Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

228 III. Судан и его соседи the choice was obvious: among my works, a paper on the Sudanese swords- kaskara suited the best. A draft of this paper had emerged long ago — in relation to an innovative conference jointly held at the State Hermitage Museum and the Institute of the History of Material Culture in St Petersburg in September 1998: “Military Archaeology: Weaponry and Warfare in a Historical Perspective”. The major goal of the conference was linking together technological, tactical and social dimensions of weaponry. Usually, the specialists in the weaponry and warfare pay only a lip service to the social dimension of the military questions. Similarly, general historians usually do not pay attention to themilitarymatters, though the latter had direct impact on the political systems and social structure of the society — and vice versa. When the idea of the conference was conceived by Prof Anatoliy Kirpichnikov and Prof VadimMasson in 1997, Prof Kirpichnikov con- tacted me through Natalya Alexeeva, my former supervisor in Archaeo­ logy, so as I would invite my British and other western colleagues in the field of theMilitaryHistory (at that time, I held a fellowship of the Royal Asiatic Society of Scotland, doing research in a related field at the Edin- burgh University). The idea was supported by a number of prominent scholars in the field, including Dr David Nicolle, a major British expert in theMiddle Eastern weaponry, and Prof JohnMason Smith (Jr.) from US, a major specialist on Mongol warfare. At that moment we under- stood this international forum as a starting point to promoting Military Archaeology as a specific historical discipline with its own recognized field of study, with a view to make St Petersburg conference a recurrent event. I also managed to attract attention of the Brill publishers, so they were keen to publish proceedings of the conference. Unfortunately, the conference coincided with the start of acute economic crisis (“default”) in Russia, which prevented the plans of future conferences from being brought to life at that period. Moreover, the proceedings I have been preparing, have not also been completed by various financial reasons. In fact, it was my major failure in the editing of academic volumes. One of the “casualties” was my own paper on the Sudanese swords. 1 1 A short version of the paper has been published prior to the beginning of the above-mentioned conference: Bell Herman, Alexander Matveev. ACase of Survival of EarlyMedieval Straight Swords: “ Kaskara ” Broadswords