Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Interesting History Things #1

All Episodes

Previous Next

March 2, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

16:27

Interesting History Things #1

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello everyone, much in the same way that this week in Stupid started, I've come across a few interesting history links that aren't really worth doing an entire video on in and of themselves, but I thought maybe I could put them together and it would be something, well, interesting for people to watch.
	I feel like I haven't been doing enough history related content, and while I do love doing the history stuff, it takes a lot of time because I've got to do a lot of reading, and I thought this might be a good way of doing some history-related content without taking all the time in the world.
	So, first up, we're starting really near to where I live.
	Old Sarum archaeologists reveal plan of medieval city, which doesn't really sound too impressive on the surface of it, because surely that's what archaeologists are meant to do.
	However, the trick here is that the detailed plan of the medieval city has been produced by experts without any digging at the site.
	The latest scanning techniques were used to uncover a network of buildings at the 11th century Old Sarum near Salisbury, Wiltshire, which is really really close to where I live.
	I live in Wiltshire.
	The results include a series of large structures, possibly defences, with open areas of ground behind it, possibly for mustering resources or people.
	And Old Sarum was the original site of Salisbury, which is now two miles away, and I believe was called New Sarum.
	So here's a picture of the site from the air, and you can see that this was once an Iron Age fort.
	You can see why it would have been used as a fort.
	It's, you know, naturally defensible.
	The only real drawback to this is that even though they can see that there were industrial areas with kilns and furnaces and whatnot, they're not actually pulling anything out of the ground, so we don't actually have the artefacts to study and look at and analyse.
	But I suppose it does give us a good map of the site without damaging the area, so swings and roundabouts really.
	But personally, I think I'd actually rather if it was carefully excavated, because you never know what you're going to find.
	While we're dealing with medieval Europe, rare medieval manuscripts on ancient war machines are now online.
	The British Library has just added several Greek manuscripts to its online collection, including a lavishly illustrated 16th century compilation of treaties on warfare, which detail the science and tactics of siegecraft.
	The manuscript includes writings from several classical authors, including Apollodorus of Damascus, who was a Roman architect and engineer of the late 1st-early 2nd century AD.
	As Emperor Trajan's architect and military engineer, he was responsible for Trajan's Forum and possibly Trajan's Column, and he produced several designs for siege engines.
	And as a lover of history, I can't stress highly enough how important Apollodorus of Damascus was to Trajan.
	The man was an engineering genius, and it's well worth taking a look at these.
	One of the giant siege engines is described by the British Library as follows.
	The tower was usually rectangular, with four wheels and a height roughly equal to that of the wall.
	It was sometimes higher to allow archers to stand on top and fire into the fortification.
	The tower was chiefly made of wood, but sometimes there were metal components as well.
	They were both unwieldy to manoeuvre and slow to assemble, and consequently were usually constructed at the siege site.
	They were considered a last resort because only to be used if defences could not be overcome by ladder assault, mining or ramming.
	Sometimes siege towers themselves incorporated other devices including artillery, rams and drop bridges.
	So let's take a look at some of the diagrams then.
	This was the siege engine we were just referring to.
	You can see that it must have been a massive machine, with the at the bottom well fortified areas for people to push it up to the walls.
	And then it's basically a moving tower with cranellations at the top that archers could have hidden behind while they were reloading their crossbows or bows and then stepped out of to fire.
	This is obviously some kind of ladder device that I don't know anything about, I'll be honest.
	but it's obviously designed to scale walls with.
	I'm wondering if there's any protection to it, or if this was just literally the bare frame, and that these ladders look like they probably were adjustable in height.
	I mean if they weren't, why wouldn't you just have a ladder?
	Why would you go to the trouble of making some kind of engine for this?
	This was a testudo to allow soldiers to approach walls or fortifications without being molested by ranged fire.
	The soldiers would obviously hide inside this, push it forward until they reached their destination and then did whatever they needed to do, either undermine the walls or try and break down the gates or whatever they were doing.
	And here is a battering ram, which you can see is held by a chain with some kind of presumably iron-sharp head at one end.
	And it doesn't appear to have any kind of protection for the people using it, so maybe this was supposed to go inside the testudo.
	But I can't read ancient Greek, so I really can't see what the writing says.
	In other news, Rome's military women have been hiding in plain sight.
	Yes, this is the news that is going to cause feminists and Hannibal the Victor XIII to declare that half of Roman legions were made up of women, which they of course weren't.
	Don't worry, I'm being facetious.
	I'm sure not even Hannibal will say that any of Roman legionaries were female.
	The article says, talk about hiding in plain sight.
	Women are thought to have had no official role in Roman army activities.
	But now a monument that's been sittering the centre of Rome for almost 2,000 years is adding to the evidence that soldiers ignored a ban on marriage, and that wives and daughters of commanders might have taken part in triumphal ceremonies.
	Well, it's not really women taking an official role in Roman army activities, is it?
	Archaeologist Elizabeth Green told the 8-11 January annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans about six females depicted on the iconic Trajan's column in Rome, Italy, a triumphal monument to a military victory over the Dacians.
	The figures on the column are attendants holding sacrificial offerings at a military religious ceremony, a role usually carried out by boys, but six of them are clearly recognisable as women or girls, says Green.
	She thinks the six females may have been wives or daughters of senior officers, which I suppose they might have been, but there's no real way to prove one way or another.
	Here is the supporting image for one of the figures, and it's very difficult to say.
	I mean, she looks like a Roman woman would look.
	She seems to be reasonably well dressed with well-made hair, so perhaps she was someone of status.
	But we do have to stress that, as they pointed out in the article, she probably wasn't operating in an official capacity.
	We do know that Roman legionaries did have wives and mistresses with them, which they weren't supposed to do.
	So it's entirely possible that she was the daughter or wife of a military commander.
	So why didn't we notice this before?
	Well, her story, that's why.
	You see what you look for, says Lindsay Allison-Jones of the University of Newcastle, UK.
	Trajan's column tended to be studied by military historians looking for details on how things were built and machinery.
	Add to the fact that the column is more than 30 meters tall and it does actually become fairly easy to understand why they may have missed these details.
	We know that there were women and children at forts in Roman territory because we have archaeological evidence of it.
	At a site called Vindalander along Hadrian's Wall in northern England they found women's and children's shoes and they also found bronze plaques called diplomas which were given to provincial soldiers who owned a Roman citizenship by 25 years of service that mention wives and children.
	At Vinderlander Green says the non-legal de facto wife of a foot soldier probably lived outside the fort with their children and had to work because the average soldier wasn't paid enough to support a family.
	Van Driel Murray thinks that some women may have worked within the fort as cooks, seamstresses or washerwomen, which all seem perfectly reasonable to me.
	Apparently though, Penelope Allison of the University of Leicester UK says that shoes and brochures from the site in Germany from the same period indicate that the women there may have lived inside the forts.
	And she says they lived inside the barracks just like everyone else, engaging with the military community.
	Well, I'm sorry Alison, I find it very unlikely that civilian women lived inside and slept inside a Roman military barracks on a frontier in Germany.
	Just very unlikely.
	Even if the artifacts were found there, that might not be the only explanation.
	But apparently it might be some time until everyone believes this happened.
	She says, I'm still trying to convince the older generation, mostly classical scholars and historians, who have problems with these forts being mixed communities.
	I imagine it's because these people were misogynists, and not because mixing a bunch of civilian women with soldiers on a dangerous frontier is an unlikely proposition.
	Also, post-traumatic stress disorder.
	It's not just for people using Twitter.
	Apparently it was evident in 1300 BC.
	The team at Anglia Ruskin University analysed translations from ancient Iraq or Mesopotamia.
	Accounts of soldiers being visited by ghosts they faced in battle fitted with the modern diagnosis of PTSD.
	The condition was likely to be as old as human civilization, the researchers concluded.
	Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, a former consultant clinical psychologist for the Ministry of Defence, said the first description of PTSD was often accredited to the Greek historian Herodotus.
	This is actually not new if you go on history forums and read historical discoveries and whatnot.
	The idea that soldiers have had PTSD is actually quite an old meme, but it's nice to see that more and more evidence is accumulating.
	Herodotus wrote of a warrior called Apazalus during the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC against the Persians, where he says, he suddenly lost the sight of both eyes, though nothing had touched him.
	And in the report it's argued that there are references in the Assyrian dynasty in Mesopotamia between 1300 BC and 609 BC.
	609 BC is the fall of the Assyrian Empire, so I imagine that's probably where the references to the Assyrian dynasty's conquest stopped.
	But given the scale and brutality of the Assyrians during their history, I would not be surprised if many of their own soldiers walked away with PTSD from it.
	The scale of the Assyrian atrocities was unprecedented at the time that they were doing them.
	You wouldn't see anything like it until the Mongols, about 2000 years later.
	Professor Hacker Hughes says, they described hearing and seeing ghosts talking to them, who would be the ghosts of the people they'd killed in battle, and that's exactly the experience of modern-day soldiers who had been involved in close hand-to-hand combat.
	Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't really diagnosed until after the Vietnam War.
	It was dismissed as shell shock in World War I, which is where artillery really became, well, modern.
	In other news, King Tutankhamun's mask has been damaged.
	The beard has been snapped off during a botched cleaning.
	That is just amazing that anyone could be that clumsy.
	One of the most priceless treasures in archaeology, the gold funerary mask of King Tutankhamun, was damaged during a cleaning attempt at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and efforts to repair the problem were also botched according to the reports.
	Brilliant.
	The mask's beard snapped off in an attempt to clean it in October.
	Museum staff stuck it back on using epoxy, which leaked onto the surface of the mask and then dried.
	Then, the mask was scratched when workers scraped off the epoxy, according to Al-Arabi al-Jeed, a London-based Arabic news site.
	Why didn't you just stop?
	It's like they don't understand that this is irreplaceable.
	The masks should have been taken to a conservation lab, but they were in a rush to get it displayed quickly again and use this quick-drying irreversible material.
	Brilliant.
	Here's King Tutankhamun's funerary mask before it was vandalized by the cleaners.
	You can see why they consider this to be one of the most precious archaeological finds of all time.
	It's fucking beautiful.
	It's just amazing.
	And here is a side-by-side comparison of before and after.
	You can see what a ham-fisted bot job they've done of reattaching his beard.
	And here is some history news that you're probably already aware of.
	ISIS thugs take the hammer to civilization.
	Priceless 3,000-year-old artworks smashed to pieces in minutes as militants destroy a Mosul museum.
	Islamic State thugs have destroyed a collection of priceless statues and sculptures in Iraq dating back thousands of years.
	Extremists use sledgehammers and power drills to smash ancient artwork as they rampage through a museum in the northern city of Mosul.
	The video footage shows a group of bearded men in the Nineveh Museum.
	Oh Jesus Christ.
	Using tools to wreck 3,000 year old statues after pushing them over.
	I tell you, my dream destination for a holiday would be Iraq.
	I would love to go to Iraq, but what's the fucking point?
	What is the point when you have these savages smashing up the patrimony of the Iraqi people?
	This is how I'm certain that the ISIS fighters, like the Syrians were saying, these are foreign mercenaries who have come into the country.
	Because I swear to God, an Iraqi surely would not want to destroy his country's heritage this way.
	I mean look at this.
	This guy is defacing a Lamassu, a winged bull Assyrian protective deity, which dates back to the 9th century BC.
	It's almost 3,000 years old.
	Look at him, just destroying the face of such a beautifully carved ornament or monument.
	Just, ah, why?
	Well, they tell us why.
	The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered the countries after him.
	Yeah, dipshit, they meant to do it in churches, temples and mosques, not in museums, you morons.
	Militants are also believed to have sold ancient artwork on the black market in order to finance their bloody campaign across the region.
	I would be more than happy to pay for some of this.
	I swear to God, I would much rather it be sold on the black market than destroyed by psychopaths with sledgehammers.
	Since there is video, let's watch some of it, shall we?
	Yeah, I don't actually need your fucking shitty music while you're doing this, you savages.
	You fucking barbarians.
	Just, that's, I don't know.
	Statue of fucking Gilgamesh or something probably just yeah.
	Have we got some books to burn next?
	I mean, just...
	Ah, Jesus Christ.
	Okay, well, I don't think I can actually take watching any more of this.
	And yesterday it was revealed how terrorists had blown up the Mosul public library, sending 10,000 books and more than 700 rare manuscripts up in flames.
	fucking brilliant that is just i i am just so fucking upset about this It's just the absolute needless destruction of Iraq's past.
	And such an amazing history as well.
	I mean, I was so furious when the Americans built a military base on the ruins of Babylon.
	I was furious when American soldiers defaced the Zigguratavur.
	was absolutely livid but at least this wasn't a campaign of deliberate destruction of the past.
	So I guess I'll round this off with something a little more fun and light-hearted because goddamn that was disappointing.
	Here is a nice quiz.
	How well do you know the 6th century AD?
	The 6th century was a time of Justinian the Great, the Merovingians and supposedly King Arthur.
	Here are 10 questions about the people and events of this century.
	How many can you answer?
	And you can see by the results here that I answered 8 out of 10 correctly, which I'm actually disappointed about, but I completely muffed up the question about King Arthur.
	I forgot that Badenfield was the battle in which he defeated the Saxons, not the battle in which he died.
	Sorry, Baden Hill, Jesus Christ, what's wrong with me today?

▲