Category Archives: History

Scientists Decode Ancient Script That Has Puzzled Scholars for 70 Years

The decipherment of the mysterious writing system, which was in use from around 200 B.C. and 700 A.D., has revealed a previously unknown language.
— Read on www.newsweek.com/scientists-decode-ancient-script-kushan-1813090

Archaeological dig in Galilee uncovers mosaics of Samson | UNC-Chapel Hill

The 11th season of excavations in the 1,600-year-old synagogue at Huqoq also reveals a panel with an inscription commemorating the donors who funded the mosaic or the artists who made it.
— Read on www.unc.edu/posts/2023/07/10/unc-chapel-hill-led-archaeological-dig-in-galilee-uncovers-mosaics-of-samson-and-commemorative-inscriptions/

Great War of Civilizations 2300 BC : Mesopotamia vs. the Indus Valley Civilisation and its allies

In this presentation, we reconstruct a great war which took place around the 24th century BC, between the expansionist Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon the Great and extended by his successors on one side, and the confederation of various armies on the other, involving, the civilization of Ancient Elam, Gutians, Magan and Dilmun from the Persian Gulf, and Marahasi – most likely the civilisation of the Oxus extending into eastern Iran – supported by the armies of Meluhha, or, the Indus Valley Civilization of the Harappans, among others.

Portraits of People and Society From Palmyra – American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

Palmyra, positioned on an oasis in the Syrian steppe, flourished because of the role its inhabitants played in the caravan trade that crossed through the region. The wealth thereby accrued was used to finance the construction of temples, arches, colonnaded streets, an agora, theater, lavish houses…
— Read on www.asor.org/anetoday/2022/06/portraits-people-society-palmyra

Kush, Rome, and their Common Frontier » World history

The first book of Procopius’ Persian Wars’728 729 provides the major documentary evidence for Roman and Byzantine frontier policy toward the Nubian kingdoms of the Noubades and Blemmyes south of Egypt, and also implicitly addresses the interaction between Rome and Meroitic Kush before the political collapse of the Meroitic state in the middle to late fourth century CE. The northern Nubian frontier area known as the Dodekaschoinos (“Twelve schoinos region”), an approximately 135 kilometer-long frontier area running south from Aswan, was a buffer zone established by Kush and Rome in the aftermath of the Roman-Kushite war between 29 and 21 BCE.730 Although it often is interpreted as a unilateral act by Rome, the discoveries in 1910 of the Hamadab stela and a royal complex in the vicinity of Meroe city, the capital of the Meroitic kingdom, provide the Kushite perspective on the war.731 The stela recalls the Kushite queen ameniras and her prince Akindad and their celebration of victory over Rome. For them, the Kushite concession to a Roman presence in lower Nubia was a mutually advantageous victory that permitted their continued patronage of nubian temples in the region.
— Read on www.worldhistory.biz/ancient-history/56680-kush-rome-and-their-common-frontier.html

Shackled by Doctrines: Why Western Strategists Need to Start Taking Ancient Chinese Texts Seriously

Marathon, Thermopylae, Guagamela, Cannae. These iconic battles permeate the collective consciousness of most contemporary Western military strategists, even if the historical details remain hazy. Writing after the conclusion of World War II, Dwight Eisenhower argued that “every ground commander seeks the battle of annihilation; so far as conditions permit, he tries to duplicate in modern war the classic example of Cannae.”[9] Most will not need a history refresher to grasp his point.

Similarly, by denying the importance of China’s own military history, Western strategists needlessly handicap their own ability to gain deeper insight into Beijing’s unique strategic and military thought processes. The People’s Liberation Army’s authoritative text on strategic thinking, The Science of Military Strategy, holds up the battles of Changshao (fought in 685 BCE)  and Bi (597 BCE) as “outstanding examples demonstrating the successful implementation of strategic guidance (戰略指導).”[10] While accounts of these iconic battles are readily found in extant historical sources, such as the Zuozhuan and the Grand Scribe’s Records, how many Western strategists possess even a basic awareness of these conflicts, let alone a deeper understanding of what contemporary lessons Chinese military leaders might be drawing from them? As Yuen Foong Khong argues in his work on the use of analogies in strategic thinking:

Because policymakers often encounter new foreign policy challenges and because structural uncertainty usually infuses the environment in which responses to such challenges must be forged, policymakers routinely turn to the past for guidance. When they do so, it behooves us to take the historical analogies they invoke seriously: these analogies do matter…analogies exert their impact on the decision-making process; they make certain options more attractive and others less so.[11]
— Read on thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2022/5/31/shackled-by-doctrines-why-western-strategists-need-to-start-taking-ancient-chinese-texts-seriously

A collision of rival visions — Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 by Neil Faulkner review

Before this book deals with either empires or jihad, we are first plunged into the world of the African slave trade. None of its horrors are omitted. Columns of armed slavers fall upon sub-Saharan pastoral tribes whose way of life has not changed since the Iron Age. Their clubs, spears, and bows are no match for the slavers’ muskets, and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children are rounded up every year to be dragged off to market. Countless numbers die on the way, as they march in shackles for weeks through the pitiless sun. Their routes can be followed by tracing the bones of the dead on the wayside, or the specialist centres established to turn captured boys into eunuchs.

On this occasion, neither Edward Colston nor the Royal African Company were responsible. The slaves were not destined for the cotton fields of the American south, nor the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. While a few of the slave masters may have been Portuguese, most of them were Arab-Swahilis or Arab-Sudanese. The rank and file of the armed slavers were themselves generally African tribesmen. The main beneficiaries of the trade were Arab and African merchants, as well as local east African potentates. Their captives’ ultimate destinations would be the harems, souks, and fine houses of North Africa and the Middle East.
— Read on engelsbergideas.com/books/a-collision-of-rival-visions-empire-and-jihad-the-anglo-arab-wars-of-1870-1920-by-neil-faulkner-review/