Ancient

Ancient

Posts on events before the middle of the first millennium CE

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.

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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.

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Babylonia and Across the River

a low relief of a man in a hat shaped like a candle snuffer standing with a long knobby staff in his let hand and symbols of the sun, moon, and winged disc overhead
Stele of Nabonidus king of Babylon from Haran in northern Iraq. Photo by Jona Lendering c/o Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nabonidus.jpg

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.

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How Heavy Were Iron Age Bows? Part 3

well-lit photo of a shallow relief of a chariot galloping from left to right. The driver holds the reins, the archer draws a bow, and a lion has fallen to the ground with three arrows in its body
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!

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Had Marlowe Read Ctesias?

a cracked wall painting in the sketchy dark Roman style of two seated gamblers with a table between them resting on their knees
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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Victor Davis Hanson was a Manichaean

a scroll with a Chinese painting of a man sitting cross-legged on a giant flower and surrounded by an aura
This Chinese scroll from the Ming Dynasty shows the Prophet Mani. Mani’s teachings survived in China and central Asia after their followers were persecuted out of the Persian empire and the Roman empire and the House of Islam. Photo from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Icon_of_Mani_2.jpg

Victor Davis Hanson can be a scholar when he wants to be, although since 2004 that has just been a hobby while he focused on punditry. Many people who have read his books and articles on antiquity are confused at the positions he takes, where Spartans can be admirable defenders of Freedom in the pass at Thermopylae, but despicable slave-holders at Leuctra (and there were helots at Thermopylae, and Hanson was not one of the radicals who teach that the Sparta we think we know emerged after the death of Leonidas). I know a bit about ancient Persian religion so this was always easy for me to understand. This week I have written up the way I explain it when it comes up in conversation ever since a much younger self was reading one of his trade books at the Greater Victoria Public Library Central Branch.

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There Is no Need to Write or Teach History in an Intellectual Sewer

crowds lined in front of a building with a stone and white terracotta facade on the ground floor and brown brick above; the front entrance has three double glass doors
Crowds entering the Royal Theatre in Victoria, BC (est. 1913: not seen, the Dread Pirate Roberta)

there is a kind of revision of history, widely practiced today, that arises not from the opportunities but from the needs- or the passions- of our time. Basically, all research means putting questions, and historical research means putting questions to the past, preferably without torture, and trying to find answers there. The questions we put are necessarily those suggested to us by our own times and preoccupations, and these differ from generation to generation and from group to group. It is inevitable and legitimate that this should be so. What is neither legitimate nor inevitable is that not only the questions we put to the past but also the answers we find there should be determined by our present concerns and needs. This can lead, particularly under authoritarian regimes, but also in free societies under pressures of various kinds, to the falsification of the past, in order to serve some present purposes.

Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 143, no. 4 (December 1999) pp. 585-586 (573-587)
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Books Read in 2024

a lifelike statue of a man in leggings and a breechclout kneeling to dig with an antler pick
One of the builders of Stonehenge as imagined for the Royal BC Museum Stonehenge exhibit in 2024

This post was scheduled late partly because I was late in writing up all the books and partially because I wanted to finish some which I left half-finished in 2024! The usual caveats about writing one of these when I read like a scholar and not like a fan of romance novels apply. John Ting calls the way academics read reading like a mongrel (picking out useful morsels and then moving on, not working all the way through). My reading was disrupted when my Tolino eReader failed in late summer. And one novel which I wanted to read did not arrive until the new year!

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The Great Courses: The Achaemenid Empire on Sale

a screenshot of a teaser photo advertising a video course on "The Persian Empire" from The Great Courses and a DVD Closeout sale

Achaemenid historian John W.I. Lee did a series of lectures for The Great Courses. Right now they have a closeout sail for the DVD editions including his series on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. If you like long-form video as well as short blog posts you might want to check them out! Whereas sites like YouTube let anyone post and share whatever gets clicks, The Great Courses gets recognized experts and skilled public speakers to teach on their area of expertise. One is educational, the other sells eyeballs to advertisers and does not care whether the eyeballs look at rants about flying saucers or careful research.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-persian-empire

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