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Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: December 2019

The Decade Still Has a Year Left

31 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

astral science, calendars, controversial opinions, not an expert

Friends! Netizens! Countrymen! The Dionysian era and the Common Era have no year 0 (because 0 did not exist in Europe when the Venerable Bede popularized numbering years by “the year of our lord”) so in those systems a decade runs from year 1 to year 10 and a century runs from year 1 to year 100. The 20th century runs from 1 January 1901 to 31 December 2000, and the 2010s run from 1 January 2011 to 31 December.

Unless you are an astronomer working in Julian days with a year 0 (= 1 BCE in the Common Era) the decade still has a year and a day left. If it were the other way round, then the first decade would only have 9 years (1 CE to 9 CE) and the first century would only have 99 years (1 CE to 99 CE) and all the others would have 10 or 100.

{this is a message from your local tablet scribe- if its really important, ask an expert in the scribal art}

{computer scientists- warning you against off-by-one errors since ENIAC}

2019 Year-Ender

28 Saturday Dec 2019

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aztecs, Internet culture, medieval, modern, not an expert, publishing, year end

A crowd gathered in a rainy street in the medieval centre of Innsbruck

A rainy Christmas Eve concert in Innsbruck, 2019

Books are precious things, and Doctor Manning finally has time to read them for fun again (and to really read them, not just skim them looking for facts or quotes). At the end of this year and the start of another, as I sit in rainy Innsbruck, I would like to tell my gentle readers about some of the ones I read in 2019.

I read Victoria Corva’s very relatable young adult fantasy Books and Bone (self-published, 2019) about a town cartographer trying to follow a vocation which she can’t prove is more than a myth.
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Herodotus Didn’t Say That, Eduard Meyer Did

21 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Achaemenid Empire, ancient, Eduard Meyer, research history, whimsy

A view of a still lake and a cool sky from a stone breakwater

When I walked along the breakwater at Bregenz, I did not meet any old drunks willing to tell me the town’s terrible secrets for a tot of Schnapps, but that is a different winter story.

It has been too long since my last cheerful winter story, so on this Winter Solistice I will tell another.

Like the protagonist of a H.P. Lovecraft story, I came to Innsbruck to look for answers. The scholarship on Achaemenid armies in English was repetitive and fell apart at the first gentle question, but was there something more trustworthy in German? Duncan Head and Nicholas Sekunda cited all kinds of people who nobody else I was reading talked about. So I visited the wood-panelled Law Library reading room on the banks of a river named in a dead tongue, and borrowed an old copy of Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums from a librarian who seemed surprised to have visitors. The first edition of Meyer’s Geschichte was completed in 1902, the last revision was in 1965 a generation after his death. Meyer tried to integrate the history of early Greece into the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And when I came to the following passage, I realized that the horrors were deeper and older than I had thought:
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Dis Manibus Steven Johansson (20 September 2019)

20 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cross-post, dis manibus, modern

Issue 269 of Knights of the Table magazine with an all-black cover except for the title and company logo

Some time in the late 1990s “Guys! The first time one of us dies, we have to give them an all-black cover on the magazine.” “I see what you are doing, you just want a promise before you step in front of a bus and get the coveted cover spot. Munchkin! Look, this Knights of the Dinner Table thing will be gone before any of us …”

Steven Konrad Johansson of Kenzer and Company, an Illinois comic book, board game, and roleplaying game company, died in his sleep on 20 September 2019. Major projects include editing, layout, and art design for Knights of the Dinner Table magazine (currently on its 269th monthly issue!), two editions of the Hackmaster RPG (especially the ten-volume Hacklopedia of Beasts), elements of the Kingdom of Kalamar RPG setting (hobgoblins, the Old Man, topography), the Western RPG Aces and Eights (also in two editions), and a career as an infantry officer in the United States Army Reserve (he retired as Major). Trying to stay in business in the RPG industry makes trying to launch an academic career look like selling water at Burning Man.

I have never met anyone in the Kenzerco family, but reading KotDT gave a younger me a glimpse of an exotic Midwestern world which made the ex-SCAdians I later met feel familiar. And I think the world needs more stories from that small-town, little-bit-of-college, some-kind-of-a-job place and about friendships between the broken, human people who live in it and the amazing things they do with their passion. You can find a full obituary at Colonial Funeral.

Comparing Lists of Works Cited with Regular Expressions

14 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern

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Tags

bibliography management, Informatik, modern, regular expressions, shell scripting

XKCD 208: a programmer swings in on a rope to save the day with regular expressions

Obligatory XKCD (#208, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License)

As part of a recent project, I had to compare my list and a co-author’s list of works cited in a chapter. Since we started five and a half years ago, one co-author dropped out and versions of the files got confused between different people in the project, some forthcoming publications had appeared or changed venues, and the first entries were written long before we had a style guide. It was very important to make sure that every work cited appeared in the bibliography, and to reduce the length of the chapter as much as possible by removing references to works which are not cited. Since the lists of works cited contained 150 and 180 entries, many of which fill several lines in print, comparing the two lists was going to be a tedious task. And so I turned to the powerful arts of a dead tongue which I had not invoked since I learned it from German and Indian adepts in a distant land: the language of shell scripting and regular expressions.

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Saka Stockings and Plataea

07 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ancient, historical clothing, Plataia 2021

Some of the felt stockings/felt boots from graves of the Pazyryk Culture in the Altai Mountains, in Polos’mak, N.V., Barkova, L.L., Костюм и текстиль пазырыкцев Алтая (IV-III вв. до н.З.) / Kostium i tekstil’ pazyryktsev Altaya (IV-III vv. do n. e.) / Pazyryk Altai Costume and Textiles (4th-3rd centuries BCE). Infolio: Novosibirsk 2005 (in Russian) pages 94-95 ISBN 5-89590-051-8 (copies occasionally appear on Bookfinder but expect to pay several hundred for a copy, this copy comes the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek by interlibrary loan)

Dario Wielec of Dariusz caballeros and Stefanos Skarmintzos want me to talk about the felt stockings with soles which have been found in some graves in eastern Central Asia. They were often worn in combination with a pair of short trousers that covered the thighs and crotch. You can find a full set of colour photographs and drawings on pp. 92-97 of the Russian book I cited in my original post. They are fascinating and beautiful objects (just think about having brightly coloured feltwork more than 2000 years old!) but I am not sure that they help us understand Chehrabad Saltman 4’s trousers for four reasons:

  • they are not what Saltman 4 is wearing (they are felt, his are woven cloth; they are two separate legs, he wears joined trousers; they have seams up the back of the legs, his have seams at the side of the legs; the felt boots are close-fitting, his trousers are “baggy”)
  • in artwork like the Darius Mosaic, Red Figure vase paintings, and the sculptures of the Aphaia temple on Aigina, the leggings of trousered warriors seem to go all the way up to crotch level without sagging. The felt stockings tend to be shorter (although I don’t have a full set of measurements) and in the middle ages when stockings (‘hose’) extended that high, they needed to be hung from a belt to stop them from falling down.
  • trousers in early Achaemenid art often have a zigzag, diamond, or spotted pattern. That strikes me as something which would be easy to weave in tapestry weave like a kilim. Clothing in this period often had gold leaf, felt, or leather appliques, and its possible that the zig-zag was applied to felt. But we have a fragment of a textile with a rhombus pattern from the Achaemenid period at Chehrabad.
  • I am not sure which genders wore these felt stockings, I seem to remember that the famous pair with shiny beads on the soles were from a female burial but I only have access to what has been translated into German or English and what I can obtain from my library or interlibrary loan.

Since none of the Chehrābād salt mummies are wearing these felt boots, and none of the artwork from the Achaemenid Empire or the Aegean clearly shows them, they don’t belong in a post on Saltman 4’s clothing. But if you scroll down, Herr Doktor Manning will give you his whole lecture on the trouser outfit across Eurasia.

A Red Figure plate painted with an archer running right and looking left with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other

When Greek artists show the bottoms of leggings, they usually end straight at the ankles, sometimes ‘breaking’ over the top of the foot and sometimes fitting tightly. A Red Figure plate signed Epiktetos, in a style attributed to around 520-510 BCE. British Museum, Registration Number 1837,0609.59 I would cite the British Museum’s Terms of use but I can’t see them without enabling a bunch of Javascripts so just search https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx

A white woolen textile with a black pattern of trapezoids inside trapezoids woven into it

Achaemenid textile with ?woven? or ?embroidered? pattern, from Karina Grömer, Archaeological Textiles Review 60 (2018) p. 113 fig. 3 and Aali and Stöllner (eds). (2015) fig. 55 Photo: DBM/RUB/MFZ, K. Grömer


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