PAYOM: The World's Oldest Continuously Inhabited City (?) And All That

If one were to time-travel in the dark to a distant parcel of the universe, and there come upon a livable space with many continents and many ancient cities not, uncannily, unlike ours -- with hints that those who had ever been there, ever passed by, were very much us -- and then have it pointed out to no one in particular the most ancient city of them all, with a name lodged in one's deep memory, that would be a day to never want to let go.

If one were to so travel in the night, what would one say upon finding the most ancient of them all? What thoughts, what thoughts, would one have, there in the impossible distance?

Defining a city: See Joshua J. Mark (2014) "The Ancient City" Ancient City Encyclopedia.

Place-names are tell-tales. They are hints, if not signs. Signs of a past life which we can decode only archaeologically -- and perhaps genealogically, so to speak -- if there's been too much passage of time (if time has had too much passage, that is, because we arrive on the scene too late or too lackluster or quite lackadaisically). We remember too little day-to-day, as it is.

Place-names are signatures, afterglows, of those who have lived -- and who lived -- there, when/where that place got its name. Or perhaps thereafter, in which case they lacked the mandate, the power -- or merely a good reason -- to change it. The vernacular of the history of places is thus that (is a slant symptomatic of the hard-driving hand) of those who do or who control the writing. There are places we cannot go back to, but which are us -- in the spirit(ual) sphere.

That ancient place, Payom -- which is nowadays known as Faiyoum or Fayoum -- is one such place. It was come upon as the long-winded Nile reached near the end of its journey and approached its own mouth. Indeed, all are agreed that Payom was and is the Nile's own creation (following an epic rainfall season in the Great Lakes region and Ethiopia far, far upstream; and that it is the dwellers who first settled there so long ago that gave it its lasting name, in their own language. 

Ancient Egyptians, to whom their god Thoth (sometimes called Atum) had gifted the art of writing, heard the Nilotic word Payom and faithfully inscribed it in their hieroglyphic record as pꜣym.  Incidentally, linguistic experts have affirmed that ancient Egyptians did not use any vowels (that is, a, e, i, o or u) in their written texts. In at least some Nilotic languages, the word thoth means plentiful (or a plenitude). On the other hand, the roots of the word Atum are tim, timo or (among Kenya's jo-Ugenya even now) tum -- all of which reference the English word do, or the act of "doing".  As a name, therefore, Atum is an epithet, an endearing a meme, attached to one who has proven in practical ways to be a doer of no mean achievement.

Read: From Payom to Faiyoum

In a Nilotic language I know and well-enough speak, pa is, in some places now (but not in all) an archaic word for "place" or "place of". Yom has resisted all spatial and temporal pressures to turn archaic, and remains a word for soft, as in a baby's face, or soft earth. Payom means soft earth or marshland, or a swampy place. Sometimes Pa means place of, as in Pakwach (place of leopards, or leopard's lair); or "people of", as in Padhola.  There is indeed another place called Payom nowadays, much farther south in South Sudan: See Map

For lexical reasons, it seems obvious, Pa has often flipped and become Pu, as in Pubungu (place of trees and/or thick undergrowth). In such a place, predators may lurk; and from it they may attack the unwary both slyly and at will. Adults teach the children to move with extreme caution thereabouts. In northern Uganda, far more so than in Kenya's and Tanzania's lake-regions, all these Pa and Pu prefixes (so to speak) continue to be components of living and robust Nilotic languages.

READ: Fayum Towns and their Papyri

READ: Faiyum Artifacts
READ:  Kom El Hammam

#Payom #PayomCity


REFERENCES
--Clark, J. Desmond, Ed. (2014) The Cambridge History of Africa. Volume 1: From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--Egypt's Mysterious Book of the Fayum
--Mark, Joshua J. (2014) "The Ancient City" Ancient City Encyclopedia.
--Wilkinson, Toby (    )  The Nile: Down River Through Egypt's Past and Present. Amazon.com (Find by googling Payom)

A Book You Can, So To Speak, Burn

Yesterday afternoon, as I was going through an oft overlooked section of my limited bookshelf space at home, I came across a book I had bought over a decade ago, at the then price of Kshs. 2,300/-. It is a 1993 paperback, a Ziff-Davis publication, titled "PC Learning Labs Teaches cc: Mail". This cc:Mail (ver 1.1) probably took several years of marketing and trading to reach the Nairobi bookshop in which I had found it.

My first reaction, after perusing it, was to throw it in the waste-paper basket, painful as that (nay, the very thought of it) was going to feel. And so I did. On second thoughts, however, I retrieved it -- just a few steps after I had, with seeming finality, dumped it. It was too good-as-new to throw away just like that. Should I do so without a thought -- without a "theory" to accompany the act? Wasn't there need for a ritual conversation about its historicity -- its once-upon-a-time pride of place (or, now, lack thereof) -- in the scheme of things, such as we are given to see?

Of course I knew that the paper (the book's holistic body-part) was recyclable, by virtue of which fact it may happily go. But the book's "finishing" provoked feelings of doubt and touchable regret -- a countervailing keeper's dream of endless, unperturbed possession (of that which one, at this unspeakable moment, wished to be finished with). I wanted to be sure.

But what of the ideas in the book that ultimately made it the book that it essentially was? What error would I, really, commit this late afternoon by letting go? There was nothing to stop the ritual "burning", but I wanted to be sure.

And so I granted a reprieve, which has run into today. Here's what I have concluded. This book is archaic, and was almost from the day I bought it. There is not an idea in it, no iota of knowledge worth preserving -- except perhaps the knowledge of it, and its very presence, as a symbol: of the total absence of knowledge of any practical or irreplaceable value, and of the virtual deadness of the procedures which it continues, in these changed times, to describe and prescribe.

It was designed, when DOS still held its ground and floppies were forever, principally as a LAN email software for windows, with some capacity for extranet and global connectivity. Events have overtaken it. From Wikipedia,we note the following facts, including one saving grace:

LAN based e-mail technology was rendered obsolete by client/server e-mail systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. The final version of cc:Mail, cc:Mail 8.5 was released in 2000.
October 31, 2000: cc:Mail withdrawn from the market.
January 31, 2001: All cc:Mail development ceased.
October 31, 2001: cc:Mail telephone support ceased.
Despite its having been discontinued, a small number of customers continue to use cc:Mail and the product continues to be commercially supported by Global System Services Corporation.

In the age of global, web-based email services such as Gmail and Yahoo, cc:Mail is gone, gone and gone -- except for a few diehards who are not about to change the world.

So this cc: Mail book of mine can burn, baby! There are books you can throw away, books you can "burn", with a clear conscience -- without invoking Thoth's name and without fear of him. But, as swords turn into ploughshares, so will this book recycle into some other, unrecognizable, paper thing -- in which the very memory of it is obliterated. And yet I don't know what path it will follow to those imagined ends, after my last act (after that final curtain) at the basket. Or perhaps there will be no pathos to talk of, as pressure mounts to preserve this thing as forensic evidence of that which I speak of.