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Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: November 2015

The Thrust of an Argument

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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Tags

Achaemenid army, Alexander the Great, ancient, armour, Darius III, Iron Age, Jarva type IV armour, methodology

See caption

Impression of a seal on clay: a warrior in a Median hood and a cuirass with a tall projection behind the neck with a piercing axe thrust into it pulls an enemy’s shield down and stabs overhand into his chest as the enemy brandishes a club. From Erich F. Schmidt with contributions by Sydney P. Noe et al., Frederick R. Matson, Lawrence J. Howell, and Louisa Bellinger, Persepolis II: Contents of the Treasury and Other Discoveries. Oriental Institute Publications 69. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957 plate 9 seal 30. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/oip/oip-69-persepolis-ii-contents-treasury-and-other-discoveries

Sometime in the sixteenth year of Xerxes great king (circa 468/7 BCE in our calendar), someone at Persepolis turned a tablet with Elamite writing on end and rolled his seal along it. A conversation with Josho Brouwers of Karwansaray BV recalled it to memory. Because this seems to show the style of body armour with a tall neck-guard and flaps over the shoulders which is often understood as distinctively Greek and said to have been invented about a hundred years before Xerxes based on its appearance in Greek vase paintings. But there is no hint of the Aegean in this scene, and this armour is missing the skirt of pteryges around the waist which usually appear in depictions of armour with this cut from the Aegean.

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Cross-Post: Conference on Experiencing Warfare in the Ancient World, Brock University, February 2016

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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ancient, call for papers, Canadian content, conference

CFP: EXPERIENCING WARFARE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
STUDENT CONFERENCE
CLASSICS GRADUUATE PROGRAM ─ BROCK UNIVERSITY
FEBRUARY 6, 2016

From Stephanie Culp

The Classics Graduate Program at Brock University is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference exploring the experience of warfare in the ancient world. How were the ancients affected by warfare? What can the literature and material remains they left behind tell us of the changes that war brought to these civilizations? Topics on the subject can include but are not limited to:

─ Weapons and Technology
─ Warfare in Literature
─ Women in Warfare
─ Representing Warfare in Archaeology
─ Creating Military Monuments in the Ancient World
─ Social Organization of Military Systems
─ Military and the Political Sphere

This year’s keynote speaker is Peter Meineck, a Clinical Professor of Classics at NYU. Dr. Meineck is the founder and former artistic director of the Aquila Theatre and recently co-edited a collection entitled Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks.

Scholars from the fields of Classics, Archeology, Near Eastern Studies, History, Anthropology, English, Contemporary Film Studies, Art History, Philosophy and Psychology are welcome to submit abstracts for consideration as well as any other academic disciplines that touch on this subject. Proposals for 15–20 minute paper presentations should include the presenter’s name, e-mail address, tentative title, a 200-word abstract, a short (150-word) bio, as well as an indication of whether any computing or electronic equipment (e.g., laptop, projector) will be needed. Please submit proposals by December 15, 2015 to

brockclassconf2016@gmail.com

I can’t afford to attend, but this is certainly a promising development.

VENI VIDI VICI

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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Achaemenid, Akkadian, ancient, Behistun Inscription, Darius I, Julius Caesar, Late Babylonian, Latin, propaganda, Roman

A stone relief of a bare-headed beardless man holding six writing boards and a stylus

A tomb relief depicting a man in a toga with six writing boards, Archaeologisches Museum, Schloss Eggenburg, Graz. Photo by Sean Manning, September 2015.

A good long time ago, Julius Caesar faced the problem of how to boast about military achievements so great and so numerous that one war threatened to blend into another. Fortunately, Caesar had people who could rise to the occasion:

Suetonius, Divus Julius §37: Pontico triumpho inter pompae fercula trium verborum praetulit titulum VENI·VIDI·VICI non acta belli significantem sicut ceteris, sed celeriter confecti notam.

In the Pontic triumph among the litters of the parade was a label of three words I CAME – I SAW – I CONQUERED, not a description of the events of the war like in the other triumphs, but a reminder of how quickly it had been finished.

A bit earlier than that, Darius the son of Hystaspes faced a similar problem.

Darius the Great, Behistun Inscription (Babylonian Version) §15-17:

Darius the king speaks as follows: Not only did I kill Gaumata the Magus, but after that there was a man, Atrina was his name, the son of Upādaramma, a man from Elam; he made an uprising in the land of Elam, he spoke as follows: ‘I am the king of Elam!’ After that the men of Elam became hostile and went over to this Atrina. He became king of Elam. Not only that, but there was a man Nidintu-Bēl, the son of Kin-Zeri the royal secretary; he made an uprising in the land of Babylonia. He lied to the people-in-arms as follows: ‘I am Nabu-Kudurrī, the son of Nabonidus, king of Babylonia.’ The people-in-arms which was in Babylonia went over to him. Babylonia became hostile. He seized the kingdom of Babylonia.

Darius the king speaks as follows: After that I sent a son of the sending. They seized this Atrina and sent him before me. I killed him.

Darius the king speaks as follows: I went to Babylon and came head-to-head with this here Nidintu-Bēl who lied as follows: ‘I am Nabu-Kudurrī.’ … (the story of how Nidintu-Bēl was defeated, captured, and executed fills three long paragraphs and is followed by stories about seven other revolts and their suppression).

Darius’ scribes did not think of a way to alliterate like Caesar’s did, but they managed to use one word šapāru three times in three sentences. And whether we see their patron as a hero or an usurper, I think we can rightly admire their cunning.

(All translations are my own; I thank Robert Rollinger for pointing out the wordplay).

Further Reading: Samuel A. Meier, The Messenger in the Ancient Semitic World (Scholars’ Press: Atlanta, 1989), Elizabeth N. von Voigtlander, The Bisitun Inscription of Darius the Great: Babylonian Version Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (Lund Humphries: London, 1978)

Keeping Just One Cloak

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

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

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ancient, modern, persecution, Remembrance Day, Zillertal

An oil painting of men, women, and children with wooden packs and small bundles of goods making their way across a pass.

In 1837, the remaining Protestants living in the Zillerthal in eastern Tyrol were ordered to convert to Catholicism or leave. Mathias Schmid (d. 1923), “Vertreibung der Zillerthaler Protestanten im Jahr 1837/Letzer Blick in die Heimat,” 1877. In Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; catalogue number Gem 3718. Photo by author, October 2015.

Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.6 (tr. Rex Warner)

The people of Samos were now completely blockaded by Lysander. At first they refused to come to terms, but when Lysander was on the point of a general assault, they came to an agreement that every free man should be allowed to leave, keeping just one cloak; everything else was to be surrendered. On those conditions they left the city.

Gloss: Agreements like this were ubiquitous in the ancient world. The attackers knew that some of them would die if they stormed the city, and that keeping inhabitants who did not want to live under the new regime could be dangerous, so letting the defenders abandon their property and leave had advantages. The defenders knew that if they fought to keep the attackers out and failed most of them would be killed or maimed or enslaved. Because large garments usually cost about a month’s income for an average family, just how many the exiles could bring with them was a deathly serious point of negotiation; in another passage of Xenophon a Persian governor shows his liberality by giving shipwrecked sailors not one garment apiece but two. For people born in Canada, exile has become a dim memory since the age when Ottawa struggled with the local Metis and First Nations to control the Canadian prairies, and the world where a single garment was an expensive piece of property is the stuff of half-remembered songs.

Eliza Griswold, “Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?”, The New York Times, 22 July 2015 (link) c/o The Scholar’s Stage

No one came for Diyaa and Rana. [The rebels] hadn’t bothered to search inside their ramshackle house. Then, on the evening of Aug. 21, word spread that [the rebel movement] was willing to offer what they call ‘‘exile and hardship’’ to the last people in Qaraqosh. They would be cast out of their homes with nothing, but at least they would survive. A kindly local mullah was going door to door with the good news. Hoping to save Diyaa and Rana, their neighbors told him where they were hiding.

Diyaa and Rana readied themselves to leave. The last residents of Qaraqosh were to report the next morning to the local medical center, to receive ‘‘checkups’’ before being deported from the Islamic State. Everyone knew the checkups were really body searches to prevent residents from taking valuables out of Qaraqosh. Before [the rebels] let residents go — if they let them go — it was very likely they would steal everything they had, as residents heard they had done elsewhere.

I hope that after my words and pictures above, this passage does not need any more glossing.

Gadal-iama, Part 3: Grammars Pile High, Head Bows Low

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Uncategorized

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Achaemenid army, ancient, cuneiform, Gadal-iama, Iron Age, Late Babylonian

Table in a library with a variety of books on ancient clothing spread across it cover-up

Entrance to the Fachbibliothek Atrium, North Wing, Universität Innsbruck. Photo by Sean Manning, February 2015.

Despite some health difficulties, I have been slowly making sense of the Gadal-iama contract and updating my transcription and further reading in an earlier post. Perhaps “making sense” is not the right expression. Because while historians happily quote translations of this text into fluid English or French, the original Babylonian is full of rare words, technical phrases whose meaning is not fully understood, and intricately nested sub-clauses. After the book by Guillaume Cardascia in 1951 and the article by E. Ebeling in 1952, both of which discuss the difficult points of this tablet and argue how to resolve some of them, translators have chosen to hide the uncertainties. Debate continues, but in philological venues where squeamish historians don’t always look. I am having trouble reconciling many of the details in the translations which I have read with the Babylonian original. So this is not the sort of text which you can read in translation with a light heart.

I find it comforting that when I look up difficult words in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (the sort in 25 volumes which fills an entire bookshelf) I almost always find a short entry which cites this contract and perhaps one or two others. The specialists in cuneiform have trouble with this text too. And the three people who have transcribed the tablet almost completely agree about which signs are written on it. But I wonder how many other optimistic translations of ancient texts I am innocently relying on.

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