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Book and Sword

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Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: May 2014

One of My Tools

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Uncategorized

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Tags

Achaemenid, ancient, documentary evidence, Johann N. Strassmaier, Neo-Babylonian, Sippar

Only a fraction of the tablets from the Achaemenid period which have been excavated have been published, and many of the published ones look like this:

Line drawing of twelve rows of cuneiform signs

A typical entry in Strassmaier’s “Inschriften von Darius, König von Babylon” (Liepzig, 1892): “1 1/2 mina 2 1/2 shekels silver …”

One Johann N. Strassmaier published tablets organized by date between 1887 and 1897, and he naturally faced the dilemma of how to publish a damaged three-dimensional object covered in a script which had only recently been deciphered. He chose to sketch the tablets but not to transcribe them in Latin letters, a choice which avoided confusions as readings and transcriptions changed but demanded that the reader know Late Babylonian script well. I don’t know it well, but this tablet seems to describe a payment of silver for men so that they could go on campaign in year 4, month 11, day 25 of Darius I.

I am told that his editions contain an index of personal names, but my copy does not have one. Assyriologists today are usually very thorough in providing indices, since they know that their editions may be used for a long time, but few publish as many tablets as Strassmaier did.

Exegi monumentum vitro fragilius

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

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digital archiving, digital humanities, electronic publishing, not_an_expert

A few months ago a kindred spirit died, and in preparation for the inevitable “404 site not found” I saved his website. I recently discovered that the copy which I saved does not work unless I have an internet connection open. His site relied on a main page with a frame at the side, and downloading the “whole site” just got the frame and the home page. Wherever else I clicked, I was silently downloading from his own server even though the URL stayed the same. After some experimentation I installed some software and created an archive of his website which works without an Internet connection and may remain readable in future years.

When we write on the Internet we are writing in sand. On one hand we must accept the risk that anything which we send over the Internet will be public forever, yet on the other hand we cannot trust that a webpage will be intact and findable in five years. The main public archiving sites often leave out images and videos to save space, but one of the strengths of the Internet is that it lets us integrate pictures and texts. Electronic publishing does not create Horace’s monument more lasting than bronze, but one more fragile than glass.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Cities

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Not an expert

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ancient, Bronze Age, Catastrophe of the Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, methodology, not_an_expert, Post-Roman Britain, world history

My visits to Heuneburg and Haithabu/Hedeby reminded me that I don’t know enough about one of the great puzzles in world history: why cities spread so slowly, with frequent retreats and abandonments. There were towns in the Balkans before the Indo-Europeans came, but it was almost the year 1,000 before there was a single town on the Baltic, and that was burned and abandoned. Why did it take 5,000 years for cities to spread from Mesopotamia to Denmark, when other innovations spread in a few centuries? And why did many societies which once had prosperous cities give them up?
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When the Bronze is Like a Mirror

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Not an expert

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ancient, Bronze Age, bronzecasting, early cities, experimental archaeology, Halstatt culture, Heuneburg, historical crafts, Iron Age, not_an_expert, reproduction

In April I participated in a prehistoric bronze-casting workshop with Dr. Bastian Asmus at the open air museum at Heuneburg (near Herbertingen, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany). I believe that it is helpful for historians to understand the world of things and skills in which their subjects lived. Like any other art, imitating historical bronze-casting requires a range of skills and is best learned by practice.

Das Donautor
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