† “‘… let alone a sacred bull—’” Gibbon writes, “The close association of lunar worship with male cattle — or, indeed, horned animals of almost any kind — was common to societies as ancient as early Mesopotamia, and likely existed in the vicinity of Broken long before the city came into being. Animal horns were identified with the ‘horns’ of the crescent moon, and from this comes the mystical association with virility and sensuality that was, evidently, a part of Old Broken’s lunar worship, and which survived among the Bane long past the arrival of Kafra. Indeed, in many parts of the Far East even today, high prices are paid for the horns of exotic animals, which are ground to powder and form the ingredients of traditional virility tonics; only one of the many paradoxes afflicting such Oriental peoples as the Chinese, who are capable at once of great works, great learning, and yet absurd, even vicious and exterminating superstitions.” It remains only to be said that this traffic in the horns and other parts of endangered animal species, illegally, brutally, and immorally harvested, has only grown with time; and that various peoples of the world — but especially, as Gibbon states, those of the Orient — will pay unheard-of amounts of money for such “virility tonics,” the efficacy of which has been found to be absurd again and again by modern scientists. —C.C.
† “‘Blast it’” Etymologically speaking, the persistent use of various oaths based on the word “blast” is interesting — and again, adds plausibility to the Manuscript — as it is one of the few words to originate in Old High German that has survived intact, but into English (by way of Old English), rather than into modern German: thus it becomes, in a sense, one of the “ghost words” of a dead language. This may seem implausible, if one assumes that the expression is somehow associated, as it usually is today, with explosives; but in fact, “blast” is another example of a phrase that might seem an anachronism, on first look, but which dates back to the early Middle Ages, where “blasts” of wind or man-made air (as in horn-blowing) occurred long before Europeans had divined the secret of how to blow each other up with gunpowder. —C.C.
† “‘… your accursed city was built …’” Gibbon writes, “We ought not think that the Bane are speaking, here, in any but literal terms. As our great British explorers — most recently the late and much lamented Captain James Cook — have discovered, the exile of tribal members who have proved unable to contribute to the advancement of a given society, onto some neighboring island, or into some wilderness or other in a remote location, is a practice found the world over — as are societies formed by those same exiles. The fact that, in this case, the exiles appear to have taken on a distinctive physical feature — reduced height — ought not surprise us, either: we have only to look to advances in, say, the breeding of livestock within England itself to understand the physical ramifications, positive as well as negative, of the careful selection of mating partners. If the citizens of Broken deliberately bred their progeny to grow tall, strong, and handsome, it only stands to reason that those exiled from the city would produce a significantly smaller — and less attractive — race.” Thus did one of the great historians of his own or any era instinctively anticipate a major scientific principle. —C.C.
† “‘… our unfortunate new recruit.’” Gibbon’s claims about the cultural mimicry of the people of Broken continue to be borne out in small ways: use of the word “recruit,” rather than simply “warrior” (or some one of the many similar terms used by barbarian tribes in Europe at the time), further calls to mind a society in which military service had been highly systematized and regimented along Roman, rather than early feudal, lines — a theory confirmed by the fact that such service was not, evidently, compulsory, even for the lower classes. —C.C.
‡ “‘Hak’” It is impossible, of course, to determine if the original translator of the Manuscript has left this exclamation intact, or if he has approximated some similar sound from the original dialect of Broken; but its close resemblance to the still-common German Ach is noteworthy. —C.C.
† “… built for the healthy.” If the policy of “culling” weak members of those tribes that eventually made up the kingdom of Broken seems to contemporary sensibilities so drastic as to be mythical, we should remember that, even in Gibbon’s time (as he makes clear in an earlier note) there was awareness of societies great and small that had employed — that still employed — similar policies; although he fails to mention how often his own Britain did the same, to rid itself of those citizens who lacked financial sense or scruples (debtors and thieves, as well as other petty criminals, all of whom were sent to America, Australia, and other distant colonies).
Nor should we be smug about Gibbon’s deliberate blindness on this score: such practices have no more vanished from the twenty-first century world than they had from the eighteenth. Various tribes that are “indigenous” (a word that almost daily loses meaning, in a world increasingly marked by transient populations) to South America and Africa allow parents to have only the number of children that the tribe generally can support, killing off surplus numbers. The ancient Roman practice of weeding out physically deformed children by exposing them at birth to the tender mercies of mountainside wildernesses, meanwhile, is currently echoed both in the Chinese practice of selling or simply drowning unwanted female children — a “traditional custom” that occurs with regrettable frequency — as well as in the license that so many Muslim societies give to individual men and entire families to disfigure, murder and anathematize women who are perceived as having disgraced themselves and their families, often by “allowing” themselves to be raped. —C.C.
‡ “the Celestial Way” The appearance of the word “celestial” in the name of Broken’s main thoroughfare — assuming, again, that it is a literal translation, and not a whimsical choice of the translator — underlines the diversity of cultural influences on the city’s society as far back as its founding, “celestial” being a word that is far more commonly found in descriptions of Eastern palaces and potentates than in those of Western. —C.C.
† “The Denep-stahla” Gibbon writes, “These more serious rituals of mutilation contain one common element: the use of stahla after the hyphen, which may indicate that they are derived from the sacred instruments used to inflict the punishments, stahl being a modern German word for ‘steel,’ particularly as pertaining to ‘blades.’ The origins of the first parts of the phrases, on the other hand, are matters for sheer speculation: more they seem to have been adaptations of terms peculiar to the original cult of Kafra, and to have therefore been brought into Broken with that god and that faith. We do not know where, precisely, this religion originated, as I have said; but the physical manifestations of these strange words are made fully, indeed hideously, clear by the narrator’s descriptions of the rituals, and suggest an Eastern, even an Oriental, morality.” [Note: Gibbon is being, as was sometimes his tendency, openly prejudicial, here — it was, after all, the Western Romans who perpetuated such ancient and “progressive” punishments as crucifixion and being mauled to death in arenas by wild animals. —C.C.]