Innholdsfortegnelse for AH 34 i Ancient History Magazine

Any modern soldier will—perhaps surprisingly—tell you that warfare and boredom go hand in hand. There are long stretches of time while on campaign where there is nothing to do but wait. Ancient soldiers dealt with the same problem. Even in the Illiad, the Greeks spend large stretches of time in camp waiting and fighting amongst themselves, rather than dealing with the Trojans. Dating from ca. 510 BC, this Athenian vase shows Achilles and Ajax passing some of this time by playing a board game, while the goddess Athena keeps watch. In antiquity, even heroes had time for some fun.…

THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD: ca. 500 – 300 BC Apollo’s heavenly lyre, Orpheus’ enchanting voice, Pan’s reed pipes, and the Muses’ ethereal songs and dances: the prevalence of music in the myths, legends, and lore of ancient Greece’s heroes and deities bears witness to its centrality in their society and culture. Indeed, in addition to mythology, eminent Greek philosophers – including Plato – exalted music and produced significant discourse on the topic, further emphasizing its importance in classical antiquity. While we are acquainted with the musical activities of mythological figures and the deliberation of prominent thinkers by means of various extant stories and philosophical writings, what do we know about quotidian musical activity in ancient Greece? Where could one experience and listen to performances? As we do today, the Greeks…

THE ANCIENT GREEK AND HELLENISTIC WORLD: ca. 700 BC – AD 100 Symposia varied significantly, from friendly gatherings to political events and venues of intrigue. They also became sites for self-positioning and self-identification. Depictions and retellings of symposia developed into a rich literary and philosophical tradition. Traditionally, they have been seen as Greek events, particularly in Athenian and later Hellenistic culture; however, they had many precursors and variants in the Near East, such as the Judaic ‘marzeah’ or the banquets represented in Lydian, Median, Persian, and Phoenician sources and material remains. At its core, the symposium was a gathering of men (initially aristocratic, although it was later adopted by lower socio-political groups) who would come together in a specific room of an individual’s home or palace, named the andron (literally…

In Germania Inferior, an exchange of cultures, eating habits, and ingredients took place. For the first time in our history, new ingredients were introduced. A society emerged in which people were no longer self-sufficient and many mouths had to be fed. Bread played a central role. Grain trade Cereals were the most important staple in the ancient world. In the south of the Netherlands, grain merchants and large country villas (villae rusticae) on the fertile loess soils provided the production, trade, and supply of the necessary cereals to feed soldiers, camp villagers, and city dwellers. Enormous grain fields must have been located around the Roman villa at Voerendaal-Ten Hove, where a large threshing floor in the courtyard and a grain storage room of no less than 380 square meters was…

Gaming the Egyptian afterlife (Colleen Darnell) • Darnell, John Coleman. Egypt and the Deserts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. • Piccione, Peter. “Mehen Mysteries, and Resurrection from the Coiled Serpent,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 27 (1990): 43-52. • Piccione, Peter. “In Search of the Meaning of Senet,” Archaeology 33/34 (1980): 55-58. A Game of Soldiers (Jo Ball) • Austin, R.G. “Roman Board Games I”. Greece & Rome 4, 1934: 24-34. • Finkel, I.L. Ancient Board Games in Perspective. London: British Museum Press, 2007. • Hall, Mark A., and Katherine Forsyth. “Roman rules? The introduction of board games to Britain and Ireland” Antiquity 85, 2011: 1325-1338. • Parlett, David. The Oxford History of Board Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Ancient symposia (Daniel Kershaw) • Hunter, R.…

EDITORIAL – SUN AND FUN WITH THE ANCIENTS The past year has been difficult to say the least; for many of us, it was fraught with anxiety, loneliness, and uncertainty. After such a turbulent year, I personally longed for a little levity, and as London slowly opens back up and comes to life, a little fun, too. This issue came about through that longing; I wondered, how did the ancients have fun? Obviously, there were no Netflix series to binge, no Zoom with friends, no social media to endlessly scroll through, or a million other things that we have the luxury of escaping into in our present time, so I decided to explore that avenue and set about planning a lighter issue around summer, fun, and plain old enjoyment. There…

For those with the means and opportunity, tourism and travel could also become a form of entertainment. The Persian king Xerxes provides a perfect example of this. Before invading Thessaly in the summer of 480 BC, he gathered his forces in Therma (modern Thessaloniki). Seeing the peaks of Olympus and Ossa, he decided to visit the canyon between the two mountains, called Tempe. One reason was to reconnoitre the road ahead. The Greek researcher Herodotus (Histories 7.128-130) mentions a second motive: the king greatly admired the great works of nature. The royal visit offers Herodotus an opportunity to digress. Referring to an ancient myth that the god Poseidon had created the Tempe canyon, he comments that this is a reasonable explanation. After all, he argues, the poet Homer had called…

THE ROMAN EMPIRE: ca. AD 1 – 500 More than gladiatorial games, chariot races, or theatre performances, a visit to the public bathhouse was an indispensable part of daily Roman life and above all a pleasurable pastime. The popularity of bathing can be inferred from the numerous remains of bathhouses found in all four corners of the Empire, and from the uncountable references in ancient literature and inscriptions. The origins of public bathhouses go back to the Greek-Hellenistic period, when modest bath buildings housing several individual bath tubs were introduced to large parts of the Mediterranean. It was only during the Roman period that bathhouses evolved from small facilities for cleaning off the proverbial dust into the large and luxurious leisure facilities that offered all sorts of entertainment. The peace…

The ancient Greek drinking game of kottabos was immensely popular from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC. It involved holding a kylix drinking cup with the index finger through one of the handles and spinning the cup so that the dregs (or lees) of wine would fly out, usually at a target (plastinx) or bowl (or targets within the bowl). The thrown wine had to make a noise when it struck – both the wine and noise were called the latax. You had to recline as you threw, leaning on one elbow. Players competed for rewards, and the game was usually played at symposia. Surviving cups show wear on the handles, telling us they have been used in games of kottabos. The game is also depicted on many vases…

This trail of crumbs of information gives us an idea of which types of bread were eaten 2000 years ago in the Netherlands. I have therefore attempted to reconstruct a Roman bread from Germania Inferior for you. Ingredients » 300 g spelt flour » 100 g emmer wheat flour (or wheat flour) » 100 g barley flour » 150 g active sourdough starter* » 8 g sea salt » 300 ml tepid water » 1 tbsp crushed coriander seeds » 2 tbsp poppy seeds » ½ tsp dill seeds Put the spelt, emmer, and barley flours into a bowl with the sourdough (or yeast), salt, and tepid water. Mix well with your hand until the dough comes together. Add coriander, poppy, and dill seeds and mix. Turn the dough out…

ANCIENT BRITAIN AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE: ca. 300 BC – AD 520 A few miles north of Poole Harbour, on a high point between the rivers Stour and Allen, is the Iron Age fort of Badbury Rings, defended by three concentric rings of ramparts and ditches. It was a key vantage point and principal settlement for the local people, and numerous circular hollows terraced into the domed interior of the hillfort are evidence for the circular timber-framed houses they occupied before the arrival of the Romans. This was a well-populated landscape, as surrounding Badbury, archaeological surveys have revealed three other large settlements and many farmsteads occupied over 2000 years ago. This area lay within the territory of a tribe known as the Durotriges. The tribe did not capitulate in AD…

ANCIENT EGYPT: ca. 3250 – 1600 BC In the popular imagination of ancient Egypt, hieroglyphic texts and papyrus scrolls – think the “Book of Thoth” that awakens Boris Karloff in the 1932 The Mummy – are seen as serious business. The humour and playfulness of texts and scenes, even in formal contexts of temples and tombs, can be easily lost in the seemingly stiff poses of the human figures that line the walls of many Egyptian monuments. A similarly dualistic approach is evident when we turn to more personal forms of entertainment – board games. One example will suffice to appreciate the ancient Egyptian sense of humor. In the first court of the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu are depictions of wrestlers and fencers that decorate a…

ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME: ca. 600 BC – AD 100 Most of us will recognise from our own social circles people who are mentally agile but physically inept; conversely, there are individuals whose prowess at sport is hardly matched by their sparkle in conversation. So where did it come from – this idea that sound ness of mind and body are mutually dependent? The source of the original Latin expression should warn us to be careful how we take it. It was a poet, Juvenal, who in the course of describing everything that was corrupt and ridiculous about Roman society in the mid-first century AD, fixed his satirical eye upon the many dreams and aspirations underlying everyday action – “the vanity of human wishes”. Juvenal’s advice was to limit your…

Game boards, counters, and dice are common finds at military sites. Games were popular among the wider population – the emperor Claudius was such a fan of one dice game that he wrote a book about it (it hasn’t survived) and fit a gaming board into his carriage so he could play on the move – it seems soldiers were no exception. Roman board games A wide range of board and dice games were played in the Roman world; they have been documented in the historical record and discovered in archaeological finds. Several were what might be thought of as the ‘classic’ games – these are the ones discussed by Roman writers, giving us more insight than we might otherwise have into the rules (although even then, the exact way…

Ostensibly, he strengthened Hellenism across Cyprus with his decidedly anti-Persian policies, elevating Salamis from relative obscurity and earning Isocrates’ unreserved praise. Historians have since come to question whether his actions were solely driven by his commitment to philhellenism (love of Greek culture). However, regardless of his motives, Evagoras skilfully wielded his political currency. Ever the Machiavellian strategist, he forged and severed alliances, wilfully provoked and pacified regional powers, and dared to defy Achaemenid will in the Eastern Mediterranean. King Evagoras’ story begins when he was exiled from his childhood home in Salamis. At some point, a Phoenician usurper, Abdemon of Tyre, seized the Salaminian throne and “reduced the city to barbarism [bringing] the whole island into subservience to the Great King [i.e., Artaxerxes II]” (Evagoras 9.19). Evagoras escaped and fled…

THE SYMPOSION IN ANCIENT GREEK SOCIETY AND THOUGHT By Fiona Hobden Cambridge University Press, 2013 ISBN: 978-1316613733 Hobden explores the symposion as a key cultural phenomenon in ancient Greece. She investigates its place in society and thought by exploring the rhetorical dynamics of its representations in literature and art. Investigating the symposion’s discursive potential enhances our understanding of how the Greeks experienced and conceptualized the symposion and demonstrates its contribution to the Greek thought world. BATHING IN PUBLIC IN THE ROMAN WORLD By Garrett G. Fagan University of Michigan Press, 1999 ISBN: 978-0472088652 Fagan explores the Roman public bathing experience primarily as a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon rather than a technological or architectural one. He reconstructs what a trip to a Roman bath was like and asks when and…