Moral’s Mark
Every memo on the site, grouped by theme.
44 memos. Each is sourced, and each records what is established, what is inferred and what is disputed. The science memos are here.
The family history of the gens Julia, from the record: the Troy chain, the Alban kingdom, the transplant to Rome, the consuls of the Republic, the lex Julia, the dictator's use of the line - and the adoption that put a non-Julian bloodline on the name. Part 1b of the Caesar-Cleopatra period.
Read →Julius Caesar from birth to the Ides of March, from the record: the Julii, the Subura, Sulla, the pirates, the marriages, the ladder to command, Gaul, the civil war, Cleopatra in Rome, the marriage bill, the will, and the last five days. Facts and sources only. Part 1 of the Caesar-Cleopatra period.
Read →Caesarion, the only son Caesar is recorded as having and the last of the Ptolemies — the dynasty is set out in Read →
Augustus had one biological child, ever - a daughter. This memo follows his blood: through Julia to the grandsons who died young, the granddaughters' lines the dynasty consumed, Nero's matricide, the Silani killed for their descent, and Junia Calvina, the last known descendant of Augustus, who…
Read →The house of Herod carried the name of the Julii for a hundred and sixty years after the grant of 47 BC: citizenship from Caesar, a crown from the Senate, exiles in Gaul, a kingmaker in Rome, thrones in Armenia, a near-empress beside Titus, a death under Vesuvius, and a consul of Rome named…
Read →The house of Herod carried the name of the Julii for a hundred and sixty years after the grant of 47 BC: citizenship from Caesar, a crown from the Senate, exiles in Gaul, a kingmaker in Rome, thrones in Armenia, a near-empress beside Titus, a death under Vesuvius, and a consul of Rome named…
Read →Herod the Great ran 30-plus building projects across 800 km of the eastern Mediterranean — a doubled Temple platform of 144,000 m², the first great artificial harbour built in open sea, desert palaces fed by 40,000 m³ of stored rainwater, and a mountain he raised by hand. An account of the works…
Read →Three centuries in which a Macedonian dynasty took a civilisation seven hundred years past its peak and gave it a library, a translation programme and three scripts on every decree - and why that is the reason we can read Egypt at all.
Read →The Myrmidons of Achilles are the elite ship-borne raiders of the Late Bronze Age Aegean — twenty-three coastal cities sacked in nine years, fifty ships of fifty men, operational profile of the Sea Peoples. The Greek lexicon preserves an entire m-r sea-cluster under the standard ant-etymology:…
Read →In 458 BC Rome found a former consul ploughing his farm and made him master of the people - supreme commander for the emergency. Cincinnatus saved a trapped army and gave absolute power back after sixteen days. How early Rome was governed, why it traded monarchy for a Republic that capped power…
Read →What stood on the Esquiline before Santa Maria Maggiore, and what the record can and cannot establish about why the hill stayed sacred.
Read →The fifth-century mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore, panel by panel - what is in each image, what it is said to show, and what that rests on.
Read →Abraham's three descent lines — Ishmael (the Ishmaelites), Jacob (Israel), and Esau (Edom) — and what they left: the Kaaba at Mecca, Judaism and Christianity, and Herod's enclosure over the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron. Genesis, Quran, and archaeology set side by side.
Read →The chosen bloodline from Noah as Islam's own books carry it: the twelve princes, Kedar the head tribe, the custodians of the Kaaba, Muhammad, the Sunni-Shia split fought inside the bloodline principle, the map of nations, the houses that still reign on descent, Sufism's transmitted light, and…
Read →Genesis 16:12, translated for centuries as 'a wild ass of a man' living 'in hostility toward his brothers'. The oldest texts say neither. The Greek of Alexandria reads agroikos anthropos — a man of the open country. The verse word by word in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, who Hagar was, and how the…
Read →The Hebrew Bible reached its final form under editors loyal to the house of David — and it shows. The house of Saul and the tribe of Benjamin lowered, Judah raised: defamed Saulide names, a giant-killing reassigned to David, a tomb pulled south, and a later book that deletes David’s crimes.
Read →One spot on the road: Rachel dies bearing Benjamin and is buried — yet scripture places the grave in the lands of two tribes, leaves the matriarch out of the family tomb, and marks the youngest son's birthplace nowhere. The data, the open questions, and a mystery left to the reader.
Read →Mordecai — an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, of the fallen house of King Saul — rose to steward the Persian court, refused to bow to Haman, and helped save his people. With the old tradition, Hebrew and Iranian alike, that Esther's blood ran on into the kings of Persia.
Read →Thirteen divisions of the country between the Jordan and the sea, c. 1200 BC to AD 135 — each mapped, each with what it rests on.
Read →Two billion Muslims, and a claim that Islam itself is radical — tested against the counted number of violent jihadists (about one in 8,700 at the most hawkish estimate), the terrorism death toll that falls overwhelmingly on Muslims, the formal verdict of Islam's own senior scholars, the survey…
Read →The Latter-day Saints — nearly 18 million strong — say they descend from Israel through Joseph. This memo follows the claim: the Book of Mormon's story, a striking genetic question among the northeastern tribes, the rise of Joseph Smith's church, and where the Mormons stand today.
Read →Ancient calendars counted sacred time in sevens and fifties — fifty days to Pentecost, fifty years to Jubilee — and Egypt opened its year on the rising of Sirius. This memo sets out the documented record, then the author's hypothesis of a Sirian pulse.
Read →The primeval mound of Egyptian creation, the capstone of every pyramid, and the phoenix that rose from it all carry one root — wbn, ‘to rise, to shine.’ The Semitic word for ‘son,’ ben, sounds almost the same. A memo on the facts of both, and one open question.
Read →The Norwegian house of Møre and its six sons: Rognvald the Wise, who named Harald Fairhair, and the sons who founded the earldom of Orkney, a line in Iceland, and the duchy of Normandy as Rollo, ancestor of William the Conqueror. The record and the saga, kept apart.
Read →In 911 AD, a Frankish king granted a band of Viking raiders a coastal strip at the mouth of the Seine. Within four centuries, the descendants ruled England, parts of Wales, Scotland, much of Ireland, southern Italy, Sicily, Malta, the principality of Antioch, and the kingdom of Cyprus. The…
Read →A Norman family of western-Norwegian Viking stock, from a small fief on the Cotentin, who expelled Byzantium from Italy, took Sicily from its Muslim rulers, built the Kingdom of Sicily, and led the First Crusade to found Antioch — the other Norman conquest, and its mark on Italy and Europe.
Read →The Wars of Scottish Independence were fought by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy that David I imported between 1124 and 1153. Andrew Moray was Flemish-Norman, William Wallace was Anglo-Norman-Welsh, Robert the Bruce was Norman to the core. The Norman conquest of Scotland produced, by 1297, the…
Read →The men who held the medieval borders were not the men whose names are on the titles. They were the stewards, the constables, the marshals — the king's working officers, placed on the most dangerous ground because they were equal to it. From the Cotentin-Breton march to the Anglo-Scottish…
Read →The Royal Stewart line that held the British thrones 1603-1714 traces back through 33 generations and approximately 950 years to Alan, hereditary seneschal of Dol-de-Bretagne in the early 11th century. The line is Breton, not Norman - Celtic-substrate nobility from Brittany, the medieval refuge…
Read →On 28 September 1396 in Perth, sixty Highland clansmen fought to the death in front of King Robert III to settle a feud over which clan stood on the right hand of the chief. Forty-eight died. The lone surviving warrior, Seath Mór, is buried under cursed stones in the Cairngorms. The full story…
Read →Two killings in early medieval Britain, ninety-one years apart on the same day. 13 November 1002: Æthelred the Unready orders the killing of Danes in England. 13 November 1093: King Malcolm III of Scotland and his eldest son and named heir Prince Edward are killed by Arkil Morel, a Norman…
Read →The Northumbrian ballad of the Laidly Worm tells of Princess Margaret turned into a dragon by her wicked stepmother at Bamburgh Castle, rescued by her brother Childe Wynd. First printed 1778 by Rev. Robert Lambe. Full ballad text plus notes on the Brittonic gwyn root that connects the prince's…
Read →The m-r sound names the most sacred mountain in three unrelated civilisations: Hebrew Moriah, Egyptian mer (pyramid), Hindu Meru. It also names the Amorites — the Bronze Age people whose name (Mar.tu, Amurru, Emori) carries the m-r phoneme and who produced Hammurabi the codifier of law. The…
Read →Mary Morrell (c. 1620–1704) crossed to New England as an indentured servant, was bought out of her bond for £20 by Peter Folger, and became the grandmother of Benjamin Franklin. Melville named her in Moby-Dick — “kith and kin to noble Benjamin.” Her story, and the Morrell–Murrell name.
Read →Thomas More — author of Utopia, Lord Chancellor, beheaded in 1535 for refusing Henry VIII's oath. His stance and conduct: an unbending conscience, the pioneering education of his daughters beside his son, and the honest contradiction — the martyr who also burned heretics.
Read →Edmund Morel (1840-1871), the first foreign Engineer-in-Chief of the Japanese government: in nineteen months, while dying of tuberculosis, he designed Japan's first railway, set the national track gauge still used today, and helped found the Ministry of Public Works and an engineering college -…
Read →In 1835 a man named Virgil Stewart, writing under the invented name Augustus Q. Walton, transformed a petty Tennessee slave-stealer named John Murrell into the Great Western Land Pirate — mastermind of a secret outlaw army called the Mystic Clan plotting a coordinated slave uprising across the…
Read →The Buddha, born a prince of the Solar-dynasty Shakya line, refused the throne to found Buddhism; the same royal bloodline rose through Chandragupta and Ashoka to build India's greatest empire, and Ashoka spread the teaching across Asia. The memo sets both beside Jesus — another king of the same…
Read →Every civilisation, with what survives, what is gone, and how the figure is known. Rome, Greece and China period by period. The one hard measurement: of 1,430 quotations in a 6th-century anthology, 1,115 are from works that no longer exist.
Read →A proposal to find, image, translate and grade what survives of the human record, and release all of it into the public domain.
Read →Nearly every organised group that must act or decide as one builds the same top-down pyramid - a head, a council, an assembly, the members, a doctrine. It is less a habit than a rule, and it repeats at every level: pyramids within pyramids, from the family through community, council and state to…
Read →Part 2 of the Statecraft series. Every pyramid stands on a doctrine - the belief that says why a group exists and the rules that say how it lives. Capitalism, communism, a state religion: the same structure, a different creed - the doctrine becomes the group’s constitution.
Read →Part 3 of the Statecraft series. The pyramid stands on its doctrine, and the checks are what stop anyone rewriting it - split power, priesthood, tradition, law. History turns on one question: when a ruler reaches for the doctrine, do the checks hold, bend, or break?
Read →Power has always rested on popular opinion, and power has always worked to manufacture it. From the Mandate of Heaven to the printing press to the nudge unit — how the trade of controlling opinion evolved, its documented modern record, and its methods.
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