Tag Archives: ancient

Just Like the Persians in Pictures

23 Saturday Sep 2017

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Like many historians who work with Xenophon, I get very frustrated with the way that his calm, manner-of-fact style can hide evasions of the truth. I don’t think he is more unreliable than most old soldiers (and he does not make any great claims for his own reliability), but he is such a good writer that he often lulls readers into trusting him when they should not. But sometimes, like in a passage which I recently rediscovered, he hints at what he is trying to do.

At the beginning of the Cyropaedia, Xenophon describes Persian institutions for raising young men at some ill-defined time. In their teens and early twenties they spend their time guarding the city, practicing with the bow and javelin, and hunting, and then they graduate to a stage of life where they are expected to engage in more difficult kinds of fighting:

But if soldiering is called for, those who have been educated in this way go soldiering armed not with the bow or even the javelins (palta), but with what is called kit for hand-to-hand combat: body armour (thorax) about the breast, a wicker shield (gerron) in the left hand, just like the Persians are drawn holding, and a machaira or kopis in the right.

– Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 1.2.13 (tr. Manning, my Greek is very rusty)

Just like the Persians are drawn (γράφονται) holding? Xenophon is appealing to vase paintings for support! This is remarkable, because the crescent-shaped shields and curved swords which barbarians often wield in Attic art are characteristic of the Aegean. They were popular with nations like the Athenians and Thracians and Lydians, not (as far as we know) amongst the Medes or Persians. Moreover, by Xenophon’s day easterners in South Greek art are hard to identify with specific ethnic groups: their clothing and weapons seem to be a mix of Thracian, Scythian, and Anatolian fashions. So what is he doing when he compares the weapons of Cyrus’ Persians to the weapons of generic orientals?

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The Wellcome Trust and the Urban Graveyard Effect

09 Saturday Sep 2017

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In the first two weeks of August there was a great kerfuffle about a BBC educational cartoon which showed a couple in Roman Britain who would be called multiracial in Late Capitalist Britain. Angry essays were typed, tweets flew with the wrath of the Stymphalian Birds, and many people hurried to let the Internet know which faction they aligned with. Neville Morley did a good job of summarizing how most ancient historians think about the problem in his blog post Diversitas et Multicultaralismus (no, a dark-skinned official and his light-skinned wife would not have been unheard of at Bath or Hadrian’s Wall; genetic data is exciting but just one of many kinds of evidence which historians draw upon to understand the past; genes are only loosely connected to identity). The Romans could be horrible snobs and bigots, but most of their stereotypes and slurs were directed at people from other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean … they do not seem to have been very interested in whether people had dark skin and kinky hair. In this post, I would like to talk about one of the methodological questions I have after reading the Wellcome Trust paper from 2015 by Leslie et al. which some people have been citing as evidence that negligible numbers of people from Africa had children in Britain before the 20th century (doi:10.1038/nature14230).

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Sometimes Bittner Was Right

02 Saturday Sep 2017

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A painted relief of a warrior on horseback stabbing downwards with a spear. His body armour has two layers of short flaps at the waist, a front and back running straight up and down, wide blocky sleeves ending before the arm joint, and a tab behind the head just as tall as the head.

The horseman on the Çan Sarcophagus wears an akinakes strapped to his right thigh. Copyright Troy Excavation Project, photo found at http://odysseion.blogspot.co.at/2010/05/oft-debated-tube-and-yoke-linothorax.html

Specialists in the Achaemenid Empire don’t like to talk about Stefan Bittner. His Doktorarbeit is the only monograph on the Achaemenid army which has ever been published, but it takes exactly the approach which was inspiring another group of scholars to organize conferences and rethink the field: it relies almost completely on Greek literature and artwork, and treats these sources as a precious collection of facts to be worked into a coherent whole. In the decades which followed, those other scholars knocked so many holes in this approach that it is hard for them work with a book like his, so they tend to cite his thesis and say nothing more. I don’t think that this is really fair, since nobody can predict how academic fashion will shift or what new evidence will become available. People who try too hard to ride the crest sometimes find themselves flailing in midair as the wave below them crashes down. There is a sad joke that farming is a simple job where you just have to predict the weather, fuel costs, and food prices a year in advance; PhD students have to predict the job market 3 to 10 years in advance. And in the early 1980s, it was not so easy to hear about conferences and intellectual movements in other countries as it is today. So this week, I would like to mention one of his good ideas which seems to have been ignored.

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Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Muhammed Dandamayev

28 Monday Aug 2017

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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:

Cross-Post: Bronze Sword Workshop, Scotland, 7-8 August

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

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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/

One Principle of Cuneiform: Punning

22 Saturday Jul 2017

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Ways of drawing unicode character 74455 񴑕, a stylized hand with the fingers pointing left

Ways of writing the sign ŠU, number 354 in Labat’s Manuel d’Épigraphie Akkadienne

As cuneiform scribes developed a script which had been designed to write brief notes in Sumerian into one which could write long complex texts in several languages, they relied on several principles. These are not always obvious to the student today, but can make it easier to learn. One of these principles is punning.

A common Sumerian word is /šu/ “hand.” Usually this is drawn as a vertical wedge and four horizontal wedges, the bottom-most longer than the others, representing the base of the hand and the fingers (Yes, hands in cuneiform have four fingers, just like hands on the Simpsons!) Now, having a sign for /šu/ is a very useful in Akkadian: lots of words begin with it and it is a common suffix. The Akkadian word for hand is /qātu/ (or /qātān/ “two hands”) and while it would be possible to write it as [qa-a-tu] or [qa-a-ta-an] it was convenient to just write ŠU or ŠU.II (so “hand” plus “2”). So we have one sign which can be pronounced /šu/ in one language or /qātu/ in another. That opened up the possibility of using the same sign to write /qad/ or /qat/ as part of other words, such as /qadādu/ “to bow down” or /qatû/ “to finish.” The sign had all three readings (“hand,” šu, qātu) immanent within it, and required the reader to judge which made sense in context.

While the multiple readings required work to learn, they allowed the system to expand as needed without ever requiring a student to learn more than a few hundred signs. On the other hand, they opened up a world of puns which Spider Robinson would be ashamed to print (and etymologies which might have made Madame Blavatsky cry “hold on, my rubes are pretty stupid but I can’t get them to accept that one.”) For example, in the first millennium BCE Gilgameš is two thirds a god and one third human (earlier tablets give him other ancestry). These proportions do not work in the world of Mendelian genetics, where ancestry is a sum of fractions like 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, … and you can prove that no sum of such fractions equals 1/3. So why is he 2/3 divine? Now, the ferryman who takes Gilgameš across the Waters of Death once had the name Sursunabu which is neither Sumerian or Akkadian. At some point, scribes started writing his name as Ur-šanabi which is Sumerian for “the servant of two thirds.” Eventually, this became accepted as his real name, but it raised a problem: how was he a servant of two-thirds? Uršanabi was first the servant of Uta-napišti the survivor of the flood, but then served Gilgameš. And its just possible that at some point the scribes said “Uršanabi is the servant of two thirds, Uršanabi is the servant of Gilgameš, therefore Gilgameš is two thirds. What is he two-thirds? He is two-thirds divine.” We don’t know, but that kind of thinking was the way that scholarly cuneiform scribes showed off their learning.

Photo of an open book with the following text and gloss: It has been suggested that these [rings on the face of a buckler] were sword-breakers, ie. they were designed to entangle an opponent's blade so that it could be broken or twisted out of his hand: Sic di Grassi vel scriptor temporis eius

I am not a very good ṭupšarru but I have extended this principle further. Its traditional to gloss books in the margins and to draw a hand pointing from text to gloss or vice versa. We have already established that ŠU = HAND = any word for hand. Ergo, a ŠU is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a drawing of a hand.

Further Reading: Sebastian Fink, “How Gilgemeš Became a Two-Thirds God: It Was the Ferryman,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin XX (2013/2014) https://www.academia.edu/12076152/How_Gilgamesh_became_a_two-thirds_God_It_was_the_Ferryman

Scott Noegel has written a book on puns in the writing system as a technique in interpreting dreams https://faculty.washington.edu/snoegel/index.html

Edit 2017-07-24: Corrected malformed HTML in second picture

An Old Dilemma

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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Inside Urim there is death, outside it there is death. Inside it we are to be finished off by famine. Outside it we are to be finished off by Elamite weapons. In Urim the enemy oppresses us, oh, we are finished.

– The Lament for Sumer and Urim, lines 389-402 (ETCSL 2.2.3)

More than 140 civilians have been killed in less than a week while trying to flee western Mosul, according to military sources [among the besiegers], as the Iraqi army seeks to close in on fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in the armed group’s last stronghold in Iraq.

According to the [besieging] military on Thursday, most of the fatalities were women and children.

– “Mosul battle: At least 142 civilians killed in six days” http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/mosul-battle-120-civilians-killed-days-170601113018034.html

Blindfolded, tied up men with dislocated shoulders dangling painfully from ceilings. Teenage boys, hands tied behind their backs screaming for mercy, only for a soldier to execute them in cold blood. Ashen-faced women clutching onto their terrified children after they had just been raped. These are just some of the scenes taking place in Iraq.

…

Ali Arkady, the Kurdish photojournalist who documented the abuses of Iraqi government troops, said he had originally set out to cover the soldiers’ heroism in the fight against ISIL. But after witnessing their crimes, his conclusion was that these men were “not heroes, but monsters”.

Arkady said he witnessed Iraqi soldiers – not Shia militias – perpetrating a wide array of abuses including abductions, torture, and rape. Not only did Shia soldiers rape one of their Sunni allied tribal fighters, but in one particularly horrifying instance, interior ministry fighters were gloating about raping a particularly beautiful girl. Their comrades, apparently jealous, vowed to pay the already violated and scarred girl a visit themselves.

– “Iraq Deserves Heroes, but Has Only Monsters,” http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/06/iraq-deserves-heroes-monsters-170601083337240.html

But those who were blockaded at Alesia , the day being past, on which they had expected auxiliaries from their countrymen, and all their corn being consumed …, convened an assembly and deliberated on the exigency of their situation. … When different opinions were expressed, they determined that those who, owing to age or ill health, were unserviceable for war, should depart from the town … The Mandubii, who had admitted them into the town, are compelled to go forth with their wives and children. When these came to the Roman fortifications, weeping, they begged of the soldiers by every entreaty to receive them as slaves and relieve them with food. But Caesar, placing guards on the rampart, forbade them to be admitted.

– Caesar, Gallic War, 7.77-78

I believe that Richard the Lion Heart responded the same way to this gambit, but my books on medieval history are still in the old country.

Further Reading: Steve Muhlberger, “The Toronto Morality Play”

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.

A Paradise

27 Saturday May 2017

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The steel gate to a cinderblock compound in Fars

The gate to the Izadi paradise. As a prosperous country family, their walls are all cinderblocks, not mud brick or fieldstone.

παράδεισ-ος -ου, masuline noun, from Avestan pairidaēza-, Old Persian +paridaida-, Median +paridaiza- (walled-around, i.e., a walled garden), an enclosed park or pleasure-ground …

Dictionaries rarely have room to illustrate many entries, even when this works better than a written definition. On this blog, however, I am free to use more pictures than words!

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Historical Prices for Gamers and Writers

20 Saturday May 2017

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Photo of cloth dealers in the old bazaar of Isfahan

Isfahan’s glory days are young, within the last thousand years, but a nice shaded place to set up shop is a luxury in any period! Photo of the Old Bazaar in Isfahan by Sean Manning, May 2017.

One of the big problems facing anyone studying ancient economies is that it’s very difficult to tell how much things cost at any given time. Records of market prices are sparse at the best of times and often nonexistent, and even where such records exist, they’re usually exceptional or represent only a single transaction. But sometimes historians get lucky …

– Matthew Riggsby, GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road p. 34 http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-hot-spots-the-silk-road

Gamers and novelists often want to know something which historians are not eager to answer: how much did practical things cost in the past? Historians of older periods tend to be very aware of the limits of a source which just says “five pounds of iron nails worth thus-and-such,” and admire the work of specialists in recent times who construct methodical serieses and statistics and turn them into charts with lines and inflection points. But characters in a short story or an adventure game are much more likely to buy a drink or a sword than ten bushels of barley. The writers of roleplaying games almost never have time to do the research, unless the game is set in very recent times and they can mine their collection of old Sears Catalogues and Baedekers. (Also, their customers tend to become just as attached to “a longsword costs 15 gold pieces” as they are to “magic missile always hits,” and in our decadent and decimalized age they sometimes revolt against something as simple as pounds/shillings/pence). So this week, I thought I would honour the release of Matthew Riggsby’s GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road with a list of some resources which I have found.

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