Once upon a time there was a very silly theory that no two countries with a McDonalds had ever gone to war therefore no two such countries would ever go to war. The wars in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine pretty much disproved that, see also XKCD #1122. Photo by Sean Manning, October 2023.
In August I have been trying to think of anything worth saying about the Russian war in Ukraine. The only things I can come up with this August are Perun’s lectures, the odd talk by the Chieftain, some long-form reporting in the Kyiv Independent, and the BBC-Meduza estimate of Russian dead. In July Russia ended the agreement not to attack ships exporting Ukrainian grain. They hoped to reduce Ukraine’s income in foreign currency, and starve people in Africa and Southwest Asia whose UN representatives might push for a ceasefire to get the grain flowing again. Every so often the Ukrainians launch a new attack on Crimea (in September they used cruise missiles and unmanned surface vessels to sink ships in Sevastopol, other times they have attacked supply dumps and the Kerch Strait bridge). The drone attacks on Moscow and the mutiny of Wagner Group certainly show that the Russian government has limited military power everywhere other than the front. The Ukrainians have quietly resumed conscription, which could mean a lot of their soldiers are dead or wounded, or could mean they have trained up all their volunteers and have room in the training courses for conscripts again.
Some Roman pottery in the Römermuseum Wien, photo by Sean Manning October 2023
Anyone who has looked at fortifications built by the Roman army of the early empire knows that they were stupid about towers. These forts are often generously provided with towers, but those towers don’t stick far enough out from the walls to provide flanking fire against anyone trying to climb them. They provide extra height for fighting and observing, and protection from the weather on cold wet nights, but they don’t let people shoot and throw things at anyone trying to get over the walls between the towers (or sitting at the base of the wall trying to dig into it and pry things out ). The basic idea of how to use projecting towers had been known since the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, and although the Greeks were slow learners by the time of Alexander the Great some of them had understood these principles and even written textbooks. Roman forts became more sophisticated in the fourth century CE as Roman urban society was struggling. I just realized that Vitruvius explained how to use towers tool in his first book on architecture!
The roads of Palestine in the Achaemenid period, after Graf 1994: figure 1
On another site, someone asked why armies have been marching through Gaza for thousands of years. I don’t have anything useful to say about Hamas’ torture, murder, and kidnapping of about a thousand unsuspecting elders, civilians, children, and tourists, or the Israeli government’s blockade of water, food, and medicine to the several million civilians in Gaza in response to the murders and kidnappings, but I can talk about geography and ancient warfare.
My regularly scheduled post (about Vitruvius and the design of forts during the Roman Principate) will come out next week instead! When commenting, keep in mind that my site is not the place for people to share angry opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and I will moderate accordingly. Because I will not have time to moderate or respond to comments until Tuesday 31 October, comments on this post will not be enabled until then.
From Graham Wrightson graham.wrightson@sdstate.edu Dear all,I would like to put together a panel on Polybius for the Celtic Classics Conference in Cardiff, Wales, 9-12 July 2024.If anyone is interested please let me know.The panel proposal and abstracts are due on October 31. (scheduled 23 October 2023)
In an earlier post I talked about how some people in 15th and 16th century England and France thought that a sword for war should be shorter than was ideal in an unarmoured duel. This week I would like to return to that and talk about how the medieval concepts of “short sword” and “arming sword” are closely related.
The International Ancient Warfare Conference Many Faces of War conference will take place in roughly June or July 2024 at Brookings, South Dakota. I attach the Call for Papers then my reply to the organizers why I do not expect to attend this one as I did in 2022 and 2023.
Crab! A Boeotian Greek model of a shield in the British Museum, museum number 1895,1026.5 under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Responses at the International Ancient Warfare Conference 2023 made me wonder whether something I take for granted is obvious to other people interested in ancient Greece.
Today our armies are parallel societies or total institutions. They take in individual recruits, separate them from their prior friends and relations, and teach them everything they will need while they are isolated from their civilian associates. They re-organize these recruits into a new hierarchy of units for both everyday and tactical purposes (people in the same platoon both live and fight together, at least in the field). Armies like the army of Classical Athens were nothing like this and yet they fought.
Over on the group blog Crooked Timber there is a retrospective post on David Graeber’s Debt ten years after they hosted a discussion of the book on the blog. The post and comments say something very important about ‘big ideas’ books which scientists mostly take for granted, but might not be obvious to curious, clever people who are not active in research:
I think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But there is value to the speculation – social scientists don’t do nearly enough of it. Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities. And that is something that Graeber was very good at doing.
When we think of people moving writing on papyrus, we probably think of one of the ‘bucket’ shaped cases from ancient statues of orators and paintings at Pompeii. These had a handle or straps so they could be carried like a lunchbox or worn like a backpack. A whole treatise could fill dozens of books (ie. scrolls), which could last for a century or two if they were treated carefully, so someone who wished to transport a lengthy work needed a case or capsa (logeion). This is probably not how people transported everyday letters and correspondence!
Until Monday 2 October, the Deeds of Arms series from Freelance Academy Press in Ilinois is on sale for 30% off (about USD 19 per volume). This is a collection of translations of sources about formal combats in front of an audience in western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. In an earlier life... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Deeds of Arms Series
