"The ancient Egyptian writing system is a pictorial script with a huge number of characters: 24 of which stand for what would be recognized as letters, others stand for complete words or combinations of consonants. There are between 700 and 800 basic symbols called glyphs and there is no punctuation or indication of where words or sentences begin or end. The glyphs are usually read from right to left, top to bottom and do not use spaces or punctuation. On the walls of temples and tombs in Egypt, they generally appear in columns." Source: Ancient Origins.
"Traditionally Egyptologists divided Hieroglyphs into three types based on appearance: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. Hieroglyphic is almost always inscribed on stones in large scale monuments. Hieratic is the 'priestly' script extensively used on manuscripts and paintings, and really is just a rather cursive form of monumental hieroglyphics. And finally, demotic is a highly cursive script that replaced hieratic as the script for everyday use from 600 BCE onward. In fact, some demotic signs translate into more than one hieratic or hieroglyphic signs, so there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between demotic and the other two systems." Source: Ancient Scripts. (Site temporarily unavailable due to some kind of WhoIs verification problem.)
"Like most ancient scripts, the origin of Egyptian hieroglyphs is poorly understood. There are, however, several hypotheses that have been put forth. One of the most convincing views claims that they derive from rock pictures produced by prehistoric hunting communities living in the desert west of the Nile, who were apparently familiar with the concept of communicating by means of visual imagery. Some of the motifs depicted on these rock images are also found on pottery vessels of early Predynastic cultures in Egypt." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.
Next video gives an overview of the Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and Demotic scripts as well as the Phoenician and Cuneiform writing systems.
"...Efforts are underway to translate the stela. Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the stela appears to be related to a military campaign that Apries undertook east of Egypt.
"The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (lived ca. 484-425 B.C.) claimed that Apries fought a losing war against the Phoenicians that left many Egyptian soldiers dead and sparked a civil war in Egypt that ultimately led to Apries being killed and replaced as pharaoh by a man named Amasis. Whether this stela will shed new light on these events is unclear."
"The Band of Holes also known in Spanish as Monte Sierpe (serpent mountain) or Cerro Viruela (smallpox hill), is a series of about 5,000-6,000 man-sized holes found in the Pisco Valley on the Nazca Plateau in Peru. Local people have no idea who made them or how they were used. Over the years, it has been speculated that they were graves, defensive positions, or storage places. Recent thought is that they were storage pits built during the time of the Inca Empire (1438-1533)." (Wikipedia)
Note: As far as I can tell, these holes are a true archaeological mystery. It doesn't sound like the site has been studied very much and nobody knows what the holes were used for.
"In 2015, archaeologists from UCLA made a brief visit to the site, using photography from drone aircraft to create a detailed map. They speculate that the holes could have been used to measure produce given to the Inca state as tribute; the measurements might have been recorded on Incan khipus and reported to government officials. The archaeologists hope to do further studies to detect pollen or phytoliths [silica structures left by decaying plants] that could tend to confirm this hypothesis." (Wikipedia)
In 73 BC, seventy-five gladiators led by the Thracian Spartacus broke out of their training school at Capua and proceeded to run amok in a slave uprising known as the Third Servile War or the Gladiator War. Burning and plundering, they gathered a huge force of runaway slaves as they rampaged through Italy, defeating every army fielded against them.
Fortune was on their side. The Roman legions were tied up fighting Mithridates in the east and putting down a rebellion in the West, leaving Italy relatively unprotected, but Spartacus and his divided army managed to turn fortune into defeat. Their greed and squabbling got the better of them and they came to a nasty end.
Spartacus and his army of slaves and gladiators started off fighting for freedom, but their revolt suffered from "mission drift" as time went by. Instead of crossing the Alps and returning to their lives when they got the chance -- free at last -- they decided to stay in Italy and grab all the booty they could get their hands on. In other words, they chose money over freedom.
Bad decision. Trapped in the heel of Italy by a couple of legions hurriedly recalled from the East, they ended up getting massacred when the Cilician pirates they hired to take them to Sicily never showed up. Thousands of slaves were crucified and left hanging along the Appian Way. Spartacus himself was killed in battle and his body was never recovered (so much for the Hollywood version of the story). On the Roman side, Pompey the Great stole the credit for the victory from Marcus Crassus, whose frustrated search for glory eventually led him to invade Parthia, where he was captured and executed and his entire army was slaughtered.
The moral of the story? Hell if I know. Spartacus has become a symbol of heroic resistance to tyranny, but the real history, as usual, was a lot more complicated and ambiguous than that, to put it mildly. I've read that he was pressured into staying in Italy, but the fact remains that his army of glorious freedom fighters chose booty over freedom when they had a chance to escape. That turned out to be a fatal blunder.
Spartacus was a freedom fighter in some ways, but in other ways his army was no different than any other barbarian horde plundering the countryside. Technically speaking, of course, that's exactly what they were: a horde of squabbling Gauls, Thracians, Goths, Roman farm slaves and general riffraff looking to get rich. They were brave enough, but they were short-sighted and greedy. Their early victories made them cocky and that gave the Romans time to get their act together. Not too bright. If there's any lesson here, it's probably this:
If you escape from slavery and decide to hang around to plunder the countryside, don't put your life in the hands of Cilician pirates.
The execution of Jarl Borg. Vikings Season 2, Episode 7
"The blood eagle is a ritualized method of execution, detailed in late skaldic poetry. According to the two instances mentioned in the Sagas, the victim (in both cases a member of a royal family) was placed prone, the ribs severed from the spine with a sharp tool and the lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of 'wings'. There is a continuing debate about whether the ritual was a literary invention, a mistranslation of the original texts or an authentic historical practice." Source: Wikipedia.
The Blood Eagle was a particularly nasty form of sacrificial execution, but did the Vikings actually put people to death this way? As far as I can tell, the only primary documentary evidence for the practice comes from sources such as the Orkneyinga Saga, the Heimskringla, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, and a handful of references in other texts.
Note: The Tale of Ragnar's Sons describes (among other things) the execution of King Aella of Northumbria, a scene also depicted in Vikings.
Jarl Borg (top video) in Vikings is an entirely fictional character, I believe. Aella, on the other hand, was apparently a real king, though the sources for his life are limited and very little is known about his reign. According to some accounts, he was executed by the Vikings after they invaded Northumbria following the king's execution of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, another figure who may or may not have actually existed. How Aella died is a matter of conjecture, though, because the sources contradict each other:
"While Norse sources claim that Ragnar's sons tortured Ælla to death with a blood eagle, Anglo-Saxon accounts maintain that he died in battle, at York, on 21 March 867." (Wikipedia)
"Well into the last century, most historians of the Vikings accepted that the blood eagle was deeply unpleasant but very real. According to the eminent medievalist J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, its possible victims were not only Ælla of Northumbria but also Halfdán, the son of Harald Finehair (or Fairhair), king of Norway, and the Irish King Maelgualai [Mael Gualae] of Munster; in some interpretations, it is supposed that even Edmund the Martyr may have suffered the same fate."
One possibility is that the Blood Eagle was a real execution method sensationalized by later writers. For instance, the Welsh scholar and translator, Gwyn Jones, argues in A History of the Vikings (1968) that this "inhuman rite" was "unhappily no fiction ... but owes its eminence in pseudo-lore almost entirely to fiction ..." (footnote pp 119-220, 1968 edition)
It's also possible that the Blood Eagle is entirely fictitious. This seems to be the current consensus, but there's a lot of disagreement. Revisionist historians have challenged the idea that the Vikings were just a mob of cruel barbarians wearing horned helmets, but their depictions of "cuddly" Vikings went too far in the other direction. One of the main problems with our picture of the Vikings is that much of what we know about them was written by their enemies.
If the Blood Eagle is a literary invention, there's a good chance that this grisly method of execution was dreamed up by Christian writers trying to demonize the pagan Vikings. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here is debate about whether the blood eagle was historically practiced, or whether it was a literary device invented by the authors who transcribed the sagas. No contemporary accounts of the ritual exist, and the scant references in the sagas are several hundred years after the Christianization of Scandinavia." Considering the Christians' history of inventing martyr stories set in the Roman Empire, I wouldn't be surprised if they concocted similar atrocity stories about the Vikings.
When I first started to research this subject, I assumed there was a high probability that the Blood Eagle was a real thing because the Vikings are thought to have conducted human sacrifices and the Blood Eagle is, in a way, just another form of ritual sacrifice. As it turns out, though, the question of whether the Vikings actually killed people for religious purposes isn't all that straightforward.
There is some archaeological evidence that the Vikings may have sacrificed humans. For instance, "[a]t Trelleborg [Sweden] a sacrificial site was found from the time before the Viking fortress was erected in 980-81. In five c. 3 metre-deep wells human and animal skeletons were found, together with jewellery and tools. Of the total of five human sacrifices, four were young children aged between 4 and 7. " Source: National Museum of Denmark.
Blood sacrifice, including human sacrifice, was an intrinsic part of pagan religions. The historical sources for Viking human sacrifice are questionable, though, because they all seem to come, once again, from Christian accounts:
According to the National Museum of Denmark, "[t]here are several horrifying accounts of human sacrifices from the Viking period. The German bishop, Thietmar of Merseburg, describes how the Vikings met every nine years at Lejre on Zealand [Denmark] in January 'and offer to their gods 99 people and just as many horses, dogs and hens or hawks, for these should serve them in the kingdom of the dead and atone for their evil deeds.'"
A similar ritual (at a different location) is also depicted in Vikings.
"The German monk Adam of Bremen wrote a similar account in 1072 about the sacrificial tradition at [Gamla Uppsala] in Sweden, where the temple was devoted to Thor, Odin and Frey. Here the Vikings also met every 9 years to ensure the goodwill of the gods. 9 males of all kinds of living creatures were sacrificed in a holy grove nearby. According to Adam of Bremen dogs, horses and humans hung from the trees. The number 9 was apparently of magical significance to the Vikings and was involved in a number of rituals." (National Museum of Denmark)
"There has been extensive debate over whether these accounts were real or simply Christian propaganda."
I wouldn't be shocked to learn that the Vikings actually executed royal prisoners using the Blood Eagle. Even if the descriptions in the sagas were written for entertainment, they may have had some basis in fact. At this point, however, it looks like this particular form of execution was a literary invention derived from the skaldic poems and embellished by later Christian writers in yet another attempt to make the pagans look like cruel and bloodthirsty savages:
"One of the features of a skaldic poem is that it’s incredibly convoluted, like a cryptic crossword puzzle. If you have a reference to what appears to be the Blood Eagle in a skaldic verse, it’s quite likely this is a poetic conceit. Roberta Frank, at Yale, argues that the Blood Eagle is just the idea of a carrion bird scratching at the back of the dead. If you create lots of corpses, you are a very good warrior. That’s what is being referred to. But when later writers made prose stories around these skaldic verses, they seem to have interpreted it literally. So it’s quite likely that there was no such thing as this horrible form of torture, but it grew in the telling." Source: National Geographic (2017).
Note: The burial chamber is "the only decorated chamber in [King Tut's] tomb, with scenes from the opening of the mouth ceremony (showing Ay, Tutankhamun's successor acting as the king's son, despite being older than he is) and Tutankhamun with the goddess Nut on the north wall, the twelve hours of Amduat (on the west wall), spell one of the Book of the Dead (on the east wall) and representations of the king with various deities (Anubis, Isis, Hathor and others now destroyed) on the south wall. The north wall shows Tutankhamen being followed by his Ka, being welcomed to the underworld by Osiris." (Wikipedia)
Note: Archaeologists found four gilded wooden shrines in King Tut's burial chamber. The second was inscribed with a mysterious text which has come to be known as the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld:
"Engraved on the second gilded shrine of Tutankhamun, discovered in his tomb by Howard Carter, was two parts of a book that is completely unique, though they do seem to have similarities to two scenes from the Amduat [a religious composition] which were depicted on the child king's third shrine. In fact, these texts are designated as an 'amduat', which here for the very first time the term is used to describe a netherworld text in general rather than the specific text to which it is normally applied. This is also the first instance of a composition describing the creation of the new solar disk." Source: Tour Egypt.
"No real title has been found for the book ... Winfried Barta described the text as a 'Kryptograph'. However, because of its obscure nature, with text that was not translated into normal hieroglyphs, most Egyptologists refer to it as the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld. That is, in the outer panels, the texts which accompany some of the illustrations are cryptographic in order to preserve the secrecy of the formulas. Indeed, this leads to some controversies where the meaning of the text is certainly not clear."
"Harry Burton (13 September 1879 – 27 June 1940) was an English archaeological photographer and Egyptologist, best known for his photographs of excavations in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. His most famous photographs are the 1,400 he took documenting Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb from 1922 to 1932." (Wikipedia)
Demons are now considered to be devils or evil spirits, but the word used to have a completely different and more positive meaning.
The word "demon" comes from the Latin daemon which in turn comes from the ancient Greek daimon. Greek writers sometimes referred to the gods as daimons, an abstract term which meant "supernatural power in its unpredictable, anonymous and often frightful manifestations. Accordingly, the adjective means 'strange,' 'incomprehensible,' 'uncanny'. Hence daimon soon acquired connotations of Fate." (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised).
The Greek writer Hesiod started to use daimon in a different sense. He described these supernatural powers as guardians or protectors, the "deceased of the golden age" who provided wealth and good fortune. After Hesiod, the daimons began to be seen as "personal protective spirits who accompany each human's life and bring either luck or charm." Good luck meant you had a good daimon watching out for you; bad luck just the opposite. According to one tradition, everyone is born with their own particular daimon assigned to them in a kind of cosmic lottery.
To make a long story short, these good and evil daimons later evolved into the familiar angels and demons of Christianity. The pagan roots of angels faded into obscurity and both the Jews and Christians began to associate the pagan gods with evil daimons:
"The malignant sense is because the Greek word was used (with daimonion) in Christian Greek translations [of the Bible] and the Vulgate for 'god of the heathen, heathen idol' and also for 'unclean spirit.' Jewish authors earlier had employed the Greek word in this sense, using it to render shedim 'lords, idols' in the Septuagint, and Matthew viii.31 has daimones, translated as deofol in Old English, feend or deuil in Middle English. Another Old English word for this was hellcniht, literally 'hell-knight.'" (Online Etymology Dictionary)
The etymology of the word "demon" shows the extent to which Christianity was influenced by pagan religions and philosophy; and the transformation of the guardian spirits of the Greeks into the malevolent, supernatural creatures we know today is a typical example of the way the church usurped and literally demonized classical polytheistic religions. The idea that the pagan gods were demons is still very widespread in Christianity today.
"From a fallen angel to a bearded, red-hued man with horns (wearing his very own Nike Satan shoes, as reported in The Guardian) the Prince of Darkness' appearance has been reinvented many times. The satanic figure of today is the result of centuries of art, literature and theatre, all sculpting a personification of evil.
"To find out what the devil really looks like, All About History magazine spoke with Marina Montesano, professor of Medieval History at the University of Messina in Italy, and Jan Machielsen, senior lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University in the UK. Both of these scholars are experts in the history of Satan and the occult.
"An earthen mound in what is now Syria may be the oldest known war memorial in the world, constructed before 2300 BC. The remains of what could be foot soldiers and charioteers were buried in distinct clusters in a monument made of piled-up soil. However, it isn’t clear if they belonged to the winning or losing side, or what the conflict was about." Source: New Scientist (May 2021).
"The finding comes from a re-examination of remains from the White Monument, which was excavated in the 1980s and 1990s. The area was submerged in 1999 by the construction of the Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates river, and hasn’t been investigated since."
Comment: This is yet another example of an archaeological discovery which sat around forgotten for decades before anyone took another look and realized what it meant. Rediscoveries aren't unheard of in other fields, of course, but this kind of thing is so common in archaeology that I'm starting to think it must be standard operating procedure.
The Spartacus Revolt
In 73 BC, seventy-five gladiators led by the Thracian Spartacus broke out of their training school at Capua and proceeded to run amok in a slave uprising known as the Third Servile War or the Gladiator War. Burning and plundering, they gathered a huge force of runaway slaves as they rampaged through Italy, defeating every army fielded against them.
Fortune was on their side. The Roman legions were tied up fighting Mithridates in the east and putting down a rebellion in the West, leaving Italy relatively unprotected, but Spartacus and his divided army managed to turn fortune into defeat. Their greed and squabbling got the better of them and they came to a nasty end.
Spartacus and his army of slaves and gladiators started off fighting for freedom, but their revolt suffered from "mission drift" as time went by. Instead of crossing the Alps and returning to their lives when they got the chance -- free at last -- they decided to stay in Italy and grab all the booty they could get their hands on. In other words, they chose money over freedom.
Bad decision. Trapped in the heel of Italy by a couple of legions hurriedly recalled from the East, they ended up getting massacred when the Cilician pirates they hired to take them to Sicily never showed up. Thousands of slaves were crucified and left hanging along the Appian Way. Spartacus himself was killed in battle and his body was never recovered (so much for the Hollywood version of the story). On the Roman side, Pompey the Great stole the credit for the victory from Marcus Crassus, whose frustrated search for glory eventually led him to invade Parthia, where he was captured and executed and his entire army was slaughtered.
The moral of the story? Hell if I know. Spartacus has become a symbol of heroic resistance to tyranny, but the real history, as usual, was a lot more complicated and ambiguous than that, to put it mildly. I've read that he was pressured into staying in Italy, but the fact remains that his army of glorious freedom fighters chose booty over freedom when they had a chance to escape. That turned out to be a fatal blunder.
Spartacus was a freedom fighter in some ways, but in other ways his army was no different than any other barbarian horde plundering the countryside. Technically speaking, of course, that's exactly what they were: a horde of squabbling Gauls, Thracians, Goths, Roman farm slaves and general riffraff looking to get rich. They were brave enough, but they were short-sighted and greedy. Their early victories made them cocky and that gave the Romans time to get their act together. Not too bright. If there's any lesson here, it's probably this:
If you escape from slavery and decide to hang around to plunder the countryside, don't put your life in the hands of Cilician pirates.
Recommended reading: The Spartacus War, by Barry Strauss. Fantastic book.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Warfare, Commentary, Culture, Rome, Videos | Permalink | Comments (0)