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Reading Neil Price's "Children of Ash and Elm," survey of Viking history, about halfway through. The first part of the book is more a loose collection of sociological essays, one chapter per subject, and I'm just getting into the "history proper" with the start of the 8th c. raids. Interesting stuff so far: -He suggests that the environmental disasters of the 6th c., which killed a large portion of northern Europe's population, motivate the idea of Fimbulwinter and color the apocalyptic tenor of Norse myth, but says there's no real way to prove this. -The English almost certainly had contact with the Vikings prior to the raids, but were shocked at their apparently inexplicable turn to looting and violence in Western Europe. -The Vikings regularly participated in human sacrifice and ritual rape, and probably brutally killed people (usually through blunt trauma) to act as "secondary burials," or people thrown in graves alongside the dead bodies of important people. He says Ibn Fadlan's account of the gory boat burial (involving the ritual rape and murder of a slave woman) in the Rus is probably largely accurate, which if true makes it one of the most hosed up things ever described. -Viking graves have inexplicably idiosyncratic stuff thrown into them. No one knows what there Vikings did with the majority of the ashes of cremated bodies, all of which weren't interred in crematory burials. -Viking halls had insignias associated with them. These were impressed onto small plates and placed on the walls of other halls when one visited them, like trading cards or business cards. -Viking "sea-king" culture violently displaced an earlier more representative political form that survived more intact in Iceland. The author suggests the "sea kings" have cultural analogies to age-of-exploration pirates and gangsters. -The Vikings were probably hot, given that foreigners always seemed impressed by their looks on meeting them. -Despite being literate, the Vikings have no long-form texts of their own from within the Viking period itself (as opposed to from the later high medieval recollections of that period). -The switch to the "Viking age" is characterized as simultaneously a mercantile revolution in NW-ern Europe and an explosion of a violent military culture now "pointed outward" that was first honed internally in Scandinavia.
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Feb 20, 2024 05:27
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I'm reading books in halves, because I have a hard time finishing them all in one go, so before getting back to the Vikings I read the first half of Eckart Frahm's "Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire." The book mostly focuses on the late kings of the "neo-Assyrian empire." The stuff before that is an impenetrable swirl of names and dates and peoples. Some interesting things: -Ashur was originally a merchant city with little interest in warfare, which for mysterious reasons reinvented itself as a land empire engaged in perpetual warfare on its peripheries, with a divine mandate to expand its territory. -The Assyrians were "Babylonia-boos," obsessed with the culture of their older southern neighbor. There was a very weird love-hate thing going on there, with the northern and southern states being ascendant at different times. -"God-napping" was a favorite strategy in Assyrian warfare (or maybe this was just everywhere in the Near East?) – the ultimate humiliation was to take the statues of foreign nations' gods, which seems to have been a stand-in somehow for taking the god itself(?) -The characteristic art-style associated with Assyria (winged bulls and so on) is apparently a fairly late invention of the neo-Assyrian empire, and arose in a fairly short span of time. -The Assyrian kings and army are portrayed as almost charmingly parochial when they had to face foreign territories on campaign in settings very distinct from their homeland – they had descriptions of deserts and mountains written in pretty colorful language, and seemed bewildered by them and frustrated at how they were an obstacle for the movements of the armies. The Assyrians also never really mastered seafaring, being a true contiguous land empire to the end. -For some reason, Frahm is fixated on the idea of Assyria as the "first empire." I don't really understand this claim, and he only devotes a couple of pages to talking about what he takes an empire to be and why the other obvious candidates don't count. I don't really understand from this book why the Akkadian "empire" is not the better first candidate. -Apparently, poo poo hit the fan when Sargon II died on campaign in modern-day Turkey and his body couldn't be recovered to be buried. His new capital was left abandoned, and his son and grandson seemed to in turn try to erase his memory and then publicly acknowledge his shameful death as the result of displeasing the Assyrian gods. -Sennacherib was apparently mentally unwell, so that he was described as possessed by a demon – it reminds me of the portrayals of Saul and Nebuchadnezzar. -Frahm describes the "siege" of Jerusalem in 701 BC by Sennacherib's forces as the first "world event," unique in history up to that time for the number of nations involved (he represents it as a kind of clash between the two "world powers" of Egypt and Assyria, with Judah caught in the middle as the final prize in the western Levant), and unique for being described in the historical records by three distinct civilizations: The Judeans, in the books of Isaiah, 2 Kings, and 2 Chronicles; the Assyrians, in a number of royal inscriptions (and artworks depicting the siege of Lachish beforehand); and the Greeks, through Herodotus. -The Assyrians were masters of deportation and relocation of their conquered enemies. From the way it's described it seems like they did the equivalent of the Trail of Tears regularly. Apparently there are historians who try to claim the deportations weren't so bad, but I think you'd have to be on crack to believe that. -The Assyrians in the latter years kept relocating the capital, and building newer and larger cities to act as the imperial center, with Nineveh being the last. A sign of decadence? Overall, I find this stuff pretty unpleasant – it's probably because all the sources deal primarily with warfare, plague, dispossession of foreign enemies, etc. I don't think you can get an interesting picture of what life was like in these places from these sorts of sources, and from their royal inscriptions, the kings of Assyria seem insane. I certainly could never be an "Assyria-boo."
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Feb 26, 2024 22:14
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Ithle01 posted:Interesting book from the way you describe it. I don't think anyone who knows anything about the Assyrians is going to go in expecting something nice or pleasant to read about they had a reputation after all. Well, what's interesting to me is that it's a tendency of contemporary historians to "downplay" whatever it is they devote their lives to studying. Every contemporary historian I read has a kind of apologetic tone, almost like their identity is tied up with what they devote their lives to, so just saying "Assyria was bad" is impossible – you have to say something like "well, yes, Assyria basically committed the Trail of Tears on a regular basis, but they had a great system of roads!" and act like there's some moral equivalence there. I think part of it might be distance in time – everything seems morally neutral when it happened in the past for some reason – and part of it is a kind of default contrarianism that's expected of the scholar (to be a scholar interfacing with the public is always to tell people something surprising or that goes against their expectations). Part of it also might be that if you study something for long enough, your identity gets deeply bound up in it, so just being repulsed by it or condemning it becomes impossible because you personally are interested in it or have stakes in it. The thing is, it doesn't work, because the weird equivocal and apologetic tone ("maybe the Assyrian deportations weren't so bad?"") obviously contradicts the actual material you're presenting. Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 17:55
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Ithle01 posted:I haven't really had this experience with reading contemporary history and, honestly, I think that most contemporary history is significantly better than that written in the past, but that's just what I've been reading. If you read about any group of humans you will inevitably get to some messed up stuff. The Assyrians might be a bit worse than some, but they're not that exceptional. Then again I haven't read this book so for all I know the author really did try to whitewash this. Overall, how was it though? Because I'm looking for some stuff to read this Summer. Fair enough. I've only gone through half of it, so I'll have to report back on the end of it, but so far, the most interesting parts are the two "case studies" he does, one about the death of Sargon II, whose body went missing in battle and so went unburied, and another one about the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC. Those were both really entertaining. The material before that was a bit difficult for me to get through, because I don't have many reference points for Assyria, and he makes it sound like the record isn't as full until you get to Tiglath-Pileser III. The last chapter of the book is dedicated to the destruction of Assyrian artifacts by ISIS in the 2010s, which I'm really looking forward to. But then again, being entertained probably isn't the main reason to read historical surveys. I can't complain about any of the info, but I wouldn't know any better. There are only hazy descriptions of what Assyrian warfare actually looked like, would be one thing I felt was missing – there's a brief description of types of troops, but no real "military history," which I thought was weird since the content is so "military." You get a lot of references to siege works and campaigning without an explanation of what that really looks like. Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 06:07
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CrypticFox posted:The stuff with trying to argue against the severity of Assyrian atrocities comes in large part from people writing in response to the traditionally dominant narrative of Assyria that is based on Biblical sources, which present Assyria as the greatest evil the world has ever seen, and trying to contextualize the Biblical account with a more balanced picture that makes heavy use of the documents from the Assyrians themselves. This effort can certainly go to far, but it doesn't serve any useful purpose if we just read the Biblical account of Assyria as the greatest evil to ever exist at face value without trying to critically assess these ideas based on all the other available evidence (as past generations of scholars often did). A lot of the most aggressive "whitewashing" of Assyrian atrocities comes out of the work of Karen Radner, and checking my copy of the book, she is the person who Frahm cites in the footnote on page 148 were he talks about other scholars who have argued for the use of the term "resettlement" rather than "deportation." That's something proposed by Radner that has not achieved much support from others, including Frahm himself (in the following line Frahm says "this view might be overly generous"). And even Radner certainly acknowledges the brutal nature of Assyrian deportations, despite wanting to reframe how they are understood by scholars today. Thank you for the explanation! You even found the main passage I was alluding to.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:09
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I've finally gotten through the second half of Neil Price's survey of Viking history. The second half has a treatment of the "Viking east," and while he claims the west-east divide is artificial, this is betrayed by the fact that he himself treats them separately in a way that seems to make a lot of sense. The east is also given a more cursory treatment than the west. There are a lot of great cultural anecdotes in this latter part of the book – thoughts on women buried with weapons, church bells thrown into harbors, Chinese silks ending up in the Danelaw, and whatever. But the book never congeals into an actual history – there's no actual temporal account of major events and characters. So at the end of the book I'm still left feeling like I don't have a good outline of the history of Viking Scandinavia, which is not something you want to be saying about a "history." What is it, if not a history? I guess, a series of sociological essays told from the perspective of an archaeologist, seemingly intended for someone who has already read an introductory history. Major people and events are alluded to in passing as if the reader already knows about them, and they're never explained. Overall, I learned a lot, but not what I actually wanted to learn, and I ended up thinking the structure and content of the book was very strange. It's not a bad book, but I think it's labeled wrong.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:31
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 04:22 |
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PittTheElder posted:Well I haven't read it, so I'm going out on something of a limb here, but it sounds like you're running into the difference between traditional narrative history ("here are the events that happened, in order", like it's a story) vs modern history which is often focused on trends or processes, because it does assume you know the basic outline, or can go reference a well known person/event in some other work (wikipedia). I suppose that, even if it's an antiquated view, I expect after reading a history to have the ability to articulate a general outline of major events and polities in a region. This book did not provide that. If a good modern history requires me already to know the outline, then I have to ask – where does the buck stop? I have to, at some point, actually be told who Harald Finehair and Harald Bluetooth are. This was a history of the Vikings which, shockingly, did not do that. Edit: I meant Harald Fairhair. See, the book didn't even teach me the name right...
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Mar 5, 2024 22:30
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