Tag Archives: link dump

Link Dump

24 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by in Ancient, Medieval, Modern

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A round, domed wicker shield with a spiked steel boss and a cloth-bound rim. Three short scimilars hang behind it with their handles up and blades crossed at the middle.

A Turkish target and three Turkish scimitars from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century in the second armoury, Schloss Ambras. Photo by author, October 2015.

(Due to some events in my private life, this post is late and pulled out of my file of drafts)

Gui Minhai, a Chinese Suetonius who did not wait until his targets were safely dead, was disappeared in October 2015. In January 2016 he appeared on Chinese state TV to make a confession then vanished again.

A character sketch of Edward Luttwak, another of those curious American academics-cum-policymakers whom my readers may know for his Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire and Grand Strategy of the Bzyantine Empire.

A watercolour of Innsbruck in 1495 courtesy of Albrecht Dürer. He sat to sketch a little bit downstream from Conrad Seusenhofer’s house.

In December 2015, Steven Payne made a pilgrimage on foot from Southhampton to Canterbury in fourteenth-century kit.

L. Sprague de Camp’s historical novels set in the Mediterranean between the fifth and the second centuries BCE have been reprinted in codex and ePub by Phoenix Pick. One of them imagines the events which might lie behind the very detailed description of an elephant in Aristotle; readers who enjoy stories about the gifting of large animals over long distance might enjoy reading up on the elephant Harun al-Rashid gave to Charlemagne, the elephants Nadir Shah sent to St. Petersburg for Emperess Anna of Russia, or the giraffe which Sultan Faraj of Egypt sent to Samurkand for Tamurlane.
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Link Dump

31 Saturday Oct 2015

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

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A plywood wheel like a waterwheel with angled bookshelves in place of the buckets

An overwhelming flow of information is not a new problem: a bookwheel inspired by ones from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the Hauptbibliothek Neubau, Universität Innsbruck. Made 2008? Photo by author, October 2015.

German for Classical Studies at the University of Cologne, free course June/July 2016, application deadline 30 November 2015 (link: warning, Facebook!)

The academics in Ghana went on strike again over nonpayment of their book allowance in August 2015 (link). As often with news from Africa, this has not received much attention in Europe and North America, even though its hard for any academics at universities in Ghana to work if they can’t buy books and journals.

Meanwhile, historian Alice Dreger has resigned from her post in Illinois after a dispute about whether a glossy magazine with her university’s logo was research (protected by academic freedom) or publicity (overseen by the university administration) revealed a deeper difference about what sort of institution she was working for (her public statement on the subject and her resignation letter). This issue has received a great deal of attention on the Anglophone internet.

The Carmarthenshire Archives in Wales are being devoured by mould, and a Freedom of Information request by J.D. Davies has revealed some disturbing facts about how the local authorities are responding to this crisis.

Some people with more money than sense decided to see what happens when you throw a human-weight or hobbit-weight mass of organic material into a pool of lava. There are videos.
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Link Dump

25 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by in Ancient, Modern

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A photo of a small blocky statuette of a seated man carved from rough stone

A votive statue of Chai-Hapi (a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of all good things to him!) excavated from the remains of Roman Vienna. Carved from gneis. In the style of late 19th Dynasty Heliopolis. Wien, Kunsthistorisches Musem, Ägyptische-Orientalische Sammlung, Inv. Nr. Äs 64. Photographed on special exhibition at Schloss Ambras by Sean Manning.

When Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened, the excavators found a copper trumpet and a silver trumpet. The British looked at them and thought a bit and decided that the obvious thing to do was to play them for the BBC. The recording is now available on YouTube (c/o Bronze Age Centre)

“More Progress Made toward Learning Contents of Herculaneum Scrolls”

The late Frederick Pohl reviews L. Sprague de Camp’s novel set in Gothic Italy Lest Darkness Fall

“Piece by Piece, Monks Scrabble to Preserve Iraq’s Christian History”

A proposal that Akkadian medical texts describe post-traumatic stress disorder has been making the rounds on the Internet (Abdul-Hamid and Hughes, ‘Nothing New Under the Sun: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in the Ancient World’). Several other scholars, such as Darin Hayton, Owen Rees, and vaughanbell have written critical responses.

Osama S. M. Amin and one “Mr. Rizgar” have posted some photos of an Akkadian rock relief and inscription on the Belula Pass in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan (link)

Steve Muhlberger reviews a translation of a fifteenth century novel about adulthood and court life. Phil Paine comments on an earlier French edition (link).

Andreea Dee enjoyed the Real Fighting Stuff conference in Glasgow on European weapons and martial arts last March (link).

This post is a bit of a stir-fry, so I thought I should end with something on food. Christian Eckert was the martial arts and training expert for a project to reconstruct the training and diet of Roman gladiators at a German university. He has published part of his work in a book, Gladiatoren Kochbuch (Neumann-Neudamm Melsungen, 2014). I noticed a copy on our library shelves, but my readers might have to try Bookfinder or the Warrior Woman of the Internet.

Link Dump

22 Saturday Nov 2014

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On the Internet as in a cavalry fight, there are too many things flashing in front of your face. Unknown painting of an incident in the Thirty Years' War, Heeresgeschichtliche Museum, Wien.

On the Internet as in a cavalry fight, there are too many things flashing in front of your face. Unknown painting of an incident in the Thirty Years’ War, Heeresgeschichtliche Museum, Wien.

A village in France has preserved the bedroom of a young officer who died in the First World War

Wardle, Higham, and Kromer, Dating the End of the Greek Bronze Age DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0106672

Events in the eastern Mediterranean in the second millennium BCE are usually assigned dates in our calendar on the basis of Egyptian and Mesopotamian king lists. Quite a few scholars are suspicious of the most popular system and some of them propose adjustments of 50, 100, or even 250 years. (Some king lists double-count periods where a king reigned together with his heir, and some invent ancestors or treat dynasties which existed at the same time in different regions as reigning one after another to imply that their ancestors always had a large, powerful kingdom; periods when there was no powerful central authority producing documents dated according to a single system also cause problems). The best solution would be to link kings from the lists to timbers whose rings can be put into a continuous sequence of tree rings from the Bronze Age to the present (dendrochronology), but for obvious reasons large timbers rarely survive from the region. Attempts to assign absolute dates on the basis of radiocarbon dating are fraught with problems, but the authors of this paper think that they have overcome them for one site in the Aegean. I will be very interested to see what specialists in Aegean archaeology and carbon dating have to say about their work. Further Reading: Jona Lendering, Mesopotamian Chronology, Aegean Dendrochronology Project, and for real nerds Regine Pruzsinszky, Mesopotamian Chronology of the 2nd Millennium B.C. Verlag für österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Wien 2009.

Novelist Christian Cameron has written a thoughtful essay on the value of recreating ancient experiences to understand the past

The team excavating the Antikythera Shipwreck with new equipment has a blog

Anthony Sattin reviews a book on the North Sea heritage of modern Europe. To his last rhetorical question I would answer “clearly both, and more besides.”

Many shields in the ancient world were made from basketwork, from bundles of reeds, or from sticks thrust through sheets of hide. A group in Germany has constructed a woven rattan shield based on 19th century Chinese examples here (thanks to Ben Judkins of Chinese Martial Arts Studies http://chinesemartialstudies.com/2014/11/03/through-a-lens-darkly-28-teng-pai-woven-shields-lances-and-william-mesny/

A very good armourer remarks on how much one can learn by studying photos of armour here

Three Links

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Ancient, Modern, Not an expert

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A recent editorial reminded me of the problems of estimating army sizes. Many ancient armies were not divided into neat units of uniform size, they did not have a central quartermaster’s service or staff which tracked numbers, and as Thucydides reminds us everyone lied about the strength of their own forces. Reporters who want to estimate the size of a demonstration face similar problems and rhetorical pressures (chose a high number to shock, or a low one to dismiss? Trust the police or the protestors? Base it on whether the crowd seemed larger or smaller than one whose size you ‘know’?) Like ancient historians, modern reporters don’t always give a source for their numbers, but when people ask them they tend to be frank:
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