The Quakers in America (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series), Thomas Hamm, c. 2006.

 The Quakers in America (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series), Thomas Hamm, c. 2006.

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King, Dan Jones, c. 2024.

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King, Dan Jones, c. 2024.

Wow, wow, wow! I doubt I will read this book -- I don't know -- I'm tempted -- I've read so many books on British history, particularly the period surrounding the Wars of Roses. But, as noted, I'm really tempted. 

We'll see.

From the linked article:

It is surely an exhausting, perhaps bewildering, time for Henry (the future Henry V) and his brothers. Henry is still only thirteen. Thomas is twelve, John ten, and Humphrey has just turned nine. It has been only one year since their father was exiled, their lives upended, and their futures thrown into uncertainty. Now their father (Henry IV) is the king, and they are knights and princes: the nucleus of a new Lancastrian royal family. Nothing like this has happened in England since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

The Greco-Persian Wars: People And Places -- September 30, 2024

Media:was a political entity centered in Ecbatana that existed from the 7th century BCE until the mid-6th century BCE and is believed to have dominated a significant portion of the Iranian plateau, preceding the powerful Achaemenid Empire. 

The frequent interference of the Assyrians in the Zagros region led to the process of unifying the Median tribes. By 612 BCE, the Medes became strong enough to overthrow the declining Assyrian Empire in alliance with the Babylonians. However, contemporary scholarship tends to be skeptical about the existence of a united Median kingdom or state, at least for most of the 7th century BCE.

The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire, also known as the Persian Empire or First Persian Empire: 'The Empire' or 'The Kingdom', was an Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. 

Darius, the founder, traced his genealogy back to Archaemenes, who may have been mythical or real. If real, would have lived in the 7th century BCE.

Based in modern-day Iran, it was the largest empire by that point in history, spanning a total of 2.1 million square miles. The empire spanned from the Balkans and Egypt in the west, West Asia as the base, the majority of Central Asia to the northeast, and the Indus Valley to the southeast.  [Think Alexander the Great some centuries later.]

Around the 7th century BC (about the time of Achaemenes), the region of Persis in the southwestern portion of the Iranian plateau was settled by the Persians. From Persis, Cyrus rose and defeated the Median Empire as well as Lydia (see below, Turkey) and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, marking the formal establishment of a new imperial polity under the Achaemenid dynasty.  

Ionia: was an ancient region on the western coast of Anatolia, to the south of present-day İzmir, Turkey. 

It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements. Never a unified state, it was named after the Ionians who had settled in the region before the archaic period.

Ionia proper comprised a narrow coastal strip from Phocaea in the north near the mouth of the river Hermus (now the Gediz), to Miletus in the south near the mouth of the river Maeander, and included the islands of Chios and Samos.

It was bounded by Aeolia to the north, Lydia to the east and Caria to the south.

The cities within the region figured significantly in the strife between the Persian Empire and the Greeks.

Ionian cities were identified by mythic traditions of kinship and by their use of the Ionic dialect, but there was a core group of twelve Ionian cities that formed the Ionian League and had a shared sanctuary and festival at Panionion. These twelve cities were (from south to north): Miletus, Myus, Priene, Ephesus, Colophon, Lebedos, Teos, Erythrae, Clazomenae and Phocaea, together with the islands of Samos and Chios. Smyrna, originally an Aeolic colony, was afterwards occupied by Ionians from Colophon, and became an Ionian city.

Miletus (Milet, TU) was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Ionia.Its ruins are located near the modern village of Balat in Aydın Province, Turkey. 

Before the Persian rule that started in the 6th century BC, Miletus was considered among the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities.

 

a

The Greco-Persian Wars, Peter Green, c. 1996

People and places for the Greco-Persian wars tracked here.

From my personal copy of this book. I was curious how I came across this book. I think it was from this, June 14, 2024: 

I find it amazing (for lack of a better word) that historians are still writing about the Greco-Persian Wars. In the current issue of The Claremont Review of Books, an essay on what Joseph Epstein calls the "war for the west."

Three books are mentioned in the essay:

• The Greco-Persian Wars, by Peter Green;
• The Persian War in Herodotus and Other Ancient Voices, William Shephere; and, 
• Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, Tom Holland.

 ********************************

From The Greco-Persian Wars, Peter Green, c. 1996, pp 16 - 17. This took place in 600 years before the birth of Christ, in Athens, Greece. Does this sound familiar?

Cleisthenes had returned from exile under the Spartan military umbrella: to get back into power by constitutional means, once that umbrella had been removed, was a far trickier business. 

The conservative group, led by Isagoras, son of Teisander, fought hard -- and with considerable initial success -- to prevent an Alcmaeonid take-over. 

They began their campaign by scrutinizing the electoral roll, and getting a good many of Cleisthenes' "new immigrants" supporters disenfranchised on technical quibbles. But they were soon saw that it would pay off better, in the long run, to capture the popular vote rather than antagonize it. 

A law was passed abolishing the judicial use of torture against Athenian citizens; other similar measures followed; for two years Isagoras had things very much his own way. The electorate showed no sign whatsoever, at this stage, of welcoming Cleisthenes as a great democratic reformer, for the very good reason that no such idea had yet entered his head. 

In 508 BC, however, Isagoras was elected Chief Archon. 

Cleisthenes had already held this office, and was thereby debarred from standing again. Something had to be done: as a desperate measure Cleisthenes, to borrow Herodotus's ambiguous phrase, "took the people into partnership." 

This probably meant a radical extension of the franchise: to put it bluntly, Cleisthenes bribed the citizen-body to support him by offering them their first real stake in the government, a government that he intended to lead by means of their block (bloc?) vote. The proposal was rushed through the Assembly; and so, by a somewhat singular accouchement (childbirth), Athenian democracy finally struggled to birth. 

The child (early democracy in Greece) proved noisy, healthy and troublesome almost before it  (democracy) could walk; which was lucky, since other its chances of survival would have been slim.

****************************
The Book's Organization

Fascinating book. 

This seems to be a full-year's history course taught by the professor / the author of this book. 

It's a history, of course, but a lot of analysis, much more analysis than I normally see in a "history book."

 

Great introduction.

Short preface and acknowledgments, signed 1969.

Part One: Darius and The West

Part Two: The Legacy of Marathon

Part Three: Waiting for the Barbarian

Part Four: the Corner-Stone of Freedom

Part Five: The Wooden Wall

Part Six: The Doors of the Peloponnese

Part Seven: The Last Enemy

Notes

Bibliography

Supplemental Bibliography

Index

***************************
Notes

Theme: the conflict between Greece and Persia was an ideological struggle -- first of its kind (good exercise: name other wars that were ideological struggles, and not wars for riches spoils). Consider:

• US Civil War, US Revolutionary War: ideological
• French and Indian War; War of 1812: territory

Aeschylus' play: The Persians -- written eight years after the war; the playwright actually fought in the war itself. Obviously a tragedy if written from the perspective of the Persians.

Replica: mutatis mutandis, p. 3.

The play: Darius' widow Atoss.

Comperes Themistocles with Churchill, page 4.

Author: we now benefit from better understanding of Achaemenid Persia.

Top of page 5: the "constitutional state."

"Modern Europe" owes nothing to the Achaemids!!! -- p. 5.

The apadana of Persepolis.

**** Achaemid Persia: produced no great literature or philosophy. Her one lasting contribution: Zoroastrianism.

Fastest expansion of an empire;
Alexander the Great
Islam after the prophet
Persia, 6th century

Mid-6th century: Near East -- several small "empires" --

• Media: capital, Ecbatana; ruler -- Astyages
• Babylonia
• Lydia: Croesus
• inhabitants of Parsa: mere upland tribesmen.

That's where it started -- 25 years later -- FARS --

• centered on modern Shiraz; controlled a greater empire than that of Assyria; at its apogee the single larges administrative complex that had ever existed in the ancient world -- p. 6.

Persia -- part of the Near East, but quite far east -- Cyrus

559 BC: Cyrus -- throne of Anshan -- a Median vassal kingdom NE of Susa (NE of Babylon) -- p. 6. 

And by 539, Cyrus marches into Babylon unopposed and is head of largest Empire ever known!!!

P. 289: "Like the Jews, the Greeks learned to define themselves as a nation in the course of their contacts with the Persians."

FARS:

The last eight years of his life, Cyrus devoted his life to organizing this great and heterogeneous empire he had acquired ... twenty provinces -- each under a viceroy (vice = deputy, as in vice president; roy = king) Viceroy, Persian title, khshathrapavan, Protector of the Kingdom -- from that Persian word transliterated by the Greeks to satrapes. Now, the generic term is "satrap." 

Two satraps were Greek:

• Lydia; governmental seat at Sardis, included the Ionian seaboard;
• Phrygia covered the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara (Propontis), and the southern short of the Black Sea -- these satraps, especially in the vast eastern provinces, wielded enormous power. -- p. 8. -- straddles the waterways that divided western Turkey with eastern Greece.

Cyrus' new capital: Pasargadae -- south-central Iran; about eight-hour south of Tehran; directly across from Kuwait.

Cyrus: first king

Son, Cambyses, ascends throne without incident. (Grandfather was also known as Camybses.)

spent most of his time in Egypt
besides Egypt also obtained the submission of Cyrene and Cyprus and, most important, of the Phoenician states. Persia thus acquired at one stroke what hitherto she had notably lacked; a strong fighting navy.

March 522: Cambyses abroad; revolution broke out in Media, led by a man who claimed to be the King's younger brother. Cambyses hurriedly left Egypt but died under suspicious circumstances.

Rebellion put down by a junta under Darius -- see background -- top of page 10. 

a

Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, Paul Gannon, c. 2006

Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, Paul Gannon, c. 2006

Early WWI, 1914, German naval codes -- link here.

Early in 1914, the Allies had three of the codebooks: SKM, HVB, and VB.

Outline: The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024.

The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024.

Part I
Early Interactions

Chapter 1
The Dawn of the Horse: Equine Evolution and Bone Wars

Chapter 2
Straight from the Horse's Mouth: I Am the Grass, Let Me Work

Chapter 3
Eat Like A Horse: Human Hunting and Vanishing Habitats

p. 59: "Robert Drews of Vanderbilt Universityin Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe, 

Chapter 4
Hold Your Horses: Steppes of Domestication and the Agricultural Revolution

Chapter 5
A Horse by Any Other Name: The Indo-European Domination of Eurasia

Part II
Forge of Empires

Chapter 6
Behold a Pale Horse: Apocalyptic Chariots and Imperial Ambitions

Chapter 7
Riders on the Storm: Cavalry, Assyrians, Libraries, and Scythians

Chapter 8
The Education of Alexander: Academia and Empires

Chapter 9
My Kingdom for a Horse: The Hitched Fates of the Chinese and Roman Empires

Chapter 10
Dark Horses: Feudal Knights and Contenign Faiths

Chapter 11
Road Apples: The Medieval Agricultural Revolution and the Making of Modern Europe

Part III
Global Trails

Chapter 12
Shuttling the Silk Roads: Mongol Hordes and Eurasian Markets

Chapter 13
The Return of the Native: The Horse and the Columbian Exchange

Chapter 14
Big Dogs of the Great Plains Horses, Bison, and the Downfall of Indigenous Peoples

Chapter 15
Spiritual Machines: The supremacy of the Horse

Chapter 16
The Final Draft: War, Mechanization, and Medicine

Chapter 17
Equus Rising: Wild Horses, Therapeutic Healing, and Worldwide Sports

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Index

******************************
Notes

Chapter 4
Hold Your Horses: Steppes of Domestication and the Agricultural Revolution

Mentions Harari (Sapiens) again. 

Gatherers and hunters, and then first agriculture: under that form of subsistence, our planet's maximum estimated human carrying capacity falls somewhere between ten million and one hundred million humans.

The Earth's population now: more than eight billion people.

If we condensed our modern existence of roughly two hundred thousand years into one hour, we have been domesticated by plants and animals for only about three minutes (or five percent of our stay as Homo sapiens), and this farming package has been the sole human provider of sustenance for around one minute (1.7 percent). Farming is a peculiar institution and intrinsically unnatural.

Whenwe tamed plants and animals, they also tamed us -- p. 63.

Then the history of "food." Begins on page 64.

Irrigation: domestication of water. I assume "irrigation" also includes building dams.

Chapter 5
A Horse by Any Other Name: The Indo-European Domination of Eurasia

 

At the end of chapter 4: over 5,600 miles to the west, at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, another, perhaps even more momentous, encounter was unfolding. With the advantage of their doomesticated horses, predatory Indo-European peoples spilled out of the steppe and confronted the relatively egalitarian and wall-less agricultural societies of "Old Europe" -- which promptly vanished.

The entire cultural fabric of Neolithic Europe (and the Indian subcontinent) was rapidly, fully, and completely replaced with the hierarchy, customs, genetics, and language of these mounted marauders. This wholesale remodeling established a more militant, capitalist, male-dominated culture that has been both the bane and the blessing of Europe. As a relatively small, densely populated region without walls or even stable borders, Europe and its shifting states were vulnerable to invasion and, through successive generations, manufacture some of the bloodiest wars the world has ever witnessed.

Now, chapter 5. 

3400 BCE

Global smelting of copper:

• 5000 BCE: origins, Turkey
• 2800 BCE: China
• 2300 BCE: British Isles
• 2000 BCE: Andes Mountains, Peru
• 900 BCE: West Africa

American anthropologist, Edward Sapir, often considered one of the founding fathers of linguistics.

History / discussion of language.

3000 BCE: past tense; Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language to which English belongs.

All extant European languages, save Basque, Finnish, Magyar, and Estonian, below to one of eight contemporary main branches of Indo-European: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic.

Note:

William Jones: mathematician; close friend with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmond Halley. Introduced the symbol π. His son, in the late 1700s, Sir William (sic) Jones, London, with a fascination for everything India, began to uncover the clues left by our ancestors with PIE to unravel the secret meanings and enigmatic stories behind their words.

Then the history of developing PIE.

"Horse" became a huge word to sort out.

Horse, wheel, and wood are words that are absent from PIE.

3500 BCE: horse-based culture on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. 

The root PIE word specifically denoting a domestic horse (*ek'wos) traveled with these nomadic Indo-European (Yamnaya) pastoralists --> Eurasia, India, and the Middle East.

Then many root words following from *ek'wos.

Horse is the only animal to appear in the personal names of early Indo-Europeans. See examples in footnote at bottom of page 97.

3400 BC: the equestrian lifestyle spread quickly.

Neolitic Europe: 6000 BCE to 3400 BCE: history, page 101.

First Yersinia pestis-ur probably seen between 6000 BCE and 3400 BCE in Europe.

Old Europe was ripe for rapid conquest and exploitation. -- p. 102

The history of global expansion of horse.

Part II
Forge Of Empires

Chapter 

 

 

 

See The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024

The Columbian Exchange:

The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024, p. 6.  

Another horse book for the bookshelf.   

"Running roughshod": a 17th century term. Described a horse that wore shoes with projecting nailheads. This gave the horse better traction while also creating a more lethal trampling weapon. Over time the term evolved to mean "attaining one's goals or desires by completely ignoring the opinions, rights, or feelings of others."

Among a gazillion other things I could mention from the book, perhaps the most important is introducing me to Brian Fagan. 

Also, from page 12: "... in 1866 the millionaire financier, banker, and philanthropist George Peabody donated $150,000 ($3 million in today's money) for the construction of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University." And then a footnote:

"Having no legitimate heir to his vast business enterprise, Peabody partnered with Junius Spencer Morgan in 1854. Their joint venture would eventually become J.P. Morgan & Co., the predecessor to three of the largest banking institutions in the world: JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank. Peabody is also considered the first modern philanthropist."

"Bits and pieces": headgear used to direct a horse -- the buckled straps and pieces to which the bit and reins are attached. The vacant space or gap between front teeth and back teeth: the diastema. 

Recommends chapter 6, "Building Pyramids," in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari.

 ****************************
Notes

Thomas Huxley, Othneil Marsh, Richard Owen, p. 24.
Eohippus, but Richard Owen called the fossil Hyracotherium some 35 years earlier, so that's the official designation of the ur-horse, but most folks still refer to it as Eohippus.

Seventeen living species of Perissodactyla from three related families: seven Equidae (one horse, three asses, and three zebras), five Rhinocerotidae, and five Tapiridae.

Hyracotherium inhabited a vast quadrant of the planet 57 million years ago. Small, fox-sized.

Five toes, but only four touched the ground; morphing into three toes.

The progenitor of Hyracotherium remains a mystery, as the post-dinosaur epoch beginning roughly 65 million years ago was the transcending shift from reptiles to mammals.

Shared common ancestor, or "stem animal," somewhere between a 100 million and 60 million years ago.

Hyracotherium: appeared during period dubbed "Greenhouse Earth." Crocodiles, swaying palm trees in the Arctic. 

Paleontology, link here.

Evolved as climate evolved; many dead ends. Finally transitioned into modern Equus, p. 26.

55 mya: Hyracotherium established throughout Europe, Asia, India, North America (particularly Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico).

50 mya; earth begins to cool and humidity levels dropped. Jungles, forests retreated slowly; grasses filled in.

34 - 25 mya: Hyracotherium becomes extinct, save for North America where they continued to evolve.

Middle Eocene period: North America becomes isolated from other northern landmasses. True Equidae persists only in North America.

32 mya: North American with small horse with same silhouette as modern horse. The 120-pound Miohippus would easily be recognized today as a miniature horse.

3.6 mya: discovered by Mary Leaky; side-by-side, Australopithecus and Hipparion.

4.5 - 4.0 mya: most significant global equine dispersion -- the modern genus Equus --- DNA research evolved.

Great American Interchange: newly formed Panamanian land bridge, or Isthmus of Darien, formed about 2.7 mya -- horses were among the first mammals to enter South America during a wave of accelerated migration known as the Great American Interchange.

1.0 mya -- common ancestor of both zebras and asses likely coexisted with the earliest horse in North america before dispersing into the Old World a little before 2 million years ago.

1.99 - 1.69 mya: separation of zebras and asses. Both zebras and asses continued to diverge into subspecies until roughly 150,000 years ago.

Pleistocene epoch, 2.6 mya to 12,000 years ago, no fewer than 58 species of Equus are present in the North American fossil record, with dozens living simultaneously. Certainly not "straight-line" evolution at play. 

The direct descendant of modern caballine horses showed up in North America loaded with genetic adaptation around 1.2 mya and its offspring in Europe as early as 1 mya.