And his description of Egyptian 'baris' boats on the Nile that had no ribs, and dragged a two-talent (~52 kilograms) stone behind them on the river bottom, and were made of thorn trees took a lot of ribbing by those doubters who didn't believe such a craft ever existed. But he has at last been exonerated by archeologists. They excavated such a craft in the Nile Delta at Thonis-Heraclion.
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/54640#comments
Troop carriers perhaps? Maybe not as they would have had to be towed upriver. But going downriver that stone drogue being dragged behind would have made it a stable platform, slowed it down, and kept it in the main channel. I've seen drift boats on the Wynoochee and Cowlitz rivers do something similar dragging a heavy chain on the bottom when fishing for salmon or steelhead. Illegal as hell, and subject to heavy fine, but it's done anyway.
And the 'gold-mining-ants' turned out to be somewhat true also - just a bad translation of the old Persian word for "marmot" with that for "mountain ant". According to French ethnologist Michel Peissel anyway. He says that local people in northern Pakistan have collected gold dust for many generations that had been inadvertently brought to the surface by marmots when digging their burrows.
So I am confident that in the future there will be verification of some of Herodotus' other not-so-tall tales. Maybe some budding archeologists can find traces of Phoenician sailors circumnavigating Africa two millennia prior to the Portuguese?
Or of Massegetae Queen Tomyris beheading Cyrus the the Great of Persia? That may be a tough one as Cyrus' tomb
was raided for grave goods and has lain empty of his bones for probably
hundreds of years. Plus Iran's Supreme Leader and his ayatollahs
certainly won't allow any historical investigations about some female
warrior besting the man who has played such " a crucial role in defining the national identity of modern Iran." Regardless, I'm waiting for the movie about Tomyris, starring the lovely and exotic Kazakhstanka Almira Tursyn. To be released soon by KazakhFilm.https://kazakh-tv.kz/en/view/culture/page_198349_a-historical-film-%E2%80%98tomiris%E2%80%99-is-nearing-its-completion
Update: Xenophon claims Cyrus died peacefully in his sleep. But he had no first hand knowledge, only what Cyrus the Younger told him. But Cyrus the Younger was five or six generations removed and had an interest in vindicating the family name. Sounds like a biased source to me. I'll stick with Herodotus and the Kazakhs.
This is one of the many reasons I ALWAYS open the Milpub every day even if I don't look at anything else. Well done, Mike!
ReplyDeleteThanks, but undeserved. Kudos should go to the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine and the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology. All the rest is just brainfarts on my part.
Deletehttps://www.ieasm.institute/institute.php?lang=en
BTW these guys are also doing some interesting undersea exploration in the Philippines and Cuba.
http://projects.arch.ox.ac.uk/ocma.html
PS - meant to add that the Oxford Center is doing great research in the Indian Ocean.
DeleteGood discussion of the respective strengths and weaknesses of the "big name" ancient historians (Heroditus, Thuycidides, and Xenophon) here: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/03/herodotus
ReplyDeleteI've always tended to read Thuycidides as "history" and Heroditus as more like a "historical novel". The fundamental story is there - this isn't Suetonius - but Heroditus never met a good story he didn't like. Makes for a fun read, but I always wonder if the fun isn't more the point...
Herodotus always took the opportunity to go off on a storytelling tangent. His basic intent was to provide a record of the Greek struggle with what they referred to as barbarians. But in his descriptions of those barbarian' lands and peoples he just can't help himself from sandwiching into the chronicle the anecdotes and tales he has been told. Or sometimes observed himself, but he is honest when giving those non-observed events as second hand.
DeleteIt is a fun read. But is 'fun' the point, or is it a method to get the point across. Some academicians think that Herodotus started out verbally with his histories - i.e. an orator before becoming a writer. Others believe his histories were preparation for an oral performance. In any case the oral tradition in Ancient Greece had a strong effect on him.
Thucydides does seem more scientific. "Just the facts, Mam' like Sergeant Friday. But there is no way that Thucydides was an eye witness to the entire Peloponnesian War. And he does not reveal his sources.
Xenophon, the soldier, was a better historian than either of them. But he undoubtedly stood on their shoulders.
Well...Heroditus also seems to have some geographic issues, as well, regarding the Massagetae. So I'm not sure there's a sure dog in this fight.
DeleteWhat IS interesting is the ancient writers who link them with the Huns. Procopus certainly did. Mind you, to a Roman (or Greek) writer all these horse-nomads were just "barbarians" in the same way that the Navajo and the Cheyenne were just "injuns" to a U.S. Congressman of 1870...
If I learned anything from doing all those "battles" pieces it was how badly military history suffered as a result of the lack of literacy among the people doing the actual fighting. A guy who'd never come closer to an angry Hun than the window of his scriptorium would be liable to buy off on some old soldier story simply because he didn't have any sort of reason to reject it. That's where you get these ridiculous troop numbers for organizations that couldn't have put half that many people in the field on their best day if they had a magical pony. There's no cause to slag off on writers like Heroditus or Tacitus who accepted what they'd been told about the "barbarians". The idea of actually fact-checking the stories just hadn't been invented.
DeleteHell, some of the battle narratives of the 19th Century read like novels; in his opening chapters to the 1976 The Face of Battle - which is still today one of the better works of military history - John Keegan points this out as a reminder that the old romantic novelization style of military history writing took a long time to be replaced (or never has been; there's still a LOT of bad war porn passing as military history out there...)
Actually, "facts" as we moderns know them, had not been invented then.
DeleteBut the ancients (and medievals) could recognize things like narrative and consequence/subsequence, and there's a fair bit of straightforward historical narrative dating from pre-modern times that works quite well today. The problem unique to militiary history is that decisions made during military operations are often made for reasons unique to those operations, and if you don't understand the unique constraints of, say, moving heavy cavalry through bad terrain in the summer, you are likely to attribute unreasonable motives for the maneuver.
DeleteArmed combat is a very odd thing for people who have never experienced it, and even for those who have it's often every difficult to make sense of; I've experienced a very little of it and can tell you that the worm's-eye view is troublesome in how it makes you susceptible to rumor and credulity about that rumor.
So I'm sure that some of the issues spring from a differing concept of what constitutes "fact"...but much may be owed simply to the unique difficulty of getting an un-skewed over-view of what is by nature a very frightening, chaotic, illogical, and difficult-to-assess sort of thing...
Yes, Chief, you are entirely correct in what you say. I simply point out that some fundamentals of how we analyse information have changed over the millennia. Thus it makes it hard to understand how Herodotus expected his readers to perceive his writing. I am unsure of the importance of this understanding gap, but it is there.
DeleteYou can also see this difference when reading ancient "science" writing, although some folks (e.g. Euclid) can almost be "modern".
On a side note, I am convinced that Socrates would have been the worst Twitter Troll, ever.
Ael - Socrates tweets may have been more biting perhaps. But no way he could top or even come close to the shitposting of Cadet Bone-Spurs.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThose 'battle' pieces you used to do were researched a thousand times better than anything from H or Th or X. When will you post another? No need to focus on 'decisive' battles. I'm down with 'indecisive' or 'inconclusive' battles - speaking of the Huns how about Battle of Chalons?
ReplyDeleteOr how about those battles that ended in Pyrrhic victories? Must be hundreds of them that eventually turned the winner into a loser in the long run. Or even a piece on old King Pyrrhus himself with some observations on modern counterparts?
Or how about 'phony' battles? Henry VIII? Trump's 'River of Blood' battle plaque on one of his golf courses in Northern Virginia:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/donald-trumps-golf-course-plaque-honors-fake-civil-war-battle-253119/
PS - regarding geographical errors by H: Did he err in the location of the Massagetae? Or did he mistranslate the name of a river? I, and others, are occasionally confused over the Araxes and the Oxus - one west of the Caspian and the other east. Plus the Massagetae were horse nomads - they may well have travelled E, W, N, and S of that Sea during their clashes with Cyrus and his successors.
He has the same confusion on where the rivers are that the other classical writers do, probably simply because they just didn't know where it was and guessed, the contemporary equivalent of "over there somewhere..."
DeleteI had a distance argument with a friend about some von Clausewitz theory stuff a while ago. He made an assertion, I disagreed, he brought forward a quote, I looked it up and wrote there's no such quote in "Vom Kriege", but identified a similar passage and explained its different meaning.
ReplyDeleteHe then proceeded to insist that the translation of his book was better, I disagreed becuase dictionaries don't even offer the words as possible translation. His final argument was that the German army's officer academy had approved of his book's and I wondered since when anyone would think of an officer academy as the place to go to verify translations.
Long story short; I concluded a long time ago that one needs to understand the original language to read ancient books at least somewhat correctly (and getting things totally correct is a much greater task).
This chills my interest in delving into ancient authors' texts in detail.
I would love to be able to read H, Th, and X and many others in ancient Greek. And CvC and Hesse in German, Guibert and Voltaire in French, Mao and Luo Guanzhong in Chinese, plus Sokolovsky and Tolstoy in Russian. Unfortunately I'm a monolinguist except for a small smattering of Spanglish and pidgin Viet. So I have read them in English translations.
DeleteBut it seems you are saying I should not have bothered. I disagree. Anyone who only sips from the well of his own country's wisdom and ignores the knowledge of others is missing the boat. IMHO that is. Seems to me that would turn into an echo chamber - or a self-licking ice-cream-cone.
One can read translations, but should remember that one read a translator's book, not the original - and thus draw little to no conclusions about the original from the translation.
DeleteEven reputable translations aren't necessarily good, and this should be especially so regarding translations that happened after 2,000 years.
I remember a translation of Caesar's Gallic War where the Germanic warriors are described as fighting in "a phalanx". Today's historians are sure that they did indeed not fight in the way of the Greek phalanx, but maybe in a tight formation. Caesar might have written "phalanx" as word for "overlapping shields formation".
DeleteOn the other hand...can you imagine the fun Suetonius would have with Orange Foolius and his crew? Melania the White Witch, Javanka, all the Russian tools, the idiots and grifters? His Lives of the Skeevesers would be an instant classic. If ever there was a writer born for the Time of Trump..!
ReplyDelete