Ancient
Posts on events before the middle of the first millennium CE
The Meaning of Sariam
Chicago Assyrian Dictionary “S” page 313 (abbreviations are expanded for clarity):
Read moresiriam (sariam, siriannu, širiam, širˀam, širˀannu) substantive masculine and feminine; [meanings] 1. leather coat, often reinforced with metal pieces, 2. (a garment); [attested in the following dialects and archaeological sites:] Middle Babylonian, Boghazkuei, Early Assyrian, Nuzi, Standard Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian; foreign word; pl. sarijamāti, širˀamēti.
Another of my Tools
A few weeks ago I showed what a bare-bones publication of a cuneiform text looks like. A much newer book is a good example of a lavish edition.
A Comment to “The Prince”
Letters and Tally Sticks
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Some Thoughts On “The Ancient World at War”
The Shoe is On the Other Foot
A much younger self was once sitting in a professor’s office when the conversation turned to the textbook which we were using in that professor’s course. He asked me what I thought of it. I commented that it was good enough … but that it was better at telling people what not to believe about... Continue reading: The Shoe is On the Other Foot
The Bronze Battle Scene from Pergamon
In 1913 Alexander Conze published some of the antiquities found at Pergamon. One of these was a remarkable relief from the second century BCE showing a battle on land. While Greek artists usually portrayed battle as a fight between scattered individuals, this relief shows different types of soldiers crowded together and even a Macedonian phalanx with its battle standard. The University of Heidelberg has generously digitized their copy of Conze’s book as part of the Heidelberger historische Bestände- Digitaler:
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One of My Tools
Only a fraction of the tablets from the Achaemenid period which have been excavated have been published, and many of the published ones look like this: A typical entry in Strassmaier’s “Inschriften von Darius, König von Babylon” (Liepzig, 1892): “1 1/2 mina 2 1/2 shekels silver …” One Johann N. Strassmaier... Continue reading: One of My Tools
The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Cities
My visits to Heuneburg and Haithabu/Hedeby reminded me that I don’t know enough about one of the great puzzles in world history: why cities spread so slowly, with frequent retreats and abandonments. There were towns in the Balkans before the Indo-Europeans came, but it was almost the year 1,000 before there was a single town on the Baltic, and that was burned and abandoned. Why did it take 5,000 years for cities to spread from Mesopotamia to Denmark, when other innovations spread in a few centuries? And why did many societies which once had prosperous cities give them up?
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