Full Transcript for Late-Night Interview: Carys Hughes, Henry Bohun, Maria Lord, Troy Wilkinson: Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Empires, Alexander the Great and more...

to write new chapter drafts and complete all the ones I was still researching. 00:06:45.304 --> 00:06:51.722 First, I had to finish and enrich one of my case studies regarding cultural hybridity in ancient cities. 00:06:51.722 --> 00:06:59.745 That city was Hatra, an ancient city in present-day Iraq and one of the three cities I am writing about. 00:06:59.745 --> 00:07:03.401 The other two are Douro-Europos and Palmyra. 00:07:03.401 --> 00:07:23.562 Second, I wrote a new sub-chapter for my first chapter, which was about Homi Barbo's arguments on mobility and diaspora and how they could feature within my main argument of cultural hybridity and third space in the Greco-Roman Near Eastern cities mobility and diaspora respectively. 00:07:23.562 --> 00:07:27.992 And third, I am currently writing a new case study. 00:07:27.992 --> 00:07:41.514 This time is about the third space, on mobility in Palmyra, where I am using epigraphic inscriptions as evidence to propose how people moved to Palmyra and what they left there. 00:07:42.336 --> 00:07:54.173 What I wrote in my paper at the Classical Association Conference in Warwick has been helpful not only in finishing this chapter faster, but also in expanding what I have in mind to write. 00:07:54.173 --> 00:08:05.745 This is what I have been doing regarding my PhD, and my supervisor is so content with such progress, and my thesis project is taking shape. 00:08:05.745 --> 00:08:16.762 Nevertheless, that shape will hopefully have one more year to complete, as I was meant to submit my dissertation on the 30th of June this year. 00:08:16.762 --> 00:08:25.925 Still, I decided to submit it next year 2025, to have a solid argument to defend at the Weiber Wauke. 00:08:25.925 --> 00:08:32.639 Besides the PhD, I started a teaching placement at the company the Brilliant Club. 00:08:33.401 --> 00:08:33.620 Here. 00:08:33.980 --> 00:08:43.865 I teach the history of art, of portraits and portraiture to pupils from key stage 2 and 3, and portraiture to pupils from key stage 2 and 3, literally pupils from 11 to 13 years old. 00:08:44.705 --> 00:08:52.009 I started this placement in January during the spring term at Glentwit Major School near Cardiff. 00:08:52.009 --> 00:09:00.173 Currently I teach at the secondary school of Bay Baglan in the summer term, which I shall finish in early June. 00:09:00.173 --> 00:09:10.717 For those who do not live in the UK, these two schools are Welsh and are located in South Wales, near Cardiff and Swansea respectively. 00:09:10.717 --> 00:09:23.153 This first experience has been productive, with some difficulties in adapting communication that is suitable for young people and how I can deliver content without being too complicated. 00:09:23.153 --> 00:09:32.489 Yet my lead teachers have been responsive to my concerns and have helped me a lot by providing reports about the pupils' behavior and engagement. 00:09:32.489 --> 00:09:46.606 Nonetheless, my first students have been brightly engaged

with my communication activities and how I help them to progress with homework and assessments which they must submit to get good marks. 00:09:46.606 --> 00:09:56.115 I hope to get another opportunity to teach the next academic year, including the autumn, winter, spring and summer terms. 00:09:57.137 --> 00:10:10.875 On a more personal level, I had to deal with my mother's issues with her right ear with the danger of the cochlear area getting calcified and thus my mother being deaf in this ear. 00:10:10.875 --> 00:10:24.000 This greatly affected me personally, my family and my PhD, phd. 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:26.345 Thankfully, she had a successful operation on her right ear in Munich back in April. 00:10:26.345 --> 00:10:37.287 As she lives in a Bavarian village called Obera Mergau, which is a couple of kilometers away from the Bavarian capital, her right ear was sore and she had to wear a bandage for some time. 00:10:37.287 --> 00:10:47.886 Now my mother is healthy, works, hears me and my brother perfectly and lives happily and peacefully with my cat, luffy. 00:10:47.886 --> 00:10:58.193 A big thank you to the medical doctors in Munich, who successfully did an amazing job With all this that has happened to me. 00:10:58.193 --> 00:11:02.711 I will now introduce the following late-night interview to you. 00:11:03.701 --> 00:11:20.651 This conversation was recorded on the 20th of October 2023, during the conference I organized with these four guests within the field of the Hellenistic world, a period in the history of ancient Greece spanning between the 4th century and the 1st century BCE. 00:11:20.651 --> 00:11:25.462 Greece spanning between the 4th century and the 1st century BCE. 00:11:25.462 --> 00:11:47.735 This call for the aforementioned conference, called Kinship and Relationship in the Hellenistic World, took place at Swansea University lasting two days in that month, where a variety of oral presentations in person and online about the Hellenistic world were presented to enthusiasts and specialists on this specific historical period of ancient Greece. 00:11:47.735 --> 00:11:58.823 If you are a PhD student or candidate, ma student or postdoc, these four guests and I are planning a new edition, in this case 2024. 00:11:58.823 --> 00:12:06.004 If you are interested, submit your abstracts and we will be enormously pleased to read them. 00:12:06.967 --> 00:12:09.290 Now it is time to introduce the guests. 00:12:09.290 --> 00:12:15.432 As mentioned above, they were the organizers of the Kinship and Relationship in the Hellenistic World Conference. 00:12:15.432 --> 00:12:27.455 One is a PhD student from Swansea University, while the other three are researching their PhDs at the University of Wales Trinity St David in Lampeter. 00:12:27.455 --> 00:12:45.641 Each one researches specific topics of the ancient world, precisely the Hellenistic period in Egypt and the Roman East East. 00:12:45.641 --> 00:13:06.680 So please have some drinks, grab your

seats and let's warmly welcome Carys Hughes, henry Bohan, maria Lord and Troy Wilkinson. 00:13:06.700 --> 00:13:40.473 So so, so, hi Harris, henry Maria and Troy, welcome to the PhD Launch Podcast and thank you for being my four guests, which, curiously, this is the first ever interview with more than two guests. 00:13:40.473 --> 00:13:47.171 The last time I had was two guests maximum, so it's pretty a big event after the big one that we had. 00:13:47.171 --> 00:14:06.674 But before venturing into what we have done today, could each one of you tell me about your journey before getting to a PhD and why you decided to venture into this arduous and long journey of undertaking a postgraduate research project. 00:14:06.674 --> 00:14:09.566 So who would be the first one to start? 00:14:11.069 --> 00:14:11.731 Shall I go first? 00:14:11.731 --> 00:14:15.730 Hello, I'll bring the microphone closer to me. 00:14:15.730 --> 00:14:23.521 So I'm Henry and, yeah, my journey is to do a PhD. 00:14:23.521 --> 00:14:35.868 So maybe I'll talk about when I was four years old, when I just fell in love with ancient Egypt and I knew from that age that I wanted to be an Egyptologist. 00:14:35.868 --> 00:14:54.742 Asking the class what they wanted to be when they were older, you know, it was a fireman, a policeman and all these other things and I was like an Egyptologist and I could just see them like look, with raised eyebrows, like some of them were like what's that? 00:14:54.742 --> 00:15:05.364 So that's kind of where my journey started, I guess into the world of academia, and then it's a passion that kind of never left me. 00:15:05.364 --> 00:15:11.481 And then when I came to apply for universities when I was at college, um, the Egyptology was the only thing I wanted to do. 00:15:11.481 --> 00:15:14.147 There was no backups, I didn't care. 00:15:15.009 --> 00:15:23.723 Basically that was the only thing that was the only thing you had to choose like five options and I was like, well, there's three universities that I want to go to that do my topic, and that's pretty much it. 00:15:23.723 --> 00:15:28.799 I definitely wasn't an Oxbridge candidate, that's for sure. 00:15:28.799 --> 00:15:31.286 So it was yeah. 00:15:31.286 --> 00:15:34.593 So I put my three down and Swansea accepted me. 00:15:34.593 --> 00:15:36.366 So I ended up coming to Swansea University. 00:15:36.366 --> 00:15:38.948 I did my BA and my MA here. 00:15:39.019 --> 00:15:46.246 I did my BA and my MA here and then after after that I I knew I wanted to do a PhD, but I didn't want to do. 00:15:46.246 --> 00:15:48.949 I didn't want to go straight into it. 00:15:48.949 --> 00:15:53.200 I thought I wanted some kind of real world work experience. 00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:54.926 For whatever reason, I wanted to do that. 00:15:54.926 --> 00:15:57.580 I don't know what possessed me, but that's what I decided to do. 00:15:57.580 --> 00:16:12.931 So I worked full time for a few years and until I was kind of I guess

I kind of wanted to do it like that, I think, because I wanted to know that, I wanted to be sure that that's what I wanted to do essentially. 00:16:12.931 --> 00:16:20.867 So I kind of took myself out of academia and I'd realised at some point I was like I do not want to work in the real world forever. 00:16:20.867 --> 00:16:22.967 No, absolutely do not want to do that. 00:16:24.863 --> 00:16:31.769 I don't want to be an adult, as you would say, as we would say no, no, no, no, no no, I wanted to pursue my passion for sure. 00:16:32.400 --> 00:16:38.001 So I knew then I was like I'm ready to do a PhD, like now, for the reasons that. 00:16:38.001 --> 00:16:48.533 Like, yeah, I didn't want to continue working in the real world and it's something I it's something I always wanted to do anyway and just felt the right time to do it then. 00:16:48.533 --> 00:17:07.230 So I now work part-time and study part-time, so, and I study with I study at UWTSD, so University of Wales Trinity, st David, based at the Lambeth campus, where my tutor from Swansea, dr Catherinearina Zinn she works there full time so I approached her and was like I want to do a PhD now, what do you think? 00:17:07.230 --> 00:17:12.094 So we had some meetings and I applied there and here I am basically. 00:17:12.094 --> 00:17:15.316 So that was my journey, I guess, and why I wanted to do a PhD. 00:17:15.316 --> 00:17:23.967 It's kind of always been a goal of mine essentially to pursue Egyptology professionally and academically. 00:17:23.967 --> 00:17:33.546 As far as it will go, and I will ride that till the wheels fall off, I'll pass over to someone else now. 00:17:33.546 --> 00:18:21.451 Yeah, go on, troy, you go, thank you Henry? 00:18:23.741 --> 00:18:25.506 Sorry, is it the same question to me, luis? 00:18:25.506 --> 00:18:28.972 Yeah, of course. 00:18:28.972 --> 00:18:38.067 Can I give quite a romantic aversion of how I got into ancient history and ended up doing a PhD as Henry? 00:18:38.067 --> 00:18:47.986 Possibly not, but I'll give it a go, the long and the short of it, because people do ask me that question regularly why are you doing a PhD? 00:18:47.986 --> 00:18:53.762 To which the half-serious and not-serious answer at the same time is I'm called Troy. 00:18:53.762 --> 00:18:57.827 It's as simple as that, and it really is. 00:19:00.701 --> 00:19:10.490 I remember discovering the associations with my name at a very young age, and that certainly sparked an interest in classical Greek mythology. 00:19:10.490 --> 00:19:26.043 I suppose, as so many people, that is the gateway drug that somehow leads to the craziness that is the PhD, and so that was kind of the starting point, although I certainly have interests in other periods of history as well. 00:19:26.043 --> 00:19:31.061 16th, 17th century history was certainly a period I was very interested in. 00:19:31.061 --> 00:19:44.395 So, yeah, no, I studied classics in 16th 17th century history at college, came to University of Wales

Trinity, st David's at Lambter. 00:19:44.395 --> 00:19:46.743 That's going to be a common theme for a couple of us. 00:19:46.743 --> 00:19:48.326 I think you've heard that from Henry already. 00:19:48.326 --> 00:19:50.101 When was that? 00:19:50.101 --> 00:19:51.323 2015,. 00:19:51.323 --> 00:19:52.786 Did my BA there? 00:19:52.786 --> 00:19:58.238 The tutors and the environment is excellent. 00:19:58.238 --> 00:20:06.063 I discovered a research topic I was very, very interested in, even as early as the BA, and some excellent supervisors, um. 00:20:06.063 --> 00:20:17.856 So I stuck with Lambda for the uh, the research masters which is two years, finished that in 2020, and then obviously 2020 was 2020, uh and it. 00:20:17.856 --> 00:20:18.798 It was a combination of. 00:20:18.879 --> 00:20:24.288 I'd always kind of wanted to do a PhD, although I'm'm actually only beginning to realise now what a PhD actually is. 00:20:24.288 --> 00:20:45.269 Hindsight's a wonderful thing, but no, it was a natural progression for me at that point to do it then, because I think I had certainly played with the idea, as Henry said, of sort of going into the real world and pursuing that avenue. 00:20:45.269 --> 00:20:53.893 But no, it sort of felt for me like a now or never. 00:20:53.893 --> 00:21:16.072 It was quite tempting to go into the real world and do other things for sort of a period of time, but then as I'm sure Henry can probably testify as well, or maybe not it sounds like you ran back to it with open arms, sort of yeah, potentially um, it's, it's hard sometimes to to come back into that academic world, and so I thought, well, I've got the opportunity to to do it. 00:21:16.152 --> 00:21:28.871 Now I've got the support of of excellent supervisors I can't say enough good things about them, really uh and and I've got a topic that I do quite enjoy no, I do enjoy it a lot A lot of opportunities. 00:21:28.871 --> 00:21:31.228 And here we are really. 00:21:35.501 --> 00:21:36.747 Great Well, thanks, Troy. 00:21:36.747 --> 00:21:40.771 I suspect my journey is a bit different. 00:21:40.771 --> 00:21:48.211 When I was young, when I was at school, I did go on archaeological digs around the city I lived in. 00:21:48.211 --> 00:21:54.893 So I remember excavating an Anglo-Saxon graveyard that was fun and a Roman water tank. 00:21:54.893 --> 00:21:57.964 I think that was even more fun, actually, bizarrely. 00:21:57.964 --> 00:22:01.890 And I did toy with doing archaeology, but I didn't. 00:22:01.890 --> 00:22:05.695 I went to study music and I went to study to be a composer. 00:22:05.695 --> 00:22:12.851 So I did three years at music college and then went to do a postgrad in musical composition. 00:22:12.851 --> 00:22:19.780 After that, I was trying to work as a musician at the same time and realised I didn't actually like being a musician. 00:22:19.780 --> 00:22:24.512 I loved playing music, but I hate late nights and I hate networking. 00:22:24.512 --> 00:22:26.907 Really, that's what it's all about. 00:22:27.583 --> 00:22:32.288 Well, we are on a late night interview, so you can't avoid it. 00:22:33.163 --> 00:22:34.419 It's not an in-person conference. 00:22:35.524 --> 00:22:36.608 So you've failed on both counts. 00:22:37.162 --> 00:22:41.807 I mean, I'm suffering severe sleep deprivation, so this could go strange. 00:22:41.807 --> 00:23:00.645 No, it was the effectively finishing work at 10 o'clock every night, um, and because I was doing a lot of jazz gigs and a lot of sessions like that, um, you know, it could be even later and the playing was, honestly, the playing and performing was wonderful, but the lifestyle was not, um. 00:23:00.645 --> 00:23:04.811 So I mean, my partner escaped to Greece um to teach English. 00:23:04.811 --> 00:23:10.948 So we went off to Crete, um, and we lived, yeah, within cycling distance of Knossos. 00:23:10.948 --> 00:23:11.870 It was amazing. 00:23:12.491 --> 00:23:21.587 So, basically, I spent a year exploring every Minoan site I could get to, which was wonderful, and then we went to Patra and India and we went to Broad for a bit, came back to to London. 00:23:21.587 --> 00:23:42.327 At that point I wanted to go back into academia, so I did ethnomusicology at SOAS, did postgrad at SOAS and did a lot of fieldwork in South India, mostly, mostly South India, but also Nepal in the Kathmandu Valley, so a lot of social anthropology as well. 00:23:42.327 --> 00:23:50.074 That was great and I think, as probably Troy and Henry know, I will bang that social anthropology drum a lot in our discussions. 00:23:50.797 --> 00:23:53.024 I love it, though I have decided to mix fingers. 00:24:00.448 --> 00:24:03.132 I was sort of mildly successful at all of this. 00:24:03.132 --> 00:24:05.355 So I think it was expected that I would do a PhD. 00:24:05.355 --> 00:24:10.109 Then I didn't do it straight away for personal reasons. 00:24:10.109 --> 00:24:11.152 There was a lot going on. 00:24:11.152 --> 00:24:14.409 I had a good job at the time in academic publishing. 00:24:14.409 --> 00:24:23.210 That was fantastic, and I was publishing a lot on South India and then I thought, ok, it's about time I go and do a PhD. 00:24:23.210 --> 00:24:32.687 But actually the practicalities of going off to do six months at a time in a South Indian village or actually it was going to be a South Indian city that wasn't going to happen. 00:24:32.687 --> 00:24:35.790 So I decided to start doing one on Fantasie de Paris. 00:24:35.790 --> 00:24:38.429 So music in Fantasie de Paris, which was great. 00:24:38.500 --> 00:24:51.790 I got a couple of years of going to Paris, which I have to say I did go to the Bibliothèque Nationale a lot, but I went to an awful lot of restaurants as well, realised this wasn't really going anywhere. 00:24:51.790 --> 00:24:53.553 I was trying I don't know what I was trying to do. 00:24:53.553 --> 00:25:02.811 I wasn't really clear about the project I swapped back to SOAS, reworked it

into a PhD on South India and then moved to Vienna and this was bad timing. 00:25:02.811 --> 00:25:04.638 So I have most of a PhD on South India and then moved to Vienna and this was bad timing. 00:25:04.638 --> 00:25:06.944 So I have most of a PhD on South India sitting in the corner of the room. 00:25:06.944 --> 00:25:10.132 I just never finished it for various reasons. 00:25:10.132 --> 00:25:18.567 I could have finished it in Vienna, but it was complicated New city, new country, new language, all the rest of it and then I got bored. 00:25:19.288 --> 00:25:20.471 I was just a bit bored. 00:25:20.471 --> 00:25:27.466 I thought I know, I'll do another master's degree because they're fun and they're easy and you know, relatively speaking, it's not the same commitment. 00:25:27.466 --> 00:25:30.169 I thought I don't want to do this in German. 00:25:30.169 --> 00:25:32.888 So I went online. 00:25:32.888 --> 00:25:34.447 I was like, ok, what am I interested in? 00:25:34.447 --> 00:25:36.607 Oh, ancient history God, that sounds great. 00:25:36.607 --> 00:25:37.690 Oh, I remember archaeology. 00:25:37.690 --> 00:25:38.161 That was good. 00:25:38.181 --> 00:25:50.270 I remember being in Greece and, you know, going around ancient sites and, honestly, ending up at Lampeter was chance because they did a distance MRes and that's what sold it. 00:25:50.270 --> 00:25:58.390 So I could do it at a distance from Vienna because I was certainly not going to leave Austria and it was fantastic. 00:25:58.390 --> 00:26:00.327 Honestly, the teaching was brilliant. 00:26:00.327 --> 00:26:09.066 I wrote a thesis on Ptolemaic Egypt and I had Katerina and Kyle as my supervisors and they were amazing. 00:26:09.607 --> 00:26:15.668 So I got to the end of that and thought that was fun and the supervision was wonderful and I thought why not just keep going? 00:26:15.668 --> 00:26:23.552 And I think it is the right time and I think it's the right subject, and I think what happened before is I still wasn't quite sold on it, but the way I also got into it. 00:26:23.552 --> 00:26:25.182 I still wasn't quite sold on it, but the way I also got into it. 00:26:25.182 --> 00:26:38.522 I was planning a big compositional project based on Greek modes and tuning systems, so I was reading loads of ancient Greek music theory and that was partly what steered me back in this direction. 00:26:38.522 --> 00:26:41.267 So that's how I ended up where I am. 00:26:41.387 --> 00:26:48.853 I think Well, last but not least, I don't know how I'm going to follow that. 00:26:48.853 --> 00:26:51.809 I had a way more straightforward. 00:26:51.809 --> 00:26:56.452 To be fair, I didn't know I wanted to do ancient history until A-levels. 00:26:56.452 --> 00:27:09.326 My sixth form did a classical civilisation option and I picked that because I didn't know what else to pick for my third option and I really enjoyed it. 00:27:09.326 --> 00:27:27.910 So I kind of I, when we were applying for universities, I thought

I might as well keep going with that and applied to applied to Swansea and when I started doing my undergraduate degree I was like I actually really like this and I think I want to keep going for as long as possible. 00:27:27.910 --> 00:27:34.448 So I did my undergrad, I did my MA in Swansea and I'm doing my PhD in Swansea as well. 00:27:34.448 --> 00:27:38.388 Yeah, I think the same as Troy. 00:27:38.388 --> 00:27:43.428 I thought if I didn't keep going and do it now, I was never going to get back into it. 00:27:43.428 --> 00:28:00.828 So I was chatting with my academic mentor and decided that, yeah, the PhD would be possible and he's now my supervisor, so it's not quite as long of a story. 00:28:03.547 --> 00:28:17.028 I'm quite a bit older than the rest of you, so I guess we all had, of course, different backgrounds and eventually we end up doing the same thing. 00:28:17.028 --> 00:28:31.489 And that's what part of this of growing up try, try, making a try, making a guarantee what this fits and what doesn't Then it leads to good things. 00:28:31.489 --> 00:28:34.947 And, as we are doing now a PhD, I could share a bit of my background as well. 00:28:34.947 --> 00:28:37.332 I could share a bit of my background as well. 00:28:37.332 --> 00:28:52.172 I never thought that I wanted to become an ancient historian or just doing a PhD at this time, because I've always wanted to become a rally driver, going to the WRC or IRC and all that. 00:28:52.172 --> 00:28:59.470 It's a completely different thing, and I need to study mechanical engineering and all that. 00:28:59.920 --> 00:29:08.771 The problem is I sucked at physics and maths, so, and then I wanted to venture into football. 00:29:08.771 --> 00:29:18.451 I played in indoor football when I was a teenager and I really wanted to try football, but then obviously fell in love with arts. 00:29:18.451 --> 00:29:25.805 But then obviously fell in love with, uh arts and unfortunately, due to my parents divorce, I failed 10th grade or year 10. 00:29:25.805 --> 00:29:38.110 But then the art, uh history of art and visual art in general led me to to do what I was really interested in doing, which which was ancient history. 00:29:38.110 --> 00:29:50.360 But I honestly found out on my third year of my undergrad when I did an internship at an archaeological site from the Roman period. 00:29:50.480 --> 00:29:55.727 So it's called Serro da Vila Well, it's in Portuguese. 00:29:55.727 --> 00:29:58.469 It's in the south of Portugal. 00:29:58.469 --> 00:30:12.851 It was a Roman villa at the time, built in the first AD during Augustus' time, and that's what fascinated me to explore the ancient world and all that. 00:30:12.851 --> 00:30:24.603 And I guess the sharing of different backgrounds and our love for the ancient world makes us going into what we are doing. 00:30:24.603 --> 00:30:39.444 So and I guess, and I fully believe, that after the phd we're going to have spectacular jobs in our fields and getting well paid, I

guess touch wood fingers, so touch wood fingers crossed in germany as well. 00:30:39.484 --> 00:30:50.196 So as, as I was saying initially at the beginning of our interview, we got so overwhelmingly tired of talking. 00:30:50.196 --> 00:31:27.185 I had a two-day call for paper conference called Kinship and Relationship in the Hellenistic World, where different PhD candidates and graduates went up to Swansea University to present their respective and interesting topics and also online interesting topics and also online. 00:31:27.185 --> 00:31:31.050 So that's why we are so exhausted of talking and dropping so much, uh, so much so saliva, saliva, exactly. 00:31:31.050 --> 00:31:37.924 So we're so wasting so much saliva that we are exhausted, basically. 00:31:37.924 --> 00:32:02.480 And but that didn't get stopped from us to um to set up a, an interview that we were planning since last year, and we finally uh realized that that uh desire to having this late night interview, as as it is in the concept of a podcast. 00:32:02.480 --> 00:32:12.901 So let's jump right into to asking another general question uh, what is your phd research project about? 00:32:12.901 --> 00:32:20.955 So, caris, I'd like to start with you, since the microphone is just near you, so just approach for a bit. 00:32:22.141 --> 00:32:35.520 Yeah, so my PhD thesis is on soft power in the inner courts of the Camelid, persia, the Hellenistic kingdoms and Imperial Rome, which it's quite a broad subject. 00:32:35.520 --> 00:32:45.268 But the idea of that was it's comparative history and it's trying to use soft power, which is more of a. 00:32:45.268 --> 00:32:49.747 It's a newer academic concept in the terms of ancient history. 00:32:49.747 --> 00:32:57.484 So I didn't want to try to go too specific too early on and then kind of box myself in and figure out there wasn't enough evidence about two years down the line. 00:32:57.484 --> 00:33:06.543 So I've kind of gone with a much broader topic so that I can find where the evidence is and then go from there. 00:33:06.543 --> 00:33:09.151 Yeah, it's that. 00:33:12.560 --> 00:33:13.665 We're going around again. 00:33:15.441 --> 00:33:19.469 Okay, so my PhD is now. 00:33:25.387 --> 00:33:25.909 That was a flex. 00:33:27.241 --> 00:33:28.726 This is going to be new for us as well. 00:33:28.746 --> 00:33:35.880 I think it's on the embodied sensory exploration of environments in Hellenistic Western Asia Minor. 00:33:35.880 --> 00:33:37.746 That's what I've ended up doing. 00:33:37.746 --> 00:33:49.890 When I started it I thought I was going to look or destroy might be a better verb the idea of the ancient border because I looked for them and couldn't find any. 00:33:49.890 --> 00:33:56.007 But once I didn't find any, I couldn't really find anything to write about them. 00:33:56.007 --> 00:33:57.566 So that was a problem. 00:33:57.566 --> 00:34:02.864 But I did want to explore two things. 00:34:02.864 --> 00:34:04.648 One is I wanted to look at

history from below. 00:34:04.769 --> 00:34:12.173 I'm not particularly interested in elite discourses, um, and obviously this is something we've discussed at length between us all, um. 00:34:12.173 --> 00:34:28.985 So I wanted to try and at least get some idea of the idea of the everyday or everyday life in the Hellenistic world, which is problematic because we have no sources, which pushes you in certain theoretical and certain sort of practical directions. 00:34:28.985 --> 00:34:36.161 And given my background in ethnomusicology, then this leads me to field work as well. 00:34:36.161 --> 00:34:52.871 So I ended up exploring sensory archaeology and walking techniques, walking ethnographies as a way of at least trying to understand that part of human experience which is the sensing of a past environment. 00:34:53.481 --> 00:35:15.266 That's sort of where I am at the minute so I am, in some real and not so real sense, a complete diametric opposite of, uh, of maria's approach, although this, this may please and surprise you to see that I I'm coming somewhat more around to that and I'll explain. 00:35:15.266 --> 00:35:17.590 I'll explain. 00:35:17.590 --> 00:35:21.380 I'll explain why in a second. 00:35:21.380 --> 00:35:50.534 So in the sense that I'm diametrically opposed, is more on the basis that my research looks at ancient states and the ability of ancient states to fundamentally to interact with the world around them and complete, I suppose, the, if you will, political, economic, military objectives that they, that they wish to wish to complete, um, the. 00:35:50.534 --> 00:35:58.096 The reason why I'm perhaps more I've come around more to maria's sort of history from below approach is more in the sense that I'm I'm interested to look at. 00:35:58.096 --> 00:36:00.190 So there's been a lot of work done on sort of history from below approach is more in the sense that I'm I'm interested to look at. 00:36:00.190 --> 00:36:11.789 So there's been a lot of work done on sort of what you know you'll see quite frequent discussions on policy and say the imperial roman period, uh, or indeed ptolemaic foreign policy. 00:36:11.789 --> 00:36:16.106 I, my phd is refined a bit more now to focus more just on the roman stuff. 00:36:16.106 --> 00:36:24.889 I had initially looked to do, uh, to to do ptolemaic and Roman stuff and my supervisors very wisely and astutely warned me early on. 00:36:24.889 --> 00:36:31.831 I hope I'm not mischaracterising their description, said Troy, we are concerned about the chronological breadth of your study. 00:36:31.831 --> 00:36:46.565 Me being the ignorant first-year PhD student I was, I seemed to decide not to listen to this first year PhD student I was, I seemed to decide not to listen to this, and my PhD is now refined a bit more. 00:36:46.585 --> 00:36:48.289 But it is similarly to what Maria's just described. 00:36:48.289 --> 00:36:49.170 It's a source problem. 00:36:49.170 --> 00:37:04.228 In some ways it's very difficult

to ascertain what those at the, if you will, the center of the state, ie in the Roman case, the princeps, the emperor and his immediate advisors in Rome. 00:37:04.228 --> 00:37:11.949 It's fairly easy, I would say, or straightforward, to infer potentially what their objectives are. 00:37:11.949 --> 00:37:16.980 But I'm much more interested in some sense and certainly this aligns a bit more with the evidences. 00:37:17.239 --> 00:37:42.128 Ok, how do they actually go about manifesting this on the ground in practice and generally, at least in the Roman period, this ends up manifesting itself through looking at the Roman army, or certainly in my area of research, this has ended up being the eastern desert of Egypt during approximately the first three centuries ad um. 00:37:42.128 --> 00:37:52.521 That that's what you end up, you end up looking at, or, as I've discovered, um, that you do inevitably in some sense end up looking primarily at the roman army. 00:37:52.521 --> 00:38:01.563 So it's, I suppose and I've I've made this argument to maria many times maria is very much I hope I'm not wrong in saying very much looking at history from below. 00:38:01.563 --> 00:38:08.246 I very much try and pull the two together and sort of look at that history from above and that history from below. 00:38:08.246 --> 00:38:24.577 I could go on, but that's what I try to accomplish with my research, I suppose with my research I suppose. 00:38:26.342 --> 00:38:30.368 So I was really interested in kingship during my BA and my MA and I did both my dissertations on that. 00:38:30.368 --> 00:38:39.188 Looking at the Egyptian New Kingdom, I did Seti I and his kind of monumental, a couple of his temples basically, and comparing the two. 00:38:39.188 --> 00:38:48.385 And then when I got to masses I looked at um, nefertiti, and I compared her essentially in the role of kingship and queenship as she's portrayed amarna. 00:38:48.385 --> 00:39:08.107 So I was very much interested opposite to maria in kind of elites, but I guess where I kind of where me and maria maybe meet, is that like um, where me and Maria maybe meet, is that like I kind of want to kind of shine a light on royal ideology but look at it not as in it's propaganda essentially. 00:39:08.107 --> 00:39:10.018 So I was interested in that. 00:39:11.444 --> 00:39:22.349 All fat terms come out of this Whoopsie daisy I'm very much a republican which is something quite interesting who researches kingship. 00:39:22.349 --> 00:39:31.449 But in Egypt there's loads of studies on kingship but it's just something that interests me, and particularly divine kingship. 00:39:31.449 --> 00:39:50.612 So this idea that a mortal can become divine and one of my tutors in Swansea was Professor Martina Minas-Nerpil, now professor, and she's very interested in a lot of her research revolves around the Ptolemaic ruler cult. 00:39:50.612 --> 00:39:52.947 So I kind of got interested in that a little bit. 00:39:52.947 --> 00:39:59.284 I was

kind of a weird soft spot for the Ptolemies Even before I kind of came to uni. 00:39:59.284 --> 00:40:12.027 Actually, if anybody went to a UK college, I did an EPQ, which is like an extended project qualification or something where you get like a little Write an essay on whatever you want. 00:40:12.027 --> 00:40:15.599 Basically, and I did mine on Ptolemaic Egypt and I looked at the Ptolemaic kings. 00:40:15.599 --> 00:40:16.380 So I kind of had a. 00:40:16.561 --> 00:40:30.025 I harbored a fascination for the Ptolemies even before I actually professionally quote unquote studied Egyptology and when I was looking at like the New Kingdom stuff there was a lot of royal ancestor veneration, like in the royal sphere. 00:40:30.025 --> 00:40:50.203 So when I then sort of dipped in and out of the Ptolemaic stuff, this idea of the Ptolemies venerating their own ancestors, a lot of the especially the earlier scholarship was kind of saying well, this is a Greek thing, we do see a royal ancestor veneration in the Hellenistic period. 00:40:50.203 --> 00:41:07.714 But it was very much kind of asserting a kind of a cultural identity for this phenomena and it's something that I'm not really happy with and I'm trying to grapple with changing and bringing it more into kind of the Egyptian cultural sphere, something that was kind of they were used to anyway or there's very much a lot of evidence for in the past. 00:41:07.714 --> 00:41:09.701 I mean a lot of that work has. 00:41:09.701 --> 00:41:21.331 There is a lot more discussion now in maybe the past 30, 40 years on the Egyptianness of this and of course it's very apparent in the kind of native temple complexes. 00:41:21.331 --> 00:41:28.886 So I'm kind of essentially kind of sitting at this point where I'm looking at kind of divine kingship, royal ancestor veneration. 00:41:30.322 --> 00:41:34.625 I've since become quite interested also in like concepts of like space and time and cultural memory. 00:41:34.625 --> 00:41:39.625 So I'm trying to kind of tie all of those together in something that's probably going to be quite ridiculously large. 00:41:39.625 --> 00:41:46.380 And I'm going to kind of tie all of those together in something that's probably going to be quite ridiculously large and I'm going to have to narrow down much like Troy was saying a second ago about the scope of a paper. 00:41:46.380 --> 00:41:59.675 I have been told a number of times that it's quite what's the term ambitious, I guess, in the time frame that I've been given or that you have for a PhD. 00:41:59.675 --> 00:42:02.528 So it will be something along those lines somewhere. 00:42:02.528 --> 00:42:14.505 Essentially, yeah, royal ancestor veneration during the Ptolemaic period and looking at it kind of from an Egyptologist perspective, more so, yeah, any new theory. 00:42:14.505 --> 00:42:16.346 I'm like, ooh, I love this, I'm going to put this in here. 00:42:16.601 --> 00:42:17.403 But, obviously. 00:42:20.462 --> 00:42:28.929 I just feel like maybe the others will agree with me as well that when you do a PhD, it goes through these periods of expansion and then contraction because it's too big. 00:42:28.929 --> 00:42:34.967 And then you're like, right, well, I need to, maybe I need to cut this to this specific material evidence or this time period or this location. 00:42:34.967 --> 00:42:38.264 And then you kind of read more theory and stuff and it gets bigger again. 00:42:38.264 --> 00:42:43.409 And and then you kind of read more theory and stuff and it gets bigger again and then you're like, oh right, well, now I need to, now I've incorporated this, I need to narrow it down again. 00:42:43.409 --> 00:42:46.264 It kind of keeps going through this process of expansion and contraction. 00:42:46.645 --> 00:42:49.447 And I'm kind of midway through my PhD now. 00:42:49.447 --> 00:42:58.182 I study part-time, by the way, so I'm it's, you know, six to eight years, sort of the full-time, three to four. 00:42:58.182 --> 00:43:01.831 But I feel like it's most bloated and ridiculous now. 00:43:01.831 --> 00:43:19.416 So my next kind of what I need to move on to is kind of cutting it down and really kind of honing all that kind of stuff and deciding what is going to be in it, what isn't going to be in it, what am I specifically going to look at While isn't going to be in it how? 00:43:19.416 --> 00:43:24.190 The exact like yeah, what am I specifically going to look at while still trying to do all that stuff at the same time? 00:43:25.101 --> 00:43:27.824 I guess that from what you said. 00:43:27.824 --> 00:43:37.386 Uh, you are quite advanced than us for your research um, I'd know I wouldn't say advanced. 00:43:37.467 --> 00:44:03.143 Like it's funny, like I feel like I um like listening to everyone here and obviously, like obviously we've just come off the back of this conference like everybody is so good at what they do and know so much and we were talking a lot essentially, and it's nice that we've kind of come together to do this like a collaborative podcast, because talking about these things, because we were saying earlier that um, doing a phd is quite isolating an experience. 00:44:03.403 --> 00:44:12.668 You're, you have a specific topic that you have to kind of give a new approach to or talk about that nobody's kind of focused on before. 00:44:12.668 --> 00:44:20.167 Like this newness element is very much um, encouraged and expected for a PhD. 00:44:20.167 --> 00:44:39.618 So doing that you being the only person studying something is quite isolating in a way, because when you do your Masters and your BA, you're usually in a cohort of people and you're all doing the same module, you're writing the same similar essays. 00:44:39.618 --> 00:44:49.366 Phd is very isolating and I think the humanities is very much behind something like stem, like that field, um, where they do collaborative phds and stuff. 00:44:49.366 --> 00:44:56.042 So, um, yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody's

advanced in this in such a way. 00:44:56.042 --> 00:45:11.625 We all just come with different tool set, essentially, and different kind of approaches, methodologies, backgrounds, and all of that enriches the disciplines that we work in and the kind of wider humanities as well. 00:45:11.645 --> 00:45:18.166 So I can guess that, I try to feel that. 00:45:18.166 --> 00:45:48.989 I guess that on the humanities side, because I feel that also that PhD from our side is monotonous and we are deeply alone, and so that's why I think, when I, when we talk, when I talk to undergrads and all that what is for your PhD and would you like to do it? 00:45:49.268 --> 00:45:52.342 They say I wouldn't do it because they have that ghost of it. 00:45:52.342 --> 00:45:56.190 I don't want to go into academia or it's too hard. 00:45:56.190 --> 00:46:13.105 And they have that assumption that that I'm going to be alone, I'm going to miss my pints, I'm going to miss party nights, I'm going to miss well, I would say, one night stands, but you can be as old as you want, as old as you want. 00:46:13.246 --> 00:46:15.228 So that that's the thing. 00:46:15.630 --> 00:46:30.614 Yeah, yeah, but uh but I think, as as I was telling on my previous late night interview with dr alan roda and and lauren saunders, that the phd in the future will be the mandatory degree. 00:46:30.614 --> 00:46:47.047 That's why I believe, uh, in a few years time, uh, because the world is is still getting so much competitive and it keeps going on, and if we don't update ourselves then we're going to miss the train. 00:46:47.047 --> 00:46:57.626 Essentially, and that especially is happening as well in academia, for example, if they want to go venture into academia, the PhD is already a mandatory degree. 00:46:57.626 --> 00:47:01.860 Who knows that in an industry job that also will happen. 00:47:01.860 --> 00:47:13.864 So, but we can, we can talk, discuss that more, uh, further down the interview, as we would like to start, uh, our question first with harris. 00:47:13.864 --> 00:47:33.493 Uh, I'd like to to if you could explain to us what does soft power mean and would you like to give us an example of a soft power movement, whether it is on the Achaemenid Empire, on the Assyrians or the Roman Empire, out of court. 00:47:51.719 --> 00:47:55.405 All right, soft power is a term popularized by Joseph Nye, I think, in his book Bound to Lead the Changing Nature of American Power. 00:47:55.405 --> 00:48:00.913 So it's a modern political concept most often used to talk about foreign relations between um world powers. 00:48:00.913 --> 00:48:10.686 Uh, obviously with america, it's specifically a superpower um I, I believe naya's given um talks in in china and things like that on on the same concept. 00:48:10.686 --> 00:48:23.402 It's it's a way to describe um influence like the, the power of um getting people to do what you want through convincing them that it's what they want. 00:48:23.402 --> 00:48:26.205 It's co-optive, indirect power. 00:48:26.205 --> 00:48:30.085 It's a fairly broad term. 00:48:30.085 --> 00:48:48.085 It's basically everything other than tangible power, like using force or coercion with, say, bribery with your economy or your military to take over another country, and things like that, or occupy it. 00:48:51.701 --> 00:48:56.206 In terms of the outer courts using it, that would be the case of propaganda. 00:48:56.206 --> 00:49:02.942 I think if we're using the term propaganda, it would be the case of propaganda I. 00:49:02.942 --> 00:49:04.625 I think if we're using the term propaganda, um, it would be the rule, occult it. 00:49:04.625 --> 00:49:11.711 It would be convincing people that um, convincing your citizens that you, you are the one in charge and they can't challenge you because you are a divine being. 00:49:11.711 --> 00:49:12.594 And who can? 00:49:12.594 --> 00:49:14.260 Who can challenge a god. 00:49:14.260 --> 00:49:17.547 Um, that would be it's. 00:49:17.547 --> 00:49:27.679 It's not making them stay in your country or accept your rule because you've got soldiers on every street corner. 00:49:27.679 --> 00:49:37.185 It's making them stay in your country and believe that you deserve to be in charge of them because that's, you are fundamentally better than them in that sort of sense. 00:49:37.185 --> 00:49:40.128 So it's convincing them that they want to do. 00:49:40.128 --> 00:49:43.163 It's convincing them that it that they want to do it and that they will do it. 00:49:44.164 --> 00:49:54.422 Um, yeah, if that's true, when you met you meant when you mentioned god in this, in the context that you're studying you mentioned the king or the deity that's the outer court. 00:49:54.542 --> 00:50:11.329 The inner court is the inner court that would be the, the women, the at least as far as I'm defining it in my thesis the women, the eunuchs, the servants, male favourites, the kind of behind-the-scenes side of the power. 00:50:11.329 --> 00:50:16.983 So in that sense that would be In Rome. 00:50:16.983 --> 00:50:37.929 They have several examples of, say, livia will go to Augustus and if someone is on trial and they happen to be in her favour, she has the ability to influence the kind of power. 00:50:37.929 --> 00:50:58.779 Behind there will always be someone, if you're in a monarchy who is close to the king but is not in an official position, so there'll be the person that guards his bedchamber, there'll be his wife, there'll be his children and there'll be his family members who can talk to him outside of those official advisory positions. 00:50:58.779 --> 00:51:03.319 And soft power in that sense would be the ability for them who can talk to him outside of those official advisory positions. 00:51:03.319 --> 00:51:11.953 And soft power in that sense would be the ability for them to influence the king, who is the ultimate decision maker, without ever having an official kind of power. 00:51:11.953 --> 00:51:15.947 If that

answers. 00:51:18.384 --> 00:51:27.364 No, I guess it matches what we, what we do nowadays as well, politicians also being influenced by other politicians. 00:51:27.864 --> 00:51:33.358 He said, troy, come on, don't be like that don't be like that we're going to get started on politics. 00:51:33.358 --> 00:51:34.589 It's like an analogy. 00:51:35.391 --> 00:51:38.888 I was hoping that modern politics would stay out for at least five minutes. 00:51:42.047 --> 00:51:43.331 It was just a comparison to it. 00:51:45.020 --> 00:51:53.134 If you want a modern day comparison, it would be during COVID that the businesses that were friends with politicians got the contracts. 00:51:53.134 --> 00:51:57.190 That's the kind of soft power into play there, sure. 00:51:58.099 --> 00:52:03.679 But, like with here, do they get mentioned by ancient authors? 00:52:03.679 --> 00:52:20.092 Is there an example of that influence by those male eunuchs, royal women, male friends and perhaps the courtesans that were standing side by side with the king? 00:52:20.092 --> 00:52:23.911 Was there any reference from ancient authors? 00:52:24.579 --> 00:52:29.353 Yes, you have the case of Livia going behind the scenes. 00:52:29.353 --> 00:52:34.952 She's an interesting one because the authors tend to be quite kind to her in their characterization. 00:52:34.952 --> 00:52:43.040 So she's talked about as raising the children of nobles and, um, giving these, these benefactions to people. 00:52:43.040 --> 00:52:47.819 She goes out when rome is on fire under tiberius and starts to command the firefighters. 00:52:47.819 --> 00:52:57.137 I believe don't don't quote me on this um and we have those under the. 00:52:57.137 --> 00:53:00.328 The roman authors, um, I can't remember specifics. 00:53:00.328 --> 00:53:02.748 Suetonius definitely at some point would have mentioned this. 00:53:02.748 --> 00:53:06.804 With eunuchs. 00:53:06.804 --> 00:53:09.351 We have a lot of talk about regencies. 00:53:09.351 --> 00:53:13.500 There's also when these people turn up in the sources. 00:53:13.500 --> 00:53:27.447 It tends to be a negative context, because my thesis is largely on is on how these people are perceived, because it's impossible to know what they actually, what actually happened. 00:53:27.447 --> 00:54:10.014 So it's the perception of them in the sources because they will show up in a negative context, because their power becomes too obvious to the outside, kind of world. 00:54:10.014 --> 00:54:10.736 Sure. 00:54:12.471 --> 00:54:39.773 That's because they are less influential and they don't have so much status as if, we say, within the Seleucid court, the philoid has more status and more influence for the decision making of seleucus or demetrius, for example, instead of those royal women that, or the concubine, the courtesan sorry that are around. 00:54:39.773 --> 00:54:43.721 Don't know if you all agree with that vision. 00:54:43.721 --> 00:54:44.463 Don't know. 00:54:44.463 --> 00:54:50.226 So once I'm trying to figure, to try and trying to understand yeah, theoretically. 00:54:50.266 --> 00:55:10.260 yes, these people had the power and the influence and they had these official positions and titles and all that kind of stuff to say that they did, sure, um, which is why, when, when these, these other people that don't have that power and shouldn't have that power and societal like societal expectations, say they, they don't do those things, they, they have their place, they should stay in that place. 00:55:10.260 --> 00:55:27.176 When it's clear that they've broken out of that and they are influencing the king, that's when they become a problem for the sources, because if the king does listen to his queen over the filloi, then what society comes to essentially will be what the sources tend to say. 00:55:28.650 --> 00:55:30.538 Which would be very interesting if Ptolemaic Egypt. 00:55:32.192 --> 00:55:34.459 I need to research more about it because it sounds very interesting. 00:55:35.250 --> 00:55:36.719 I mean the queens essentially. 00:55:36.719 --> 00:55:37.947 Can I quickly say something? 00:55:37.947 --> 00:55:45.296 The queens, essentially, in Ptolemaic Egypt, are sometimes described as essentially being the pharaoh. 00:55:45.296 --> 00:55:50.334 It's almost like a joint rulership, or some of them quite clearly actually rule independently. 00:55:50.334 --> 00:56:04.893 So, yeah, there's definitely some cultural differences in our period, um, in our, in the hellenistic world, so to speak, it's not all, yeah, yeah but since you're touching you're now touched upon the culture, does that also affect? 00:56:05.975 --> 00:56:20.389 uh, so saying those influences affect one culture or affect both cultures, or could be some sort of cultural imposition over another? 00:56:20.389 --> 00:56:23.840 So I can give you the. 00:56:23.840 --> 00:56:33.321 So I was, basically I was while I was reading every, every article, every bits of research that you have done. 00:56:33.321 --> 00:56:40.003 There was one particular thing that amazed me, and we talk about him very often. 00:56:42.352 --> 00:56:51.119 Here we go, Our big guy our big guy called Alexander the Great and while I was researching it I was doing the research and all that. 00:56:51.119 --> 00:57:04.789 So I'm going to purposely put Alexander because he's our big OG and I would give it to the part of cultural imposition through soft power. 00:57:04.789 --> 00:57:55.210 Would be something I don't know, a way of elevating one culture above the other, and I would give, if that happens, with the imposition of Greco-Macedonian culture through Alexander and his Macedonian companions over the Persian culture, the Persian culture even though they adopted some of the royal titles, or the imposition of the inclusion of satraps across the Near East, as some sort of persuasive rise to an influence of Persian characters like Roxanna within the Macedonian and Persian royal courts

following the death of Alexander. 00:57:55.210 --> 00:57:56.854 Does that make sense? 00:57:59.581 --> 00:58:08.970 Yeah, the comparative part of my PhD would be how those cultures influenced each other. 00:58:08.970 --> 00:58:14.698 So Alexander the Great, when he takes over the Persian Empire, he does pick up all those elements of Persian culture. 00:58:14.698 --> 00:58:22.138 He's portraying himself as a legitimate ruler there through the elements of their culture. 00:58:22.138 --> 00:58:28.519 So that would be their self-power influencing him in a sense, and he's using it to influence the citizens. 00:58:28.519 --> 00:58:31.375 Because you can rule through hard power all you like If you've got the biggest to influence the citizens because you can rule through hard power all you like. 00:58:31.375 --> 00:58:56.615 If you've got the biggest army in the world, you can take over everyone, but there's not going to be much left to rule if if you are just killing people all the time, if your rule is based on on your military strength, then people aren't going to want to be ruled by you and it's just going to be a thing of attrition at that point sure so to legitimize yourself, you've got to be, you've got to get these people to eventually decide that you're okay as a ruler, um, so to speak. 00:58:57.436 --> 00:59:05.656 So when he starts using these titles, um, he starts being influenced by the achaemen methods of soft power. 00:59:05.656 --> 00:59:17.042 And then, when we talk about the Hellenistic kingdoms, they start using how, the elements of how he did it and, um, suddenly his soft power is transferring to them. 00:59:17.042 --> 00:59:27.982 And then, when you get to the Romans, they also start looking back to the Hellenistic kingdoms and came to Persia, for how they start to create their, their monarchy, kind of. 00:59:27.982 --> 00:59:55.055 In a sense it's complicated when you start talking about imperial Rome, but in that sense, when Augustus starts to become more monarch than first among all the other Romans, they will start to look back at the people who've come before them and how they've legitimised themselves and start to use that and that's um that's yeah. 00:59:55.115 --> 01:00:05.832 So if we're talking about alexander the, great when he, when he's, he's um, when he's taking over all these places, he doesn't just come in and say this is how macedonians do it, we're gonna do that this way. 01:00:05.832 --> 01:00:08.059 Now he comes in and he says, right, you guys do it this way. 01:00:08.059 --> 01:00:10.809 Now he comes in and he says, right, you guys do it this way, but my people expect this. 01:00:10.809 --> 01:00:15.791 So I'm going to come up with kind of a possible compromise between these two. 01:00:15.791 --> 01:00:18.439 Or I'm going to do it one way here, one way here. 01:00:18.439 --> 01:00:27.297 You go to Egypt and then they start utilising all the existing structures there and doing it that way. 01:00:29.682 --> 01:01:38.803 Yeah, if that balances no, I guess, from what you say, and very briefly, kings in the ancient world, and just like Alexander, he was influenced by his surrounding environment, and that's the influences and that epitomizes his decision-making then may end up positively or negatively, or even a bit of both, and so it's up to us to analyze what were the good things that, in this case, alexander had and the bad things Alexander had, and so that's why we rely on the archaeological facts and also literature, as you're also using also the modern terms, terms so far as you're using, but also using other ways to approach these types of characteristics. 01:01:38.803 --> 01:01:51.802 And I'd like to go through to Maria to ask her about this fantastic article and I really enjoyed it about different approaches in archeology. 01:01:51.802 --> 01:01:57.149 Then just the palpable things and all that, but also seeing through the senses. 01:01:57.149 --> 01:02:30.998 And that's where Ann Davis and Ruth Tringham sorry for butchering your surname that wrote about sensory archeology, which I think it's really important for archaeologists, including myself, even though I don't excavate that should think about the material culture and what lies behind it, such as contexts, social memories, walking around an archaeological site, how did they behave, how was it like this x, y, z? 01:02:32.870 --> 01:02:37.862 And I'd like to ask you, maria, what is sensory archaeology. 01:02:37.862 --> 01:02:57.043 For the listeners that might be future archaeologists and would like to explore this angle, and in what ways do you conjugate the material culture and literature with your analysis of sensory archaeology? 01:02:57.043 --> 01:03:25.042 To understand our favorite Alexander the Great, to argue whether he was praised or perhaps marketed as an idol, invincible military legend, a culturally educated individual who was better than the Achaemenids and has established many cities under his name, or being downright as a con and a thug, or all of the above? 01:03:26.470 --> 01:03:27.334 So no pressure then. 01:03:30.211 --> 01:03:31.713 It was a long question to. 01:03:31.813 --> 01:03:42.751 I'm now so jealous of Karis's project. 01:03:42.751 --> 01:03:43.652 I want to be doing that one. 01:03:43.652 --> 01:03:47.939 It's utterly fascinating. 01:03:47.939 --> 01:03:58.379 Oh God right, sensory archaeology it's not completely new, but I think it's really come of age within the last few years. 01:03:58.529 --> 01:04:16.899 I think the article that I sent to you, lewis, that came from the Routledge handbook and that was published 2020, if I'm correct and that was a sort of summing up of the field, as it is a lot of it starts with phenomenology. 01:04:16.899 --> 01:04:36.266 So we're going back to Tilly in 1994, who talks about the phenomenology of landscape and that I, for the first time, brings in the bodily engagement of the archaeologist or the researcher with the

landscape. 01:04:36.266 --> 01:05:09.034 Now, in Tilly's case, a lot of sensory archaeology has um worked with cultures which we don't have written records for, you know, and, of course, because it was a, I think that's why it's so applicable to what I'm doing, because it is one way of perhaps approaching, you know, an, an experience of a non-written record. 01:05:09.034 --> 01:05:10.138 So that's quite interesting. 01:05:10.138 --> 01:05:12.532 What is it? 01:05:12.532 --> 01:05:14.340 Well, it's many, many different things. 01:05:14.340 --> 01:05:17.290 There is no such one thing as sensory archaeology. 01:05:17.290 --> 01:05:23.162 We have phenomenologists, and Tilly, I suppose, is our prime example of that. 01:05:23.162 --> 01:05:33.109 Perhaps but other people have picked up on this there's Hamilakis, who wrote a very influential book in this. 01:05:33.109 --> 01:05:35.617 Hamilakis wrote a very influential book in 2013 on archaeology and the senses. 01:05:35.617 --> 01:05:36.720 That had a massive impact, I think, on the field. 01:05:36.720 --> 01:05:39.789 But it also picks up on a lot of ethnographic techniques. 01:05:39.789 --> 01:06:01.980 We have ethnographic techniques of walking and you know, I've read some very interesting stuff on this recently but also, you know, sort of social cultural anthropology theory, or theorists and thinkers, people like Tim Ingold, who, over the summer, almost destroyed my PhD, but when I was reading it, I was like, oh God, I never thought about that. 01:06:03.270 --> 01:06:06.019 So I think there's a few things that are very exciting about it. 01:06:06.019 --> 01:06:07.959 One is that it makes you think. 01:06:07.959 --> 01:06:12.157 I mean, I I've particularly been impressed with with Ingold's work recently. 01:06:12.157 --> 01:06:23.633 Um, you know, it made me think about, uh, for example, space, which was sitting at the heart of what I was doing, and, um, you know, it was just a couple of paragraphs that just made me stop and go. 01:06:23.633 --> 01:06:25.837 Oh shit. 01:06:25.837 --> 01:06:36.374 You know, um, and it was at that point I had to go back and I had to rewrite because it was so imperative Ingold's position. 01:06:37.702 --> 01:06:42.189 He was writing back in 2011 and he said that space is an absence. 01:06:42.189 --> 01:06:44.478 And I'm not dealing with absence. 01:06:44.478 --> 01:06:45.695 If you're dealing with the senses. 01:06:45.695 --> 01:06:47.434 You're not dealing with an absence. 01:06:47.434 --> 01:06:53.060 So that's the first thing You're embedded within an environment, and so I'm'm very much interested in environments. 01:06:53.060 --> 01:07:02.245 I think that's a key point, um, the second thing is it's moving away from what has been described as a tyranny of vision. 01:07:02.245 --> 01:07:14.599 That, uh, as as academics, as, um, I think, thinkers in we tend to interface with the world through our eyes, and I think modern digital technology forces us into that. 01:07:14.599 --> 01:07:18.177 You know, we interact with the world through a screen. 01:07:18.177 --> 01:11:49.793 It's a visual impulse, but we are, I think part of my research also came out of thinking about the body and the body as a research site. 01:11:49.793 --> 01:11:53.648 I was thinking about bodies. 01:11:53.648 --> 01:11:56.666 Anyway, this is something I should not go too deeply into. 01:11:56.907 --> 01:11:57.287 Be careful. 01:11:57.287 --> 01:12:02.909 I mean, this is a late-night podcast, absolutely. 01:12:04.180 --> 01:12:06.047 So you did give your paper this morning, wasn't you? 01:12:06.360 --> 01:12:15.092 Well, yes, exactly on elements of the body, shall we say, or representations of interactions of bodily parts. 01:12:18.206 --> 01:12:21.873 Yeah, and that makes it sound way way more like goatee than it was. 01:12:25.940 --> 01:12:26.081 Right. 01:12:26.081 --> 01:12:32.840 So when I've stopped blushing, I'll get back to the body as our primary research tool. 01:12:32.840 --> 01:12:42.154 I'll get back to the body as our primary research tool because I think we've moved away from the fact that we are embodied creatures. 01:12:42.154 --> 01:12:57.750 And I think another thing that I think is very key to the way in which we do research is the impact of the contemporary world on how we see the past, and at the minute, there are all sorts of discourses which move us away from being embodied. 01:12:57.960 --> 01:13:05.293 People are talking about transhumanism and honestly, I think this is an incredibly dangerous direction to be going in. 01:13:05.293 --> 01:13:09.251 We are, I suppose, quite literate about this. 01:13:09.251 --> 01:13:17.932 We are sort of flesh and blood, you know, in that sort of way, and anything that pushes us away from this pushes us away from the human experience. 01:13:17.932 --> 01:13:21.409 So there is that aspect to it. 01:13:21.409 --> 01:13:41.529 But I also think, of course, that when you're embodied, you're embodied within an environment, and we are a long way removed from I don't want to use the word natural, but from the biological and geological and climatic environments in which we evolved in. 01:13:41.529 --> 01:14:05.415 You know, as creatures we aren't so different from any other creature in the world in that we are born to be part of a system which we have progressively distanced ourselves from through built environments, and you know the pod in Swansea University Library that we're sitting in is as far from that as you could possibly imagine. 01:14:06.521 --> 01:14:13.692 So, thinking ourselves back 2,300, 2,200, 2,300 years, what was that experience? 01:14:13.692 --> 01:14:15.715 And it certainly wasn't the one we've got. 01:14:15.715 --> 01:14:21.110 So, um, there's the, the challenge of then going back to the sites. 01:14:21.110 --> 01:14:22.092 I mean, it is great. 01:14:22.092 --> 01:14:38.047 Again, I sort of think it's going on holiday, but it's um, doing field work, going back to

the sites, walking the sites, recording our, our impressions and how we, we interact with, not just through site, but through touch, smell, taste. 01:14:38.047 --> 01:14:49.502 I mean, I've done some fairly, I would say fearless ethnographic research by tasting a lot of the water around the sites, but I'm still here, um, which is good, um, just to find out if it was brackish. 01:14:49.502 --> 01:14:52.227 This was, this was my excuse. 01:14:52.908 --> 01:14:56.195 But also, we have many, many more than the five Aristotelian senses. 01:14:56.195 --> 01:15:01.292 You know, I think currently neuroscientists are up to about 32, is it? 01:15:01.292 --> 01:15:33.913 You know just some pain sensors, heat and cold, everything, but also it's that being there and being hit with the wind can be just as, I think, telling as looking at a papyrus or, you know, picking up a pot or something like that I have recently in fact, I'm giving a paper next week on this where, you know, of course, we are dealing with severely denuded natural environments, and this is another issue we have to overcome if we go through that. 01:15:33.913 --> 01:15:38.870 How this all comes back to Alexander, I have absolutely no idea. 01:15:38.870 --> 01:15:42.631 I mean, I think it's no secret that I have absolutely no respect for the man whatsoever. 01:15:45.162 --> 01:15:49.769 Before we jump to say that you don't respect him at all? 01:15:49.769 --> 01:16:02.753 Is it to say that when exploring this framework in archaeology, is it when we, when archaeologists, go to the site? 01:16:02.753 --> 01:16:11.710 I'm going to be very risky on this question, but aren't they romanticizing too much the archaeological sites? 01:16:12.338 --> 01:16:12.925 Oh, absolutely. 01:16:12.925 --> 01:16:17.949 But I think that's really important that we do this, because I have another. 01:16:17.949 --> 01:16:21.884 I mean, I could go on about theory at considerable length, and much to Troy's detriment, I think. 01:16:21.884 --> 01:16:23.184 But you know, I could go on about theory at considerable length and much to Troy's detriment. 01:16:23.131 --> 01:16:24.250 I think no, I'd love it. 01:16:28.132 --> 01:16:30.737 I don't know if I can roll my eyes loudly enough to appreciate. 01:16:34.327 --> 01:16:40.957 It's three of us all like theory, but we are historians first and foremost. 01:16:40.957 --> 01:16:51.752 So you know, while I think there is a crossover with my work with anthropology and with archaeology, but first and foremost we're historians and what historians do is write stories. 01:16:51.752 --> 01:17:00.798 Yeah, yeah, you know, we are just telling narratives and I think the creative imagination is an absolutely vital part of that. 01:17:00.798 --> 01:17:10.765 Now, we can be wrong, but honestly I'm not so sure that that is a problem, because it's an exploration and we've been wrong in the past. 01:17:10.765 --> 01:17:16.515 We will carry on being wrong writing about the past. 01:17:16.575 -->

01:17:40.495 But what I think this brings us back to a more sort of fundamental thing about doing a PhD is, I like to think of it as you're just being dumped into a great big play pit of ideas, you know, and it's fun, and you're exploring ways of seeing and understanding and using critical faculty, using evidence, using logical argument. 01:17:40.495 --> 01:17:42.459 Of course, that all feeds into it. 01:17:42.459 --> 01:17:52.756 But fundamentally, we're in there because we want to recreate a narrative, and I don't just want to recreate a narrative. 01:17:52.756 --> 01:17:59.175 I want to recreate, I want to evoke the past, and I don't think we do enough of that. 01:17:59.465 --> 01:18:16.830 I don't think that our work often has what's the right word, the attraction or the outreach that brings people into something which is actually fundamentally very exciting, if we're not telling the right stories and if we're not presenting them in the right way and if we're not taking risks with that. 01:18:17.351 --> 01:18:52.450 You know, and I think we need to be very explicit about the fact, but I don't think if I go to a site and record my impressions of that and use that as an interpretive tool, I'm actually doing any worse a job than Walbrook who, let's face it, stephen yesterday, who gave the introduction you know, was saying you know, fundamentally and I I'm paraphrasing him badly here you know, a lot of what we've written about is Orientalist and racist and we've been creating sexist discourses, as I spoke about today. 01:18:52.450 --> 01:19:16.539 We've created heteronormative discourses about the past, and I think there's room in that for other stories and I think, yes, there's obviously dangers with it, but I think we should embrace them rather than so that's why Alexander comes into play, because when we read what ancient authors said, Don't get me started. 01:19:18.286 --> 01:19:24.105 It's more a lot of compliments and just like downright dethroning. 01:19:24.105 --> 01:19:37.109 Well, in this sense, what the Easterners have done, in this case the Achaemenids, when he ventured throughout the campaigns and saying Alexander is this thing, alexander is the great king. 01:19:37.109 --> 01:19:38.615 He dethroned the riots. 01:19:38.615 --> 01:19:58.695 He dethroned, I would say porous, but no, he dethroned all these major kings that extended westwards, but then they were so bad according to those ancient authors, and then he wanted to challenge those things. 01:19:58.695 --> 01:20:12.426 But in the end, the biographers of plutarch, for example, that he praises a lot in a positive angle just to satisfy the narrative and the greek, the greek audience or the roman audience as well. 01:20:13.307 --> 01:20:17.271 And yeah, I mean, I think it's convenience. 01:20:17.271 --> 01:20:20.494 I think there are several things going on here. 01:20:20.494 --> 01:20:40.159 The first point I'd like to make is that any text that we have been writing over the last,

what as a discipline, 100, 150 years give or take, you know they have ignored 96% as a conservative estimate of ancient populations. 01:20:40.159 --> 01:20:42.273 Their stories just are not told. 01:20:42.273 --> 01:20:46.414 You know we have written the story of elites. 01:20:46.414 --> 01:20:51.036 These are a tiny proportion of the ancient population. 01:20:52.126 --> 01:20:56.837 I would dispute the impact they actually had on people's lives. 01:20:56.837 --> 01:20:59.870 That's another argument. 01:20:59.870 --> 01:21:08.291 We could be here all night on with that one, but I want to hear the stories of the other 96%. 01:21:08.291 --> 01:21:10.056 So that's the first thing I would say about it. 01:21:10.056 --> 01:21:14.925 The second thing is I think we have a problem as a discipline. 01:21:14.925 --> 01:21:30.398 Looking back on what we've been doing, I think that the discipline that we find ourselves in has been exceptionally convenient for, and has been driven by, elite discourses in the modern and contemporary world. 01:21:30.398 --> 01:21:45.954 After all, the number of, I would say, british leaders who have been through Oxbridge and studied classics, you know, just tells us something. 01:21:46.646 --> 01:21:59.997 I don't want to point any particular fingers, but you know it perhaps has served a particular political discourse running through that and I think the discipline is guilty of feeding that. 01:21:59.997 --> 01:22:08.387 The discipline is guilty of feeding that. 01:22:08.387 --> 01:22:21.289 So we have prioritised a heroic, hagiographic history of violence and empire building and power which has been at the expense of, frankly, modern and contemporary populations. 01:22:21.289 --> 01:22:27.152 I think we could I haven't done the research on it, I think this is one that's still out there to be done, but I think you could map it directly. 01:22:27.152 --> 01:22:31.565 And the other thing, this is slightly dichotomous. 01:22:31.565 --> 01:22:42.818 I'm saying that on the one hand, they are not important and I think, from my perspective, they are pretty much irrelevant in the history of the Hellenistic world. 01:22:42.818 --> 01:22:43.960 That would be my perspective. 01:22:43.960 --> 01:22:50.713 It's very radical to say that, but this is not the history of Hellenistic peoples, this is the history of a tiny elite. 01:22:50.713 --> 01:22:53.514 It's not the history of the 96%. 01:22:53.514 --> 01:22:54.377 Yes. 01:22:54.377 --> 01:23:06.874 But the other thing this is why it's slightly dichotomous because at times they can have a profound impact and at that point their impact is not pleasant, their impact on those populations. 01:23:07.326 --> 01:23:09.734 We don't hear the discourse. 01:23:09.734 --> 01:23:15.893 What would it be in modern, mealy mouth terms, the collateral damage that they did. 01:23:15.893 --> 01:23:43.480 We don't hear about the death, we don't think about the you know the abductions or the rapes, or you know the maiming that takes place because these frankly dick-swinging idiots want to conquer a bit more territory, or because another dick-swinging idiot has taken a little bit of theirs, and, honestly, it makes me angry that we do not deal with that. 01:23:43.480 --> 01:23:58.705 And I think we could see this in a contemporary context, of course, because of the conflicts going on as we speak, where, frankly, dick-swinging idiots are killing women and children in their thousands. 01:23:59.567 --> 01:24:23.091 You know people, innocents, who are caught up in elite discourses and our discipline has prioritised those elite discourses and fed into those which we see happening in the contemporary world, and that's something we need to undermine, we need to rework, we need to give a big mea culpa for as well. 01:24:23.091 --> 01:24:36.515 Um, and that's where I think we need to find other approaches and that's where sensory archaeology, evocative writing, the imagination and empathetic history. 01:24:36.515 --> 01:24:41.369 I think empathy is one thing that is hugely missing the emotion of history. 01:24:41.369 --> 01:24:49.301 We don't write emotive accounts because we're told as you know, academics that emotion has no place in our writing. 01:24:49.301 --> 01:24:54.076 But actually I think the emotions are one of the most fundamental human conditions. 01:24:54.076 --> 01:24:54.938 We have them. 01:24:54.938 --> 01:24:58.936 That's what makes us human in many ways. 01:24:59.065 --> 01:25:56.467 You know the ways in which we emotively respond to the world and that needs to be written in and if it needs imagination and taking risks and you know using our senses to do that, we should do it you know, yes, yeah, yes, and and as, as you point out is correctly, as the emotion plays a major part here, and also, I add as well, uh, the issue of critical thinking in in ancient, in ancient history, specifically, when we study someone that has been for hundreds of years and even until today, and we sometimes we are, we are so emotional in see, this guy was a big thing that we sometimes tend to forget okay, well, what about he's the other side and all that. 01:25:56.928 --> 01:26:07.401 And specifically, we put that into this modern context of those different environments that we have. 01:26:07.401 --> 01:26:14.698 You kind of reminded me of what I'm studying about the third space. 01:26:14.698 --> 01:26:19.836 Different environments are from different contexts. 01:26:19.836 --> 01:26:45.613 If I'm here, we're having a podcast session and we are talking about alexander in a more critical way, on having a two sides of his coin, whereas we, if we go to to the out, to the outer space of this pod, we're going to talk about alexander in another way, based on what expert says I don't know Lane Fox, for example. 01:26:45.613 --> 01:26:50.692 He would say on Alexander, very emotional yeah, he's a big, big mother fuck. 01:26:51.347 --> 01:27:19.440 Lane Fox comes out of a

particular environment which has prioritized those discourses he comes in within that environment of being stuck inside of a library and I don't know, just let's imagine and then comes into making a film with Colin Farrell and say, no, now you're going to be on an environment where you're going to be accordingly with Hollywood. 01:27:19.440 --> 01:27:28.791 Basically, that's what I'm thinking about and I guess you've answered already the question that I was going to propose to. 01:27:28.791 --> 01:28:02.872 Not I said to you, but that includes all of us, that we should educate better ourselves about a major character that changed alongside with secondary or tertiary characters, All of them, those 96%, but I think you've already pointed to one of the problems that you've automatically reached for terminology that prioritizes Alexander, a major character, tertiary, secondary characters. 01:28:02.724 --> 01:28:05.978 These character, tertiary, secondary characters these are not tertiary and secondary characters in history. 01:28:05.978 --> 01:28:18.911 They are just as valuable, their stories are just as interesting, they're just as important, and I think that's the sort of intellectual hurdle we have to overcome. 01:28:19.392 --> 01:28:19.572 Yes. 01:28:20.173 --> 01:28:23.059 Yeah, you know it's about being very guarded. 01:28:23.059 --> 01:28:30.012 We need to be ultra careful in many ways about how we, in this case, use language about these people. 01:28:30.012 --> 01:28:35.407 I mean, I know I talked about dick-swinging idiots, but perhaps it was unfair, but it's. 01:28:35.407 --> 01:28:40.785 I think we automatically reach for that language. 01:28:40.785 --> 01:28:43.334 That puts us in our place. 01:28:43.334 --> 01:28:44.871 It keeps us down. 01:28:44.871 --> 01:28:51.435 You know, it's the place of whoever marginalised communities, women, whatever in history. 01:28:51.435 --> 01:28:52.930 Where are their stories? 01:28:52.930 --> 01:28:53.733 Where are their histories? 01:28:53.733 --> 01:28:57.305 You know, and that's yeah, and please, yes, please, hang on. 01:28:57.365 --> 01:29:20.768 I think maybe I want to bounce off what Carys and you have said essentially, because it's something that I've been kind of trying to incorporate in my work essentially is like to kind of reframe these narratives and kind of think in that way and essentially I kind of always want to expose, like the complete ridiculousness of the deification of a living being and what like. 01:29:20.768 --> 01:29:22.033 How are they doing that? 01:29:22.033 --> 01:29:22.655 Why are they doing that? 01:29:22.655 --> 01:29:24.493 How do they think about that sort of thing? 01:29:24.493 --> 01:29:31.832 I mean, you particularly mentioned Alexander and I just gave a paper on him. 01:29:31.852 --> 01:29:38.990 Essentially, something that me and one of my tutors have talked about is there isn't. 01:29:38.990 --> 01:29:45.114 Really, when we talk about these figures, we also have to maybe recontextualise them as, like we are talking about their myth. 01:29:45.114 --> 01:29:48.074 There is no historical Alexander. 01:29:48.074 --> 01:30:03.385 Nobody can say for definite Alexander did X Y, z, because there's so like One of the earlier, like Greek written sources that we have of him is basically complains about the diversity of sources and how they contradict each other. 01:30:03.385 --> 01:30:17.188 Um, because each kind of culture in its, I guess, soft power approach and its own kind of things take, absorbs that figure and puts it into an elite narrative or puts it into the narrative of elites essentially. 01:30:17.188 --> 01:30:19.233 So you know we have. 01:30:19.252 --> 01:30:38.574 there's so many layers to this that we have to break down essentially in our own kind of reframing of history and yeah, I was going to say something about yeah, no, Carys, you carry on, because I've literally forgotten what I was going to say, but you carry on. 01:30:39.307 --> 01:30:43.971 I was just going to say it's very easy to forget that all these people were people like they were. 01:30:43.971 --> 01:30:47.638 They were, they were human beings, the same as as kind of we are like. 01:30:47.638 --> 01:31:00.727 Sometimes I find that the most interesting parts of history are when we have like we were looking at the egypt center, the the letter from someone asking their brother to send them goose fat and things like that. 01:31:00.727 --> 01:31:12.633 It or it's the kind of when people made graves for their dogs and they've written poetry about their dog that we have all these years, like hundreds and thousands of years later, we know how this one person loved their dog. 01:31:12.633 --> 01:31:16.355 We might not even know their name, but we know the dog's name it's kind of. 01:31:17.749 --> 01:31:18.512 Yeah, they were people. 01:31:18.512 --> 01:31:30.271 They did all the same things as us and it's kind of it's easy to forget it because we can never actually see that sort of evidence, because it doesn't exist. 01:31:30.271 --> 01:31:33.916 What we've got is the mythology, is what people want us to know about. 01:31:35.666 --> 01:31:51.966 I kind of also think that actually what's happened in the past and maybe what continues in the future, is that there's some inherent kind of belief, or we're participating in this idea, that elites are the only ones worthy of having a narrative for a memory, and that they're the only ones important for culture. 01:31:51.966 --> 01:32:14.233 And therefore they're the they're the only ones worthy of a narrative and we kind of as historians, we kind of accidentally repeat the ancient dare I say it propaganda continuously, because they're the only ones that have left or believed to have a memory to essentially hold on to. 01:32:14.233 --> 01:32:25.349 And in that way they're not only preserving their kind of in the kind of class-based system that they're the head of, that, their importance to contemporary

society. 01:32:25.349 --> 01:32:48.496 So it's imperishable, essentially, and those are the only discourses that were left because they stay for such a long period of time. 01:32:48.496 --> 01:33:07.773 And that's the intent to reinforce this narrative of elites being kind of what Karis was touching about, touching on essentially qualitatively better human beings than the rest of us, on essentially qualitatively better human beings than the rest of us, and therefore they have this narrative which lasts and it's embedded in our culture. 01:33:07.793 --> 01:33:11.890 I mean, just the cycle just continues, like how do we break that? 01:33:11.890 --> 01:33:29.038 Um, I think modern technology is great in the sense that it might help, essentially because we ask what we're talking about now can be listened to whenever you upload it, luis, it can be listened to across the world almost instantly. 01:33:29.038 --> 01:33:31.992 That wouldn't happen before. 01:33:31.992 --> 01:33:49.768 And there's this idea that narratives aren't just kind of spread in their kind of contemporary culture, but they're also spread across time and these paradigms keep getting repeated and you know, I think that a lot of the sort of quote-unquote history of ancient elites they're just being. 01:33:49.768 --> 01:33:54.873 Those are narratives essentially as well, which are being moulded to kind of paradigms. 01:33:54.873 --> 01:33:56.948 It's all bullshit. 01:33:56.948 --> 01:34:07.972 May I say yes, troy's going to want to jump in here and take us down from our theoretical pedestals. 01:34:09.972 --> 01:34:10.313 No no. 01:34:14.735 --> 01:34:19.675 I think a lot of interesting points have certainly been made. 01:34:19.675 --> 01:34:22.228 No, no, I'm not going to. 01:34:22.228 --> 01:34:22.652 I'm not going to. 01:34:22.652 --> 01:34:23.800 Interesting points have certainly been made. 01:34:23.800 --> 01:34:27.089 I think you, no, no, no, I'm not going to. 01:34:27.089 --> 01:34:35.515 I'm not going to sit and, if you like, morally defend the various wars of the Hellenistic period. 01:34:35.515 --> 01:34:43.077 Anybody who studies war, as a historian or not, should learn very, very quickly that these are not pleasant events. 01:34:43.566 --> 01:34:53.755 I've had an academic interest in classical warfare and Hellenistic warfare for a very long time now and I must admit, I do catch myself sometimes and I wonder why. 01:34:53.755 --> 01:35:07.013 Because, yeah, these are incredibly dramatic, violent, unpleasant events. 01:35:07.013 --> 01:35:18.890 I don't know if the more philosophical part of me is sort of look the worst in the face and at least then you can kind of spot it in the hopes that you'll be consciously aware of it. 01:35:18.890 --> 01:35:22.661 But unfortunately you do somewhat desensitise to it at the same time, I suppose, or at least when you read about, consciously aware of it, but unfortunately you do somewhat desensitise to it. 01:35:22.661 --> 01:35:25.735 At

the same time, I suppose, or at least when you read about it, you read it or watch it. 01:35:25.735 --> 01:35:38.721 But no, I think Henry was very right there, and certainly with this focus on, yes, admittedly a very small subset of the populations of antiquity. 01:35:38.721 --> 01:35:42.516 It is a source problem, unfortunately, in its fundamental essence. 01:35:42.516 --> 01:36:03.955 I certainly know people who work on, say, more early modern material, that they have access to archives and they're still talking about upper echelons of the social population, shall we say, but relatively not so much the kings and the queens and those people at the immediate centres of power. 01:36:03.955 --> 01:36:08.727 So, but it is a source problem and actually I think. 01:36:09.148 --> 01:36:27.472 But the other thing that I wondered, listening to all of you there was actually, I mean, yes, there is a very conscious change, I think, or beginning to be a very conscious change, in the efforts of scholarship on antiquity to try to look at the history from below. 01:36:27.472 --> 01:36:43.093 And certainly, I think, the more I go into it with my own PhD topic, it ends up being that way, because I don't necessarily look at the soft power that, say, caris does, which looks at individual, perhaps individual examples of, say, someone like Livio going out and doing the things that she does. 01:36:43.093 --> 01:36:48.397 But so, yeah, you do kind of end up. 01:36:48.397 --> 01:37:05.459 I mean, as I said in my introduction, I work on the Roman army in the eastern desert and I'm very interested to see how these, these state apparatuses which ultimately would come down to a king or a queen or an emperor or an empress, how do they actually manifest themselves on the ground? 01:37:05.459 --> 01:37:07.092 How much do they actually work on the ground? 01:37:07.092 --> 01:37:19.599 So there is, I think, or has been over recent decades, a definite shift in the scholarship towards trying to look at that history from below perspective. 01:37:19.599 --> 01:38:09.574 I think it is very difficult, challenging and so new, new avenues where we can reasonably access them are certainly worthwhile and certainly new ways of looking, uh, at the scholarship, uh, or that sorry, the sources uh, is is worthwhile, um, but I also wondered, listening to all of you then obviously you discussed previous scholarship over the last century or two, and certainly I found this in my own research that I hadn't necessarily noticed just the extent to which actually the ideas and we had this from Stephen in his introduction to the conference how much the scholarship from a century or so ago actually influences, subconsciously almost, the scholarship we're reading or we read and to some extent we write today. 01:38:09.574 --> 01:38:34.771 But I also wonder and this comes back to I think it was Henry your point earlier with PhDs more broadly is that by the time you get to a PhD you are writing a subject or

a topic that no one else is doing, and I do wonder to some extent that I mean scholarships. 01:38:35.051 --> 01:38:44.938 Trends change, certainly on the military front, on the sort of scholarship or the ancient world from below, if you like. 01:38:44.938 --> 01:38:52.030 I think there's been some relatively interesting scholarship on PTSD and warfare in classical Athens, which has been particularly interesting. 01:38:52.030 --> 01:39:05.039 I think that potentially has its own methodological issues, since I think it sort of adapts potentially frameworks, if I'm paraphrasing correctly from, say, treatment of PTSD from the 1960s and things like that. 01:39:05.039 --> 01:39:07.052 But these are interesting. 01:39:07.052 --> 01:39:09.092 I haven't read the work in full. 01:39:09.092 --> 01:39:23.414 These are very interesting and it's also actually it always used to strike me when you'd look at, I don't know, the classical Athenian plays, for example, and you'd have these discussions of warfare and violence. 01:39:23.414 --> 01:39:44.274 And it's at least in that case you have communities that engage in warfare, certainly compared to in the modern world, very regularly and more importantly, it's at least in the citizen body, it's the entirety of the community who are doing it and I just I pose it as an intellectual quandary as to what that then does to social dynamics. 01:39:44.274 --> 01:39:47.104 If you have an entire relative. 01:39:47.104 --> 01:39:51.154 Okay, this, you know, we're talking about 8 000 people out of maybe 40 000. 01:39:51.154 --> 01:39:56.816 But you know, suddenly you're you are talking about a much larger body who are engaging in these things more regularly. 01:39:57.356 --> 01:40:07.294 Um, anyway, I digress, but the the the thing I actually wondered about is the extent to which actually, again, you have these trends in scholarship. 01:40:07.294 --> 01:40:11.837 But actually I'll take my own research as an example. 01:40:11.837 --> 01:40:19.639 The point at which we tend to start sort of Indian Ocean, red Sea stuff to an extent, is 1928. 01:40:19.639 --> 01:40:22.032 That's not even a century ago. 01:40:22.032 --> 01:40:23.550 It's not that long. 01:40:23.550 --> 01:40:28.580 And I just wonder, more broadly, in terms of how long do trends in scholarship take to change? 01:40:29.744 --> 01:40:40.110 Henry, to go to your point with how isolating PhDs can be, actually you have relatively few people working on these topics at any given time. 01:40:40.110 --> 01:40:41.193 Think about our own fields. 01:40:41.193 --> 01:40:44.129 How many people really? 01:40:44.129 --> 01:40:48.134 There'll be plenty of Egyptologists, there are certainly plenty of archaeologists, there are plenty of ancient historians. 01:40:48.134 --> 01:40:52.891 How many people are really working on the topic that you're working on? 01:40:53.847 --> 01:41:13.037 And so I'm not so much making an argument, I'm not arguing actually against per se a change in approach to the scholarship or to the ancient sources, although certainly I think it is important to don't necessarily dispense with them. 01:41:13.037 --> 01:41:23.191 It is what we have ultimately if we can find more, if we can find reasonably justifiable ways to reinterpret them with new frameworks. 01:41:23.191 --> 01:41:24.455 I'm absolutely on board. 01:41:24.455 --> 01:41:47.485 Much as theory is not my thing, but the question I pose to all of you really is yeah, I suppose a combination of how long do scholarly threatens actually have to take to change, have to take to change and consider the fact we're actually talking about, relatively well, period of time approximately the same as, or less than, the Hellenistic period itself. 01:41:47.485 --> 01:41:49.553 We're talking about a couple of hundred years. 01:41:49.553 --> 01:41:54.854 Have fun, who knows. 01:41:54.854 --> 01:41:55.862 Have fun with that. 01:41:56.064 --> 01:42:04.816 Yeah no, and I think Troy's got a very good point and we shouldn't stop studying ancient warfare. 01:42:04.816 --> 01:42:05.769 Of course we shouldn't know. 01:42:05.769 --> 01:42:07.700 It's it's you know, it's fascinating. 01:42:07.720 --> 01:42:12.633 You pointed out yourself when it happens, it's integral and all integral it's. 01:42:12.873 --> 01:42:16.206 It's pretty damn disruptive yeah, it is, um, it was in. 01:42:16.206 --> 01:42:21.017 I liked your comment about you know the the whole community going to war. 01:42:21.017 --> 01:42:24.115 You know this, this mass mobilization, and you see it in the sources. 01:42:24.115 --> 01:42:33.314 Well, I do have to say that that's, at the maximum, half the population, because the other half were not getting tooled up and going out and killing people. 01:42:33.314 --> 01:42:36.760 They were at home waiting for their Generally speaking? 01:42:36.941 --> 01:42:37.725 Yes, generally speaking. 01:42:38.947 --> 01:42:43.353 I think there might be some Roman empresses who were there were, but it's less common, isn't it? 01:42:43.353 --> 01:42:50.125 It's not the system that was set up. 01:42:50.446 --> 01:43:00.375 You tend to have your Annalisa Queen turn up on a battlefield, do a parade in front of the troops and then sort of vanish to the but again, it's a gendered assumption about history, isn't it? 01:43:01.187 --> 01:43:01.950 Did she just do that? 01:43:01.990 --> 01:43:02.693 or did she actually? 01:43:02.693 --> 01:43:09.048 I think from the few snippets of sources I've seen those are the examples we have left, but again, there's so much. 01:43:09.245 --> 01:43:14.077 I mean what 25% of our source material is medical text from Galen. 01:43:14.077 --> 01:43:29.557 You know our sources are so tragically, and I do, wonder as well, tragically, and I do wonder as well, in slight defence of some of the scholarship for the last two centuries, that is what they've had. 01:43:29.557 --> 01:43:32.901 Maybe they have been too constrained in how they've looked at it.

01:43:32.901 --> 01:43:39.803 Sure, I think we do just have to acknowledge that they are so nice. 01:43:42.070 --> 01:43:44.938 Talk about your embodiment thing, about being embodied in a landscape. 01:43:44.938 --> 01:43:57.617 We're also embodied in a social context and so that social context will have agency over us and the writing that we do and the way that we tell the narratives that we do through our research and history. 01:43:57.617 --> 01:44:07.335 And I don't think that's I know we talk about there's, there's a lot, there's a big push to kind of recognize your own biases in your, in your work and unpick the. 01:44:07.335 --> 01:44:15.747 Well, you know, the job of modern scholarship now is to kind of unpick the racist biases that are in the early 20th century scholarship. 01:44:15.747 --> 01:44:18.311 Um, absolutely, that's important to do. 01:44:18.712 --> 01:44:25.448 But there is also, I think we are, we only exist, like we exist, in our contemporary time period, right? 01:44:25.448 --> 01:44:44.151 So whatever knowledge and biases that we have because of the agency of that time period on us, I think it's important that we sometimes lean into that and and say, or we should, like you know, predicate our work by saying you know, this is what's happening in in our world right now, in my world right now. 01:44:44.151 --> 01:44:55.809 This is influencing, subconsciously, influencing me in some way, because nobody else is going to be able to have used that like fully understand that, to influence their own work. 01:44:55.809 --> 01:44:57.553 So it's the. 01:44:57.553 --> 01:45:01.007 It's important job for us, I think, to kind of unpick previous work. 01:45:01.007 --> 01:45:01.669 But it will. 01:45:02.130 --> 01:45:06.313 Our work will be unpicked in the future as well, and that's necessary because we have these biases. 01:45:06.313 --> 01:45:13.936 But only we can provide that full perspective on it and, you know, we might have hit something like the nail on the head. 01:45:13.936 --> 01:45:16.012 We might have kind of done something. 01:45:16.012 --> 01:45:27.360 Well, we won't have done it all the time, but you know, this is the only chance that we have to frame history from our own perspective. 01:45:27.360 --> 01:45:28.931 But we have to be aware that we're doing that. 01:45:29.225 --> 01:45:30.609 I think it's called a methodology. 01:45:30.630 --> 01:45:36.609 Henry, and that changes yeah maybe that turnover is quite a recent one. 01:45:36.609 --> 01:46:00.777 Speaking about the sources that we collect, that we use to write our dissertations, that comes from the colonial period and I grabbed the example of the Parthians, for example, that George Rawlinson wrote, if I'm not mistaken. 01:46:00.777 --> 01:46:08.329 He wrote about the Parthians but he might have known that the Parthians were a big empire but decided to. 01:46:08.329 --> 01:46:35.891 He might have changed the narrative to fit into the context of the colonial period, where the British, the Belgians, the French people, when they colonized Africa and then Asia, to say that and then putting into the context of the ancient that the Parthians were a savage people, they were uneducated, and all of that. 01:46:35.891 --> 01:46:48.215 And as now our generation, this new generation of PhDs, I believe that we tried to do to change the course of that aspect, but it's still a long way to go. 01:46:49.472 --> 01:47:09.272 And again, upon the Parthians, I'd say one great book that I'm using as well, which is talking about the rise of the Parthians and how they get into good relationships with the Romans, especially when I was reading your article about the transition from the Red Sea. 01:47:09.272 --> 01:47:17.233 It was just not getting to war with the Parthians only, it was just a way of commercializing, getting to a sort of middle ground. 01:47:17.233 --> 01:47:33.811 For example and that example comes from I was mentioning, in the book the Rise of Parthians by Nicholas Overton and where he explains that the Parthians had also a major role in developing the Near East and going westwards. 01:47:33.811 --> 01:47:53.638 So that's why I would say that there's still a major gap, that we, step by step by step, trying to netting it, including the 96% of all the protagonists. 01:47:54.365 --> 01:47:56.028 On the 96% of the protagonists. 01:47:56.028 --> 01:48:00.634 I do have to make one addition to the points I was making about the evidence we have. 01:48:00.634 --> 01:48:08.373 And actually it is the evidence we have, and actually it's, it's the archeology, yeah, Um that's right and archeology as a science is. 01:48:09.066 --> 01:48:11.734 it's very nascent, it's very nascent, it's very young. 01:48:11.734 --> 01:48:19.052 Yeah, I I'm going to be selfish again and and and point to to Red Sea, eastern desert or eastern deserts specifically. 01:48:19.052 --> 01:48:31.893 Um, okay, some of the the india excavations that say eric and edu go a bit further back, but um excavations in the eastern desert, we're talking 1907, late 1970s, 1980s, through to the present. 01:48:32.254 --> 01:48:56.234 This is a few decades and actually this, this will, I hope, um fill in a lot of our gaps for for the history from below it will it will provide or it will provide us, it will provide us with usable evidence that we can start to use some new approaches on, and I think that is perhaps one thing that we should retroactively consider, certainly when we are reinterpreting this older scholarship. 01:48:56.234 --> 01:49:01.346 Is that this is, I don't doubt, that there are narratives they're feeding into Heck. 01:49:01.346 --> 01:49:07.218 We see this enough in the ancient sources that they do follow on from work that's been done before. 01:49:07.218 --> 01:49:30.631 This is something that does happen, but this is information that they simply didn't have at the same time, and so, no, it is just to point out that the addition of the archaeology, I

think will, as Maria and Henry, you two have just pointed out this will, I hope, start to fill in some of our gap While Maria and Henry were talking about that aspect. 01:49:33.275 --> 01:49:40.932 I think you've already answered a great part of the question that I had for you, sorry, no, no, don't be sorry because it's just keep rolling on. 01:49:40.932 --> 01:49:41.595 It's too efficient. 01:49:42.277 --> 01:49:44.402 No, no, don't be sorry, because he just keeps rolling on. 01:49:44.442 --> 01:50:21.971 He's too, efficient the bottom of the line here, especially when talking about the Ptolemy kingship and I'll ask you to just tell the listeners very briefly who the Ptolemy is and how they ruled Egypt and then touching on Alexander, all this, the issue that everyone was involved and unfortunately Alexander is the one that is emerged is propaganda. 01:50:21.971 --> 01:50:29.237 So, I guess, did the Ptolemies use Alexander as an icon of graphic propaganda? 01:50:29.237 --> 01:50:36.563 To wear their coat to be the best one, including Cleopatra, if we want to. 01:50:36.825 --> 01:51:08.003 Yeah, well, I think, like so kind of coming back to more, like less theoretical stuff maybe and more Maybe, I said maybe, actually talking about some of the evidence in some kind of traditional way, I guess, yeah, that Alexander is important to Ptolemies because and I think, for probably most Hellenistic kingdoms, in the sense that, like, the reason that they are there is because of the actions of this individual. 01:51:08.343 --> 01:51:15.617 Supposedly, obviously, it's not an individual, it's the, he is the, he is the forefront of Macedonian monarchy. 01:51:15.617 --> 01:51:42.905 Whatever you know, we can let's not, let's not delve into every single word and, uh, pick it apart, but yeah, so he is important for their propaganda in a sense, because, like, I think this is something that, because all of these monarchies are there because of those actions, um, they have in the reality, that's the reality essentially, um, and there's very much alexander. 01:51:42.905 --> 01:51:45.432 Pretty much the myth making begins immediately. 01:51:45.432 --> 01:51:54.957 Um, pretty much um, the ptolemies and other, probably the solukids as well, find themselves in a environment, a new environment, I guess. 01:51:54.957 --> 01:51:58.270 They're embodied in an environment which has its own history, its own culture. 01:51:58.270 --> 01:52:02.877 Um, it also has its own history of interactions with other cultures. 01:52:02.877 --> 01:52:11.397 Um, there's so many, so many layers to it, um, so it, I think it's conian, he. 01:52:11.397 --> 01:52:15.169 He calls the ptolemaic monarchy a face, so it has like two faces. 01:52:15.169 --> 01:52:20.267 Essentially it has a like a greco-macedonian face and it has an egyptian one. 01:52:20.327 --> 01:52:28.475 So I said earlier about the epq that I did um that was based off of a book I read um by stanwick. 01:52:28.475 --> 01:52:33.399 It's called portraits of the ptolemies, egyptian greek kings as egyptian pharaohs or something. 01:52:33.399 --> 01:52:34.585 It was something along those lines. 01:52:34.585 --> 01:53:12.135 Um, essentially, how you know, you have these traditions, greek and Egyptian ones, that are continuing their own patterns of culture and production, cultural production of artefacts and stuff, interpreting kingship in their way that can, so that for the Ptolemies you can have a Greek like a traditional quote unquote Greek sculpture that would fit into Greek history and cultural tradition, and you can also have exactly the same portrait or quote-unquote royal portraiture in an Egyptian style. 01:53:12.905 --> 01:53:16.899 Essentially I don't believe there's any, especially for that time period. 01:53:16.899 --> 01:53:18.251 There's no such thing as royal portraiture. 01:53:18.251 --> 01:53:46.628 These are not accurate representations of these rulers, which is is part of a kind of why I get a little bit not annoyed, so to speak, but of like discourses about, like the racial identities of some of these figures, um, because that wasn't really a concern of ancient peoples as soon as a new ruler comes into a context, they will take on whatever image is necessary or indeed um projected in that culture. 01:53:46.628 --> 01:54:04.945 So when people are like, particularly with cleopatra the seventh, for instance, and they're like, oh well, look at this coin, she probably had this nose stuff, I'm like absolutely no, no, no, no, this is, this is a, this is fixing a long, particularly on coins, of how to portray a monarchy. 01:54:04.945 --> 01:54:09.016 They didn't have portraiture in the same sense that we have it. 01:54:09.016 --> 01:54:11.893 Sorry, I'm a bit off topic, a bit from Alexander. 01:54:13.326 --> 01:54:17.295 Also off topic, did she have a hooked nose in her coin? 01:54:17.295 --> 01:54:18.258 Portraits Cleopatra VII. 01:54:19.087 --> 01:54:20.894 I think so from memory. 01:54:21.405 --> 01:54:28.253 Antiochus Gryphus, antiochus Hucnos people kings from then onwards tend to have that in their portraits. 01:54:28.333 --> 01:54:43.072 Yeah, yeah, so like when Cleopatra VII, for instance, is with Mark Antony and the whole of the Eastern Roman Empire essentially is kind of under their rule, quote-unquote. 01:54:43.072 --> 01:54:51.953 The coins minted for Cleopatra VII in the Seleucid territories or the previous Seleucid territories fit in with Seleucid coinage. 01:54:51.953 --> 01:55:08.909 She's playing on a particular Greek identity, a particular facet of quote-unquote Greek-Greco-Macedonian identity in that context, and Mark Antony is portrayed on coins looking like a Ptolemaic king. 01:55:08.909 --> 01:55:10.831 Yeah, these aren't royal portraits exactly. 01:55:10.831 --> 01:55:38.479 But coming back to the importance of Alexander, yes, so for the Ptolemies, the ruler cult or the dynastic cult of the Ptolemies in Alexandria is embedded into the priest of

Alexander and that particular office or function or whatever you want to call it, it becomes the priest of Alexander and every single deified royal couple after him. 01:55:38.479 --> 01:55:41.713 So he is important for them. 01:55:42.391 --> 01:56:01.367 And in my paper that you obviously all listened to yesterday, I talked a little bit about how it's quite possible that a lot of, particularly alexander's episodes in egypt were manipulated by the ptolemaic court, because they have they have to kind of they have really interesting ways of having this like hybrid interpretation of things. 01:56:01.367 --> 01:56:23.485 So their kind of literature, um, and imagery, for instance, can project like, could project like a, a notion or pattern of kingship in egyptian, which is um like a pharaonic pattern, but it now has, it's completely kind of redone into like g motifs essentially, and perhaps vice versa. 01:56:23.485 --> 01:56:32.164 So they find these nice hybrid ways essentially of kind of combining important different motifs and cultural narratives into the legacy and the myth of Alexander. 01:56:32.164 --> 01:56:35.793 But in Egypt he's not particularly relevant. 01:56:35.793 --> 01:57:00.634 So the priests of the like the Ptolemaic ruler cult, or priests that are essentially dedicated to the worship of, or the priest of, for instance, the sibling gods In Egypt, so outside of Alexandria, aren't connected to Alexander the Great, so he doesn't really have in that particular facet of royal ancestor veneration. 01:57:01.949 --> 01:57:03.158 He isn't really important in the rest of Egypt. 01:57:03.158 --> 01:57:08.411 He's important in Alexandria and I have lots of theories on that which I won't divulge here. 01:57:08.411 --> 01:57:12.893 You'll have to wait for my thesis in however many years time. 01:57:15.163 --> 01:57:16.937 Yeah, it's going to be a long wait. 01:57:17.206 --> 01:57:20.774 It's going to be a long wait maybe I'll give a paper on it before then. 01:57:20.774 --> 01:57:21.995 So he's important in Alexandria, but not anywhere else. 01:57:21.995 --> 01:57:24.070 Um, so, so he's important alexandria, but not anywhere else. 01:57:24.070 --> 01:57:43.791 So I think he's important in projecting his identity internationally to other hellenistic rulers, but not to necessary egyptian elites, because he was, if he went there at all uh, um, he was essentially irrelevant, and and they have to also create identity that's separate from him as well. 01:57:43.791 --> 01:58:02.045 I think they have to really portray themselves as separate to him because they aren't related to him like blood-wise, although there are some theories that Ptolemy I may have been a half-brother or something like that, but I don't quite believe that he's a stepping stone for integration into a new environment. 01:58:02.105 --> 01:58:04.318 Yeah, exactly, yeah, new environment. 01:58:04.318 --> 01:58:27.694 But I think these trends are going on before, essentially, like you talk

about the narrative of the 96%, I think maybe not the 96%, but the 20% nearer the top, maybe these merchants and soldiers and other people who are moving about in this time period before alexander the great, you have a lot of greek mercenaries in egypt. 01:58:27.694 --> 01:58:33.256 Um, you have, like the necratis, for instance, becomes like a sort of a greek trading colony, that's this in egypt. 01:58:33.256 --> 01:58:38.235 And you have, um, they're called the hella memphites, so greeks living in memphis. 01:58:38.235 --> 01:58:44.072 Um, these people are probably already creating these new kind of cultural codes of hybridity. 01:58:44.920 --> 01:58:49.153 So it's quite convenient when Alexander Ptolemy's come in, they can probably get that from those communities. 01:58:49.153 --> 01:58:53.574 So they're actually kind of some of the groundwork's already been done for them before, essentially. 01:58:53.574 --> 01:59:07.025 So I wonder if there's a bit of a narrative there of these trends that these non-elites, like elite elites who are like rulers, have already been creating beforehand. 01:59:07.025 --> 01:59:10.981 Probably it doesn't come out of nowhere. 01:59:10.981 --> 01:59:16.849 It's not as though Alexander comes and conquers the Persian Empire and it's like, oh god, who are these people? 01:59:16.849 --> 01:59:17.731 Like? 01:59:17.731 --> 01:59:20.358 That's not happening, obviously. 01:59:20.358 --> 01:59:23.905 Yeah, I hope I answered that question. 01:59:24.865 --> 02:00:25.036 No, it's true of saying that non-elites, the local non-elites, seeing someone who is somewhat well, a bigger influence, but for the elites that are not that just went there and settled with non-elites and trying to projecting something that the non-elites are not fancy with it and, as you said, moving it internationally and I think that probably would move into the Roman Empire, would that also reflect in the beginning of the principle no, throughout the Roman Republic and then transferring it into the Roman imperial campaigns? 02:00:28.189 --> 02:00:34.045 I love the shifting that you're doing to like, ah, new things, it's great so what exactly. 02:00:35.950 --> 02:00:48.634 So exactly that what Henry touched upon transmitting Alexander the Great in an international way, and would that reflect upon the Roman Republic? 02:00:48.634 --> 02:01:00.034 And then jumping straight on what you are researching, Because at the beginning of your article, if I Let me just open here, you mean the article by Dario Napo that I've read. 02:01:00.114 --> 02:01:01.530 Yes To clarify for your listeners. 02:01:01.530 --> 02:01:11.912 It's not my article, let me just I'm very flattered, but I'm a great admirer of Napo's work, but no, okay, he. 02:01:17.891 --> 02:01:18.011 Oh. 02:01:18.030 --> 02:01:21.142 Karas has already got it. 02:01:21.142 --> 02:01:23.352 He's at the beginning. 02:01:23.352 --> 02:01:33.855 Dario Napo says this In the summer of 116 CE, the Emperor Trajan completed his spartan campaign, which Spartan or Karras, on the shores of the Persian Gulf. 02:01:33.855 --> 02:01:42.913 When he arrived, he complained, allegedly he was not young enough to attempt the conquest of India as Alexander the Great had done. 02:01:42.913 --> 02:01:53.696 At least this is what Cassius Dio tells us in one of the books of his work, which survives only through the epitome of Siliphinos. 02:01:53.696 --> 02:02:02.647 So upon this first paragraph, and then comes with the, the source. 02:02:02.647 --> 02:02:20.114 So should we say the same is more or less what we have been talking about Alexander being this marketable individual over the people that influenced and that are not. 02:02:20.114 --> 02:02:23.512 Sadly, they're not mentioned of those 96%. 02:02:26.751 --> 02:02:30.559 How good is Alexander the Great's strong power in the Imperial Roman period? 02:02:30.559 --> 02:02:31.800 Is that fundamentally what you're asking? 02:02:32.225 --> 02:02:34.882 Yes, so how Specifically under the 96%? 02:02:34.882 --> 02:02:50.628 So the Imperial campaigns until Trajan's reign, solidifying what the known Roman world at the time, in the second century, is? 02:02:50.628 --> 02:03:14.990 That was that resembling, uh, the demise as I was, as I was speaking previously, demising the demise of eastern empires by ancient authors, while reminiscing the campaigns of Alexander the Great as the restorer of the known Roman map at the time, during the peak of its empire. 02:03:15.010 --> 02:03:32.567 Oh, oh, so well in terms of Alexander's influence in the Roman period, he's certainly his soft power is. 02:03:32.567 --> 02:03:38.179 He's clearly quite influential over the foremost individuals in both the Republican period and the Imperial period. 02:03:38.179 --> 02:03:46.975 I mean, heck, julius Caesar's supposed to have cried at the foot of one of Alexander's statues because he was older than him and hadn't achieved half as much. 02:03:47.687 --> 02:03:52.113 Just for the listener, maria is rolling her eyes back really far into the back of her head. 02:03:54.110 --> 02:03:55.535 I guess Maria has something to say. 02:03:55.535 --> 02:03:58.313 I may have said what I had to say. 02:03:59.725 --> 02:04:05.527 There's one particular achievement Maria is wishing that Caesar had imitated by that point in time, didn't he? 02:04:05.668 --> 02:04:06.972 also refuse to see the body. 02:04:06.972 --> 02:04:13.937 They came to Alexandria and Refused to go to the tomb, refused to see the tomb of the Ptolemies, and he just wanted to see Alexander. 02:04:13.937 --> 02:04:14.963 He was like I don't want to see those. 02:04:14.963 --> 02:04:17.294 Yes, I'll go and see Alexander, I think so. 02:04:17.294 --> 02:04:24.972 Yeah, apparently of course, alexander's influence. 02:04:25.012 --> 02:04:30.821 He clearly does loom large, in the same way as he has, as the others have alluded to, to our modern narratives. 02:04:30.821 --> 02:04:38.699 I remember reading in

one book this was a number of years ago someone listed the number of books written on Alexander and it was over 3,000. 02:04:38.699 --> 02:04:40.852 It was literally thousands. 02:04:44.805 --> 02:04:47.771 It is, I think, just to kind of jump in sorry that the Alexander romance is. 02:04:48.652 --> 02:05:00.974 I think it becomes second essentially to the Bible in its popularity and how much it's translated and different languages that it's translated to in the medieval period. 02:05:00.974 --> 02:05:14.574 So it's something that has a continual effect essentially, or that myth and that narrative is something that stays almost, maybe not continuously, but is quite strong even thousands of years later. 02:05:15.725 --> 02:05:17.170 No, so I, yeah. 02:05:17.170 --> 02:05:23.131 Thank you, henry, that was a useful input, I think. 02:05:23.131 --> 02:05:30.136 Fundamentally, Alexander, as I've said several times, he does loom large for a number of reasons. 02:05:30.136 --> 02:05:57.885 I think as well we and it comes back to the point that Maria made earlier about when these individuals do undertake events or undertake courses of action which do have a profound influence on the environments around them and the people around them, they do have very, very real, very, very long-lasting consequences psychologically on these societies. 02:05:58.226 --> 02:06:05.005 Actually, to jump to a completely different boogeyman from Alexander, I'm going to jump over to Hannibal Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general. 02:06:05.005 --> 02:06:08.007 I'm going to jump over to Hannibal Hannibal Barker, the Carthaginian general. 02:06:08.007 --> 02:06:16.513 This is an individual and actually potentially, to some extent the example is, dare I say, almost better. 02:06:16.513 --> 02:06:19.035 This is an individual who takes. 02:06:19.035 --> 02:06:26.861 So Carthage has just suffered defeat in the First Punic War in 241 BC. 02:06:26.861 --> 02:06:32.613 You have the mercenary revolt in 240, which is right at the gates of Carthage. 02:06:32.613 --> 02:06:37.207 You do not leave a rather large army of unpaid mercenaries outside your front gates. 02:06:37.207 --> 02:06:38.050 That's a terrible idea. 02:06:38.050 --> 02:06:42.551 Carthage then rebuilds its power base in Spain. 02:06:42.551 --> 02:06:49.256 Hannibal then takes an army of 30,000-40,000 men plus a bunch of elephants I knew they were coming. 02:06:50.666 --> 02:06:51.930 The first time when am. 02:06:51.950 --> 02:06:52.752 I getting them in. 02:06:52.752 --> 02:06:56.064 I've been waiting for this, troy owes about £100. 02:06:56.064 --> 02:06:58.125 His job every time he mentions elephants is £100. 02:06:59.530 --> 02:07:00.994 We swore five times. 02:07:04.652 --> 02:07:08.159 I'm not sure the word elephant is going to give your podcast the R rating you desire. 02:07:08.159 --> 02:07:13.677 Louise, but that was actually a totally subconscious insertion, I'm afraid. 02:07:14.629 --> 02:07:15.975 I can see you

coming here, as soon as. 02:07:16.036 --> 02:07:19.335 I can, but there is a point to that. 02:07:19.335 --> 02:07:39.007 So this is an individual who, along with his command staff, he, takes an army of 40,000 men and a bunch of elephants out of Spain through France, through the Alps, in the middle of winter, and they wind up in Italy. 02:07:39.007 --> 02:07:50.817 Apparently, and admittedly, this is not the first time that elephants reached Italy. 02:07:50.817 --> 02:07:53.354 They did so under Pyrrhus years before. 02:07:53.354 --> 02:08:20.615 But I remember seeing a wonderful interview on one of these sort of late evening American style history documentaries when I was young and they were interviewing a historian I can't remember who, but they were sort of creating this hypothetical scenario in which Hannibal has arrived in Italy and someone is riding into a Roman military encampment somewhere and he's describing oh, hannibal has crossed the Alps and he's here in force, oh, and he has elephants. 02:08:20.615 --> 02:08:25.591 And the army officer just says what, what are you? 02:08:25.651 --> 02:08:32.928 talking about, but this is then an army that proceeds to rampage through Italy for about ten years. 02:08:32.928 --> 02:08:37.512 Actually, if you want the impact on the 96% there, it is there. 02:08:37.512 --> 02:08:38.788 It is Because he does. 02:08:38.788 --> 02:08:41.953 He rampages through Italy for a good better part of a decade. 02:08:41.953 --> 02:08:43.351 If I'm not, what are we talking? 02:08:43.351 --> 02:08:46.334 219 to 202 is the second Punic War. 02:08:46.334 --> 02:08:46.600 Yeah, if I'm not, what are we talking? 02:08:46.600 --> 02:08:48.953 219 to 202 is the second Punic War. 02:08:48.953 --> 02:08:51.618 Yeah, you know. 02:08:51.698 --> 02:09:06.215 You have Capua, major Italian city defects, and actually and this comes back to the point on the horrors of battle, again, you have the defeats at Trebia the Romans lose 10,000-15,000 men there. 02:09:06.215 --> 02:09:08.106 You have the ambush at Lake Trasimene you have 15,000 men. 02:09:08.106 --> 02:09:08.563 There, you have the ambush at Lake Trasimene. 02:09:08.563 --> 02:09:11.614 You have 15,000 men lost there. 02:09:11.614 --> 02:09:31.318 And then you get to Cannae, which is just on a different scale, and I think that to some extent, this is why, particularly these big battles, I remember because, maria, you made the fair and reasonable point that a good portion of society is not marching off to beat each other with sticks in a very bloody and gruesome way. 02:09:31.318 --> 02:09:32.811 I'm not going to underplay that. 02:09:32.811 --> 02:09:43.216 But at Cannae, you do have the deployment of supposedly 80,000 men from across the entirety of Italy and by the end of a single day, 50,000 of these are dead. 02:09:43.216 --> 02:09:43.739 Yeah, that's unbelievable. 02:09:43.739 --> 02:09:44.724 A single day, 50,000 of these are dead. 02:09:44.724 --> 02:09:52.691 Yeah, you

know, this is and this is actually to factor back into narratives in scholarship. 02:09:52.691 --> 02:09:59.150 There is a profound reason why this battle has been so influential, right down to German strategists in World War II. 02:09:59.150 --> 02:10:08.574 This does become the epitome of a I won't say good, I will say successful battlefield, battlefield engagement. 02:10:08.574 --> 02:10:15.756 Ie, you've taken an enemy army that is numerically twice the size and you have butchered it completely. 02:10:16.646 --> 02:10:29.052 The shockwaves that go through because Hannibal is, I think the arguments basically are that he is operating on a Hellenistic or almost classical Greek notion of military engagement where basically you batter your enemy into submission and they will sue for peace. 02:10:29.052 --> 02:10:30.631 The Romans do not do this. 02:10:30.631 --> 02:10:31.408 They say you know what? 02:10:31.408 --> 02:10:35.152 No, fuck you, we are going to keep fighting you. 02:10:35.152 --> 02:10:41.905 We are going to engage in strategies that you cannot deal with because we will not meet you in pitch battle. 02:10:41.905 --> 02:10:45.956 But the psychological effect on the Roman population is massive. 02:10:45.956 --> 02:11:06.234 Hannibal becomes the boogeyman for certainly the remainder of the Roman Republican period, which is the better part of 200 years, because Hannibal eventually reaches the court of Antiochus III, one of the conditions, I think after the defeat of Magnesia in 191, is that they surrender Hannibal. 02:11:06.234 --> 02:11:11.317 The Romans are desperate to get their hands on him and this is why Hannibal allegedly commits suicide. 02:11:11.317 --> 02:11:13.530 At the end he manages to deprive Rome of. 02:11:14.507 --> 02:11:21.110 Can you think of Caesar and Vercingetorix, the Gallic chieftain? 02:11:21.110 --> 02:11:23.338 They make a big public spectacle of this. 02:11:23.338 --> 02:11:26.206 Can you imagine what they would have done to Hannibal if they'd got their hands on him? 02:11:26.206 --> 02:11:31.641 Cle know this is yeah, exactly so. 02:11:31.641 --> 02:11:39.510 The impact of these individuals, and actually not just the 96%, you know. 02:11:39.510 --> 02:11:43.090 You have the story of Hannibal's brother. 02:11:43.090 --> 02:11:55.833 He returns to Carthage shortly after Cannae and he walks into the Senate floor at Carthage and he just dumps a chest full of rings of senators onto the floor. 02:11:55.833 --> 02:12:06.233 Hannibal manages to wipe out not just 50,000 men, he manages to wipe out a massive number of at least the lower nobility. 02:12:06.233 --> 02:12:07.869 Hannibal's growing on me. 02:12:10.662 --> 02:12:10.923 Oh dear. 02:12:14.310 --> 02:12:16.932 But no one of the consuls, I think, is killed at Cannae. 02:12:16.932 --> 02:12:19.437 It is a complete disaster for Rome. 02:12:19.437 --> 02:12:24.791 And so, no, the site is absolutely massive. 02:12:24.791 --> 02:12:29.048 This is nowhere near Alexander in the east, I grant you, but sorry, I've just remembered. 02:12:29.048 --> 02:12:31.236 I should actually bother to try to link it back to that. 02:12:31.236 --> 02:12:35.332 But no, I think actually it does serve the point, because it's Alexander. 02:12:36.033 --> 02:12:51.234 He does undertake something similar, he undertakes an anabasis, he undertakes an immense journey geographically, he conducts a number of battles that are immensely militarily successful, and he wins them. 02:12:51.234 --> 02:12:57.048 The Battle of Gaugamela is much, much bigger, supposedly, than Cannae. 02:12:57.048 --> 02:13:10.384 Cannae is one of the bigger battles of non-naval battles of antiquity, but Gaugamela is meant to be what 40,000 Macedonians allegedly against 40,000 Macedonians allegedly against 250,000 Parthians. 02:13:10.384 --> 02:13:12.573 This is. 02:13:12.573 --> 02:13:28.714 This is apocalyptic in some sense in terms of antiquity, and this might be a one off event, but I don't think we should underestimate the psychological impacts of that and just the ripple effect that that would have. 02:13:28.714 --> 02:13:34.618 But also, then, obviously, alexander goes on to go into India and engages with Porus. 02:13:34.618 --> 02:13:36.573 You have another large battle at the Hydaspes. 02:13:38.849 --> 02:14:13.092 But the actual importance and the impact of Alexander and those campaigns of alexander and those campaigns, um, it is psychological in some sense because it because it is not that it's the first time that those areas have been explored by any, by any means, and I think we're beginning to start to unpick that in the scholarship and elucidate it, and and that's great, um, but it it is, as far as we can tell, it's the one, it's the first time where, if you will an organized body, a very large, but you know, 30, 40 000 people go to a place. 02:14:13.092 --> 02:14:17.760 Apparently this is not newbie henry come on. 02:14:20.030 --> 02:14:27.078 I think we need to ask ourselves why and what does it look like from the people who were already there? 02:14:27.078 --> 02:14:29.993 This is very much from our perspective. 02:14:29.993 --> 02:14:33.636 It's very much looking from the west towards the east in the case of Alexander. 02:14:33.636 --> 02:14:35.892 Why would Alexander do this? 02:14:36.988 --> 02:14:50.178 Sorry, I was talking about the impact of that event on, because obviously Luis was asking about by the time of Trajan, and I think it is that a narrative like that would be highly impactful on Trajan. 02:14:50.178 --> 02:14:54.153 Well, clearly it is because Trajan says he wishes he could have imitated Alexander. 02:14:54.205 --> 02:15:00.171 So we can see directly there that the narrative is the spectre of Alexander, pretty much just loom large over the ensuing period. 02:15:02.526 --> 02:15:08.096 Alexander is probably the closest soft power can get to hard power without military or coercive force. 02:15:08.096 --> 02:15:09.430 Is that

fair to say, Kairos? 02:15:09.430 --> 02:15:09.912 I don't know. 02:15:11.145 --> 02:15:13.735 Yeah, if soft power is propaganda, then it's worked. 02:15:13.735 --> 02:15:15.530 We're still talking about him. 02:15:15.530 --> 02:15:18.589 Yeah, and it's Alexander the Great. 02:15:18.589 --> 02:15:21.417 He is this, being above everything else. 02:15:22.385 --> 02:15:27.918 We should also point out to the listeners that certain figures in history do tend to like to name themselves great on their own initiative. 02:15:29.365 --> 02:15:41.401 Maybe in the Roman period I don't know if this is necessarily true, but, like I think you know, a feature of culture and a feature of, I think you know maybe we can empathize with this as historians essentially is to kind of make, to make sense of the present. 02:15:41.401 --> 02:15:43.432 You have to sort of in a sense understand your past. 02:15:43.432 --> 02:15:46.507 In the sense understand your past. 02:15:46.507 --> 02:15:53.231 So looking back into the past and looking at these like narratives you've constructed of, or a culture is constructed of, its identity, um, you know what is its point of reference, like what is this? 02:15:53.231 --> 02:16:01.216 Similar, similar to you know, we talk about like financial crashes, and we talk about, um, you know, back in 1929, all that sort of stuff. 02:16:01.236 --> 02:16:08.948 So we look back at these key events to kind of situate ourselves in the present, in some respect into our current social landscape. 02:16:08.948 --> 02:16:25.891 So I wonder, I do wonder if, like the roman empire essentially is like you know, I mean, the hellenistic kingdoms have continued alexander's memory and you know, I think I'm pretty sure it is for the ptolemaic um royal house, in that they mint coins up until the very end still with alexander's face on them. 02:16:25.891 --> 02:16:32.831 I don't know if it's the same as the Seleucid Empire, I think. 02:16:32.831 --> 02:16:33.795 Don't hold me to it, please. 02:16:35.405 --> 02:16:37.932 We're sorry in advance Kyle. 02:16:38.112 --> 02:17:15.019 So when they're in those areas, Alexander's memory and narrative, when the Romans move into those, is already looming large and they have this huge empire that he was the last one to essentially have, almost as a comparison, essentially maybe, but I think this was the point in some sense that I was hoping to kind of allude to just then is that you have figures like Alexander who clearly have a profound, very profound impact on the actions and perception of individuals of similar status later on, whether it be Trajan or any other. 02:17:15.019 --> 02:17:49.912 I would wonder again I think this is why Hannibal's quite a good example is, because then instances like Cannae and presumably actually Galgamela as well, these would be or Raphia, by the time you get to the Ptolemaic period, these are genuinely massive flashpoints and I would presume the ripple effect and the psychological impact on not just the upper echelons of society but the rest of you know, these are events that would genuinely, I would think, have that effect or have an effect on. 02:17:50.305 --> 02:17:55.769 If you're a farmer down at the first cataract, you know, Raffia, do you care? 02:17:55.769 --> 02:17:56.872 Well, again, these may. 02:17:59.290 --> 02:18:00.234 You might be conscripted somewhere. 02:18:02.813 --> 02:18:03.136 No again. 02:18:03.136 --> 02:18:15.068 So the example of Hannibal again is quite good because it's in some sense it's relatively geographically confined to Roman Italy, but again, this is something that has an impact on Roman Italy for the next. 02:18:15.068 --> 02:18:20.281 Well, certainly until the destruction of Carthage in 146. 02:18:20.281 --> 02:18:23.757 Influences Roman Italy for decades. 02:18:23.757 --> 02:18:25.043 We also have to be careful as well. 02:18:25.043 --> 02:18:27.617 That might be one clear example, I think we also have to be careful as well. 02:18:27.637 --> 02:18:28.662 That might be one clear example. 02:18:28.682 --> 02:18:29.145 Yeah, that's a good one. 02:18:29.145 --> 02:18:32.070 I think we also have to be careful as well in some of the numbers that these ancient authors give. 02:18:32.070 --> 02:18:45.986 Because obviously, when we start talking about gigantic battles again, it's like somebody said, it is a gigantic battle with a particular number and that in itself might be an element of you know. 02:18:45.986 --> 02:19:04.513 I'm sure we're all well aware of in contemporary life and politics the keenness to over exaggerate achievements and the argument that these are government statistics Maybe To take it to take, it to take a social media. 02:19:05.005 --> 02:19:10.712 Yeah, yeah, those sorts of of things you know, like like a yes minister quote, you know, so it was the same. 02:19:10.712 --> 02:19:11.273 I think it was. 02:19:11.273 --> 02:19:23.747 You know, part of the same back then, you know, and especially especially coming from like ancient egypt, when they're talking about like how many, like you know, prisoners and stuff they've captured and stuff sometimes, like numbers, numbers also have symbolic value as well. 02:19:23.907 --> 02:19:29.638 So you know, you know, yeah, I think there absolutely is that You're quite right. 02:19:29.638 --> 02:19:34.433 But again, I think at least again can I is an example, or the aftermath. 02:19:34.433 --> 02:19:44.340 That is an example where we can see in the literature that we have which, yes, is upper echelon, but this does quite clearly have a profound impact Whether the numbers are quite what we're told. 02:19:44.340 --> 02:19:45.438 I agree, a profound impact Whether the numbers are quite what we're told. 02:19:45.438 --> 02:19:49.070 I agree. 02:19:49.150 --> 02:19:52.278 I would like to draw a contemporary parallel. 02:19:52.278 --> 02:19:59.791 So if we take the Second World War as potentially the biggest event, from the mid-20th century.

02:19:59.811 --> 02:20:05.137 Militarily yes, and the impact that had on the British population. 02:20:05.137 --> 02:20:16.992 So my grandfather was sent away to fight and got captured and all the rest of it, and he was away for six years. 02:20:16.992 --> 02:20:26.450 So there's an impact in the family, but without the constant reinforcement of the message in the post-war years. 02:20:26.450 --> 02:20:45.612 The sheer number of war films, the depiction of the Axis powers and the cultures of the Axis powers, which were, I mean, you know, in my childhood it was just constant, this reminder, and I wonder if the same thing happened in the ancient world, and I don't, I suspect it didn't. 02:20:45.612 --> 02:20:54.733 So it might have been in upper echelons, there was a good reason for keeping that alive, but for most people they're not seeing. 02:20:54.733 --> 02:21:02.444 You know, every Sunday there's yet another Second World War film on the telly and I I wonder if that died out much quicker. 02:21:03.868 --> 02:21:10.256 Could I make the point that they're not seeing the film, but when we're talking about Alexander being on all these coins, they're not seeing the film, but when we're talking about Alexander being on all these coins, they're still seeing his face everywhere. 02:21:11.180 --> 02:21:14.531 Yeah, I have a problem with coinage like that because do you actually look? 02:21:14.571 --> 02:21:15.353 at it when you use it. 02:21:15.353 --> 02:21:16.256 But also who is it? 02:21:16.256 --> 02:21:17.648 Who is that coinage going to? 02:21:17.648 --> 02:21:20.336 Is it paying particular military figures, for instance? 02:21:20.336 --> 02:21:22.728 Does it have a particular context? 02:21:22.768 --> 02:21:29.586 The other I can jump, try to jump in a little bit with that and it's, it's. 02:21:29.586 --> 02:21:41.541 It is always difficult to try to use the, the literary sources that we have to elucidate the views of the 96 percent I think that's probably. 02:21:41.862 --> 02:21:49.844 That's just a figure that's now going to be quoted in every oh no, the 96%. 02:21:49.844 --> 02:21:51.371 This is how some shit starts. 02:21:51.371 --> 02:21:56.611 Like somebody will pluck a figure for, like you know, just a random figure. 02:21:57.106 --> 02:22:01.703 It's not so random, because I think I read an article and it was what is it? 02:22:01.703 --> 02:22:03.852 The Demography of the Greco-Roman World. 02:22:03.852 --> 02:22:04.746 It was a reassessment or something. 02:22:04.746 --> 02:22:05.527 It was a reassessment or something. 02:22:05.527 --> 02:22:06.870 It was in that book. 02:22:06.870 --> 02:22:07.552 Is this what makes you want? 02:22:07.572 --> 02:22:08.594 to do away with demography. 02:22:08.594 --> 02:22:09.937 That's right, no. 02:22:13.424 --> 02:22:15.369 But I think they did a calculation for Egypt, Ptolemaic Egypt. 02:22:15.389 --> 02:22:19.249 They reckon an elite comprised about 4% of that population, with various criteria. 02:22:19.249 --> 02:22:19.912 Sorry, Stuart. 02:22:21.405 --> 02:23:04.438 No, just the point that at least by the time you get to kind of the first century, at least by the time you get to, um, to kind of the first century, ad just the the authors, I think, such as as plinny or a number of others, they do actually, for example, show an awareness broadly um of, say, street level discussions of, of, say, indians in alexandria, or or eastern trade items appearing, and so it's always a slightly delicate operation to infer from those sources, but unfortunately, again, this is another gap in the evidence where we just, in some sense again this is why, as Keris rightly pointed out the coins we don't know what these entire swaths of the population have access to and how regularly. 02:23:05.845 --> 02:23:07.490 All origins obviously get completely lost. 02:23:08.474 --> 02:23:08.694 Of course. 02:23:08.694 --> 02:23:14.554 But the point is, we assume that they're there, but then unfortunately we don't know what those oral traditions are. 02:23:14.904 --> 02:23:16.688 Actually I wanted to ask Carys about coinage. 02:23:16.688 --> 02:23:18.070 Sorry, Because. 02:23:22.205 --> 02:23:23.389 This is going to be a whirlwind for your listeners. 02:23:23.389 --> 02:23:23.711 Yeah, absolutely. 02:23:23.751 --> 02:23:24.213 This is very intense. 02:23:24.233 --> 02:23:25.498 This is going to be like a few parts, your listeners. 02:23:25.518 --> 02:23:25.839 Yeah, absolutely. 02:23:25.839 --> 02:23:26.261 This is very intense. 02:23:26.261 --> 02:23:27.064 This is going to be like a few parts. 02:23:27.364 --> 02:23:30.169 Would you like to take this just a five minute break, because I have to weep. 02:23:33.106 --> 02:23:33.587 Why don't you? 02:23:33.587 --> 02:23:34.229 Why don't you? 02:23:34.229 --> 02:23:34.751 Why don't? 02:23:34.751 --> 02:23:36.015 It's a little surprise for you. 02:23:36.015 --> 02:23:38.952 You go, and then we'll just you can just leave us here. 02:23:39.012 --> 02:23:39.975 We'll talk about whatever. 02:23:39.975 --> 02:23:41.888 Yeah, we'll direct ourselves, unless. 02:23:41.888 --> 02:23:46.922 I just need to pause because I'm going to edit this section here, so in this part. 02:23:46.942 --> 02:23:50.193 so okay, just leave it running and we'll go. 02:23:50.193 --> 02:23:54.333 Okay, leave it running and we'll just carry on, I'm going to edit it anyway. 02:23:54.353 --> 02:23:55.936 Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah alright. 02:23:56.116 --> 02:23:58.804 I'll be right back no, no, we can keep going. 02:23:58.804 --> 02:24:03.344 No, no, no, just keep going, just keep running keep running, because here it's also running. 02:24:03.524 --> 02:24:04.969 Okay, I, because here it is also running. 02:24:05.009 --> 02:24:05.430 OK, I'll run back. 02:24:05.430 --> 02:24:06.554 You have to unlock the door. 02:24:06.554 --> 02:24:10.827 Yeah, we've locked ourselves in. 02:24:10.887 --> 02:24:12.809 So we can't escape until we've sorted this. 02:24:13.190

--> 02:24:16.354 No about coinage, because Troy's going as well, they're going together. 02:24:17.035 --> 02:24:18.857 And I'll go afterwards. 02:24:18.877 --> 02:24:19.038 Yeah. 02:24:19.058 --> 02:24:20.199 They're taking their handbags. 02:24:20.199 --> 02:24:29.176 I mean, yeah, yeah, I was wondering about who actually had these coins in their hands. 02:24:29.176 --> 02:24:35.517 And this is quite an interesting point because obviously on an everyday level, you're going to be using bronze coinage. 02:24:35.517 --> 02:24:48.098 It gets worn very quickly, as far as I can tell, and actually a lot of some bronze coinage doesn't carry specifically ideological messages, as far as we can tell. 02:24:48.098 --> 02:24:57.459 So is the coinage that's being produced you know the gold staters or you know the silver tetradrachms and all the rest of it? 02:24:57.459 --> 02:25:07.294 Are they being produced for an elite audience, to maintain an illusion of a propaganda that's continuing, or is this something that's got a wider reach. 02:25:07.784 --> 02:25:09.010 I put a little asterisk there. 02:25:09.010 --> 02:25:12.712 Everything we're saying is all speculation. 02:25:12.712 --> 02:25:14.049 Possibly it's wrong. 02:25:14.049 --> 02:25:15.148 It's okay to be wrong. 02:25:15.148 --> 02:25:17.950 As you said earlier, I'm not a coin expert. 02:25:19.286 --> 02:25:20.551 I'm so sorry to put you on the spot. 02:25:20.805 --> 02:25:23.064 I wrote a paper on coins and then I went shit. 02:25:23.064 --> 02:25:26.587 I don't know anything about how you talk about coins. 02:25:26.587 --> 02:25:29.529 I just thought these looked cool and were interesting. 02:25:29.750 --> 02:25:33.593 I think that's a perfectly good justification for how you paper. 02:25:33.593 --> 02:25:34.113 You know. 02:25:34.713 --> 02:25:36.355 I mean it worked. 02:25:36.355 --> 02:25:43.941 I think it worked out well On one of the Coin 101 books I was basically reading in the past week. 02:25:43.941 --> 02:25:57.292 They talk about, with fine spots of coins, bronze coins you are likely to find less so in the big hordes that people buried their life savings and then, for whatever reason, didn't come back for it. 02:25:57.292 --> 02:26:06.045 You find it essentially dropped on the back of the sofa, like the ancient comparison of that that it's dropped between the floorboards. 02:26:06.045 --> 02:26:08.248 People didn't bother to go find it because it's a bronze coin. 02:26:08.328 --> 02:26:19.263 It seems that that's the kind of coinage that people just had and I think there had to be laws put into place. 02:26:19.263 --> 02:26:31.052 Apparently I'm very much remembering this from something I read in the past week there had to be laws put into place to make people use the coins because they just weren't worth as much as they were said to be worth. 02:26:31.052 --> 02:26:39.952 It'd be like if we were suddenly introduced to paper money and we were like this is just a piece of paper, this isn't

like five pound coins, this is a piece of paper. 02:26:39.952 --> 02:26:42.305 I think it was that sort of thing. 02:26:42.305 --> 02:26:44.510 So I guess they would have had these coins. 02:26:44.510 --> 02:26:45.933 Maybe they wouldn't have cared what was on them. 02:26:45.974 --> 02:27:05.570 but but yeah, the elite clearly did, because otherwise we wouldn't have all these different variations of things I do wonder whether some of the coins, particularly like coming from this ones I've seen, um, or like the you know numismatics I've like dipped my toe into whether, like some of the coins, are kind of commemorative of certain events. 02:27:05.570 --> 02:27:29.670 I don't know whether to talk about propaganda, but when I was at school and it was Elizabeth Windsor's 50th Jubilee or whatever it was you mean Betty Betty, yeah, betty Windsor, when it was her Jubilee, we were all given coins at school to commemorate the occasion, and that is embedding an ideology and is a oh, they're back together as well. 02:27:29.670 --> 02:27:35.434 You know, getting those kind of commemorative coins is something that was. 02:27:35.434 --> 02:27:44.610 I wonder whether that was a similar thing in the Ptolemaic and Sleutid Empires, especially with those gold ones and you get the ones with, like, arsinoe II and Ptolemy II. 02:27:44.610 --> 02:27:49.075 I wonder whether it's like commemorating their marriage or something along those lines. 02:27:49.698 --> 02:28:00.233 Um, yeah, yeah, I do kind of wonder because, as I say, I'm not a coin expert, I don't know how much the gold status were worth, theoretically speaking, like like, where would you spend it? 02:28:00.233 --> 02:28:00.773 Um? 02:28:00.913 --> 02:28:02.577 yeah, who would give you change yeah? 02:28:03.986 --> 02:28:10.899 walking into like a shop, in like a local coin store, and trying to buy something that's worth maybe less than a pound with a £50 note. 02:28:10.899 --> 02:28:15.195 I don't know how realistic was it that people were going to spend them. 02:28:15.195 --> 02:28:29.126 But I think the coins I was talking about the Cleopatra, thea and Alexander Ballas Dugate coins and Cleopatra's gold stater they're talked about in terms of marriage issue coins they were. 02:28:29.126 --> 02:28:32.036 They were minted to commemorate the event of their marriage. 02:28:32.036 --> 02:28:39.630 So I guess we don't know and all that sort of thing, like it's it's, it's all speculation, there's absolutely no way of proving it. 02:28:39.630 --> 02:28:42.103 But in that case it would have been a commemorative event. 02:28:42.103 --> 02:28:44.489 It would have been our equivalent of the, the jubilee coins. 02:28:44.729 --> 02:28:54.250 Yeah, um, that of thing, yeah, I find it really interesting when you talked about where would you spend these sorts of things and I do. 02:28:55.825 --> 02:28:57.351 People still invest in gold. 02:28:58.966 --> 02:29:31.191 It's actual material worth is like a precious metal and my grandma used to wear a gold sovereign around her neck on a chain and everything like chain and it was like and everything, and I think it was given to her by her dad and he said, like, always wear this because if you ever some stuck somewhere and you have nothing, um that you have, you have something of worth to like bargain your way out of a situation or, if you know, pay for something if you need to, just because the material value of that gold that they had. 02:29:31.191 --> 02:29:51.327 So I wonder whether, like these big gold coins and maybe were like an investment or like kind of a um, a consolidation of wealth, um, which was transportable essentially, especially if you're paying, like you know if you need to pay a mercenary something for their service, but they're going to go back. 02:29:51.327 --> 02:30:04.313 You know, if they're fighting in like Upper Egypt, for instance, but they're going to go back to their home in like Northern Greece, they can't for their services, they can't like take food with them because it's perishable. 02:30:04.313 --> 02:30:05.234 So you know. 02:30:06.156 --> 02:30:08.945 Gold is gold, gold food with them, because it's perishable. 02:30:08.945 --> 02:30:10.349 So you know, gold is gold, gold is gold and it's transportable. 02:30:10.349 --> 02:30:18.272 Um, and we forget, I think, sometimes about the transportability of money, um, and how you can essentially carry your wealth with you. 02:30:18.272 --> 02:30:18.674 That's what. 02:30:18.674 --> 02:30:19.518 That's what money is. 02:30:19.518 --> 02:30:25.690 It's a consolidation of wealth into a form that is transportable and you can take wherever um you know. 02:30:25.690 --> 02:30:34.489 Whether you want to send it to the cayman islands and hide it, or if you want to like um you know, spend it all all in one go, you can do what you want with it. 02:30:34.489 --> 02:30:36.519 But the point of money is, it's transportable. 02:30:36.519 --> 02:30:40.171 It's transportable wealth so that you can set yourself up wherever you're you're. 02:30:40.171 --> 02:30:43.708 You're less embedded in your, in your natural environment, I guess, with portable money. 02:30:43.708 --> 02:30:47.836 Yeah, is that a PhD topic in mind? 02:30:47.836 --> 02:30:48.337 Good one. 02:30:49.985 --> 02:30:55.075 But with portable money, your money also has to be internationally recognised, or at least nationally. 02:30:55.075 --> 02:31:01.751 Phrases not necessarily to apply to antiquity, but it has to be recognised on a geographically wide scale. 02:31:01.771 --> 02:31:02.735 Let's put it that way. 02:31:02.735 --> 02:31:05.252 Do you want to get into attic weight and Ptolemaic weight? 02:31:05.846 --> 02:31:08.094 Oh, maybe that's a bit too much, but we could do. 02:31:08.385 --> 02:31:10.903 No, because I don't know anything about Attic weight. 02:31:11.505 --> 02:31:12.971 Maybe on those two terms. 02:31:12.971 --> 02:31:16.654 But also if we're talking about, would people have looked

at them? 02:31:16.654 --> 02:31:20.270 If it is this huge deal to have this coin, I guess it's special. 02:31:20.270 --> 02:31:22.043 People haven't seen this sort of thing before. 02:31:22.043 --> 02:31:25.295 Maybe they would have paid more attention to what was on it. 02:31:25.295 --> 02:31:39.207 I guess, if you're talking about in terms of the 96% and how much these people would have known about what was going on everywhere in the Empire, when you're talking about the bronze coins which featured, say, alexander the Great, it's kind of the. 02:31:39.207 --> 02:31:43.868 That's what you know, that's what people know, people know. 02:31:43.868 --> 02:31:46.390 It's the same thing that everyone knows what it is. 02:31:47.332 --> 02:31:48.713 So something's just occurred to me. 02:31:48.713 --> 02:31:50.835 This is light bulb moment. 02:31:50.835 --> 02:31:54.480 Yeah, possibly I'm going to conduct some experiential archaeology. 02:31:54.480 --> 02:31:58.253 Oh, excellent Coins. 02:31:58.253 --> 02:32:01.354 What did we all think when we held? 02:32:01.354 --> 02:32:07.492 So for your listeners, Luis, we were at the Swansea Egypt Centre yesterday after the conference Not just the Egypt. 02:32:07.511 --> 02:32:12.378 Centre yesterday after the conference, not just the Egypt Centre, but also the experience of holding a coin. 02:32:13.039 --> 02:32:13.519 But this is it. 02:32:13.519 --> 02:32:34.307 So for your listeners, we got to hold a silver tetradrachm of Ptolemy I wasn't it With Alexander's face on it, With an elephant scalp headdress and Athena and the eagle and the owl on the river it had a bee. 02:32:34.327 --> 02:32:35.211 It had a little tiny bee. 02:32:35.532 --> 02:32:44.610 Yes, but you know this was an item that had weight to it, it was beautifully made. 02:32:44.610 --> 02:32:46.810 I said to all of you I really struggled to put that coin down. 02:32:46.810 --> 02:32:47.649 It's a mesmerising artifact, had weight to it, it was beautifully made. 02:32:47.649 --> 02:32:49.500 I mean, I I said to all of you, you know I I really struggled to put that coin down. 02:32:49.500 --> 02:32:53.403 It's a mesmerizing artifact, it is, it's it it. 02:32:53.403 --> 02:32:56.109 Well, think, think about how these things are made. 02:32:56.109 --> 02:33:00.266 You know you've got someone that has to to create the, the portrait or the image. 02:33:00.266 --> 02:33:02.431 Uh, they then have to mold it. 02:33:02.431 --> 02:33:09.629 Um, I did have the opportunity a number of summers ago to to strike, uh, an anglo-Saxon replica coin, and that takes a lot. 02:33:09.629 --> 02:33:18.916 These are very complex items to produce and certainly the one any of your listeners, louise, can go and look up Hellenistic coins. 02:33:18.916 --> 02:33:19.859 Just Google them. 02:33:19.859 --> 02:33:22.031 Some of the finest silver examples. 02:33:22.031 --> 02:33:24.533 The artistry involved is immense. 02:33:24.533 --> 02:33:27.673 The weight of these things are ridiculous. 02:33:27.673 --> 02:33:29.127 You're talking what? 02:33:29.127 --> 02:33:32.277 20, 30, maybe not 30 grams? 02:33:33.467 --> 02:33:34.974 Well, yeah, some of the bigger tetradrachms. 02:33:35.013 --> 02:33:38.493 Yeah, you're talking about a significant weight in silver. 02:33:38.493 --> 02:33:40.853 There is a I don't want to say that, sorry. 02:33:40.853 --> 02:33:48.416 I don't want to say it's an all-shiny effect, but it kind of is. 02:33:48.704 --> 02:33:50.893 I was just going to say, oh, they're shiny though. 02:33:53.647 --> 02:34:08.677 But I think these are items that and I say this is the experiential archaeology, if I can call it experiential archaeology there was something intrinsic about these coins that immediately you could tell that these were items of value, these were well made. 02:34:08.677 --> 02:34:09.879 I don't know. 02:34:10.787 --> 02:34:13.815 Do they have that because they're synonymous with elites, though? 02:34:13.815 --> 02:34:15.890 Or like do? 02:34:15.890 --> 02:34:24.434 One of the questions that I've kind of been thinking or like grappling with is like, do Does like the quality of these objects so like shiny things? 02:34:24.434 --> 02:34:32.171 Metal that's come from the ground, gone through a craft specialisation process which is very intense, is very shiny. 02:34:32.171 --> 02:34:37.671 It's come from somewhere like very far away or deep underground. 02:34:37.671 --> 02:35:08.097 So I think of like lapis lazuli in Egypt, for instance, or like lapis lazuli comes from Afghanistan and elites you know, that is kind of a symbol of wealth, so to speak, if you find it in someone's tomb like elites become like this kind of shiny, and like the qualitative nature of these material objects is shared with the people who own them, so like so I wonder like the relationship between these objects had like kind of what's being exchanged here, like do the elites, do they? 02:35:08.097 --> 02:35:14.445 Is that is, the material quality of the objects, like because, like do they? 02:35:14.445 --> 02:35:16.613 What am I trying to say here? 02:35:16.613 --> 02:35:22.666 Like do they share that quality of nature of being special and more important than other things? 02:35:22.666 --> 02:35:25.620 And like, how does that happen? 02:35:25.701 --> 02:35:34.296 And coins, maybe, are part of that, especially, who's worthy of being on a coin, who's worth having their image in gold or in silver. 02:35:34.296 --> 02:35:38.450 Usually it's gods, like statues of gods in Egypt might be in gold and silver. 02:35:38.450 --> 02:35:39.867 So it's interesting. 02:35:39.867 --> 02:36:00.809 Maybe in the Ptolemaic period this is just a light bulb in my head now you have this kind of their image in gold, literally that their image in gold makes them divine, essentially um, I am also wondering say you're a mercenary guard, you left like this little tiny village in the middle of nowhere and you went off and you did all this cool stuff.

02:36:01.813 --> 02:36:02.494 It's so you know? 02:36:02.494 --> 02:36:04.862 Um yeah you. 02:36:04.922 --> 02:36:07.228 you did all this stuff that no one in your in no one went. 02:36:07.228 --> 02:36:10.717 No one back home would ever have experienced that sort of thing. 02:36:10.717 --> 02:36:12.573 You've been to all these places and done all that sort of stuff. 02:36:12.573 --> 02:36:22.114 In the case of Cleopatra Thea's gold stater, there was someone I can't remember who said it could possibly be they were minted to pay her mercenary guard. 02:36:22.114 --> 02:36:25.970 So one of those guards gets this coin, like where does he go with it? 02:36:25.970 --> 02:36:26.537 What does he go with it? 02:36:26.537 --> 02:36:27.324 What does he do with it? 02:36:27.324 --> 02:36:38.844 And the people that he kind of goes back to, they might have looked at this coin, might have had the context from him, where it was, from what it's commemorating. 02:36:38.844 --> 02:36:39.868 I don't know. 02:36:39.868 --> 02:36:49.676 Maybe people would have all gathered around to see this new design on a coin, like look at this new thing, it's exciting, it is shiny, different and new. 02:36:49.837 --> 02:36:50.519 Yeah, and here's. 02:36:50.559 --> 02:36:52.664 Alexander oh there's always a downside. 02:36:55.950 --> 02:36:59.198 Oh, it's the same guy on the obverse, but look at this little tiny B on the reverse. 02:37:00.145 --> 02:37:01.711 I was fascinated with coins when I was younger. 02:37:01.711 --> 02:37:11.914 To be fair, my dad had a coin collection and I inherited that and I still have it at home and I remember being fascinated just going through it and just looking at all the different things that are on it it was just. 02:37:12.225 --> 02:37:14.007 There are two things I think. 02:37:14.007 --> 02:37:19.759 What's interesting about gold and silver is they're not very useful metals in a practical sense. 02:37:19.759 --> 02:37:20.504 What can you actually? 02:37:20.504 --> 02:37:21.510 Gold is too soft. 02:37:21.510 --> 02:37:23.309 Isn't silver antibacterial? 02:37:24.372 --> 02:37:26.768 yes, a little, I think, but copper's better. 02:37:27.448 --> 02:37:30.715 Yeah, possibly, I'm just not sure you've watched enough vampire movies, marie. 02:37:31.034 --> 02:37:38.394 Yeah, I think this could have announced the downfall in my argument I think there was something about silver, though. 02:37:38.575 --> 02:37:38.855 I'm sure. 02:37:38.855 --> 02:37:45.435 Yeah, no, I think silver maybe, but certainly copper and bronze are really good at being antibacterial. 02:37:45.435 --> 02:37:49.350 In essence, they're not very useful metals. 02:37:49.350 --> 02:37:50.385 You can't do much with them. 02:37:50.385 --> 02:37:52.648 They're not like iron or something like that. 02:37:52.648 --> 02:37:57.369 They're not strong enough, so they're only valued because they're shiny, which, frankly, who cares? 02:37:57.369 --> 02:37:58.613 So that's the first thing. 02:37:59.765 --> 02:38:00.890 I have a collection of shiny rocks. 02:38:02.547 --> 02:38:03.813 We're all really good magpies. 02:38:03.813 --> 02:38:05.970 We like collecting shiny things. 02:38:06.131 --> 02:38:12.188 I don't like to make this sound personal, Henry, but I should point out to the listeners that Henry does have a signet ring on, I think with Alexander's head on. 02:38:12.188 --> 02:38:12.750 It Is that Alexander's. 02:38:12.750 --> 02:38:14.192 This is so embarrassing, Sorry. 02:38:19.146 --> 02:38:27.632 I did get it because I've never seen something like it before and because I study the guy to some extent, I thought, well, I should wear it, so I bought it. 02:38:27.632 --> 02:38:29.416 I'm not judging you for it. 02:38:30.828 --> 02:38:31.953 Yeah, I mean, I'm not wearing it at him. 02:38:32.024 --> 02:38:38.113 It just reminds me of what I'm doing essentially, and it's shiny and it's unique. 02:38:38.113 --> 02:38:40.465 You know, I'm sorry, that's a cruel thing. 02:38:40.465 --> 02:38:42.371 I'm falling into the social patterns. 02:38:42.612 --> 02:38:42.993 I'm sorry. 02:38:47.545 --> 02:38:49.566 That's a cruel thing for me to have done to you, I'm sorry. 02:38:49.566 --> 02:38:50.449 I wanted to go back to the idea of the mercenary and I thought this was really interesting. 02:38:50.449 --> 02:38:51.533 What Carys said about this. 02:38:51.533 --> 02:38:58.813 It's mercenary going out from the village and then being paid with this gold stater, you know, and it's shiny and it's beautifully made. 02:38:58.813 --> 02:39:02.507 I think all the things Troy said, you know they're heavy, they have that weight in your hand. 02:39:02.707 --> 02:39:03.930 I don't think Henry's wrong either. 02:39:03.930 --> 02:39:05.152 I think it's all of the above. 02:39:06.273 --> 02:39:09.760 I think there's no one thing I think they're shiny, they're well made. 02:39:11.925 --> 02:39:16.393 I think the monarch is quite literally sharing that aura with whoever's holding it. 02:39:16.734 --> 02:39:22.113 Sorry, no, no, that's a very good point, but I also think you've got a mercenary and that's how they're paid. 02:39:22.113 --> 02:39:26.810 That coin is useless unless that mercenary transforms it into something. 02:39:26.810 --> 02:39:40.653 So I wonder if that coin is going to make it back to the village, because the whole point of going to become a mercenary is to get money well, to be paid in some way so that you can improve your life. 02:39:40.653 --> 02:39:46.806 A gold stater in your run down little hut is not going to improve your life, it's not going to feed you, it's not going to give you material comfort, so it's going to improve your life. 02:39:46.806 --> 02:39:50.932 It's not going to feed you, it's not going to give you material comfort, so it's going to be, I would imagine. 02:39:50.932 --> 02:40:03.125 I mean, I don't know, but I wonder they're going to be sort of cashed in pretty quickly into more usable currency, so actually

it just goes straight back into the banker's box in the forum. 02:40:04.027 --> 02:40:07.534 I do wonder whether you know soldiers are also part of. 02:40:07.534 --> 02:40:10.087 They are elite, well, some, some degree. 02:40:10.087 --> 02:40:23.572 So especially, yeah, especially like professional shots, like soldiers who have perhaps, you know, inherited armor from like their soldier or military families and stuff like they're given larger states to kind of settle on when they've retired. 02:40:23.572 --> 02:40:29.040 So these figures are actually elite of themselves. 02:40:29.040 --> 02:40:33.935 So they may not necessarily need to cash it in. 02:40:33.935 --> 02:40:39.649 They're just kind of compacting and compounding their wealth and consolidating to what they already have. 02:40:39.649 --> 02:40:40.130 Maybe. 02:40:40.130 --> 02:40:42.197 Go on, karis. 02:40:42.645 --> 02:40:46.672 I was going to say maybe it's about it being a coin and it's more equivalent of a medal. 02:40:46.672 --> 02:40:48.148 You get a medal for being in. 02:40:51.429 --> 02:40:52.209 Well, not quite. 02:40:52.209 --> 02:40:57.859 My question is so I was thinking in the context of Roman India. 02:40:57.859 --> 02:41:08.807 There have been about 7,000 coins discovered, generally silver denarii of either the Augustan or Tiberian period, and then they kind of peter off. 02:41:08.807 --> 02:41:20.746 Generally this is a trade item, but they have, I think, also found examples that have puncture marks in them, so presumably they've been threaded, they've gone on necklaces. 02:41:20.746 --> 02:41:35.972 I was going to open it up to all of you, actually, whether any of you have heard of this sort of practice in a Hellenistic, as in traditional Hellenistic, as in traditional Hellenistic geographical areas the Mediterranean, the Aegean, asia Minor, any of those sorts of practices. 02:41:35.972 --> 02:41:36.987 Do we have any evidence? 02:41:37.109 --> 02:41:41.773 for how these coins are used In a relatively modern context. 02:41:41.773 --> 02:42:00.625 Yes, In northern Greece, women would wear the wealth of the family and it would be pierced coins stitched onto traditional death, women still do wear the wealth of the family or sometimes earrings, bracelets, not just women. 02:42:00.925 --> 02:42:01.649 I did just mention this. 02:42:01.649 --> 02:42:08.932 I think I'm not sure if you were in the room, but my grandma used to wear a sovereign around her neck and her father gave it to her and he said, if you were in the room, but my grandma used to wear a soffin around her neck yeah, that's a classic, isn't it? 02:42:08.952 --> 02:42:23.350 And her father gave it to her and he said if you're in a tight situation, you have something of value that you can sort yourself out with, like get to safety or buy food, or you can exchange that portable wealth around your neck as an emergency, essentially. 02:42:25.435 --> 02:42:26.077 and do with it what you wish. 02:42:26.077 --> 02:42:32.887 I was really hoping you'd say yes, there's this big coin hoard in Asia Minor somewhere that they've all got puncture marks in the coins. 02:42:32.907 --> 02:42:39.811 That would have been great, I mean they have a life after being used for money, essentially, or they have. 02:42:39.811 --> 02:42:44.031 There's multiple ways in which coins can be used, which we've kind of touched upon. 02:42:44.747 --> 02:42:54.394 I still think if you're being paid with one great big gold coin for all your years of service, yeah, you could keep it like a medal, but you've got to live after you're retired. 02:42:56.527 --> 02:42:57.549 The only thing they were paid with. 02:42:57.549 --> 02:42:59.334 I don't know if it's, I've got no idea. 02:42:59.334 --> 02:42:59.815 I don't know. 02:43:01.766 --> 02:43:05.277 We are speaking from a point of relative ignorance. 02:43:05.277 --> 02:43:11.311 We're kind of workshopping coins here with not having done a lot of research on them. 02:43:12.674 --> 02:43:24.564 Talking about more of a personal value than itself the whole general, broader situation of picking up of the mercenaries objectives in their sentence. 02:43:24.564 --> 02:43:35.734 But I guess that research we should leave it for another time, or maybe just One of our tutors, Kyle. 02:43:37.246 --> 02:43:38.551 He'll all be telling us off after this. 02:43:39.068 --> 02:43:55.457 He'll disown us all as students Try to email or talk to Elijah he's the one he talks about coin cuts and process of production of coins, yeah, of. 02:43:55.457 --> 02:43:56.179 Suzuki coins. 02:43:56.179 --> 02:44:04.690 But that would be something that it's, that expands into a larger context. 02:44:04.690 --> 02:44:06.430 We could last talking here. 02:44:06.430 --> 02:44:07.764 I thought you were going to say larger podcast. 02:44:08.126 --> 02:44:09.311 We're not giving you enough hours. 02:44:10.887 --> 02:44:13.876 I think, we're going to be enough to talk about coins and all that. 02:44:13.876 --> 02:44:16.930 We're just doing a live study session. 02:44:16.930 --> 02:44:17.753 Sorry world. 02:44:18.745 --> 02:44:20.091 We're doing the research at the same time. 02:44:21.005 --> 02:44:22.784 I think we're like five minutes away from going and finding a book. 02:44:23.586 --> 02:44:29.393 Yes, we're just going to the Egypt Centre and just checking out some coins I have to do a study with me sometime. 02:44:30.125 --> 02:44:33.554 It's very much the trend at the moment, isn't it? 02:44:34.248 --> 02:44:36.908 We can all get little TikTok accounts like study with me. 02:44:36.908 --> 02:44:38.153 What are we doing today? 02:44:38.864 --> 02:44:40.190 Study with me, select your coins. 02:44:41.786 --> 02:44:44.853 Yeah, I have had many breakdowns in this library, by the way, in the past. 02:44:47.528 --> 02:44:53.870 While I was unbreaking, you and you guys were talking shit about the ancient world so the point of the line here. 02:44:53.870 --> 02:45:02.172 Just to wrap

up the things, let's classify Alexander the Great Con or thug? 02:45:02.172 --> 02:45:03.855 Oh, thug Thug. 02:45:03.855 --> 02:45:04.957 What's the option? 02:45:04.957 --> 02:45:07.770 Sorry Thug or what I said con or thug, but A con or a thug Thug, what's the option? 02:45:07.770 --> 02:45:09.738 Sorry Thug or what I think I said, con or thug. 02:45:09.738 --> 02:45:10.180 A con or a thug? 02:45:10.180 --> 02:45:11.104 No, both, they're both things. 02:45:11.104 --> 02:45:16.408 So let's see I don't think Great king or thug? 02:45:16.429 --> 02:45:21.011 Oh OK, I was going to say I don't think he's a con in any way. 02:45:21.613 --> 02:45:34.625 I think you know he obviously was pretty charismatic in some way, if even half of what is written about him is true. 02:45:34.625 --> 02:45:41.352 These are fairly astounding things for anybody to have done or have wanted to do, but undoubtedly he's a thug if he did them. 02:45:43.448 --> 02:45:44.953 Yeah, I would sort of agree. 02:45:44.953 --> 02:45:55.630 He was definitely a great king for the Macedonians in the time period when he was for sure, but he's definitely a thug. 02:45:55.630 --> 02:45:58.076 And I would say perhaps all monarchs are thugs. 02:45:58.076 --> 02:46:05.113 They're institutionalised mafia families basically that can do whatever the fuck they want. 02:46:05.113 --> 02:46:06.995 Mafia families basically that they can do whatever the fuck they want. 02:46:06.995 --> 02:46:17.755 You know, even now in contemporary modern Britain, the monarchy is essentially untouchable by the law and that is essentially what criminals are. 02:46:18.817 --> 02:46:21.076 So Someone take the mic before you get done. 02:46:22.708 --> 02:46:27.610 Oh no, I'm a Republican, not in the American political sense, but yeah for sure. 02:46:27.610 --> 02:46:29.932 And like monarchies are criminal families. 02:46:29.932 --> 02:46:31.751 Essentially they're institutionalised and legitimised. 02:46:32.284 --> 02:46:33.971 And it was theft in the first place that got them. 02:46:34.045 --> 02:46:37.609 Complete theft yeah, theft from the community and hoarding extreme wealth. 02:46:37.609 --> 02:46:40.977 Thank you, goodbye. 02:46:40.977 --> 02:46:43.530 That was a good mic drop. 02:46:47.694 --> 02:46:48.356 I was going to weigh in. 02:46:48.356 --> 02:46:53.073 I actually I never refer to Alexander the Great as Alexander the Great. 02:46:53.574 --> 02:46:55.439 When I write Alexander III, it's Alexander III. 02:46:55.945 --> 02:47:12.929 You stole the Persian nebulous yeah of course, you have ancient rulers who do this, pompey Magnus yes, he literally has a hair-flicking imitation of Alexander in his statutory he, you know he does imitate. 02:47:12.929 --> 02:47:16.032 No, I always refer to him as I mean. 02:47:16.032 --> 02:47:23.693 If you want to call him Alexander the Great in the sense that he has become cultural phenomenon, the right word. 02:47:23.693 --> 02:47:30.226 He's become a cultural entity unto himself and I think in that sense you can call him Alexander the Great. 02:47:30.226 --> 02:47:41.310 I personally, in a professional, academic context, I call him Alexander the Third, primarily because when I found out that he was the third Alexander, I thought oh, there are other ones, and so I always like reminding people of this fact. 02:47:41.310 --> 02:47:43.110 He is Alexander the Third. 02:47:44.725 --> 02:47:51.052 I don't think it's from time to be Better to put it this way If we really dislike him. 02:47:51.052 --> 02:47:55.815 Well, putting it this way Alexander III. 02:47:55.815 --> 02:47:59.127 Instead of saying Alexander III, we say Alexander III, the third. 02:47:59.930 --> 02:48:00.049 Again. 02:48:04.688 --> 02:48:04.988 I don't? 02:48:06.087 --> 02:48:23.911 I personally am not fussed about passing moral judgements on people that have been dead for two and a half thousand years and about which we know and about which we know nothing, relatively speaking, and about which half of which we do know may or may not be true, depending on who you ask. 02:48:23.911 --> 02:48:27.753 So no, I think he's Alexander III. 02:48:27.753 --> 02:48:30.667 Is he a thug in the sense that? 02:48:30.667 --> 02:48:32.305 Again, I'm not sure. 02:48:32.305 --> 02:48:34.287 Thug is even the right word. 02:48:34.287 --> 02:48:38.934 Successful warmonger Warmonger's definitely not the right word either. 02:48:38.934 --> 02:48:53.566 He was an individual who conducted war very, very, very, very successfully by all accounts, and unfortunately, geopolitically, this means great alterations in territory and perception of the world and all these sorts of things. 02:48:53.566 --> 02:48:56.694 Uh in the class, in in the, specifically in the ancient world. 02:48:56.694 --> 02:49:01.609 Uh, on, on a practical basis, this does mean death and destruction. 02:49:01.609 --> 02:49:04.573 This, this is what it means, unfortunately. 02:49:04.573 --> 02:49:08.659 But yeah, so no he's. 02:49:08.699 --> 02:49:13.595 Alexander III he's also my litmus test for people's historical knowledge. 02:49:13.595 --> 02:49:41.716 When they ask me what I'm doing a PhD on and you know Ptolemaic Egypt is and like Ptolemaic divine kingship and royal ancestor veneration is quite a mouthful and people just would look at me as if I'm talking a different language and I'm crazy which I could well be but he's a good historical figure to kind of point to and be like, to kind of like what people's historical knowledge are that like don't study like the ancient world academically. 02:49:41.716 --> 02:49:45.790 I always kind of, whenever someone asks what I do, I'm like have you heard of Alexander the Great? 02:49:45.790 --> 02:49:48.114 If the answer's yes, then I go into a bit more detail. 02:49:48.114 --> 02:49:51.675 If the answer's no, then I go into a different detail. 02:49:51.675 --> 02:49:53.469 That was less dramatic. 02:49:56.305 --> 02:50:06.489 Well, I think I do have to answer this

question, because the word thug was mine originally, which was a rhetorical device, I mean. 02:50:06.510 --> 02:50:11.224 I used it, the level of your soft power on our academic discourse is that it should not be overlooked. 02:50:11.467 --> 02:50:32.378 So I did toy with other words, but something about that complete disregard for human life, I think, in many ways, and which I think does have this sense of thuggery to it. 02:50:32.378 --> 02:50:42.832 But also I wonder about the motivation, both for himself, which of course we can never really know. 02:50:42.832 --> 02:50:45.833 You know what motivates somebody to go and do that? 02:50:45.833 --> 02:50:59.663 What worries me more than alexander's own motivation, because, troy, you're absolutely right passing judgment on somebody 2300, 2400 years ago is about which we know nothing yeah, that's really the key. 02:50:59.683 --> 02:51:00.826 Yeah, about really what? 02:51:00.826 --> 02:51:03.171 What do we know we've got an alexander romance. 02:51:03.171 --> 02:51:06.489 Well, you know, I'm sorry, kyle, but I don't think that was really very reliable. 02:51:08.984 --> 02:51:10.250 He would agree, he would absolutely agree. 02:51:11.533 --> 02:51:18.456 But it's more how that has impacted on the motivations of people who came afterwards. 02:51:18.456 --> 02:51:25.091 And I think that's where it becomes maybe in Henry's term a sort of you know, a sort of mafia don or a thug. 02:51:25.091 --> 02:51:26.965 It becomes symbolic of a way of you know a sort of mafia don or a thug or something. 02:51:27.104 --> 02:51:39.772 It becomes symbolic of a way of acting which is then given a glamour and a degree of it's not respectability, what's the right word. 02:51:39.772 --> 02:51:43.930 But I think glamour is part Legitimisation Legitimisation, that's the perfect word. 02:51:43.930 --> 02:51:53.675 Yes, so it's glamour and legitimisation and you know, in part the ancient sources and our current discourses on him are responsible for that. 02:51:54.126 --> 02:52:02.532 Yeah, we are guilty of repeating those narratives, but we should always be talking about them as narratives rather than historical facts. 02:52:03.054 --> 02:52:03.895 Exactly yeah. 02:52:05.906 --> 02:52:25.130 I mean, if you want to talk about him in the how successful he was in the sense of what kings, like past kings, their goal was ultimately was to continue their dynasty, their family, have the rule pass on to the next generation. 02:52:25.130 --> 02:52:27.231 He was a massive fuck up at that point. 02:52:27.251 --> 02:52:27.793 Yeah, he was. 02:52:30.948 --> 02:52:36.331 The one thing he didn't do well and his empire never. 02:52:36.331 --> 02:52:37.314 It died with him. 02:52:37.635 --> 02:52:41.032 Yeah, that's a really good point. 02:52:41.032 --> 02:52:43.055 We talk about going out in a blaze of glory. 02:52:43.790 --> 02:52:46.930 Like the standards of Hellenistic kingship going out in a blaze of glory. 02:52:46.930 --> 02:52:49.209 I

love that because it's almost like he won a Darwin Award. 02:52:49.711 --> 02:52:57.149 Yeah his legacy was never able to be tarnished by a son who was a shitty ruler or anything like that. 02:52:58.492 --> 02:53:07.368 He died at the peak of Blaze, of Glory by kingship standards but for a narrative, historical or like historical narrative standard, that's quite good. 02:53:07.368 --> 02:53:10.233 Yes, absolutely. 02:53:10.233 --> 02:53:14.529 Oh well, are we allowed to say some final other thoughts? 02:53:14.590 --> 02:53:14.912 as well. 02:53:14.912 --> 02:53:16.469 Yes, so let's wrap up. 02:53:16.469 --> 02:53:17.474 Do you have a final question? 02:53:17.684 --> 02:53:19.431 Yeah, let's wrap up the. 02:53:19.692 --> 02:53:20.676 No, this was a question. 02:53:20.676 --> 02:53:22.382 Oh, this was a question. 02:53:22.483 --> 02:53:22.864 I'll accept it. 02:53:24.049 --> 02:53:27.504 Okay, right, right, great king of that Are we going to do a final. 02:53:27.865 --> 02:53:30.370 So let's so as we wrap up. 02:53:30.845 --> 02:53:33.541 Should we bring this back a bit more to PhDs, and why? 02:53:33.561 --> 02:53:34.064 you should do that. 02:53:34.064 --> 02:54:00.475 We're going to wrap up our big session and we touched initially that PhD is A monotonous road and long, especially Obviously seeing from the humanistic and long journey especially we obviously seeing from the humanistic perspective, but I also think that from the science stem is also kind of a lonesome journey too. 02:54:00.475 --> 02:54:12.519 But what are your thoughts in researching a PhD topic and what advice would you like to share for those who are listening to our fantastic interview? 02:54:14.266 --> 02:54:15.069 Who would like to go first? 02:54:15.090 --> 02:54:22.409 I'll go first, or conversation it's better to say like that I think there's one thing I wouldn't say it's monotonous. 02:54:22.790 --> 02:54:31.850 Actually, it's hard work and it's long, yes, but we have had a lot of fun discussing, you know. 02:54:31.850 --> 02:54:40.255 It's um, yeah, we have to go to the library, you have to look at your sources, you have to do your, you have to do your work, but it's not monotonousness. 02:54:40.255 --> 02:54:56.349 I mean, there's times when you're slogging through the sources but you are gaining insights and it's making you think, and I don't think that can be described as monotonous, more something that requires gritting your teeth and a bit of dedication, but to which there are great rewards. 02:54:56.349 --> 02:55:03.530 Um, I would say, do it if you are, if you have a real burning interest in something. 02:55:03.530 --> 02:55:09.269 If you're not interested in your fields, then it's really not going to be, I think, successful. 02:55:09.269 --> 02:55:12.365 I don't ultimately think you're going to get through it or write a good PhD. 02:55:13.106 --> 02:55:22.269 But the other thing about the process is, you know, meeting up with Caris and Troy and and Henry and of

course, lewis as well. 02:55:22.269 --> 02:55:33.925 You know, and the discussions we have, we have got differing perspectives and sometimes they're quite I don't know, very divergent and quite startlingly different ways of seeing the ancient world. 02:55:33.925 --> 02:55:40.645 But I think all of us would agree that they are valid and we learn an enormous amount from each other. 02:55:40.645 --> 02:55:44.254 And I sometimes joke that troy is the one who keeps my feet on the ground. 02:55:44.254 --> 02:55:45.969 You know, because he's the one who then comes. 02:55:45.969 --> 02:55:47.094 But what about evidence? 02:55:47.094 --> 02:55:50.068 He's trying to stand on the ground, right, yeah, you know. 02:55:50.068 --> 02:56:10.733 So when I'm off on my wild flights of theoretical fancy, you know wanting to write, you know beautifully evocative texts and use my imagination and sense the environment, and Troy will then mention things like inscriptions and you know, then Carys comes up with coinage and I'm like, oh shh, and they're absolutely right. 02:56:10.733 --> 02:56:17.748 So it's vital that, if you are going to do it, you find a similarly great group of people to embed yourself within. 02:56:17.788 --> 02:56:25.515 I would say oh, I imagine many of us will say similar things to what Maria's just said, and actually I would say that absolutely is true. 02:56:25.515 --> 02:56:33.744 I imagine many of us will say similar things to what Maria's just said and actually I would say that absolutely is true majority of it, I must admit. 02:56:33.744 --> 02:56:41.182 I personally probably would sometimes use the term monotonous just again, if I'm slogging through material. 02:56:41.182 --> 02:56:43.493 I don't want to. 02:56:43.493 --> 02:56:47.912 I've been accused before of being too morbid and miserable sometimes. 02:56:47.912 --> 02:56:57.251 I was talking to a group of first years a couple of years ago and I was saying look, be under no illusions, this is going to be really difficult and it may be one of the hardest things you're going to do. 02:56:57.251 --> 02:56:58.570 This was just me talking about BA. 02:56:58.570 --> 02:57:08.153 I saw friends of mine who really struggled with it, and so I don't like to pull the wool over people's eyes. 02:57:08.153 --> 02:57:17.871 It is very different and there will be parts of ancient history or ancient history or any PhD that you don't enjoy doing or any discipline that you don't enjoy doing. 02:57:17.871 --> 02:57:27.064 Find the bits that you I'll speak just from an ancient history perspective, obviously, because that's what we all are Find the bits that you enjoy doing. 02:57:27.064 --> 02:57:41.407 Um, I know, for me I very much like to uh, connect pieces of a puzzle together and sort of start to work it out and make small adjustments in the scholarship that may clarify my thinking on things or how things have happened. 02:57:41.407 --> 02:57:45.585 You know, so I I enjoy those bits and that some certainly with a phd. 02:57:45.585 --> 02:57:50.478 I think a couple of us mentioned that we would sort of get to a two year point and then things start to crystallize. 02:57:50.478 --> 02:57:58.519 So I think don't, for PhDs coming in, don't be under the illusion particularly for ancient history PhDs, don't be under the illusion that this isn't going to take time. 02:57:58.519 --> 02:58:11.370 And I've certainly said to my supervisors well, I've got lost and confused with working through stuff and I know I've been told, oh good, I was worried, I thought that you weren't going to get lost and confused because it's almost a part of the journey and I think it is. 02:58:11.370 --> 02:58:27.213 I think, at the same time, listen to your gut instinct, to the PhD, much more than perhaps I did, so you may get lost for slightly less time, because nobody wants to feel that they've lost two years of time, even if they have finally ended up at roughly the right place. 02:58:27.213 --> 02:58:28.156 So I think there's that. 02:58:28.156 --> 02:58:49.852 So, yeah, it will be a grind, but find the bits that you enjoy doing, I think, absolutely as well and this is something I haven't done as much of, perhaps, as I should have done is actually because I do enjoy getting up and giving papers when I actually have them and, as it turns out, when I don't have them as well, it's equally quite fun. 02:58:50.425 --> 02:58:52.753 I do enjoy presenting, and it is you know. 02:58:52.753 --> 02:58:57.630 I think that is something that people should do, whether it's presenting in a conference or like this. 02:58:57.630 --> 02:59:01.134 You, just you don't forget, we live. 02:59:01.134 --> 02:59:02.733 You want to talk about the 96%. 02:59:02.733 --> 02:59:21.951 We live 99% of our lives on our own in libraries Effectively, yes, and so I think the 96% we live 99% of our lives on our own in libraries effectively, and so I think we often forget that the reason why we actually do this is to be able to then discuss it with somebody, and I think hopefully, that's what we've just proven to your listeners over the last few hours is that it is fun. 02:59:22.153 --> 02:59:26.665 It is profound and challenging and difficult, but it is fun. 02:59:26.665 --> 02:59:30.672 You can enjoy it, you can have a laugh with it and at the end of the world, end of the day. 02:59:30.672 --> 02:59:31.293 End of the world. 02:59:31.293 --> 02:59:32.916 Thanks, alexander again. 02:59:32.916 --> 02:59:48.994 Ah well, no, at the end of the day, the ancient world is a phenomenal place, whether it is you know, and it's full of remarkable people and stories, whether it is Alexander marching from one side of the known world to the other, it is Alexander marching from one side of the known world to the other, or, in my case, going down to the Red Sea to hunt elephants and all this sort of stuff. 02:59:48.994 --> 02:59:52.479 It's crazy, the things that people did a couple of thousand years ago. 02:59:52.479 -->

02:59:58.475 It's mental and in a good way, from a story perspective. 02:59:58.475 --> 03:00:00.930 As Maria said earlier on, it's about telling stories. 03:00:00.930 --> 03:00:08.131 So give yourself, as a PhD, the opportunity to do that with other people, which, hopefully, is what we've all proven to do for the last few hours. 03:00:08.131 --> 03:00:09.234 I could go on, but I will. 03:00:09.234 --> 03:00:13.045 I will pass on to somebody else. 03:00:13.244 --> 03:00:15.871 They might also see a three-hour podcast and not listen to it. 03:00:16.212 --> 03:00:18.005 Yeah, it's actually part one, two and three. 03:00:18.486 --> 03:00:19.829 I did just ring them. 03:00:19.829 --> 03:00:20.851 They need to grind. 03:00:20.951 --> 03:00:48.636 Sometimes they'll have to get to the end to hear that, um, I mean, I feel like if I'm going to talk about doing a PhD and all of that, I need to say what my supervisor, stephen Harrison, said to me, which is, if you're just doing it to get a job in academia, don't Because the chances are like it's very difficult to get a job in academia, but also it's a lot of fun to do it. 03:00:48.636 --> 03:00:54.453 If you want to do a PhD, do it because you're enjoying it sure you don't have to be an expert. 03:00:54.827 --> 03:00:56.504 You don't have to go into it being an expert on things. 03:00:56.504 --> 03:00:59.709 You don't have to go into it with a solid idea of what you want to do. 03:00:59.709 --> 03:01:02.664 And if you write a piece of research. 03:01:02.664 --> 03:01:06.851 I've written a lot of pieces of research that will never go into my actual thesis, but they were still worth writing. 03:01:06.851 --> 03:01:11.792 I've written a lot of pieces of research that will never go into my actual thesis, but they were still worth writing because I've kind of I've learnt things from them. 03:01:11.792 --> 03:01:17.504 I've learnt other stuff that might, if I did get into academia, might come in handy later. 03:01:17.504 --> 03:01:28.513 I wrote all this stuff about coins and it probably won't go into my thesis, but it's useful to know, possibly, or it's at least interesting, and then I have that context to write future stuff on. 03:01:31.325 --> 03:01:32.067 Yeah, I don't know. 03:01:32.067 --> 03:01:38.595 I guess just if you want to do a PhD, it's hard work but it's also, it's fun. 03:01:38.595 --> 03:01:45.655 It might not be incredibly rewarding in the end, but it's not so much that end goal of getting a job in academia. 03:01:45.655 --> 03:01:48.754 It's the process of doing it, the kind of things you learn from that. 03:01:51.385 --> 03:01:57.795 There's a motivational quote in that somewhere, like that you could print out and put on a card or something. 03:01:58.825 --> 03:02:00.653 I can agree with all of you more in that sense. 03:02:00.653 --> 03:02:08.367 I think, personally speaking, there will be some trade-offs that you have to make essentially. 03:02:08.367 --> 03:02:49.677 So, like you know, I said at the very beginning that, like I, I work part-time, um and study part-time, and I'm very, very lucky to be in a position where I can like afford to live and, um, study as well, um, and you know like I'm extremely lucky and privileged in that respect, um, but you know, equally, like I had to make choices to get to that point as well, um, you know, I would have, you know, in an ideal and you know we talked about the phd maybe being isolating in some respects like I kind of I have personally made choices which I've kind of sort of isolated myself in some ways. 03:02:49.677 --> 03:02:53.485 Like where I work is, for instance, quite a small business. 03:02:53.485 --> 03:03:03.394 So, and I work a lot from home, so I do, I do spend a lot of time doing monotonously, kind of doing the same thing essentially and seeing the same environments all the time. 03:03:03.394 --> 03:03:21.278 So you know, my kind of advice is don't put yourself in, try and make it as different and fun as you can and put yourself, you know, change your environments if you like changing your environment or go to you know a few different places where you like studying, like make it comfortable for you and make it exciting for you as well. 03:03:21.278 --> 03:03:24.388 Um, and you will also find that by talking to other people. 03:03:24.388 --> 03:03:28.677 So do, do, put yourself out there, essentially in that regard. 03:03:29.966 --> 03:03:41.869 But there will always be a trade-off in something and it's so easy to kind of think, to have this ideal of what the perfect PhD would be like, you know, and what your perfect experience would be like, and it's never going to be like that. 03:03:41.869 --> 03:03:45.091 But just do your best to enjoy it. 03:03:45.091 --> 03:03:47.084 Remember you're doing it for pleasure. 03:03:47.084 --> 03:03:52.894 You don't have to, like Harris said, you don't have to do it with the idea for it Troy's putting a face. 03:03:52.894 --> 03:03:59.968 You don't have to do it for getting a specific job or getting a job in academia. 03:04:00.048 --> 03:04:15.650 Like, if you, if doing the research that you, you know we go into this field because we love the topic, right, if it enriches your life in whatever way, then that's worth it enough and we shouldn't have to pay for them. 03:04:15.650 --> 03:04:25.532 But, um, you know, if it enriches your life in whatever respect and you know you don't have the intent of going to academia, that's also fine. 03:04:25.532 --> 03:04:34.292 Just try and enjoy doing it and like remember you're doing it because you love it and don't try not to let it become a chore or see it as a chore. 03:04:34.292 --> 03:04:38.988 And it can be quite difficult to do sometimes, but that would sort of be my advice in that respect. 03:04:39.689 --> 03:04:41.914 Um, yeah, I was just gonna say. 03:04:42.075 --> 03:04:58.753 Also, you can call yourself a doctor at the end, and that's pretty neat especially, especially those people with, like

certain I don't know, maybe Like everyone has someone in their life that maybe they don't get on with and then, or at some point in their life it's a bit of a. 03:04:58.753 --> 03:05:01.450 Just want to thwart it over the yeah, just a little bit. 03:05:01.450 --> 03:05:10.793 You know, like you know, if someone calls you a twat, you can be like. 03:05:10.875 --> 03:05:11.457 that's Dr Twat to you. 03:05:11.457 --> 03:05:12.381 I have no such grandiose aspirations. 03:05:12.402 --> 03:05:12.924 That's what I say. 03:05:12.924 --> 03:05:21.390 That's what I say Because some of the listeners probably know that already I'm working at Nando's part-time and I have an assistant manager. 03:05:21.390 --> 03:05:23.216 That is the. 03:05:23.324 --> 03:05:24.609 Are you going to have a job anymore, luis? 03:05:24.609 --> 03:05:29.570 No, no, no, I'm living for this. 03:05:29.570 --> 03:05:30.012 Keep going. 03:05:31.047 --> 03:06:01.091 That assistant manager I'm not going to mention the name, I don't want to destroy her ego, but I want to destroy her actions, saying with class and say that behaviour of sense of entitlement, say I'm the manager and I'm the boss, and I say, okay, when I become a doctor I'm going to shove the title right in the front of your face to say, look, I busted my ass for three plus years for this and you will not take me that pleasure. 03:06:01.091 --> 03:06:01.972 So here it goes. 03:06:02.013 --> 03:06:06.545 There it is Talk about removing elites from society. 03:06:06.745 --> 03:06:29.091 Yes, exactly Removing exactly from the workplace now exactly louise welcome to nando I think on that note I also think you need to be kind to yourself when you do it yes and I yeah, you know, um, and I think that's very much what Henry was saying you know, find the environment in which you can work. 03:06:29.091 --> 03:06:31.432 You know, I find I work really well in cafes. 03:06:32.385 --> 03:06:33.609 Yeah, I love working in cafes. 03:06:34.324 --> 03:06:37.117 So if that means, you know, eating loads of cakes and drinking loads of coffee, that's fine by me. 03:06:38.566 --> 03:06:46.537 Also, like you know, do be aware of your own mental health along the journey and if you need to get a therapist or put yourself on medication, just do it. 03:06:46.537 --> 03:06:58.719 Like you know it's, you are going to find out things about yourself, I think, along the way, like you're going to grow as a person as well as kind of like growing your own kind of knowledge and like professional skills. 03:07:00.025 --> 03:07:03.512 So having to rethink everything of the book for three years. 03:07:03.592 --> 03:07:32.066 No, no, it is, it is it is Rethinking, trying to find new perspectives and rethink, like you know, things in like ancient history and stuff like makes you we're essentially studying an alien foreign culture essentially, and we're studying many of them and realising that people live many, many, many different ways over a long course of history and that our own kind of hang-ups and shames, that and things that we we find shameful about ourselves probably don't, they don't fucking matter. 03:07:32.066 --> 03:07:39.030 Um, you know, we were talking earlier a bit about like the agency of like cultures and stuff you know like and like wars and like death and stuff like. 03:07:39.030 --> 03:07:50.551 I think if they're like, is it in japan, in japanese, like samurai culture it was seppuku they would actually ritually disembowel themselves rather than face the shame of a defeat. 03:07:51.052 --> 03:07:56.365 Bring the defeat on, and you know it's mad to think that you would be. 03:07:57.987 --> 03:08:06.332 It's mad to think that societal pressure could make you feel that kind of shame or something like that could make you feel to actually do that to yourself. 03:08:06.332 --> 03:08:21.807 So you know, be kind to yourself yeah, so with all this, I on that lovely note on that lovely note of seppuku we're really gonna end on that note ritual disembowelment. 03:08:21.807 --> 03:08:24.131 Yeah, that's what a PhD feels like. 03:08:24.131 --> 03:08:32.533 Yeah, phd equals seppuku. 03:08:33.449 --> 03:08:35.564 Trinity, st David, can have that for advertising. 03:08:36.211 --> 03:08:39.805 Oh, yeah, we'll give that to our university For their advertising Amazing. 03:08:39.805 --> 03:08:48.469 So, We'll arrive home in a few weeks' time to a letter on the door. 03:08:48.469 --> 03:08:54.217 Like your education has been terminated at this institution. 03:08:57.368 --> 03:08:58.431 I think on that note. 03:09:00.907 --> 03:09:05.653 And Luis will have a message from his workforce saying his employment has been terminated as well. 03:09:07.125 --> 03:09:15.238 So, with all this, are there any final end comments you wish to make that aren't about Nando's or Japanese ritual. 03:09:16.406 --> 03:09:17.811 I'm being culturally insensitive. 03:09:19.229 --> 03:09:19.972 I still don't know. 03:09:19.972 --> 03:09:22.944 I have to decide when I finish the PhD, we'll see what will happen. 03:09:22.944 --> 03:09:30.734 Okay, so to know more about you, any social media? 03:09:30.734 --> 03:09:34.912 Or, if you don't have social media, any academic pages, anything? 03:09:35.064 --> 03:09:47.443 Yeah, you can click the link in my bio, for I'm I am joking. 03:09:47.443 --> 03:10:01.171 I mean, I'm not sure what I would make more money out of an OnlyFans or academia, I have no idea what would make more money? 03:10:01.171 --> 03:10:03.512 What's better my brain or my body? 03:10:03.512 --> 03:10:04.074 Who knows? 03:10:04.074 --> 03:10:06.649 You can actually really find me on Twitter. 03:10:06.649 --> 03:10:07.690 You know what's better my brain or my body? 03:10:07.690 --> 03:10:07.951 Who knows? 03:10:07.951 --> 03:10:11.177 Okay, you can actually really find me on Twitter. 03:10:11.177 --> 03:10:13.832 Oh, now it's X, isn't it? 03:10:13.832 --> 03:10:14.542 I don't really use it that much. 03:10:15.106 -->

03:10:16.050 X, x, X, x, x X X. 03:10:17.845 --> 03:10:18.750 Careful with those Xs. 03:10:18.750 --> 03:10:23.238 Yeah, it's H-N-B-O-H-U-N. 03:10:23.238 --> 03:10:28.095 H-n Bohan, which is my name, obviously. 03:10:28.095 --> 03:10:29.850 So yeah, you can find me on. 03:10:29.850 --> 03:10:31.130 I don't really use it that often. 03:10:31.130 --> 03:10:41.611 That's pretty much what you can find me on, yeah, so good luck, or don't bother, whatever you want to call it. 03:10:43.656 --> 03:10:44.707 I'm going to hand that over to. 03:10:44.726 --> 03:10:46.513 Ria, I can't quite follow that, absolutely. 03:10:48.065 --> 03:10:48.386 I'm still sorry. 03:10:48.386 --> 03:10:49.269 I'm going to hand that over to Maria. 03:10:49.269 --> 03:10:49.950 I can't quite follow that. 03:10:49.950 --> 03:10:50.753 I'm still sorry. 03:10:50.753 --> 03:10:51.796 I'm still processing. 03:10:53.264 --> 03:10:55.073 Absolutely no social media whatsoever. 03:10:56.025 --> 03:10:56.729 That's the way to go. 03:10:58.166 --> 03:11:00.113 Where can we, where can the listeners follow you? 03:11:00.113 --> 03:11:01.486 I? 03:11:01.527 --> 03:11:02.952 do have an academia page. 03:11:04.650 --> 03:11:05.854 Yeah, I suppose. 03:11:06.386 --> 03:11:08.004 That wasn't the bio you were talking about. 03:11:08.004 --> 03:11:17.777 I don't have LinkedIn nothing I try to fly under that but I suppose they could contact me via the university. 03:11:17.777 --> 03:11:26.936 I mean, I can give you my email address, my university email address, which is the snappy 15037, whatever it is called, I can't remember. 03:11:27.405 --> 03:11:29.912 You're just a number in a system, that's absolutely it. 03:11:30.685 --> 03:11:33.153 I thought you were trying to remember the catalogue reference from this morning. 03:11:33.685 --> 03:11:38.324 Oh no, that's 1885,0316.01. 03:11:38.825 --> 03:11:39.649 Wow, what was that? 03:11:39.649 --> 03:11:42.631 And the viewer can look that up at their own pleasure. 03:11:42.631 --> 03:11:44.876 Considerable pleasure. 03:11:44.876 --> 03:11:47.130 And what catalogue? 03:11:47.130 --> 03:11:47.753 British Museum? 03:11:47.753 --> 03:11:48.448 Look that number up. 03:11:48.448 --> 03:11:49.451 British Museum catalogue. 03:11:50.846 --> 03:11:54.847 I was going to say do we want to just give the study group Twitter that? 03:11:54.887 --> 03:11:56.612 would be great. 03:11:56.612 --> 03:11:57.957 Yes, yes, no, the better. 03:12:00.369 --> 03:12:03.269 For context, we all know each other because we set up a study group. 03:12:03.269 --> 03:12:07.012 We probably should have said this at the very beginning. 03:12:07.012 --> 03:12:16.753 And it's HSGW underscore C-O-N on Twitter it's HSGW con. 03:12:16.753 --> 03:12:20.971 So yeah, Luis will put that in the description. 03:12:20.971 --> 03:12:23.011 Yeah, the link in the bio. 03:12:25.325 --> 03:12:31.498 I was going to say I suspect otherwise you can find most of it at our respective academia pages. 03:12:31.498

--> 03:12:34.613 Do we all have pages on academia? 03:12:34.613 --> 03:12:44.433 Yeah, okay, I was going to say I would give your listeners my Twitter handle, but there is really no point because I do not post on it. 03:12:45.306 --> 03:12:47.885 Except when we force him to retweet stuff about the conference. 03:12:47.924 --> 03:12:49.289 Yeah, but that only happens once a year, or. 03:12:49.309 --> 03:12:50.292 Facebook? 03:12:50.292 --> 03:12:53.171 Absolutely no way ever. 03:12:54.825 --> 03:12:56.711 I'm not handing out my Facebook or my Instagram. 03:12:56.711 --> 03:12:57.574 Thank you, yeah. 03:12:58.493 --> 03:13:05.515 No, I suggested the Hellenistic group because I also don't have much social media and my Twitter would just be Formula One stuff. 03:13:05.515 --> 03:13:12.950 I do not want to get involved in any kind of discourse in Formula One, let alone academic discourse. 03:13:14.565 --> 03:13:19.497 But we do have a Discord page, by the way, which you can share or not. 03:13:22.591 --> 03:13:27.930 That's our organising one, because also there's people who email us addresses on there's data protection issues. 03:13:27.930 --> 03:13:28.452 Yeah, yeah. 03:13:29.626 --> 03:13:35.611 I think for the sake of your, Seriously professionally, for the sake of your listeners, find most of us on academia. 03:13:36.052 --> 03:13:36.193 Yes. 03:13:37.325 --> 03:13:41.430 Academia, or perhaps ResearchGate I don't know, Does Alfie have a? 03:13:41.430 --> 03:13:41.710 Page. 03:13:45.668 --> 03:13:51.744 So, with all this amazing interview and well, we we were literally. 03:13:51.744 --> 03:13:55.772 We were literally talking about so many things. 03:13:56.115 --> 03:14:01.045 Heckling, alexander and with all this, is that gonna be the name of the episode? 03:14:01.045 --> 03:14:02.671 We'll see it should be. 03:14:03.150 --> 03:14:17.650 I'm not gonna tell you because it's a spoiler alert, but, with all this, thank you very, very, very much for this opportunity of having this amazing late night interview. 03:14:17.650 --> 03:14:18.246 Thank you. 03:14:18.246 --> 03:14:19.130 Thank you, Luis. 03:14:19.130 --> 03:14:31.376 I think that all the listeners will be filled with such knowledge about the ancient world and how they for the next generations. 03:14:31.376 --> 03:14:42.711 How can we see what we're studying and the ancient world in general in a doubling way? 03:14:43.252 --> 03:14:52.175 as Paul Cosme says, yeah, yeah, the dragon man and this is so important and that's for the PhD. 03:14:52.175 --> 03:15:11.405 And, as I mentioned in my previous solo episodes, I'd say, if it is a seven-headed monster for you, then it might be not yet that you want to do a phd, but might be something that you want to do later. 03:15:11.405 --> 03:15:16.295 But you're only turning into a seven-headed monster if you want to. 03:15:16.295 --> 03:15:39.798 So, if you listen to other people experiences of doing a phd, and not just a negative way, but also and also how can the PhD be fruitful for the next generations, and that in the end, will be something amazing. 03:15:39.798 --> 03:15:55.216 So, within the PhDs, not just the thesis is having your own moment in time when you have to be alone doing your research, but also doing what you like, any hobbies. 03:15:55.216 --> 03:16:08.475 If you have a part-time job, like myself or many others that also do a PhD, I mean just use it to your own benefit or also hang out with your friends if you have some time to spare. 03:16:09.046 --> 03:16:11.110 Yeah, do live your life as well. 03:16:11.110 --> 03:16:13.796 Life is for living it, so and that's basically it. 03:16:14.157 --> 03:16:23.130 So, all in all, we'd like to thank you very, thank you very much again for this opportunity and we shall see you again and I will look forward. 03:16:23.130 --> 03:16:24.092 I look forward to see the final product. 03:16:24.092 --> 03:16:24.314 Yeah, maybe. 03:16:24.314 --> 03:16:25.576 Thank you very much and thank you until next time. 03:16:25.576 --> 03:16:27.620 Then I'll see you again and I look forward to see the final product. 03:16:27.640 --> 03:16:28.462 Yeah, maybe part two again. 03:16:28.462 --> 03:16:29.225 Thank you very much, thank you. 03:16:29.225 --> 03:16:30.908 Until next time then. 03:16:32.073 --> 03:16:36.492 Thank you, and thank you to everybody for listening as well, yes, and thank you to everybody for tuning in. 03:16:36.492 --> 03:16:42.208 If you've made it to the end, you'll be fine with the PhD If you've made it to the end of this you'll make it to the end of the PhD. 03:16:42.208 --> 03:16:45.271 This might have to be like four parts maybe or something Right. 03:16:46.394 --> 03:16:47.834 Bye now, thank you. 03:16:47.834 --> 03:16:52.460 And this was the late night interview with Karis, henry, maria and Troy. 03:16:52.460 --> 03:17:18.681 Thank you all for having the want to pursue the doctoral degree. 03:17:18.681 --> 03:17:29.245 This conversation will be launched on the first days of June, and so stay tuned for the soundbite I shall publish on Instagram Soon. 03:17:29.245 --> 03:17:37.390 There will be another late night talk I had in late May to be launched in June as well, and more solo sessions will also be coming soon. 03:17:38.292 --> 03:17:43.150 I am continuing to be focused on writing new chapter drafts for my thesis nevertheless. 03:17:43.150 --> 03:17:52.311 Yet I will dedicate the weekend to write new content for the running series of the PhD Iceberg Explained to share with you. 03:17:52.311 --> 03:18:05.891 Also, me and Natalie Jarvis, who organizes the PhD Lounges website, are updating the podcast's website with the latest sessions, including these two late-night talks. 03:18:05.891 --> 03:18:08.119 To keep checking those and previous sessions, including these two late night talks. 03:18:08.119 --> 03:18:24.538 To keep checking those and previous sessions, check out phdloungecouk and also feel free to follow the socials Facebook phdpodlounge, instagram at phdlmf and x at phdloungecast. 03:18:24.538 --> 03:18:40.332 And if you are a PhD student or graduate and would like to have a talk with me or for business collabs, then send me an email at luisphdlounge at gmailcom for the podcast algorithm. 03:18:40.332 --> 03:18:42.650 Thank you all for tuning in. 03:18:42.650 --> 03:18:54.227 It has been a pleasure, thank you.