Roman relief of a man wearing what scholars call an “Attic helmet” (style of first or second century CE, Palazzo Ducale, Mantova, inv. gen. 6733). Showing someone wearing one of these helmets associated them with Greek culture, but examples from this period are hard to find in the ground.
People, especially people who are most interested in material culture, often find it hard to accept that ancient art does not directly and literally depict the world. People who recreate Roman material culture, for example, often fret that when we can check it against other evidence, Trajan’s column is usually wrong. “But the rest of the sculpture is so lifelike,” they complain. “Shouldn’t we use what evidence we have?” “Why would they go to so much trouble to depict something wrong?”
Random clay artifacts from ancient Iraq, on display in Palazzo Te, Mantua and connected with one Ugo Sissa.
One of the most interesting texts from Achaemenid Babylonia which has been published is a contract between Gadal-iama, son of Rahîm-ilê, and Rîmût-Ninurta, son of Murašû. Amongst other things, it contains the first description of special garments meant to be worn with armour which I have ever heard of. Because there do not seem to be any good discussions online, and because the translations in books for non-specialists are often very loose, I decided to post an Akkadian text and a translation or summary online. Before I do so, I should probably explain what this contract is.
Since I am too busy this week to spare many words, I thought I would post some pictures instead. This relief from a sarcophagus belongs to the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua. The caption dates it to the second quarter of the second century CE and labels it as a battle of Greeks and Amazons, but the barbarians look awfully masculine to me.
A student reading in his room, as painted in Paris circa 1420. British Library Royal MS 20 B XX. Cropped from an image in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts which has been released under a Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
One of my academic interests is knightly combat in late medieval Europe as described in four manuscripts by Fiore dei Liberi dating to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Fiore’s works, and those of his contemporaries in more northerly lands, give us a unique chance to understand how the weapons and armour racked in museums were meant to be used. They at the very least give anyone interested in how ancient people fought food for thought.This series of posts is inspired by the Greek scholar Plutarch, who wrote an antiquarian essay asking why the Romans practiced some curious customs. Plutarch was wise enough to give questions not answers, and that will be my policy in these posts as well.
Blows, steps, and guards make up the vocabulary of an early European martial art. While Fiore describes these things more clearly than his contemporaries did, his words still leave some ambiguity.
A few weeks ago I had a chance to visit the Südtiroler Archäologiemuseum in Bolzen. The modest stone building is the current home of the famous mummy of Ötzi, who died in an Alpine pass about 3300 BCE. Photographing the artifacts, including several sturdy longbows with the knife-marks still visible on their surface, was forbidden, but I did take a photo of this reconstruction.
A reconstruction of Ötzi, from the Südtiroler Archäologiemuseum, Bolzen. Read more
My Internet connection is having trouble uploading, which it making it difficult to post some pictures which I wanted to talk about. Instead, I think I will use this post to gripe about design choices in another kind of information technology. My first career was in programming, but programming languages were not the first where it proved very difficult to change early decisions as their disadvantages became apparent or the context changed. Read more
In later millennia, architectural copper could still impress
Last week I mentioned that one Hittite document tells the commander of a frontier post how they are to guard, build, and maintain their post. While the section on the curtain wall is badly damaged, the section on the watchtower is mostly intact:
Let the ?[watc]h? tower be 4 cubits around the top, but around the bottom let it be 6 cubits, and let it be encircled with a copper rain-gutter and a ?gallery?. Let the gallery be 6 cubits in circumference, and let it protrude 5 spans.
The word URUDḫeyawallit is not known elsewhere, but because it is proceeded with the determinative for copper and begins with the word for rain it fairly clearly means “copper rain-gutter”. The measurements of length and the word translated as “gallery” are not as well understood (the later could be more like “battlements” or “palisade”). I am not sure that the scholar who excerpted this text noticed what I did, because he didn’t translate the determinative.
It occurred to me that recently I have been writing a lot about the last thousand years, but not so much about ancient Southwest Asia. I promised to write about the different ancient traditions of tactical writing. This is a topic known from Greek, Hebrew, Hittite, and Indian literature in the ancient world, and it may have been discussed in Latin texts as well. Of these, the Hittite is by far the oldest, being attested in the middle of the second millennium BCE.
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: Read more
Guy Windsor, Mastering the Art of Arms, Volume 2: The Medieval Longsword (School of European Swordsmanship: Helsinki, 2014) (link to author’s online store)
Sometimes reviewers are tempted to review the book which they wish was sitting in front of them, rather than the book which actually is there. This is not a discussion of possible interpretations, their strengths and weaknesses, and why the author prefers the one which he does. Instead, it is an experienced teacher’s best attempt to teach Fiore’s art to people today from scratch, and it does that very well if somewhat narrowly.
