Reading Roundup: Women, War & Weird Beliefs
Micro-reviews of media I consumed recently, articles about powerful women in history, and reflections on travelogues and war.
Tagged: rome
Ancient Princesses: Diplomatic Agents & Religious Leaders
Ancient Princesses from the Levant region served as advisors, diplomats, and independent religious leaders — unlike their Egyptian counterparts.
Five SFF Stories That Shed Light on Obscure History
Echoes of history reverberate through SFF, parallels that can be hard to pick up on, but which still inform how we think about the world. (published at tor.com)
Reading Roundup: Unconventional Gods & Elitist Fashions
A wide-ranging reflection on what I learned in January, mostly about the history of fashion, ancient infrastructure, economy and war.
Transporting Information: Sending Messages in Low Tech Societies
The first roads were little more than game trails. Early infrastructure focused more on stopping travel than facilitating it. With civilization, though, came a need to transport information, and history...
Analysis: Karen Haegemans on Elissa of Carthage
Elissa of Carthage (commonly known as Dido, the wanderer) is one of the more fascinating examples of history becoming myth. History is rife with examples of strong women dismissed as mythology...
Beyond Rome: Infrastructure in Ancient Civilizations
There’s an idea floating around that roads, aqueducts, and other large-scale civil engineering projects required Roman-era engineering. This is a false narrative. A fantasy world doesn’t need iron-age technology to...
Removing Monuments to White Supremacists & Racists
Henry Olsen wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post about removing monuments in which he claimed: Knocking down or defacing statues of national founders or heroes not only displays ignorance...
Ancient Priests: Practical Impacts of Early Experts
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the role of ancient priests and how temples helped early civilizations thrive. As a culture, we do a pretty poor job of looking beyond the...
Maritime Empires: the Phoenician Gap
We in the West seem to spend a lot of time tracing our cultures back to the maritime empires — thalassocracies — like the Greeks and the Vikings, but we spend very little time talking about the civilization that inspired Greece to consolidate its military power.
