The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7187 p304
2 March 2002

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Aftermath of Afghan strife [more]
Balance and fear of falling [more]
Wars of words on windy Troy [more]

Aftermath of Afghan strife

There is so much human misery to contemplate in Afghanistan after the expulsion of the brutal Taliban regime that minor cultural difficulties do not rank high in our awareness. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to note from an account in Science for 18 January that archaeological scholars are examining the recent wanton destruction of features of the cultural heritage of the country with a view to making good some of the devastation wrought by irresponsible fanaticism.

Not long ago the Buddhist murals known to have existed at the site of Bamiyan were removed after the Buddhas themselves had been wrecked with dynamite. Moreover, every depiction of a human body that had been stored for safety and research in the national museum in Kabul had been wrecked, and the museum building itself was probably looted beyond repair, according to a report from officials of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Despite the dereliction, international support is growing for restoring and possibly reconstructing artefacts considered to be of cultural importance. A Swiss architect has produced a plan to rebuild the great Buddha statue, standing 53m high, which was destroyed at Bamiyan. This was the world's largest Buddha and was carved 1,700 years ago. A smaller model, costing some million dollars, will be the first step to recreating the original statue.

The scheme has been described not only as a symbolic measure of recovery, but as a welcome help in restoring the once-thriving tourist industry of Afghanistan. The engineering aspects of the operation are daunting, since the cliffs behind the original statue were heavily damaged by the dynamite used. Conservation is necessary, and much of the rubble of destruction has been systematically disposed of by the Taliban fanatics, hostile to all representational images.

On the brighter side, some of the material stored in the ransacked museum seems to have remained intact, as of no commercial value. But thousands of antiquities known to have been excavated in the past have disappeared from the face of the earth.

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Balance and fear of falling

In Nature for 31 January, Victor Smetacek of Bremerhaven has examined the strange role of gravity in the functioning of both body and mind. He remarks that balance is so central to every human activity that we have grown to take it for granted. When balance is disturbed and we experience fear of falling, make a mental effort to balance an equation, or feel the urge to correct a moral injustice, our appreciation of gravitational balance and imbalance becomes a serious concern.

The quality of balance was not included by Aristotle among the senses, despite its dependence upon the function of our sensory organs, and in this matter the Oriental philosophers differed from him. Sense organs perceive only gradients, so that during movements of the body our sensory motor system responds precisely to changes in the gravitational field. To judge our positioning and take our bearings we have to rely upon vestibular, visual and somatosensory systems. Our inner ear not only detects gravitational change directly but it also detects deviation from the vertical, as happens when we sense the motion of a ship at sea.

Our eyes also sense and judge balance and mass, and to this effect we owe our appreciation of symmetry and beauty in external objects. Receptors in our skin, muscles and skeleton sense gravitational pull and interpret it as pressure and weight. Our vestibular cortex interacts with the visual and sensorimotor cortices, subject to control by right hemispheral dominance, unlike other sensory systems.

The evolutionary refinement of our gravitational balancing abilities has determined our use of tools and our design of measuring rods, levers, balances and pendulums. And the mind's own gravitational effects are as important an influence as are the eye and ear, making it possible for us to set mass, balance and momentum as entities in scientific definitions.

"Archimedes, Newton and Einstein, among a host of others, have shown that there is more to insight than just vision or words, " says Smetacek. By challenging gravity we progress onwards and upwards.

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Wars of words on windy Troy

Alfred Tennyson's hero of the poem 'Ulysses' (1842) tells us how he has enjoyed greatly and suffered greatly: "And drunk delight of battle with my peers / Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." What is amazing is the breadth and depth of the arguments over the windy city that have rocked the world of classical scholarship and archaeology every now and then. Disagreements, often savage in their intensity, over the classical texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey and their interpretation, have raged for some 2,500 years, and even the identity of that blind Homer to whom the critics attribute these epics has been disputed.

In an attempt to clear the air a little, Robert Graves commented in 1960: "The Iliad and its later companion-piece the Odyssey deserve to be rescued from the classroom curse which has lain heavily on them throughout the past twenty-six centuries, and become entertainment once more." Indeed, we tend to forget that in fact these poems were designed to entertain an audience, like the romances of Roland and Don Quixote.

One school of thought has maintained that, whereas the Iliad was written for men and is full of schoolboy violence, the Odyssey was for women, with its depiction of domestic interactions and delving into emotional situations. Such a consideration persuaded Samuel Butler in his 'The authoress of the Odyssey' (1897) to make an impressive case for attributing the later work to Nausicaa, the daughter of the Phaeacian king and queen, Alcinous and Arete. This young woman, indeed, stands out as one of the most likable and capable persons in the poem, and Butler has made a most persuasive case for her authorship.

The controversy over the authorship of Homer, however, fades into the background when it comes to the fierce battles between the Trojan excavator Schliemann and other archaeologists at the end of the 19th century, and described in the 1979 edition of M. I. Finley's 'The world of Odysseus'. "Lunacy", Finley wrote, "was not restricted to one side of the debate." Schliemann raved at Botticher, Meyer and others over what was signified by the ancient discoveries at Hissarlik, the supposed site of Troy.

We can sympathise with Byron who wrote in 1824; "I've stood upon Achilles' tomb /And heard Troy doubted."

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