Thread w/excerpts from Gaza: A History (2014) by Filiu. Was curious how pre-1967 Egyptian rule compared to Jordan's West-Bank (spoiler: far worse) or how it fared under Israel before the cordon sanitaire after Hamas took over. Author clearly pro-🇵🇸 but his tone is dispassionate. Antique points of interest. Soft local soil always lent to siege tunnels. Post-Alexander Gaza was totally Hellenised, with negligible✡️, so☦️came quite late. Saint Porphyry deviously had persecution of pagans authorised by "petitioning" the tolerant Emperor Arcadius' infant son.

Thread on communal tensions & the Moulid festivals of Egypt, many of which have distant Shia origins or incorporate Coptic saints. Unsurprisingly Islamists have attempted to disrupt or shut them down. Excerpts from JR Bradley's 2012 "Inside Egypt".

Moulids are mostly celebrations of Muslim saints, though Christian & even (until 1948) Jewish ones also appeared. Surviving hidden Egyptian Sufi traditions. Given Egypt's teeming population & density, some Moulid festivals are bigger in terms of attendees than the Haj itself.

Thread on Ottoman Civilisation & the Janissary system w/excerpts by Toynbee. Citing primary sources of contemporary European visitors, who were so impressed they urged adoption of similar practices. In many ways, the institution of "slave-soldiery" was meritocracy at its purest. Opening remarks on ephemeral nature of nomad-empires, citing Al-Ghazali. Examples such as the Avars inadvertently teaching their formerly passive Slav subjects how to fight, sowing their own overthrow/assimilation. Nomad-origin Mongol & Parthian states exceptional in longevity.

Exerpt thread of "Likud's Leaders". As an originally Hebrew book, its about internal Israel conflicts. Still, interesting history on the transformation the Likud party brought after its 1977 victory, after spending decades on the extremist fringes of Israeli society. /🧵 The uniting narrative of what would become Likud.
Only months after Israel's declared independence, its 1st (Mapai, socialist) leader Ben-Gurion, tried to have his chief rival Begin killed, as he arrived by boat. This was a one-time attempt, only enabled the chaos of the 1948.

Thread w/excerpts of "Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena".
Same tone on 🇺🇸-🇦🇺 relations as former PM Malcolm Fraser's "Dangerous Allies". Found this far better on specific incidents & laws, many pathetically abject or darkly amusing, depending on your POV. Author makes clear from the start that 🇦🇺 is not some poor exploited US colony: its leaders are enthusiastic participants in the 🇺🇸 Empire.
Imperial identity instrinsic to Australia. Aus-army rejected superior 🇨🇦rifles in favour of full inter-operability with 🇬🇧guns during WW1.

Since I've read books on the Basques & Welsh already, decided to read an introduction on the only other culturo-linguistic survival from the Western Roman Empire, the Berbers. This book passes over Antiquity in a few paragraphs, focuses on post-Islamic 🇲🇦history. Exerpt🧵.

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1919175916472631475

Furthest Roman expedition into the Atlas. Its leader, G.Suetonius Paulinus, later defeated Boudica's revolt in Britain.
Only ancient texts concerning Berbers (Numidia, now🇩🇿) is Sallust's Jugurthine War & scraps in Livy/Polybius, but they contain almost no ethnographic info.

Thread answering whether the Ancient Macedonians were Greeks. The short answer is no. Macedonians would eventually merge with Greeks, in a process taking centuries.
But at the time of Alexander, no Greek thought of them as co-ethnics, & the average Macedonian wasn't keen either. On the question of Macedonian language vs dialect, the technical specifics remain unanswerable due to lack of evidence. However, even if that did exist, Badian points out this lense can be highly misleading: few would guess Ashkenazi Jews spoke Low-German based on other factors.

Started reading. Quite excited to get going on this. Berezovsky's unstoppable personal drive & his thoughts on the *reality* of how the American government is run.

Thread on the multinational origins & fall of the interwar 2nd Polish state.
Excerpts from Lukowski's "Brief History of 🇵🇱" - nothing specialist. but discussion of widely divergent strategies to recreate 🇵🇱, each with very different envisioned alliances were most interesting.🧵

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1868288699223642539

The biggest movement for 🇵🇱 independence, the National Democrats, had very different ideas from Piłsudski's faction that won out after WW1.
The ND founder, Dmowski 1st aimed at autonomy under 🇷🇺. He saw 🇩🇪as the real threat to Polish culture. He was a hard-right Social Darwinist.

Thread w/excerpts of "The Sociology of the Yoruba".
One of 3 main nations of Nigeria, with Hausa & Igbo.
Also the overwhelming original ethnicity of most USian slaves, or what @tariqnasheed dubs "Foundational Black Americans". I prefer Hakan's term "Afro-Saxon" as more precise. Pre-colonial culturo-political divisions of the Yoruba. Like the Greeks or Sumerians, they were divide into warring city-states, but acknowledged their unity in language and religion.
Author (1970) notes older people identified with their local tribe/dialect over being Yoruba.

Thread w/excerpts of How Long Will South Africa Survive (1982).
Much new info here to me; as a millennial, how apartheid SA worked as a state is a blank. Parallels with🇮🇱 are constant, though author never draws them. SA however, couldn't rely on a powerful lobby or diaspora. Author opens with the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, contends SA government very narrowly missed a violent overthrow, just as the Tsarist Russia barely dodged the abortive 1905 Revolution.
Both states had experienced breakneck economic growth alongside boiling social tension.

Thread w/excerpts of Toynbee on the lost Minoan Civilisation, which had been discovered only 33 years prior in 1900.
Most curious are speculations on possible subterranean influence on Ancient Greek religion. The Minoan culture & language (undeciphered) have no known relatives.🧵
Greek authors had acknowledged from earliest times there had been on their lands an earlier Civilisation than their own, which they had since taken over. But beyond their existence, nothing was known of these "Pelasgians" or "Trojans".
Völkerwanderung means "mass migration".

First of threads on the Hellenisation of Ancient Anatolia.
A millenium-long process that saw its transformation from an unruly province of the Persian Empire, to the main surviving bulwark of Greek culture by the early Middle-Ages.
Summarising the pre-Hellenistic period here.🧵 There are very few good sources on Anatolian between the Hittite civilisation's collapse & Persian conquest.
Known for certain is its unusual linguistic diversity (even by ancient standards) with at least 2 non-Aryan, non-Semitic language families. Because fractured geography.

Thread w/excerpts of Spencer & Gillen's "Native Tribes of Central Australia" (1899). One of the latest anthropological accounts of Aboriginal societies in a relatively 'pristine' state, though early comments in the book say their isolation wouldn't last much longer.🧵 Authors state urgency of their mission, having scant remaining time to describe Aboriginal social organisation & beliefs, already rapidly going extinct at the time of writing. Book mostly focuses on the Arunda (Arendte, spellings vary) still one of the most numerous groups today.

Thread on the lost Greco-Roman historians.
Hopefully again relevant, with the decipherment of burnt & damaged scrolls from Herculaneum.
Naturally we can only speak of Donald Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" -histories we know only via reference or quotation by other ancient texts.🧵
Though we can only guess at the true number, roughly between 80-95% of all Greco-Roman literature has been lost.
You can get a vague sense of this from (e.g.) Plutarch, Athenaios or Polybios, attacking, praising & quoting dozens of authors, who now lack 1 line of surviving text.

Short thread on life of the Tasmanian Aborigines prior to European arrival - the most isolated & primitive human society that has ever existed.
Excerpts from Edgerton's "Sick Societies".
Photos from my own last holiday there.🧵
Tasmania is a cool temperate, mountainous & windyswept island, roughly the size of a united Ireland.
Humans crossed the landbridge to Tasmania from mainland Australia during the Ice Age, at least 20K years ago. From 10K BC that connection was flooded, & they were totally alone.

Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak's "Jewish History, Jewish Religion".
Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945.
For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.🧵 A key point to understanding this book:
Shahak's descriptions are mostly about traditional (not liberal/reform) Jewish religious communities, who were the only kind of self-identifying Jews that existed before the 1800s.
They were hermetic enclaves of totalitarian theocracies.

Thread on Alexander's invasion of the Persian Empire from the Iranian POV.
In particular, how its last Emperor, Darius III, responded to the crisis. Post-conquest Iranian resistance was also far more widespread than recognised.
Excerpts from E. Badian's paper "Conspiracies".🧵

Darius III (hence just Darius) won the throne of the world's largest yet-known Empire as a usurper, from fairly obscure origins.
He was of royal blood -alongside 100s of fellow contenders. Murderous Ottoman succession struggles derived from the harem have an ancient pedigree.

Earliest human remains (9000 BC) yet found in Nigeria are comparatively extremely recent compared to China, MENA or Europe whose earliest homo sapiens date between 100K to 33K BC.
But this may be simply due to a lack of investigation - the Stone Age isn't an area I know about.
With a lack of any written records, the process of state formation in the Nigeria region remains murky.
Whilst early farming villages were organised in a relatively "democratic" manner, major decisions & "foreign relations" were conducted by martial Secret Societies.

Thread w/excerpts from Zubok's "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union".
The author believe's the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable, & US pressure had little to do with it. Rereading this, I'm still astounded by Gorbachev's naivety & hubris - unshaken even to the very end.🧵 A key to understanding Gorbachev, ignored by both Western & Russian historiography: "He was the last true Leninist believer".
Gorbachev believed in the myth (for schoolchildren) of Lenin as a kindly man, only forced to rule through terror by extreme circumstances. As an adult.

Thread w/excerpts of "Disorderly Liberty".
Anyone claiming "real Libertarianism🐍has never been tried" has never heard of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
For over a century, its government, by design, atrophied to almost nothing, until it was extinguished by outsiders.🧵 Background up the the 18th Century.
Despite the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's [hence PLC] compound name & bewildering ethnic diversity, by the 1600s PLC elite was entirely Polish in culture & speech.
Russians/Ukrainians were by far the 2nd largest group, mostly downtrodden.