History Archives - Martin's Booklog

The End of the Bronze Age – Robert Drews

Published on December 15, 2009

Cover of The End of the Bronze Age

The End of the Bronze Age
Robert Drews
252 pages including index
published in 1993

Sometimes pickings are slim at the library and you just have to take what you can get rather than what you want. This is especially true for the history section, which is why I took out this book, as it looked the best of a sorry bunch. Luckily it turned out a blessing in disguise. The Bronze Age is not a period I know little more than a very few basic facts about, so any reasonably well written book about it is welcome. Even if, like this, it’s a decade and a half old and therefore likely to be out of date.

There is a catch however. The End of the Bronze Age is not a pop science book but a proper academic study, arguing a thesis and it assumes a certain background familiarity of its readers. I can usually fake this reasonably well, but of course I can’t really judge whether or not the conclusions its author Robert Drews reaches are justified by the evidence, only whether they sound plausible. And when you’re ignorant of a given subject, even abject nonsense can sound plausible — which has tripped me up before…These days I use Wikipedia as a sanity check: it’s not perfect, but on most subjects it’s a good indicator of mainstream opinion.

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town – Mary Beard

Published on July 12, 2009

Cover of Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
360 pages including index
published in 2008

We think we know Pompeii. An ordinary Roman town like so many others in 79 CE, made extraordinary because it was overwhelmed without warning by the eruption of the Vesuvius, through its death granting us a rare glimpse of what daily life in the Roman Empire really was like. Under a metres thick layer of volcanic ashes Pompeii laid hidden for centuries, only discovered in the eighteenth century, its secrets kept intact, preserved by the very disaster that caused the death of the city. With the slow and careful excavation of the city those secrets are unlocked, giving up definitive answers to all kind of questions about how the Romans lived. This is the view of Pompeii that countless books, magazine articles and television specials have given us. Unfortunately, as Mary Beard explains in Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town, it’s wrong.

Or at least, not entirely accurate. As she explains, Pompeii wasn’t overwhelmed by an unforeseen catastrophe, as most likely its inhabitants had had at least several days warning before the actual eruption. Quite a few of them therefore had already left the town when it got buried, while many of the dead found under the lava had been overtaken in their flight, or while having sought shelter nearby or within the city itself. What’s more, the city wasn’t immediately abandonded after the disaster either, as all through the city evidence has been found of people coming back to their houses or businesses to rescue possessions – as well as of plunderers looking for easy riches. What’s more, once Pompeii was rediscovered, obviously things gut dug up, damaged, disappeared or just altered through being exposed to the elements again. All of which means that what we can see in Pompeii now is not entirely the city that the inhabitants would’ve known in 79 CE, that if we dig up a largely empty villa it doesn’t necessarily mean the Romans were great minimalists…

The Kingdom of the Hittites – Trevor Bryce

Published on June 20, 2009

Cover of The Kingdom of the Hittites

The Kingdom of the Hittites
Trevor Bryce
554 pages including index
published in 2005

The nice thing about history is that there’s so much of it, and so much still barely known. The Hittites are a case in point. Their existence was largely unsuspected until the late nineteenth century, when the first of their sites were uncovered in what is now Turkey and Syria. Here was a major Late Bronze Age civilisation and Near East superpower, an empire on par with Ancient Egypt or Assyria that lasted almost fivehundred years and nobody had a clue it existed. The sole cluess to their existence then known were some vague references in the Old Testament, from which they gotten their name as well as some mentions in the official correspondence of their rivals in Egypt, Assyria and Babylon but these were still largely untranslated when the first Hittite sites were found. The rediscovery of the Hittites is but one example of how much more complex ancient history is compared to the caricature we get of it in pop culture, which largely goes Sumeria > Egypt > Greece > Rome, with a sidestep to Israel.

What’s also nice about history is how fluid it is. We think we know the history of given region or country until a chance archeological discovery turns everything upside down again. Especially with subjects as far removed in time from us as the Hittite Empire, which existed roughly from 1650 BCE until about 1200 BCE, our views of it can change surprisingly quickly, as can be seen in The Kingdom of the Hittites. Originally published in 1998, the second, 2005 edition has been thoroughly revised with sections of every chapter having been rewritten, based on new discoveries and other advances since the original publication. If less than a decade of progress can make such a difference in a textbook like this it’s no wonder its author, Trevor Bryce, stresses that this is still only a preliminary history of the Hittites, subject to further revision.

As a textbook The Kingdom of the Hittites is firmly of the “kings and battles” school of history writing, with a companion volume dealing with society and daily life of the Hittites. Sadly the Amsterdam library didn’t seem to have that in its stacks. No matter, this was enough to be going on with on its own as well. The book is set up in chronological order, it starts with the origins of the Hittites and an overview of the history of Anatolia just before the Hittite kingdom was established and ends with the last known Hittite king. The reign of each known Hittite king is looked at, but as Bryce makes clear throughout, of some kings much less is known than others. Indeed, for several kings not even the approximate dates of their reigns are known. Two appendixes, on the chronology of Hittite history and the sources available to historians, make this problem even more clear.

Byzantium — Judith Herrin

Published on March 15, 2009

Cover of Byzantium

Byzantium
Judith Herrin
392 pages including index
published in 2008

In her introduction Judith Herrin explains she was inspired to write this book by a conversation she had with two workmen knocking on her office door. They had been doing repairs on the building in King’s College where she worked and noticed the sign on her office: “Professor of Byzantine History” and were interested enough to ask what this meant. As she puts it, she found herself “trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots”. From their suggestion that she should write a book explaining Byzantium to people like (or me, for that matter) who knew little if anything about the subject, this book arose. Byzantium — The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is an attempt to explain more than a thousand years of Byzantine history, as well as the many facets of this history.

It sounded like the perfect book to read, now that I had temporarily exhausted my library’s stock of interesting looking books on Roman history. Byzantium was after all a clear succesor to Rome, I knew little about it and Herrin’s book easily passed the page 37 test. She isn’t a historian I was aware of before, but with Byzantium she’s become one of the names I’ll pay attention to when looking for new books, no matter the subject. She manages to write a good introduction to a complex subject without talking down to the reader.

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea — Ernle Bradford

Published on June 2, 2008

Cover of Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea
Ernle Bradford
574 pages including index
published in 1971

I read Ernle Bradford’s book on the 1565 Ottoman siege of Malta, The Great Siege, some four years ago and enjoyed Bradford’s obvious enthusiasm and interest in the subject, though at times he made the siege sound a bit too much like a boy’s adventure. Other people seem to like it too, as not a week goes by without recieving hits on the review of it I did back. Apart from The Great Siege however I’ve never seen any other Ernle Bradford book, until Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea caught my eye on the Amsterdam library’s shelves two weeks ago. Bradford did a great job with his book on the siege of Malta, so I thought it would be interesting to see how he would do with a slightly bigger subject.

And subjects don’t come much bigger than this: the complete story of the Mediterranean, one of the most important areas in human history, from the earliest beginning to the present day. As the subtitle indicates, Bradford isn’t interested as much in the history of the various countries and empires that have bordered the Mediterranean, as he is in the sea itself. He focuses therefore on the ebb and flow of human exploration of the Mediterranean, on how the traderoutes through it were established and fought over, on the maritine empires that were established on it, on how their domination of the sea led succesive empires to rule the countries surrounding it.