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Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: April 2014

The Research Process

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

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ancient, ancient history, methodology, modern, research process

On Thursday I traced a theory back from 1935 to 1909. Asking colleagues did not help. Being in Europe, I didn’t have my usual handbooks available, but a search on some of the standard journal databases had turned up some articles after I experimented with keywords. One of these articles was published in 1935 and cited an earlier one in an abbreviated way. The abbreviations were still intelligible, so on Thursday I set about tracing down the works cited, but it soon became clear that something was wrong. The year number, volume number, and journal name were inconsistent: that volume of that journal was published in a different year. There was nothing by the listed author in either volume. One of the librarians at Innsbruck helped me figure out that the note had confused two journals by the same publisher, and that it was the journal name not the year or volume number which was wrong. This gave me a useful page of text and another two abbreviated citations. Some searches in library catalogues and Googling gave me the full name of one work cited; there is no copy in Innsbruck, on http://www.archive.org, or in the Hathi Trust, and the Google Books copy is only available in three-line snippets. That is as far as I could go on Thursday; if I decide to pursue this further, I will need to order a copy of the article through interlibrary loan. Perhaps if I find it, I can understand the other note.

I wonder how many people have looked at these footnotes over the years, scratched their heads, and given up? One reason why many books today have an “abbreviations” section is that what is clear to members of one discipline today may not be clear to members of another 50 years later.

Twilight of the Scribes

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

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ancient, book history, Deir el Medina, Egypt, Elephantine, India, modern, scribe

The BBC has a short piece on the vanishing of professional letter-writers in India (link). A generation ago, someone who wanted a letter written or a package addressed could hire someone to do that for them outside most post offices in big cities. In the author’s view, rising literacy rates make letter-writers less necessary, but the final blow has been the availability of cheap cell phones which let people communicate across long distances without writing.

What the article does not say is that people have been making a living writing letters and simple documents for about four thousand years. In the cosmopolitan world of the Late Bronze Age, Egyptian villagers had the local scribe write them letters and contracts. Soldiers on the island of Elephantine sent short notes to and from their friends and relations on the mainland. Of the several hundred which survive from the Achaemenid period, many are written in a single hand yet under many different names. High medieval teachers wrote textbooks on formal letter-writing. While many men in some societies could read, the skills to write neatly and to compose an elegant letter or official document tended to be rare, so many people in a wide range of societies preferred to find a professional. After such a long time, it would be sad if the trade ends not with universal literacy but with the triumph of the spoken word.

Further reading: J.M. Lindeberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters (1994), Jac J. Janssen, “Commodity Prices From the Ramesside Period.” E.J. Brill: Leiden, Netherlands, 1975, James J. Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts (1971)

Persian Encounters

11 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

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Achaemenid, Achaemenid art, ancient, bull protome, modern, Persepolis sculptures, reproduction

Blocky stone sculpture of the head of a bull on a pedistal

Replica of an Achaemenid bull column-capital from a Bierkeller in Ingolstadt, by Bildhauerei Setayesh http://www.bildhauerei-setayesh.de/

On a recent trip, I stumbled over a bar with some Achaemenid sculpture in front. Most of the pillars at Persepolis were crowned with a pair of bull’s heads back-to-back; they supported one set of timbers on their heads, and cross-timbers in the space between their backs. Art historians call these bull protomes. Traces of paint were found on the originals, but like many reconstructions this one is plain stone.

Of course I am biased, but I will take this over a plaster Venus di Milo every day.

See Also: Bull capital from the Hall of One Hundred Columns, relief of a similar capital from the tomb of Artaxerxes III, and a reconstruction of a bull capital in its original context.

A “Primitive” Battle in Afghanistan

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Achaemenid army, ancient, battle, comparative evidence, early Greek warfare, Greek, Homeric battle, modern

The horrors of these domestic feuds [amongst the Eusofzyes, Kipling’s “Yusufzaies”] are sometimes aggravated by a war with another Oolooss [roughly a “tribe,” p. 211]. Many causes occasion these wars, but the commonest are the seduction of a woman of one Oolooss by a man of another, or a man’s eloping with a girl of his own Oolooss, and seeking protection from another. This protection is never refused, and it sometimes produces long and bloody wars. I shall show their nature, as usual, by the example of the Naikpeekhail.
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