Monthly Archives: January 2019

Cross-Post: New Book on Legio IX Hispana

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Ancient, Modern

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A book cover with the title in black and a fragment of a Roman sculpture of an eagle below it

Duncan B. Campbell, The Fate of the Ninth: The Curious Disappearance of One of Rome’s Legions (Bocca della Verità Publishing: Glasgow, 2018)
https://www.amazon.ca/Fate-Ninth-curious-disappearance-legions/dp/1791768334

Duncan B. Campbell, the author of many fine books and articles on the Roman army, has published a new book on the mysterious fate of the 9th legion, which fades from the historical record with a building inscription at York dated 108, a scattering of stamped tiles at Nijmegen, and a series of officers who were promoted away from the legion in the middle of the second century CE. It certainly was not involved in the building of Hadrian’s Wall and the other construction projects in Britain after 122 CE. When only the inscriptions from York were known, this lead to a romantic theory that it had been destroyed by the Caledonians or the Brigantes which inspired one of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s novels. Campbell goes through the history of investigations into this legion, showing how excavations in the Netherlands and Egypt and painstaking work reconstructing the careers of Roman officials allow us to sketch the history of this legion after it left its station at York. This is a story about how scholars methodically build a history of the Roman army and the men who made it up, but also about how once they have committed to a theory, human beings fight to salvage it rather than ask whether a premise was incorrect.

You can find a shorter, earlier version of his argument from Karwansaray Publishers and buy The Fate of the Ninth from Amazon.

Full Disclosure: I have traded emails with the author

The Iron of Khorsabad

05 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Ancient

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A gate tower six modern stories high with the gate passing through the ground floor

One of the western gates of the city of Bologna, September 2018. Note the put-log holes in the brickwork. Photo by Sean Manning.

Around 1853, gangs of workers under French supervision were excavating Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad, the ancient Dūr-Šarrukin (Fort Sargon). One of the great courts had some long storerooms along one side, and in one which they numbered 86 (or 84), they found marvelous things: “un vèritable mur métallique, occupant tout un côte de la chamber.” The orderly piles of ironware filled a space 5.80 metres wide, 2.60 metres deep and 1.40 metres high: hammers, pick-axes, grappling irons, chains, ploughshares, and fish-shaped iron ingots with a hole through them. The hoard must have weighed more than a hundred tons,* and was so plentiful that it was handed over to local blacksmiths to make sickles, wagon fittings, and other necessary objects. One of them remarked that aside from the famous Persian iron (wootz?) he had never yet worked better metal. Other objects like ploughshares were put back into use by the local farmers and served their purpose. This was all for the best, since most of the artefacts from Khorsabad were sunk by brigands near the Shatt al Arab at Kurnah in 1855 as they were being shipped to Europe. This was the period when the excavators at Susa built themselves a castle to protect themselves and their goods from robbers.

Finds like that were not uncommon in the early days of Assyrian archaeology. At Nimrud, the north end of chamber SW7 contained a mass of rusted scale armour piled 35 cm thick in spots. Groups of rusted-together scales can still be found in museums. Later the graves of three queens rich in ivory, gold, crystal and silver were uncovered at that site: probably Yaba, Banitu, and Atalia who lived in the eighth century BCE and were laid to rest with appropriately gruesome curses upon anyone who violated their chambers. These finds give us another perspective on early iron after looking at the lancehead from Deve Hüyük and the akinakes from the dealer in Iran. By the seventh century BCE, the Assyrians were incredibly rich in iron, and this presupposes a massive industry of charcoal burners and miners and smelters and forgers. So far, the only trace of this is the objects they produced.
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