10-16 Oct
Writing and Data
Added new entries further into the Orbeli rebellion. In particular, worked through the names list of rebels in the History of Sisakan and compared to Brosset’s identifications – agree on some, others seem far too much of a stretch.
Unsolved mysteries: location of “Saxate”, some names of Ivane’s faction.
Created new batch files to make opening the database systems faster, fixed “add new element” files which closed the database connection too soon. The latter should be the last part of the database upgrade process from some weeks ago.
Note for next week: I really need to make a front-end system for the map maker, because typing in the whole query by URL is a pain.
Skills
First session of Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval cluster colloquium: mostly went over people’s research interests and the utility and problems of field boundaries.
Third session of East European Doc Seminar: Focus on CV writing and abstracts. CV notes about UK quals not being universally understood are important to remember.
Reading
Further parts of the Shahnameh, the start of the Iran/Turan war and rise of Rostom including him gaining his special horse. Reading Shahnameh with a map handy might help, I’m not familiar enough with the geography and nomenclature (and therefore in some cases not clear which places are and are not real).
Have worked through a number of Brett Deveraux’s blogs on rice, iron production, and archery, not directly relevant but interesting and some useful take-aways. Especially notable: iron mostly open-mined in the middle ages, not pit-mined; very high forest impacts of iron working; vast differences in arrow utility by range and thus decreased importance of max range/movement in reality (and utility of Parthian shots etc). What mines did C12 GE have & where were they? Real lack of studies as far as I know on that sort of economic hist for the area.