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2. Toward Egypt’s Sacred Bull
- University of California Press
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2 Toward Egypt’s Sacred Bull In the northern suburbs of Paris lies an artistic district known as Montmartre (“mount of the martyrs”). The area takes its name from events that transpired in the third century a.d., when a small cadre of Christian missionaries was dispatched to the Gallo-Roman city of Lutece, as Paris was known at the time. The prominence of Roman Catholicism throughout subsequent French history testifies to the effectiveness of these early evangelists in converting the local population. Yet, as might have been expected, the group’s missionary zeal also contributed to their own downfall. Local pagan priests conspired with the ruling Roman authorities to have the Christian missionaries arrested and tortured. Eventually , some were executed on a hillside outside of town. Legend has it that Saint Denis, who was among those beheaded on the slopes of Montmartre , rose from the dead, picked up his decapitated head, and climbed to its summit, aided by an angel. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, the hill that Saint Denis is said to have ascended so miraculously had been dramatically transformed . Paris had expanded far beyond its roots as a Gallo-Roman frontier town, but urban sprawl was only indirectly responsible for the changes around Montmartre. The city itself still lay to the south. Rather, the rapid expansion of Paris fueled a growing demand for building ma29 terials, especially the plaster that still bears the city’s name. Gypsum is the most important ingredient in the production of plaster of Paris, a substance prized for its utility in finishing interior ceilings and walls. The rock strata that outcrop in the vicinity of Montmartre contain vast quantities of gypsum suitable for industrial exploitation. As a result, where wooded slopes had once witnessed the martyrdom of Saint Denis, commercial rock quarries now gouged the sides of Montmartre. Occasionally, the laborers who toiled in the Montmartre gypsum quarries uncovered the fossilized remains of animals embedded directly in the rock. While the fossil bones themselves had no apparent commercial value, they did attract the attention of a young, brilliant, and highly ambitious scientist by the name of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). Cuvier’s meticulous research on the fossil bones unearthed near Montmartre would eventually launch paleontology as a respectable scientific discipline . Fittingly, efforts to decipher our own deep evolutionary history can also be traced directly to Cuvier, although Cuvier himself would never have admitted such a role. Indeed, Cuvier’s part in our story highlights two of his most egregious scientific mistakes. The first of these was his decision to stand out as one of the leading antievolutionists of his day. The second was his failure to recognize one of the many fossils he described from Montmartre—a badly crushed skull and lower jaws for which Cuvier coined the name Adapis—for the lemurlike primate that it is. Yet, as we shall see, Cuvier’s errors must be judged in historical context. To imagine the intellectual setting of the time, you must first forget everything you’ve ever heard about Charles Darwin and his scientific theories. I find it counterintuitive that the science of paleontology antedates Darwin ’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Yet upon further reflection, what first seems like a quirk of history actually makes sense. The logical connections between paleontology and biological evolution that are so obvious today were much less apparent then. In fact, when Cuvier initially founded paleontology, his primary goal was to illuminate the history of Earth itself, not that of its inhabitants. Like any good scientist, Cuvier believed that all comprehensive theories needed to be grounded in direct, empirical observations. Some of the more outlandish theories in vogue during Cuvier’s lifetime attempted to explain Earth history, often in terms that closely paralleled the biblical account in the Book of Genesis. Cuvier scorned such grandiose, yet weakly supported arm-waving. Instead, Cuvier thought that fossils, which he correctly interpreted as relics from Earth’s antiquity, might provide precisely 30 TOWARD EGYPT’S SACRED BULL [18.212.87.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:22 GMT) the sort of factual basis that all-encompassing geological theories required . In much the same way that archeological artifacts and the ruins of ancient cities illuminate prehistoric human civilizations, Cuvier thought that fossils might cast light on Earth’s deepest antiquity. In reaching this conclusion, Cuvier relied on his considerable skills as a comparative anatomist to demonstrate that the...