North To Northumbria

AM visiting the Durham town of Darlington.

In the parish churchyard is a Boer War memorial, dedicated in 1905 by Earl Roberts, a winner of the Victoria Cross who later led the British army in South Africa, where his son died while winning a posthumous VC.

The gun's bayonet is missing - broken off sometime in the 1950s by children swinging on it

THIS MEMORIAL WAS ERECTED BY 5,576 SUBSCRIBERS AS A TRIBUTE

TO THE MEMORY OF THE BRAVE MEN OF DARLINGTON WHO VOLUNTEERED

AND SERVED THE EMPIRE IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 1899 - 1902
There are 100 names on the memorial, of whom 11 died on service.
The church is dedicated to St Cuthbert, who was born in 634 in Dunbar, which was then part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, but is now part of Scotland.
He may have been a soldier before taking monastic orders, rising to become bishop of Lindisfarne in 684, dying three years later.
He seems to have led a particularly frugal existence, enjoying the life of a hermit or traveling preacher.

The church dates back to the early 1100s, but has been much-modified over the centuries, including by adding a spire in the 1300s

The sundial looks a modern addition

The chimney was a vent for Victorian boilers installed in church cellars

Great

AM making my annual visit to Olomouc, which was an important settlement - possibly the capital - of the Greater Moravian Empire in the late 800s and early 900s.

Its walls defied Mongols and Hungarians, but proved less successful at stopping Swedes and Prussians.

Much of the defences still exist, partly because the town's predominantly German-speaking population kept the walls to ensure the city's population did not become dominated by Slavs.

The following photos are all from a short section of the walls near Olomouc's botanical garden.

Big Disappointment

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S Atlas Of The Bible, contrary to my expectations, proved a huge let-down.

The pithy summaries of key biblical stories are OK, but the maps are next-to-useless, and in many cases downright inaccurate.

Instead of showing the lay of the land when the events took place, the maps show modern coastlines and routes of rivers, etc.

In other words, any modern atlas could have done as well, and probably would be better, as the detail on the National Geographic maps is pretty sparse. 

The magazine is also liberally illustrated with photos of old paintings, which give a completely misleading impression of what life was like in biblical times, eg depicting men in Renaissance armour and clothing. 

Basically I feel as though I have been tricked into buying a cheaply produced cut-and-paste job.

I shall certainly be much more wary about purchasing future National Geographic publications.

Mapping The Bible

I FLY quite a lot - most months, in fact - but at airports I almost always find time to browse bookshops and similar.

Yesterday, flying from Stansted to Prague, I spotted what should prove useful for my long-term biblical-battles project.

National Geographic's Atlas Of The Bible includes 17 maps and what look to be pithily entertaining summaries of the stories connected with them

I have yet to start reading the magazine, but feel sure I will find it £9.99 well spent.

Remembering

NOT many places in Britain still have prominent war memorials commemorating the country's battles against the Boers of South Africa.

But I am currently visiting Hull, East Yorkshire, where such a memorial exists, and is more prominently sited than a nearby cenotaph marking the two world wars.

The South African memorial, with the cenotaph behind

The plaque bears the words: Erected by public subscription to the memory of the men of Hull who lost their lives during the South African War 1899, 1900, 1901 & 1902.

Several Careful Owners

DURING a visit to North Macedonia I was able to walk the 12 miles or so around Lake Ohrid from my hotel near Kalishta monastery to a castle named after Bulgarian Tsar Samuel.

He ruled from 997 to 1014, much of his reign taken up with warfare against the Byzantine Empire.

Samuel moved the Bulgarian capital to the town of Ohrid, building what is now known as Samuel's Fortress on the site of previous fortifications believed to date back to Phillip II of Macedon, ie some 1,300+ years earlier.

Approaching through Ohrid's Muslim quarter

Outside the walls

Imposing tower

Inside the castle, parts of which have been reconstructed

Another inside view, with Lake Ohrid in the background

Looking through the battlements

Many views help the imagination run riot

Even on a cloudy day, the area is beautiful

Ohrid changed hands many times over the centuries, the city's conquerors including Byzantines, Normans, Serbs, Albanians and Turks.

But the castle does not seem to have had an equally exciting history, at least as far as I can discover.

Slingshot Issue 352

THE May/June edition of Slingshot, the journal of the Society Of Ancients, includes the first of a promised series of 50th anniversary refights of Charles Grant's well-known refights of famous ancient battles, starting with Marathon.

Slingshot ... always an interesting read

Brilliant Book

EVERY so often one comes across a gem of a book that is difficult to put down and is worth every penny of its relatively high price.

Lester Grabbe's Ancient Israel: What Do We Know And How Do We Know It? is very much in that category, at least as far as I am concerned.

Rather than being a history of Bronze Age Hebrews, it is a book setting out the various arguments that need to be addressed by anyone writing such a history.

Grabbe wanted to call the book Prolegomena To A History Of Israel, and that gives some idea of his learning, which at times he does not wear lightly, and of his intentions.

Prolegomena is the plural of prolegomenon, which is a fancy way of saying introduction or preliminary discussion.

Presumably his publishers, Bloomsbury, put their collective foot down and went for the more catchy title that the book bears.

Ancient Israel - the revised second edition, which I got by post for £27.21 from Books Etc

Grabbe, who was born in America but lectures at Hull University on the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism, comes across as passionate but detached - in other words, someone deeply immersed in his favourite subject, but without an axe to grind.

A long-running debate on the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament, divides many historians into minimalists and maximalists.

[There are extreme fringes on both sides, ie those who reckon the Bible is more-or-less a fairy tale, and those who believe it to be the direct word of God.]

Grabbe's take on this debate is to insist on the primacy of primary sources, the main one for him being archaeology.

He regards the Hebrew Bible as a secondary source and, though I doubt he would like the label, is very much a minimalist when it comes to what the Bible has to say about kings David and Solomon, and to what it has to say about what occurred before them.

But from the time of Omri, who almost 3,000 years ago ruled the northern kingdom of Israel, which the Assyrians referred to as the House of Omri, Grabbe leans much more to the maximalist side.

This is not really the place to give my take on the debate, but I found Grabbe's discussion of the points fascinating, even when I was reluctant to accept his conclusions.

Grabbe's book is one I look forward to continually dipping back into, and can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in ancient history, and especially anyone with an interest in biblical times.

But it certainly helps to have read the Old Testament, and so have some idea of the characters at the centre of the debate.

A Little German History

AM visiting Bad Herrenalb, a spa town in the northern Black Forest in what is now Baden-Württemberg.

It grew up around a Cistercian monastery, founded in the mid-1100s on a bank of the River Alb, a tributary of the Rhine.

Ruins of the church of the Cistercian monastery, around which Bad Herrenalb developed 

The church was badly damaged in the Peasants' War in 1525 and again by Swedish troops in the 30 Years War in 1642.

Notice anything strange about the rear view (below) of Bad Herrenalb's Cistercian ruins?

Don't worry about the timber-framed building on the left - concentrate on the doorway in the ruins

In this close-up a pine tree can be seen growing out of the arch above the entrance

The tree started growing about 200 years ago, with its roots forcing their way down through the wall to take nutrients from the underlying soil.

Another view of the pine

Today Bad Herrenalb's 8,000+ population lives less than 20 miles from the French border.

View from my hotel balcony

In about 1840 a sanatorium, based on cold-water therapy, was founded in what was then a village, the settlement's upgrade to town status coming in 1887.

A well that was bored down 600 metres in 1964 reached a thermal spring, which led to the building of thermal baths and the granting of the prefix Bad (Spa) to Herrenalb in 1971.

Bad Herrenalb's memorial to the two world wars is in the centre of town, near the Cistercian ruins.

The central plinth has a quotation, in German, from John's Gospel, chapter 15, verse 13: "No-one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his brother"

The 1914-18 plinth has the names of people who died in Russia, Poland (an interesting inclusion since Poland did not exist as a country from 1795 until after WW1), France (easily the commonest place of death), Germany, Belgium and "Missing"

As is true with most countries, the 1939-45 plinth contains many more names, and over a wider geographical spread: Russia (easily the commonest place of death), Romania, Poland, Finland, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Tunisia and "Missing" 

More Auxilia

I HAVE painted two more units of 10mm Hebrew auxilia.

Mostly Newline Designs, but with some Magister Militum