Achaemenid historian John W.I. Lee did a series of lectures for The Great Courses. Right now they have a closeout sail for the DVD editions including his series on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. If you like long-form video as well as short blog posts you might want to check them out! Whereas sites like YouTube let anyone post and share whatever gets clicks, The Great Courses gets recognized experts and skilled public speakers to teach on their area of expertise. One is educational, the other sells eyeballs to advertisers and does not care whether the eyeballs look at rants about flying saucers or careful research.
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.
Two weird and wonderful conferences have come through my inbox in the past few weeks. I thought some of my gentle readers might be interested. There is a face-to-face conference on the f word in France, and an online conference on the medieval world in computer games in Vienna. Linguists are where historians are going (nobody but other linguists knows what they do) but they have fun! These involve Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary and Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and James Baillie the British specialist in medieval Georgia.
Ancient World Studies has a few bold characters who push ideas that most people are not brave enough or foolhardy enough to say aloud. Peter James was one of them: he took the widely agreed fact that there are not many fine artifacts from the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries around 1000 BCE (but objects dated a few hundred years earlier and a few hundred years later that look very similar to one another) to argue that a few hundred years were accidentally inserted into Bronze Age Egyptian history and carried over into archaeology elsewhere before precise scientific methods became available. Not many scholars agreed but some admitted that the evidence for the established system was not as clear as textbooks make it seem, and the Aegean Dendrochronology Project kept themselves busy trying to prove his Centuries of Darkness thesis wrong. Currently there is a fad for performing complicated statistical manipulations on many unclear radiocarbon dates to get one precise date which I am not qualified to comment on. I did not know that James started as a Velikovskian and moderated his ideas as he learned more! Sit terra tibi levis.
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.
In early June I wrote a guest post for the L. Sprague de Camp Fan Blog about the wild animal which one of the delegations on the Apadana at Persepolis brings as tribute. Its common to read that the animal above is a giraffe (!) but there are two other plausible theories. Below the fold I have some additional bibliography.
From the pleiades-community mailing list: Free summer training sessions on using the #PleiadesGazetteer of ancient places are now open for registration at https://pleiades.stoa.org/events There are two classes, each offered three times over the course of the summer: Finding and Using: Learn how the gazetteer is organized, what it contains, and how to search and use... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Pleiades Project Training
Novelist, reenactor, Plataia 2024 organizer, and veteran Christian Cameron has launched a patreon https://www.patreon.com/CameronAuthor I am told that one of the corporate social media services he uses is stopping him from reaching followers just like corporate social media services do whenever they want more money. The Oatmeal has a comic about this.
International Conference on Alexander the Great: Alexander and Macedon
South Dakota State University – Sioux Falls, SD – September 4-7, 2024
Announcing the next instalment of the series of international conferences on Alexander the Great.
Alexander and Macedon, held at South Dakota State University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, September 4-7, 2024
2024 heralds the 2,350th anniversary of Alexander’s final major battle of the Hydaspes as well as the so-called Hyphasis mutiny, the death of his famed horse Bukephalos, Alexander’s journey down the Indus River, the start of the Mallian campaign, and the creation of Nearchos’ exploratory naval expedition.
Papers are welcome on any aspect of Alexander the Great and his era, or on the history of Macedon. A particular focus is on Alexander’s influence on Macedon and vice versa.
Papers from any relevant discipline are particularly encouraged to facilitate a multi-disciplinary discussion.
The conference is aimed equally at postgraduate students, early career researchers and established academics.
The keynote session on Thursday September 5th, will be delivered by Edward Anson, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock,and Waldemar Heckel, Research Fellow in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
There will also be a public afternoon workshop involving experimental history in recreating a sarissa phalanx using replica weapons.
Please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief bio to the organizer, Graham Wrightson (alexanderconference@yahoo.com ) BEFORE March 30th 2024.
Professor Michael Zerjadtke of https://www.linothorax.de/ has dealt with the problems with publishing by self-publishing a book on his and his students’ experiments reproducing ancient linen armour. It is available on Amazon for EUR 14,99 which is much more affordable than a book from a German academic press!
Der griechische Leinenpanzer im experimentalarchäologischen Versuch: Eine Zwischenbilanz des Hamburger Projektes mit Ausblick zum Hoplitenschild (Books on Demand, 2024) ISBN 978-3758315619 (Publisher’s Webpage) (amazon.de)
