🧵What we are seeing unfold in Lebanon this week is an attempt to counter a new form of warfare.

It has relevance to both 🇮🇱🇰🇷.

This form emerged as a response to the total dominance of the United States in conventional warfare which became undeniable by the early 1990s. It's hard to understand today just how much of a shock Operation Desert Storm was to military leaders around the world. The US and its allies annihilated one of the world's largest and most battle-experienced militaries in a matter of weeks, at the cost of 225 soldiers KIA.

🧵A brief history of Israel-Lebanon relations: A guide to the curious or ill-informed.

We'll begin this story in 1943. Lebanon has just gained independence after a British invasion two years earlier wrestled the colony away from French control. According to the 1932 census, Lebanon was 53% Christian. This is the last census that has ever been taken in Lebanon's history. Hold that piece of info, we'll come back to it.

After years of reading birth rate discourse on this site, I have developed what could be a universally applicable birthrate theory:

The number of births in a society is primarily correlated with the extent to which a woman can expect motherhood to increase her social status. This holds for modern and ancient societies, societies where women have many rights and where they have few, patriarchal and matriarchal cultures, religious and non-religious, rich and poor.

There's an open "Letter of Solidarity with the People of Palestine" which has been circulating and which many people in my field have signed.

This letter (which was written shortly after the 10/7 attack) says a lot of problematic things, but I want to focus on one paragraph. The contrast here can't be more clear: Claims that the Jewish people have a long history in the land of Israel are a falsification, while the Palestinian claim is true and legitimate.

🧵on the history of hostage-taking in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The short version is that terrorist groups have long ago identified a significant weakness in Israeli society which they can manipulate: its cultural attitude towards hostages. Modern Israeli attitudes towards hostages have their roots in the Talmud, where the rabbis assert that being held captive is a fate worse than death (quoting Jeremiah 15:2).

"Pidyon Shvuyim" or the ransoming of captives is therefore seen as a religious duty of the highest order.

Last week I wrote a 🧵about how both Israel and western observers have misunderstood Hamas' ideology and its goals, leading to poor strategic thinking.

This week, let's talk🧵about how Hamas and its supporters in the west fundamentally misunderstand Israel.

https://twitter.com/cwjones89/status/1718338369858490565

Note: By Hamas supporters in the west, I do not mean people who are calling for a ceasefire or who support a two-state solution.

I mean those who are openly calling for a Hamas victory, praising the 10/7 massacre as a glorious act of resistance, calling for a mass uprising etc.

Because the bad takes continue to proliferate, I'm making another 🧵. This time we'll be looking at the history, origins, and goals of Hamas.

Where did Hamas come from and what do they want?

To understand the origins of Hamas, we need to go back to Ismailia, Egypt in 1928. It was here that an Egyptian imam named Hassan al-Banna and six workers of the Suez Canal company founded a movement they called the Muslim Brotherhood.

Alright, get in guys, it's time for a 🧵on war crimes and how to identify them.

We're going to look at two incidents which happened less than one month apart in 1944 through the lens of just war theory. INCIDENT #1

On June 10, 1944, the 1st Battalion, 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" was moving north from the south of France to counter the Allied landings at Normandy four days earlier.

As the extent of the massacre at the Music Festival of Peace becomes apparent, lots of analysts seem to have trouble understanding the decision by Hamas to embrace ISIS-style tactics.

I think there's a very clear brutal calculus going on here.

https://twitter.com/cwjones89/status/1710859792443678927

From Anwar Sadat up to the present, Israeli-Arab decisions towards normalization has always been a triangular calculation recognizing the unlikelihood of military victory over Israel versus the economic benefits of peace with Israel and improved relations with the USA.

Today I woke up to a picture of a street in Ashkelon that I used to walk down regularly on the front page of CNN, aflame and littered with burned-out cars.

I've been stunned. As a sense-making exercise for myself, here's a brief 🧵with some thoughts on what this means: A great strategic threat to Hamas is that the Sunni Arab countries will choose to set the Palestine issue aside and normalize ties with Israel. This has already happened with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

Finally had a chance to read "Sailing Close to the Wind," Philip Beale's account of the 2008-2010 Phoenicia Expedition, meant to recreate the circumnavigation of Africa by a Phoenician fleet commissioned by Pharaoh Neco II c. 600 BC which is attested only by Herodotus. The ship was based on the Marseille 4 wreck (also called Jules Verne 7), which is a late 6th century wreck found near the Greek colony of Massalia. This caused the expedition to receive some criticism, but Greek and Phoenician shipbuilding probably wasn't that different.

I've got a new article out in the latest NABU based on an idea that came to me while writing a presentation for one of our @ANEE_Helsinki meetings in April (no. 24, p. 56-59): sepoa.fr/nabu-2023/

To where did Merodach-baladan flee in 700 BC? In short, Sennacherib's royal inscriptions of his fourth campaign against Bit-Yakin say that when he invaded Merodach-baladan II loaded his gods into a boat and "fled like a bird to Nagīti-raqqi which is in the middle of the sea."

Why does premodern history matter?

Here's a slide from day 1 of my World History before 1500 class (unabashedly Braudelian PPT).

"Events" are what most people think of when they think of studying history. But how to determine the causes of events? "Trends" ("conjunctures" in Annales terminology) are things which change only slowly over time: family and social structures, technology, religious ideas, the economy, etc.

The "longue durée" refers to things like geography and the environment, which change very, very slowly.

🧵How scholars of imperialism got Assyria wrong.

Assyria was the first territorial empire in world history. It was the first empire to directly rule the majority of its territory rather than rely on vassals.

Yet, its place in world history has largely gone unrecognized. Other empires which came before - Sargon of Akkad, Šamši-Adad, Hammurabi, Mitanni, the Kassites, Hittites, New Kingdom Egypt - primarily ruled over territory through local vassals who paid tribute and otherwise governed their own internal affairs.

New Assyria🧵 this week!

The Afterlife of Nimrod

Last week's thread and my new article argue that the figure of Nimrod in the Bible was a reaction to the role of Sargon of Akkad in Assyrian literary propaganda.

https://twitter.com/cwjones89/status/1620762159201525761?s=20

However, use of Akkadian and the cuneiform script became rare during the Persian Empire. After the time of Alexander the Great its use was mostly confined to temples.

By the 1st century AD, cuneiform died out entirely. No one would read cuneiform again until the 19th century.

Launching some new Global Assyria threads! For this week's 🧵we're going to take a turn in to the world of the Bible.

Who is Nimrod in Genesis 10:8-12? And what does this passage have to do with Assyria? Biblical studies is the field which has most thoroughly explored the influence of the Neo-Assyrian Empire on other cultures, specifically on the people of ancient Israel and Judah which wrote the Bible.

A new Assyrian animal!

In a royal inscription, the Assyrian king Aššur-bel-kala (r. 1075-1074 BC) claims to have received three animals as a gift from the king of Egypt: a paguta rabuta (baboon), a namsuhu (crocodile) and an amel nairi ("river-man").

What's a "river-man"? In a new article (read it here:
sepoa.fr/nabu-2022-3-no…) Werner Nahm argues he has identified the "man of the river" in a fragment of an Assyrian relief (see above).

The inscription shows he is correct, and the flippers circled above are unmistakably a Mediterranean Monk Seal:

OK, I said yesterday that I'd take a brief dive into this this Syria mosaic. So here we go🧵:

First of all, a good rule of thumb is that when you see something blow up in the news like this, it's usually the result of a coordinated media campaign operating behind the scenes. That can be good! Public communication about our field is vital!

But no one takes the time to coordinate a media campaign for no reason. They do it because they want to shape public discourse in some way.

Seven years ago, the Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-As'ad was beheaded by ISIS.

Unfortunately, his death has been eclipsed by a myth which is repeated every year on this date: that he was killed because he refused to reveal the location of hidden antiquities. These claims can be traced back to Maamoun Abdulkarim, the director of the Syrian Arab Republic's Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, who immediately began promoting this claim to western media the same day the news of his execution broke.

For this week's Global Assyria 🧵, I'm going to tell the story of a single object's journey.

These bronze sheets are covered in Assyrian designs. You would think this was found in Nineveh, Nimrud, Aššur, or maybe Syria.

Nope.

It was found at Olympia. Yes, that Olympia, from Greece, of the ancient Olympic games.

The story of how it got there can tell us a lot about how Assyrian culture spread around the Mediterranean.

For today's 🧵 I want to explore how people in the seventh century BC were able to sail the oceans to conduct long distance trade. Phoenicians and Greeks ruled the waves in the seventh century Mediterranean. Where they sailed was something of a mystery to Assyrians.

When Sennacherib marched on Sidon in 701 BC, he says Lulî its king "fled into the midst of the sea and disappeared."