Craftmenship

Dès l’aube du XIVe siècle, l’incroyable essor des corporations de métiers à Liège a laissé son empreinte dans la défense de la cité. Celles-ci fournissent de nouveaux contingents pour la sauvegarde des murs de la ville. La capacité militaire des métiers s’accroît aussi avec l’extension des droits de bourgeoisie à la banlieue en 1343 et 1429, fournissant aux corporations un nouveau vivier de membres potentiels. A l’origine, les bras armés de ces corporations semblent plutôt être une émanation de l’ancien ost urbain, qui se répartissait par vinâves (quartiers). Mais contrairement à cet ost, demeuré bien obscur, on connaît un peu mieux leurs prérogatives militaires et leurs atours. Au fil du temps, les métiers liégeois montrent leurs limites dans l’exercice de leur fonction protectrice. Pour y remédier, les deux derniers tiers du XVe siècle
voient ainsi la mise au premier plan d’autres corps de défense. Présentant une puissance similaire à celles des plus grandes villes de Flandre de la même époque, les métiers de Liège et leurs milices semblent avoir suivi une destinée… tout aussi équivalente.



Guilds and Urban Defence : the Example of Liege

From the beginning of the fourteenth century, the extraordinary growth of the craftsmen guilds from the city of Liège had a knock-on efect on urban defense : guilds provided new troops for the town’s safety. This new military capacity continued to increase with the extension of the bourgeoisie’s rights to the suburbs in 1343 and 1429, giving the guilds another large pool of potential members. Originally, the armed men of the guilds seem to have been drafted from the old urban ost, which was divided into wards. But unlike these irst barely known urban troops, we know a little more about their military privileges and their attire. Over time, the serious shortcomings of the craftsmen guilds with respect to their defensive duties began to reveal themselves, and to remedy this, other defense forces were placed at the forefront during the last two thirds of the ifteenth century. With a manpower equivalent to that of the guilds of the largest cities in Flanders at this time, the guilds of Liège and their militias seem to have met a similar fate to their counterparts in these areas.

In the ancient Mesopotamia, the creation of the divine statue was a complex process that required deep cultic knowledge and technical skills. Since the statue was not only the image of a god or a goddess, but the very essence of him/her, and the effigy itself was endowed with agency, its creation in- volved a unitary presence of deities, cultic officers, and craftsmen. Hence, this paper aims to provide an overview of the divine and human entities that were involved in the creation of the god statue in the light of the Neo-Assyrian cuneiform sources, including rituals, prayers, royal inscriptions, and correspondence.

The well-known Bronze Age sword from an insecure find spot in “Marias de Nantes” in France is investigated with regard to its fabrication history. Predominantly, the article deals with the rare metal inlay technology of the sword which is also known under the term damascening. The technique implies the fixing of one metal into incisions or on the surface of a second one, often achieving stability only mechanically. High developed and earlier examples of this decoration are primarily known from the Mediterranean area suggesting a possible relationship and a technology transfer. This seems to be supported by the composition and technology of the gold inlays, but since metal inlay traditions north of the Alps reach back to the first centuries of the second millennium BC, an independent development appears also possible. This is made plausible by comparison of the wrench sword with other damascened artefacts of this region.

The current study is a short summary of the observations made during the one-day field surveys conducted in the bazaar area in the Konak district of Izmir, Turkey in 2011 and 2015. The main aim of the surveys was gathering information regarding the practices of the metalsmiths’ traditional work which could serve as comparative evidence for Antique manufacturing processes. In this regard, the research subjects were small and midscale enterprises, which apply primarily manual labor.