The reading room of the library of the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Photo by Sean Manning, March 2012.
For the last few weeks I have been trying to follow a lead on the origin of the idea that the Greeks made armour by gluing layers of linen together. Everyone who believes this theory today seems to have got it from the late Peter Connolly, but some of my American friends have found versions as early as 1869 (if you know of an earlier text linking glue and armour, please say so in the comments!) I think I can link it to Isaac Casaubon and another famous 16th century scholar, and show how between 1868 and 1875 their theory of linen soaked in vinegar until it became like felt turned into Connolly’s theory of linen soaked in glue until it became like a mask of bandages soaked in plaster. But my case for that will appear in a footnoted article not a blog post, and today I want to make a larger point which is useful even if you have never spent 10 minutes ranting about silly theories of armour construction.
Everyone with a browser and an uncensored Internet connection is two clicks away from every book in a great library. And if you chose to learn to use it, you can discover wonderful things known to very few people in this world. There are rooms full of books which which are interesting to some community today which have either been forgotten, or were never brought to the attention of that community because it did not exist in 1881. Armour in Texts might seem impressive, but most of the works there were quoted or summarized in about three books published before I was born. I did not find most of them by reading sources, I found most of them by reading people who had read sources and noted down which were useful for understanding armour. The farther back I dig into scholarly books on armour, the more interesting sources I find which nobody seems to read.
It helps if you can read even a little bit of any major language other than English, and if you know a little bit about 19th and early 20th century culture to spot the Edwardian equivalent of Osprey books and self-published treatises on how mainstream science is totally wrong. But I know plenty of people without a lot of university education or knowledge of other languages who have still found and copied useful things. This work is too big for me: I have a dissertation to finish, and I do not love every kind of learning equally.
Google Books and archive.org are the best known collections of digitized books, but even more useful are French projects like Persee and Gallica and German projects by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the University of Kassel. These projects are run by libraries and universities, and librarians are expert in putting books away in a place where they can be found again, and in warning people about issues like the different forms of letters used before the 20th century. (Google rushed to scan books and refused to listen to librarians, so about a third of their books are mis-catalogued and many have transcriptions which make basic blunders like confusing ʃ and f … and it is much more expensive to correct these mistakes after they have been scanned and processed than it would have been if they had moved more slowly and done it right the first time). But having any of these resources is a treasure, and it gives you powers which were once limited to people living in Vienna or Paris or London.
This picture combines deer, hockey, and a snowless New Year … what could be more Victoria than that?
Another year ends in the manner of the one which ended Xenophon’s Hellenica: after terrible battles and startling results, there is not peace but confusion and disorder. Xenophon’s perplexity lead to a Sacred War, 300 dead lions on the plain of Chaeronea, and the King dead in an abandoned carriage as his conqueror bent down and took his seal with clean white hands. As for me, I am getting to know the local deer and my old library.
Peter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565: now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession number 19.164). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Some people on the Internet are curious about how much a shirt cost in the middle ages. Now you could try to answer that question by trying to calculate how long it would take to spin and weave the linen and sew the shirt, combining your guesses in an elaborate chain of assumptions using your modern education. A certain Eve Fisher imagined and calculated and came up with the figures $3500 or $4200 for a shirt like those depicted by painters like Peter Brueghel the Elder. This has been re-posted by a number of popular websites, and several weavers and spinners have dropped by her website to comment that they are not so sure about some of her assumptions. But did you know that we can skip all of these guesses and calculations, and the questions which they pose about whether we spin and weave as fast as people in the past, and just ask medieval people how much they paid for a shirt?
Paladin Press in the USA, republisher of old military and intelligence manuals and publisher of the only handbook for plate armourers, an early interpretation of Sigmund Ringeck’s teachings on the longsword, and many excited books and videos with “combat” “tactical” “street” or “survival” in the title, is going out of business on 30 November 2017.... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Paladin Press is Shutting Down
One of the streets near the Zentrum für alte Kulturen, Innsbruck. Sorry for the rush-hour traffic, but sun waits for no photographer! This blog is in its fourth year, and I have posted almost every week. But in this fifth year (my years start in September), I have a dissertation to finish and some issues... Continue reading: Change in Plans
Some happy warriors after a historical fencing event in the Midwestern USA.
Quite a few people seem to be finding their way to my post about why I drifted away from the historical fencing movement. While I think it needed to be said, it might leave someone wondering what I found attractive about that world in the first place. Some of the reasons seemed obvious: the historical fencing movement gives people the chance to learn horse archery in Vancouver and a reason to get happy and sweaty with a group of friends (sometimes leading to to other more private happy-sweaty times). Those are wonderful things! And while I am not sure how much we can know about how ancient Greeks or Viking Age Norwegians used their shields, I think that someone who wants to know would be wise to get one and spend time moving it (because Thucydides and Snorri Stirluson wrote for an audience who had all used spear and shield). So this week, I would like to talk about some good things which the community does in 2017.
Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle died a few days ago. As someone who only knew him through his work, its hard for me to express what a brilliant, multitalented, frustrating individual he was. The summary of his career on Wikipedia gives some idea: born poor in Louisiana, conscripted into the US Army and sent to Korea as an artillery officer, he made his way through university by keeping a pot constantly simmering in his one-room apartment and got a doctorate in Political Science. Having just gotten started, he moved to Southern California and filled his life with political advocacy, academic work on the strategy of technology and operations research, hobbyist and professional wargaming, science-fiction fandom and the early SCA, fiction writing, a technology column for the early home computer movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually a blog (not to mention marrying and having two children, one a multi-talented academic and another who prefers a quiet life). Like some other Catholic intellectuals in rich English-speaking countries, he was a contrarian by nature and loved a good rant. Throughout his life he was fearless in expressing his political opinions and attacking his political opponents, but since he had very different convictions than I do, particularly later in his life, I will say no more about that here. He did his best to save the world from communism and his country from its most threatening neighbours, and his writings were an important influence on my thought in my teens and early twenties.
In the first two weeks of August there was a great kerfuffle about a BBC educational cartoon which showed a couple in Roman Britain who would be called multiracial in Late Capitalist Britain. Angry essays were typed, tweets flew with the wrath of the Stymphalian Birds, and many people hurried to let the Internet know which faction they aligned with. Neville Morley did a good job of summarizing how most ancient historians think about the problem in his blog post Diversitas et Multicultaralismus (no, a dark-skinned official and his light-skinned wife would not have been unheard of at Bath or Hadrian’s Wall; genetic data is exciting but just one of many kinds of evidence which historians draw upon to understand the past; genes are only loosely connected to identity). The Romans could be horrible snobs and bigots, but most of their stereotypes and slurs were directed at people from other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean … they do not seem to have been very interested in whether people had dark skin and kinky hair. In this post, I would like to talk about one of the methodological questions I have after reading the Wellcome Trust paper from 2015 by Leslie et al. which some people have been citing as evidence that negligible numbers of people from Africa had children in Britain before the 20th century (doi:10.1038/nature14230).
The countryside in Khuzestan (ancient Susiane/lowland Elam) near Ahwaz where 30 years ago the king of Babylon and the assembly of the land of Iran fought a terrible war.
As part of my dissertation I have to talk about conscription and how well it functioned in the Ancient Near East, and that turned me to a classic article. As I was searching for it I found another which I want to talk about.
Back in 1999, Norvell Atkine set out to explain to the American imperial elite why the “Arab armies” which they had armed and trained were so reluctant to fight the way that Americans told them to fight. These armies kept losing, so why were they rejecting help from more effective soldiers like him and his friends? “There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.” When I read it the first time, I took away his lovely anecdotes about the culture clash between American military personnel and the Arab officers which they had been assigned to collaborate with. Atkine focuses on the armies of Mubarak’s Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. But a few years ago, Caitlyn Talmadge wrote a scholarly article on one of the Arab armies which he is less interested in: Saddam Hussein’s. Her article has an abstract, so I will let her speak for herself:
Saddam’s Iraq has become a cliché in the study of military effectiveness—the quintessentially coup-proofed, personalist dictatorship, unable to generate fighting power commensurate with its resources. But evidence from the later years of the Iran-Iraq War actually suggests that the Iraqi military could be quite effective on the battlefield. What explains this puzzling instance of effectiveness, which existing theories predict should not have occurred? Recently declassified documents and new histories of the war show that the Iraqi improvements stemmed from changes in Saddam’s perceptions of the threat environment, which resulted in significant shifts in his policies with respect to promotions, training, command arrangements, and information management in the military. Threat perceptions and related changes in these practices also help explain Iraq’s return to ineffectiveness after the war, as evident in 1991 and 2003. These findings, conceived as a theory development exercise, suggest that arguments linking regime type and coup-ridden civil-military relations to military performance need to take into account the threat perceptions that drive autocratic leaders’ policies toward their militaries.
To put it bluntly, Saddam spent his time in power worried that someone would toss him in his own torture chambers. After all, most of the governments in the region, including his Baˀath party, were descended from a group of soldiers who had overthrown the previous regime. So he set up policies to ensure that the army was not a threat to him: strictly limiting communication between units, requiring minor acts to be authorized from Baghdad, refusing to allow different types of troops to train together, and killing officers who were too popular. This kept him in power for 25 years and able to play warlord, even if it also meant that his adventures cost the lives of too many of his own soldiers for little or no gain. The only time that he relaxed these politics was the late 1980s, when it seemed like if the war continued, his regime might collapse. As soon as he had driven the Iranians back across the border and made peace, he treated the army just like he had before, because once again he was more worried about a coup from within than an invasion from without. And while Saddam was crazy (and perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer), his 25 year rule suggests that he knew how to stay in power.
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
More 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.
