Ancient
Posts on events before the middle of the first millennium CE
New Article: Mountain Passes Ancient and Modern

In mid-September I got lost on my return from the Goldbichl and found myself between Patsch and the Brennerautobahn. If you spend time hiking in Tirol that happens frequently, even though the mountain peaks provide good points of references and there are networks of paved or gravelled paths dotted with nice yellow signs, some of which even point within 90 degrees of the actual direction. And if you think about why that happens, you will understand the topic of my latest article for Ancient Warfare, namely why armies in eastern Anatolia (modern Turkey) follow the same few routes for thousands of years.
Cross-Post: A Fourth Calgary Dissertation
Semitic Words in Greek

Back in 2013, Jerker Blomqvist took the time to compare three books on Semitic words in ancient Greek texts. Scholars often disagree about which arguments are “certain,” “probable,” or to be “rejected.” Out of about 400 words which have been seen as loans, he found about 25 which are accepted by all three authorities:
Cross-Post: Oxbow Books Sale
Oxbow Books, purveyors of choice tomes on archaeology, history, and ethnology, is having a spring and summer sale. If your purse is deeper and your dwelling is wider than mine, check it out! I have picked out some titles which my gentle readers might be interested in.
- Rose Mary Sheldon, Ambush! Surprise Attack in Ancient Greek Warfare (Frontline Books, 2012) {Sheldon, John Lynn, and Myke Cole- soldiers or the teachers of soldiers- are doing the work of rebutting some false and bigoted ideas about the ancients in a form that ordinary people actually read}
- Neil Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia Second Edition (Oxbow Books, 2019) GBP 30 {big ideas book on ritual magic in the Norse world which combines the sagas, archaeology, and modern ethnography/comparative religion}
- Alireza Askari Chaverdi & Pierfrancesco Callieri, Tang-E Bolaghi (Fars) Sites TB76 and TB77: Rural Settlements of the Achaemenid and Post-Achaemenid Periods (Archaeopress, 2016) GBP 43 {the first published excavation of a rural site from Achaemenid Fars!}
- B. V. Andrianov and Simone Mantellini, Ancient Irrigation Systems of the Aral Sea Area. American School of Prehistoric Research Monographs (Oxbow, 2016) GBP 13 {apparently a translation of a work from the 1970s, but data does not go out of date like interpretations do and Rudenko published when Stalin was still alive}
- Daniel T. Potts, Nomadism in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2014) {argues that until the Turkish migrations of the 11th century CE, most herders in Iran lived in villages and sent only a few people to watch the flocks when they migrated to distant pastures. A similar book by Silvia Balatti is on my to-read list}
- Melanie Schuessler Bond, Dressing the Scottish Court 1543-1553: Clothing in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland. Medieval and Renaissance Clothing and Textiles volume 3 (Boydell & Brewer, 2019)
- Cecilie Brøns, Gods and Garments: Textiles in Greek Sanctuaries (Oxbow Books, 2016) GPB 15 {heavily discounted! books like this are best purchased when they are published, because rare copies become very expensive}
Was Hadrian’s Wall Proceeded by an Earth-and-Post Construction?
Hadrian’s wall across Britain has left complex traces in the forms of trenches, pits, scraps of stonework which were not salvaged by later farmers and road-builders, and of course inscriptions boasting of what the dedicator had accomplished. Geoff Carter, the archaeologist of Britain, is working on his theory that Hadrian’s Wall was first built as... Continue reading: Was Hadrian’s Wall Proceeded by an Earth-and-Post Construction?
Agricultural Surplus is a Dangerous Idea

A lot of historians throw around the term ‘agricultural surplus.’ By this they mean food which the farmers and their livestock don’t eat, and which can be used to feed stonemastons and metalworkers and scribes and priests and gentlemen farmers. In this theory, societies have to find a way to produce a larger surplus before they can produce things historians like such as books. I think this term is one of the terms which historians borrowed from economists in the early 20th century.
At first the idea seems harmless enough: if a family needs 20 bushels of barley to feed itself and its animals and have seed for next year, and they harvest 30, they will probably trade 10 for something else or use it to fatten stock. But in the real world there is rent and taxation. And when you look at the science of nutrition, you find that there is a range in the amount of food that farm workers eat. At the low end, they can’t work very well, lose most of their children, and die young of chronic diseases or infections which their weakened body can’t fight off; at the high end, they have a varied diet, grow taller and stronger, and can be pretty sure of having surviving children. Its not actually the case that people need a certain number of calories of Generic Food ™ a day, above which they just get fat and below which they die. Taxes and rents often come out of this margin in between. And it is usually taxes and rents which pay for the stone buildings, the scholars writing treatises on ethics, and the beautiful silver cups.
Two Dresses a Year

For 10,000 years or so, clothing was so expensive that most people could only afford a few outfits. Then over the past lifetime they suddenly became so cheap that for people in a rich country, storage space is the main concern. We see traces of this in inventories of family property during divorces outside the Valley of the Kings, in Babylonian invoices for one suit of clothing per soldier per year, and then in medieval post-mortem inventories and sumptuary laws, but it continued later than we like to remember. A snatch of old verse was stuck in Robert Heinlein’s head:
There’s a pawn shop on the corner
Where I usually keep my overcoat.
Now, today a synthetic winter coat would hardly be worth pawning (a day’s minimum wage?), but a woollen one of 2-5 yards of fulled cloth could last decades and cost accordingly. A passage by George Bernard Shaw touches on this from another angle.
More Numbers with Curious Echoes
Its a strange fact that the kind of hyperbolic numbers which Greek writers use for barbarian armies sometimes occur in the Old Testament, but rarely in other texts in Semitic languages. But if you look at numbers as part of a broad west Eurasian world, you sometimes still notice echoes. There is an inscription written... Continue reading: More Numbers with Curious Echoes
The Number Problem in the Persian Wars 480-479 BCE

Quite a few people interested in ancient warfare know an article by one F. Maurice on the water and roads at the Hellespont. After reading Herodotus’ story that Xerxes marched through the area with 1,700,000 infantry, 80,000 cavalry, and 20,000 charioteers and camel-riders and hiking around the countryside in summer, he argues that an army of 150,000 soldiers, 60,000 noncombatants, and 75,000 animals is the absolute maximum that could have been fed and watered in the area (paragraphs 10, 21, 33). I think this was the Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice who was forced out of the British Army for political reasons in 1918, became a journalist and an advocate for veterans, and died on 1 May 1951. People cite it because he was an experienced staff officer who had walked the ground and talked to classicists like J.A.R. Munro. Its full of details such as that the British Expeditionary Force of 72,000 men, with railroads for supply but just horses for transport, needed 20 square miles for its camp in 1914 (the cavalry were stationed elsewhere and the motor vehicles had not yet arrived). But its certainly not the last say, and while he was talking to British classicists, a retired Bavarian general was preparing a study of the same problem and addressing their arguments.
One Robert von Fischer (d. 1937) commanded the 1st Royal Bavarian Landwehr Division in France from September 1914 to December 1915 and received the honorary title of Bavarian General of Infantry in 1917. He had similar military credentials as Maurice: he commanded a division on the Western Front for 16 months, Maurice served in the Tirah Expedition in Afghanistan, the Boer War, and briefly on the Western Front. And after examining the whole route and the problems involved, he felt that the Persian army was probably no more than 40,000 soldiers strong.