Category Archives: Uncategorized

Science Fiction with Egyptian Themes

20 Saturday Mar 2021

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For Dr. Leire Olabarria and Dr. Eleanor Dobson’s conference “Do Ancient Egyptians Dream of Electric Sheep?” I have been trying to think of science fiction that engages with ancient Egypt. This was much harder than I expected, and the difficulty became the basis for my proposal. My understanding of science fiction is centered around people who published short stories and novels between the 1930s and the 1970s, but this is the list I came up with after talking to people in different places online:

The number sign # after an entry indicates that I have not seen or read it.

Of course this short list could just reflect my own taste and what was available in the libraries and used book stores of my home town in the 1990s. But writers who loved the ancient world like L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, and Harry Turtledove are absent, and the things in this list begin in 1975 rather than trailing off after 1975. And most of these films, shows, cartoons and games involve ancient astronauts or archaeologists digging too deep and awaking ancient horrors like in the film The Mummy (the famous ones begin with Universal Pictures, 1932). If you think I have left anything out let me know! And if you want to know what other people have come up with, check out the conference on 9 July 2021. Some talks will be streamed online.

In lieu of a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of all good things in my mortuary temple, I happily accept donations on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay

PS. People suggested the following things which I am not sure are science fiction or I am not sure have a strong enough Egyptian theme to count.

(scheduled 17 March 2021)

And the Morning Road Leads to Stalingrad

20 Saturday Feb 2021

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Three softcover history books on a hardwood floor

The Second World War created the world that I grew up in, and the central event of that war was the Nazi-Soviet struggle. 80% of the Germans and Austrians killed or captured in the war were killed or captured by the Soviets (Glantz, The Soviet-German War1941-1945: Myths and Realities: A Survey Essay [2001]). My standby reference on the war, R.A.C. Parker’s brilliantly concise The Second World War: A Short History (Oxford University Press, 1989), was written too early to take advantage of the opening of the Soviet archives and the deconstruction of the German generals’ memoirs. Two recent English books represent two major approaches to writing about this unspeakably terrible conflict.

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What Did the Persians Do For Us?

05 Saturday Dec 2020

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Younger me would have been ever more excited, his David Macaulay books are coming to life! Repairing the piers of the foot bridge downstream from the Hofgarten on the river Inn, Austria in summer 2019.

The Centre for Ancient Cultures in Innsbruck is a glass and steel building full of carefully catalogued books next to a grain field and a car dealership. A block away on one street is a church, a block away along another is a Chinese buffet. Our building and its neighbourhood embody the heritage of the ancient Near East

Most of the crops and animals which fed and clothed Eurasia until the Columbian Exchange were domesticated in the Near East. Many of the trees in our orchards come from the mountains of central Asia through gardens in Iran. Writing has been independently invented at least four times, but it was Near Eastern Semitic-speakers who turned hieroglyphics into the aleph bet gimmel which became our alphabet. And it was people in the fertile crescent in the first centuries CE who turned Near Eastern texts and customs into the largest single family of religions today, and their descendants who kept the Fertile Crescent a place of great religious diversity until the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

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Temple and Palace, Gods and Kings

23 Saturday May 2020

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Arzl has not had a king or a Caesar for a long time, but it is still Keith Hopkins’ World Full of Gods. And like unto the Esangila, this house has been covered with scaffolding for a long time due to a little dispute over who should pay the bills for restoring it.

I don’t talk enough about the gods and their cult because its not a subject I feel like I can say anything useful about. I grew up in a place where religion is a private matter (which anyone in the ancient world would think is insane) and I am a lot more comfortable talking about solid things like types of swords or what the third line of the tenth chapter of that book actually says. But religion in the ancient Near East had some peculiar qualities which can be easy for us to take for granted if we grew up in post-Christian, Christian, Moslem, or Jewish societies and don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the cult of the gods and the praising of kings.

Perhaps capitalizing on the ethical imperative of protecting the poor, petitioners— and Gimil-Ninurta and Khunanup (hero of the Egyptian folktale “The Eloquent Peasant”) may be literary examples here— tend to present themselves as being poor, describing themselves using diminutive terms and overstating their poverty in an effort to win favor. One particular petitioner, the spurned exorcist Urad-Gula may have actually drawn subtle parallels between his circumstances and the poverty of Gimil-Ninurta in an effort to win the favor of Assurbanipal, a move that underscores PMN’s popularity. Interestingly, petitions such as these followed the same pattern as prayers, reminding us of the idea that poverty was often understood as divine punishment: gods made people poor and the king could intercede on their behalf, a nuance that will be important to remember in reading PMN and EP.

Daniel Shalom Fisher, “Representations of the Poor in The Poor Man of Nippur and the Eloquent Peasant” (MA thesis, Vanderbilt University, 2008) p. 5 https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07012008-205634/

In Sumerian, a temple and a palace are both a Big House (E2.GAL). They are both places where powerful and distant beings sit, and demand to be placated with obedience and generous gifts, but are also places of splendour (the White House at Sippar) whose occupants can make your dreams come true (the House of All Joys at Harran). There are people who think that the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible took shape under some of the last kings of independent Judah who wanted to center both the cult of the gods and the rule of the kingdom in Jerusalem. I think it might be helpful for some of us to think about how our pictures of gods are modelled on kings, and how our culture’s expectations of a leader are modelled on a father-god.

There is a performance of the Poor Man of Nippur (in English with cuneiform subtitles!) on YouTube

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Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Paul ‘Xenophon’ McDonnell-Staff (12 March 2020)

26 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by in Ancient, Modern, Not an expert, Uncategorized

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From pothos.org

Hi all,

Just a note to say that regular contributor and poster Paul McDonnell-Staff – “Xenophon” as members would know him – died on March 12th. Paul suffered from an illness, which I won’t go into here, for the last five years of his life. Though it did not always look like it here, Paul and I were strong friends over a couple of decades. There’s nothing better than pointing out the foibles of your mate! The “Old Man” (as I called him) and I (“Bertie Old thing” as he’d address me) had an ongoing relationship for some two decades. I recall us downing three bottles of red (after a beer or two over dinner) in “Brisvegas” going over the Second Diadoch War, the nature of the hypaspists and the foibles of “certainty” in a hotel in Brisbane some thirteen years ago. What others in the bar made of the hard copies of Diodoros, the Tacticians and Plutarch is anyone’s guess. As ever, we parted in disagreement on whatever sticking point(s) we’d arrived at by bottle three.

One of the effects of the Old Man’s serious and restrictive illness was that it attacked his phalanges. Given this, I was constantly surprised at the amount he could type – the email trees, on many subjects, were no bonsai – more like giant redwoods. Though one had to be patient. That back and forth will be missed.

Paul had been writing on ancient military history for decades going back to John Warry’s Warfare in The Classical World. From it’s inception, we both wrote for Ancient Warfare. The articles we prepared were the source of much private and occasional Pothosian debate. I recall calling him, at the editor’s suggestion, to see if he was still corporeal as he’d he’d missed a deadline by a couple of days (something he never did). He suggested that were he not “the whole world would…”. I suggested Demades’ acid quip was a little beyond the pale. He continued writing for Ancient Warfare under the nom de plume “Tacticus”. The journal will miss him and so will I.

Vale “Old Man”

Michael Park.

Paul was more of a rhetorician and less of a scientist than I am, but I still learned a lot from him. He knew the classical literary sources, including the unfashionable ones like Aelian, very well. There is another memorial from Jasper Oorthuys at Karwansaray and some of his comments on In Antiquity, Fighting Wasn’t a Young Man’s Game and How Many Arrows in a Scythian’s Gorytos?

I am surrounded by the ghosts of dead friends, dead communities, and dead activities. For an age that has made it hard to move at all: its hard to keep putting my heart into communities which will just vanish like the fog on a sunny day however hard I work, and hard to keep reaching out to new communities when the last one cut off my hand or used it to toss me into the nearest wall. But I also know that in this life there is one thing to do and that is to make good art. For in Sheol where we are going there is no work or planning or knowledge or wisdom.

I am Re-Reading

01 Friday Nov 2019

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Robin Reich, “Historians have too Many Learning Objectives”

(In the Anglo tradition) history as a field does not explicitly discuss our basic assumptions, methods, or theories and so what we as historians agree on we only pick up informally or through snippets and crumbs dropped by our advisers. In my undergrad curriculum at a small liberal arts college, which was exceptional in many ways, the only two required classes for history majors were a historiography colloquium to be taken Junior year, and a research seminar in preparation for writing a senior thesis. There was no introductory course that explained what history is or how it is practiced – in effect, the historiography colloquium was this introductory course, as well as an advanced seminar in field-specific methods. Other disciplines don’t do this, because they have a sense of what the basics are in their field. But historians can’t even agree on what makes us all part of the same field. So we relegate these kinds of lessons to survey courses, which are totally inappropriate to teaching these lessons because they are large and structured around taking on a lot of information at once. The result is overloaded, bloated syllabi and assignments. In large universities, this usually shakes out to one history class actually being two – there’s the survey lecture course that the professor teaches, and then there’s the intro seminar that the TA teaches in section, and they have completely different goals. How do TAs even know what to teach when we ourselves were educated in this way?

As I have said elsewhere, even the English word historiography covers far too much ground to be useful as an intellectual tool (it can mean writing about history, methods for understanding the past, or writing about how people have written about history).

Edwin Black, “IBM and ‘Death’s Calculator'” (based on his book IBM and the Holocaust)

I hope that since 2013, some executives at IT companies have re-read the story of the high-tech Dutch census of 1940.

The Cyrus Dossier

09 Saturday Jun 2018

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Back view of a small black songbird sitting on a lawn with several species of uneven grass

I am too tired to find some appropriate ancient picture, so how about this bird?

One of my articles is out in Ancient History Bulletin 32.1-2, “A Prosopography of the Followers of Cyrus the Younger.” This one is about the forgotten Cyreans: the ones whom Xenophon classed as part of ‘the barbarian army’ like Procles, Ariaeus, and Artapates. Where ancient historians have written quite a bit about men like Clearchus, and a famous article from 1963 studies men in ‘the Greek army,’ this is the first article to look at these men as a group (I hope to write another article on women like Aspasia the Phocaean and the Milesian woman, but that won’t be this decade).

This is a prosopography, so it takes a group of people each of whom we know a little about and spends a lot of energy tracking down their families, social backgrounds, careers, inter-relationships, and descendents. But it also cites cuneiform texts, Iranian philology, and suggests that the distinction between ‘the Greek army’ and ‘the barbarian army’ of Cyrus the Younger might not be what you think.

If you want a copy, please tell me so in the comments and I will email you one. Ancient History Bulletin also sells subscriptions and individual articles for a very reasonable rate. In two years, I will put it up on my site.

A Mysterious Armour from Verona

18 Sunday Jun 2017

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Front view of a painted marble statue of a torso from Verona. Photo by Sean Manning, April 2017.

I was travelling last week and am sick this week, so don’t have time for a full post. Instead, I thought I would post some photos of a statue in the Museo Archaeologico, Verona.

Side view of a painted marble statue of an armoured torso from Verona. Photo by Sean Manning, April 2017.

This style of armour is a mystery, because none of it survives and no text clearly refers to it. Armour from the Roman imperial period usually survives because it was deliberately buried when a fort was abandoned or deposited in water as an offering to the gods. This favours armour worn by common soldiers (especially kinds which left a trail of broken parts as they were worn), and small objects like helmets and greaves. Written sources are not interested in distinguishing muscled armours from shoulder-flap armours or armours with a cape which wraps over the shoulders from behind, and in the imperial period they rarely describe materials in detail. So whether they were made of iron plate, or bronze plate, or hardened leather, or something else is a mystery, despite many people having loud and angry opinions on the subject. Whether at some point they fell out of use, and just survived in art because they looked old and Greek, is a mystery. Just how they opened and closed, and what function the straps over the shoulders served, is a mystery. What the feathers at the shoulder and waist were made of is a mystery, although woven braid is a plausible guess.

Studying ancient armour is full of mysteries: types which are common in art but invisible in finds, kinds which are common in archaeological sites but difficult to identify in art, helmets which usually have cheek pieces in paintings but rarely have them in museums.

The Linen Karballatu

24 Saturday Dec 2016

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A bascinet with a perforated-metal visor wearing a red hood with cheek flaps and a tall comb at the top folded down

I am cautious about posting closeups of my face on the Internet, but while I am visiting my parents I have a convenient surrogate available

Some years ago, I made up one of the famous Persian hoods in red linen cloth. I machine-sewed it and bag-lined it, and did not have sources other than reliefs, the Darius Mosaic, the bonnet from one of the Pazyryk tombs, and an interesting woodcut which Jona Lendering showed me. I used linen because it was available and appropriately light and flowing. I had a feeling that wool would have been more common. Back then, I knew that Strabo said that ordinary Persians wore a rag of sindōn (fine linen? by the middle ages sindon was a delicate silk) about their heads while rich ones wore a tower-like felt hat, so I had one possible source for linen (the original Greek is ῥάκος σινδόνιόν and πίλημα πυργωτόν and the citation is Strabo, Geography, 15.3.19). In the meantime I learned a bit of Greek, and also some Akkadian. It turned out that both of those languages are relevant.
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Quaestiones Forojulienses: Why Do Fiore’s Jargon and Armour Jargon Overlap?

17 Saturday Sep 2016

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A man in a robe sits in an armchair with a circular table in front of him. The table rotates on a screw joint and supports two books, one open and upright and one horizontal and closed. In the background a glass window shows a dark night.

A student reading in his room, as painted in Paris circa 1420. British Library Royal MS 20 B XX. Cropped from an image in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts which has been released under a Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

One of my academic interests is knightly combat in late medieval Europe as described in four manuscripts by Fiore dei Liberi dating to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Fiore’s works, and those of his contemporaries in more northerly lands, give us a unique chance to understand how the weapons and armour racked in museums were meant to be used. They at the very least give anyone interested in how ancient people fought food for thought.

This series of posts is inspired by the Greek scholar Plutarch, who wrote an antiquarian essay asking why the Romans practiced some curious customs. Plutarch was wise enough to give questions not answers, and that will be my policy in these posts as well.

Fiore dei Liberi was a startlingly intelligent man, and the words he chose to describe his art reflect this. He worked very hard to find words and design mnemonics which would help his audience understand and remember. Many of these words are still clear to students today, while some require a gloss. Because few of us hunt boar with spears, we need to be taught that the boar kills by ripping diagonally upwards with its fangs, and so does posta dente di cinghiaro (the position ‘boar’s tooth’). Quite a few of the words which he chose have another technical meaning within the world of arms and armour:
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