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King Arthur, the Iranian

The new King Arthur movie claims to be based on a fresh “historical” take on the mythic king (which includes Guinevere in a leather bikini). Specifically, it references the speculation about a connection between the historical general that supposedly was the basis for the legendary figure of Arthur, and the Sarmatians, an Iranian people of nomadic horsemen who were recruited by the Romans (like many other barbarians) to serve in their military, and who were apparently stationed in roman Britain.
This article details the links between the Sarmatians and Arthurian Legend, which include the dragon banner (the source of “Uthur Pendragon”?) and the legends of the magic sword and the holy cup:

After hard but victorious battles, 5,500 Sarmatian/Alanian heavy cavalry (called cataphractarii, i.e. clothed fully in scale armour) consisting of prisoners taken in war were posted to Britain in 175.

The closed society of Sarmatian cataphractarii in Britain was able to maintain its ethnic features during the Late Roman period and afterwards. One reason is that their troops, called cuneus Sarmatorum, equitum Sarmatorum Bremetennacensium Gordianorum were not part of any military organization in active service. Consequently, after the withdrawal of the Roman army, they continued to live on their accustomed sites (Chester, Ribchester, etc.). They were still called Sarmatians after 250 years. A semihistoric Arthur lived about A.D. 500. He was very probably a descendant of those Alan horsemen, a battle leader of the Romanized Celts and Britons against the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded Britain after the Roman army had withdrawn. Arthur and his military leaders could therefore manage to train the natives as armoured horseman after Iranian patterns against the attacks of Angles and Saxons fighting on feet until their victory at Badon Hill.

There’s more stuff here, including parallels between the sword in the stone and Sarmatian rituals, and the close parallels in the legend about a king’s retainers reluctantly obeying his dying command to throw his sword in a lake.
Naturally, the Sarmatian Arthur has annoyed some people, but apparently not many.

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Resources

Visual Literacy

The Visual Literacy project is a tutorial teaching amuteur cartooning, sort-of “you, too, can draw your own silly Powerpoint clip-art!”. The link is from the online book explaining how to make a complete map of every thought you think which I referred to last week.

Categories
Resources Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tau Ceti’s halo of debris

New Scientist:

A nearby star system thought of as a candidate for harbouring life has 10 times the number of asteroids and comets as found in our Solar System. The sheer number of bodies raging around the Sun-like star may mean that any potential life is choked off, say UK researchers.

The star, Tau Ceti, lies just 12 light-years away and has been eyed as a possible oasis for life because of its similarity to the Sun and the inference of a surrounding debris disk that may harbour planets.

Imaging the disk has now identified the 10-billion-year-old Tau Ceti as the oldest of about a dozen stars with confirmed disks. Its span is similar to our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt.

This shadowy belt consists of a ring of comets and asteroids reaching just past Pluto’s orbit. But the amount of dust around Tau Ceti suggests it is circled by more than 10 times as many of the objects.

Categories
Resources Software and Programming

Downloading music, the UNIX way

Jeffrey Veen: MP3 Blogs and wget. Also, a blog dedicated to the workhorses of UNIX downloading, wget and curl (both of these programs work quite fine on Windows, through cygwin or perhaps other distributions).
Here’s a link to some free classical music to experiment with.

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Resources short

MA in novel writing

MA in Novel Writing programme, at Manchester University. (via del.icio.us)