Zahara and her friends (and so, so many enemies) are going to the author expo! I’ll be signing copies of SUMMONED and trying (unsuccessfully) to not buy up half of the books for sale. And there will be so many to choose from! Over a hundred authors and their works will be at the event, with free admission and parking. Rumors have it that Santa Claus will be in attendance, and you know that Zahara will most certainly make the naughty list…

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Take the quiz and find out which famous poet best matches your personality! When you’re done, make sure to click on page 2 below to learn more about these incredible writers from the past.

The post Which Dead Poet Are You? appeared first on M.A. Guglielmo.

The murder of Nizam al-Mulk, considered the Assassin’s first political killing.

As persecuted followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam, the medieval Nizari Ismailis
 of Persia and Syria developed a unique form of asymmetric warfare to offset the far superior military might of their enemies: a secret order of political killers known as the fidai. The Fidai were young men prepared to spend years learning new languages and customs, and to face almost certain death, all for the opportunity to sink a knife into the target of their leader’s choice. To their enemies, these solitary warriors became known as the Ḥashshashin — giving rise to the modern term of assassin. The Ḥashshashin generally chose political targets, selecting high-ranking leaders who had mounted campaigns against the Ismailis.

The founder of the Assassins was Hassan-i Sabbah, a devout Ismaili who brought his followers to the castle of Alamut, in northwestern Iran, after he took the fortress. The castle reportedly held a vast library of texts, many destroyed as heretical when the castle finally fell in 1256.

Hassan-i Sabbah

As the Grand Headmaster of the Order, Sabbah never left the fortified Alamut. He created a complex hierarchy below him, with the fully initiated Da’i (preachers) on top, followed by the partially initiated Rafiqs, or comrades, and lastly the Lasiqs, or adherents. The Fidai were selected from the final group, but received extensive training and education to carry out their missions. The killings by the Assassins had significant psychological impact, since they were often performed in public by a Fidai who had infiltrated a target’s inner circle. This gave the group disproportionate political influence, given that they held only scattered fortresses and had no large standing army.

The remains of Alamut in Iran.

The entire sect was known as the Ḥashshashin, a term now thought to be a derogatory word meaning ‘outcasts’, but it was taken up by Western writers to refer to the supposed hashish use by the sect and its leaders. Lurid tales of adherents entranced by drugs and lured into service by promises of a paradise after death have more recently been called into question. Many of the stories originated from accounts by the Nizari’s enemies and questionable retellings from Westerners such as Marco Polo.

The preferred weapon of the Fidai was a dagger, so that the killing took place close up and left the attacker little chance to flee. The Fidai’s willingness to sacrifice his life for the cause added to the sect’s fearsome reputation. Many details of the medieval Nizari Ismaili’s scholarship and imagery have been lost to history. The Ḥashshashin in Hungary were said to take on the symbol of the hajal, a partridge-like bird, and worked for a time as mercenaries before being eliminated by the Inquisition. A green flag was raised over Alamut, with a prophecy that a red flag, symbolizing the return of the hidden Iman, would someday be lifted above the fortress. A combined green and red flag was created in the 19^th century for the Nizari. Another symbol associated with the Ismaili is the heptogram, or seven-pointed star.

Painting of the siege of Alamut by the Mongols.

The Ḥashshashin sect was largely eradicated by the Mongol Empire, although some members survived as assassins for hire and hid their true identities. The Nizari Ismailis today form the second largest branch of Shia Islam and the denomination has over 15 million adherents in many countries. The deadly Fidai of Hassan Sabbah have faded into history, but the name and myth of the Assassin live on.

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In its simplest form, time is measured by the inflow or outflow of water into a container.  The location and date of the invention of the first water clock is unknown, but early versions in Babylon and Egypt date back to around 1600 BC.  During the reign of Amenhotep III, outflow water clocks dripped out the time to mark the dates of religious ceremonies. Watching the clock at work in Babylonian times meant watching the drops: a guard’s shift was determined by how long it took for a volume of water to drip out of a cylindrical container. Water clocks were used in China and India, and the Greeks and Romans used a version called the clepsydra, modifying it to make it more accurate.

Precision in measuring units of time was important in the practice of agriculture in ancient Persia, where it was need to insure an equitable distribution of irrigation water from qanats.

A picture I took inside the dried up shaft of a qanat in Morocco.  A local entrepreneur has set up tourist tours of the irrigation system which once brought mountain streams down to lowland farms.

Time measurement was also helpful in determining the holy days in pre-Islamic religions, some of which corresponded to the Western concept of the solstices: the shortest and longest days of the year.  The Persian water clock, or feejan was used for both purposes.  It consists of a large basin filled with water.  A bowl with a hole in the bottom is placed on top, and water ripples up into the bowl until it sinks.  Trusted monitors place a pebble in a jar every time in drops to the bottom.

In medieval Iran, the Persian engineer Al Jazari took water clocks to a whole new level with his over-the-top (literally) elephant clock.

Another of his inventions, the water-powered castle clock, has been compared to an early computer.

While ancient Persian water clocks might not be readily available in the nearest big box store, my daughter discovered this high-tech descendent in the always wonderful Boston Museum of Science: the Bedol water clock.

It relies on the ions in tap water to generate enough electricity to run a small digital alarm clock.  And it comes in great colors!

The post Like Drops Through the Water Clock: Ancient Time-Telling Inventions appeared first on M.A. Guglielmo.

In Pre-Islamic Iran, the lute became the dominant stringed instrument gradually over a thousand years after its invention in Mesopotamia around 2300 BCE.  This was probably a millennium after the origin of the harp, also a popular stringed instrument in Iran.  The Persian word ‘rud’ is thought to possibly be an origin for the Arabic word al-ud.

Although the lute is thought to predate the oud in archeology, in mythology the oud came first, and has a gruesome backstory.  According to the medieval Islamic scholar Al-Farabi one of the descendants of Cain,  Lamak, hung the dead body of his son from a tree to decay slowly as it swung.  The dangling skeleton provided the inspiration for the stringed shape of the instrument.

If you were curious what would happen if the ancient oud was used to play more modern music, check out this version of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal. (Link courtesy of the awesome @ShunraCat and @YousefMunayyer)

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