Aornos by train
I keep telling myself to give up the blog and use my time more productively, but then an image like this comes along.
It was sent me by Luca Olivieri, Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, and it’s a photo of a tunnel entrance he saw on the Peshawar-Rawalpindi railway line when travelling it in the 1980s. Heading from Peshawar toward Pindi, this is apparently the last tunnel before the line crosses the river Indus by the bridge at Attock.
Aornos was the mountain fastness captured by Alexander in 327/6, his last significant military success before crossing the Indus and entering India proper. As I suggested both here and here, Aornos is to be identified with Mt. Ilam in Swat, which is about 60 miles as the crow flies from this tunnel entrance.
So what were they thinking about in 1883?
Well, as I also indicated back when, the location of Aornos has long been a matter of dispute, and even today you’ll find scholars who don’t accept the identification with Ilam. Earlier or other candidates for Aornos tend to have a particular thing in common which Ilam lacks, and that is a location, strongly encouraged by Curtius Rufus 8.11.7, Diodorus 17.85.3 and Strabo 15.1.8, close to the river Indus. Here is an extremely rough-and-ready map of the four most influential proposals for the site of Aornos before Ilam, while Ilam is the dot far off to the west.
The Indus-adjacent dots are the locations proposed, from bottom to top, by Claude-Auguste Court in 1836, a Napoleonic veteran who served Maharajah Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, Alexander Cunningham in 1848, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, James Abbott in 1854, founder of Abbottabad, and Aurel Stein in 1926, archaeologist and explorer, and they track the right bank of the river from south to north. The Aornos railway tunnel is situated close to General Court’s candidate across the river from Attock, possibly actually right underneath it.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times before the remarkable energy that the British (and other Europeans) in N.-W. India put into identifying the vestiges, real or imagined, of Alexander’s campaigns, and identifying the rock of Aornos was the ultimate prize. This quest was never innocent of a sense of their own presence and purpose in these unfamiliar places, needless to say. It is unexpected, but entirely apt, that we find that preoccupation with Alexander here married to the most familiar example of British efforts to pacify their Indian possessions, the railways.
which built his house upon a rock
Thoughts on something I found rather remarkable during a weekend away; also on encountering in three-dimensional form the argument of the book I happened to be reading. In the photograph is Wesley Hall in Whitby, opened in 1901, and my holiday reading (because I know how to have fun) was Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In Whitby, I know, I know, I should have been reading Dracula.
When first built, Wesley Hall apparently provided the Methodists of Whitby with a space for a Sunday School and other such ancillary activities, but it later became their main place of worship when an adjacent chapel became too ramshackle for that purpose.
A closer view of the building reveals that it is covered in names, on larger ashlar details that decorate the brick facade,
on smaller ashlar details,
and (as initials) on individual bricks,
The names and initials self-evidently record financial contributions toward the construction of the Hall, donations large, medium and small. They decorate the front facade of the building and the right side as one looks at it, at least (I couldn’t see the left side), for a certain distance back from the road. The names are as a result clearly visible, and deliberately so, to anyone passing by the building.
As Weber was simultaneously informing me, this is all very characteristically Methodist, a religious philosophy that has always been comfortable with the acquisition of wealth, in a way similar to other low Protestant traditions (the theme of Weber’s book), so long as that wealth be put to good use. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, held to “the old Puritan doctrine that works are not the cause, but only the means of knowing one’s state of grace, and even this only when they are performed solely for the glory of God” (Weber tr. Parsons, p. 141). By doing good works you assure yourself that you are one of the elect. In the case of Wesley Hall, much of the funding for the building came from Robert Elliott Pannett, a Methodist solicitor who also bequeathed money for the building of an art gallery (now a gallery and town museum) in a park named after him in Whitby. His name features on one of the larger blocks.
Wesley Hall thus, it seems to me, expresses in architectural form in an unusually explicit way its religious principles, a building that advertises the individual acts of generosity that brought it into existence, and blazons for all to see the worthiness in the sight of God of each and every person named on it. The Hall has not housed the Methodists since the 1970s, and now contains a bar and restaurant, but the community who built it, and their faith, is celebrated for as long as it remains standing. I am not a Methodist; I am not even a believer. But I can’t help finding that arresting, and rather beautiful.