Sean

Sean

User: Sean
Email: rab_berqi@bookandsword.com
Web: https://bookandsword.com

What Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” Gets Right

a blue-tinted photo of a white horse with a headless man riding it; Roman soldiers are in the background
I wish I could like a flick where this happens to a Roman in the first scene! This and all subsequent screenshots are from Gladiator (Ridley Scott dir., 2000) and the ActionPicks YouTube channel

In the Kingdom of Khauran, every hundred years a witch shall be born to the royal family. In the United States of America, every ten years Ridley Scott shall borrow unimaginable sums of money to mangle a new period of warfare. This has been foretold and has come to pass although none can foretell whether he will return with an Amarna Age epic where the chariots have exhaust pipes or a science fiction adventure which makes Starship Troopers look like sound military science.1 Making fun of all the things these films get wrong is healthy fun around a gaming table or along a bar, and recently Bret Devereaux entered the genre on his ACOUP blog (part 1) (part 2) (part 3). But as I wrote back in 2016, complaining about bad things is often bad strategy. So this week I will wrote about the things I like about the opening scene in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. That is something I can cover in a short bookandsword post, whereas it takes three long ACOUP posts to cover some of the things that are wrong with the same scene.

Read more

Theories of Victory in the War against Iran

A very foolish and ignorant man has made a decision. Unlike some people with a PhD, I won’t claim I can predict the future. If you want that, I recommend you find a haruspex and slaughter an ox. What he sees when the steaming liver gleams like a mirror may be true or plausible lies, but at least you will get a summer barbecue for your trouble. But I can describe the structure of the situation as I see it, just like I did in The Iron Horse in Ukraine.

Read more

Some of My Recent Publications

A wooden bookshelf stained dark brown with many issues of the classics journal "Mouseion" in its dark blue softcover binding, three burgundy hardcover volumes of "Festschrift Rollinger", a white hardcover issue of "Medieval Clothing and Textiles," and the red and yellow hardcover "Soldiers and Silver" by Michael J. Taylor sitting on it

In the past year a number of my academic publications have come out (it often takes years from submitting an article to an academic venue to seeing it in print because almost everyone involved is a volunteer with a demanding day job and no personal assistant to help them organize and focus). This week I would like to talk about them.

Read more

Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative

Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, offers 20 scholarships of at least CAD $40,000/year for four years to doctoral students whose offers from top U.S. schools have been rescinded or who are reconsidering their acceptance to a US school for the 2025/26 academic year. The application is straightforward: find someone willing to supervise you, show your... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative

Editing and Translation Services

Do you need a second pair of eyes on that book, paper, or project report? I have been editing business and academic writing since 2013. Aside from ancient world studies and medieval studies, I have experience creating software documentation and a background in academic computer science. Because of my time living in Austria, I have experience with the challenges of writing in a second language or a new field.

Read more

Linen Armour in the Twelfth Century

the cover of Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18, a thin hardcover book, in a patch of sunlight on a hardwood floor

The first part of my three-part series on medieval linen armour has appeared in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18. Whereas in some periods linen armour is commonly showed in paintings and sculptures, there are very few pictures of fabric armour from western Europe between 500 and 1250 CE. No quilted garment survives from Europe in this period either. So I discuss about thirty texts from this period. I work with texts in Greek, Latin, Old French, Ibero-Romance, Irish, Middle High German, Old Norse, and Arabic, and provide my own translations of the Greek, Latin, Romance languages, and Middle High German. Whereas most books summarize and allude to a few of these texts, I put them in context and give both the original language and a translation.

Read more

Baumwolle is an Old Word

a Victoria, BC street scene with a brick building and a brick building with a stone facade
The building one street up, at Government and Fort, reminds me of architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire!

Cotton is an old word, but people west of India and north of Sudan often call cotton “tree wool.”

iṣe naš šipati “the tree which bears wool” (inscription of Sennacherib of Assyria describing plants in his garden, 705-681 BCE) Chicago Assyrian Dictionary volume “I” p. 217

“This breastplate had been stolen by the Samians in the year before they took the bowl; it was of linen, decked with gold and tree-wool (εἰρίοισι ἀπὸ ξύλου), and embroidered with many figures” Herodotus 3.47.2 (c. 430-420 BCE) tr. A.D. Godley slightly adapted, cp. 3.106.3, 7.65 on tree-wool in India and Theophrastus, On Plants IV. 7, 8 on cotton grown on the island of Bahrain (Akkadian and Sumerian Dilmun, Greek Tylos)

Middle and Modern German Baumwolle “tree wool, cotton” (already appears in Erec by Hartmann von Aue around the year 1185 per https://www.koeblergerhard.de/mhd/mhd_b.html “boumwolle”, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm do not have much to say. The line about a saddle cushion soft as a cotton (ein Paumwol) is line 7703 of the Ambraser Heldenbuch so there is Innsbruck content!)

Do my gentle readers know this calque in other languages?

Read more

Forecasting Future Wars is Hard

the title page of a book printed in black and red with a little print with the publisher's logo
The book that launched a thousand raids and burned the topless towers of Minas Tirith! H.G. Wells’ “Little Wars” the first modern wargame for civilians. Image care of https://philbancients.blogspot.com/2012/09/little-wars-by-hg-wells.html

Since 1805, combat between well-equipped air and naval forces has become rarer and rarer. This is because states which can produce such forces have little to gain from fighting one another, and because it has become harder and harder to sustain such forces at all. In the 19th century, the Royal Navy was usually overwhelmingly superior to everyone else (although the French and the United States sometimes gave it a run for its money). Since the 1950s, the US air force has had a similar advantage over everyone else’s. Small states look at these navies and air forces, decide they can never defeat them, and either stop bothering with their own navies and air forces, or side with one of the big powers, or hide in harbour or in neutral countries when war approaches (the fleet-in-being strategy). Big states do some spectacularly stupid and thoughtless things, but rarely something as stupid as getting into a war with their allies or a nuclear power, and pretty much all the states with sophisticated air forces and navies are either each other’s allies or nuclear powers.

This means that stories about how a future naval or air war would go are fantasies based on speculation and imagination and peacetime tests, not observation and experience of actual warfare.

Read more

Cross-Post: SASA Virtual Conference, Christian Cameron Patreon

The Save Ancient Studies Alliance will have a virtual conference on Representations of the Past in Ancient and Modern Times on 21 and 22 July 2024. The call for papers is open until 16 April.

Novelist, reenactor, Plataia 2024 organizer, and veteran Christian Cameron has launched a patreon https://www.patreon.com/CameronAuthor I am told that one of the corporate social media services he uses is stopping him from reaching followers just like corporate social media services do whenever they want more money. The Oatmeal has a comic about this.

Read more
paypal logo
patreon logo