IS's new spring-summer campaign is underway in Iraq. May 2nd month attacks were up. For more details please visit my blog: Musings On Iraq. Thank you.
Reminder Reddit is not letting my make posts with a link to my blog right now.
Preview: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=37A2SHHJCAKLPBPY9U302W5UVPKKJM
TO: https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/A1165NJPZ7NRHY
Bubbles, but not too bad
ACs
It's a little odd that the Israelites were in fact indigenous to the the Southern Levant, but the Jews, their descendants, decided to place their origin myth in another region. I can't really think of many other origin myths that do this. I have to assume that since the story of Abraham was created around the time of the Babylonian Captivity, that had something to do with it?
I know that when the arabs took much of the Byzantine empire under The early Rashidun Caliphs, particularly the Levant and Egypt, there were numerous Greek communities present there. Where exactly did they go? To my knowledge they seem to disappear from the records and are never talked about again. And I know that when it comes to Egypt at least their genetic contribution is very low or absent from modern Egyptians, so where did they go? Did they all flee to Constantinople? Or did they in fact stay, and were the same communities who would end up being expelled in after 1952?
As a true noob, my interest in Roman / Byzantine history is largely based off Wikipedia. Supposedly the entire legionary structure gradually morphed into stratiotai [comitatenses, field army troops] and akritai [limitanei, border army troops] by the time Justinian I was in power. But V Macedonica was mentioned in Egyptian manuscripts well into the 7th century A.D., and III Cyrenaica was supposedly destroyed fighting in the Levant in 630. What happened to the others? Did they effectively "distintegrate" into their more flexible subunits to counter this new Eastern threat [as the general Byzantine military did during the 7th century] and transformed into tagmatic units during the Empire's hellenisation?
