cross-post

Cross-Post: CFP Many Faces of War XI – March 4-6, 2026

From Graham Wrightson: Call for Papers – The Many Faces of War XI, The Consequences of Conquest – March 4-6, 2026Downtown Library, Sioux Falls, South Dakota In honor of the 250th anniversary of American Independence we will examine the origins of war, conflict, or battle and if there is a difference between rebellion or revolution. The... Continue reading: Cross-Post: CFP Many Faces of War XI – March 4-6, 2026

Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative

Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, offers 20 scholarships of at least CAD $40,000/year for four years to doctoral students whose offers from top U.S. schools have been rescinded or who are reconsidering their acceptance to a US school for the 2025/26 academic year. The application is straightforward: find someone willing to supervise you, show your... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Queen’s University Special U.S. Doctoral Recruitment Initiative

The Great Courses: The Achaemenid Empire on Sale

a screenshot of a teaser photo advertising a video course on "The Persian Empire" from The Great Courses and a DVD Closeout sale

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.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-persian-empire

CFP: 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.

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.

Dis Manibus: Peter James, Chronology Challenger

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.

a screenshot of the kickstarter page for "Bog Fashion: Recreating Bronze and Iron Age Clothing" by ChronoCopia Publishing in Sweden

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.

a detail of a stone relief of a man carrying an elephant tusk on his shoulder and leading a quadruped on a leash

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.

The Creature on the Persepolis Staircase

Cross-Post: Pleiades Project Training

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

Cross-Post: SASA Virtual Conference, Christian Cameron Patreon

The Save Ancient Studies Alliance will have a virtual conference on Representations of the Past in Ancient and Modern Times on 21 and 22 July 2024. The call for papers is open until 16 April.

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.