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Monthly Archives: March 2016

Low Water in the Sill

26 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

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Innsbruck, modern, not_an_expert, River Sill

A crystal-clear river with broad stretches of gravel and some hibernating trees on either bank and a blocky glass building in the background.

Low water in the river Sill at the beginning of March 2015. Photo by Sean Manning.

Living in Innsbruck, its hard to ignore the changes in the local waterways over the course of the year. The local rivers are fed by runoff, and these days large areas of the Alps are bare by May. I took these photos on the tenth of March, in a week where snow fell for several days but melted as it hit the ground of the valley.

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I Was Wrong about the HEMA Movement

19 Saturday Mar 2016

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

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

heresy, historical European martial arts, medieval, methodology, modern, not_an_expert

Photo of a stunning church entrance with a multicoloured stone archway with double doors set inside it

I understand that its traditional in the German-speaking countries to nail these manifesti to a church door, but since this is the 21st century, and there do not seem to be any historical fencers in Innsbruck, a blog post with a photo of San Anastasia in Verona will have to do.

There are those who say that because most people forget their false predictions and remember their true, it is healthy to make a note when one notices that one was wrong about something. There is a movement variously known as historical European martial arts, Western Martial Arts, or historical fencing. Its central activity is recreating dead martial arts from the manuals which they left behind, although many practitioners also try to recreate ‘prehistoric’ martial arts which died without leaving manuals, or revive obscure but still living European martial arts such as Irish stick-fighting. And my understanding of what it is about, and what sort of people it attracts, has drastically changed over the past few years.

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Snark or Piety on an Assyrian Muster Roll

12 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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ancient, gender, Iron Age, muster roll, Neo-Assyrian, source

Carving of two bare-headed scribes, one beardless with a scroll and one bearded with a writing boardin several leaves, in a grove of date palms.

Scribes take notes as an officer rewards a soldier for taking enemy heads. An Assyrian relief from Nineveh, late 7th century BCE. British Museum, Number 124955. Image courtesy of the British Museum here.

Tel Halaf 23 = Aaron Dornauer, Das Archiv des assyrischen Statthalters Mannu-kī-Aššur von Gūzāna/Tall Ḥalaf. (Harrasowitz Verlag: Wiesbaden, 2014) no. 21 Truppen vor Hūˀa-dīdu pp. 53, 54

This little, undated tablet is a list of names with a note every dozen lines. It was written sometime around the 8th century BCE. Texts like this are rarely exciting, but if one pays attention details sometimes leap out.

Meˀīsu, his son
Hannān, his son
2 son (sic) of Zannānu
Adda-sakā, 2 sons
(5) “God as my witness, she’s really a daughter”: Sîn-iprus
Saˀīlu, 5 sons
Kuwayni, 2 sons
Manānu, his brother
Qatarā, 2 sons
(10) Nanî, Igilu
Total: 25 troops
who are before Hūˀa-dīdu
…

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The Madness Continues

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval, Modern

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historical clothing, medieval, modern, reconstruction, vir armatus

A doublet of coarse cotton lined with fine, thin striped cotton with one arm attached and the other missing

The madness continues, in the form of a mockup in the traditional cheap cotton.

The Rewards of Scholarship

05 Saturday Mar 2016

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

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Achaemenid Empire, ancient, career, introspection, modern, Neo-Babylonian Empire

A green glass bottle of whiskey, mostly full, on a cluttered desktop

Bottoms up! A prize bottle of whiskey.

There is an old joke that most of the people who will ever read your dissertation are in the room when you defend it (and that not all the examiners will be among them). I recently received a royalty cheque from ProQuest for the princely sum of CAD 2.25 for their distributing a copy of my master’s thesis. While Service and Supply in the Achaemenid Army is available free online, some people don’t have high-speed internet access, or are censored by their governments from sites like academia dot edu.

Not only that! At recent quizzes in Innsbruck there were questions about the Neo-Babylonians (well, Judith and Holofernes) and Greek infantry formations. Triumph in such encounters can bring rewards in the form of free drinks worth several Euros, and at times I and my fellow quiz-goers have brought back such prizes from the field. Humanists have felt little respected and under-paid for a good long time; I am especially touched by the Babylonian scholars who responded to being ruled by Persians and Macedonians who had difficulty faking enthusiasm for cuneiform by energetically copying texts about the kings of old who had mastered the scribal art and generously rewarded their court literati. But the scholarly life has its compensations, both financial and otherwise.

Further Reading: Eckart Frahm, “Keeping Company with Men of Learning: The King as Scholar,” in Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson eds., The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 508-532 (available on Academia.edu)

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