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)
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.
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!
Assyriologists have a lot of big ideas which nobody outside the field seems to know. When I was living in Innsbruck, I stumbled over this article while looking for a different one. It was so striking that I took a few minutes to make a photocopy: Religious controversy was probably more common in Babylonia from... Continue reading: W.G. Lambert on Theological Imperialism
Wolfgang Kimmig’s famous photos of the shield from Harit in Egypt (a name which he misremembered as Kasr el Harit, “Harit Castle”)
In May a well-known ancient historian told the Internet that the style of shield from Harit in the Fayum in Egypt weighed 10 kg. He probably got this from Mike Bishop and John Coulston’s classic handbook Roman Military Equipment (second edition p. 62) which cites reconstructions by Peter Connolly and Marcus Junkelmann. He was writing a general lecture so could not spend too much time questioning his sources. But I think this estimate is too high for four reasons.
Staring across the Inner Harbour of Victoria, BC at the former site of Capitol Iron (at one time a shipbreaker which recycled parts of the WW II Canadian Navy). Photo by Sean Manning July 2023
Martin Rundkvist has told me that Russell Gray is writing about Proto-Indo-European using phylogenetics again (basically, trying to figure out when languages diverged from one another by seeing how many words they have in common). The last paper in Science on this topic using these methods was so poor from a linguistic point of view that a whole monograph from Cambridge University Press was needed to explain the problems. Like the last paper, this one is in Science, which is a good journal for some things but not competent to review papers on linguistics. I’m a philologist but not a linguist or a specialist in PIE. Can any of my gentle readers point me to where linguists are discussing it? I am sending out the <*bhat> signal.
The current system of academic training, recruitment and promotion is not well equipped to recognize work that is routinely collaborative, may result in electronic outputs rather than traditional deliverables, and is not overtly focused on the monograph as the basic coin of the realm. All that makes it hard to reconcile with norms and expectations that are deeply entrenched in the academic humanities, most notably in the United States where institutionalized individualism and fetishization of the little-read book rule supreme. Academic incentive structures will need to be tweaked in favor of collaborative and non-traditional work to give simulation studies a chance to flourish.
Some of my gentle readers may not know that in ancient world studies we have a situation where to make a bibliography count for academic promotion, we have to print a few hundred copies and sell them to libraries where they collect dust while researchers check the website with PDFs or a searchable database. Rachel Mairs’ Hellenistic Far East Bibliography faces this barrier, so does the ETCSL. And peer-reviewed publications in ancient history and philology are still expected to be written by one or two authors, whereas in natural science there are often a dozen or more authors who contribute different specialized skills (perhaps one performs a chemical test, another writes the software, a third does most of the writing, and a fourth manages the project). But I see a big problem with pushing to focus on understanding the ancient world through mathematical models.
