Ancient World Studies has a few bold characters who push ideas that most people are not brave enough or foolhardy enough to say aloud. Peter James was one of them: he took the widely agreed fact that there are not many fine artifacts from the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries around 1000 BCE (but objects dated a few hundred years earlier and a few hundred years later that look very similar to one another) to argue that a few hundred years were accidentally inserted into Bronze Age Egyptian history and carried over into archaeology elsewhere before precise scientific methods became available. Not many scholars agreed but some admitted that the evidence for the established system was not as clear as textbooks make it seem, and the Aegean Dendrochronology Project kept themselves busy trying to prove his Centuries of Darkness thesis wrong. Currently there is a fad for performing complicated statistical manipulations on many unclear radiocarbon dates to get one precise date which I am not qualified to comment on. I did not know that James started as a Velikovskian and moderated his ideas as he learned more! Sit terra tibi levis.
Three Salish Sea ferries in one shoot! The photo is from one, another from Vancouver is coming behind, and a third is hidden behind the grey steel upright.
In my article for the Journal of Ancient Civilizations, I tried to be as clear and concise about Greek soldiers in the Achaemenid empire as I could. In the 20th century scholars often used the subjective and partisan term ‘mercenary‘ and focused specifically on Greek soldiers and Greek hoplites. I think its better to think about them differently.
Beginning with Ctesias, Greek writers often mention that thousands of Greeks fought for Achaemenid kings and satraps in exchange for pay (in earlier periods Greeks fought for the king as allies or subjects). Modern researchers have written half a dozen books about these so-called “mercenaries” but have not always considered the Egyptian and Near Eastern context. Since the Old Kingdom, Egyptian armies had contained large contingents of Nubians, Libyans, and other people from the edges of the Egyptian world. The Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians deported all kinds of people to the cores of their empires, gave them land to work, and extracted civil or military service from them. By the Achaemenid period Babylonians often provided a substitute or paid a fee rather than serve themselves. Hiring Greeks for coins was just another way of obtaining foreign soldiers.
“The Armies of the Teispids and Achaemenids: The Armies of an Ancient World Empire,” Journal of Ancient Civilizations Vol. 27 Nr. 2 (2022) p. 156 hosted here
Thirty years ago, Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood gave us a book of Patterns for Ancient Egyptian Clothing. Now a researcher in the UK wants to do the same for clothing from prehistoric Denmark. This new book will be lavishly illustrated with colour photos of reconstructions. If that is of interest, check it out on Kickstarter.
The Greeks invented scripts for their own language based on Phoenician writing during the eighth century BCE. From the eighth century BCE we have a few short Greek texts written on pottery or carved or scratched into stone. Nestor’s Cup from the settlement of Pithekoussai on an island in the Gulf of Naples is especially famous since it seems to allude to a character in the Iliad (less famously, all three lines go from right to left like in the Semitic languages, not left to right like in later European alphabets – other early inscriptions alternate between right to left and left to right like an ox plowing a field). But classicist Peter Gainsford tells us that these early Greek texts have something in common:
All extant Greek writing from before about 540 BCE is framed as an utterance designed for the moment at which it is read – declarative statements, instructions, etc. for the reader at the moment of reading it. We have no direct evidence that writing was used to transcribe anything at all until after that point. (See further Jesper Svenbro, “Phrasikleia”, opening chapter.) [JSTOR]
Have you ever seen a Wikipedia page warn you that it cites too many primary sources? Or wondered why the most active Wikipedia editors tend to be understimulated older or younger people but rarely practitioners, researchers, or journalists?1 It turns out these two factors are connected, because Wikipedia has a unique culture which is hard for academics or journalists to engage with.
In early June I wrote a guest post for the L. Sprague de Camp Fan Blog about the wild animal which one of the delegations on the Apadana at Persepolis brings as tribute. Its common to read that the animal above is a giraffe (!) but there are two other plausible theories. Below the fold I have some additional bibliography.
Well, on Canada Day I was attending “As You Like It” at Craigdarroch Castle but lets not be too literal!
The blessing and curse of being a writer in the 21st century is that there are endless places to publish things. Whereas in the 20th century you needed to petition the few businesses which owned the kinds of presses that could make a few hundred thousand copies of a paperback to get your writing in stores, today everyone has a printing press in their pocket. This has been catastrophic for the ability to get paid for writing, but rather nice for the ability to get paid for a comic strip. There are so many options, each with advantages and disadvantages, that Jane Friedman felt it necessary to write an essay on the major paths to book publishing.
The city-side entrance to fortress Hohensalzburg was designed in the 17th century, but many aspects of a 17th century siege would be familiar to a soldier in the Great War or on parts of the front in Ukraine without many drones
In Spring 2024 there were two ways of looking at the war in Ukraine. One was to emphasize that Ukraine was short of troops and artillery ammunition, that Russian forces were capturing a sunflower field here and a village there, and that US aid to Ukraine may end if the Republicans win the next US election. We don’t hear much about the small Ukrainian operations on the east bank of the Dnipro River any more so perhaps they have withdrawn those few hundred men. Ukraine can’t get enough of its young men in uniform, in part because the officials in charge of exemptions and exit permits accept bribes. In this view, Russian forces will grind down Ukrainian forces and force the Ukrainian government to sign over territory. The ground war is not going well for Ukraine. The other way was to emphasize that Ukraine continues to strike Russian naval vessels and ports, destroys Russian aircraft and air defence systems, and launched a strategic bombing campaign against Russian oil refineries. The air and naval war are going better.
Hellenistic diplomacy, like all Hellenistic rulership, was fundamentally personal: agreements and alliances were not struck between abstract states or nations, but between individuals. When a monarch died, previous agreements no longer stood, and new agreements with the next monarch had to be negotiated. The contemporary purpose of these marriage alliances at the time was to create a direct and personal link two monarchs, symbolized and meditated by marriage to a royal woman. In other words, the marriage of Stratonice I to Seleucus created a direct bond between her husband and her father that, in turn, united their two families.
Graphtreon is awesome! Patreon is awesome! But Patreon is also another giant institution which we are are asked to trust but don’t have a way to verify
Patreon is essential for funding many types of digital creations. Patreon is not the best at processing payments or building and running websites. So a lot of us are very interested in them as a business because they offer an alternative to surveillance advertising and creating merchandise or face-to-face services to sell, but they seem kind of flimsy. Because they are a private business, we have to guess a lot. One of the things we have to guess about is whether they are a $24 million / year business or a $120 million / year business. (All sums in this post are in US dollars).
