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Book and Sword

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Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: August 2017

Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Muhammed Dandamayev

28 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ancient, dis manibus, Muhammad Dandamayev, obituary

Muhammad Dandamayev, the distinguished Russian Assyriologist and Achaemenid scholar, has died at the age of 88. He was startlingly multilingual (as he was born in Dagestan, even Russian was a second language for him) and untiring (the author of several books which required pouring through transcriptions of thousands of cuneiform tablets), and during the Soviet era built some of the few bridges between Russian and western European scholarship by having his works translated into French and English. Without his books and articles, it would be even harder for scholars without knowledge of Russian to learn what researchers in the Slavic countries are working on.

I suppose it is traditional at times like this to anoint his inscriptions with oil, but my photocopy of sixteen pages of The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran won’t survive that kind of treatment as well as good old diorite.

Further Reading:

  • http://www.orientalstudies.ru/ s.v. Muhammad Abdulkadyrovich Dandamayev
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Dandamayev

The Innsbrucker Labyrinth

13 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

21st century, Innsbruck, monster, whimsy

The Innsbrucker Marktplatz in July 2017. Where do you turn, and turn again? How do delivery vans, bicyclists, and pedestrians share the space with the construction site, the underground garage [right next to a major river, natch], and the farmer’s market?

Last summer I regaled my gentle readers with the story of the Innsbrucker Scylla and Charybdis. Time passed, and that monster was vanquished (perhaps when the wine bar on the riverbank side of the farmers’ market noticed that a lack of pedestrian access was cutting into its profits). But its always possible that when one monster dies, another will take its place and occupy the vacant real estate, or ecological niche if you want to go all second-edition-Dungeons-and-Dragons. I see a labyrinth with walls and paths which shift and turn when I am not looking, and while I am pretty sure that the dung on the street belongs to the horses which pull the tourist carriages, and all the cows in town are up in the high pastures for the summer, I am not so sure that there is not a minotaur lurking about, perhaps in the depths of the underground parking garage under the Marktplatz. For something built metres away from a river, it descends through a surprising numbers of spiralling turns, and that raises another disturbing possibility. Did the diggers of the storm drain delve too greedily and too deep? The Nordkette has been wrapped in an unseasonable fog split only by flashes like lightning of late …

Since I took this photo, the labyrinth has vanished and been replaced with a fish market. But I would not be surprised if the dragons across the street take up residence there, or a sea serpent wriggles its way up from the Inn across the stones which Hapsburg engineers enthusiastically laid in concrete to keep the Inn within its bounds. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that monsters are not as easy to banish as we think.

A Lombard Silver Bowl

05 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

combat mechanics, Late Antique, medieval, Migration Era, military manuals, source

A plate wrought with a horseman in a shirt of mail riding down a man on foot with a two-handed thrust of a lance.  Another infantryman has already fallen atop his large round shield.

Detail from a wrought silver plate in the Castelvecchio, Verona. Said to come from northern Italy and date to the sixth century CE. Photo by Sean Manning.

One of the treasures housed in the Castelvecchio of Verona is an extraordinary silver plate. It dates a bit later than the Sasanid silverwork which I have blogged about before, to the age which gave us Maurice’s Strategikon when East Romans, Goths, and Lombards were struggling for control in Italy and destroying what was left of the wealth and learning built up in the centuries when Rome ruled the world.
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Cross-Post: Bronze Sword Workshop, Scotland, 7-8 August

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

ancient, Bronze Age, cross-post, event, reconstruction, swords

Six unpolished bronze swords laid on the grass

Photo care of Neil Burridge of Bronze Age Swords

Neil Burridge had to give up his annual bronze sword workshops when he noticed his competitors taking them, but he is making an exception this year. This one is not in Cornwall:

Bronze Sword Workshop 7th & 8th AUG Crannog Center
there are still 3 places left of the 6 contact them directly
01887 830583 this follows a history event over the weekend
Cost £100 stunning value

Bronze sword workshop
A two day workshop exploring the manufacture of bronze swords in the Late Bronze Age. The group will work together to cast a sword using charcoal and bronze age methods.
Then each participant will work on there own Ewart Park sword, cleaning, forging and looking at different ways handles were fitted. The development of leaf shaped blades though the late bronze age is the story of the Ewart Park sword making it the most prolific sword from this time in the British isles.

I believed that he means the Scottish Crannog Centre near Aberfeldy in Perthshire. You can find the original posting by Neil Burridge at https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1026451124124591&id=644921868944187&substory_index=0 {warning: Facebook!}

Further Reading Bronze Age Swords http://www.bronze-age-swords.com/

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