No Romans in China

The Lost Ninth Legion has been a recurring theme on this blog since 2007 (revisited in 2008 and 2009). And, with the new Eagle movie about to hit the big screen, there will no doubt be further revisiting.

But, from all of my previous posts, one which I never imagined revisiting was last year's Rome and China offering. But it seems that the theme of Romans in China is, again, in the headlines.

Chinese villagers 'descended from Roman soldiers'

This was the headline trumpeted on 23 November by no less an authority than The Daily Telegraph. Tests apparently showing 56% Caucasian DNA amongst the inhabitants of the Chinese village of Liqian, coupled with the fact that "many of the villagers have blue or green eyes, long noses and even fair hair", was enough to start the speculation that these people were "descended from the lost legion". (Don't panic -- it's not the Lost Ninth Legion, but a different one.)

The story was quickly picked up by the other newspapers (e.g. The Daily Mail) and, naturally, the bizarre theory of the village's Roman origins popped up. This was the brainchild of the late Homer H. Dubs in 1957 (in a book and article entitled A Roman City in Ancient China).

(I am surprised to see that I have not blogged on this before. It is a fascinating lesson in misguided scholarship, but must wait for another occasion.)

But, now -- thank the Olympian Gods for Discover magazine! Sanity has been restored. In an article from 29 November entitled No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes, genetics commentator Razib Khan explains that the neighbouring Uyghur population were a Turkic ethnic group with a physical European appearance. It is quite likely that the Han Chinese, expanding their influence to the north-west, came into contact with these people. It's far more likely, at any rate, than Homer Dubs' theory of a colony of Romans!

Well, there goes another plank in the "Romans in China" theory. But, like our Lost Ninth Legion, I suspect that this story will run and run.

Roman twitter

The Romans are tweeting. Whatever next?

Apparently, Roman experts at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle have decided to post a daily message on Twitter, purporting to be one of the "thousands of Roman soldiers marching in to occupy Cumbria in the winter of 72/73 AD". They call it iTweetus.

What a marvellous idea. The name "is a play on words of the celebrated novel I, Claudius, written in the form of an autobiography of a real Roman Emperor, Claudius I". (It's a sad day when we have to have I, Claudius explained to us. And only people who don't need it explained would know that the emperor Claudius was technically "the first", since a second, more obscure emperor of the same name reigned over 200 years later.)

Unfortunately, iTweetus doesn't have the wit and wisdom of Robert Graves, which is surely needed to pull off a stunt like this.

Daily Diary of a Roman Soldier

Our Roman soldier, Marcus Julius Latinus, takes his name from a fragment of a writing tablet dredged from a latrine deposit at Roman Carlisle. Probably dumped there in around AD 103/5, when the first fort was demolished, it must have lain in the latrine for quite some time if it was delivered to iTweetus "in the winter of 72/73 AD". He really ought to have taken better care of his correspondence.

The whole enterprise is evidently intended to be educational: the kind of thing that our American friends call info-tainment. But, as the daily diary of a Roman soldier, it comes across as rather a contrivance. The museum's Keeper of Archaeology, Tim Padley, evidently hopes that primary school children will follow iTweetus (Westmorland Gazette report). Hence the casual mention of Marcus' height ("At 5ft10” I used to tower over my siblings, in the Roman army my height is standard. I strain to see past others in to the distance") or his age ("At 26, I am not a stranger to the daily routine of a Roman Legionary, being stationed in Deva in the second legion for the past two years"). But who would note such banalities in their wartime diary?

If the exercise is an educational one, quite apart from avoiding factual error ("Our legion, named ‘Aditrix Pia Fidelis’ is full of good, brave men." It was actually called the Second Adiutrix legion), this old emperor wishes that the Tullie House "Roman experts" would spend a little more time on their grammar (Note: a comma is not a conjunction). And it would be nice if they placed "AD" in its grammatically correct position, before the numeral ("I am Marcus Julius Latinus, a Roman soldier marching on Northern Britannia by order of Emperor Vespasian in the winter of 72AD")

In particular, this old emperor hopes that none of the Cumbrian school children are sharp enough to realise that their Roman friend is using a dating system that wasn't devised until the Sixth Century!

Three-million-dollar Helmet

You know that a story is important when the folks at National Geographic pick it up.

And so, this old emperor comes, somewhat belatedly, to the sorry tale of the Crosby Garrett helmet. By now, you've probably read all about it elsewhere.

And if there were any justice in the land, you would be able to view it, right now, in Tullie House Museum.

But it seems that there isn't. And you can't. But, if nothing else, the whole sorry affair should prompt English law-makers to revise their Treasure Act (1996), which considers only precious gold and silver to be worthy of note, and failed to protect this exquisite helmet because it is made of base metal.

Some press coverage:

• National Geographic


• Daily Telegraph


• New York Times

Romans in Germany

This old emperor rarely ventures outside of Rome, and usually confines himself to the new lingua franca of English. But he couldn't ignore the publication of an exciting new study by German publisher WBG, which traces Roman knowledge of deepest Germany.

It is well known that the Roman advance stalled on the Rhine, more or less. After a couple of punitive expeditions had reached as far as the River Elbe, the Roman frontier settled down along the line now known as the Obergermanisch-Raetischer Limes, which runs through the modern west German states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. It is generally agreed that the Romans had few dealings farther east.

But the second century AD Geography of Ptolemy contains lists of placenames purporting to exist in Roman-era Germany. These have never raised much interest in the English-speaking world, which has been more intrigued by Ptolemy's Scottish placenames. So the new book promises to renew much overdue interest.

German magazine Der Spiegel has hailed the new book as the Google Earth of Antiquity! "Now a team of researchers have cracked the code, revealing that half of Germany's cities are 1,000 years older than previously thought." They may be a little premature in their claims -- only the book reviews will reveal how successful the authors have been in assigning Ptolemy's placenames to actual settlements.

WBG Article here.

Why History should not be written by Journalists

Last week, the UK newspapers were full of an amazing new revelation. The Romans wore socks! The newsmen arrived at this earth-shattering conclusion via a convoluted path -- they were supposed to be reporting the excavation of an exciting Roman industrial complex -- and chose to spin their revelation as a new take on the tired stereotype of the "socks and sandals" fashion crime.

There are a number of points that should have caused any reasonably well-educated newspaper editor to rein in his over-enthusiastic minions. After all, the news was the discovery of Roman industrial activity near the site of a known fort at Healam Bridge, North Yorkshire. The opportunity could have been taken to inform the public that many forts are known to have had such manufacturing activity located nearby.

Instead, such venerable newssheets as The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and The Independent chose to emphasize the fact that "rust on a nail from a Roman sandal appears to contain fibres". (How do we know the nail was from a sandal and not a shoe? How do we know the fibres were from inside the putative sandal? What kind of fibres were they, anyway?)

Of course, newspapers are in the business of selling copies, not (necessarily) crafting a well-balanced report. The Independent mis-informs us that this "latest evidence corroborates the socks and sandal theory which first emerged when a Roman copper razor handle was recovered from the Tees near Darlington". No, it was well-known long before that. The Telegraph mistakenly assumes that the find shows "that legionnaires wore socks with sandals". No, legionnaires belong in Algeria, not in a North Yorkshire fort. Best of all, The Guardian's offering shamelessly centers on a reference to the Lost Ninth Legion and their (supposed) military outpost in Yorkshire. But pride of place must be shared with The Mail, speculatively describing the unexcavated Healam Bridge as "ruins which may once have been home to the famous Roman Ninth Hispanic Legion".

It all goes to show that History should not be written by journalists.

Why History should only be written by Historians

History is written by the victors. To anyone who finds this an unpalatable truth, I have one piece of advice: get over it. The history of Roman Britain will always be the history of the Romans in Britain. Archaeology can show us vignettes from the lives of ancient Britons, but it cannot give us a History of the Ancient Britons. All we can hope to do is to observe how the history of the Romans in Britain touched the lives of the native population.

One individual who has not realised this truth, or who has chosen to ignore it, is the owner of the Roman Scotland web site, one Euan Lindsay by name. I'm sure I have been here before, refuting false or misguided statements. A favorite topic of his seems to be how the academic establishment has conspired to falsify Romano-British history, particularly where the "Lost Roman Legion" is concerned. I believe that it is always bad form to begin with an agenda, but let us leave that aside.

Now Mr Lindsay is entitled to his own opinion. Indeed, he is positively encouraged to voice that opinion, as long as he sticks to the Rules of Historical Enquiry, because history is an academic discipline like any other. A physicist is not permitted to invent the results of falsified experiments. A statistician cannot arbitrarily skew the results of a survey to satisfy some personal belief. A mathematician cannot assume that a theorem is true without demonstrating the proof. Likewise, the historian is not allowed to make stuff up.

Mr Lindsay, unfortunately, is guilty of making stuff up. This simply will not do. He begins well enough, by listing the sources of evidence that he intends to utilise in tracking down the Lost Legion: namely,

1. "the primary written sources from antiquity";
2. "the archaeological source in the shape of marching camp remains" (I presume he does not literally mean the "shape" of the camps);
3. "the tribes known to have been in conflict with Rome" (and here he begins to stray from "evidence" into "interpretation", if not wishful thinking); and
4. "casting a canny eye over the landscapes that these factors point towards" (scientific analysis has now left the room)

His argument goes rapidly downhill, because he has not followed the Rules of Historical Enquiry. In category (1), his "ancient sound-bites" (a truly toe-curling phrase in this old emperor's opinion) are very woolly indeed. He claims that "when taken with the archaeological body of evidence of destruction in southern Scotland and along the Stanegate in 105 AD ..." (er, exactly what evidence is this?) "... it assists in painting a tantalising picture of the troubled years immediately preceding Hadrian’s ascension to power in 117 AD". Tantalising is, of course, the wrong word; vague, is more accurate.

Category (2), "the fragmentary remains of the once-mighty chains of camps which marked the progress of many Roman armies on campaign in Scotland" (once mighty? shudder), leads precisely nowhere. So it remains unclear how this can be "an incredibly fruitful – if speculative - line of enquiry".

Category (3), where Lindsay hopes to "glean a fair understanding of which tribes were frequently at odds with Rome", actually relies upon category (2), allegedly permitting us "to focus on marching camps which sit in the problematic lands of those notably intractable tribes". Which notably intractable tribes? On the one hand, Lindsay is arguing that marching camp = intractable tribe, but on the other hand, intractable tribe = marching camp; we could dance around this circle all day.

Finally, in category (4), "it is absolutely imperative that a quest like this is undertaken out in the countryside" ... where the truth will leap up and slap us in the face? What about all that careful sifting of (1) literary evidence, however tantalising, and (2) archaeological evidence, allegedly incredibly fruitful, and (3) tribal, er, evidence ...?

Any case based on these vague factors would (and should) be laughed out of Historical court. There's a reason why History should only be written by Historians.

Pictish Nationalism

As an outsider looking in -- I am, after all, a Roman emperor -- I am always bemused by the rampant Pictish nationalism on the internet. Whenever the subject of the Romans in Scotland arises, you can be sure that a Pictish sympathiser will pop up to berate us for our interest in an alien imperialist power. In any discussion of Caledonia, it seems that we should be rooting for the underdog, the downtrodden native.

The resurgence of interest in the Ninth Legion (see previous posts here and here) seems to have touched a Pictish nerve. And an earlier post on Roman Nonsense on the internet attracted a rash of argumentative comments from individuals with suspiciously Pictish names like Thormod and Calag.

It is one thing to be enthusiastically interested in a past culture, and steeping yourself in the evidence for that culture. After all, re-enactors do that, and occasionally come up with a surprisingly new slant on the ancient evidence. But it is quite another thing to be fanatically obsessed to the point that evidence no longer matters, and a blinkered anti-Roman, anti-imperialist view colors your judgment.

Still, at least the AlbaWest web site (which started that particular line of discussion) is now extinct. Just like the Picts.

The Untold Invasion of Britain?

Readers in the UK recently had the opportunity to view a TV documentary entitled The Untold Invasion of Britain. Now, as a grizzled old Roman emperor, I know that there were two Roman invasions of Britain: Caesar's visits in 55 and 54 BC, and Claudius' invasion in AD 43. Readers of Wikipedia are even offered a third instance, when the province was recaptured from Carausius in AD 296 by Constantius Chlorus, on behalf of the western emperor, Maximian.

Channel 4 have now defined a fourth "invasion of Britain", when the emperor Septimius Severus visited the province in AD 208.

A Fourth Invasion?

They helpfully explain that their documentary is about "Rome's African Emperor who fought a brutal campaign in Britain, crossing Hadrian's Wall and helping to forge the English-Scottish divide familiar to us today".

I'm not certain that the modern Anglo-Scottish divide owes anything to Hadrian's Wall. Notice, for example, that nowhere does it mark the border between the two countries. Nor am I sure that the visit of a Roman emperor 1800 years ago could have had any influence on dividing two nations (the Scots and the English) which did not exist at the time. But I suppose Channel 4 had to somehow drum up interest in their documentary. (Although the fact that they couldn't simply tell the truth speaks volumes about the audience they expect to attract.)

Counter-insurgency, Roman-style

Interestingly, the documentary had another selling point. "In a mountainous land, at the limit of its influence, ..." [Afghanistan, anyone?] "... the world's only superpower ..." [America, anyone?] "... gets bogged down in an asymmetric war against a deadly insurgency ..." [Taliban, anyone?]

As I said, Channel 4 have to boost their documentary somehow. But there were far more serious flaws than this rather simplistic comparison with modern history. First, the dodgy CGI footage: "Brought to life with animated sequences based on contemporary Roman sources ..." Clearly an attempt to entertain the UK's youth, with their notoriously short attention span; but, in this grumpy old emperor's opinion, poorly (and repetitively) done.

To distinguish the historical scenes from the modern day live action we degraded the footage and bled the colours into each other, before adding a flicker and grain to replicate the appearance of old archive reels. The effect is designed ... to give the impression that archaeologists had unearthed an eighteen-hundred-year-old year old (sic) film, documenting Septimius Severus and his attempt to conquer the whole of the British Isles for his empire.

Who did they think would fall for this conceit? Or even enjoy it?

Second, the unfulfilled promises: "This programme follows Severus's trail from the magnificent remains at Lepcis Magna in the Libyan Desert, to the military hardware left by his campaign in Britain." I don't recall following any trail, but it was difficult to tell, with all the grainy, repetitive CGI scenes. I think we saw Leptis Magna. That was probably the place where Tom Holland, renowned Septimius Severus expert, gave us the benefit of his hard-won knowledge. (After all, it can't be easy for a novelist to suddenly become a Roman historian.) But what was this "military hardware left by his campaign in Britain"? I half-expected to see burnt-out tanks with Praetorian insignia, lying forgotten in the Tweeddale heathland.

Extraordinary documentary?

Channel 4 claim that they have told "the extraordinary story of a very bloody foreigner: the little-known Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, an African who seized Rome's Imperial throne in a vicious civil war and then fought a brutal campaign in Britain, transforming the country in his wake." Little-known emperor? Mehercle, if Channel 4 have heard of him, then he can't be little-known. An African? This, of course, was another major selling point: a foreigner, not only in Britain, but at Rome. However, as Channel 4 were forced to concede, North Africa was simply another region of the Roman empire: Septimius Severus was a Roman, not an African. brutal campaign in Britain? Okay, all Roman campaigns were, by definition, brutal. But transforming the country in his wake? What on earth were Channel 4 thinking of?

This old emperor's verdict? Must do better.

The Battle at the Edge of the World

It seems that there is a new book about Mons Graupius, the famous battle in Scotland where the Roman army of Agricola defeated the Caledonian tribes and brought Britain into the Roman empire.

The battlefield is notoriously unlocated, with many candidates proposed over the years, and there are still those who cling to the previously-fashionable date of AD 84. But it looks as if we now have a firm date, at least.

All of this is good news. The last book about Mons Graupius appeared twenty years ago, and has long been out-of-print: if you can find a copy, you'll discover that Gordon Maxwell's A Battle Lost is a wonderful little book, beautifully written and meticulously researched by an acknowledged expert in Romano-Scottish archaeology. But Maxwell was unwilling to commit to one or other of the date ranges then current for Agricola's governorship (consequently dating the battle to AD 83/84), and favoured a southerly location for the battlefield. On the contrary, Tacitus' description would lead us to place the battle as far north as possible. And Tacitus is currently our only guide, until some metal-detectorists attempt to rectify the situation.

If Mons Graupius AD 83 delivers half as much as some other recent Osprey Campaign volumes (I have seen a particularly readable Pharsalus 48 BC, for example), then we are all in for a treat!

The book is available directly from Osprey Publishing.

World-class Ephesus

I was amazed to discover that Ephesus is not yet a World Heritage Site.

In fact, the ancient town of Ephesus has been on UNESCO's tentative list since 1994 but seems never to have been formally nominated for recognition as a World Heritage Site.

This is odd. Ephesus seems to be an archaeological site of outstanding value, the primary qualification for recognition. It is also an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement which is representative of Graeco-Roman culture. This site should be at the top of the list.

Of course, a successful nomination brings expensive responsibilities, and Turkey already has nine other World Heritage Sites to look after.

But, at last, it seems that Ephesus is to be nominated (Balkan News report). Good luck, Turkey!