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This week I want to do something a little different and discuss the evolution and development of a specific weapon, in this case the famed Roman gladius, the sword of the legions. As we're going to see, this is going to entail a journey covering quite a bit of both time and space as the gladius…

This is the first of a planned five-part series looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquity, to match our series on the Greek polis. As with that series, we're going to start by defining our community and its constituent parts in this part, before moving…

This week on the blog we're going to talk about Cleopatra or to be more specific, we're going to talk about Cleopatra VII Philopator, who is the only Cleopatra you've likely ever heard of, but that 'seven' after he name should signal that she's not the only Cleopatra. One of the trends in scholarship over…

This week we're going to take a bit of a detour to talk about how we should imagine the warriors of Gallic/Celtic armies were equipped and fought. I wanted to write about the topic because the YouTube algorithm served me up a video on it, which isn't ever fully wrong but struck me as importantly…

March 31, 2021 25 Minutes This week we are starting the first of a four (?) part look at pre-modern textile production. As with our series on farming and iron, we are going to follow the sequence of production from the growing of fibers all the way to the finished object, with a focus not merely on the methods of production but also on the people doing the producing at each stage of production. Now while I have titled this series, “Clothing, How Did They Make It?” it is worth not...