Taking a break from academic blogging is not as simple as it seems (meme from The Godfather, Part III courtesy of memegenerator.net)
In November 2016 I expressed a desire to read Fernando González de León’s article “Spanish Military Power and the Military Revolution.” As I found the citation in a forum post from 2011, it occurred to me that I might as well order the book instead of spending another five years wishing and hoping. González challenges Maurice of Nassau’s claim that after reading Aelian’s tactical manual he invented a drill where soldiers fired one rank at a time and then countermarched to get out of the way while they reloaded their cumbersome weapons. (The original letter in which Maurice makes this claim survives, and photos of his sketch of the new tactic have been reprinted in, if I remember correctly, Parker’s Military Revolution). González thinks this was already practised in Hapsburg armies. I wrote this post back in 2017, and decided to post it after listening to the Ancient Warfare Podcast on Ancient Military Manuals in June 2018.
This drill was developed to meet the needs of a particular time and place. In the 16th and 17th centuries, soldiers loaded their matchlock muskets and arquebuses with loose powder and balls and defended themselves with swords and daggers. Manipulating all of this equipment and a lit match without setting oneself on fire or shooting a neighbour was a slow process, and there was a danger that infantry who fired all at once would be over-run by enemies before they could reload. Clubbed muskets or cheap swords were no match for pikes or lances, and when more than two or three ranks of soldiers tried to fire at once, they tended to shoot, deafen, or ignite each other. Ordering the front rank to fire and then countermarch (march to the rear between their file and its neighbour) was a convenient way to get them out of the way while they reloaded. Famously, soldiers in Europe and Japan took to this drill, while soldiers in India and most of the Moslem world rejected it. By the 18th century, infantry were armed with bayonets and issued with pre-made paper cartridges and muskets which made their own fire, and other drills were developed to suit new conditions. Having defined what we are looking for, let see how González’ argument holds up:
The speakers at the conference on the Courts of Philip II and Alexander the Great, Edmonton AB, 2-4 May 2018. I am fourth from the left next to the woman in the yellow dress.
At the beginning of May I attended the conference on the courts of Philip and Alexander at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. I arrived late due to some travel problems, so I can’t talk about Graham Wrightson’s sarissa project down in South Dakota. Most of the intended guests were there, although unfortunately Pat Wheatley from Otago New Zealand had to cancel. (Aside from the Otagonians, there were two of us from Austria, two from Germany, two from Poland, one from South Africa, and the rest from Canadian, American, and British universities).
Quite a few scholars have taken a postmodern approach to Alexander, emphasizing that the vast majority of sources date from Roman times or questioning whether after 200 years of learned scholarship there are any more facts to tease out (Mary Beard’s “Alexander: How Great?” in the New York Review of Books is a good example, even though it contains one or two howlers … if she has ever written up similar ideas in a more careful way, please let me know!)* The papers on Thursday took the opposite view, showing that for a figure in ancient or medieval history, we are quite well informed about Alexander.
Sabine Müller had a very amusing paper about Macedonia in Athenian comedy, with its stereotypes of hard-drinking, fish-eating, rough and tough northerners. Several speakers looked at the Attic orators, and all the gossip about upper-class men in southern Greece which survives. These texts are as blissfully self-centred as the opinion section of a national news magazine, but they have all kinds of stories about who was marrying or bedding whom, who fumbled their speech at a particular embassy or accepted a gift of golden cups, and the different policies which people adopted as Macedonian power grew. Dina Guth looked at stories about the origins of Macedonia, and how in different tellings Macedonia either came into existence at a specific place and expanded by conquest, or was the result of fusing different lands and peoples into something new. This was an important question if you were an Argead king trying to justify your rule and find a modus vivendi with other powerful families. Jeanne Reames used onomastics to try and track down Hephaistion’s family background. In Argead times, names invoking Hephaistus are much more common in Aeolis, Boeoetia, Attica and the Crimea than in northern Greece and Macedonia, which raises the possibility that his family were immigrants. Fred Naiden looked at references to Alexander discussing military problems with his advisors, and said that on a quick look, he could not find a similar list for any general before modern times. While it is hard to pick out fact from slander or apology in stories about Parmenio warning Alexander not to take a risk, or Darius offering to trade peace for half his kingdom, we at least have a great many opportunities to study how Alexander and his companions made decisions. For most kings, we have no sources instead of unreliable sources. Read more
I am too tired to find some appropriate ancient picture, so how about this bird? One of my articles is out in Ancient History Bulletin 32.1-2, “A Prosopography of the Followers of Cyrus the Younger.” This one is about the forgotten Cyreans: the ones whom Xenophon classed as part of ‘the... Continue reading: The Cyrus Dossier
Oxbow Books, fine publisher and bookseller, has a book sale on. I flipped through their leaflet and picked out some things which my readers might be interested in. Anastasius Antonaras, Fire and Sand (Yale University Press, 2013) {509 glass objects from Preislamic times in an American collection} Beltrame (ed.), Sveti Pavao Shipwreck: a 16th Century... Continue reading: Sale at Oxbow Books
The first Rustkammer at Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck. Photo by Sean Manning, May 2018.
In an earlier post, I talked about videos on making armour. But what if you prefer books? Whereas 20 years ago very little was available, today there are quite a few things to read and look at.
There is one textbook on making European plate armour: Brian R. Price, Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction: The 14th Century (Paladin Press: Boulder Colorado, 2000). The book is a reasonable introduction by a mid-level armourer with a troubling history. Brian R. Price (now an Associate Professor at Hawai’i Pacific University) once ran a small press (Chivalry Bookshelf) until it emerged that he had not been paying the agreed royalties, had not obtained rights to all the illustrations, and had not registered their works with the appropriate authorities. Many of his other business (Thornbird Arms, Revival Enterprises, Past Tents, Fettered Cock Pewter, agilitas.tv, Sirivitana printer in Thailand, Midpoint Distribution Services) and martial-arts (Schola Saint George) associates had similar stories dating back to the 1980s, and in the end a coalition of authors sued him and regained control of their works in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement.* While Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction was published by Paladin Press, an independent business, many people are uncomfortable with supporting the author. (Also, this book is specifically on late medieval European armour … if you are interested in ancient kinds or kinds outside of Catholic Europe you will need other resources).
The architecture of holy places in the Middle East has changed a bit since the glory days of the Ebabbar, but how about this photo of a mosque in Isfahan? A tablet from Sippar with the forgettable names BM 57222 and CT 57, 82 contains the following lines: “(6) 1/2 mina... Continue reading: Horse Troops and Troops of the Bow
Sometimes the tablet-gods smile on us. Over the last hundred years, scholars have worked to establish when the properties known as bow, horse, and chariot estates first appeared in Mesopotamia. Earlier writers often saw them as examples of Iranian feudalism, imposed on Babylonia by the Medes or Persians, but there were a few examples under Nabonidus. Then in 1998 Michael Jursa reread a text from Uruk from the 35th year of Nebuchadnezzar with the following lines:
1 kur 2 pi of seed (ie. field which is sown with 7 bushels of barley), the bow estate of Dannēa, which Nergal-dān acquired to sow, is pledged to Gimillu, until Gimillu received the barley.
One of the graves of the kings of Elam at Tschoga Zanbil in Iran. If you haven’t invented any new mathematics, and are thinking of rounding up a gang of forced labourers to build a fancy tomb to give you immortal fame, keep in mind that the Assyrians may come around and dig up your... Continue reading: The Ancient Story of Stephen Hawking’s Tombstone
A reconstruction of a Scythian noble with the bowcase on his left hip. I almost wrote nobleman, but that is not a safe guess in the steppes! Probably from Philip De Souza ed., The Ancient World at War. A Global History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).
For a few years now, I have been trying to remember where I learned that Scythian bowcases (Greek gorytos, Babylonian šalṭu) often contained a hundred or more arrows. I have heard it in various places, including in a lecture by a famous classicist in the sunset lands beyond the Ocean, but what is the archaeological evidence?
Ellis H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1913) p. 68: 200 to 300 arrows in quivers from Scythian graves https://archive.org/details/scythiansgreekss00minn
Geo Widengren, “Recherches sur le féodalisme iranien,” Orientalia Suecanica V (1956) p. 152 n. 2: A gorytos in a kurgan at Solokha contained 180 arrows
Richard Brzeinski and Mariusz Mielczarek, The Sarmatians 600 BC-AD 450. Men at Arms 373. Osprey Publishing: Botley, 2002. p. 34: 128 arrows with painted shafts in a gorytos in Sholokhovskii kurgan at Rostov-on-Don (-IV); 228 iron heads, 4 bronze, 9 bone in two clumps in a kurgan near Hutor Kascheevka, Rostov-on-Don (-IV or -III)
Now, citing these sources makes me feel a bit dirty, because the ones after the Bolsheviks seized power don’t cite their sources. Unfortunately very few people talk about the Soviet excavations in English, German, or French, and when they do they do not give footnotes. So in the time I have available, these sources will do.
Armed with the power of HITTITE IRON, reedy doctor Sinuhe breaks general Horemhab’s sword! From scene 12 of Sinuhe: The Egyptian (Michael Curtiz director, 1954)
Most people interested in ancient weapons know that early iron swords were not any better than bronze ones. But they don’t always know where the idea comes from, or how we know about the properties of early edged weapons. If you want to find out, the article is available in Ancient Warfare XI.6 (The Decelean War) from Karwansaray.
But in a little magazine article, I was not able to include all the references which I wanted. So what if you want to learn more?
