The Human Magnet Stone

The bahit, or human magnet stone, was widely accepted as real by geographers and historians of the Middle Ages. This stone – sometimes also called baht – reputedly had the power to attract human beings to it, who would then be held fast to it until they died. The bahit was associated with the legendary City of Brass, described in the Thousand and One Nights. The lost city's exterior walls were said to have been built of solid brass blocks, but the interior walls were believed by some to have been constructed of bahit stone. In fact, the City of Brass is sometimes called El Baht.

The stone is described by various writers, among them Ibn Fadl Allah al-‘Umari (1301-1349) of Damascus, who authored an unconventional encyclopedia – a combination universal history and world geography – called Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar, “Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises.” This work has never been published in its entirety. But a section that has been published (Section One, ed. Ahmed Zaki, Vol. 1, Cairo 1342/1924) talks about the bahit stone…

All mountains are branches of the range which encircles most of the inhabited world. It is called Jabal al-Qaf and is the mother of mountains, for they all stem from it….
 This side-chain of the Jabal al-Qaf is called at its beginning [i.e. the eastern end] al-Mujarrid. Then it extends until it reaches, in the western section, a longitude of 65 degrees from the beginning of the Maghreb….
 A chain called the Mountains of the Moon branches off here. The Nile rises in it. It is said that glittering stones are to be found there which gleam like white silver. They are called sanjat al-bahit. Anyone who sees one laughs and cleaves to it till he dies. It is also called the “human magnet” (maghnatis al-nas). The author of [the] Jughrafiya [“Geography” – presumably Ptolemy is meant here] says that Aristotle mentions it in his Book of Stones (Kitab al-ahjar)….
 There are numerous accounts of the origins of the course of the Nile. Al-Mas‘udi and others give worthless information. The most commonly expressed view is that somebody or other has actually seen its source, and each writer puts forward a reason for the failure to find out the truth about it.
 Some say: “Some persons reached the mountains [where the Nile rises], climbed them, and saw beyond them a heaving sea with water black as night split by a river white as day which entered the mountains on the south and came out on the north, where it divided into branches at the dome of Hermes, which is built there. They assert that the builder of this dome was Hirmis al-Haramisa (Hermes of the Hermeses), who is called the Threefold in Wisdom [Trismegistus], while others claim that he is Idris (peace be upon him!), who reached that place and there built a dome; and they say that he is called the Threefold because he combines three things: prophethood, wisdom, and kingship.”
 Others say: “Some persons climbed the mountain, but each time one of them stepped forward he would laugh, clap his hands, and fling himself down the far side. The rest feared to suffer the same fate, and so came back.”
 Others make this assertion: “What these persons mentioned about actually saw was the bahit stone. Everyone from among them who saw it laughed, stepped forward, and cleaved to it until he died.”

The celebrated geographer al-Idrisi mentions the human magnet stone in the well-known work he penned for the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II – Nuzhat al-mushtaq fî ikhtiraq al-afaq (“The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons”), completed in 1154….

[The First Section of the Second Clime]
 On the coast of the sea that stretches away from these [the Fortunate Isles] and other islands, ambergris of excellent quality is found. From its coasts, too, comes the baht stone, which is famous among the people of al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. Single specimens of that stone are sold at great price, especially in the country of the Lamtûna, who relate that if a person sets out to fulfill some need, and takes hold of such a stone, he will succeed in full. They assert, too, that it is good for tongue-tie….

A Syrian writer, al-Dimashqi (1256-1327), briefly mentions the bahit stone in Nukhbat al-dahr fî ‘aja’ib al-barr wa-’l-bahr, “The Choice of the Age, on the Marvels of Land and Sea”…

[The sources of the Nile are ten streams which flow into two lakes situated beyond the Equator.]
 According to Qudama one of the ten streams, the most westerly, is called Aliha. Its water issues from beneath the bahitstone, the human magnet (maghnatis al-nas).

The earliest reference to the bahit or baht stone that I’ve been able to find appears in a work by historian-geographer Ibn al-Fakih al-Hamadhani, who wrote in the late 9^th and early 10^th centuries. Ibn al-Fakih mentions the human magnet stone in his Kitab al-Buldan (“Book of the Countries”),  a work which remains largely untranslated but is summarized in the Compendium libri Kitab al-Boldan (Leiden: 1885). Ibn al-Fakih applies the name baht to a lost city in the North African desert that he later identifies with the City of Brass…

Alexander constructed the city of Baht in the Maghreb: it was called The Splendid or The Brilliant. It was constructed of a stone called el baht. Anyone who looks at it loses his mind and laughs in a manner so prolonged and reckless that he perishes.

Later on, he mentions the city again:

Among the marvelous things of the region of Sous (Moroccan), it is necessary to mention the Wadi r remel (valley or river of sand), and the city of el Baht, which is located in one of the deserts of this country.

Finally, in the same book, Ibn Fakih merges the baht stone with the story of the City of Brass in a longish account that begins as follows. (At the time this book was written, “al-Andalus” was sometimes used as the name not only for Arab Spain but for Northwest Africa as well.) …

Among the wonders of al-Andalus is al-Baht, which is a city lying in one of its deserts. When the report of this city, and especially of treasures contained in it, had reached Abdu’l-Malik ibn Marwan, he wrote to Musa ibn Nusair, who was his governor in the Maghrib, ordering him to make a journey thither….

Ibn al-Fakih’s story – and the later “City of Brass” tale in the Arabian Nights– both relate that soldiers who scaled the walls of the city looked inside, laughed loudly, in some cases clapped their hands, and then jumped inside the walls.... These actions suggest the presence of the human magnet stone…

Folklorist Mai I. Gerhardt notes this phenomenon and discusses its further development in The Art of Story-Telling (Leiden: 1963), her impressive literary study of the Arabian Nights…

Both Yakut (d. 1229) and the wonder-loving Kazwini (d. 1283), when copying Ibn el-Fakih’s account, introduce it by the following paragraph:

 Ibn el-Fakih reports that according to the most ancient authors, the City of Brass was constructed by Dhou el-Qarnein [Alexander the Great], who deposited there his treasures and the products of his science, and prevented entry by some enchantments, which halted visitors. He constructed its interior of the bahtstone, which is for men what a magnet is for iron; whoever views it is forced to laugh at the brilliance and hurl themselves towards it: they then cannot detach themselves from it. One finds it in the deserts of Andalusia [ = el-Andalus].
                                (quoted by Gaudefroy-Demombynes, 101 Nuits, p. 333.)

 And Kazwini complacently adds some more stone-lore: the baht-stone has the colour of white marcassite; a certain little bird, when alighting on it, robs it of its power. – Yakut and Kazwini expressly identify the City of Brass with the city Ibn el-Fakih calls el-Baht; Kazwini specifies that its centre was occupied by a pillar of baht-stone. They keep, on the authority of Ibn el-Fakih, the attribution to Alexander, but at the same time reproduce the inscription speaking of Solomon; and, of course, the episode of the lake. It would seem as if, with these 13^th-century authors, the legend enters its period of decadence; no attempt is made to sort out conflicting information (as Abu Hamid still tried to do) and the mysterious is replaced and “explained” by the marvellous.
 The progress of this decadence is strikingly attested by the compilers of the next century. The Persian-writing Mustawfi (1340) [also a native of Kazwin, and sometimes designated Kazwini II] who follows Kazwini and an otherwise unknown History of the Maghreb [probably 12^th century], expressly locates the city in Spain. According to him the expedition of explorers was sent out by one of the Ommayad caliphs of Cordoba, while Musa ibn Nusair, earlier, dispatched fishermen to bring up the Solomonic jars from the lake. He then continues:

Near the City of Brass, there had been set up two stone tablets on which were inscribed certain details concerning the (future) prophets – peace be upon them all – and mention here was also made of our Prophet – upon whom be peace – and many profitable admonitions and precepts were added thereto. The above account is taken from the History of the Maghreb, and Qazvini [Kazwini] states that the reason why every one at the sight of the City of Brass fell to laughter, was that therein lay a mountain of Bahat(or Laughing) stone. Now the peculiarity of this stone is, that when any man casts his eyes thereon, he falls into convulsions of laughter, and he laughs so violently that he forthwith dies; therefore the demons have great content in the presence there of this stone.
 (Mustawfi, The geographical part of the Nuzhat el-Qulub, transl. cit.,p. 260.)

 The inscribed tablets near the city are a new detail, recalling the seven marble tablets of the Spanish narrator in the ‘1001 Nights’-story. For the rest, Mustawfi’s data are garbled; but he gratefully reproduces Kazwini’s explanatory information on the marvellous stone.
 A few generations later, el-Bakuwi (d. 1403) still relies on Kazwini, as the wording in his paragraph shows:

Medinat al nehas. It is also called Medinat al Saphar(the City of Brass); it is famous: it is said that it was built by Dhoulcarnain, who deposited his treasures there with talismans to keep them untouched. In the interior there is a baht stone, which is the magnet for men; it is called such because if a man approaches too close, he is drawn to it and attached to it like iron to a magnet; he cannot free himself and he dies; this magnet is found in the deserts of Andalusia.
 The circuit of this city is some forty parasangs, the height of its walls five hundred cubits; it has no gates, its foundations are impregnable; what is more certain is that it was built by Solomon, son of David. Musa ibn Nasr, lieutenant of Abdol-malik, made his army approach it, and set up a ladder with which he reached the top of its walls, and he sent a man inside who never came back; he [Musa] entered also, and never returned; (but we leave there all the fables that are produced on this city). [The bracketed sentence at the end is due to the translator, who makes a point of suppressing the “fables” of his original. It is a pity to be thus deprived of whatever information the – very mediocre – el-Bakuwi still had to offer.]
                                     (El-Bakoui, Exposition…; transl. cit., p. 524.)

 As far as can be ascertained from the abridged and condensed eighteenth-century translation, this account seems to represent a shrivelled state of the legend. The familiar details, and notably also the baht-stone, are still there, but the whole is by way of losing whatever consistency it used to possess. Alexander and Solomon are mentioned, as builders of the city, almost in the same breath; the statement that Musa himself entered the city and never returned [I wonder if the translation is correct here] is preposterous, seeing that his whole career has come down in history.

[Source: Gerhardt, Mia I. The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights.Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963.]

Heat Death Warriors: The Battle Against Entropy

The universe tends to wind down.

            As they taught us in high school science class, everything slowly – or sometimes quickly – deteriorates. Energy is lost, either suddenly or gradually.  Heat seeps away. Stars burn out. Complex systems collapse. This is the physical process we call entropy. Thermal equilibrium is the goal of the universe.

            There seem to be only two things that work against entropy. One is the Big Bang, which happened almost 14 billion years ago. Whatever caused the start of our universe, it created processes that led to complexity and molecules and galactic systems and everything else that makes up the universe. The Big Bang, mysterious as it was, challenged thermal equilibrium.

            The second opponent of entropy is life – just as mysterious as the Big Bang – which began some four billion years ago and which is ongoing. Living organisms store energy and fight the tendency toward collapse, breakdown, rot, disorder. These organisms do die, but they create successors, offspring, which carry on the struggle against entropy. Life creates systems that challenge the tendency of the universe.

            What does all this mean? Simply, that we human beings, as living organisms, are engineered, designed, created, to fight entropy. There may be other reasons why we exist, but fighting entropy is self-evident and clearly our most important priority – for if we fail to stave off heat death (the end of thermodynamic free energy) we are finished.

            It is not certain that humans or any other living species can win the battle against entropy. In fact, it is very likely that the struggle is unwinnable in the long run. But it is in our nature as a species to fight against our own deaths and against the heat death of the universe.

            It may be that in time – perhaps billions of years from now – we will figure out a way to outwit the laws of thermodynamics, keep energy pulsing, and become literal masters of the universe. We’re a long way from that outcome, but we will doubtless continue to pursue it.

When the World Shook

When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard is an unusual if flawed piece of early science fiction, laced with philosophy, religion, colonial anthropology, romance and humor.

The journal Science Fiction Studies of DePauw University sums up the book as follows:

When The World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot. 1919. The most science-fictional of Haggard's novels, for along with such psychic phenomena as metempsychosis we have suspended animation with survivors from a technologically advanced civilization 250,000 years in the past, a chart comparing the star patterns of that time with those of today, and a monstrous machine — one capable of changing the tilt of the earth.

It is a post-Victorian novel, written during World War I, and the conflict impinges upon the narrative in various ways. When the World Shook was first published in serial form in the British Christian evangelical magazine The Quiver in 1918, at the end of the war, and was released as a novel the following year.

A thoughtful blogger was right on target when he recently observed:

When the World Shook is a beautiful and silly book. It has very clear flaws and is definitely not one of the best books ever written, but it may turn out to be one of my favorites. This thing is deeply flawed, but I fully intend to read it again and again throughout my life. The book is, at its core, the adventures of a troubled agnostic and his buddies the atheist and the believer, as they explore a mysterious island and meet the powerful man-god-king asleep in its bowels. They also argue philosophy and theology a lot. Oh and there’s World War I? Plus a touch of racism, but not as much as I expected! Basically, it’s your normal “boy widower who suffers anxiety about where we go when we die and what our place in the universe might be meets girl who is an ancient scientifimagical princess who has slept in the Earth for eons and might be a reincarnation of someone who lived during her sleep” story.

The author, Sir Henry Rider Haggard, wrote adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa – such as King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887) and She (1887) – and was a pioneer of the “lost world” literary genre, of which When the World Shook is a late example.

Haggard was a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Henry’s biographer Morton Cohen says Kipling provided the idea for When the World Shook. The website HiLoBrow says Kipling “helped with the plot.”

HiLoBrow has posted a modern serialization of the novel, with some minor abridgements.

Here is HiLoBrow’s plot summary plus some interesting blurbs, old and new:

When the World Shook concerns adventurers Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot, who discover two Atlanteans in a state of suspended animation on a remote island. One of the awakened sleepers, Lord Oro, is a superman — the last king of the Sons of Wisdom, who’d relied on hyper-advanced technology to subjugate the planet’s lesser peoples. The other is Oro’s sexy daughter, Yva… who falls in love with Arbuthnot. Using astral projection, Lord Oro visits London and the battlefields of the Western Front. Why? To determine whether or not he should once again employ an infernal chthonic machine to drown the worthless human race, as he’d done 250,000 years earlier!... 

“A really splendid romance, rich in color, fresh and gorgeous in its imaginative qualities and power, and needless to add, absorbingly interesting, is this wherein Rider Haggard tells us of what happened ‘When the World Shook.’” — The New York Times (1919) 

“Speaking quite soberly and without exaggeration, this story of ‘When the World Shook’ is an amazing novel. Amazing in its imaginative quality, its romance, the splendor of its descriptions, doubly amazing when one remembers that it is the successor to a long series of colorful tales of adventure in savage or extraordinary lands… We frankly admit that, in our opinion at least, Rider Haggard has never conceived and placed before our eyes any pictures more thrilling or more impressive that are contained in this latest book.” — New York Evening Post (1919) 

“Rider Haggard has again unbridled his splendid imagination. A thrilling, gigantic wonder tale.” — Pittsburgh Sun (1919) 

“If this is pulp fiction it’s high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance. When the World Shook has it all — English gentlemen of leisure, a devastating shipwreck, a volcanic tropical island inhabited by cannibals, an ancient princess risen from the grave, and if that weren’t enough a friendly, ongoing debate between a godless materialist and a devout Christian. H. Rider Haggard’s rich universe is both profoundly camp and deeply idealistic.” — Lydia Millet (2012 blurb for HiLoBooks)

Another online version of the novel is available on an Australian website, freeread.com.au.

Queens of Mesopotamia – Part II: Nitocris

‘Darius Opens the Tomb of Nitocris’

By Eustache Le Sueur

In the previous post, we discussed the Assyrian queen Semiramis, as described in the Histories of Herodotus and other works. Now we will take a look at Nitocris, another queen who ruled Babylon five generations after Semiramis.

(Another, perhaps better-known, Nitocris was also mentioned by Herodotus as a ruler of Egypt. She was said to be the last pharaoh of the Sixth dynasty. Today, scholars question her very existence.)

The Assyrian-origin Nitocris, sometimes called Nitocris of Babylon, is said to be either the wife or daughter of Nebuchadnezzar II. This Nebuchadnezzar (a major figure in the Bible’s Book of Daniel) was the son of Nabopolassar, founder of the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire, which broke free from Nineveh-based Assyria by forming an alliance with the Medes of Persia. After the destruction of Nineveh, the Babylonians began to worry about the ambitions of their erstwhile Persian allies.

Nitocris is introduced by Herodotus as follows (in George Rawlinson’s translation):

The later of the two queens, whose name was Nitocris, a wiser princess than her predecessor, not only left behind her, as memorials of her occupancy of the throne, the works which I shall presently describe, but also, observing the great power and restless enterprise of the Medes, who had taken so large a number of cities, and among them Nineveh, and expecting to be attacked in her turn, made all possible exertions to increase the defences of her empire.

Herodotus says Nitocris ordered a number of grand civil works aimed at creating defensive positions north of Babylon and thereby deterring attacks by the Medes. Among other things, Babylonian excavations transformed the Euphrates, formerly a straight river course flowing into Babylon from the north, turning it into a winding river with a number of sharp bends. She also ordered a huge lake to be dug to the north of her capital.

As Herodotus put it: “All these works were on that side of Babylon where the passes lay, and the roads into Media were the straightest, and the aim of the queen in making them was to prevent the Medes from holding intercourse with the Babylonians, and so to keep them in ignorance of her affairs.”

She also took advantage of the massive construction projects to temporarily redirect the Euphrates into the new lake basin and build a stone bridge across the riverbed inside the city of Babylon, for the first time linking the two sides of the capital.

Says Herodotus: “When the river had filled the cutting, and the bridge was finished, the Euphrates was turned back again into its ancient bed; and thus the basin, transformed suddenly into a lake, was seen to answer the purpose for which it was made, and the inhabitants, by help of the basin, obtained the advantage of a bridge.”

The location of the bridge of Nitocris has been uncovered by archaeologists at the site of the city of Babylon.

The Achaemenid Persian King Cyrus used Nitocris’ public works against her in his conquest of Babylon. He diverted the Euphrates into her artificial lake, lowering the river’s level to allow his troops to enter the city under the defensive walls beneath which the river passed.

Nitocris also created what Herodotus called “a remarkable deception” to prevent anyone from seizing her burial treasure after her death. She built her tomb above one of the main gates of Babylon, rendering the entrance unusable, because of a widespread cultural prohibition against passing beneath a dead body:

She had her tomb constructed in the upper part of one of the principal gateways of the city, high above the heads of the passers by, with this inscription cut upon it:- "If there be one among my successors on the throne of Babylon who is in want of treasure, let him open my tomb, and take as much as he chooses -- not, however, unless he be truly in want, for it will not be for his good." This tomb continued untouched until [the Achaemenid Persian king] Darius came to the kingdom. To him it seemed a monstrous thing that he should be unable to use one of the gates of the town, and that a sum of money should be lying idle, and moreover inviting his grasp, and he not seize upon it. Now he could not use the gate, because, as he drove through, the dead body would have been over his head. Accordingly he opened the tomb; but instead of money, found only the dead body, and a writing which said- "Hadst thou not been insatiate of pelf, and careless how thou gottest it, thou wouldst not have broken open the sepulchres of the dead."

Herodotus does not specifically say what happened to Nitocris’ treasure, but his account suggests none was buried with her – that, of course, would have been the centerpiece of the deception.

Classicist Deborah Levine Gera, author of Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus De Mulieribus, says Nitocris of Babylon appears to be more intelligent than Semiramis, particularly because of her public works projects and her awareness of Median expansionism. But she notes that some scholars suspect the two queens, if they actually existed, were in fact the same person. Plutarch, for example confuses the two, and has Darius plunder Semiramis’ tomb. Also some accounts attribute the bridge-building and artificial lake to Semiramis.

There are other theories about Nitocris’ identity, including:

(1) She was Nebuchadnezzar II, whose name Herodotus mistook for a feminine form. 

(2) She was Adad-Guppi, mother of Nabonidus, last of the Neo-Babylonian rulers. The influential Adad-Guppi, who helped engineer her son’s rise to the throne, was born in about 649 B.C., 150 years or five generations after the queen thought to be Semiramis. 

(3) Nitocris was a powerful Assyrian queen named Naqi’a, wife of Sennacherib (who ruled from 704-681 B.C.) and mother of Esarhaddon (who ruled from 680-669 B.C.). Many of the public works completed during Naqi’a’s lifetime resembled those of Nitocris.

To sum up, as Levine Gera puts it:

Nitocris is an elusive figure. All of the attempts to identify the Babylonian queen with an historical personage lead to difficulties of one kind or another and we cannot establish whether, in fact, she ever existed. Real or not, Nitocris is a complex, ambiguous personality whose successes and failures are inextricably linked.  She builds magnificent, monumental waterworks, but these are used by Cyrus to capture her city. She tricks Darius into opening her tomb only to bring about the violation of her own grave. Nitocris is said to be clever, but the queen is, in Herodotus’ tale, her own worst enemy: ultimately, her building feats and artful epitaph – the outstanding products of her intelligence – do her no good.

The mystery of Nitocris, like that of Semiramis, continues….