ancient
Knowing Things is Hard
Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand them. Until then I can add entries one at a time as they become necessary.
Read moreCFP: Many Faces of War V, and WAWIC 2025
Two conferences on ancient warfare will be held in the northern part of the United States next spring or summer.
Jeffrey Rop and Lennart Gilhaus are organizing the next War in the Ancient World International Conference as a dual online-offline event in Duluth MN and Münster DE.
Read moreXenophon is Still Sad
An anonymous Tumblr account called Xenophon is Sad used to collect quotes where researchers disrespected or erased Xenophon the Athenian adventurer. Although Xenophon was a friend of Socrates and an extremely successful writer in many genres, his words leave many academics cold. The Tumblr has not been updated since 2021 but I found two more quotes which belong on it.
Read moreDo Not Cut These Trees!
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Low-tech people tend to be good at preserving commons. They have to be, because they don’t have a global supply chain to save them if they wreck their environment. And so for thousands of years people have conserved the cedar forest on Mount Lebanon and saved its wood for special purposes. Ancient inscriptions tell the story.
Read moreThe Case of the Five Hitmen and Ten Oligarchs
News outlets such as the BBC have been retelling a story about a failed business hit in Nanning, China.
A group of hitmen have been jailed after repeatedly trying to subcontract a job to each other in Guangxi, China.
Businessman Tan Youhui hired a hitman to “take out” his competitor for $282,000 (£218,000), a court heard.
But the hitman hired another man to do the job, offering $141,000. That man hired another hitman, who hired another hitman, who hired another hitman.
The plan crumbled when the final hitman met the man, named only as Wei, in a cafe and proposed faking his death.
All six men – the five hitmen and Tan – were convicted of attempted murder by the court in Nanning, Guangxi, following a trial that lasted three years.
Some people might see this as a story about outsourcing, neoliberal capitalism, or the rough-and-tumble nature of some things in China. I have a classical education so this made me think of the fall of the Bacchidae of Corinth in the seventh century BCE. The story was told by Herodotus two centuries later, and he puts it in the mouth of someone telling the Spartans that it is terrible to be ruled by a monarch or tyrant, so beware:
Read moreHow to Grip Bronze Age Swords (Response to Dimicator and Matt Easton)
Over on his website and social media, Roland Warzecha has been talking about how to hold European swords of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the so-called Naue type II. These swords have a broad flat blade, a broad tang with scales riveted to the sides, and usually a mushroom-shaped pommel. If you are at all interested in swords, these are worth studying, because they are the earliest swords that we can understand really well. Iron tends to shrink or expand in the ground or water, and especially after it is excavated, so the remains of iron or steel swords tend to be ugly misshapen things. Bronze swords can emerge from the ground looking like they just left a cutler’s shop, and sometimes they have bronze grips and pommels so all parts of the sword are preserved. In the worst case the handle and the area where the handle joins the blade are usually preserved. In most of Bronze Age Europe it was not customary to make detailed images of human beings. Nor was it customary to write things down. But the swords, spears, and shields in museums speak to us and tell us how they want to be used if we can learn to hear them. They were carefully designed by sophisticated people for sophisticated people.
Read moreSaint Hippolytus the Skeptic
About sixty years ago, L. Sprague de Camp discovered a list of ancient magic tricks and stagecraft.
Read moreMost 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)
Greek Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire
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.
Read moreBeginning 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
Cross-Post: Book on Early Germanic Clothing Fundraising
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.
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