Albrecht Dürer’s print “The Witch” from around 1500. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number 17.37.31 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/391138 I visited Dürer’s house, it was saved from bombing by being built next to the city wall.
About sixty years ago, L. Sprague de Camp discovered a list of ancient magic tricks and stagecraft.
Most of the tricks employed by the witch Saphanbaal to awe her clients (in my novel) are described by Bishop Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies. In the early third century, the bishop constituted himself a one-man Society for Psychical Research. He exposed the deceptions of magicians, such as putting lumps of alum in the fire and gluing fish scales to the ceiling. Of course, this was six hundred years after the time of my story. But, since some of the methods Hippolytus describes have been used by mediums right down to modern times, we may assume for the purposes of fiction that these sleights were already old when he revealed them.
“Author’s note,” L. Sprague de Camp, The Arrrows of Hercules (1965)
Ancient World Studies has a few bold characters who push ideas that most people are not brave enough or foolhardy enough to say aloud. Peter James was one of them: he took the widely agreed fact that there are not many fine artifacts from the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries around 1000 BCE (but objects dated a few hundred years earlier and a few hundred years later that look very similar to one another) to argue that a few hundred years were accidentally inserted into Bronze Age Egyptian history and carried over into archaeology elsewhere before precise scientific methods became available. Not many scholars agreed but some admitted that the evidence for the established system was not as clear as textbooks make it seem, and the Aegean Dendrochronology Project kept themselves busy trying to prove his Centuries of Darkness thesis wrong. Currently there is a fad for performing complicated statistical manipulations on many unclear radiocarbon dates to get one precise date which I am not qualified to comment on. I did not know that James started as a Velikovskian and moderated his ideas as he learned more! Sit terra tibi levis.
Three Salish Sea ferries in one shoot! The photo is from one, another from Vancouver is coming behind, and a third is hidden behind the grey steel upright.
In my article for the Journal of Ancient Civilizations, I tried to be as clear and concise about Greek soldiers in the Achaemenid empire as I could. In the 20th century scholars often used the subjective and partisan term ‘mercenary‘ and focused specifically on Greek soldiers and Greek hoplites. I think its better to think about them differently.
Beginning with Ctesias, Greek writers often mention that thousands of Greeks fought for Achaemenid kings and satraps in exchange for pay (in earlier periods Greeks fought for the king as allies or subjects). Modern researchers have written half a dozen books about these so-called “mercenaries” but have not always considered the Egyptian and Near Eastern context. Since the Old Kingdom, Egyptian armies had contained large contingents of Nubians, Libyans, and other people from the edges of the Egyptian world. The Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians deported all kinds of people to the cores of their empires, gave them land to work, and extracted civil or military service from them. By the Achaemenid period Babylonians often provided a substitute or paid a fee rather than serve themselves. Hiring Greeks for coins was just another way of obtaining foreign soldiers.
“The Armies of the Teispids and Achaemenids: The Armies of an Ancient World Empire,” Journal of Ancient Civilizations Vol. 27 Nr. 2 (2022) p. 156 hosted here
Thirty years ago, Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood gave us a book of Patterns for Ancient Egyptian Clothing. Now a researcher in the UK wants to do the same for clothing from prehistoric Denmark. This new book will be lavishly illustrated with colour photos of reconstructions. If that is of interest, check it out on Kickstarter.
The Greeks invented scripts for their own language based on Phoenician writing during the eighth century BCE. From the eighth century BCE we have a few short Greek texts written on pottery or carved or scratched into stone. Nestor’s Cup from the settlement of Pithekoussai on an island in the Gulf of Naples is especially famous since it seems to allude to a character in the Iliad (less famously, all three lines go from right to left like in the Semitic languages, not left to right like in later European alphabets – other early inscriptions alternate between right to left and left to right like an ox plowing a field). But classicist Peter Gainsford tells us that these early Greek texts have something in common:
All extant Greek writing from before about 540 BCE is framed as an utterance designed for the moment at which it is read – declarative statements, instructions, etc. for the reader at the moment of reading it. We have no direct evidence that writing was used to transcribe anything at all until after that point. (See further Jesper Svenbro, “Phrasikleia”, opening chapter.) [JSTOR]
In early June I wrote a guest post for the L. Sprague de Camp Fan Blog about the wild animal which one of the delegations on the Apadana at Persepolis brings as tribute. Its common to read that the animal above is a giraffe (!) but there are two other plausible theories. Below the fold I have some additional bibliography.
Hellenistic diplomacy, like all Hellenistic rulership, was fundamentally personal: agreements and alliances were not struck between abstract states or nations, but between individuals. When a monarch died, previous agreements no longer stood, and new agreements with the next monarch had to be negotiated. The contemporary purpose of these marriage alliances at the time was to create a direct and personal link two monarchs, symbolized and meditated by marriage to a royal woman. In other words, the marriage of Stratonice I to Seleucus created a direct bond between her husband and her father that, in turn, united their two families.
Some architectural terracotta moulding from the House of the Black Room, Pompeii c/o BBC
There are many things to talk about the excavations at the House of the Black Room in Pompeii, from the awesome Parthian Perseus to the poor bakery workers who may have been locked in their quarters to die when the volcano erupted. Onetime Bookandswordblog commentator Sophie Hay gets to work there! One thing which I like is this piece of terracotta architectural decoration with painting which is colourful but not fussily precise.
From the pleiades-community mailing list: Free summer training sessions on using the #PleiadesGazetteer of ancient places are now open for registration at https://pleiades.stoa.org/events There are two classes, each offered three times over the course of the summer: Finding and Using: Learn how the gazetteer is organized, what it contains, and how to search and use... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Pleiades Project Training
One reason why I like Fernando Quesada Sanz’ Weapons, Warriors, and Battles of Ancient Iberia (publisher’s website) is that he looks east to the Punic world as well as the Greek and Roman worlds. Whereas specialists in archaic and classical Greece rarely pay much attention to any kind of barbarians, Quesada Sanz reminds readers that Iberia has been influenced by people who arrived by sea from the east since the 9th century BCE. A good example is what he has to say about the Iberian disc cuirasses.
