• About
  • Armour in Texts
    • English Wills and Inventories
    • French and Burgundian Military Ordinances
    • Greek and Roman Inscriptions and Papyri
    • Lydgate’s Troy Book
    • Nineteenth-Century Travellers and Researchers
    • Pedro de Aguado on Armour in New Spain
    • Records of the Armourers’ Company of London
    • Rules of the Paris Guilds
    • Rules of the Troyes Guilds
    • Rules of the Venetian Guilds
    • Statutes and Privileges of the Armourers and Scabbardmakers of the City of Angers
    • The Book of the Hirelings of the Republic of Florence
    • The Norwegian King’s Mirror
  • My Articles
  • Resources
    • Building a Website to Last
    • COVID-19
    • Fashion in the Age of Datini
      • Bocksten Cloaks
      • How Heavy Were Doublets and Pourpoints?
      • Sheaths and Sword-Belts
    • Project TUPPU
    • Reenacting the Archaic and the Long Sixth Century
      • Cooking, Eating, and Drinking
      • Edgetools
      • Firestarting
      • Recipes
      • Replica Edgetools
      • Shoes and Sandals
    • Suppliers for Historical Crafts
  • Support
  • Why no Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn/Tumblr/… buttons?
    • My Social Media Policy

Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: March 2020

Some Terrifying Numbers

28 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Achaemenid, ancient, army size, dis manibus, methodology

St. Felix in the armour of roughly 1400 with a red surcoat with a white cross on it

St. Felix (probably not the bishop of Nola?) From a polyptych by Battista da Vicenza (b. ca. 1375, d. 1438), Vicenza, Museo Civico, inv. no. A 18-22

So a lot of us have spent the past month or two staring at some scary numbers and working out their implications. These numbers are based on counts, even if the authors had to make some assumptions and do some arithmetic to turn something they can count into what they want to know. I spend a lot of time staring at Greek numbers for barbarian armies, and if they were based on counts they are hard to understand:

  • If we have multiple sources, they give numbers which vary widely, even if they all drew on the same earlier writers
  • The smallest Greek number for a barbarian army, 100,000, is as big as the largest army we can document in western Eurasia before the Napoleonic Wars, even if we are very generous about what counts as ‘documentation’ (hard-hearted historians would say we need archives so no army strength can be known until about a thousand years ago)
  • The smallest Greek number for a barbarian army is about as many as the biggest army which any Near Eastern ruler claims to have commanded.
  • Either there are no numbers for individual units, or the numbers given add up to a much smaller number than the grand total
  • Usually, no source for the numbers is given: we are not told whether they are an estimate by scouts or by the enemy’s clerks.
  • Such vast armies could not march, camp, and fight in the usual fashion or on the described battlefield.

If we assume that these numbers are based on counts, we have to chose one of the figures in our different sources, then ‘correct’ it by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing until it fits our expectations. As a fellow named Whatley said in 1920, these theories often sound convincing until you read the next article with another ingenious theory that contradicts the first one. So assuming that these numbers are based on counts has not lead to new knowledge that people with different perspectives can agree on, it has just lead to endless arguments and speculation.

So a few years ago, I asked myself what would we expect to see if these numbers are drawn from something other than counting. And instead of looking at different writers’ figures for the same army, I looked for the same number in stories about different armies. Have a look at the fifteen lines on this table and decide if you see what I see.

 

Text

Date

Summary

RIMAP A.0.102.10, iii:15-16

845 BCE

Šalmanessar III crossed the Euphrates with 120,000 men

Judges 8:10

Debated

Gideon and his 300 soldiers kill 120,000 Midanites

Hdt. 2.158.5

5th century BCE

120,000 Egyptians die building a canal for pharaoh Necho

Ctesias F. 13.28, 30 Lenfant

4th century BCE

120,000 Persians attack Plataea, 120,000 Persians die after Xerxes retreats from Greece

Xen. Anab. 1.7.11-13

4th century BCE

Deserters claim that Artaxerxes II has 1,200,000 men

Xen. Hell. 1.5.21

4th century BCE

An interpolator says that the Carthaginians invaded Sicily with 120 triremes and an army of 120,000 men

Xen. Cyr. 1.2.15

4th century BCE

“They say that the Persians are about 12 myriads”

Xen. Cyr.  8.6.19

4th century BCE

An elderly Cyrus commands 120,000 cavalry and 600,000 (5 × 120,000) infantry

2 Chronicles 28:6

4th century BCE?

Pekah of Remaliah slew 120,000 valiant men in Judah in a single day

Jonah 4:11

4th century BCE?

There are more than 120,000 persons in Nineveh, and also many cattle

Judith 2:15

2nd century BCE?

Holofernes gathers an army of 120,000 men and 12,000 cavalry

I Maccabees 11:45

c. 100 BCE

The 120,000 people of Antioch rise up against their king

Justin, Epitoma Pompei Troagi, 41.5.7

1st century CE (original 1st century BCE)

Arsaces, the second Parthian king, fought Antiochus with 100,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry

Plut. Vit. Sulla 22.4

2nd century CE

Sulla says that he defeated a Pontic army of 120,000 men at Chaeronea

Plut. Vit. Lucull. 7.4

2nd century CE

Mithridates trained 120,000 infantry in the Roman fashion and invaded Bithynia

Continue reading →

Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Paul ‘Xenophon’ McDonnell-Staff (12 March 2020)

26 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern, Not an expert, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

cross-post, dis manibus, tactics

From pothos.org

Hi all,

Just a note to say that regular contributor and poster Paul McDonnell-Staff – “Xenophon” as members would know him – died on March 12th. Paul suffered from an illness, which I won’t go into here, for the last five years of his life. Though it did not always look like it here, Paul and I were strong friends over a couple of decades. There’s nothing better than pointing out the foibles of your mate! The “Old Man” (as I called him) and I (“Bertie Old thing” as he’d address me) had an ongoing relationship for some two decades. I recall us downing three bottles of red (after a beer or two over dinner) in “Brisvegas” going over the Second Diadoch War, the nature of the hypaspists and the foibles of “certainty” in a hotel in Brisbane some thirteen years ago. What others in the bar made of the hard copies of Diodoros, the Tacticians and Plutarch is anyone’s guess. As ever, we parted in disagreement on whatever sticking point(s) we’d arrived at by bottle three.

One of the effects of the Old Man’s serious and restrictive illness was that it attacked his phalanges. Given this, I was constantly surprised at the amount he could type – the email trees, on many subjects, were no bonsai – more like giant redwoods. Though one had to be patient. That back and forth will be missed.

Paul had been writing on ancient military history for decades going back to John Warry’s Warfare in The Classical World. From it’s inception, we both wrote for Ancient Warfare. The articles we prepared were the source of much private and occasional Pothosian debate. I recall calling him, at the editor’s suggestion, to see if he was still corporeal as he’d he’d missed a deadline by a couple of days (something he never did). He suggested that were he not “the whole world would…”. I suggested Demades’ acid quip was a little beyond the pale. He continued writing for Ancient Warfare under the nom de plume “Tacticus”. The journal will miss him and so will I.

Vale “Old Man”

Michael Park.

Paul was more of a rhetorician and less of a scientist than I am, but I still learned a lot from him. He knew the classical literary sources, including the unfashionable ones like Aelian, very well. There is another memorial from Jasper Oorthuys at Karwansaray and some of his comments on In Antiquity, Fighting Wasn’t a Young Man’s Game and How Many Arrows in a Scythian’s Gorytos?

I am surrounded by the ghosts of dead friends, dead communities, and dead activities. For an age that has made it hard to move at all: its hard to keep putting my heart into communities which will just vanish like the fog on a sunny day however hard I work, and hard to keep reaching out to new communities when the last one cut off my hand or used it to toss me into the nearest wall. But I also know that in this life there is one thing to do and that is to make good art. For in Sheol where we are going there is no work or planning or knowledge or wisdom.

Important Assyriological Discovery!

21 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

academic navel-gazing, Achaemenid, ancient, book project, statistics

a carved ivory pommel with ruminant heads and a scabbard chape with a great cat pouncing on a ruminant

The ivory pommel and chape of an akinakes and scabbard in the Louvre. For more information see Bernard, Paul (1976) “À propos de bouterolles de forreaux achéménides,” Revue Archéologique pp. 227-246 or for our Russian friends Perevodčikova, E.V. (1983) “Subjects Depicted Upon the Bouterolles of Akinakes-Sheaths in the Achaemenid Period.” Vestnik Drevnej Istorii 3 (165) pp. 96-103

Between looking for work and finishing articles, I have been working on a book on Achaemenid warfare which bears a certain similarity to a 2018 Innsbruck PhD dissertation and should be released this year. In Austria you make the mechanical fixes and the changes in response to the committee’s comments after the thesis is accepted, not before (in Canada, you are normally given a list of changes by the committee, make them, and pass the revised version back to the committee for them to approve before you are granted the title).

I never converted to citation-management software, preferring a simple word processor file with bibliographic information and notes on everything I had read, wanted to read, or thought I might one day want to read. When I was assembling the different files into a dissertation, I stripped out the metadata and dumped the individual entries into the bibliography then sorted it alphabetically with Tools → Sort. So one problem I had is that some works in the footnotes were not in the bibliography, and some notes were in different formats than others. To sort this out I went through each chapter recording the works cited, then removed duplicates and standardized the format, then combined the eight separate lists into one and removed the duplicates again. I checked that list against the bibliography, making sure that everything in the footnotes was in the bibliography.

And that leads to the important question, out of the roughly 1,232 works in the final bibliography (77 pages x 16 citations per page), how many do I actually cite?
Continue reading →

Cross-Post: Roland Warzecha Workshops 2020

09 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cross-post, High Medieval, historical European martial arts, medival, prehistoric European martial arts, Viking Age

A bout with Viking shields and blunt swords.  One fenceruses the strange palm-up cut which was taught in late medival marital arts but not most other traditions.

Roland Warzecha is teaching five (!) workshops this year on his interpretation of fighting with Viking Age shields, and on the sword-and-buckler system of Royal Armouries MS. I.33. The living-history related workshops include:

April 4/5, Viking Museum Haithabu: Viking shield (cancelled due to insufficient enrolment)

June 13/14, History Park Bärnau: Viking shield

August 1/2, History Park Bärnau: Sword & buckler. You are welcome to bring your 13th/14th century shields, too.

September 12/13, Viking Museum Haithabu: Hedeby Bouts

September 7–13, Viking Museum Haithabu: Hedeby Viking Week

All of these events except the Berlin Buckler Bouts are on the margin of ‘enough students to justify it and not, so if you are able to travel to Germany and interested in Viking Age or c. 1320 living history, check them out!

You can find more information about equipment and about the 2020 workshops on Patreon. He is very close to reaching his next fundraising milestone!

What is a Martial Art?

07 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Not an expert

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

definition, historical European martial arts, not an expert

A display of wicker shields, helmets and face-masks, bows in bowcases, and sabres on a whitewashed wall

Captured Turkish arms from the 2. Rustkammer, Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, July 2013

Back when I started historical fencing, I thought about what is a martial art and came up with a definition which worked for what I was doing (ie. trying to learn to fight a particular way). Someone interested in martial arts communities might chose a different definition: someone is an Olympic wrestler or SCA heavy fighter because they participate in a certain kind of event, and how they move is irrelevant.

Definition: A martial art is a subset of all the possible ways of moving effectively in combat which works well together and is sufficient to solve a martial problem.

We shall divide this sermon into six parts.
Continue reading →

Recent Posts

  • Sir Charles Oman Almost Understood
  • Apropos of Nothing
  • 2020 Decade-Ender, or, the Isidore Option
  • Twelve Early European Fencing Manuals
  • Some Thoughts on “Fuzzy Nation”

Recent Comments

Sean Manning on Apropos of Nothing
Mart Shearer on Apropos of Nothing
2020 Decade-Ender, o… on The Key Question in the Fall o…
Sean Manning on Scythed Chariots
Jonathan Dean on My First Book is Out

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013

Categories

  • Ancient
  • Medieval
  • Modern
  • Not an expert
  • Uncategorized

Blogroll

  • .. clericus .. making art technological sources accessible
  • A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  • A Durham Weaver
  • A Fencer's Ramblings
  • A Hot Cup of Joe
  • Aardvarchaeology
  • Active History
  • Ad Astra per Mundum
  • Albrechts Bösser
  • Alec Nevala-Lee
  • An Elegant Weapon
  • Ancient World Magazine
  • Andrew Holt: History, Religion, and Foreign Affairs
  • ANE: Just the Facts
  • Angry Staff Officer
  • Anthropologist in the Attic ~2017
  • Archäotechnik- textile Fläche
  • Archeothoughts
  • Artistic License or Why I Trust No One
  • Aryballos: Cdn Research Grp for Ancient Sport
  • Ask the Past
  • Backreaction
  • Bad Science † 2017
  • Balkan Celts
  • Bibliographia Iranica
  • Boke of the Wardrobe
  • Bow vs. Musket
  • Bread & Circuses ~2016
  • Carolyn Willikes
  • Celsus
  • Classics at the Intersections
  • Constantinus Africanus
  • Dan Cohen
  • Dr. Caitlyn R. Green
  • Dr. Conor Whately: Byzantine (OED) "Intricate, Complicate; Inflexible, Rigid, Unyielding"
  • Dr. Ellie Bennett
  • elamit.net
  • Encyclopaedia Iranica
  • Erik D. Schmidt
  • Erik Kwakkel
  • Ex Urbe
  • Executed Today
  • Forensic Fashion
  • Found in Antiquity ~2015
  • Gates of Nineveh
  • Geocurrents † 2016
  • Great Ming Military
  • Hammered Out Bits
  • Handling the Humanities
  • History From Below
  • Hollow Lakedaimon
  • Hook and Eye
  • Ian Milligan
  • Institute for the Study of War
  • International Armizare Society
  • Janice Liedl
  • jfleck at Inkstain
  • Karen Selk Textile Artist
  • Katafalk
  • Ken Mondschein
  • Kiwi Hellenist
  • Kristina Killgrove, PhD
  • Kung Fu Tea
  • La Cotte Simple
  • Language Hat
  • Languages of the World † 2016
  • Linguistrix
  • Loose Threads: Yet Another Costuming Blog
  • Macro-Typography
  • Magistra et Mater
  • Matthew Amt's Greek Hoplite Page
  • Medieval Manuscripts Blog
  • Milesian Tales
  • Mons Graupius
  • Moonspeaker
  • Muhlberger's World History
  • Neues aus der Gothik
  • Neurodojo
  • New At LacusCurtius and Livius † 2014
  • Paleopix
  • pallia: Katrin Kania
  • Paola Fabbri
  • Papyrus Stories
  • Pen, Book, Sword
  • Persian Things
  • Professeur … Ou Pas
  • Publishing Archaeology
  • Reportret
  • Robin Writes
  • Rogue Classicism
  • Royal Oak Armoury
  • Saewulf (Tumblr)
  • Sardinian Warrior
  • School of the Renaissance Soldier
  • Scott Manning: Historian on the Warpath
  • Shtetl-Optimized
  • Silk Road Gourmet ~2018
  • Sparta Reconsidered
  • Sphinx
  • Sprang Lady
  • St. Thomas Guild
  • Tales of Times Forgotten
  • Tetsuji No Llama
  • The Melammu Project
  • The Royal Road
  • Theoretical Structural Archaeology
  • Tracy's Middle East
  • Traditions of Conflict
  • Violent Metaphors
  • Vortigern Studies
  • Website of a Historical Polymath
  • West's Meditations † 2018
  • Wide Urban World
  • Zenobia: Empress of the East ~2017

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel