One of the most charming and exasperating traits of small-city Austria is the locals’ casualness about copyright law. From a local plumber whose logo alludes to a popular TV series, to the cafe with a Disney Corp artist’s version of a Kipling character on their sign, to the academics who publish wherever and then stick the PDF on academia.edu as soon as it arrives in their inbox, they just do what they want as long as large sums of money are not involved. Ironically, Austrian Urheberrecht guarantees creators some privileges which in other countries they can sign away, such as the right to be acknowledged as the origin of a work. But on some other areas, they don’t fuss the details. Also, the Austrian academics I know have mostly moved away from assigning textbooks which are sold for money; they don’t write long tracts about the affordability of education (university in Austria costs about EUR 1600 a year in fees) or wicked commercial publishers charging hundreds of dollars for a calculus book, just put handouts together and share them.
Although I can’t put my finger on how, somehow this feels different than my gamer buddies explaining why they are not willing to pay $40 for a beautiful illustrated hardcover book by a game designer, or Jessamyn West agonizingly debating whether to tell library patrons that DRM can be broken or sci-hub exists. To me it feels more like the way Austrians smoke like chimneys, manage the sex trade, and accept polite corruption and horse-trading. Austria had to put up with the counter-reformation and watch National Socialists rebranded themselves as libertarian (freiheitlich), and quite a few Austrians don’t want to fight for fundamental reform, just quietly get what they want done in the grey areas. Read more
Deliberate allusion or accidental choice of a name? Just like the river shrine to a certain Lady, parallels with ancient motifs are all around you in Innsbruck!
Epictetus, Enchiridion 17 tr. Manning
Remember that you are an actor in a play, in whatever kind the producer chooses: if short, then short, if long, then long. If he wants you to play a pauper, or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen, you should play it the best that you can. For this is your job, to play the part that is given to you well, but to chose it belongs to another.
In Mantua did Gonzaga a stately pleasure dome decree. Being a renaissance tyrant, he decorated that dome with plaster frippery and curliques and paintings of fashionable Greek and Roman themes, but he also decorated it with these:
A decorated roof at one of the palaces in Mantua.
Those are fake hieroglyphics! Nobody could read heiroglyphics in the sixteenth century, but that was not a problem for the plasterers of Mantua any more than it had been for the priests of Isis at Pompeii 1500 years before. Putting up some old sculptures with a sphinx or obelisk and some mysterious inscriptions communicated a message of exotic cosmopolitanism, and that (not “a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of all good things to Semtutefnakht” or “Pa the scribe was here, these other scribes have trembling hands and stumbling lips”) was the message which visitors needed to read. Looking fashionably ancient in sixteenth-century Italy included Egyptian inscriptions as well as Greek friezes and busts of emperors. This raises the question when Europeans, and European settlers overseas, decided that the Greeks and Romans were ‘us’ and Egyptians, Syrians, or Persians were ‘them.’ Read more
The field behind the Zentrum für alte Kulturen, Langer Weg, Innsbruck, on 31 January 2019
Over on Patreon, Maciej Talaga talks about the folk sports which Polish peasants used to play in the slack times of the agricultural year. As he says, outside of the harvest season peasant societies tend to have more workers than useful things for them to do, so people on the land have to find ways to amuse themselves.
Biady, that is wrestling, was one of the most popular. It was played mostly by older boys and unmarried men, but there were exceptions. Participants would establish a specific hold – you can see it demonstrated on the video – and try to throw each other down without breaking it. Such matches could last anything from a few seconds to up to half an hour (with a single successful throw!). They involved no judges or coaches, as none of the participants would receive any formal training.
The latter was also the very reason why documenting “biady” required a specific research strategy. Since this martial game had no technolect or jargon, practitioners had no consistent way to talk about it. They couldn’t discuss given techniques, as we are used to do in HEMA, since there were no names for wrestling actions involved. Even less so in regard to tactics and theoretical concepts. In effect, my Grandpa also had hard times answering my inquisitive questions which I started bombarding him with after I discovered he has a vivid memory of this fascinating tradition. Being a simple man, he not only was surprised that anyone found it interesting, but also lacked words to explain martial matters in a structured way.
Having realised these difficulties, I called for help: I have a pleasure to run a little youth club teaching HEMA to some fantastic boys and girls. Three of them, Krzysztof Markowski, Marcel Kwapisz and Bruno Biernacki, enthusiastically agreed to assist me in a research trip. We went by bus to Wizna, a town located some 30 km away from my grandparents’ house in Łomża, and took a walk to visit the only Polish folk wrestler we knew about. And this time we were prepared much better – instead of asking questions, we started “biadying” in front of my Grandpa in the hopes that it would be easier for him to comment on our performance than talk about “biady” from a scratch on his own. And it worked!
Rome was not built in a day, but my emails were transferred in one! A Baroque tapestry of the AEDIFICATIO BABILONIAE in the city museum, Rimini.
It is the end of the semester in which I graduated, so I have been working to back up my emails onto my computer (Austrian university webmail is limited to 500 MB, and does IMAP not POP, so when the account closes the emails go away unless you move them to local folders). The Anglo chattering class loves to talk about what to do with old papers and knicknacks, with Marie Kondo or the Swedish Death Purge inspiring opinion pieces and social media threads. Did you know that the cuneiform world had a pretty firm opinion on the matter? Read more
The remains of the Roman amphitheatre, Rimini (ancient Ariminum) Evans-Pritchard [1937] (1977: 153) made the comment that when informants fall out; it is to the anthropologist’s advantage. However, in the modern era where informants read the anthropologist’s work, disputes among informants lead to all kinds of complications, and one must be especially careful in preparing... Continue reading: A Herodotean Sentiment
Innsbruck’s copy of Max Jähns, Handbuch einer Geschichte des Kriegswesens von der Urzeit bis zur Renaissance. Technischer Theil. (Leipzig: Fr. Wilh. Grunow Verlag, 1880)
Today, we often take it for granted that ancient texts mentioning linen or leather armour must describe the kind with a yoke over the shoulders and a skirt of ‘feathers’ which we see in Red Figure vase paintings and Etruscan tomb paintings. But like many other aspects of this debate, it is hard to trace back before Peter Connolly in the 1970s. People have collected references to linen and leather armour in literature since the 16th century, but for a long time they did not compare it to artwork any more than they compared it to objects in museums. At first this may have been because travelling to collections of art and accurately reproducing them was impractically expensive. Any scholar could see a collection of antiquities, but the one in their patron’s library was not the one in another scholar’s cathedral or a third’s country house, so they could not refer readers to a specific sculpture and expect that they would seek it out in the way they could cite a line of poetry and expect readers to take down another book and read it. Also, the brighter researchers often noticed that many of these passages describe the armour of barbarians: Egyptians, Assyrians, Iberians. John Kinloch Anderson is the first writer who comes to mind who explicitly identified the “linen and leather armour” he saw in Greek texts with the armour with shoulder flaps in Greek sculptures and paintings (Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon, 1970, pp. 22-23). About a hundred years before, him, a Prussian staff officer named Max Jähns had some different thoughts on this question.
I am going to say a bad word: historiography. The problem with this word is that it can either mean “the writing of history” or “the history of writing about history.” Thus Roman historiography can be history written by Romans, but it can also be the things which people in the last few hundred years... Continue reading: Historiography, Forschungsgeschichte, and Geschichtsschreibung
Duncan B. Campbell, The Fate of the Ninth: The Curious Disappearance of One of Rome’s Legions (Bocca della Verità Publishing: Glasgow, 2018)https://www.amazon.ca/Fate-Ninth-curious-disappearance-legions/dp/1791768334 Duncan B. Campbell, the author of many fine books and articles on the Roman army, has published a new book on the mysterious fate of the 9th legion, which fades from the historical... Continue reading: Cross-Post: New Book on Legio IX Hispana
There is snow in the Nordkette, but it is the warmest year in Austria since measurements began in 1767. This winter I am spending Christmas and New Year in Innsbruck rather than burn a lot of oil and money to visit my family. I have some new books to read, friends to drink a coffee or a Glühwein with, and jobs to apply to.
This year I became Dr. Manning, saw my first journal article printed, went hiking with friends, and discovered that Assyriologists are surprisingly interested in talks about swords. Visits to this site increased about 10% despite my slower posting. The most visited pages were Learning Sumerian is Hard, How Heavy Were Doublets and Pourpoints?, my description of how the historical fencers drifted away from me, Fashion in the Age of Datini, and From Aleph Bet to Alphabet.
This fall produced the usual crop of people wondering if keeping a personal website is anachronistic. I don’t see anything wrong with being anachronistic, and as I look at the political economy of the Internet this decade, I see some things which maybe they have not considered. Read more
