Brian Hughes and Fergus Robson (eds.) Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) circa 80 Euros on Bookfinder
I borrowed this volume in hopes that it would have more clues as to the oldest source for Good King Robert’s Testament (it did not, although Alastair John MacDonald very kindly helped me with modern editions of the Scotichronicon). But I ended up reading about half of it (skipping the chapters on 20th century warfare such as Julia Welland on NATO’s unlucky intervention in Afghanistan and Raphäelle Branche on French Algeria).
The book is in reverse chronological order, but lets begin with Tim Piceu describing an outbreak of small war in Flanders as the Dutch Republic and Hapsburgs wrestled for control (p. 160, 164)
Freebooter raids generally started in a tavern in one of the above-mentioned frontier towns or in a town in the island of Walcheren (Zeeland). There a group of around a dozen men- no women are known to have been freebooters- discussed a tip received by a local informant who knew of booty. Although frebooter bands acted under the guidance of an experienced marauder, the conducteur, and some friends raided together, there seemed to be no regular composition of the crew. Everybody who had the courage could join in. If the value of the booty outweighed the risks, the group would decided to leave for enemy territory. They packed their weapons and victuals for some days, dressed themselves like peasants, and slipped past enemy posts to a hiding-place in enemy territory. The sources mention freebooters carrying a vaulting-pole to move across the many Flemish creeks, ditches, and tidal inlets. Travelling happened mostly at night and the band avoided major roads. … Most freebooters probably used their takings for living expenses, paying off debt or, to quote a Dutch civil servant, ‘to indulge for a little time in a bad and godforsaken life of drunkenness and whoring.’
You all meet in a tavern, forsooth! And every gamer agrees with that Dutch civil servant about the proper way to spend the spoils of an adventure, even if they have not read sources from the Wars of the Low Countries or the Yukon Gold Rush.
One of the polychrome brick reliefs from Achaemenid Susa, now in the Louvre, Paris.
In an earlier post, I talked about the guards in Persian reliefs from Susa who are 17 bricks tall and have spears 19 or 21 bricks tall. Artists often ‘improve’ human proportions according to different ideas of what the well-formed body looks like: these guards are 5 2/3 bearded faces tall (17/3), Cennino Cennini would have them 6 1/2 bearded faces tall (26/4).
When I visited the Louvre in July I had a chance to look at some of those reliefs for the first time since 2016 (a few are on display behind glass in Tehran). As you see, my hand and the hand of the sculpture are about the same size (and I am not particularly tall or short). My hand is slightly closer to the camera than the sculpture is, so it is slightly enlarged.
A new article by myself and Jack Schropp has just appeared in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigrafik. It concerns a well-known story that as Tigranes the Great of Armenia saw the Romans advance to challenge him outside Tigranocerta in 69 BCE, he quipped “if they are come as an embassy, they are too many,... Continue reading: An Echo of an Aramaic Story in Five Greek Texts
Descendants of mighty Rhaetian war-horses? West side of the Brenner near Patsch, Tirol.
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.
Back in 2015 I blogged about three Calgary dissertations related to Alexander, ancient Macedonia, or ancient horse culture. The fourth of this group is now finished: Dr. Megan Falconer Ward, East Looking West: the Relationship between the Western Satraps and the Greeks (PhD dissertation, University of Calgary, 2018) http://hdl.handle.net/1880/109170 Dr. Ward had to deal with... Continue reading: Cross-Post: A Fourth Calgary Dissertation
The tube stop just outside the tower of London, June 2019. I don’t entirely understand the topography, but anything higher than the walls is out of bowshot of the moat (currently drained and replaced with a dry ditch, and the water gate is only accessible through a long tunnel).
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:
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}
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?
Its a rainy September, so how about the field across from the Atrium in a rainy September? The field is now a construction site.
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.
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.
