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Book and Sword

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Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Liebster Award, or, Becoming Aware of an Internet Tradition

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert, Uncategorized

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Liebster Award, modern, not_an_expert

Photo of a red limestone building with a weathered gateway of white stone carved in relief built into it

The very rich and very patient can ignore practical constraints on their collecting too: random Tudor gateway built into the Burrell Collection, Scotland.

A few weeks ago Alexandra of ascholarlyskater nominated me for the Liebster Award. Thanks Alex! I see that Judith Weingarten won one of these in 2013. Although I do not normally post personal things on this blog, I thought I would get into the spirit of things in my reply. Those of you who are here for the history can come back next week when I will have something nice and martial and either Babylonian or Phoenician.

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Three Calgary Dissertations

18 Saturday Apr 2015

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

≈ 2 Comments

Stone panel sculpted with a man in robes carrying a horn over his right shoulder

The funerary stele of Gnaeus Coponius Felicio, a trumpeter in the Roman army who was buried at Aquileia (CIL V 1027: Palazzo Te, Mantua; photo by author)

One of the joys of the modern age is that doctoral dissertations are usually published online. While it is still sometimes necessary to travel to the correct university and make a copy of an older dissertation by hand (or order it and wait months for the librarians and the appropriate university to send their copy), this makes the process of finding and obtaining research much less expensive and laborious. This week I thought I would take some time to mention some dissertations which my readers might be interested in. All of them are clearly written and provide enough background information that most readers of a blog like this should be able to understand their subjects, namely ancient horses, ancient Greek and Macedonian tactics, and the skeletons found in the tombs of the Macedonian kings.

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Some thoughts on Tobias Capwell’s “The Real Fighting Stuff”

11 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval, Modern

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Tags

armour, book review, Glasgow Museums, medieval, modern, Realien

Photograph of the cover of the book with three suits of plate armour and a title

Cover photograph c/o the Wallace Collection website

Tobias Capwell, The Real Fighting Stuff: Arms and Armour at the Glasgow Museums (Glasgow City Council: Glasgow, 2007) ISBN 978-0-902752-82-5

Dr. Tobias “Toby” Capwell, jouster and curator with a PhD in fifteenth-century armour, is taking preorders for his forthcoming book on knightly armour in late medieval England. In honour of that, I thought I would post on the only one of his publications which I have been able to read, a book for beginners on arms and armour at the Glasgow museums.

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Chronology, Ethnicity, Archaeology

04 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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ancient, chronology, Hellanicus of Mytilene, Herodotus, Thucydides

Corroded bronze horse bit lying on clear plastic with two cheek-pieces shaped like integral signs with outwards-facing rings and side-pieces surrounded with nobs and capped with interlocked rings which hold left and right pieces together.

A bronze horse bit in the Burrell Collection, Scotland (photographed by your humble correspondent). Note that there is no gap or join in the rings which link the left and right cheeks; the caster poured one side then made the mould for the other around it. They date it to the fourth century BCE and place it in Etruria. Does that make it an Etruscan horse bit?

A recent post at Bones Don’t Lie inspired me to pull this out of my file of prepared posts. I promise my patient readers that my next post will have both books and swords in it.

Like Herodotus and Hellanicus, Thucydides also specified certain intervals of years from the Fall of Troy (eg. for the Return of the Heraclids) and others from his own time (eg. Corinthian naval activity). To this day, numerical expressions such as these condition the chronology, yet historians are skeptical when Thucydides demonstrates the great antiquity of an erstwhile Delian festival from the fact that it is mentioned in Homer’s Hymn to Apollo, and reject his testimony that the grave goods from the opened Delian tombs were Carian, because the tombs, when excavated, yielded Geometric pottery. The manufacture of such pottery is attributed to Hellenes, presumably because it is found in what became known, at some indeterminate moment, as Hellas, but in fact there is nothing about the pottery that proves the hypothesis of Hellenic manufacture. A remark from R.M. Cook shows how the hypothesis has taken precedence over the testimony: “Thucydides, or an informant who he considered reliable, did not recognize Geometric (or perhaps Orientalizing) pottery as being particularly Greek, and dated it at least 300 years too early.” It is we who have assumed that Geometric pottery was made only by Hellenes; perhaps Thucydides’ remark should cause us to re-examine that assumption.

Pamela-Jane Shaw, Discrepancies in Olympiad Dating and Chronological Problems of Archaic Peloponnesian History, Historia Einzelschriften 166 (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 2003) pp. 23, 24

I certainly can’t speak to pottery typologies, but I can say that ethnic terms are always tricky, and that people have a curious tendency to repeat numbers once they have heard them.

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