14: Genetics and Evolution

I intent to read through material from a couple books before the next post, so it may take some time to get to the next one, but I will post some review material in the meantime.

[1] After Charles Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806).

[2] The idea that the voltage difference across each element in a series circuit add up to the total voltage is called "Kirchhoff's law" for voltage.

[3] Named after Georg Ohm (1789-1854).

[4] Kirchhoff's current law.

[5] I have introduced k as a constant to show the similarity with Newton's Law of Gravitation. The constant is usually expressed as 1/4πɛ₀, where ɛ₀ is the "constant of permittivity of free space," approximately, 8.85 x 10^-12 farads/meter.

Gen Eds 10c: Ancient Egypt

This is the third post in the Classical Civilizations" unit of my World History series. The first two were India and China.

This is part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. The series consists of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. So far in the world history section:

• World History Overview
• From 9-11 to the Present
• From the Cold War to the Millennium
• From Waterloo to World War II
• 5a. The French Revolution
• 5b. The Enlightenment to the American Revolution
• 5c. From Cromwell to the First Industrial Revolution
• 6a. Reformation and Scientific Revolution 
• 6b. The Renaissance and a New World
• 7a. Church Schisms in the Middle Ages
• 7b. Kings Rising in the Middle Ages
• 7c. Medieval Arabia, India, China, and South America
• 8a. The Roman Empire
• 8b. The Roman Republic
• 9a. Greeks and the Hellenistic Age
• 9b. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians
• 10a. Ancient India
• 10b. Ancient China

___________________________
1. For some 3000 years, Egypt was the dominant civilization around the Mediterranean Sea. From about 3400BC until Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332BC, Egypt was unsurpassed in the Mediterranean part of the world.

The first real dynasty of Egypt took place around 3100BC under king Menes, who set up his capital in the area that would later come to be known as Memphis. However, even before him there was a northern and southern kingdom. [1] The movie The Scorpion King, although completely unhistorical, no doubt took its inspiration from a king named Scorpion who in 3200 unsuccessfully tried to conquer the northern kingdom from the south.

The oldest known hieroglyphics come from the time of Menes, and it was during this time that some of the most enduring aspects of Egyptian culture were being formed. For example, the king of Egypt (the Pharaoh) was thought to be like a god and associated with the god Horus. The yearly flooding of the Nile provided natural irrigation.

2. The five hundred years of the Old Kingdom (2686-2181BC) was the time during which the pyramids were build. These were funerary monuments for the kings of the third dynasty. The first pyramid was the "step pyramid" of Djoser, built about 2630. It was the first major stone building in the world. The Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the seven wonders of the world was build by Khufu or Cheops in Greek in the 2500s. Two more pyramids were also built.

The third and fourth dynasties were the golden age. From the fifth to the sixth dynasty, the rise of a priestly class drained the resources that before belonged to the king, and the building of pyramids became a significant economic burden.

3. The "First Intermediate Period" saw the disintegration of a united kingdom for a period of about a hundred years (2181-55BC). There were several kings one after the other until Mentuhotep, a king ruling from Thebes in the south, reunited Egypt. Thus began the eleventh dynasty and the Middle Kingdom.

4. The Middle Kingdom dates from 2055-1786BC and runs from the eleventh to the twelfth dynasty. Pyramids returned. The practice of co-regents so that a successor was in place began. The last ruler of the twelfth dynasty was the first female ruler of Egypt. This is about the time of Abraham.

5. A "Second Intermediate Period" (1786-1567BC) erupted after the end of the twelfth dynasty. Around 1650, the Hyksos invaded and ruled from the northern part of Egypt (Lower Egypt). There is no real agreement on who the Hyksos were. Some think they were Semitic. Others think they were Indo-European.

If you try to align this part of Egyptian history with Genesis, then it would seem that the Pharaoh before whom Joseph appeared as a Hyksos king. Meanwhile, the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt in 1570, and the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph may have been a New Kingdom king.

6.  The New Kingdom (1567-1085BC) began when Ahmose I reunified Egypt under an 18th dynasty. At one point the Egyptian empire stretched from Nubia in the south to the Euphrates River in the east. There were a number of powerful queen rulers during this period, including Queen Hatshepsut (1503-1482BC).

One of the most intriguing episodes during this period is the rule of Akhenaton (1379-62BC), otherwise known as Amenhotep IV. (His wife Nefertiti is also well known) He disbanded the priests of Amon-Re and instituted the worship of only one God, Aton, another sun god. He built a new capital in Middle Egypt at a place called Amarna, and the Amarna letters are a collection of letters from his reign.

Tutankhamen (1361-52BC) is well known today because this child emperor's tomb was discovered intact in 1922. He was the child of Akhenaton. Not long after their deaths, their names were expunged from all records and traditional Egyptian religion was restored. The capital returned to Thebes.

7. Many locate the time of Moses with the reign of Ramses II (1304-1237BC), and you can see the letters MSES in Ramses' name. It is interesting to wonder about the interplay of Akhenaton's henotheism and the henotheism of the Israelites. [2]

Funerary Temple of Ramses III

The 19th and 20th dynasties were the Ramesside period. All the New Kingdom rulers except Akhenaton were buried in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes. The last king of the twentieth dynasty, Ramses III, had a magnificent funerary temple.

8. A "Third Intermediate Period" (1085-664BC) followed the end of Ramses III's rule. During this period, there was no strong central king, but local rulers vied for power. Shishak, who began the 22nd dynasty around 945BC, is mentioned in the Old Testament as a king who came and plundered the Jerusalem temple built by Solomon (1 Kings 14:25).

The Assyrians came through Egypt in 671 and destroyed Memphis. Egypt became part of the Persian empire in 525BC. The Greeks took it over in 332BC and it was then ruled by the Ptolemies. Finally, the Romans took over after the death of Cleopatra in 31BC.

Next Week: History 10d. Ancient Mesopotamia

[1] The southern part of Egypt was known as Upper Egypt and the northern part Lower Egypt because the Nile is the most famous river in the world that flows from south to north. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for Egypt, mizraim, is a "dual" noun, indicating two things.

[2] Henotheism is the belief that there is only one legitimate God to worship, even though other gods may also exist. Monolatry similarly refers to the worship of only one God, even though other gods may also exist.

Take-Aways:

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Gen Eds 10b: Ancient China

This is the second post in the Classical Civilizations" unit of my World History series.

This is part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. The series consists of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. So far in the world history section:

• World History Overview
• From 9-11 to the Present
• From the Cold War to the Millennium
• From Waterloo to World War II
• 5a. The French Revolution
• 5b. The Enlightenment to the American Revolution
• 5c. From Cromwell to the First Industrial Revolution
• 6a. Reformation and Scientific Revolution 
• 6b. The Renaissance and a New World
• 7a. Church Schisms in the Middle Ages
• 7b. Kings Rising in the Middle Ages
• 7c. Medieval Arabia, India, China, and South America
• 8a. The Roman Empire
• 8b. The Roman Republic
• 9a. Greeks and the Hellenistic Age
• 9b. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians
• 10a. Ancient India

___________________________
1. The first dynasties in China go back to the 2000s BC (the Xia Dynasty, 2070-1600BC), although our first written records only go back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046BC). One of the four ancient cradles of civilization (India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia), Chinese civilization originated along the Yellow River, just as Indian civilization arose along the Indus River. Ironically, the movement to a "civilization" is often marked by the beginning of slavery by the Xia Dynasty.

The "Zhou" Dynasty is usually considered the period of the birthplace of Chinese culture, although the dynasty only had widespread control from 1046-771BC. In the second half of their time, they only had limited power in the east (771-221BC). This was a period with a collection of clans that warred off and on with each other.

The first half of this "Eastern Zhou" time is called the "Spring and Autumn Period" (771-476BC), during which there were four major clans: Qin in the west, Jin in the center, Chu in the south, and Qi in the east. [1] Then a split in the Jin clan led to the "Warring States Period" from 476-221BC.

There is something fascinating about the 500s BC around the world. Human cultures everywhere seem to have made some sort of a jump. Buddhism rises in India. This is the time of Isaiah 40-66, the center point of monotheism in the Old Testament. In China, this is when Confucianism (Confucius' given name was Kong Qiu) and Taoism (founded by Lao Tzu) originated.

2. The "Warring States Period" was brutal, with as many as eight different "states" vying for power (Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Wei, Yue, and Zhao). The power that would emerge as the first real unifier of China as an empire was the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC), and the name "China" is thought to come from "Qin." They used iron swords. The Art of War was written in the Warring States period by Sun Tzu.

The Qin Dynasty was strongly autocratic, and they created a highly bureaucratic and centralized state. Their approach to governance is known as "Legalism" and every dissenter to the central authority was put to death. The diverse "One Hundred Schools of Thought" from the Spring and Autumn Period was purged, with only the schools of thought the Qin Dynasty approved of allowed to survive. All other literature was destroyed.

It was the shortest dynasty of all.

Nevertheless, it was during the Qin moment of history that Chinese writing was standardized for the first time. The Great Wall, although a wall was started earlier, received its first substantial building during the Qi Dynasty. The well-known "Terracotta Army" is a massive collection of life-size model soldiers, chariots, horses, and such in battle array, celebrating the victory of the Qin armies. It is located in the tomb of the Qin Dynasty.

3. The Qin Dynasty only lasted 15 years until it was defeated by the Han clan, which set up the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD9). Han was less oppressive. While the population under Qin rule was decimated, it expanded during the Han period. The Han empire was the first long-standing empire in the region.

It was during the Han Dynasty that the Silk Road began to take shape, the trading route for silk between China and the Western world. Also, a Confusion Academy was set up to train bureaucrats for the empire. Some subordinate rulers were empowered on the edges of the empire.

Remnants of the Han rule continued until AD220, mostly in the east. During this time, the Silk Road brought Buddhism into China. The Han period ended with natural disasters and decimation by war.

4. At the end of the Han Dynasty, the area of China was divided into three kingdoms (AD220-80), after which the Jin Dynasty began (AD265-420). Another dynasty called the Sui dynasty (AD581-618) built the Grand Canal, while extending the Great Wall. It is interesting that their rule was so short. It seems like the dynasties that focused on building projects were shorter than those that focused on war.

5. Ancient Chinese history is full of war between clans and factions, back and forth, back and forth. The highly disciplined and usually authoritarian bureaucracy is another feature.

Next Week: History 10c. Ancient Egypt

Take-Away:

• Extreme authoritarianism is often short lived, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• Trade inevitably changes a culture because of the inevitable influences from the outside, but you change them too.

[1] Cf. http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/chinese-history/spring-and-autumn-period.htm