"City, sister, silver" by Jachym Topol
"The Anchor book of modern Arabic fiction", edited by Denys Johnson-Davies
"Crusader Castles and Modern Histories" by Ronnie Ellenblum
Sunday, February 24, 2008
iron bridge?
So I was reading about this battle, called the Battle of Iron Bridge, where the Byzantines lost Antioch and its area to the Muslims, in the 7th century. Huh? A bridge made out of iron in the 600's? The first bridge made completely out of iron was built in England in the late 18th century, at the same time people in this country were writing Declarations and crossing Delawares. So that name doesn't make much sense.
There were some pretty impressive feats of ironworking in antiquity. The Iron Pillar of Delhi was put up in the late 3rd/early 4th century. It's this big column made out of almost almost pure iron, and it's still around. Hasn't rusted away or anything. Yeah, these days we've got pillars of iron every which where, but that was pretty impressive back then. And it's even more impressive that the pillar is still around and intact about 1600 years later.
But a bridge, made out of iron, even in the very very important city of Antioch, just ain't possible. So I tried to do a little internet research. The Wikipedia article on the battle says it was a bridge of iron. Most every other place seems to just say "the iron bridge". I found one site that claimed that "Iron Bridge", in the Latin, pons ferrum, was a Crusader garbling of some kind of local toponym. But the battle happened hundreds of years before any Crusader was in the area. I even found one place that said there were towers of iron in the area. Which just raises even more questions.
So, iron bridge? Huh? The Internet isn't a great place for doing investigations about stuff like this, so I'm going to go look for a book at the library that might help, sometime this week. Hopefully I'll find some explanation. It seems most likely to me that it was just a really, really strong bridge that was called pons ferrum or something like that just because it was a solid and sturdy as iron. Like "man of iron loyalty". It's probably that. We'll see.
There were some pretty impressive feats of ironworking in antiquity. The Iron Pillar of Delhi was put up in the late 3rd/early 4th century. It's this big column made out of almost almost pure iron, and it's still around. Hasn't rusted away or anything. Yeah, these days we've got pillars of iron every which where, but that was pretty impressive back then. And it's even more impressive that the pillar is still around and intact about 1600 years later.
But a bridge, made out of iron, even in the very very important city of Antioch, just ain't possible. So I tried to do a little internet research. The Wikipedia article on the battle says it was a bridge of iron. Most every other place seems to just say "the iron bridge". I found one site that claimed that "Iron Bridge", in the Latin, pons ferrum, was a Crusader garbling of some kind of local toponym. But the battle happened hundreds of years before any Crusader was in the area. I even found one place that said there were towers of iron in the area. Which just raises even more questions.
So, iron bridge? Huh? The Internet isn't a great place for doing investigations about stuff like this, so I'm going to go look for a book at the library that might help, sometime this week. Hopefully I'll find some explanation. It seems most likely to me that it was just a really, really strong bridge that was called pons ferrum or something like that just because it was a solid and sturdy as iron. Like "man of iron loyalty". It's probably that. We'll see.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)