Abstract Vladimir Peniakoff’s Popski’s Private Army remains one of the most influential published accounts of the Libyan Arab Force (LAF) during the Second World War. This archive-led article reassesses Vladimir Peniakoff as a problematic source for the LAF, showing how his memoir preserved valuable traces of LAF activity while distorting chronology, agency, reputational memory and attribution. This has contributed to the marginalisation of Libyan, and specifically Senussi, wartime agency. Three connected examples support this argument: his erroneous description of the sinking of the SS Warszawa , tested against Oscar Fiteni’s eyewitness account and archival sinking reports; his treatment of the death of J.S.N. Bernays, who was lost on the SS Chakdina ; and Peniakoff’s own unsubstantiated autobiographical claims concerning academic excellence and French artillery service during the First World War. These examples are then positioned within the later mythology of Popski’s Private Army (PPA), including its brief Western Desert career and ambiguous disciplinary culture. Reading Peniakoff against the grain reveals how memoir tradition has obscured Libyan and Senussi agency within the history of the Western Desert campaign.
Abstract Boardgames appear frequently in early medieval Arabic literature, reflecting their embeddedness in everyday life and social discourse. Despite abundant textual and material evidence, the archaeology of games in Islamic contexts remains understudied, partly due to the scarcity of reliably-dated gameboards. This article addresses this gap by presenting a previously unpublished game board from the medieval hammam of Walīla (Roman Volubilis), Morocco. The bathhouse was built in the late eighth/ninth century CE and abandoned by the tenth or eleventh century CE, offering a rare secure context for the board’s date. The board’s design suggests it was used for playing tāb/sig , making it the earliest known evidence of this game in North Africa. This case study sheds light on how games intersected with communal life and public spaces in early medieval North Africa.
