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Nenonen posted:That's a tough question given that 'ancient history' covers so many diverse cultures over such a large span of time. Consider that this: I like the comparison between the great pyramid at Giza, the suicide of Cleopatra, and the 1969 moon landing. There's ~500 years more between the building of the Giza pyramid and Cleopatra's (the one in the rug) suicide than there is between her death and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. It's almost exactly what you said but the juxtaposition of pyramids, Cleopatra, and the goddamn moon landings really make the mind reel. Also, regarding Spanish loot, good points. I'd just assumed it was a suit to claim the treasure as cultural heritage (I.e. putting it in Spanish museums rather than letting it be hoarded in foreign countries or sold off at Sotheby's) but the state entity thing didn't seem too reasonable since the treasure wasn't some kind of state-tied law or treaty 
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Apr 6, 2015 21:24
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FAUXTON posted:but the state entity thing didn't seem too reasonable since the treasure wasn't some kind of state-tied law or treaty Edit: Never mind, the example on the PDF is 19th century, I heard treasure ship and assumed it was 16th/17th. I know nothing about the 19th century HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 21:30
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FAUXTON posted:Also, regarding Spanish loot, good points. I'd just assumed it was a suit to claim the treasure as cultural heritage (I.e. putting it in Spanish museums rather than letting it be hoarded in foreign countries or sold off at Sotheby's) but the state entity thing didn't seem too reasonable since the treasure wasn't some kind of state-tied law or treaty IANAL so anyone more familiar feel free to correct that.
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Apr 6, 2015 21:31
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Apparently Bernard Cornwell wrote a nonfiction book about Waterloo. I read his Viking-era novels and they were good, kind of excited about this one.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:06
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ArchangeI posted:Legal continuity of states has been a thing for a long time, mostly so people couldn't just say "Lol we're now a republic/monarchy/theocratic communist people's meritocracy, all the past treaties our country made are null and void and so is our debt, later guys!" This does happen from time to time but involves debt from the previous state 99% of the time a new state disavows links to the old one.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:12
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bewbies posted:Apparently Bernard Cornwell wrote a nonfiction book about Waterloo. I read his Viking-era novels and they were good, kind of excited about this one. Thanks! And everyone should read his Viking books.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:12
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bewbies posted:Apparently Bernard Cornwell wrote a nonfiction book about Waterloo. I read his Viking-era novels and they were good, kind of excited about this one. Neat, wonder if he'll be tongue in cheek about the more silly stuff he added in his fictional book about it  . Must check this out.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:29
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With gold and silver from an old shipwreck, would it have more value as an artifact or as generic precious metal? I wouldn't hold it against the Spanish if they recovered their
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Apr 6, 2015 22:42
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Chamale posted:With gold and silver from an old shipwreck, would it have more value as an artifact or as generic precious metal? I wouldn't hold it against the Spanish if they recovered their They can have a lot more value as an artifact than the market price of the metal. edit - I learned this from Pawn Stars sorry bewbies fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 22:53
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Chamale posted:With gold and silver from an old shipwreck, would it have more value as an artifact or as generic precious metal? I wouldn't hold it against the Spanish if they recovered their I guess it would depend on condition. If you've got an unrecognizable mass of a soft metal like gold and it's been hosed up by mechanical means like the ship collapsing on it while it was against a rock or a cannon or something, then you might as well consider it a hunk of precious metal. Stuff like being minted as coins or stamped as bullion (or shaped decoratively) makes it more valuable as an artifact. I think it was the Staffordshire hoard that had fallen victim to a plow or something and gotten some of the items nearly destroyed but they preserved them since the fact that they were worked as crafts was still apparent. That's a little different from a more modern find, though.
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Apr 6, 2015 22:57
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Nenonen posted:That's a tough question given that 'ancient history' covers so many diverse cultures over such a large span of time. Consider that this: Great answer, thanks; the Sinjar comparison definitely puts perspective on things. I suppose it would be difficult then to say exactly how much more prevalent sieges became during the Medieval period.
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Apr 7, 2015 00:36
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JaucheCharly posted:Speaking of that, I just looked into it and there's a Jesus or bible question on like every page. Yeah, some of the questions that pour in are retarded as gently caress (and also you get a ton of flavor of the week questions if a new WW2 movie comes out or something), but you get some real standout answers in there.
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Apr 7, 2015 01:13
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Rent-A-Cop posted:IANAL This will never stop being hilarious.
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Apr 7, 2015 01:47
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Has anyone read No Simple Victory? If so, what's your opinion? If it's a Bad Book, tell me why.
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Apr 7, 2015 02:52
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esn2500 posted:Great answer, thanks; the Sinjar comparison definitely puts perspective on things. I suppose it would be difficult then to say exactly how much more prevalent sieges became during the Medieval period. Well there's actually a lot to be said, but the question needs to be a little more specific, warfare varied a lot during the ancient era over time and around the world. Archaeology has a lot to say about sieges just because fortifications are rather enduring structures, so there's a lot of evidence. However the answer to the question will be very different if you focus on say, classical antiquity in the Mediterranean world, Iron Age Britain, or proto-Khmer rice farmers on the Khorat plateau. On that subject I recently had the luck to visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the most famous temple of the Khmer civilization, but I found the walls and defense of neighboring Angkor Thom, the ancient capital of the Khmers, more interesting than that better known temple's spires.  Here's one of the four huge gates, large enough for an elephant and rider to easily pass beneath. The wall is eight meters tall, and forms a square three by three kilometers wide. The city also has an absurd moat surrounding it on all sides, here's view of the causeway approaching the gate:  For reference, each of those little pyramid shapes along the top of the causeway is a man sized statue of a deva or assura, or gods and demons. There's 54 on either side, the scale is MASSIVE. The causeway is 100 meters long. Anybody besieging the city would struggle just to get a bow-shot off at a defender, let alone assault the walls, which are made of earth faced with sandstone. However despite their grandeur many aspects of the wall seem simple, even naive. They just aren't very defensible, there are no towers, not even above the gates. Their are no crenelations that I could see along the top. The causeway and its statues make for an awe inspiring approach, but there's no draw bridge, or anyway to close the approach. There is an impression that the defenses are designed as as much to awe as to defend the city. Still defense must have been on the architect's mind. The Chams had sacked Angkor Thom only a few years before construction of the gates. In 1178 they sailed a fleet up the Mekong and surprised the Khmers. They had several relief depicting the invasion at one of the temples inside.  The men in flower shaped hats/helmets wielding spears are the Chams. Those guys swimming with the fishes? Dead Khmers. The Cham victory would be short lived however. Jayavarman VII, who would go on to rebuild much of the city including the gates, drove them off in 1181, and went on the conquer all of Champa. This relief is quite unusual. The vast majority of reliefs at Angkor Wat and on the surrounding temples is religious, and where the Khmer army does appear elsewhere, as at Angkor Wat, it is depicted as triumphant. Here though they memorialized what their greatest defeat, their Cannae, in all its horror, perhaps to emphasize their ultimate triumph. I'm struck by the umbrellas, is that really necessary on a military voyage? Or is there some defensive function? Not that I blame them for wanting a little sun protection, I came away with a nasty burn across my neck and nose. Squalid fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 05:55
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Squalid posted:Anybody besieging the city would struggle just to get a bow-shot off at a defender, let alone assault the walls, which are made of earth faced with sandstone. However despite their grandeur many aspects of the wall seem simple, even naive. They just aren't very defensible, there are no towers, not even above the gates. Their are no crenelations that I could see along the top. Squalid posted:I'm struck by the umbrellas, is that really necessary on a military voyage? Or is their some defensive function. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 06:17
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The walls are thick, the sandstone hard and the drop shear. From inside its an easy scramble up the slope around figs and weedy shrubs, and in the silted up section of moat below I saw a faun dash for cover as I topped the ruin. There was some trace of what might have been a parapet, but what remained was only a few inches higher than the portion I was standing on. Notably the gate is completely inaccessibly from above, being topped with a gigantic head. The head is hollow, and full of bats. There are two small rooms inside the gate on either side, both quite plain. Presumably store rooms, with no clear defensive function. I guess a guard could have lived in them but they had no windows and, didn't seem very pleasant. Although it has survived 900 years it doesn't seem very sturdy, the gate is corbelled instead of possessing a true arch. The design is very similar to that at the Thai town of Phi Mai, just scaled up and with a bit more flair. They both had the mysterious side rooms inside the gate, although at Phi Mai you have to face indignant roosters eyeing you warily perched where the roof should be, the modern town is built right up against the ruins and I rather awkwardly found myself walking through peoples back yard to check out the remains. The moat at first clearly seems like a defensive feature, but we know for sure it had potent symbolic meaning. It represents the sea of milk which surrounds Mount Meru and was churned by the devas and assuras to produce the nectar of immortality. In fact the entire city, like most monumental Khmer architecture, is laid out in the form of a Mandela, and taken as a whole symbolizes the universe. More practically, wet paddy rice agriculture required enormous reservoirs in this dry region. Today the moat is still used as a reservoir by local people, and I assume the same was true at the peak of the Khmer empire. During the height of the empire there were enormous reservoirs in the area. There's also the fact that many of the most impressive temples in the area are built far outside the defensive perimeter, Angkor Wat for example. Although it has its own moat and walls, the walls aren't impressive. If defense was really a priority I wouldn't expect there to be so much sprawl. There were several other fortified towns in the region too, although like Phimai their walls were more like 3-4 meters. The scale of the place is just unbelievable. There were literally thousands of tourists crawling over the place, and yet I frequently found myself alone, simply wondering between sunken foundations and green stagnant reflecting pools. There was a small village beside the remains of Jayavarman VII's palace, where venders hawked Coca Cola and green mangoes. Here's an illustration that gives a good idea of the size:  The barays are huge reservoirs. edit: the picture gives an idea of the scale of the walls and moat but doesn't show the city itself for some reason. Most of the space inside Angkor Thom would have been full of structures of some sort. Squalid fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 08:39
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Squalid posted:the modern town is built right up against the ruins and I rather awkwardly found myself walking through peoples back yard to check out the remains.
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Apr 7, 2015 08:46
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Today marks the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Yamato off Okinawa      It's a myth that she did not load enough fuel to make a return trip. Even though she was part of a "Surface Special Attack Unit" and it was considered unlikely that she would survive her mission and her crew did try to beach her for use as a coastal gun battery, she did have enough fuel stored to sail back to the Home Islands had the opportunity ever come up. She was hit by at least 8 bombs, although none of them ever penetrated her armored deck. Unfortunately, she was also hit by at least 11 and as many as 13 torpedoes, all on her port side, as the American pilots attacking her that day had taken to heart lessons from the sinking of her sister Musashi six months earlier.  The explosion of her aft magazines left a plume of smoke visible for hundreds of miles, and only 269 of her 3332 crewmen survived. The Americans lost 10 planes and 12 crewmen.
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Apr 7, 2015 09:00
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100 Years Ago The Friendly Feldwebel is ordered out of the trenches. However, the German Sapper is actually in action, and his brutal, detailed account of fighting hand-to-hand at Vauquois is where we're at. Hold onto your lunch. He doesn't hold back much.
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Apr 7, 2015 12:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:Today marks the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Yamato off Okinawa You know how at the end of _The Final Countdown_, no matter how many times you see it, you want Kirk Douglas to just say "screw it," and vaporize the Japanese fleet? You know it's not going to happen and you know why but, dammit, it'd be nice? The 12-year-old boy in me wishes we'd just have sent an Iowa after that thing to settle the issue once and for all.
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Apr 7, 2015 15:09
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Phanatic posted:You know how at the end of _The Final Countdown_, no matter how many times you see it, you want Kirk Douglas to just say "screw it," and vaporize the Japanese fleet? You know it's not going to happen and you know why but, dammit, it'd be nice? If Americans had any honour they would have staged a boarding action with cutlasses and we could have settled the issue of the ~sublime Japanese katana~ at the same time.
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Apr 7, 2015 15:11
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Phanatic posted:You know how at the end of _The Final Countdown_, no matter how many times you see it, you want Kirk Douglas to just say "screw it," and vaporize the Japanese fleet? You know it's not going to happen and you know why but, dammit, it'd be nice? I feel the same way about the ending of Salt. And besides, we already know how it'd turn out: 
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Apr 7, 2015 15:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:I feel the same way about the ending of Salt. Kirishima vs. Washington?
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Apr 7, 2015 16:14
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ArchangeI posted:Kirishima vs. Washington? Yup!
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Apr 7, 2015 16:20
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So apparently the Japanese had quite a series of sabotage devices include: Incendiary bar of soap disguised as IVORY brand soap, Incendiary brick that looks like a normal construction brick, and explosive coal that is almost indistinguishable from regular coal and blows up when heated.
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Apr 7, 2015 17:22
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So thats why the Maine blew up! 
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Apr 7, 2015 17:28
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Jobbo_Fett posted:So apparently the Japanese had quite a series of sabotage devices include: Incendiary bar of soap disguised as IVORY brand soap, Incendiary brick that looks like a normal construction brick, and explosive coal that is almost indistinguishable from regular coal and blows up when heated. Explosive coal was a thing in the American Civil War as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_torpedo
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Apr 7, 2015 17:33
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Agean90 posted:So thats why the Maine blew up! You joke, but the Japanese battleship Mutsu blew up in harbor in 1943. I'm not saying that was what happened, but has anyone checked if the IJA had access to her coal stores?
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Apr 7, 2015 17:51
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Explosive coal was a thing in the American Civil War as well. Yeah, but its coal in name only. It doesnt even have coal dustings on it. Still though, both are pretty cool.
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Apr 7, 2015 18:08
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Explosive coal was a thing in the American Civil War as well. Links to the Explosive Rat, which is a rather silly idea that sort of worked (in that the Nazis spent a lot of time looking for more of them).
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Apr 7, 2015 18:22
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ArchangeI posted:You joke, but the Japanese battleship Mutsu blew up in harbor in 1943. I'm not saying that was what happened, but has anyone checked if the IJA had access to her coal stores? But Mutsu was oil fueled?
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Apr 7, 2015 19:07
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wdarkk posted:Links to the Explosive Rat, which is a rather silly idea that sort of worked (in that the Nazis spent a lot of time looking for more of them). That's about the only way that *could* have worked. Unless you use a detonator, plastic explosives don't detonate, they just burn. Throwing a lump of gelignite into a boiler is just going to result in a lump of burning gelignite sitting there amongst all the burning coal.
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Apr 7, 2015 19:09
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Squalid posted:
When I was about 10 I went to Angkor, I remember our guide* pointing out all the different nationalities on the reliefs. "And here are the Chinese mercenaries. You can tell because their eyes are tilted." I dunno if that's like, the accepted interpretation but it amused me. I think the considerations taken for elephants is a pretty fun aspect of a lot of fortifications in that area. I remember some Rajput forts were built with gates placed at hard corners so that elephants wouldn't be able to back up to get a running start on the gate. Also four inch spikes studded all over the gate at elephant forehead level. Now some of those forts were really up front about killing people trying to get in. *A real cool dude. With some very scary stories. "Oh yeah, and down there, that's where they shot my dad and my uncle. They spoke French."
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Apr 7, 2015 19:33
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Saint Celestine posted:But Mutsu was oil fueled? The plot thickens
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Apr 7, 2015 19:36
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Phanatic posted:You know how at the end of _The Final Countdown_, no matter how many times you see it, you want Kirk Douglas to just say "screw it," and vaporize the Japanese fleet? You know it's not going to happen and you know why but, dammit, it'd be nice? Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there were American battleships sent out to attack the Yamato, and that was the thing that was going to happen if the planes didn't succeed in putting her on the bottom. Not that they were held in reserve, either, they were actively on their way while the air assault was going on and if it hadn't been successful there would have been a big ol' fashioned battleship throwdown.
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Apr 7, 2015 19:58
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Squalid posted:For reference, each of those little pyramid shapes along the top of the causeway is a man sized statue of a deva or assura, or gods and demons. There's 54 on either side, the scale is MASSIVE. The causeway is 100 meters long. Anybody besieging the city would struggle just to get a bow-shot off at a defender, let alone assault the walls, which are made of earth faced with sandstone. However despite their grandeur many aspects of the wall seem simple, even naive. They just aren't very defensible, there are no towers, not even above the gates. Their are no crenelations that I could see along the top. The causeway and its statues make for an awe inspiring approach, but there's no draw bridge, or anyway to close the approach. There is an impression that the defenses are designed as as much to awe as to defend the city. I don't know much about Cambodian history or Angkor Thom, but is it possible that they supplemented the structure with wood or other decomposable material that would've been lost? If that's the case then the city might seem a lot less defensible now than it was when it was fully inhabited. The only thing I can recall about South East Asian history is a 100-level college class wherein the professor said not much was known because the jungle tended to reclaim the predominantly wooden cities. That was a long time ago so I might just be misremembering things, but it would make sense that the city doesn't seem well defended if you look at only the parts that are made of stone.
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Apr 7, 2015 20:26
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This is also true of many European fortresses of the modern era. Their walls may not seem hard to climb, but all types of obstacles made it difficult for an attacking force to approach in a good order while under fire.
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Apr 7, 2015 20:40
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That's completely different premises. There are no firearms and artillery in the 12th century in SEA that would make such a design successful.
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Apr 7, 2015 20:49
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cheerfullydrab posted:Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there were American battleships sent out to attack the Yamato, and that was the thing that was going to happen if the planes didn't succeed in putting her on the bottom. Not that they were held in reserve, either, they were actively on their way while the air assault was going on and if it hadn't been successful there would have been a big ol' fashioned battleship throwdown. When Admiral Spruance got the first contact report he ordered Morton Deyo and Task Force 54 to intercept and destroy the Yamato. TF 54 was the bombardment force, consisting of older modernized battleships. However Admiral Mitscher in command of Task Force 58, the fast carriers, got the contact report too. He started launching a massive airstrike, and only bothered to inform Spruance and Deyo of this after the planes were launched and on their way. So Task Force 54 became the backup plan. However if Yamato had broken through, it would have faced 6 other battleships and Morton Deyo would have gone down in history as the last Admiral to form a battle-line in combat. TF 54 circa Operation Ten-go BBs Idaho, New Mexico, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, Colorado 7 CL 21 DD
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