In July and August I was working on a life of my father Kelly Bert Manning who died in 2020. His sickness and death affected many people. Some other things reminded me of how other people’s lives have been derailed by the death of someone close to them.
Read moreNews 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 moreSince early in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, critics have warned about ghost soldiers. A significant part of the payroll of the old Iraqi and Afghan armies was soldiers who had never existed, or had died or deserted, or were just collecting pay but had never expected to do anything dangerous for it (or never been trained to fight). This was an easy way for the people in charge of an army or navy to get rich. I talked about this timeless swindle in my first book, Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire:
Read moreThe temple archives imply that some officials abused their positions to enrich themselves or hurt their enemies: the notorious Gimillu, a lowly širku of Ištar at Uruk, is a famous example. Matthew Stolper has collected a series of tablets where officials complain that they do not have a full allotment of supplies or workers, but are still expected to achieve the same amount of work, or that other officials have taken their workers and not replaced them. Even if Babylonians had distinguished between ‘civil’ and ‘military’ service, CT 22, 74 shows that officials also argued about who had jurisdiction over particular groups of soldiers. In Thucydides’ day, Greek observers worried that Tissaphernes might call a royal fleet into his satrapy in order to make money in exchange for release (ἐκχρηματίσαιτο ἀφείς 8.87.3). Xenophon’s Socrates also mentions bad garrison commanders who “neglect their commands or make money from them” and are punished by the king (Xen. Oec. 4.7 ἢ καταμελοῦντας τῶν φρουραρχιῶν ἢ κατακερδαίνοντας). Both writers’ Greek is vague and colloquial, but in other armies leaders have let soldiers return home in exchange for a fee or for keeping their salary, charged for exempting them from unpleasant duties, sold things and recorded them as lost in action, assigned soldiers to work which makes money for the commander, or embezzled money meant for pay and supplies. These scams are documented in the armies of the past 500 years, but also in Roman documents and literature, and it would be very unlikely that the Achaemenids managed to prevent all of their officials from abusing their position in these ways.
Manning, Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire: Past Approaches, Future Prospects (2021) pp. 201, 202
Inside Urim there is death, outside it there is death. Inside it we are to be finished off by famine. Outside it we are to be finished off by Elamite weapons. In Urim the enemy oppresses us, oh, we are finished.
The Lament for Sumer and Urim, lines 389-402 (ETCSL 2.2.3)
Industrial Age
Read moreMore than 140 civilians have been killed in less than a week while trying to flee western Mosul, according to military sources [among the besiegers], as the Iraqi army seeks to close in on fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in the armed group’s last stronghold in Iraq.
According to the [besieging] military on Thursday, most of the fatalities were women and children.
“Mosul battle: At least 142 civilians killed in six days” http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/mosul-battle-120-civilians-killed-days-170601113018034.html
