East and Middle East

Half a dozen solar-systems events are listed in Astronomical Calendar 2024 for January 27 (with their Universal Times):

5   Uranus stationary in longitude; resumes direct motion
7   Jupiter at east quadrature, 90° from the Sun
8   Uranus stationary in right ascension; resumes direct motion
15   Venus at southernmost declination, -22.48°
17   Mercury 0.24° N of Mars; 20° from Sun in morning sky; magnitudes -0.2 and 1.3
21   Moon 3.3° NNE of Regulus; 156° and 157° from Sun in morning sky; magnitudes -12.0 and 1.4

But the Mercury-Mars conjunction is low to the eastern horizon.

Down to Earth Department

A Palestinian child.

He was one of the pupils in the school in Arab Jerusalem where I was once a teacher. To my great regret, I did very little drawing or painting in that visually rich environment; teaching must have kept me too busy. This sketch is on a scrap of paper. I think he was Sami, younger of two brothers of the Baramki family. The elder brother’s name was George, so they were probably a Christian family.

Family names preserve traces of the deep history of that place, like fragments brought up from the soil by archaeology. Dajani, from the village Beit Dajan, “house of Dagon,” god of the Philistines. One of the teachers was Mr. Masarwi: surely a form of Misrawi, from Misr, “Egypt.” And my theory is that Baramki, with similar hopping of vowels around consonants, is Barmaki.

And this takes us deeper into Asia. The Barmaki were the descendants of the Barmak. The Barmak was the hereditary priest of a Buddhist temple at Balkh. An earlier temple on the site was Zoroastrian, the ancient dualistic religion of Iran.

Balkh’s name was earlier Bactra, and even earlier was Barmi, the name of a Scythian goddess. It was the capital of the region called Bactria, between what are now Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

The region became a province of the Persian empire; then of the empire of Alexander of Macedon; some of his troops settled there and maintained a remote Greco-Bactrian kingdom for several centuries; then it became part of the Muslim empire.

The Barmak’s descendants became Muslims, and rose to become viziers – like prime ministers – to the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad; Khalid ibn Barmak, then his son Yahya, then Yahya’s sons Fadl and Jafar. They brought the Muslim empire to its zenith under caliph Harun al-Rashid.

Jafar was Harun’s boon companion, and was the arbiter of elegance. Because he had a long neck and wore high collars to cover it, high collars were the fashion in Baghdad, in the world. Many of the stories in the Arabian Nights (the Alf Layla wa Layla, “Thousand and One Nights”) have Harun and Jafar foraying in disguise into the town for a night of adventure.

According to one story, Jafar set empty dishes before a hungry man to test his sense of humor. This is the proverbial “Barmecide feast.”

Barmecide – the word may make you wonder whether it is something like suicide or pesticide. I first encountered it, and these stories, in a volume of the Arabian Nights that was on a shelf in my bedroom in a farm in Devon where I spent a childhood holiday.

There came the Fall of the Barmecides. In one night, Harun had the whole family arrested. He suspected them of aiming even higher, or wanted to be in control, free of over-clever Persian courtiers. Jafar was executed.

Maybe a line of the family, or of their associates, survived and descended into the ethnic medley of Palestine.

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