PhD Lounge
Late-Night Interview: Carys Hughes, Henry Bohun, Maria Lord, Troy Wilkinson: Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Empires, Alexander the Great and more...
Students and Graduates!
PhD Lounge is back with another late-night interview! Carys Hughes is a PhD student from Swansea University, researching soft power within the Achaemenid and Seleucid royal courts. Maria Lord, Henry Bohun and Troy Wilkinson are three PhD candidates from University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) researching about sensorial archaeology in the Hellenistic world, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Roman campaigns during the reign of emperor Trajan, respectively.
Thank you all for tuning in, it has been a pleasure!
Business collabs and become a guest: luisphdlounge@gmail.com
Website: https://www.phdlounge.co.uk
Facebook: phdpodlounge
Instagram: @phdlmf
X: @phdloungecast
1-time donation: https://phdlounge-podcast.pod.fan
Dissertation Editor proudly sponsors PhD Lounge 10% off for their services if you listen PhD Lounge
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Buzzsprout subscription: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1808542/support
Website: https://www.phdlounge.co.uk
Facebook: @phdpodlounge
Instagram: @phdlmf
Threads: @phdlmf
Twitter: @phdloungecast
PodFan: https://pod.fan/phdlounge-podcast
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/phdloungepodcast
Twitch: phdlounge https://www.twitch.tv/phdlounge
Students and Graduates!
PhD Lounge is back with another late-night interview! Carys Hughes is a PhD student from Swansea University, researching soft power within the Achaemenid and Seleucid royal courts. Maria Lord, Henry Bohun and Troy Wilkinson are three PhD candidates from University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) researching about sensorial archaeology in the Hellenistic world, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Roman campaigns during the reign of emperor Trajan, respectively.
Thank you all for tuning in, it has been a pleasure!
Business collabs and become a guest: luisphdlounge@gmail.com
Website: https://www.phdlounge.co.uk
Facebook: phdpodlounge
Instagram: @phdlmf
X: @phdloungecast
1-time donation: https://phdlounge-podcast.pod.fan
Dissertation Editor proudly sponsors PhD Lounge 10% off for their services if you listen PhD Lounge
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Buzzsprout subscription: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1808542/support
Website: https://www.phdlounge.co.uk
Facebook: @phdpodlounge
Instagram: @phdlmf
Threads: @phdlmf
Twitter: @phdloungecast
PodFan: https://pod.fan/phdlounge-podcast
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/phdloungepodcast
Twitch: phdlounge https://www.twitch.tv/phdlounge
Hello students and graduates, welcome to PhD Lounge, the podcast of late night interviews in which PhDs have a drink and talk about their research topics. We have a new late night interview, but before that, it has been a long time since the last time I launched this session. This last session was in November 2023 and it was about different factors that influence PhD students to market or network themselves online. After that, I paused in researching and writing new content projects on the podcast for some time. Let's break it down. After the last conference I organized in late October 2023, I planned a late-night interview with four PhD candidates with whom I am friends. Ironically, it is that talk I launched on the PhD lounge today.
Speaker 1:Things, however, did not go south, fortunately. Still, I had some life priorities and some PhD tasks to complete. To show progress to my supervisor In the PhD, I was preparing two papers. One was for an important annual conference called Classical Association, which took place in March 2024 at the University of Warwick near Coventry. The paper I presented was about applying the concept of the third space, which I am utilizing for my research thesis project, specifically on mobility and migration patterns. Palmyra was the main case study for my paper, specifically the Temple of Bel and the Greek Palmyrene bilingual inscriptions left by merchants who made commerce in Palmyra during the Roman Empire in the Near East. Furthermore, there were also worshippers of Bel and benefactors in the temple's construction in his dedication. The second paper, which I presented at the University of Liverpool in early April and was organized by myself and three other PhD students, concerned proposing synagogues that were built in the Jewish diaspora as open spaces applying cultural milieu as a methodology to argue that those synagogues were available for non-Jewish people to interact with Jewish culture.
Speaker 1:The Dura-Europa Synagogue and its wall paintings were my case study to support my argument. Both papers took me the first three months of 2024 to write and prepare. They received a laudable reception from other PhD students and postdocs who attended and presented their topics as well. If you want to download and read them, check my profile pages on academiaedu or researchgatenet by typing my full name, luiz Maia de Freitas. Moreover, I had to write new chapter drafts and complete all the ones I was still researching.
Speaker 1:First, I had to finish and enrich one of my case studies regarding cultural hybridity in ancient cities. That city was Hatra, an ancient city in present-day Iraq and one of the three cities I am writing about. The other two are Douro-Europos and Palmyra. 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. And third, I am currently writing a new case study. 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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. 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. Still, I decided to submit it next year 2025, to have a solid argument to defend at the Weiber Wauke. Besides the PhD, I started a teaching placement at the company the Brilliant Club.
Speaker 4:Here.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:I started this placement in January during the spring term at Glentwit Major School near Cardiff. Currently I teach at the secondary school of Bay Baglan in the summer term, which I shall finish in early June. 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. 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. 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. 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. I hope to get another opportunity to teach the next academic year, including the autumn, winter, spring and summer terms.
Speaker 1: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. This greatly affected me personally, my family and my PhD, phd. Thankfully, she had a successful operation on her right ear in Munich back in April. 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. Now my mother is healthy, works, hears me and my brother perfectly and lives happily and peacefully with my cat, luffy. A big thank you to the medical doctors in Munich, who successfully did an amazing job With all this that has happened to me. I will now introduce the following late-night interview to you.
Speaker 1: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. Greece spanning between the 4th century and the 1st century BCE. 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. 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. If you are interested, submit your abstracts and we will be enormously pleased to read them.
Speaker 1:Now it is time to introduce the guests. As mentioned above, they were the organizers of the Kinship and Relationship in the Hellenistic World Conference. 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. Each one researches specific topics of the ancient world, precisely the Hellenistic period in Egypt and the Roman East East. So please have some drinks, grab your seats and let's warmly welcome Carys Hughes, henry Bohan, maria Lord and Troy Wilkinson.
Speaker 1: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. The last time I had was two guests maximum, so it's pretty a big event after the big one that we had. 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. So who would be the first one to start?
Speaker 2:Shall I go first? Hello, I'll bring the microphone closer to me. So I'm Henry and, yeah, my journey is to do a PhD. 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. 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? 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. 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. There was no backups, I didn't care.
Speaker 2: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. I definitely wasn't an Oxbridge candidate, that's for sure. So it was yeah. So I put my three down and Swansea accepted me. So I ended up coming to Swansea University. I did my BA and my MA here.
Speaker 2: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. I didn't want to go straight into it. I thought I wanted some kind of real world work experience. For whatever reason, I wanted to do that. I don't know what possessed me, but that's what I decided to do. 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. 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. No, absolutely do not want to do that.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:So I knew then I was like I'm ready to do a PhD, like now, for the reasons that. 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. 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? So we had some meetings and I applied there and here I am basically. So that was my journey, I guess, and why I wanted to do a PhD. It's kind of always been a goal of mine essentially to pursue Egyptology professionally and academically. As far as it will go, and I will ride that till the wheels fall off, I'll pass over to someone else now. Yeah, go on, troy, you go, thank you Henry?
Speaker 5:Sorry, is it the same question to me, luis? Yeah, of course. Can I give quite a romantic aversion of how I got into ancient history and ended up doing a PhD as Henry? 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? To which the half-serious and not-serious answer at the same time is I'm called Troy. It's as simple as that, and it really is.
Speaker 5:I remember discovering the associations with my name at a very young age, and that certainly sparked an interest in classical Greek mythology. 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. 16th, 17th century history was certainly a period I was very interested in. So, yeah, no, I studied classics in 16th 17th century history at college, came to University of Wales Trinity, st David's at Lambter. That's going to be a common theme for a couple of us. I think you've heard that from Henry already. When was that? 2015,. Did my BA there? The tutors and the environment is excellent. I discovered a research topic I was very, very interested in, even as early as the BA, and some excellent supervisors, um. 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. It was a combination of.
Speaker 5: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. 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. But no, it sort of felt for me like a now or never. 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.
Speaker 5: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. And here we are really.
Speaker 3:Great Well, thanks, Troy. I suspect my journey is a bit different. When I was young, when I was at school, I did go on archaeological digs around the city I lived in. So I remember excavating an Anglo-Saxon graveyard that was fun and a Roman water tank. I think that was even more fun, actually, bizarrely. And I did toy with doing archaeology, but I didn't. I went to study music and I went to study to be a composer. So I did three years at music college and then went to do a postgrad in musical composition. After that, I was trying to work as a musician at the same time and realised I didn't actually like being a musician. I loved playing music, but I hate late nights and I hate networking. Really, that's what it's all about.
Speaker 1:Well, we are on a late night interview, so you can't avoid it.
Speaker 2:It's not an in-person conference.
Speaker 5:So you've failed on both counts.
Speaker 3:I mean, I'm suffering severe sleep deprivation, so this could go strange. 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. So I mean, my partner escaped to Greece um to teach English. So we went off to Crete, um, and we lived, yeah, within cycling distance of Knossos. It was amazing.
Speaker 3: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. 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. That was great and I think, as probably Troy and Henry know, I will bang that social anthropology drum a lot in our discussions.
Speaker 2:I love it, though I have decided to mix fingers.
Speaker 3:I was sort of mildly successful at all of this. So I think it was expected that I would do a PhD. Then I didn't do it straight away for personal reasons. There was a lot going on. I had a good job at the time in academic publishing. 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. 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. So I decided to start doing one on Fantasie de Paris. So music in Fantasie de Paris, which was great.
Speaker 3: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. I was trying I don't know what I was trying to do. 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. So I have most of a PhD on South India and then moved to Vienna and this was bad timing. So I have most of a PhD on South India sitting in the corner of the room. I just never finished it for various reasons. 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.
Speaker 3:I was just a bit bored. 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. I thought I don't want to do this in German. So I went online. I was like, ok, what am I interested in? Oh, ancient history God, that sounds great. Oh, I remember archaeology. That was good.
Speaker 3: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. So I could do it at a distance from Vienna because I was certainly not going to leave Austria and it was fantastic. Honestly, the teaching was brilliant. I wrote a thesis on Ptolemaic Egypt and I had Katerina and Kyle as my supervisors and they were amazing.
Speaker 3: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? 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. I still wasn't quite sold on it, but the way I also got into it. 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. So that's how I ended up where I am.
Speaker 4:I think Well, last but not least, I don't know how I'm going to follow that. I had a way more straightforward. To be fair, I didn't know I wanted to do ancient history until A-levels. 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. 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. So I did my undergrad, I did my MA in Swansea and I'm doing my PhD in Swansea as well. Yeah, I think the same as Troy. I thought if I didn't keep going and do it now, I was never going to get back into it. 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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. And, as we are doing now a PhD, I could share a bit of my background as well. I could share a bit of my background as well. 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. It's a completely different thing, and I need to study mechanical engineering and all that.
Speaker 1:The problem is I sucked at physics and maths, so, and then I wanted to venture into football. 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. But then obviously fell in love with, uh arts and unfortunately, due to my parents divorce, I failed 10th grade or year 10. 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. 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.
Speaker 1:So it's called Serro da Vila Well, it's in Portuguese. It's in the south of Portugal. 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. And I guess the sharing of different backgrounds and our love for the ancient world makes us going into what we are doing. 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.
Speaker 1:So as, as I was saying initially at the beginning of our interview, we got so overwhelmingly tired of talking. 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. So that's why we are so exhausted of talking and dropping so much, uh, so much so saliva, saliva, exactly. So we're so wasting so much saliva that we are exhausted, basically. 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. So let's jump right into to asking another general question uh, what is your phd research project about? So, caris, I'd like to start with you, since the microphone is just near you, so just approach for a bit.
Speaker 4: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. But the idea of that was it's comparative history and it's trying to use soft power, which is more of a. It's a newer academic concept in the terms of ancient history. 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. 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. Yeah, it's that.
Speaker 1:We're going around again.
Speaker 3:Okay, so my PhD is now.
Speaker 1:That was a flex.
Speaker 2:This is going to be new for us as well.
Speaker 3:I think it's on the embodied sensory exploration of environments in Hellenistic Western Asia Minor. That's what I've ended up doing. 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. But once I didn't find any, I couldn't really find anything to write about them. So that was a problem. But I did want to explore two things. One is I wanted to look at history from below.
Speaker 3:I'm not particularly interested in elite discourses, um, and obviously this is something we've discussed at length between us all, um. 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. And given my background in ethnomusicology, then this leads me to field work as well. 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.
Speaker 5: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. I'll explain. I'll explain why in a second. 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. 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. 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. 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. I, my phd is refined a bit more now to focus more just on the roman stuff. 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. I hope I'm not mischaracterising their description, said Troy, we are concerned about the chronological breadth of your study. 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.
Speaker 5:But it is similarly to what Maria's just described. It's a source problem. 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. It's fairly easy, I would say, or straightforward, to infer potentially what their objectives are. But I'm much more interested in some sense and certainly this aligns a bit more with the evidences.
Speaker 5: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. 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. 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. I very much try and pull the two together and sort of look at that history from above and that history from below. I could go on, but that's what I try to accomplish with my research, I suppose with my research I suppose.
Speaker 2:So I was really interested in kingship during my BA and my MA and I did both my dissertations on that. 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. 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. 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. So I was interested in that.
Speaker 2:All fat terms come out of this Whoopsie daisy I'm very much a republican which is something quite interesting who researches kingship. But in Egypt there's loads of studies on kingship but it's just something that interests me, and particularly divine kingship. 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. So I kind of got interested in that a little bit. I was kind of a weird soft spot for the Ptolemies Even before I kind of came to uni. 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. Basically, and I did mine on Ptolemaic Egypt and I looked at the Ptolemaic kings. So I kind of had a.
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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. I mean a lot of that work has. 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. So I'm kind of essentially kind of sitting at this point where I'm looking at kind of divine kingship, royal ancestor veneration.
Speaker 2:I've since become quite interested also in like concepts of like space and time and cultural memory. So I'm trying to kind of tie all of those together in something that's probably going to be quite ridiculously large. 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. 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. So it will be something along those lines somewhere. 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. I'm like, ooh, I love this, I'm going to put this in here.
Speaker 3:But, obviously.
Speaker 2: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. 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. And then you kind of read more theory and stuff and it gets bigger again. 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. It kind of keeps going through this process of expansion and contraction.
Speaker 2:And I'm kind of midway through my PhD now. 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. But I feel like it's most bloated and ridiculous now. 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? The exact like yeah, what am I specifically going to look at while still trying to do all that stuff at the same time?
Speaker 1:I guess that from what you said. Uh, you are quite advanced than us for your research um, I'd know I wouldn't say advanced.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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. Like this newness element is very much um, encouraged and expected for a PhD. 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. 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. So, um, yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody's advanced in this in such a way. 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.
Speaker 1:So I can guess that, I try to feel that. 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?
Speaker 1:They say I wouldn't do it because they have that ghost of it. I don't want to go into academia or it's too hard. 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.
Speaker 2:So that that's the thing.
Speaker 1: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. 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. 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. Who knows that in an industry job that also will happen. 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. 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.
Speaker 4: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. So it's a modern political concept most often used to talk about foreign relations between um world powers. 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. 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. It's co-optive, indirect power. It's a fairly broad term. 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.
Speaker 4:In terms of the outer courts using it, that would be the case of propaganda. I think if we're using the term propaganda, it would be the case of propaganda I. I think if we're using the term propaganda, um, it would be the rule, occult it. 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. And who can? Who can challenge a god. Um, that would be it's. It's not making them stay in your country or accept your rule because you've got soldiers on every street corner. 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. So it's convincing them that they want to do. It's convincing them that it that they want to do it and that they will do it.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 4: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. So in that sense that would be In Rome. 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. 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. And soft power in that sense would be the ability for them who can talk to him outside of those official advisory positions. 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. If that answers.
Speaker 1:No, I guess it matches what we, what we do nowadays as well, politicians also being influenced by other politicians.
Speaker 2:He said, troy, come on, don't be like that don't be like that we're going to get started on politics. It's like an analogy.
Speaker 5:I was hoping that modern politics would stay out for at least five minutes.
Speaker 1:It was just a comparison to it.
Speaker 4:If you want a modern day comparison, it would be during COVID that the businesses that were friends with politicians got the contracts. That's the kind of soft power into play there, sure.
Speaker 1:But, like with here, do they get mentioned by ancient authors? 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? Was there any reference from ancient authors?
Speaker 4:Yes, you have the case of Livia going behind the scenes. She's an interesting one because the authors tend to be quite kind to her in their characterization. So she's talked about as raising the children of nobles and, um, giving these, these benefactions to people. She goes out when rome is on fire under tiberius and starts to command the firefighters. I believe don't don't quote me on this um and we have those under the. The roman authors, um, I can't remember specifics. Suetonius definitely at some point would have mentioned this. With eunuchs. We have a lot of talk about regencies. There's also when these people turn up in the sources. 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. 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. Sure.
Speaker 1: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. Don't know if you all agree with that vision. Don't know. So once I'm trying to figure, to try and trying to understand yeah, theoretically.
Speaker 4: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. 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.
Speaker 2:Which would be very interesting if Ptolemaic Egypt.
Speaker 4:I need to research more about it because it sounds very interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean the queens essentially. Can I quickly say something? The queens, essentially, in Ptolemaic Egypt, are sometimes described as essentially being the pharaoh. It's almost like a joint rulership, or some of them quite clearly actually rule independently. 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?
Speaker 1:uh, so saying those influences affect one culture or affect both cultures, or could be some sort of cultural imposition over another? So I can give you the. So I was, basically I was while I was reading every, every article, every bits of research that you have done. There was one particular thing that amazed me, and we talk about him very often.
Speaker 1: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. 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. 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. Does that make sense?
Speaker 4:Yeah, the comparative part of my PhD would be how those cultures influenced each other. So Alexander the Great, when he takes over the Persian Empire, he does pick up all those elements of Persian culture. He's portraying himself as a legitimate ruler there through the elements of their culture. So that would be their self-power influencing him in a sense, and he's using it to influence the citizens. 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. 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.
Speaker 4:So when he starts using these titles, um, he starts being influenced by the achaemen methods of soft power. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 4: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. Now he comes in and he says, right, you guys do it this way. Now he comes in and he says, right, you guys do it this way, but my people expect this. So I'm going to come up with kind of a possible compromise between these two. Or I'm going to do it one way here, one way here. You go to Egypt and then they start utilising all the existing structures there and doing it that way.
Speaker 1: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. 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. Then just the palpable things and all that, but also seeing through the senses. 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?
Speaker 1:And I'd like to ask you, maria, what is sensory archaeology. 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? 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?
Speaker 3:So no pressure then.
Speaker 1:It was a long question to.
Speaker 3:I'm now so jealous of Karis's project. I want to be doing that one. It's utterly fascinating. Oh God right, sensory archaeology it's not completely new, but I think it's really come of age within the last few years.
Speaker 3: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. 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. 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. So that's quite interesting. What is it? Well, it's many, many different things. There is no such one thing as sensory archaeology. We have phenomenologists, and Tilly, I suppose, is our prime example of that. Perhaps but other people have picked up on this there's Hamilakis, who wrote a very influential book in this. Hamilakis wrote a very influential book in 2013 on archaeology and the senses. That had a massive impact, I think, on the field. But it also picks up on a lot of ethnographic techniques. 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.
Speaker 3:So I think there's a few things that are very exciting about it. One is that it makes you think. I mean, I I've particularly been impressed with with Ingold's work recently. 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. Oh shit. 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.
Speaker 3:He was writing back in 2011 and he said that space is an absence. And I'm not dealing with absence. If you're dealing with the senses. You're not dealing with an absence. So that's the first thing You're embedded within an environment, and so I'm'm very much interested in environments. 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. 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. You know, we interact with the world through a screen. 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. I was thinking about bodies. Anyway, this is something I should not go too deeply into.
Speaker 2:Be careful. I mean, this is a late-night podcast, absolutely.
Speaker 5:So you did give your paper this morning, wasn't you?
Speaker 3:Well, yes, exactly on elements of the body, shall we say, or representations of interactions of bodily parts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that makes it sound way way more like goatee than it was.
Speaker 3:Right. So when I've stopped blushing, I'll get back to the body as our primary research tool. 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. 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.
Speaker 3:People are talking about transhumanism and honestly, I think this is an incredibly dangerous direction to be going in. We are, I suppose, quite literate about this. 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. So there is that aspect to it. 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. 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.
Speaker 3:So, thinking ourselves back 2,300, 2,200, 2,300 years, what was that experience? And it certainly wasn't the one we've got. So, um, there's the, the challenge of then going back to the sites. I mean, it is great. 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. 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. This was, this was my excuse.
Speaker 3:But also, we have many, many more than the five Aristotelian senses. You know, I think currently neuroscientists are up to about 32, is it? 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. How this all comes back to Alexander, I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I think it's no secret that I have absolutely no respect for the man whatsoever.
Speaker 1:Before we jump to say that you don't respect him at all? Is it to say that when exploring this framework in archaeology, is it when we, when archaeologists, go to the site? I'm going to be very risky on this question, but aren't they romanticizing too much the archaeological sites?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. But I think that's really important that we do this, because I have another. I mean, I could go on about theory at considerable length, and much to Troy's detriment, I think. But you know, I could go on about theory at considerable length and much to Troy's detriment.
Speaker 2:I think no, I'd love it.
Speaker 5:I don't know if I can roll my eyes loudly enough to appreciate.
Speaker 3:It's three of us all like theory, but we are historians first and foremost. 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. Yeah, yeah, you know, we are just telling narratives and I think the creative imagination is an absolutely vital part of that. 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. We will carry on being wrong writing about the past.
Speaker 3: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. Of course, that all feeds into it. But fundamentally, we're in there because we want to recreate a narrative, and I don't just want to recreate a narrative. I want to recreate, I want to evoke the past, and I don't think we do enough of that.
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 3: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. 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.
Speaker 1:It's more a lot of compliments and just like downright dethroning. 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. He dethroned the riots. 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. 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.
Speaker 3:And yeah, I mean, I think it's convenience. I think there are several things going on here. 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. Their stories just are not told. You know we have written the story of elites. These are a tiny proportion of the ancient population.
Speaker 3:I would dispute the impact they actually had on people's lives. That's another argument. We could be here all night on with that one, but I want to hear the stories of the other 96%. So that's the first thing I would say about it. The second thing is I think we have a problem as a discipline. 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. After all, the number of, I would say, british leaders who have been through Oxbridge and studied classics, you know, just tells us something.
Speaker 3: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. The discipline is guilty of feeding that. 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. 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. And the other thing, this is slightly dichotomous. 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. That would be my perspective. It's very radical to say that, but this is not the history of Hellenistic peoples, this is the history of a tiny elite. It's not the history of the 96%. Yes. 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.
Speaker 3:We don't hear the discourse. What would it be in modern, mealy mouth terms, the collateral damage that they did. 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. 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.
Speaker 3: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. 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. I think empathy is one thing that is hugely missing the emotion of history. We don't write emotive accounts because we're told as you know, academics that emotion has no place in our writing. But actually I think the emotions are one of the most fundamental human conditions. We have them. That's what makes us human in many ways.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:And specifically, we put that into this modern context of those different environments that we have. You kind of reminded me of what I'm studying about the third space. Different environments are from different contexts. 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. He would say on Alexander, very emotional yeah, he's a big, big mother fuck.
Speaker 1: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. Basically, that's what I'm thinking about and I guess you've answered already the question that I was going to propose to. 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.
Speaker 3:These character, tertiary, secondary characters these are not tertiary and secondary characters in history. 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.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know it's about being very guarded. We need to be ultra careful in many ways about how we, in this case, use language about these people. I mean, I know I talked about dick-swinging idiots, but perhaps it was unfair, but it's. I think we automatically reach for that language. That puts us in our place. It keeps us down. You know, it's the place of whoever marginalised communities, women, whatever in history. Where are their stories? Where are their histories? You know, and that's yeah, and please, yes, please, hang on.
Speaker 2: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. How are they doing that? Why are they doing that? How do they think about that sort of thing? I mean, you particularly mentioned Alexander and I just gave a paper on him.
Speaker 2:Essentially, something that me and one of my tutors have talked about is there isn't. Really, when we talk about these figures, we also have to maybe recontextualise them as, like we are talking about their myth. There is no historical Alexander. 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. 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. So you know we have.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 4:I was just going to say it's very easy to forget that all these people were people like they were. They were, they were human beings, the same as as kind of we are like. 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. 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. We might not even know their name, but we know the dog's name it's kind of.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they were people. 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. What we've got is the mythology, is what people want us to know about.
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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. So it's imperishable, essentially, and those are the only discourses that were left because they stay for such a long period of time. 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.
Speaker 2:I mean, just the cycle just continues, like how do we break that? 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. That wouldn't happen before. 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. Those are narratives essentially as well, which are being moulded to kind of paradigms. It's all bullshit. May I say yes, troy's going to want to jump in here and take us down from our theoretical pedestals.
Speaker 5:No no.
Speaker 5:I think a lot of interesting points have certainly been made. No, no, I'm not going to. I'm not going to. Interesting points have certainly been made. I think you, no, no, no, I'm not going to. I'm not going to sit and, if you like, morally defend the various wars of the Hellenistic period. Anybody who studies war, as a historian or not, should learn very, very quickly that these are not pleasant events.
Speaker 5: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. Because, yeah, these are incredibly dramatic, violent, unpleasant events. 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. 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. At the same time, I suppose, or at least when you read about it, you read it or watch it. 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. It is a source problem, unfortunately, in its fundamental essence. 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. So, but it is a source problem and actually I think.
Speaker 5: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. 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. But so, yeah, you do kind of end up. 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? How much do they actually work on the ground? 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 5:Trends change, certainly on the military front, on the sort of scholarship or the ancient world from below, if you like. I think there's been some relatively interesting scholarship on PTSD and warfare in classical Athens, which has been particularly interesting. 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. But these are interesting. I haven't read the work in full. 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. 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. If you have an entire relative. Okay, this, you know, we're talking about 8 000 people out of maybe 40 000. But you know, suddenly you're you are talking about a much larger body who are engaging in these things more regularly.
Speaker 5: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. But actually I'll take my own research as an example. The point at which we tend to start sort of Indian Ocean, red Sea stuff to an extent, is 1928. That's not even a century ago. It's not that long. And I just wonder, more broadly, in terms of how long do trends in scholarship take to change?
Speaker 5: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. Think about our own fields. How many people really? There'll be plenty of Egyptologists, there are certainly plenty of archaeologists, there are plenty of ancient historians. How many people are really working on the topic that you're working on?
Speaker 5: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. It is what we have ultimately if we can find more, if we can find reasonably justifiable ways to reinterpret them with new frameworks. I'm absolutely on board. 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. We're talking about a couple of hundred years. Have fun, who knows. Have fun with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah no, and I think Troy's got a very good point and we shouldn't stop studying ancient warfare. Of course we shouldn't know. It's it's you know, it's fascinating.
Speaker 5:You pointed out yourself when it happens, it's integral and all integral it's.
Speaker 3:It's pretty damn disruptive yeah, it is, um, it was in. I liked your comment about you know the the whole community going to war. You know this, this mass mobilization, and you see it in the sources. 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. They were at home waiting for their Generally speaking?
Speaker 2:Yes, generally speaking.
Speaker 3:I think there might be some Roman empresses who were there were, but it's less common, isn't it? It's not the system that was set up.
Speaker 5: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?
Speaker 3:Did she just do that?
Speaker 2:or did she actually? I think from the few snippets of sources I've seen those are the examples we have left, but again, there's so much.
Speaker 5:I mean what 25% of our source material is medical text from Galen. 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. Maybe they have been too constrained in how they've looked at it. Sure, I think we do just have to acknowledge that they are so nice.
Speaker 2:Talk about your embodiment thing, about being embodied in a landscape. 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. 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. 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. Um, absolutely, that's important to do.
Speaker 2:But there is also, I think we are, we only exist, like we exist, in our contemporary time period, right? 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. 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. So it's the. It's important job for us, I think, to kind of unpick previous work. But it will.
Speaker 2:Our work will be unpicked in the future as well, and that's necessary because we have these biases. But only we can provide that full perspective on it and, you know, we might have hit something like the nail on the head. We might have kind of done something. 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. But we have to be aware that we're doing that.
Speaker 5:I think it's called a methodology.
Speaker 1:Henry, and that changes yeah maybe that turnover is quite a recent one. 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. He wrote about the Parthians but he might have known that the Parthians were a big empire but decided to. 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. 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 5:On the 96% of the protagonists. I do have to make one addition to the points I was making about the evidence we have. 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.
Speaker 5:it's very nascent, it's very nascent, it's very young. Yeah, I I'm going to be selfish again and and and point to to Red Sea, eastern desert or eastern deserts specifically. 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.
Speaker 5: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. Is that this is, I don't doubt, that there are narratives they're feeding into Heck. We see this enough in the ancient sources that they do follow on from work that's been done before. 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.
Speaker 1: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. It's too efficient.
Speaker 5:No, no, don't be sorry, because he just keeps rolling on.
Speaker 1: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. So, I guess, did the Ptolemies use Alexander as an icon of graphic propaganda? To wear their coat to be the best one, including Cleopatra, if we want to.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Supposedly, obviously, it's not an individual, it's the, he is the, he is the forefront of Macedonian monarchy. 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. Pretty much the myth making begins immediately. Um, pretty much um, the ptolemies and other, probably the solukids as well, find themselves in a environment, a new environment, I guess. They're embodied in an environment which has its own history, its own culture. Um, it also has its own history of interactions with other cultures. Um, there's so many, so many layers to it, um, so it, I think it's conian, he. He calls the ptolemaic monarchy a face, so it has like two faces. Essentially it has a like a greco-macedonian face and it has an egyptian one.
Speaker 2:So I said earlier about the epq that I did um that was based off of a book I read um by stanwick. It's called portraits of the ptolemies, egyptian greek kings as egyptian pharaohs or something. It was something along those lines. 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.
Speaker 2:Essentially I don't believe there's any, especially for that time period. There's no such thing as royal portraiture. 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. 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. They didn't have portraiture in the same sense that we have it. Sorry, I'm a bit off topic, a bit from Alexander.
Speaker 4:Also off topic, did she have a hooked nose in her coin? Portraits Cleopatra VII.
Speaker 2:I think so from memory.
Speaker 4:Antiochus Gryphus, antiochus Hucnos people kings from then onwards tend to have that in their portraits.
Speaker 2: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. The coins minted for Cleopatra VII in the Seleucid territories or the previous Seleucid territories fit in with Seleucid coinage. 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. Yeah, these aren't royal portraits exactly. 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. So he is important for them.
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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. But in Egypt he's not particularly relevant. 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.
Speaker 2:He isn't really important in the rest of Egypt. He's important in Alexandria and I have lots of theories on that which I won't divulge here. You'll have to wait for my thesis in however many years time.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it's going to be a long wait.
Speaker 2:It's going to be a long wait maybe I'll give a paper on it before then. So he's important in Alexandria, but not anywhere else. Um, so, so he's important alexandria, but not anywhere else. 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. 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, yeah, new environment. 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. Um, you have, like the necratis, for instance, becomes like a sort of a greek trading colony, that's this in egypt. And you have, um, they're called the hella memphites, so greeks living in memphis. Um, these people are probably already creating these new kind of cultural codes of hybridity.
Speaker 2:So it's quite convenient when Alexander Ptolemy's come in, they can probably get that from those communities. So they're actually kind of some of the groundwork's already been done for them before, essentially. 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. Probably it doesn't come out of nowhere. It's not as though Alexander comes and conquers the Persian Empire and it's like, oh god, who are these people? Like? That's not happening, obviously. Yeah, I hope I answered that question.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:I love the shifting that you're doing to like, ah, new things, it's great so what exactly.
Speaker 1:So exactly that what Henry touched upon transmitting Alexander the Great in an international way, and would that reflect upon the Roman Republic? 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.
Speaker 5:Yes To clarify for your listeners. 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.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 1:Karas has already got it. He's at the beginning. 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. When he arrived, he complained, allegedly he was not young enough to attempt the conquest of India as Alexander the Great had done. 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. So upon this first paragraph, and then comes with the, the source. 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. Sadly, they're not mentioned of those 96%.
Speaker 5:How good is Alexander the Great's strong power in the Imperial Roman period? Is that fundamentally what you're asking?
Speaker 1:Yes, so how Specifically under the 96%? So the Imperial campaigns until Trajan's reign, solidifying what the known Roman world at the time, in the second century, is? 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.
Speaker 5:Oh, oh, so well in terms of Alexander's influence in the Roman period, he's certainly his soft power is. He's clearly quite influential over the foremost individuals in both the Republican period and the Imperial period. 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.
Speaker 2:Just for the listener, maria is rolling her eyes back really far into the back of her head.
Speaker 3:I guess Maria has something to say. I may have said what I had to say.
Speaker 5:There's one particular achievement Maria is wishing that Caesar had imitated by that point in time, didn't he?
Speaker 2:also refuse to see the body. 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. He was like I don't want to see those. Yes, I'll go and see Alexander, I think so. Yeah, apparently of course, alexander's influence.
Speaker 5:He clearly does loom large, in the same way as he has, as the others have alluded to, to our modern narratives. 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. It was literally thousands.
Speaker 4:It is, I think, just to kind of jump in sorry that the Alexander romance is.
Speaker 2: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. 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.
Speaker 5:No, so I, yeah. Thank you, henry, that was a useful input, I think. Fundamentally, Alexander, as I've said several times, he does loom large for a number of reasons. 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.
Speaker 5:Actually, to jump to a completely different boogeyman from Alexander, I'm going to jump over to Hannibal Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general. I'm going to jump over to Hannibal Hannibal Barker, the Carthaginian general. This is an individual and actually potentially, to some extent the example is, dare I say, almost better. This is an individual who takes. So Carthage has just suffered defeat in the First Punic War in 241 BC. You have the mercenary revolt in 240, which is right at the gates of Carthage. You do not leave a rather large army of unpaid mercenaries outside your front gates. That's a terrible idea. Carthage then rebuilds its power base in Spain. Hannibal then takes an army of 30,000-40,000 men plus a bunch of elephants I knew they were coming.
Speaker 5:The first time when am.
Speaker 2:I getting them in. I've been waiting for this, troy owes about £100. His job every time he mentions elephants is £100.
Speaker 1:We swore five times.
Speaker 5:I'm not sure the word elephant is going to give your podcast the R rating you desire. Louise, but that was actually a totally subconscious insertion, I'm afraid.
Speaker 3:I can see you coming here, as soon as.
Speaker 5:I can, but there is a point to that. 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. Apparently, and admittedly, this is not the first time that elephants reached Italy. They did so under Pyrrhus years before. 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. And the army officer just says what, what are you?
Speaker 5:talking about, but this is then an army that proceeds to rampage through Italy for about ten years. Actually, if you want the impact on the 96% there, it is there. It is Because he does. He rampages through Italy for a good better part of a decade. If I'm not, what are we talking? 219 to 202 is the second Punic War. Yeah, if I'm not, what are we talking? 219 to 202 is the second Punic War. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 5: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. You have the ambush at Lake Trasimene you have 15,000 men. There, you have the ambush at Lake Trasimene. You have 15,000 men lost there. 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. I'm not going to underplay that. 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. Yeah, that's unbelievable. A single day, 50,000 of these are dead. Yeah, you know, this is and this is actually to factor back into narratives in scholarship. There is a profound reason why this battle has been so influential, right down to German strategists in World War II. This does become the epitome of a I won't say good, I will say successful battlefield, battlefield engagement. Ie, you've taken an enemy army that is numerically twice the size and you have butchered it completely.
Speaker 5: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. The Romans do not do this. They say you know what? No, fuck you, we are going to keep fighting you. We are going to engage in strategies that you cannot deal with because we will not meet you in pitch battle. But the psychological effect on the Roman population is massive. 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. The Romans are desperate to get their hands on him and this is why Hannibal allegedly commits suicide. At the end he manages to deprive Rome of.
Speaker 5:Can you think of Caesar and Vercingetorix, the Gallic chieftain? They make a big public spectacle of this. Can you imagine what they would have done to Hannibal if they'd got their hands on him? Cle know this is yeah, exactly so. The impact of these individuals, and actually not just the 96%, you know. You have the story of Hannibal's brother. 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. Hannibal manages to wipe out not just 50,000 men, he manages to wipe out a massive number of at least the lower nobility. Hannibal's growing on me.
Speaker 2:Oh dear.
Speaker 5:But no one of the consuls, I think, is killed at Cannae. It is a complete disaster for Rome. And so, no, the site is absolutely massive. This is nowhere near Alexander in the east, I grant you, but sorry, I've just remembered. I should actually bother to try to link it back to that. But no, I think actually it does serve the point, because it's Alexander.
Speaker 5: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. The Battle of Gaugamela is much, much bigger, supposedly, than Cannae. 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. This is. 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. But also, then, obviously, alexander goes on to go into India and engages with Porus. You have another large battle at the Hydaspes.
Speaker 5: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. Apparently this is not newbie henry come on.
Speaker 3:I think we need to ask ourselves why and what does it look like from the people who were already there? This is very much from our perspective. It's very much looking from the west towards the east in the case of Alexander. Why would Alexander do this?
Speaker 5: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. Well, clearly it is because Trajan says he wishes he could have imitated Alexander.
Speaker 2:So we can see directly there that the narrative is the spectre of Alexander, pretty much just loom large over the ensuing period.
Speaker 5:Alexander is probably the closest soft power can get to hard power without military or coercive force. Is that fair to say, Kairos? I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah, if soft power is propaganda, then it's worked. We're still talking about him. Yeah, and it's Alexander the Great. He is this, being above everything else.
Speaker 5: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.
Speaker 2: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. You have to sort of in a sense understand your past. In the sense understand your past. 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? 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.
Speaker 2:So we look back at these key events to kind of situate ourselves in the present, in some respect into our current social landscape. 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. I don't know if it's the same as the Seleucid Empire, I think. Don't hold me to it, please.
Speaker 4:We're sorry in advance Kyle.
Speaker 5: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. 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.
Speaker 3:If you're a farmer down at the first cataract, you know, Raffia, do you care? Well, again, these may.
Speaker 2:You might be conscripted somewhere.
Speaker 5:No again. 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. Well, certainly until the destruction of Carthage in 146. Influences Roman Italy for decades. We also have to be careful as well. That might be one clear example, I think we also have to be careful as well.
Speaker 3:That might be one clear example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good one. I think we also have to be careful as well in some of the numbers that these ancient authors give. 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. 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, those sorts of of things you know, like like a yes minister quote, you know, so it was the same. I think it was. 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.
Speaker 5:So you know, you know, yeah, I think there absolutely is that You're quite right. But again, I think at least again can I is an example, or the aftermath. 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. I agree, a profound impact Whether the numbers are quite what we're told. I agree.
Speaker 3:I would like to draw a contemporary parallel. So if we take the Second World War as potentially the biggest event, from the mid-20th century.
Speaker 3:Militarily yes, and the impact that had on the British population. So my grandfather was sent away to fight and got captured and all the rest of it, and he was away for six years. So there's an impact in the family, but without the constant reinforcement of the message in the post-war years. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 4: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.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have a problem with coinage like that because do you actually look?
Speaker 2:at it when you use it. But also who is it? Who is that coinage going to? Is it paying particular military figures, for instance? Does it have a particular context?
Speaker 5:The other I can jump, try to jump in a little bit with that and it's, it's. 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.
Speaker 2:That's just a figure that's now going to be quoted in every oh no, the 96%. This is how some shit starts. Like somebody will pluck a figure for, like you know, just a random figure.
Speaker 3:It's not so random, because I think I read an article and it was what is it? The Demography of the Greco-Roman World. It was a reassessment or something. It was a reassessment or something. It was in that book. Is this what makes you want?
Speaker 5:to do away with demography. That's right, no.
Speaker 1:But I think they did a calculation for Egypt, Ptolemaic Egypt.
Speaker 3:They reckon an elite comprised about 4% of that population, with various criteria. Sorry, Stuart.
Speaker 5: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.
Speaker 2:All origins obviously get completely lost.
Speaker 5:Of course. But the point is, we assume that they're there, but then unfortunately we don't know what those oral traditions are.
Speaker 3:Actually I wanted to ask Carys about coinage. Sorry, Because.
Speaker 5:This is going to be a whirlwind for your listeners. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:This is very intense.
Speaker 5:This is going to be like a few parts, your listeners.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. This is very intense. This is going to be like a few parts.
Speaker 1:Would you like to take this just a five minute break, because I have to weep.
Speaker 2:Why don't you? Why don't you? Why don't? It's a little surprise for you. You go, and then we'll just you can just leave us here.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about whatever. Yeah, we'll direct ourselves, unless. I just need to pause because I'm going to edit this section here, so in this part.
Speaker 2:so okay, just leave it running and we'll go. Okay, leave it running and we'll just carry on, I'm going to edit it anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah alright.
Speaker 2:I'll be right back no, no, we can keep going. No, no, no, just keep going, just keep running keep running, because here it's also running.
Speaker 1:Okay, I, because here it is also running.
Speaker 2:OK, I'll run back. You have to unlock the door. Yeah, we've locked ourselves in.
Speaker 3:So we can't escape until we've sorted this.
Speaker 2:No about coinage, because Troy's going as well, they're going together.
Speaker 3:And I'll go afterwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're taking their handbags. I mean, yeah, yeah, I was wondering about who actually had these coins in their hands. And this is quite an interesting point because obviously on an everyday level, you're going to be using bronze coinage. 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. 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? 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.
Speaker 4:I put a little asterisk there. Everything we're saying is all speculation. Possibly it's wrong. It's okay to be wrong. As you said earlier, I'm not a coin expert.
Speaker 3:I'm so sorry to put you on the spot.
Speaker 4:I wrote a paper on coins and then I went shit. I don't know anything about how you talk about coins. I just thought these looked cool and were interesting.
Speaker 3:I think that's a perfectly good justification for how you paper. You know.
Speaker 4:I mean it worked. I think it worked out well On one of the Coin 101 books I was basically reading in the past week. 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. You find it essentially dropped on the back of the sofa, like the ancient comparison of that that it's dropped between the floorboards. People didn't bother to go find it because it's a bronze coin.
Speaker 4:It seems that that's the kind of coinage that people just had and I think there had to be laws put into place. 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. 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. I think it was that sort of thing. So I guess they would have had these coins. Maybe they wouldn't have cared what was on them.
Speaker 2: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. 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. You know, getting those kind of commemorative coins is something that was. 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. I wonder whether it's like commemorating their marriage or something along those lines.
Speaker 4: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? Um?
Speaker 2:yeah, who would give you change yeah?
Speaker 4: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. I don't know how realistic was it that people were going to spend them. 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. They were minted to commemorate the event of their marriage. 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. But in that case it would have been a commemorative event. It would have been our equivalent of the, the jubilee coins.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:People still invest in gold.
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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. So you know.
Speaker 2:Gold is gold, gold food with them, because it's perishable. So you know, gold is gold, gold is gold and it's transportable. Um, and we forget, I think, sometimes about the transportability of money, um, and how you can essentially carry your wealth with you. That's what. That's what money is. It's a consolidation of wealth into a form that is transportable and you can take wherever um you know. 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. But the point of money is, it's transportable. It's transportable wealth so that you can set yourself up wherever you're you're. You're less embedded in your, in your natural environment, I guess, with portable money. Yeah, is that a PhD topic in mind? Good one.
Speaker 5:But with portable money, your money also has to be internationally recognised, or at least nationally. Phrases not necessarily to apply to antiquity, but it has to be recognised on a geographically wide scale.
Speaker 4:Let's put it that way. Do you want to get into attic weight and Ptolemaic weight?
Speaker 2:Oh, maybe that's a bit too much, but we could do.
Speaker 5:No, because I don't know anything about Attic weight.
Speaker 4:Maybe on those two terms. But also if we're talking about, would people have looked at them? If it is this huge deal to have this coin, I guess it's special. People haven't seen this sort of thing before. Maybe they would have paid more attention to what was on it. 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. That's what you know, that's what people know, people know. It's the same thing that everyone knows what it is.
Speaker 5:So something's just occurred to me. This is light bulb moment. Yeah, possibly I'm going to conduct some experiential archaeology. Oh, excellent Coins. What did we all think when we held? So for your listeners, Luis, we were at the Swansea Egypt Centre yesterday after the conference Not just the Egypt.
Speaker 1:Centre yesterday after the conference, not just the Egypt Centre, but also the experience of holding a coin.
Speaker 5:But this is it. 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.
Speaker 4:It had a little tiny bee.
Speaker 5:Yes, but you know this was an item that had weight to it, it was beautifully made. I said to all of you I really struggled to put that coin down. It's a mesmerising artifact, had weight to it, it was beautifully made. I mean, I I said to all of you, you know I I really struggled to put that coin down. It's a mesmerizing artifact, it is, it's it it. Well, think, think about how these things are made. You know you've got someone that has to to create the, the portrait or the image. Uh, they then have to mold it. 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. These are very complex items to produce and certainly the one any of your listeners, louise, can go and look up Hellenistic coins. Just Google them. Some of the finest silver examples. The artistry involved is immense. The weight of these things are ridiculous. You're talking what? 20, 30, maybe not 30 grams?
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, some of the bigger tetradrachms.
Speaker 5:Yeah, you're talking about a significant weight in silver. There is a I don't want to say that, sorry. I don't want to say it's an all-shiny effect, but it kind of is.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say, oh, they're shiny though.
Speaker 5: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. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Do they have that because they're synonymous with elites, though? Or like do? 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? Metal that's come from the ground, gone through a craft specialisation process which is very intense, is very shiny. It's come from somewhere like very far away or deep underground. 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? Is that is, the material quality of the objects, like because, like do they? What am I trying to say here? Like do they share that quality of nature of being special and more important than other things? And like, how does that happen?
Speaker 2: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. Usually it's gods, like statues of gods in Egypt might be in gold and silver. So it's interesting. 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.
Speaker 4:It's so you know? Um yeah you.
Speaker 4:you did all this stuff that no one in your in no one went. No one back home would ever have experienced that sort of thing. You've been to all these places and done all that sort of stuff. 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. So one of those guards gets this coin, like where does he go with it? What does he go with it? What does he do with it? 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. I don't know. 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.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here's.
Speaker 3:Alexander oh there's always a downside.
Speaker 4:Oh, it's the same guy on the obverse, but look at this little tiny B on the reverse.
Speaker 2:I was fascinated with coins when I was younger. 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.
Speaker 3:There are two things I think. What's interesting about gold and silver is they're not very useful metals in a practical sense. What can you actually? Gold is too soft. Isn't silver antibacterial?
Speaker 2:yes, a little, I think, but copper's better.
Speaker 5:Yeah, possibly, I'm just not sure you've watched enough vampire movies, marie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this could have announced the downfall in my argument I think there was something about silver, though.
Speaker 3:I'm sure. Yeah, no, I think silver maybe, but certainly copper and bronze are really good at being antibacterial. In essence, they're not very useful metals. You can't do much with them. They're not like iron or something like that. They're not strong enough, so they're only valued because they're shiny, which, frankly, who cares? So that's the first thing.
Speaker 4:I have a collection of shiny rocks.
Speaker 2:We're all really good magpies. We like collecting shiny things.
Speaker 5: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. It Is that Alexander's. This is so embarrassing, Sorry.
Speaker 2: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. I'm not judging you for it.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, I'm not wearing it at him.
Speaker 2:It just reminds me of what I'm doing essentially, and it's shiny and it's unique. You know, I'm sorry, that's a cruel thing. I'm falling into the social patterns.
Speaker 5:I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:That's a cruel thing for me to have done to you, I'm sorry. I wanted to go back to the idea of the mercenary and I thought this was really interesting. What Carys said about this. 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. I think all the things Troy said, you know they're heavy, they have that weight in your hand.
Speaker 5:I don't think Henry's wrong either. I think it's all of the above.
Speaker 2:I think there's no one thing I think they're shiny, they're well made.
Speaker 5:I think the monarch is quite literally sharing that aura with whoever's holding it.
Speaker 3: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. That coin is useless unless that mercenary transforms it into something. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 2:I do wonder whether you know soldiers are also part of. They are elite, well, some, some degree. 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. So these figures are actually elite of themselves. So they may not necessarily need to cash it in. They're just kind of compacting and compounding their wealth and consolidating to what they already have. Maybe. Go on, karis.
Speaker 4:I was going to say maybe it's about it being a coin and it's more equivalent of a medal. You get a medal for being in.
Speaker 5:Well, not quite. My question is so I was thinking in the context of Roman India. 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. 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. 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. Do we have any evidence?
Speaker 3:for how these coins are used In a relatively modern context. 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.
Speaker 2:I did just mention this. 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?
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 5:and do with it what you wish. 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.
Speaker 2:That would have been great, I mean they have a life after being used for money, essentially, or they have. There's multiple ways in which coins can be used, which we've kind of touched upon.
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 4:The only thing they were paid with. I don't know if it's, I've got no idea. I don't know.
Speaker 2:We are speaking from a point of relative ignorance. We're kind of workshopping coins here with not having done a lot of research on them.
Speaker 1:Talking about more of a personal value than itself the whole general, broader situation of picking up of the mercenaries objectives in their sentence. But I guess that research we should leave it for another time, or maybe just One of our tutors, Kyle.
Speaker 2:He'll all be telling us off after this.
Speaker 1: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. Suzuki coins. But that would be something that it's, that expands into a larger context. We could last talking here. I thought you were going to say larger podcast.
Speaker 5:We're not giving you enough hours.
Speaker 2:I think, we're going to be enough to talk about coins and all that. We're just doing a live study session. Sorry world.
Speaker 5:We're doing the research at the same time.
Speaker 4:I think we're like five minutes away from going and finding a book.
Speaker 1:Yes, we're just going to the Egypt Centre and just checking out some coins I have to do a study with me sometime.
Speaker 5:It's very much the trend at the moment, isn't it?
Speaker 2:We can all get little TikTok accounts like study with me. What are we doing today?
Speaker 5:Study with me, select your coins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have had many breakdowns in this library, by the way, in the past.
Speaker 1:While I was unbreaking, you and you guys were talking shit about the ancient world so the point of the line here. Just to wrap up the things, let's classify Alexander the Great Con or thug? Oh, thug Thug. What's the option? Sorry Thug or what I said con or thug, but A con or a thug Thug, what's the option? Sorry Thug or what I think I said, con or thug. A con or a thug? No, both, they're both things. So let's see I don't think Great king or thug?
Speaker 1:Oh OK, I was going to say I don't think he's a con in any way.
Speaker 3:I think you know he obviously was pretty charismatic in some way, if even half of what is written about him is true. 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would sort of agree. He was definitely a great king for the Macedonians in the time period when he was for sure, but he's definitely a thug. And I would say perhaps all monarchs are thugs. They're institutionalised mafia families basically that can do whatever the fuck they want. Mafia families basically that they can do whatever the fuck they want. You know, even now in contemporary modern Britain, the monarchy is essentially untouchable by the law and that is essentially what criminals are.
Speaker 4:So Someone take the mic before you get done.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I'm a Republican, not in the American political sense, but yeah for sure. And like monarchies are criminal families. Essentially they're institutionalised and legitimised.
Speaker 3:And it was theft in the first place that got them.
Speaker 2:Complete theft yeah, theft from the community and hoarding extreme wealth. Thank you, goodbye. That was a good mic drop.
Speaker 5:I was going to weigh in. I actually I never refer to Alexander the Great as Alexander the Great.
Speaker 1:When I write Alexander III, it's Alexander III.
Speaker 5: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. No, I always refer to him as I mean. If you want to call him Alexander the Great in the sense that he has become cultural phenomenon, the right word. He's become a cultural entity unto himself and I think in that sense you can call him Alexander the Great. 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. He is Alexander the Third.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's from time to be Better to put it this way If we really dislike him. Well, putting it this way Alexander III. Instead of saying Alexander III, we say Alexander III, the third.
Speaker 3:Again.
Speaker 2:I don't?
Speaker 5: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. So no, I think he's Alexander III. Is he a thug in the sense that? Again, I'm not sure. Thug is even the right word. Successful warmonger Warmonger's definitely not the right word either. 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. Uh in the class, in in the, specifically in the ancient world. Uh, on, on a practical basis, this does mean death and destruction. This, this is what it means, unfortunately. But yeah, so no he's.
Speaker 2:Alexander III he's also my litmus test for people's historical knowledge. 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. I always kind of, whenever someone asks what I do, I'm like have you heard of Alexander the Great? If the answer's yes, then I go into a bit more detail. If the answer's no, then I go into a different detail. That was less dramatic.
Speaker 3:Well, I think I do have to answer this question, because the word thug was mine originally, which was a rhetorical device, I mean.
Speaker 5:I used it, the level of your soft power on our academic discourse is that it should not be overlooked.
Speaker 3: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. But also I wonder about the motivation, both for himself, which of course we can never really know. You know what motivates somebody to go and do that? 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.
Speaker 3:Yeah, about really what? What do we know we've got an alexander romance. Well, you know, I'm sorry, kyle, but I don't think that was really very reliable.
Speaker 2:He would agree, he would absolutely agree.
Speaker 3:But it's more how that has impacted on the motivations of people who came afterwards. 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. It becomes symbolic of a way of you know a sort of mafia don or a thug or something.
Speaker 3: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. But I think glamour is part Legitimisation Legitimisation, that's the perfect word. 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are guilty of repeating those narratives, but we should always be talking about them as narratives rather than historical facts.
Speaker 3:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 4: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. He was a massive fuck up at that point.
Speaker 5:Yeah, he was.
Speaker 4:The one thing he didn't do well and his empire never. It died with him.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's a really good point. We talk about going out in a blaze of glory.
Speaker 3:Like the standards of Hellenistic kingship going out in a blaze of glory. I love that because it's almost like he won a Darwin Award.
Speaker 4:Yeah his legacy was never able to be tarnished by a son who was a shitty ruler or anything like that.
Speaker 2: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. Yes, absolutely. Oh well, are we allowed to say some final other thoughts?
Speaker 1:as well. Yes, so let's wrap up. Do you have a final question?
Speaker 5:Yeah, let's wrap up the.
Speaker 1:No, this was a question. Oh, this was a question.
Speaker 4:I'll accept it.
Speaker 3:Okay, right, right, great king of that Are we going to do a final.
Speaker 1:So let's so as we wrap up.
Speaker 5:Should we bring this back a bit more to PhDs, and why?
Speaker 1:you should do that. 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. 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?
Speaker 2:Who would like to go first?
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 3:Actually, it's hard work and it's long, yes, but we have had a lot of fun discussing, you know. 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. 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. Um, I would say, do it if you are, if you have a real burning interest in something. If you're not interested in your fields, then it's really not going to be, I think, successful. I don't ultimately think you're going to get through it or write a good PhD.
Speaker 3: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. 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. But I think all of us would agree that they are valid and we learn an enormous amount from each other. And I sometimes joke that troy is the one who keeps my feet on the ground. You know, because he's the one who then comes. But what about evidence? He's trying to stand on the ground, right, yeah, you know. 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. So it's vital that, if you are going to do it, you find a similarly great group of people to embed yourself within.
Speaker 5: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. 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. I personally probably would sometimes use the term monotonous just again, if I'm slogging through material. I don't want to. I've been accused before of being too morbid and miserable sometimes. 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. This was just me talking about BA. I saw friends of mine who really struggled with it, and so I don't like to pull the wool over people's eyes. 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. 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. 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. You know, so I I enjoy those bits and that some certainly with a phd. I think a couple of us mentioned that we would sort of get to a two year point and then things start to crystallize. 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. 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. 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. So I think there's that. 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.
Speaker 5:I do enjoy presenting, and it is you know. I think that is something that people should do, whether it's presenting in a conference or like this. You, just you don't forget, we live. You want to talk about the 96%. 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.
Speaker 5:It is profound and challenging and difficult, but it is fun. You can enjoy it, you can have a laugh with it and at the end of the world, end of the day. End of the world. Thanks, alexander again. 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. It's crazy, the things that people did a couple of thousand years ago. It's mental and in a good way, from a story perspective. As Maria said earlier on, it's about telling stories. 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. I could go on, but I will. I will pass on to somebody else.
Speaker 4:They might also see a three-hour podcast and not listen to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually part one, two and three.
Speaker 5:I did just ring them. They need to grind.
Speaker 4: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. If you want to do a PhD, do it because you're enjoying it sure you don't have to be an expert.
Speaker 4:You don't have to go into it being an expert on things. You don't have to go into it with a solid idea of what you want to do. And if you write a piece of research. I've written a lot of pieces of research that will never go into my actual thesis, but they were still worth writing. 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. I've learnt other stuff that might, if I did get into academia, might come in handy later. 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.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I don't know. I guess just if you want to do a PhD, it's hard work but it's also, it's fun. It might not be incredibly rewarding in the end, but it's not so much that end goal of getting a job in academia. It's the process of doing it, the kind of things you learn from that.
Speaker 5:There's a motivational quote in that somewhere, like that you could print out and put on a card or something.
Speaker 2:I can agree with all of you more in that sense. I think, personally speaking, there will be some trade-offs that you have to make essentially. 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. Like where I work is, for instance, quite a small business. 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. 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. Um, and you will also find that by talking to other people. So do, do, put yourself out there, essentially in that regard.
Speaker 2: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. But just do your best to enjoy it. Remember you're doing it for pleasure. 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. You don't have to do it for getting a specific job or getting a job in academia.
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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. And it can be quite difficult to do sometimes, but that would sort of be my advice in that respect.
Speaker 4:Um, yeah, I was just gonna say.
Speaker 2: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. Just want to thwart it over the yeah, just a little bit. You know, like you know, if someone calls you a twat, you can be like.
Speaker 5:that's Dr Twat to you. I have no such grandiose aspirations.
Speaker 1:That's what I say. 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. That is the.
Speaker 2:Are you going to have a job anymore, luis? No, no, no, I'm living for this. Keep going.
Speaker 1: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. So here it goes.
Speaker 2:There it is Talk about removing elites from society.
Speaker 3: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. You know, I find I work really well in cafes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love working in cafes.
Speaker 3:So if that means, you know, eating loads of cakes and drinking loads of coffee, that's fine by me.
Speaker 2: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. 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.
Speaker 5:So having to rethink everything of the book for three years.
Speaker 2: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. 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. 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.
Speaker 3:Bring the defeat on, and you know it's mad to think that you would be.
Speaker 2: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. 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. Yeah, that's what a PhD feels like. Yeah, phd equals seppuku.
Speaker 3:Trinity, st David, can have that for advertising.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, we'll give that to our university For their advertising Amazing. So, We'll arrive home in a few weeks' time to a letter on the door. Like your education has been terminated at this institution.
Speaker 5:I think on that note.
Speaker 2:And Luis will have a message from his workforce saying his employment has been terminated as well.
Speaker 5:So, with all this, are there any final end comments you wish to make that aren't about Nando's or Japanese ritual.
Speaker 4:I'm being culturally insensitive.
Speaker 1:I still don't know. I have to decide when I finish the PhD, we'll see what will happen. Okay, so to know more about you, any social media? Or, if you don't have social media, any academic pages, anything?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can click the link in my bio, for I'm I am joking. 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? What's better my brain or my body? Who knows? You can actually really find me on Twitter. You know what's better my brain or my body? Who knows? Okay, you can actually really find me on Twitter. Oh, now it's X, isn't it? I don't really use it that much.
Speaker 1:X, x, X, x, x X X.
Speaker 2:Careful with those Xs. Yeah, it's H-N-B-O-H-U-N. H-n Bohan, which is my name, obviously. So yeah, you can find me on. I don't really use it that often. That's pretty much what you can find me on, yeah, so good luck, or don't bother, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 5:I'm going to hand that over to.
Speaker 4:Ria, I can't quite follow that, absolutely.
Speaker 5:I'm still sorry. I'm going to hand that over to Maria. I can't quite follow that. I'm still sorry. I'm still processing.
Speaker 3:Absolutely no social media whatsoever.
Speaker 2:That's the way to go.
Speaker 1:Where can we, where can the listeners follow you? I?
Speaker 3:do have an academia page.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I suppose.
Speaker 3:That wasn't the bio you were talking about. I don't have LinkedIn nothing I try to fly under that but I suppose they could contact me via the university. 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.
Speaker 2:You're just a number in a system, that's absolutely it.
Speaker 5:I thought you were trying to remember the catalogue reference from this morning.
Speaker 3:Oh no, that's 1885,0316.01.
Speaker 2:Wow, what was that? And the viewer can look that up at their own pleasure. Considerable pleasure. And what catalogue? British Museum? Look that number up. British Museum catalogue.
Speaker 4:I was going to say do we want to just give the study group Twitter that?
Speaker 1:would be great. Yes, yes, no, the better.
Speaker 2:For context, we all know each other because we set up a study group. We probably should have said this at the very beginning. And it's HSGW underscore C-O-N on Twitter it's HSGW con. So yeah, Luis will put that in the description. Yeah, the link in the bio.
Speaker 5:I was going to say I suspect otherwise you can find most of it at our respective academia pages. Do we all have pages on academia? 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.
Speaker 2:Except when we force him to retweet stuff about the conference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but that only happens once a year, or.
Speaker 2:Facebook? Absolutely no way ever.
Speaker 5:I'm not handing out my Facebook or my Instagram. Thank you, yeah.
Speaker 4:No, I suggested the Hellenistic group because I also don't have much social media and my Twitter would just be Formula One stuff. I do not want to get involved in any kind of discourse in Formula One, let alone academic discourse.
Speaker 1:But we do have a Discord page, by the way, which you can share or not.
Speaker 3:That's our organising one, because also there's people who email us addresses on there's data protection issues. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5:I think for the sake of your, Seriously professionally, for the sake of your listeners, find most of us on academia.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Academia, or perhaps ResearchGate I don't know, Does Alfie have a? Page.
Speaker 1:So, with all this amazing interview and well, we we were literally. We were literally talking about so many things.
Speaker 5:Heckling, alexander and with all this, is that gonna be the name of the episode? We'll see it should be.
Speaker 1: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. Thank you. Thank you, Luis. I think that all the listeners will be filled with such knowledge about the ancient world and how they for the next generations. How can we see what we're studying and the ancient world in general in a doubling way?
Speaker 1:as Paul Cosme says, yeah, yeah, the dragon man and this is so important and that's for the PhD. 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. But you're only turning into a seven-headed monster if you want to. 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. 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. 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, do live your life as well. Life is for living it, so and that's basically it.
Speaker 1: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. I look forward to see the final product. Yeah, maybe. Thank you very much and thank you until next time. Then I'll see you again and I look forward to see the final product.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe part two again. Thank you very much, thank you. Until next time then.
Speaker 5:Thank you, and thank you to everybody for listening as well, yes, and thank you to everybody for tuning in. 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. This might have to be like four parts maybe or something Right.
Speaker 1:Bye now, thank you. And this was the late night interview with Karis, henry, maria and Troy. Thank you all for having the want to pursue the doctoral degree. This conversation will be launched on the first days of June, and so stay tuned for the soundbite I shall publish on Instagram Soon. 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.
Speaker 1:I am continuing to be focused on writing new chapter drafts for my thesis nevertheless. Yet I will dedicate the weekend to write new content for the running series of the PhD Iceberg Explained to share with you. 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. To keep checking those and previous sessions, including these two late night talks. 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. 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. Thank you all for tuning in. It has been a pleasure, thank you.
