#lebombo

[abcdepiklmno]

Singita Lebombo Lodge, South Africa

[panafrocore]

The Lebombo bone

The Lebombo bone is a bone tool made of a baboon fibula with incised markings discovered in Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains located between South Africa and Eswatini. According to The Universal Book of Mathematics the Lebombo bone’s 29 notches suggest “it may have been used as a lunar phase counter, in which case African women may have been the first mathematicians, because keeping track of…

[joseolivarez]

Singita Lebombo Lodge, South Africa

[unsensitive-feelings]

Singita Lebombo Lodge, South Africa

[insidecroydon]

The 'incompetent' Lebombo scout who helped win Boer War

SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: In the latest stage of his world tour of places named after Croydon, DAVID MORGAN encounters some old-style adventurers in southern Africa Raiders of the lost mines: the Victorian adventure novel was set close to Croydon If you are a fan of the quiz show Pointless, then you will know that Eswatini is an answer to keep up your sleeve for a question on geography or vexillology…

[makabrotka]

Singita Lebombo Lodge, South Africa

[fluffy-crimp]

Singita Lebombo Lodge, South Africa

[ghostlook]

Singita Lebombo Lodge, South Africa

[myhouseidea]

The Singita Lebombo Lodge in Mpumalanga, South Africa by @cecileandboyds Photo by @alexpreview

Get Inspired, visit www.myhouseidea.com

[mutant-distraction]

Rudi Hulshof's Classic Africa

Singita Lebombo Lodge. Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga

[tsalala]

The oldest lioness of the Shishangaan Pride. Photographed by Bill Drew in Singita Game Reserve, Lebombo, South Africa.

[lost-lycaon]

Fever tree or Koorsboom, common in the Lebombo mountains of South Africa. The locals call it Umkhanyakude, variously translated as tree of light, or light from afar.

[supremechancellorrex]

The continent of Africa has one of the oldest mathematical artefacts in the world, going back 35,000 years with the Lebombo Bone. Africans discovered fractals first and have a rich history of iron smelting and metallurgy going back thousands of years too. Old Benin was famous for incorporating mathematics like fractals into their city design.

In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto reported: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”

[tenaciouschaosturtle-ad805251]

Singita Lebombo

[mangodestroyer]

You know? As a math major who has taken a History of Mathematics course, I would find it very hard to believe that Aziraphale isn't interested in math. He sure as Hell would have been following its development throughout the years.

He would have started out watching humans only knowing the numbers one and two and keeping track of things that way. And seen humans use things like the Ishango or Lebombo bone (they're bones with a bunch of lines carved into them and one theory is that they're believed to have been used to keep track of lunar cycles).

Later on, he would have witnessed humans discovering the fundamentals of algebra and geometry. And he would have also seen many of the uses for it as well. He would have seen the new accounting systems and more complicated architecture developing in various civilizations.

He would have witnessed all the weird shit happening with Pythagoras and his cult. Along with all the other drama involving mathematics throughout the years, like the huge controversy over irrational numbers (I mean, blood was literally shed over this, a person died for believing they were a thing). The burning of the Library of Alexandria (in which a lot of information, including math info, was lost). The early Christians opposing math as they thought it was somehow against God (which was probably painful for Aziraphale to witness, and idk how this would have played out in the GOs universe/if this was really anyone's doing or just humans being humans).

And then later seeing math make a come back in the Western world (and no, math was never just isolated to the Western world, there have been many discoveries in civilizations in other parts of the world that happened separately from Western civilizations, such as the quipu accounting system used by the Inca, and the fact that the Pythagorean theorem was discovered multiple times in different parts of the world, long before the Greeks discovered it). Math started becoming a lot more interesting once Calculus came into play. Math started to evolve RAPIDLY. The new math also branched into many different areas of science, and many more big, yet controversial, discoveries were made. This has continued up to the current day, where we now have lots of different branches of pure math which have yet to find real world application (as they are very abstract, albeit logically sound), along with many new forms of applied mathematics that hadn't previously been considered. At this point, maybe it became difficult to keep track of all of it.

Needless to say, Aziraphale had to have been getting involved with some of the math people throughout history. At the very least, he was reading about it. And who knows? Maybe Crowley even inspired some of the inventions that tended to require some applications of math (even if he wasn't as into it). He is the creative one, after all.

I'm not sure how much mathematics celestial beings would know by default. If they even use math the same way humans do, or if they have completely different tools for understanding the world around them as interdimensional beings (I would think though that this still involves understanding math, even if only on a subconscious level, or with a different presentation). It would be interesting though if humans happen to discover many nuances about the universe that celestial beings never noticed. Maybe learning math even helps Aziraphale learn how to better perform miracles, as math gives him a better understanding of logic (and I assume miracles, to some extent, are bounded by more rules than we're shown in canon). Also, some people believe that numbers have magical properties. This has been a thing throughout history and is even a feature in many religions. What if there's something to that in the GOs universe?

[stuffman-silverquest]

Singita Lebombo, South Africa + The 20 Best Safari Lodges and Camps in Africa Explore the untamed beauty of Singita Lebombo in South Africa, and discover why it's one of the 20 Best Safari Lodges and Camps in Africa.