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THEME - A BOOKISH RIVALRY // THE PERGAMON ALTAR // SATAN'S THRONE // ROMAN GLADIATORS SPECIALS - MAKING PAPYRUS // REINVENTING THE PERSIAN PAST // RADIOCARBON DATING
Issue 3
THEME:
Pergamon was one of the jewels of the Hellenistic world, a centre of art and learning, whose influence can be felt even today.
Pergamon Hellenism's forgotten civilization
The Attalid empire and capital Maps of the Pergamene world
The Attalid jewel The city of Pergamon
A bookish rivalry Libraries at Alexandria and Pergamon
Pergamene puzzle The great altar of Pergamon
"The throne of Satan" Five ways to read four ancient words
Imperial gladiators A procurator's offering
SPECIAL FEATURES Glass Ancient objects and ancient sources
The papyrus Growing an ancient sedge
Money talks Cash in the first century AD
Kayanian history How the Persians reinvented their past
Roman segmental arch bridges A blind spot in the history of technology
Enigmatic Hatra A desert city long ago abandoned
Lust for life The philosophical system of the Hedonists
DEPARTMENTS Preliminaries On the cover & other things
Reviews Books about the ancient world
How do they know? The age of organic material
WAR OF WORDS The rivalry between the libraries in Pergamon and Alexandria.
ANCIENT PERGAMON
BRIDGING THE GAP Ancient Roman bridge building technique and practice.
POUNDING PAPYRUS How the ancient world's favour- ite writing material was created.
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Publisher: Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier Managing Director: Jasper Oorthuys Editor: Jona Lendering Contributing Editor: Josho Brouwers Design & Media: Christianne C. Beall Design © 2015 Karwansaray Publishers
Contributors: Kees Alders, René van Beek, Chris Bond, Duncan Campbell, Marc DeSantis, Pieter van der Horst, Christian Koepfer, Richard Kroes, Holger Michiels, Daan Nijssen, Manolis Peponas, Tanya Sieiro van der Beek, Dirk-Jan de Vink, Cristian Violatti
Illustrators: Christy Beall, Rocío Espin, Shen Fei, Milek Jakubiec, Mirco Paganessi, Maxime Plasse, Fabrice Weiss
Thanks to: Duncan Campbell, Marc DeSantis
Print: Grafi Advies
Editorial office PO Box 4082, 7200 BB Zutphen, The Netherlands Phone: +31-575-776076 (NL), +44-20-8816281 (Europe), +1-740-994-0091 (US) E-mail: editor@ancienthistorymagazine.com Customer service: service@karwansaraypublishers.com Website: www.ancienthistorymagazine.com
Contributions in the form of articles, letters, reviews, news, and queries are welcomed. Please send to the above address or use the contact form on www.ancienthistorymagazine.com
Subscriptions Subscriptions can be purchased at www.kp-shop.com, via phone, or by email. For the address, see above.
Distribution Ancient History Magazine is sold through retailers, the internet, and by subscription. If you wish to become a sales outlet, please contact us at service@karwansaraypublishers.com
Copyright Karwansaray B.V. All rights reserved. Noth- ing in this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior written consent of the publishers. Any in- dividual providing material for publication must ensure that the correct permissions have been obtained before submission to us. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but in few cases this proves impos- sible. The editor and publishers apologize for any un- witting cases of copyright transgressions and would like to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged. Articles and the opinions expressed herein do not neces- sarily represent the views of the editor and/or publishers. Advertising in Ancient History Magazine does not nec- essarily imply endorsement.
Ancient History Magazine is published every two months by Karwansaray B.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands. PO Box 1110, 3000 BC Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
ISSN: 2211-5129
Unless otherwise indicated, all photos © Karwan- saray Publishers, Holger Michiels, Izabela Miszczak, or Livius.org.
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Ancient History Magazine 34
PRELIMINARIES Editorial Creating a magazine is an adventure. You discuss the project with colleagues, schol- ars, and journalists. You prepare yourself by looking at other magazines: Ancient Warfare, National Geographic, New Scien- tist... You realize that if you want to bring together all ancient studies, you are not addressing a well-defined audience, but you'll be dealing not only with historians, archaeologists, and philologists interested in Classical Antiquity, but also with Egyp- tologists, Assyriologists, and other “-olo- gists”. You decide that you need a recurring feature to explain that which is obvious to one group of readers, to the other readers: “how do they know?” When you have thought long enough, you publish your first issue. Now the real ad- venture begins. Because hidden defects have the unpleasant tendency of not staying hid- den, you pay special attention to what your readers suggest. After all, they can spot the problems for which you had a blind eye. One of those who responded was Mr Kees Huyser, who makes his living explaining subatomic physics to a larger audience. In other words, he is active in
the rapidly developing field of science communication. It is regrettable that there is nothing comparable in the hu- manities, because scholars can learn a lot from the way science communicators think about information flows or dealing with increasingly skeptical audiences. Fortunately, the flaw that Huyser had spotted was less serious. Ancient His- tory Magazine does not explain where and when the readers should situate this ancient culture or that long-ago tribe on their mental maps. This is can be prob- lematic, because if you don’t know where to store new information, you'll find it hard to remember and apply it. We first tried to solve this with small maps and year numbers next to the titles of our articles, but found out that this was impractical. In the end, we settled for us- ing the line at the top of the page, saying, for example, “Iran, Late Antiquity”. It’s a very, very minor change, but we hope it will help you find your way through the many civilizations of Antiquity.
— Jona Lendering Editor, Ancient History Magazine
On the cover The Asclepium, the sanctuary of the heal- ing god Asclepius in Pergamon, was a very large hospital, where all kinds of patients were treated. Because it was be- lieved that people with mental illnesses would benefit from music, there was a small theater which was also used for humorous performances to entertain the Asclepium’s residents (see page 24). After all, laughter is the best medicine. On the cover, illustrator Milek Jakubiec has depicted a performance of Synaristosae (“The lunching ladies”), a comedy by the Athenian playwright Menander (342-291). Only a couple of lines of this text survive, but we may be sure that the people enjoyed
it: Menander’s comedies were immensely popular in the Hellenistic age. The illustration is based on a mosaic from the so-called Villa of Cicero in Pom- peii, made by one Dioscorides of Samos in about 120 BC. Excavated in the eight- eenth century, it can now be seen in the Archaeological Museum in Naples. As always, the actors are masked, but the mosaic o¢ers an interesting detail: the figure to the right, who arrives with a drink, has no mask. It is possible that he is an extra in the play. On the cover, it is a portrait of Jef- ferson Green, one of the backers of the Kick- starter campaign that enabled us to launch Ancient History Magazine.
Scene from Synaristosae on a mosaic from Pompeii. © WolfgangRieger via Wikimedia
PRELIMINARIES
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Ancient History Magazine 3
THE NUMBER: 210 Books about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire are always the same: the explanation they o¢er for “the awful revolution” is always a problem that was im- portant in the day and age of their authors. Because the disintegration of the Roman administration in the western provinces – which is usually the real subject; in the East, the Empire continued for another millennium – was a process that lasted for about a century, an author can always find arguments for his thesis. So the history of the fall of Rome is always a story about the anxieties of the histo- rian. If the historian fears a totalitarian state, he will blame the absolute powers of the emperors. If the historian considers religion something terrible, he will suggest that the rise of Christian asceticism and pacifism caused the demise of the Roman Empire. If the historian is afraid of militarism, he will identify Rome’s professional army as the root of all evil. If the historian fears the excesses of capitalism and embraces Marxism, Rome’s fall is triggered by a crisis in the slave mode of production. And so on. Books about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire are always the same. Still, the number of contributing factors is not infinite. In 1984, German his- torian Alexander Demandt published a famous book on the fall of Rome, Der Fall Roms, in which he describes how people look at the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. At the end of the book, Demandt o¢ers a list of causes: 210 fac- tors have been mentioned as contributing to the demise of Rome. It’s a fascinating summary, that makes you understand why historians tend to be modest about their explanations: what seems right today, will be outdated tomorrow.
Hiatus The ancient studies have one thing in com- mon that is rare among other branches of scholarship: a devastating lack of informa- tion. Because we don’t want to ignore what we cannot know, here’s our new recurring feature about lost information: “Hiatus”. When reading an ancient text, we are well-advised to look for clues that indicate incompleteness. For example, the Histories, in which the Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus tells the story of the Graeco- Persian Wars, break o¢ in the winter of 479 BC: we don’t read about the expeditions to the strategically important city of Byz- antium, to Cyprus, to pro-Persian Thessaly, and to the Persian base in Eion: the Histo- ries end before their logical conclusion. However, Herodotus o¢ers clues about what he had intended to relate in the missing section. In 1.106 and 1.184, he announces
that he wants to return to what he calls Assyria (i.e., Mesopotamia). This is interesting, be- cause we know from another author, Arrian, that the Persian king who had invaded Greece in 480, Xerxes, attacked Babylon on his return from Greece (Anabasis 7.17.2). We can imag- ine that the Babylonian insurrection of 484 BC was still smoldering, demanded Xerxes’ atten- tion, and prevented his return to Greece. Did Herodotus plan a grand finale for the Histories, in which he narrated the story of a new Babylonian revolt? We don’t know, but it is possible. If this is true, we un- expectedly recognize a message of Hero- dotus to his contemporaries, who were wit- nessing the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War: just like Persia had created an empire but had to take the wellbeing of its Babylo- nian subjects into account, so Athens had to think about the interests of its own allies.
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PRELIMINARIES