academic navel-gazing

Battles and Sieges

Eannatum of Lagaš’s Stele of the Vultures in the Louvre, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stele_of_Vultures_detail_01-transparent.png

Academic histories sometimes get very narrowly focused. There are some good reasons for this, but its not so good to read a book on archaic or classical Greek warfare which barely acknowledges that Italy or the Hellenistic period existed. Did I fall into that trap in my book on Achaemenid armies and warfare?

To find out, I made a list of all the battles and sieges which I mentioned in my forthcoming book. Edit 2024-01-11: periods are the same as in Armour in Texts

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Thanks to the University of Victoria

Good harness, attentive students, and a Gothic podium to profess from – teaching and writing brought different rewards in Giovanni da Legnago’s day (d. 1383). Sculpture in the Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna (possibly slightly later than his death).

This summer, my plan is to publish two posts a month while I enjoy the weather and the slowdown in the pandemic and get some other things in my life sorted out. But with the burst of traffic from Hacker News, and a reminder of a previous life beyond the ocean sea, I would like to thank one of the biggest intellectual influences on my thought which does not get called out in my book: the University of Victoria.
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Important Assyriological Discovery!

a carved ivory pommel with ruminant heads and a scabbard chape with a great cat pouncing on a ruminant
The ivory pommel and chape of an akinakes and scabbard in the Louvre. For more information see Bernard, Paul (1976) “À propos de bouterolles de forreaux achéménides,” Revue Archéologique pp. 227-246 or for our Russian friends Perevodčikova, E.V. (1983) “Subjects Depicted Upon the Bouterolles of Akinakes-Sheaths in the Achaemenid Period.” Vestnik Drevnej Istorii 3 (165) pp. 96-103

Between looking for work and finishing articles, I have been working on a book on Achaemenid warfare which bears a certain similarity to a 2018 Innsbruck PhD dissertation and should be released this year. In Austria you make the mechanical fixes and the changes in response to the committee’s comments after the thesis is accepted, not before (in Canada, you are normally given a list of changes by the committee, make them, and pass the revised version back to the committee for them to approve before you are granted the title).

I never converted to citation-management software, preferring a simple word processor file with bibliographic information and notes on everything I had read, wanted to read, or thought I might one day want to read. When I was assembling the different files into a dissertation, I stripped out the metadata and dumped the individual entries into the bibliography then sorted it alphabetically with Tools → Sort. So one problem I had is that some works in the footnotes were not in the bibliography, and some notes were in different formats than others. To sort this out I went through each chapter recording the works cited, then removed duplicates and standardized the format, then combined the eight separate lists into one and removed the duplicates again. I checked that list against the bibliography, making sure that everything in the footnotes was in the bibliography.

And that leads to the important question, out of the roughly 1,232 works in the final bibliography (77 pages x 16 citations per page), how many do I actually cite?
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