A look at Lydian warfare

This blog post is a brief overview of warfare in ancient Lydia. It was inspired by my earlier blog post on the supposed "Western" way of war, and hopefully illustrates how difficult it can be to distinguish "east" from "west".

Ancient Lydia was located in Western Anatolia, east of the Greek...

Soldier, scribe, king: the career of Horemheb

After the premature death of the young King Tutankhamun (r. 1332–1323 BC) – who died without leaving an heir – there was a succession of kings who were of non-royal blood, or only very loosely related to the royal family. They include Ay (r. 1327–1323 BC) and Horemheb (r. 1323–1295 BC), the last...

A Western way of war?

In a recent review of the otherwise excellent collection of essays called Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives, I spent some time criticizing the use of the phrase "Western way of war" to refer to the mode of fighting employed by European cultures and their derivatives, chief among them...

Caesar in Germania

Our good friend Jona Lendering has posted breaking news (in Dutch) over on his blog, which I translate c.q. paraphrase below. Siggi Karcher, over at the Roman Army Talk forum, was the first to break this news, but Jona has written a coherent treatment on the subject. 

As everyone knows, Julius...

The archaeology of ancient warfare

This is a review of the book Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by John Carman and Anthony Harding and published in 1999 (the reviewed edition appeared in 2009). As an edited volume, it contains chapters written by a wide variety of different authors. (Obviously, I should note...

A talk on Arrian and Alexander the Great

Allan Vorda conducted an interview with James Romm, Associate Professor of Classics at Bard College, who edited The Landmark Arrian, probably the definitive ancient text on Alexander the Great. What follows is an interesting talk on Arrian and various aspects of the life and career of the famed...

Themes for volume VIII

We have just published the first issue of the seventh volume, on ancient Egypt, and are currently preparing the second issue, which will deal with the many wars fought on and over the island of Sicily. This means it's about time that we start thinking about possible themes to use for the next...