November 7, 2019 31
(^3) Janine Balty, “La ‘mosaïque à
l’éléphant’ de Huqoq: un document très
convoité et d’interprétation controver-
sée,” Journal of Roman Archaeology,
Vol. 31, No. 2 (2018).
able suggestion,^3 although she has not
convinced everyone. She emphasizes
the nine lamps above the seated fig-
ures and argues that the allusion must
be to Hanukkah after the reconsecra-
tion in 164 BC of the Second Temple,
which Antiochus IV desecrated. She
sees the lamps as an allusion to the
miraculous use of a modest amount of
oil to light lamps for eight days. This
would give the mosaic an appropriately
Jewish context and identify the cen-
tral older figure as the High Priest. It
would also explain the presence of the
scene in a synagogue even if it uniquely
shows a strictly non-biblical episode.
The long memory of the Seleucid era
is even more impressive in a few frag-
ments of inscribed stones from the late
Roman occupation of Syria, which sug-
gest that Seleucus’s calendar was still in
use in the late fourth century CE. An
inscription that was seen and recorded
in the nineteenth century at the west-
ern edge of the Leja plateau in southern
Syria is dated to 689 by something that
the text calls the “era of Damascus.”
Although this part of the world usually
employed the era of the province of Ara-
bia, that era would deliver far too late
a date, and recent editors have rightly
determined that the era of Damascus in
this instance is nothing less than the Se-
leucid era under another name.
Seleucus had correlated the Macedo-
nian calendar of his army with the local
Babylonian calendar he had found in
place when he entered the region. The
Macedonian calendar began in the au-
tumn, but Seleucus knew perfectly well
that the Babylonians began each year
in the spring. He therefore combined
the Babylonian calendar with the Mace-
donian one, so that there were two si-
multaneous calendars. In the winter the
Macedonian calendar would be one year
ahead of the Babylonian, but during the
summer their years would be the same.
In this way Seleucus could stake his
claim, in front of his troops and among
the Babylonians. This is the calcula-
tion behind the tradition of represent-
ing Seleucus’s first year as 312/311 BCE,
indicating autumn 312 by Macedonian
reckoning and spring 311 by Babylonian.
The Damascenes began their year in
the spring, like the old Babylonians and
unlike the Macedonian Seleucids, and
it is now generally agreed that the Leja
stone is dated by the Seleucid calendar
but by reckoning from the spring of each
year. Hence we seem to have a survival of
Seleuc id t i me i n Sy r ia a s late a s 377 CE—
far later than any date Seleucus himself
could have imagined. The double dat-
ing he introduced in 305 BCE, with each
year beginning both in the autumn and
in the spring, proved to have a longevity
beyond any other era in the Middle East.
This was no small achievement. Without
Paul Kosmin’s meticulous investigation
of what Seleucus ach ieved i n c reat i ng h i s
calendar without end we would never
have been able to comprehend the
traces of it that appear in late antiquity.
Of the countless new eras that
emerged in antiquity after Seleucus,
his was the most enduring and argu-
ably made him the most influential of
Alexander’s successors. Only Cleopa-
tra, the last descendant of the successor
Ptolemy, eclipsed the fame of the first
Seleucid. But Seleucus achieved his
fame by a rare conjunction of adminis-
trative creativity and military prowess.
The cuneiform texts that Kosmin has
expertly deployed prove that the Baby-
lonians themselves accepted what was
happening even when Seleucus was still
alive. His book is a magisterial con-
tribution to this hitherto obscure but
clearly important restructuring of time
in the ancient Mediterranean world.
An Afro-Cuban plea guards over heart
& head, that old rugged cross-tree
of the South in the tropical air of Cuba,
but it would take years in Madrid,
then Matisse, & a daily dreaming
of Paris before Wifredo Lam
painted himself in a floral kimono,
echoes of war tangled in his brushes,
before he could bring himself to half-see
those watchful polymorphic figures
in gouache on Kraft paper glued
to cloth canvas smooth as second skin.
He said, “When I am not asleep, I dream.”
The land grew whole by brushstrokes,
an uproar of growth pruned back
to vantage point, the first time I faced
The Jungle, big as a double door
to a secret realm. I close my eyes
to step into vegetable silence, living
designs triangulated, into a kingdom
of spirit totems in bamboo, sugarcane,
tobacco leaves, & double-headed limbo
growing one with the other, caught
in a love fever of three worlds, a path
to the other side, hidden from the sun,
relying on conjured light in a blue-green
season, pelting the ground with seeds.
Did the “W” in his name etch the first
winged symbol as indigenous signs
& masks rooted in black soil?
Breasts, buttocks, & terrestrial mouths
laugh in the greenery—we onlookers
see magic we cannot face in ourselves,
reasoned beyond our own mortality
enriching the wet-green profusion
wild within itself & what cries out,
seeped in ceremonial lamentation.
Tall figures hold sharpened shears
as if shaping footsteps out of foliage,
gazing into a future, these maroons
masked by zodiacs in their leafy hideout,
a rhythm of breathing architecture.
A slew of bluish incantations erupt
in carved silence, unwoven trance,
& these elongated, slantwise warriors
& seers, the other side, hidden from us
in daylight, interwoven & multiplied,
peer out of camouflaged revelation.
He drew questions out of shapes,
rooting shadows to the roaming mind,
& this makes me take another step.
Exiled, but not from his homeland,
orishas tiptoed back into CoBrA’s
inner sanctum. Vodun & Santeria
followed him to Marseille, still
orangery-red touches of Caribbean
sunlight on the skin of his figures.
Though once in a cabaret on La Rue Vavin
he heard “I put a spell on you,”
& a smile broke across his face.
—Yusef Komu nya kaa
THE JUNGLE
Inspired by Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, 1943
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