And back again to the bibliography for my book.
We’re still in the “history” section, as opposed to the “biography” section, but we’ve mostly dealth with the ancient sources (Polybius, Livy and Plutarch). So now I’ll move into the modern writers.
If I had to choose just one book to give you a fun but thorough overview [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Carthage’
November 11, 2008
Goldsworthy on The Punic Wars
October 31, 2008
Hannibal’s Y chromosome
Click on the map above and read about the latest in this fantastic research effort called the “genographic project“. The dots show the areas of the Mediterranean with the highest frequency of the Phoenician haplotype.
They swabbed the cheeks of men from Syria and Cyprus to Malta and Morocco to have a closer look at the [...]
October 25, 2008
Livy
I left off my series on the bibliography for my book with a long post on Polybius. Polybius, as I said, was one of the greatest historians ever, but most of his books were lost. This means that for the history of Hannibal’s war against Rome we have to rely heavily on another ancient source. [...]
September 19, 2008
Zidane rode for Hannibal
Well, this is really cool. I learned something that has long puzzled me, and I did it through blogging.
You recall that I recommended a blog post by Mathilda, in which she explains the ethnic categories of “Africans” in antiquity. (In a nutshell: “Libyan” = white; “Ethiopian” = black). All of which fascinates me because I [...]
August 25, 2008
Hannibal’s life in eight minutes
Well-made YouTube video (meaning: hewing closely to Polybius and Livy) about Hannibal’s life, by Wolfshead:
Interesting moment of interpretation: why Hannibal, in this version, chose not to take Rome itself, which was the single biggest decision of his life. “We are not animals,” he says here.
(Also: did I detect stirrups on the [...]
August 23, 2008
Carthaginians and “Libyans”
Great research by Mathilda about ancient Libyans here. In a nutshell, the ancients apparently considered “whites” living in Africa to be “Libyans”, in contrast to “black” Africans, who were called “Ethiopians.”
This fits my previous description of Hannibal and the Carthaginians, according to which Denzel would not be the most historically correct choice of actor.
Hannibal’s mercenary [...]
August 20, 2008
The map of Hannibal’s march and life
Join me for a moment in having fun with this map below.
It comes to us, via the Wikimedia Commons, from Frank Martini, a cartographer in the Department of History at the United States Military Academy.
There are two ways of looking at this map–one obvious and one surprising and cheeky–and I will avail myself of both. [...]
August 14, 2008
About Hannibal’s elephants
So the other day I get a text message from our dear friends, the Rammings, with an urgent plea to intervene in one of their heated controversies around the dinner table of their rustic farm house in hip and rural North Carolina. James Ramming, aged eleven and studying Latin (and contemplating adding Greek), was contesting [...]
August 3, 2008
Denzel’s “African” Hannibal
I jokingly promised some controversy at the end of a previous post about the matter of whether or not Hannibal, my hero and antihero, was in fact a DWM, a “dead white male”, and thus a legitimate target for the derision for the politically correct post-whateverist crowd when I went to college. Dead, yes. Male, [...]
