#ancient-warfare

#ancient-warfare

Seven were the strings of the lyre (unless there happened to be eight or nine), seven were the gates of Thebes, and seven were the "wandering stars" in the night sky (if you count the sun and moon). The identity of the wonders was less important than the length of their list, and indeed, additions and changes were proposed since the beginning.

"To me, it feels like 80% of the job of an infantryman is exactly the same and probably exactly the same as it was in a Napoleonic era," he said. "You need to be fit. You need to be strong and robust. You need to be able to survive in the field. You need to be able to dig a hole."

The Nizaris had survived in part because of their position on a warring frontier. They had been irritating but, as a buffer state against the Franks, they fulfilled a useful function for their much bigger Sunni neighbours. Now even that usefulness was gone. As the Franks were forced back to their last enclaves on the coast, the Assassins looked increasingly anomalous - a Shi'ite nuisance in the midst of victorious Sunni orthodoxy.

An ancient Egyptian papyrus held by the British Museum has been cited as possible evidence supporting some of the Bible's most controversial claims about giants. The 3,300-year-old document, known as Anastasi I, has been in the museum's collection since 1839 and has recently resurfaced on the Associates for Biblical Research, renewing interest in its possible links to biblical accounts. The papyrus describes encounters with the Shosu people, said to stand 'four cubits or five cubits' tall, up to eight feet in height.

While the bone was worn and poorly preserved, archaeologists managed to identify its origin by comparing it with modern elephant and mammoth bones. Despite there not being enough DNA to confirm the exact species, the researchers were able to carbon date a tiny sample of the bone. This places the elephant's death between the late fourth and early third centuries BC - right in the middle of the Second Punic War.