The UK paperback publication of the first Total War Rome novel, DESTROY CARTHAGE.
Journal
DESTROY CARTHAGE: UK paperback publication
PYRAMID: an excerpt from the new novel
FOUND! Lost city of Atlantis
This two-page feature by Marcus Dunk on my first novel Atlantis appeared in The Daily Express on 23 July 2005. Since then Atlantis has sold well over a million copies and been published in thirty languages.
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DESTROY CARTHAGE: the UK paperback cover
Here's the brilliant new cover for the UK paperback edition of Destroy Carthage, published by Macmillan on 14 April.
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Free giveaway offer: Pharaoh postcard and Destroy Carthage sampler
David Gibbins talks about a sword gauntlet in his novel The Tiger Warrior: Colonel Walter Andrew Gale, Royal Engineers
Murder in Jhansi, 1915: Major Marmaduke Henry Littledale Gale, 8th (Indian) Cavalry
A few posts back I wrote of the First World War death of one of my great-great uncles in France in 1914. Another death on the other side of my family is recounted in the press release opposite, from July 1915. Two Muslim sowars – cavalry troopers – went on a murderous rampage in Jhansi in central India and killed four of their British officers, including my grandfather’s first cou sin Marmaduke Gale. Their regiment, the 8th Cavalry, had been kept in India for internal security duties ...
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PHARAOH: firepower in the desert, 1884
The video in this blog shows me shooting an 1882 Martini-Henry rifle, the weapon used in my novel Pharaoh by British troops against the forces of the Mahdi during the 1884 expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. That war was one of the last major conflicts fought using black powder, though with fast-action breech-loading rifles far superior to the muzzle-loading weapons that had been the mainstay of armies only twenty years previously. With reloading now taking only seconds, these new rifles allowed a disciplined force to lay down a withering fire almost as devastating as machine-gun fire was to be in wars to come; their accuracy also meant that sniping, or ‘sharpshooting’ as it was called, was now possible at ranges that were previously impossible, allowing my protagonist Major Mayne to use one of these rifles to pick off a dervish rifleman across the Nile more than 600 yards distant ...
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DESTROY CARTHAGE: the triumph of Aemilius Paullus
This magnificent painting by Carle Venet depicts the triumph of Aemilius Paullus, the Roman general who defeated the Macedonians at the battle of Pydna in 168 BC. At that date, mid-way between the Second and the Third Punic Wars, Rome’s conflict with Carthage was still unresolved, but at Pydna she smashed the last remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire and opened the way for conquest of the East. A little over twenty years later Roman legionaries stood astride the towering crags of AcroCorinth and proclaimed rule over all Greece, and in the same year Paullus’ son Scipio Aemilianus took Carthage and secured Roman control over the west Mediterranean. Without Pydna it’s unlikely that either of those victories in 146 BC would have taken place as they did, so this painting represents one of the pivotal events of ancient history ...
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PHARAOH: French edition
The war to end all wars: Ernest Reginald Handford, South Stafforshire Regiment, killed in action 1914
A little over ninety-nine years ago one of my great-great uncles died of his wounds near the river Aisne in northern France, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. He was one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, the regular soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force which was all but destroyed by the end of that year, among the first of some eight million men of all sides killed by the time of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 ...
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PHARAOH: a Canadian Mohawk on the Nile
Of all the larger-than-life character portraits that have entered popular memory from the 1884-5 British Nile campaign – the future Lord Kitchener, a desert spy, disguised as an Arab and carrying a cyanide tablet in case of capture; the wiry and imperturbable General Wolseley, sticking to his plans against the odds; the extraordinary Colonel Fred Burnaby, greatest adventurer of his age, wearing a deerstalker and blasting away at the dervishes with his shotgun – none are more impressive for me than James Deer, known to his people as Sak Arakentiake ...
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DESTROY CARTHAGE: what it meant to look Roman
My novel Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage begins in 168 BC at the Battle of Pydna, the decisive engagement in which the Roman general Aemilius Paullus defeated a Macedonian army and secured Roman power in northern Greece. The action then moves to Rome for the triumphal procession, a massive haul of works of art and other booty being watched by Aemilius Paullus, his son Scipio Aemilianus and the old senator Marcus Porcius Cato, whose cry ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ resonates through the novel just as it did in real history ...
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PHARAOH: the maps
I blogged last month about my pleasure in reading General Gordon's diary from Khartoum while I was researching my novel Pharaoh, and how I particularly relished his attention to detail - describing everything with an engineer's eye, and calculating quantities and distances as closely as possible. One great advantage of this was that I knew that I could rely on his sketch maps as a basis for the maps that my publisher Headline created for the novel, both of which are reproduced here along with a printed original from Gordon's diary
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PHARAOH: medals of the 1884-5 Nile campaign
The two Victorian campaign medals shown here were among my most prized artefacts while I was writing Pharaoh, and appear as illustrations in several editions of the novel. My 19th century protagonist is a Royal Engineers officer in the 1884 campaign to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum, and I was thrilled to discover a medal named to an actual R.E. sapper who took part in the campaign. These two medals were awarded to all British soldiers and sailors who saw active service in Egypt and Sudan from 1882 to 1889, and were dated accordingly ...
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DESTROY CARTHAGE: interview with David Gibbins
Interview with David Gibbins on The Book Plank:
Question one: tell us about yourself and your hobbies:
I’m an archaeologist by training, and a novelist by profession. After a first career as a university lecturer I became a full-time writer ten years ago, and have since published eight novels that have sold three million copies in thirty languages. My biggest passion is diving and underwater exploration, but I’ve also worked on archaeological sites on land and travelled extensively. My hobbies – when I can find the time! – include antiquarian books and maps, genealogy, and restoring and shooting antique firearms; in Britain I love mountaineering, and in Canada, where I was born, wilderness canoeing, everything about the winter and managing the forest on our family farm where I do most of my writing ...
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DESTROY CARTHAGE: the stuff that dreams are made on
One of the great excitements for me of writing Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage was the chance to create a story set against an event that was not only pivotal in ancient history, but also a highlight of my own career. Like many archaeologists I’ve often had difficulty correlating what I’ve been excavating with the great events of recorded history—with wars and political upheavals. Often it seems as if those events simply bypass the majority of people, leaving unaffected what the historian Fernand Braudel called the “underlying continuity” of day-to-day life. But sometimes the events are so huge, so all-encompassing, that they reach through the entire fabric of life, leaving their mark everywhere. When you’re confronted with that evidence emerging from the ground, when the scale and reality of those events becomes apparent, the effect can be shocking ...
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PHARAOH: The Journals of General Gordon of Khartoum
One of the great pleasures for me in researching my novel Pharaoh was acquiring an original copy of General Charles Gordon’s Journals, covering his final months as Governor-General in Khartoum in 1884-5 before the city was overrun by Mahdist forces and he was killed. I’d wanted to find out more about his archaeological and ethnographic interests, but I found myself utterly absorbed by his day-to-day management of the city and the problems he faced. Unlike his other published work of the period ...
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DESTROY CARTHAGE: free maps preview
I'm delighted to be able to show two maps that appear in Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage, produced by my publisher Macmillan. The first one is a superb topographical map of the Mediterranean region showing the main settings of the novel - Rome, Macedonia, Spain and North Africa. The second is a plan of ancient Carthage showing the direction of the final Roman assault in 146 BC, from the harbours and the sea wall towards the 'Byrsa' and its temple. One the way you can see places that figure in the novel - the Tanit sanctuary, where the Romans witness horrific scenes of child sacrifice ...
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