Rindis.com

You’ve probably never heard of this war. There’s a good reason: John Harrel is the only one calling it that. This book covers what is usually considered two wars, neither of which seems to have any sort ‘official’ name. “Nisibis” was the name of a city that Rome had gotten in the previous peace deal with Persia (known as the Peace of Nisibis), and was the focus of much of the campaigning in this period, though not where the most decisive actions happened.

Considering that there is basically nine quiet years on the frontier between the two wars, I’m not sure considering them one war is justified. However, they are of a piece, with Shapur II campaigning to drive the Roman Empire out of Mesopotamia, so no matter how you look at it, studying them together is well justified.

This is a fairly in-depth study of the campaigning and the armies of the period, and definitely recommended for anyone interested in 4th Century military history. Given the state of knowledge of the period, I think he’s a bit too certain on some of his statements, but he does a good job of laying out his thinking for the state of the Roman army, it’s composition, and sources of replenishment. There’s a good number of maps, I found the symbology a little crude, but effective.

My main problem is the use of terminology, which kind of goes all over the place. For most Roman offices, he sticks with the Roman names, in italics as foreign words, which is fine. However, he then insists on translating comes and dux as ‘count’ and ‘duke’. That is where the English words come from, but those forms come with a lot feudal baggage that has nothing to do with the Roman offices, and they shouldn’t be translated like that. Also, oddly, he insists on giving place and unit names italics as foreign words, even though as proper nouns, that not the general practice. It makes for some highly distracted reading in places.

There is also some good discussion of Shapur II’s activities (including during the ‘lull’), and discussion of his strategic skill. Sadly, while he gives a good look at Emperor Julian (and a very good account of the entire retreat from Ctesiphon), he touches on Julian’s experience (and gives an account of his campaigns in Gaul), but doesn’t consider anything analogous to  Goldworthy’s assertion from In the Name of Rome that Julian’s being unused to the scale of operations (in men and distance) was the major Roman failing in 363, though he does touch on a similar idea.

This basically a follow-on to McLaughlin’s study of trade across the Indian Ocean. Despite being almost the same size, it feels like an appendix to it.

Whereas his former book spent a lot of time giving specifics of particular trade goods and where Romans were going to get them and trying to get an idea of the overall Roman budget, this is more of a jumbled history of some of the land area between Rome and China. He starts off with a discussion of what Rome had to get from China, which is interesting.

The obvious part is silk, and he goes into the difference between ‘domesticated’ silk, and ‘wild’ silk, where the latter uses threads from cocoons where the larvae ate it’s way out, cutting the strands. Chinese ‘domesticated’ silk is so good because it has extremely long single strands to work with. At any rate, the lesser version was produced in many places, including the Greek island of Cos. More surprising is the assertion that Chinese steel was superior to what Rome could produce, so high-quality steel was an import. I’d like to see some sort of study of the history of metallurgy to check that. The most surprising part is indications that Rome was exporting silk to China. It wouldn’t have been much, but the Roman world had access to some brilliant dyes that China did not, so dyed silks left the Empire again.

Most of the rest of the book takes a look at various areas and regimes along the northern trade routes that made up the Silk Road(s). He starts with China’s troubles with the Xiongnu (Huns!), which started China exploring to the south of their territory looking for potential allies against them. This eventually gets them to Bactria… but just as the post-Alexandrian nation there is dissolving into fragmented city-states.

There is some look at the Chinese economy, but it’s not nearly as well developed, and most of the book he seems to try to avoid discussing their currency. (“Han revenues: 12,300 million cash”, without saying cash what.) At one point near the end he does define the wushu, which seems to be the currency base for his calculations. He spends some time discussing the differences between revenue collection between the two, which could probably stand to be more in depth, though I’d have to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it to make sense of everything he does have there.

All that is basically the ends of the book. In between, there’s a discussion of various regions in between, their contacts with other areas, trade routes through, but mostly little on the actual trade itself. It makes for a good history of central Asia from ~200 BC to ~100 AD, also with some helpful notes on the geography involved, but it doesn’t integrate them with each other very much except for a time line given in the front. So, it’s nowhere near as useful as The Roman Empire in the Indian Ocean, though it is interesting, and good books on this region are rare.