Georeactor Blog

Back home I've stalled in reading, but on this trip I am enjoying these two books:

Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts (Roberta Mazza, 2024)

This is a new release looking behind the scenes of Hobby Lobby's Museum of the Bible.
When I picked this up I thought maybe it was from a journalist book-ifying their work, but Dr. Mazza is a papyrologist and trustee of the UK's Egypt Exploration Society. When we go back in time to an Oxford Papyrology Summer School where Mazza met two of the key players, I realized: oh shit this is an academic feud (I also pictured Austin Powers and Dr. Evil going to school together in Goldmember). Sure enough, there are excerpts from blogs and emails and seminars, mixed in with chats with eBay sellers, the history of the Egyptian artifacts trade, evangelical views on Biblical authorship, and several other threads which messily converge.

To zoom out, this is about how the papyrology field was upended by a flood of money from the Hobby Lobby family (the Greens). There are a limited number of papyrus fragments which were exported from Egypt and Iraq when it was "legal". If a new fragment is on the market, whether it's on eBay or Sotheby's or even a Vatican exhibit, experts on its time period will be skeptical that it and its provenance are authentic. The Greens were so eager to acquire New Testament artifacts that they would buy papyrus through sketchy sources. It's not clear if they figured that provenance was no issue when the museum would hold the artifacts forever (i.e. no resale), if they felt secure by handling the artifact trade personally, or if the tax incentive of donating to the museum was too valuable.

It's difficult to summarize all of the threads, but the destruction of mummy masks and attempted selling of Oxford papyri were particularly shocking. I also appreciate Mazza's goal for the field to protect history first, to the point that she believes it's wrong to comment and give credibility to an unethically sourced artifact. There's also some inside baseball about museums deaccessioning / selling their artifacts, and traders cutting up papyrus for more sales, which makes the whole trade feel beyond redemption.

Notes:

• There is a 2017 book Bible Nation by theology professors which covers a broader set of conservative activism by Hobby Lobby (such as the Obamacare stuff).
• The book uses the word "cupidity" multiple times, which was new to me. I thought it might mean "for the love of money," but officially means "extreme greed". Maybe a way to call them stupid greedy?
• I'm glad that I checked out end notes while in the Stansted security line, because it mentions the massive cyberattack and subsequent outage at the British Library.

Golddiggers, Farmers, and Traders in the "Chinese Districts" of West Kalimantan, Indonesia (Mary Somers Heidhues, 2003)

While looking for books still in print about the 'kongsi republics', I found this academic read with a more complete history of the Chinese and Peranakans in western Borneo (around Pontianak). Dr. Heidhues did a dissertation Peranakan Chinese politics in Indonesia in 1965, and researched this book around 1995–1997.

After ~1,000 years of Chinese trade with early Brunei / Borneo, miners from Guangdong Province established settlements in the late 1700s to pursue gold. The kongsi, a mining co-op / shareholder model, was adopted for administration of the outposts. From Dutch colonial times to modern Indonesia, the 1776/77 election in the Lanfang Republic holds legendary status with comments like "Lo Fang Pak is no less than [George] Washington". When profitable gold was no longer accessible, the kongsis chased other boom economies in coconut, pepper, and ultimately rubber and similar materials. The Chinese communities lost influence with suppression by the Dutch, Japanese wartime occupation, and anti-communist purges in 1960s Indonesia.

While the Taiping Rebellion raged and Wallace visited the Rajah James Brooke in Sarawak, on the other side of the island Hakka and Hokkien settlers had just ended the second 'Kongsi War' with the Dutch colonial officials. Chinese traders were at times fleeing between the three countries. The Dutch presence on Borneo was particularly weak, and they were perplexed about how to tax trade and supervise relations between the Chinese and the Malay and Dayak communities. Where Malay traders had at times implemented a type of slavery, the Chinese found a preferable and effective model of prepaying Dayak workers and offering imported goods on credit. Malay and Dutch leaders would restrict which industries the Chinese could participate in (failing to discourage new rice farms) and later prevented mixed marriages (supposedly to avoid Dayaks getting married off to repay debts).

Ethnic communities were not homogeneous within, with Hakka and Hokkien communities taking different roles in cities and outposts, and the Dayak chiefs and allegiances not getting described in detail here (as there is little documentation). Dayak people could also 'become Malay' by converting to Islam and changing their customs.

A story which amazed me (but I couldn't research online; the Dutch Wikipedia cites this book) was that in 1853 the Resident T. J. Willer came up with a ceremony to dissolve the Thaikong kongsi and ceremonially burn its seal/stamp with its leaders. They put the ashes into the form of the new approved company seal. This seemed quite Apocalypse Now to the Governor-General, and Willer was quickly dismissed.
All together I think the democratic miners / Malay pirates / jungle setting could make an epic foundation for a Netflix series, though if you bring in the Dutch it gets a little much like Shogun.

Updates to Previous Reads

Ling Ma, author of Severance, and Ruha Benjamin, author of books on race and technology, were awarded MacArthur fellowships.

New PBS series on the early history of Muslims in America: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/13/nx-s1-5147723/a-new-pbs-series-shows-the-history-of-muslims-in-america

The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast had a mini-episode about This Was A Graffiti, a new short film ( https://yugoblok.com/inspired-by-yugoslavia5/ ). Everyone in Sarajevo remembers this graffiti exchange but no photos have surfaced, only reconstructions. After looking for the earliest mentions, it seems it's a hyper-local, Mandela Effect situation.

Debunking rumors of pre-Columbus origins for an old stone tower in Rhode Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_Tower_(Rhode_Island)

Unclear evidence for biofortification of crops? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktI29yCELWw

The ground floor lobby / communal meeting place of Singapore apartments is apparently called a "void deck".

After years of collecting books on a closet shelf, I found a book drop which supports a local school (they donate or sell non-school books).

My subreddit reads got me recommended some more legal subreddits, and I discovered lawyers complaining about "post-covid juries" who award a million dollars like it's nothing. Not knowing any of the stats on this, it does strike me that puppies, driving, and every aspect of life has some collective blame of Covid / the Covid Era.

A co-author of Warday (a speculative fiction interviewing people around the US after a limited nuclear war -  I read the NYC chapters but didn't review it) later wrote about his experiences with aliens which was made into a movie Communion.

The mayor of Buffalo, who lost the Democratic primary to a socialist candidate in 2021 and had to continue as a write-in candidate, resigned early to join a gambling project https://x.com/JDale_Shoemaker/status/1840865883813466215

The Xinjiang conversation on social media: https://x.com/ShangguanJiewen/status/1845712775621874002

1857 chain letter vibes with this story from India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapati_Movement