Natron Means
Copyright (c) by Greg Utrecht 10-17-2002

The other day I sat down at my computer, wanting to find out more
about what natron means.  I had been reading this ancient book by
Herodotus about Egypt which mentioned natron among a lot of other
things like the puzzle about why the Nile had more water during
the summer than during the cooler parts of the year.  But it
mentioned natron and I wanted to find out more about that because
earlier this year I went to a lecture by an archaelogist who was
a specialist in natron.

Natron is the stuff they use to mummify mummies and it is made
out of bicarbonate of soda and salt, a mixture of which seems to
appear commonly in some places along the Nile.  Bicarb is baking
soda, I think, and salt of course is sodium chloride, and the
archaelogist I learned about it from says the secret to
mummification is to "change your natron"  It turns out that she
regularly appears on Discovery Channel and History Channel on
shows about Egypt and is even more interesting to listen to in
person due to having a good sense of humor and the ability to
connect with the audience.  Dr Salima Ikram.

Anyway I was looking for info on the web about natron and got
distracted by some comparisons Herodotus made between Egypt and
Greece, where Herodotus is from.   Herodotus translates into easy
going English and he says things like:

"I am bound to declare an opinion of my own about the matters
which are in doubt, I will tell what to my mind is the reason why
the Nile increases in the summer.

"As to the breeze, why none blows from the river, my opinion is
that from very hot places it is not natural that anything should
blow, and that a breeze is wont to blow from something cold.

"Hellenes keep the rings and ropes of the sails outside the ship,
the Egyptians do this inside: finally in the writing of
characters and reckoning with pebbles, while the Hellenes carry
the hand from the left to the right, the Egyptians do this from
the right to the left; and doing so they say that they do it
themselves rightwise and the Hellenes leftwise."

Where this last paragraph reminded me of a controversy about hand
held calculator designs in the mid 1970's when Hewlett Packard
bragged (correctly) that their design was the reverse of
backwards.

Meanwhile back on the web I was looking at some jingoistic pages
from some historians of what is now Transylvania and Romania  but
was once the home of a civilization called the Thracians from
whom some say the Greeks and Romans are descendants.  Dracula too
I guess, as Transylvania is where Dracula was supposedly from.
The way the Internet is, pretty soon I was looking at a
collection of photographs of female gymnasts from that area who
are all quite striking looking in a pixie kind of way.

I found a few pages of photographs of Thracian artworks which
were fascinating in that they supposedly predate Greek, Roman and
maybe even Egyptian antiquities.  That's where I found the line
drawings and laughed because it reminded me so much of ET the
Extra Terrestrial, which basically, is a scary monster movie
where the monster turns out not to be scary at all, as if it was
a remake of Casper the Friendly Ghost wearing a necklace.

So I laughed and was fascinated and thought that Spielberg must
have seen the same artwork in some museum somewhere, because he
didn't have access to the Internet in 1982, because people like
Wes C. hadn't built it for him yet.  But then I read that
Spielberg had thought of ET during the filming of Raiders of the
Lost Ark which happened in Egypt during World War II which is why
I was interested in Egypt in the first place because a famous
German scientist wrote once that the Pyramids were "A study in
density"

Pretty soon I started thinking that the Thracians were just bad
artists and the ET image was just their attempt to draw some
person who was particulary googley eyed, the way slaves were said
to be when they first got off the slave ships and first saw
things like buildings and stores and farms in colonial America.
And then I thought of Barney Oldfield the first world's most
famous auto racer who was practically a superstar until Lindbergh
flew the Atlantic to become even more famous.  Oldfield was
rarely photographed without goggles on his head and the ET image
reminded me of what a bad artist might do if they tried to carve
his image into some reluctant granite wall.  Kind of like on that
current show "The Ship" where the aborigine shows the historian
the sketch of Captain Cook's ship that his ancestors painted on a
cave two hundred and fifty years ago.  Cook's ship must have
seemed like magic to them.

Many people who saw my collage noticed the ET similarity but one
person who saw it said it reminded them of Close Encounters,
which can't be right because they didn't wear goggles in that
movie.  Besides if I wanted to meet Teri Garr (and who wouldn't)
I would go to the Grand Canyon or the beach in Malibu and not the
Devil's Tower wherever the dickens that is.

But it is interesting that if you watch the James Bond movie
"From Russia with Love" you will see Sean Connery make that same
Close Encounters hand gesture at the very end of the movie.  I'll
bet Spielberg didn't have to go to a museum to see that, he
probably studied it while finishing his college education up at
Long Beach State (go Beach!)  The next thing you know I was
computing that if you were going 36,000 miles per hour your
microwave communications would probably fail, not from speed or
acceleration, but from the one millionth of one percent effect of
relativity.

I never did find out anything about what natron means that I
didnt already know from Dr. Ikram's lecture.

I pay twelve dollars a month for the Internet, where did you want
to go today?

    Have a happy Halloween