Unless You Are A Scholar Of Middle Eastern Antiquity
The mere mention of 'Ctesiphon' won't mean much to you, which is to your loss and my advantage as I can boast boast boast about how I know exactly what it is. Art!
ART!
O Dog Buns, the wretch has acquired another crush after Mara Corday and young Angela Lansbury. Allow me to apply a punitive Tazer broadside -
<sounds of sizzling and smells of cooking>
Let's try that again. Art!
With puny humans for scale
Impressive, nicht wahr? This edifice was constructed about 500 BC, just to give you an architectural heads-up, when the greatest achievement in This Sceptred Isle would have been a two-storey house. What you are looking at here is the ruined Sassanid palace of Taq Kisra, situated to the south-east of another city with a Biblical presence: Baghdad. What you see here is commonly known as the "Arch Of Ctesiphon", which is in fact the partial remnant of a whole hall that extended further inwards.
Why do I mention this? Well, one reason is that armies have recently fought over the territory described by classical scholars of two and a half thousand years ago, and no, I don't mean Gulf War One or Two. Pshaw! You're thinking with far too little imagination. Art!
Enter General Charles Townshend. There is not space enough in this blog entry nor another ten to fill in the details of this chap. Let it just be said that he commanded a British and Commonwealth army in 1915 that advanced to almost the suburbs of Baghdad, against the Turkish Ottoman opposition. They came hideously unstuck at -
Ctesiphon. There was a pitched battle there and Townshend's forces fell back, with him blaming everyone but himself for the reverse. The thing was, he was at the end of a very long and tenuous supply chain, where there were no railways for strategic supply and logistics had to be moved via waterway, whereas the Turks had internal lines of communication thanks to railways, which were far more flexible than rivers.
There then followed the Siege Of Kut, another battle you've probably never heard of, which ended in February 1916 with the surrender of all the forces that had managed to retreat from Ctesiphon. The Arch was seen by both sides as a kind of culmination point, because if you managed to get past it then you were going to succeed; and if you failed to pass it, then you had only stalemate at best or retreat to look forward to. Art!
Looking a bit "Ozymandias" there, matey*
And thus we have the campaign in Mesopotamia, 'Between The Waters', which was fought between the Ottoman Turks (who put up a very doughty fight) and the British and Commonwealth, especially India & Egypt. We shall definitely come back to this, because in this theatre water was worth more than gold, whereas, in Flanders ...
Don't worry, we will come back to this topic. O yes Elliot Ness.
From Rubble To Ruble
I mean, the Ctesiphon Arch isn't in the prime of health, is it? Neither, so it would seem, is that Ruffian currency, the ruble. Or, as it used to be transcribed, the 'rouble'.
You may dimly remember that back in 2022 the Ruffians carried out a 'Special Idiotic Operation' against Ukraine, which led to a variety of financial sanctions being levied against them. Art!
<LOUD SLAPPING NOISE>
There were several reasons why the Ruffian economy didn't roll over and die, and no, rigor mortis of the brain was not one of them. For one, the Ruffian Ministry of Finance immediately raised interest rates to try and rein in the economy, and then shortly afterwards had to drop the interest rates, as otherwise it would have been Brick Wall Meet Ruffian Economy. Art!
If you owned Ruffian assets, you couldn't simply sell them willy-nilly, you had to pay a premium in rubles. If you had foreign assets then you needed to pay to release them. Any trades needed to be done in rubles. Rubles rubles rubles. Quite the most overarching measure of all was expending FOREX in order to purchase rubles, thus artificially propping-up the ruble and exchange rate.
The ruble is now down to ₽81.66 to the dollar, from ₽70 a couple of weeks ago. This is very bad news for your average citizen of Orcville, who will soon have to make the decision: rent or food? Already there are queues at banks trying to change the rubble for Euros or Yen or even <gasp shudder shock horror> Dollars.
"The Sea Of Sand"
Our galactic Gallifreyan gadfly, the Doctor, is busy plotting on how to further the revolting Farmers on their homeworld in order to best the aristocratic party.
With startling clarity a phrase
from Sorbusa came back to the Doctor.
Target World Fourteen – and that gave him an idea.
‘What
we need is a Torjan Horse. None of you
are familiar with that concept?’
Imgelissa
crossed both hands over his proboscis.
‘We
are Farmers, Thedoctor, not Warriors.
Conflict is novel to us.’
‘Good! Let’s hope it stays that way.’
From the sentry post of Lord
Url’s keep, the warning went out that an Element Sieve was approaching, being
dragged by two dozen Farmers, escorted by Warriors.
The
garrison at Lord Url’s keep had been reduced due to the escort sent to obvserve
matters at the large-scale transmat.
They had been warned by the survivors of the escort that Lord Url was
missing, had not been seen for hours, and that Farmers – yes, Farmers! – were
attacking at the trans-mat platform.
The
huge metal artefact was dragged into the inner keep, scraping over the granite
flooring – which is when the escorting Warriors turned on the keep’s garrison,
as did the towing Farmers.
Not
only that, the service and retrieval hatches on the Element Sieve fell open,
and more Farmers stormed out. Within
half an hour the keep had fallen to the fifty attackers.
The
Doctor was allowed out of the Element Sieve when the fighting finished, to be
led deeper within the castle and to Lord Url’s own private trans-mat.
Aha, a Trojan Sled!
Roe Roe Roe Your Boat
For are we not talking about legendary professor of ancient and medieval history Roel <NAME TOO COMPLICATED>? Why yes we are, and here we are looking at - Art!
Roel immediately pours cold water onto the concept of 'berserker' warriors, as there is absolutely no contemporary evidence that they ever existed, and all the stories come from centuries later. Art!
Sorry, ladies, naked warriors with big swords WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS! just didn't happen. Once these impolite people get into the pallisaded village - Art!
They're on their own, with no shields, no lances, no bows & arrows - there would have been a massacre and it wouldn't have been the villagers. Art!
ROEL SITS IN JUDGEMENT!
AND IT'S NOT GOOD!
Ah Yes. Barren Desert Wasteland Kiwiland
You know, the Land Of The Polite Australians, all baking ochre earth under an incessant sun, where you can die from sunstrokeatidness in 30 minutes if you're not wearing your hat, shirt, shorts, boots and sunscreen. Art!
* I know, I know, poetry and Percy Shelley. It seemed appropriate, somehow. Don't hate me too much.
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