Monthly Archives: April 2019

Mount Zion was established in 1856, two years before Minnesota became a state, and was the first Jewish congregation in St. Paul. Among their first acts was to pay $150 for a half acre of land for a cemetery just beyond the city limits. By 1889 the original half-acre was full and an additional five acres were acquired.

Jewish tradition discouraged figurative art. No statues of angels or humans will be found in the old Jewish cemeteries. Natural forms, trees and flowers, are found however, as well as geometric patterns, as in Islamic religious art.

The following are photographs I took on a walk through the cemetery on a cloudy spring day.

You probably never heard of the lost cities of Heracleion and Canopus.
I hadn’t.

They collapsed into the Mediterranean Sea more than 1200 years ago. Located in the Nile Delta near Alexandria, they were assailed by a combination of earthquakes, tsunamis and rising sea levels. Nothing found in either city dates later than the 2nd century AD when the soil liquified and the buildings collapsed.

Two decades ago, underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio and his team discovered the cities, revealing monumental statues, religious images carved in stone, exquisite jewelry, and delicate ceramics that shed more light on life during the age of the pharaohs.

Until its collapse, Canopus was famous for its sanctuaries of Osiris and Serapis. Pilgrims from all over the world came to visit in search of miraculous healing. The God Osiris was taken on his ritual barque from the Sanctuary of Heracles in Heracleion to his sanctuary in Canopus creating a mystical link between the two cities.

We often dismiss the incredibly high levels of culture and technology of previous civilizations, discounting them as stunted and less advanced. The artifacts tell a different story. They are masterful and perfectly served the ritualized and stratified structure of ancient society. The slave empires of antiquity were theocracies, highly organized, permeated and structured with religious ritual for millennia. They cannot be dismissed easily but they fossilized as all theocracies must. They also reached intellectual, technological, and artistic peaks which we still do not fully comprehend, and offer us the lesson of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.