Its hard to understand the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. Pagan texts in Aramaic were not selected to be copied and recopied by Christian scribes like Christian scribes copied some pagan Greek and Latin texts, and the heart of the empire fell to Cyrus without a fight. Burning cities can preserve texts painted on or pressed into clay, but archivists under Cyrus and Darius just continued to throw out old documents like they had under Nabopolassar, and so those documents were lost to us. Most surviving documents from the Neo-Babylonian empire are from temple or family archives which stuck to the old script and language, not the archives of the kings or governors which may not have been written on clay anyways. The famous Babylonian chronicles tell us about some events but not the structure of the kingdom or life in the provinces. By the time Greeks like Herodotus and Ctesias were writing, they were as vague on the difference between Assyrians and Babylonians as we are on the difference between upper and lower Egyptians. We know far more about Babylonia in the sixth century BCE than Greece in the sixth century BCE, but not everything (and not much about the rest of the empire). Some teaching in spring made me think of one of the oddest things about this empire.
A relief from the reign of Assurnasirpal II or Shalmaneser III of Assyria in the 800s BCE. London, British Museum, Museum Number 124579, photo asset number 112855001; see them for rights.
In previous posts I talked about how the bows used for war in Europe and Asia in the 15th and 16th century were much stiffer than hunters or target archers use today. They usually had draw weights on the order of 100-150 pounds, so you could draw the bow to full draw length by tying twine to the string, hanging the twine over a pulley, and hanging a 100-150 pound weight off it. Deer hunters in Canada and the USA tend to use draw weights around 40-70 pounds with traditional bows (compound bows with pulleys are another kettle of fish). Some researchers today invoke the heavy bow hypothesis and argue that bows in the ancient world were as stiff as Chinese, Turkish, and English bows 2000 years later. I am not convinced.
In those previous posts I talked about extant bows which can be reproduced and measured (or sometimes plugged into a physics model- there is a whole PhD thesis just on the physics of archery). Anecdotes about famous shots or feats of arms are a little too subtle for me to discuss in a blog post, and the surviving treatises on archery date to the sixth century CE and later so are past the period I focus on. But there is one other type of evidence!
Marlowe could not see these ancient Roman gamblers at a pub because they were still buried with the Pompeiians, but we can. The caption reads EXSI (“I’m out!”) and NON TRIA DUAS EST (“Its not three, but two!”) In the next scene they start to shove each other around. Note the dice-box and the lack of legs for the table where they play. Its possible that the gambler in yellow has just bet his tunic. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_painting_-_scenes_around_the_pub_-_Pompeii_(VI_14_35-36)_-_Napoli_MAN_111482_-_04.jpg
Christopher Marlowe has not yet departed that that little, little span the dead are borne in mind. We remember that he wrote Dr. Faustus and Tamburlane the Great and died in a drunken quarrel over a bar bill (and perhaps because he was part of the long tradition of English writers working as spies to pay the bills). Unlike Shakespeare he had a good formal education, not just grammar-school Latin but a Master of Arts from Cambridge, and unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his subversion in the mouth of fools and madmen. His life of Tamurlane was what J.J. Abrams would have done at an early modern theatre, with overblown rhetoric, battles, love affairs, and special effects. There was even a disappointing sequel driven by crass commercialism. Its full of ancient Greek flavour because Marlowe knew much more about ancient Greeks than modern Persians (emissaries of the English East India Company would reach Shah Abbas by 1614 after Marlowe’s timely death, and Robert Shirley arrived in Iran in 1598 a decade after the play was written). Several times Marlowe’s characters accuse Tamburlane of being a shepherd which sounds like a way to get a tower of skulls with your name on it.
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