Ucalegon: neighbour whose house is on fire or has burned down [from Gk. Oukalégōn – one of the Elders of whose house was set on fire by the Achaeans during the sack of Troy, a character in the Iliad (3.148)]
Ululate: to howl like a wolf [from L. ululāre (“to howl or bay”)]
Ululate (source: the Conversation)
Umbersorrow: fit, robust, sturdy, resisting disease or the effects of severe weather; rugged, uncultivated, surly disposition [from Scot. Eng. origin obscure]
Umbriferous: shady; making shade [from L. umbrifer, from umbra (“a shade”) + –ferre (“to bear”)]
Undinism: the association of water with erotic thoughts; sexual arousal from urination [from Ger. undine from L. unda (“wave”)+ -ism]
Unidextral: capable of using one hand only [L. uni (“one only”) + –dexter (“right hand”)] ✋
Upaithric: (Arch.) (a building or structure) without a roof [Gk. Origin obscure] (Synonym: Hypethral)
Upaithric
Urorilocal: (refer to Uxorious in the Logolept’s Diet 1.0) living with one’s wife’s family [borrowed from L. uxōrius (“of or pertaining to a wife”), from uxor (“wife”) + -local(?)]
<: word meaning root formation:>
Valetudinarian: an invalid, esp one with a tendency towards hypochondria; a person who is unduly anxious about their health [from L. valēre, (“to have strength” or “to be well”) + -arian]
Vapulatory: relating to flogging or beating [from L. vāpulō (“cry”; “wail”)]
Venery: sexual indulgence (from L. vener-, venus– (“sexual desire, sexual intercourse”) + -ery]
Verecund: modest; shy; bashful [from L. verēcundus (“shy, modest”)]
Verkramp: someone narrow-minded or extremely conservative in their views [Afrik. “cramped”]
Vetust: venerable from antiquity [from L. vetustus (“old, ancient”)]
Viduity: widowhood [from MidEng. (Scots) viduite, from L. vidua (“widow”) + –ity]
Viviseplture: the practice of burying someone alive [from L. vivus (“alive”) + –sepulture (from L. sepultura (“bury”)]
Viviseplture
Voteen: a zealously pious person [from Gael. Irish. corruption of devotee + -een]
Vulpinate: to wilily cheat or deceive someone [from L. vulpes (“fox” )]
The culmination of archaeological excavations on the island state of Bahrain during the 20th century (see endnote) saw the emergence of a fully-formed Bronze Age city that had been buried for 4,000 years. The Saar settlement, as it is known, was found to comprise two sections, a residential zone and some distance away a “honeycomb” cemetery. Archaeologists working at the site described Saar as having all the elements of a modern city including houses, restaurants, commercial outlets and a place of worship [Sylvia Smith, ‘Bahrain digs unveil one of oldest civilisations’, BBC News, 20-May-2013, www.bbc.com].
Excavated sites on Bahrain (image: archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/)
The great Qal’at tell: Saar is the not the only Bahraini site to yield evidence of ancient civilisation. Located at the northern point of the island is Qal’at–al-Bahrain (Fort of Bahrain), a vast tell (artificial mound) 18-hectare in size, which when excavated revealed three early Dilmun cities (dating to 2,800BC) and one later Greek city (200BC), all built on top of one another!(ᗩ) Like Saar, Qal’at–al-Bahrain had multiple human uses, public, residential, religious as well as military, and was in all likelihood the capital of the ancient Dilmun state. There are also approximately 170,000 burial mounds, in Bahrain occupying some 5% of the of the island (Smith)(ᗷ)…including the royal tombs at A’ali which are 15 metres in height.
The Fort , Qal’at al-Bahrain (source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre)
The archaeological finds pieced together testify to the existence of an ancient civilisation known as Dilmun (also rendered as Telmun), which means in the Akkadian language “the place where the sun rises”. The Dilmun region in antiquity—populated by an East Semitic people—stretched over an area comprising Bahrain, the islands of Failaka (today part of Kuwait) and Tarout (now part of Saudi Arabia) and a coastal strip on the East Arabian mainland.
Mesopotamia, the Gulf, Dilmun (image: peterborougharchaeology.org/)
Dilmun as entrepôt for north and south: Dilmuth is mentioned in Near Eastern historical sources, in Sumerian economic texts of the Fourth Millennium BC, written on cuneiform clay tablets, which identify Dilmun as a regional commercial centre [‘Dilmun’, Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com]. Seen from the early Mesopotamian civilisations’ perspective, the key strategic location of Dilmun was central to trade. Sumer (and Babylon) wanted the luxury commodities produced by the Indus Valley civilisations (Meluha) – spices, precious stones, ivory, etc. But to facilitate trade with the Indian merchants and secure these highly desirable goods, the Sumerians sought to avoid the overland route which took them through a habitually hostile Persia…the sea route via the Gulf and Dilmun allowed Sumer to bypass Persian territory altogether [‘The Sumerian Connection’, (Jon Mandaville), Saudi Aramco World, (1980), www.archives.aramco.org]. By this circumstance Dilmun was able to establish itself as the hub for trade between Mesopotamia and South Asia. Dilmun merchants at one point maintained a monopoly over the supply of copper, a precious commodity produced in the mines of Oman (then called Magan), also much in demand in the cities of Mesopotamia as a metal of improved durability for weapons, utensils and tools(ᑕ). Dilmun also had commercial ties with other cities in the Near East, with Elam in Iran/Iraq, Alba in Syria and Haitian in Turkey (Smith).
“Boats from the land of Dilmun carried the wood”, inscription on a relief of Ur-Nanshe (c.2550–2500 BC)
By some time around 2,050 BC an independent kingdom of Dilmun was at the apex of its powers. Control over the Persian/Arabian Gulf trading routes had made Dilmun a very prosperous state. Agriculture played its part in Dilmun’s commercial ascent as well. The countryside was fertile land both for the farming of livestock and the growing of diverse crops due to the presence of artesian springs.
Early Dilmun burial mounds (photo: Danish Gulf Expedition/Moesgaard Museum)
Decline of Dilmun:From the mid-Second Millennium Dilmun started to enter a decline. Beginning before 1,500 BC the kingdom(ᗪ) is conquered by the first of a series of dominant regional powers – the Sealand Dynasty, followed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Kessite Dynasty (Neo-Babylonian Empire). Dilmun was further weakened after 1,000 BC by the flourishing of piracy in the Gulf. By 800 BC it is no longer a trading power, having entered a Hellenistic period, it becomes Tylos. By the time of the fall of Babylon, 539 BC, the Dilmun civilisation had been abandoned.
Saar site
Dilmun in the Sumerian creation myth:In Mesopotamian mythology Dilmun held special significance to Sumerians, referred to regularly in texts as a paradisal place to the south…a pure, virginal and pristine land which the (Sumerian) god Enki provides with abundant fresh water, a place where its inhabitants are no longer plagued by the ravages of disease and old age [‘Paradise Found? The Archaeology of Bahrain’ www.peterborougharchaeology.org]. The heavenly characterisation of Dilmun has led some scholars to hypothesise that arguably it may be the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden(ᗴ).
Endnote: The key pioneering work on the location and unearthing of Dilmun civilisation was undertaken by archaeologists Geoffrey Bibby and Prof Peter Glob in the 1950s. Bibby and Glob led a Danish expedition which was the first to excavate the ruins of the ancient civilisation at the Qal’at and Saar sites and date it to the early Dilmun era.
Dilmun excavations (photo: cphpost.dk)
(ᗩ) there is also a Portuguese fort at the Qal’at site built during their occupancy of Bahrain in the 16-17th centuries
(ᗷ) prompting one academic to conjecture that perhaps as many as 20,000 people lived in Dilmun at the ancient civilisation’s peak [C.E. Larson, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (1983)]
(ᑕ) Dilmun itself exported dates and pearls, the latter especially prized for their quality, thought to be the result of the mixing of salt-water and submarine spring-waters (www.ngwa.org)
(ᗪ) Virtually nothing is known of the Dilmun dynasties or rulers other than the names of some of the kings, garnered from discovered cuneiform inscriptions (eg, Yagli-El, Ilī-ippašra)
(ᗴ) also echoed in the great epic poem of the late Second Millennium, the Gilgamesh Epic
After the early prominence of “Lord Haw-Haw” in World War II (see previous blog ‘WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves I: Lord Haw-Haw’s Career in Radio Propaganda’), the Nazis obviously thought the idea of employing native English speakers to undermine the British enemy through radio propagandising was one worth replicating against the Americans when they too entered the global conflict. For this special communications role the Germans choose a woman, moreover an expatriate American woman living in the Third Reich.
Fräulein Gillars (Source: Alamy Stock Photo)
Mildred Gillars Maine-born Mildred Gillars had demonstrated her loyalty to the Fatherland by staying in Germany after war broke out (not wanting to part from her German fiancé). Recruited by program director Max Otto Koischewitz for the German State Radio (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft), Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally” by US GIsa̳, had a DJ segment on Radio Berlin which was beamed over the American airwaves. Her messages to America followed predictable themes, eg, “Damn all Jews who made this war popular. I love America, but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boyfriends”b̳. Gillars had visited American POWs in German camps while posing as a Red Cross worker, collected their messages for home and then after giving them a pro-Germany tweak, broadcast them on the airwaves (‘Axis Sally. World War II Propagandist/The Bride of Lord Haw-Haw!’, Rob Weisburg, Lives of the Great DJs, www.wfmu.org).
Max Koischewitz (Image: www.popularbio.com)
Berlin calling Gillars’s on air style was diametrically the opposite of Joyce’s hectoring tone, she used a pleasant, conversational approach which sought to sow the seeds of doubt, posing the question whether the wives and girlfriends of the serving soldiers, sailors and airmen would remain faithful during their absence. However, as with Lord Haw-Haw, many of the GIs only listened because they found Axis Sally’s shows humorous (‘6 World War II Propaganda Broadcasters’, Evan Andrews, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com).
Gillars’ greatest notoriety lies with the radio play (Vision ofInvasion) she broadcast to American soldiers in England a month prior to D-Day, forecasting doom and devastation awaiting the Allies if they were to invade occupied France. After the war Gillars was apprehended and eventually returned to the US in 1948 to stand trial on 10 counts of treason. The ”voice of Axis Sally” was acquitted on nine of the counts but was convicted on the 10th count, the broadcast of Vision ofInvasion. Gillars was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in a West Virginian prison and ultimately served 12 years (released in 1961).
༄࿓ ༄࿓ ༄࿓
The strabismic but sexy sounding Rita Axis Sally, Italian style In 1943 the Fascist Regime in Italy sought to capitalise on Nazi Germany’s success with the Axis Sally broadcasts by coming up with an Axis Sally of their own. Actually this Axis Sally, Rita Zucca, was born in New York of Italian parents. Rita Zucca with her sweet and seductive voice was teamed up with a German broadcaster in a radio program entitled “Jerry’s Front Calling”, spewing out defeatist propaganda from Rome to Allied troops in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. When the original ’Sally’, Midge Gillars, heard that someone else had appropriated her moniker, she was ropeable (‘Rita Zucca’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
One of Signorina Zucca’s ploys was using intelligence provided by the Nazis to try to deceive and confuse the Allied forces. In 1944 when the enemy advanced on Rome, Zucca fled north with the retreating Germans to Milan where she resumed her radio communication with American soldiers. After the war the victorious Allies caught up with Zucca in Turin, any plans the Americans to try the Italian-American broadcaster as a traitor were quickly squashed however after it became known that Rita had renounced her American citizenship in 1941 (before taking up her propaganda broadcasting role)c̳. Instead, Zucca was tried by an Italian military tribunal on charges of collaboration and sentenced to four years and five months. She only served nine months of her term but was barred from ever returning to the US (‘“Axis Sally” Mildred Gillars and Rita Luisa Zucca’, www.psywarrior.com) .
“Argentine Annie:” “Hello Tommy, I am Liberty” (Source: Infobae.com)
Postscript: Continuing Axis Sally’s legacy The two Axis Sallys (and their pro-Japanese counterpart Tokyo Rose) were not to be the last we would see of female propaganda broadcasters in wartime. The Korean War produced its version in ”Seoul City Sue”, an American born missionary in Korea (Anna Wallis Suh) who defected to the North Korean side, joining “Radio Seoul” (when the city was occupied by the North) for a on air spot of undermining American troop morale in the war. The tradition continued in the Vietnam War with “Hanoi Hannah”, a North Vietnamese female broadcaster whose propaganda was directed at “war-weary” American GIs, trying to persuade them that their involvement in the Indochina war was unjust and immoral (“‘Smooth as Silk’ Vietnamese Propagandist ‘Hanoi Hannah’ Dies at 87”, Jeff Stein, Newsweek, 03-Oct-2016, www.newsweek.com). More recently, the Argentine military dictatorship (elProceso) during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 employed the same tactic of a feminine radio announcer—known as “Argentine Annie” or to the Argentinian side, “Liberty”—as the sultry-voiced Anglophone bearer of bad (and fake) news for serving British combatants in the ward̳.
‘Argentine Annie’ (YouTube video)
➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿
a̳ Gillars in her radio show referred to herself as “Midge at the mike”
b̳ a common refrain from Nazis and other anti-Semitic fascist wannabes such as William Joyce and the BUF was that the world war was a war caused by Jews for the benefit of international Jewry which they tended to equate with capitalism
c̳ renounced to save her family’s property from being expropriated by the Mussolini regime
d̳ ’Liberty’ no doubt kept the British forces in the South Atlantic amused with her references to the Royal Marines counting sheep and bizarre diversions into the historic origins of the modern lavatory
Mention “The Ten Commandments” to cinephiles and almost invariably they’ll think of the 1956 epic with Chuck Heston as the resolute Moses. But that was Cecil B DeMille’s second attempt at filming the Old Testament story, or his (Cold War-inspired) interpretation of it at least. Back when Hollywood was still in it’s adolescence, 1923, DeMille made a silent version of The Ten Commandments, in black and white with some sequences in Technicolor.
(Image: www.bestplaces.com)
The location chosen by DeMille for his first go at shooting the biblical epic was a barren 18-mile stretch of sand some 170 miles north of LA, at Guadalupe on California’s central coast. Today, the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, as they are called, are a protected sea coast and wildlife refuge (eg, for the endangered western snowy plover) and largely unchanged, but for three months in 1923 it was a hive of mega-budget movie-making activity as DeMille transformed the empty dunes into a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian city. DeMille chose the Guadalupe dunes for the movie set because he thought it might pass for the Egyptian desert (or at least the Sahara Desert) [‘Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes’, Atlas Obscura, www.altasobscura.com].
𐅉 ‘10 Commandments’ of California in glorious “techni-tint”
Hollywood scale extravaganza
The set was massive scale, destined to become the director’s trademark – 120 foot high by 720 feet wide, erected by 1,500 construction workers, a twelve-story tall “Egyptian city” of plaster, wood and straw. The city’s human population comprised a further 3,500 actors✖and technicians plus 125 cooks to feed the assembled masses. Add to these impressive numbers some 5,000 animals, 300 chariots and 21 plaster sphinxes. Statues of Pharaoh Rameses were eleven metres tall and the facade had a 110-foot high gate enclosure✧[‘The Ten Commandments, (1923 film)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, (2013); www.lostcitydemille.com].
(Source: G-N Dune Center)
A Virtuous Camp DeMille?
DeMille had a huge makeshift tent city erected (nicknamed “Camp DeMille”) to house all of the personnel on the set. Perhaps, in keeping with the overtly religious theme of the film⊡, DeMille laid down strict rules of non-engagement for everyone involved on the production…men and women were billeted separately with no fraternisation allowed, no gambling, no alcohol and no coarse language [‘The Ten Commandments of 1923: The Exodus, Take One’, Patheos, 20-Apr-2012, www.patheos.com]. The alcohol ban adhered to the Prohibition rules in place in America at the time, but subsequent generations of beach-combing visitors to Guadalupe’s dunes have discovered evidence that participants on the movie set found a way round that…the debris of empty bottles of alcohol-laced cough syrup strewn all over the dunes [PJ Grisar, ‘How DeMille made his ‘Ten Commandments’ Jewish again’, Forward, 08-Apr-2020, www.forward.com].
A vanishing “Egyptian metropolis”
After filming of The Ten Commandments on the Central Coast finished in August 1923✥, what DeMille did next astounds. Instead of dismantling and hauling the costly set (the overall budget for the movie was a staggering $1.5M or more) back to Hollywood, DeMille had it bulldozed and buried in the Guadalupe dunes. The film-maker just didn’t want to be bothered with the logistics or expense of an enormous removal task and/or he didn’t want rival Hollywood film-makers or studios to get their hands on the set.
(Photo:www.fws.gov)
Unearthing cinematic artefacts
And there it sat—or shifted around in the constantly swirling winds of the dunes—for sixty years, one of Hollywood’s most expensive-ever film sets. Then in 1983 film-maker Peter Brosnan became intrigued after a chance encounter with the story, got hooked on it and spent the next 30 years searching for the site, finding it and trying (frustratingly) to excavate it. The project is ongoing, and has taken this length of time due to a combination of factors – local “red tape” (jurisdiction of the dunes falls under two separate counties); the site is a bird-life sanctuary with limited, seasonal access; plus there’s the extremely high cost of funding excavations. Over the years, archaeologists, both professional and amateur, have joined the quest to dig up DeMille’s treasure-trove. Buried replicas from DeMille’s Lost City have been unearthed including a 300-pound plaster sphinx which now resides in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center [‘There’s a Fake Egyptian City Buried in California’, (Marissa Fessenden), Smithsonian Magazine, 15-Oct-2015, www.smithsonianmag.com]. Brosnan compiled his years of research, including interviews with surviving actors, extras and other crew members, into a documentary film, The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille, screened in 2016.
✖DeMille also bused in some 250 Orthodox Jews as extras to give the movie a more authentic Hebrew look
✧ Rameses’ ‘temple’ contained recreations of hieroglyphics copied from the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922
⊡ certainly in keeping with the sternly moralising tone of DeMille’s film
✥ only part of the film was made on the Guadalupe dunes, the wonky parting of the Red Sea scene was shot at Seal Beach in Orange County, and a modern-day morality tale DeMille tacked on to the film was shot back at the studios
