The Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon (c. 1100) was a communication written by six elders of the Karaite Jewish community of Ascalon, Israel and sent to their coreligionists in Alexandria, Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. It is important to the study of the first crusade because it dates only 9 months after the siege, making it one of the earliest primary sources on the subject (most European accounts date...

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The fourth was: clear orders. He gave his soldiers clear delineations and his commissions were always clear and simple, so that they could be easily followed. Whoever went against them was invariably punished.

The fifth was: strict discipline. Even when his army was on the march, there was never the slightest misdemeanor such as the trampling of the people’s fields, damaging of agricultural...

Archive #2: Old Yue Fei paper - Part I

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Since I posted the Kaifeng Jew Haggadah on my blog for archival purposes, I have decided to do the same for another hard to find document. It is an old and often cited paper on the famous Song Dynasty general Yue Fei (1103-1141). It comes from the following publication:

Wilhelm, Hellmut. "From Myth to Myth: The Case of Yueh Fei's biography," in Confucian Personalities, ed. Arthur Wright and Denis Twitchett.

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The First Crusade was a religio-political war that culminated with the siege of the holy city of Jerusalem in 1099. Most European accounts of this "pilgrimage" (as it was contemporarily called) were written years after the fact, leading to much exaggeration in regard to individual fighting prowess and the number of lives claimed. For instance, one chronicle mentions men...

Note: This brief paper is a companion piece to my earlier paper on the subject.


In my first paper on the Daoist origins of the Yijin Jing (易筋經, Tendon-Changing Classic) qigong manual, I mentioned how the earliest known extent version possible derives from the 17th century. The manual carries a comment which reads: “Stored at the Narrating-Antiquities Library of Qian...