Has anyone visited the Society of Ancients (SOA) site?noticed before, but that now she can see and understand for herself. No, that is not possible. Posters need to write as if posts were legal documents. A statement in a legal document WILL be interpreted adversarially, without the assumption of
It's not a public forum, but a forum nevertheless, and it stands alone like one of those houses you see, spared by a hurricane or volcanic eruption, intact yet surrounded by destruction.
It's a real hit of fresh air... People being nice to one another, criticism couched in bales of cotton wool, and yet rare is the thread or post that doesn't have interesting, if not thoroughly engaging, prose, if you like history.
Complaints about the decline of writing standards in the young seem obligatory for every generation to make about the next. The people of Sumer complained about it in clay tablets and the whining has never stopped since.
No point being stern and censorious then about the way posters write here, except for the undesirable effects the medium itself has on good prose.
It's not syntax or punctuation, or the mush we see from the careless, it's the slow erosion of the qualities of classical prose and the difficulty avoiding bad habits. Exhibit 1.
Why the hedging? The constant hedging.
"Apparently," "in part," "to some extent," "almost," "nearly" .... you know...
And, "I would argue." That's a good one. I must mean that you'd argue something if you had a better argument, but for now what follows is all you can manage - a pathetic premise.
~99% of posts are hedging posts, including mine.
All made necessary because, before long in places like this, posters discover that one has to write not classic prose where the reader and writer are viewed as equals, and the writer is just directing the reader's gaze towards some truth, she hadn't
Hedging is sometimes justified, but it's a choice not a tic. And a tic is what posters soon develop here. It is a bad habit, because a classic writer counts on the common sense and the ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversationwe know when a speaker means 'in general,' or 'all other things being equal,' without saying it.
This allows a normal writer to phrase subordinate points precisely, but without the promise that they are technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged in those points, because they are merescaffolding.
We keep learning and forgetting that any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least uncharitable reading to an unhedged statement, will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket full of hedged ones anyway.amplify the phenomenon enough to make it plain to see.
Examples abound, no names necessary.
No wonder that after more than twenty years in SHM, I can only think kindly of a handful of people. It's not really the people, if you discount geocentrists, it's the medium. It brings out the worse in us. We knew it all along, but it took Facebook to
A good explanation for 'the good old times' is usually a faulty memory, but I still think there were a few good times here too, let's not forget.
"To some extent."
Has anyone visited the Society of Ancients (SOA) site?noticed before, but that now she can see and understand for herself. No, that is not possible. Posters need to write as if posts were legal documents. A statement in a legal document WILL be interpreted adversarially, without the assumption of
It's not a public forum, but a forum nevertheless, and it stands alone like one of those houses you see, spared by a hurricane or volcanic eruption, intact yet surrounded by destruction.
It's a real hit of fresh air... People being nice to one another, criticism couched in bales of cotton wool, and yet rare is the thread or post that doesn't have interesting, if not thoroughly engaging, prose, if you like history.
Complaints about the decline of writing standards in the young seem obligatory for every generation to make about the next. The people of Sumer complained about it in clay tablets and the whining has never stopped since.
No point being stern and censorious then about the way posters write here, except for the undesirable effects the medium itself has on good prose.
It's not syntax or punctuation, or the mush we see from the careless, it's the slow erosion of the qualities of classical prose and the difficulty avoiding bad habits. Exhibit 1.
Why the hedging? The constant hedging.
"Apparently," "in part," "to some extent," "almost," "nearly" .... you know...
And, "I would argue." That's a good one. I must mean that you'd argue something if you had a better argument, but for now what follows is all you can manage - a pathetic premise.
~99% of posts are hedging posts, including mine.
All made necessary because, before long in places like this, posters discover that one has to write not classic prose where the reader and writer are viewed as equals, and the writer is just directing the reader's gaze towards some truth, she hadn't
Hedging is sometimes justified, but it's a choice not a tic. And a tic is what posters soon develop here. It is a bad habit, because a classic writer counts on the common sense and the ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversationwe know when a speaker means 'in general,' or 'all other things being equal,' without saying it.
This allows a normal writer to phrase subordinate points precisely, but without the promise that they are technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged in those points, because they are merescaffolding.
We keep learning and forgetting that any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least uncharitable reading to an unhedged statement, will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket full of hedged ones anyway.amplify the phenomenon enough to make it plain to see.
Examples abound, no names necessary.
No wonder that after more than twenty years in SHM, I can only think kindly of a handful of people. It's not really the people, if you discount geocentrists, it's the medium. It brings out the worse in us. We knew it all along, but it took Facebook to
A good explanation for 'the good old times' is usually a faulty memory, but I still think there were a few good times here too, let's not forget.
"To some extent."
Pleasant surprise! David & David in from the cold... I hope you are doing great, guys.better.
Historians Fred E. Ray and Justin Swanton and a few SOA members are helping with my history project that for the first time includes serious field work.
It's not Hastings, sorry.
It's Sardis-Thermopylae. _Xerxes: The Recount_ project - trying to show Herodotus figures for Xerxes' army feasible, by retracing Xerxes march from a logistical point of view.
It's also a shot against 19th and 20th century historians, some of them with military careers, who saw ancient warfare through Napoleonic eyes. And their followers, who to this day continue to disregard and disrespect ancient sources, as if they knew
There is no archeology involved for reasons much too deep. The ground Persians and Spartans fought on at the Thermopylae pass, for example, lies 66 feet below today's ground level, though the site is still well worth a visit.last word on the subject. He concludes that water supply and Chersonese topography would have made it impossible for Xerxes' army to be larger than 200,000. He was probably wrong.
The stretch after crossing the Hellespont is the tricky segment of the march, where the Gallipoli campaign was fought. British Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice wrote a paper 100 years ago on Xerxes' army, and some still recognize it as the
I'll find out next summer, Covid permitting. I'll be flying drones to complement the satellite images already available.march was no Hannibalic Alpine crossing. I know the Turkish Aegean coast well, and it's mostly a land of vacation grade spots. Xerxes' feat in 480 BC, was a relatively short march during spring and summer through friendly territory. Unprecedented huge
Maurice's calculations of the discharge of rivers appear terribly wrong, and he seemed to think that armies could only advance along roads and paths, a la Grande Armée , when it's a fact that ancient armies advanced cross country as well. Xerxes'
I'll stop now, as I could go on and on... this lovely subject... completely off-topic par the course.
Kind regards
Pleasant surprise! David & David in from the cold... I hope you are doing great, guys.
Historians Fred E. Ray and Justin Swanton and a few SOA members are helping with my history project that for the first time includes serious field work.
It's not Hastings, sorry.
It's Sardis-Thermopylae. _Xerxes: The Recount_ project - trying to show Herodotus figures for Xerxes' army feasible, by retracing Xerxes march from a logistical point of view.
It's also a shot against 19th and 20th century historians, some of them with military careers, who saw ancient warfare through Napoleonic eyes. And their followers, who to this day continue to disregard and disrespect ancient sources, as if they knewbetter.
There is no archeology involved for reasons much too deep. The ground Persians and Spartans fought on at the Thermopylae pass, for example, lies 66 feet below today's ground level, though the site is still well worth a visit.last word on the subject. He concludes that water supply and Chersonese topography would have made it impossible for Xerxes' army to be larger than 200,000. He was probably wrong.
The stretch after crossing the Hellespont is the tricky segment of the march, where the Gallipoli campaign was fought. British Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice wrote a paper 100 years ago on Xerxes' army, and some still recognize it as the
I'll find out next summer, Covid permitting. I'll be flying drones to complement the satellite images already available.march was no Hannibalic Alpine crossing. I know the Turkish Aegean coast well, and it's mostly a land of vacation grade spots. Xerxes' feat in 480 BC, was a relatively short march during spring and summer through friendly territory. Unprecedented huge
Maurice's calculations of the discharge of rivers appear terribly wrong, and he seemed to think that armies could only advance along roads and paths, a la Grande Armée , when it's a fact that ancient armies advanced cross country as well. Xerxes'
I'll stop now, as I could go on and on... this lovely subject... completely off-topic par the course.
Kind regards
On Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 2:12:01 AM UTC+1, te...@tiglath.net wrote:
Getting older, kids grown-up, a hat-full of grandchildren, health in good shape, finances stable.
Yaay.
Or even, yaaaay!
Presumably beginning with Hans Delbrück.
I'm not so sure that it a case of Delbrück and others disregarding and disrepecting ancient sources,
but rather calling them into question and re-examining them.
The numbers game with regard to the size of medieval armies has been played out over and over again on shm, e.g. Hastings, Bannockburn, Towton, Carolingian armies, Byzantine armies and Hunnic armies. They're just the ones I recall. Delbrückian andmodified Delbrückian methodology argues for much smaller forces than contemporary and near contemporary medieval sources state (and such sources are often wildly in conflict with each other). But there have been more recent scholars arguing against
I don't know where academia currently stands on these matters in general, but I suspect Delbrück is still proving to be a hard nut to crack.
Anyway, enjoy your own personal anabasis, and maybe you'll get your findings published. I can see a beautifully illustrated travelogue in prospect, at least.
Correct Figure For Xerxes' Army Is __________________?
On Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 4:50:32 AM UTC-4, David Read wrote:
Presumably beginning with Hans Delbrück.
He's one of them, a real bad-tempered baddy too.
would we feel?I'm not so sure that it a case of Delbrück and others disregarding and disrepecting ancient sources,
but rather calling them into question and re-examining them.
That's how it's being justified. Just think for a moment, some guy in the year 4,521 disputes WITHOUT HARD EVIDENCE Churchill on WWII, or Mr. Hines on Vietnam, or even you or me, who I take know quite a bit about those wars. The sheer nerve... How
Modern historians rarely have evidence for ancient battle numbers, they just decide mostly with the gut that they couldn't have been that big; as if saying so made it so. In the back of their minds they must believe ancient Sapiens couldn't organized apiss-out in a brewery. It's an awful mannerism.
If the Pyramids were gone, materials totally reused and such... Who would believe that people BEFORE the Bronze Age, built a pyramid 150 meters tall, bringing granite blocks for the royal chamber from Aswan, some 600 miles up-river. And that itremained the tallest building until the English built a taller cathedral around 1300? Fortunately, we can stand on the Gizah plain and see them for ourselves still.
It's not only Herodotus, but they disrespect also Xenophon, Arrian, Livy, and Polybius (Polybius!) and Tacitus (Tacitus!). At the same time they show excessive reverence for Thucydides, who is far from perfect.of the Vietnam War making out they were ten times the real number. He would be laughed at, because people still remember. That is what those pesky historians accuse Herodotus of. Conversely, I am not saying all Herodotus wrote should be believed, he
Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) published what he wrote about the army of Xerxes some 50 years after the events. He roamed around a lot and used Greek and Persian sources. Imagine, a writer today trying to fool readers about the size of the armies
Herodotus is kind of a sole source for this, which is unfortunate, but his numbers have internal consistency in his own account, and there are two other contemporary sources who corroborate him in magnitude, if not exact numbers. Those are: Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC, who fought at Salamis) in his play The Persians, and Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 BC) whose engraved epitaph on a commemorative stone placed on top of the burial mound of the Spartans at Thermopylae.monument, gave 3 million as the size
From Wikipedia's entry for Thermopylae: (my notes)number at three million. Today, it is considered to have been much smaller. Scholars report various figures ranging between about 100,000 and 150,000 soldiers (incorrect, the range is much wider, some put it at five figures only !!!!) ."
"Herodotus, a contemporary writer, put the Persian army strength as one million (incorrect) and went to great pains to describe how they were counted in groups of ten thousand at a review of the troops. Simonides went as far as to put the Persian
modified Delbrückian methodology argues for much smaller forces than contemporary and near contemporary medieval sources state (and such sources are often wildly in conflict with each other). But there have been more recent scholars arguing againstThe numbers game with regard to the size of medieval armies has been played out over and over again on shm, e.g. Hastings, Bannockburn, Towton, Carolingian armies, Byzantine armies and Hunnic armies. They're just the ones I recall. Delbrückian and
Yep, so you know what I'm talking about. Mediaevalists guilty too.way, when I corrected Fred Ray on Hannibal several times, and other authors. Best avoided. Luckily, Mr. Ray is no fool, but he didn't like it a bit, I could tell.
I don't know where academia currently stands on these matters in general, but I suspect Delbrück is still proving to be a hard nut to crack.
Depends on the claim. He is not alone. Theodore Ayrault Dodge on Cannae is terrible.
C. Whatley put it best: "Modern writers take up modern books on strategy and rewrite ancient wars in the light of them. The result is magnificent, but it is not ancient war."
Anyway, enjoy your own personal anabasis, and maybe you'll get your findings published. I can see a beautifully illustrated travelogue in prospect, at least.Book publishing is not for me. Writing a book is like having a child, you can't stand anyone criticizing your baby. They say that if you correct a wise man you make him wiser, but if you correct a fool you make him your enemy. I learned that the hard
Plus, just like the music industry makes you hate music, if you let them, it seems publishers do something similar to writers.phrase 'almost brilliant' about his plan. What balls, right? Varro, the Plebeian who lost FOUR consular armies (8 legions) in half a day... And for seconds an article putting down Fabian Tactics... which all they did is delay Rome's final victory,
I have a web site ready for the findings of Xerxes: The Recount. The excellent Dutch magazine Ancient Warfare may be interested in quoting it. We'll see.
Disregarding my advice to refrain, Fred intends to write for Ancient Warfare... Myths of the Second Punic War... articles praising Roman consul Terentius Varro's battle plan at Cannae... he feels Varro has been unduly demonized..<sigh>. He used the
I've been working on this project for over a year and I have until the summer to get ready.I have a large program to work out logistic figures based on the metrics given by Donald Engels' excellent, 'Logistics of the Macedonian Army.' I chose Fred Ray because he is not only a historian, but also a geologist, retired from the oil industry. His
Obviously, I would like Herodotus to be right, but to balance my bias I have Fred Ray, who believes Maurice, Delbruck, et al., and Justin who believes Herodotus. I have similar others from SOA. So I hope they keep me honest. Whatever I find, I will say.
Whatever the findings, I envision no bad outcomes. At the very least I'll have a whole lot of fun, after the Papillon life I've led for two years.
--
What are actually your periods of interest, anything medieval? And why?
He's one of them, a real bad-tempered baddy too.Alex Milman used to be our primary local sword bearer for Hans Delbrück at shm, and David Brewer posted this on 23rd February 1999:-
"Hank Delbruck again...
the examples of HD quoting sources and contradicting them are
*legion*. Indeed, he ridicules them with greatly enjoyable gusto,
so much so that I'd recommend his work for the humour value alone."
So, bad-tempered? I'm not so sure. The only volume I've read of his History of Warfare is volume two, but that was back in the early nineties.
The main problem with accepting ancient and medieval sources which claim extraordinarily large numbers for armies is that one then has to explain how the logistics for maintaining those forces worked, plus a whole host of other factors besides,including paper strength versus actual strength, field army size versus entire armed forces size, composition, population, rates of march, command and control, and so on and so forth.
The main problem for those denying such numbers is that they are then asked if those numbers are incorrect, what were the actual numbers? If they commit themselves at all, even after all the analysis they can bring to bear, the answer often seems to benothing more than pulling a figure out of a hat. One sometimes comes across the 10% theory, where ancient or medieval sources are argued to have probably inflated the actual numbers tenfold.
particular interest.What are actually your periods of interest, anything medieval? And why?
Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars. But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.
Why? Hmmmm. The periods look good aesthetically to my eye, and I guess that is what first attracted me. Then there are the personalities, the huge social upheavals, and the constant switching in balances of power that all go towards their being of
Maurice also maintains that a British force of 72,000 men with 22,000 animals camped as close together as possible and occupied an area of 20 square miles. That's 45 square kilometers or 478 square meters per man/animal. To put it colloquially, whatwas Maurice smoking? Romans left a 100-200 meter zone vacant inside the camp's perimeter to absorb missiles coming over, and even with this, by Maurice standards, Roman soldiers in their camps must have been perched on each other's shoulders.
Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars.
But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.
Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars.
But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.
On Friday, October 15, 2021 at 3:43:59 AM UTC-4, David Read wrote:
matter, the monotonous diet didn't matter. The first tyrannical agricultural potentates didn't matter, the fact that Paleolithic beer was probably porridge-like gruel didn't matter, just fill another one just like the other one and sip away... That's whyPrimarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars. But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.
I like agricultural history. In 2009 I visited Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. It was a riot... A ~7000 BC city with no streets, roofs were it. Amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk#/media/File:MUFT_-_Catal_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk_Modell.jpg
I wanted to see also Göbekli Tepe, a much older city, ~10000 BC, built by hunter-gatherers, but it was too close to Syria for comfort.
I have this idea about agriculture... in the unscholarly category of "I can't prove it, but I know it's true."
From running around all day, people suddenly preferred to sit down and lie about... Why?
Climate change, I hear, as if rabbits and gazelle, the main meats, had become extinct and people had no choice but to invent agriculture. Nope.
It was BEER. Forget about, 'it was produced by accident as a by-product of making bread' or 'It was used for religious purposes to honor ancestors.' No way.
Running Man, became first semi-sedentary. Mixing beer and running for a while, an uneasy mix, but it was not long before the lure of barley wine convinced them to go the full sedentary monty. Breaking their backs carrying water to irrigate didn't
The oldest brewery in Israel places beer much before the first civilization of Sumer, In the Upper Paleolithic before the Mesolithic. So I may be right after all.
American beer sucks, in case you didn't know...
On Friday, October 15, 2021 at 12:48:06 PM UTC-4, Tiglath wrote:was Maurice smoking? Romans left a 100-200 meter zone vacant inside the camp's perimeter to absorb missiles coming over, and even with this, by Maurice standards, Roman soldiers in their camps must have been perched on each other's shoulders.
Maurice also maintains that a British force of 72,000 men with 22,000 animals camped as close together as possible and occupied an area of 20 square miles. That's 45 square kilometers or 478 square meters per man/animal. To put it colloquially, what
WRONG! I copypasted from the wrong page in my notes...
Correction: 20 square miles = 51.8 square kilometers, and 551 square meters per man or animal. A square of 23 meters per side.
Even allowing for large areas for communal use and transit, it's ridiculous.
That is almost 6,000 square feet per man or animal. The Sopranos' mansion in New Jersey was 5600 sq. ft. And the average London flat is 860 sq. ft. Viva Maurice.
I won't even bother to quote the per man footage in Roman and other military camps...
Perhaps we should give Frederick Maurice the benefit of the doubt and apply the 10% rule, i.e., 2 square miles instead of 20. That would make a lot more sense. Maybe it was a goof on his part or even a misprint.
It would have made the telling of stories, singing of songs, oral histories and family genealogies told around the hearth a lot more fun too.
American beer sucks, in case you didn't know...I did, but micro-breweries everywhere are doing a pretty good job of improving things. And as William Cobbet wrote in "Cottage Economy"(pub.1822):-
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