Ras Het posted:

A tiny little caveat.

Friendly Tumour posted:

If I had a working body, I'd go fight with the peshmergas against them. Those people are the enemy and they must be obliterated.

Obliterati posted:

Cost. Greek citizens, like most soldiers of the period, were expected to provide their own equipment, and the maintenance of horses is of course expensive. Greek city-states, whilst possessing rich and powerful families, didn't have a large nobility. Cavalry as a whole doesn't hugely feature in a lot of Greek armies of the period. Conversely, there were lots of Persian nobles, each of whom could afford the stables, grooms, fodder etc. necessary to maintain chariots.

On top of this, even flat plains are really hard for chariots! A single bump has them throwing a wheel and disaster. Armies used to pick their fields in advance and then spend a shittonne of time levelling out the ground in order to make chariots at all viable. Greek armies just didn't have the sort of manpower necessary to modify battlefields to support chariots.


IIRC Chinese chariots are very different, essentially working like slow but mobile platforms for archers/spears rather than the raw charge of a scythed chariot.

Dalael posted:

Could you provide any source for the bolded part of your text? I had never ever heard of this. I know chariots tended to break spokes all the time, which is one of the reasons egyptiens chariots had 5 spokes rather than 4 as the hittites (According to the documentaries I saw anyways), but the idea of an army of dude levelling off the terrain before a fight is something I have never came accross before.

Fragrag posted:

Maybe slingers foraging for stones to throw?

Jamwad Hilder posted:

Slingers generally used bullets made of clay or lead. Lead bullets are fun because the metal is soft and archaeologists sometimes find caches of bullets with stuff carved in to them. Sometimes it's stuff like a lightning bolt, or a scorpion, but other times people wrote messages on their bullets. We've found lead sling bullets that say things like "Ouch!" or "Take that" or "I hope this hits you in the dick"

Jerusalem posted:

I recall one battle (involving Augustus and Mark Antony's brother, from memory) had a ton of clever insults regarding sexual proclivities and the like.... and also the rather adorable insult that was,"Lucius is bald! "

Jamwad Hilder posted:

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

gently caress, humanity has actively regressed away from this level of wit.

Jamwad Hilder posted:

Slingers generally used bullets made of clay or lead. Lead bullets are fun because the metal is soft and archaeologists sometimes find caches of bullets with stuff carved in to them. Sometimes it's stuff like a lightning bolt, or a scorpion, but other times people wrote messages on their bullets. We've found lead sling bullets that say things like "Ouch!" or "Take that" or "I hope this hits you in the dick"

To bring it back to an earlier discussion, it just goes to show that humanity is still very similar to our ancestors in many ways. Their sling bullet jokes are still funny thousands of years later, and on the darker side people still do stuff like this. Remember those pictures that came out of Israeli kids writing messages on mortar rounds?

Dalael posted:

I dont know. I always thought that "catch this" on a bomb or mortar round was really clever.

Dalael posted:

Could you provide any source for the bolded part of your text? I had never ever heard of this. I know chariots tended to break spokes all the time, which is one of the reasons egyptiens chariots had 5 spokes rather than 4 as the hittites (According to the documentaries I saw anyways), but the idea of an army of dude levelling off the terrain before a fight is something I have never came accross before.

shallowj posted:

I think the most well-known example is Darius preparing the battlefield at Gaugamela.

This is from Arrian:

"With these forces Darius had encamped at Gaugamela, near the river Bumodus, about seventy miles from the city of Arbela, in a district everywhere level; for whatever ground thereabouts was unlevel and unfit for the evolutions of cavalry had long before been levelled by the Persians, and made fit for the easy rolling of chariots and for the galloping of horses."

tho it sort of makes it sound like this was a long-term process, modern write-ups describes as done recently before the battle itself by military engineers. I don't think they are so much literally shifting earth as they are just picking up rocks. Clearing brush, too, maybe?

Obliterati posted:

Obliterati posted:

PittTheElder posted:

Gaugamela was the site of a previous battle between the worlds oldest enemies: holes and piles.

Grand Fromage posted:

Is it that cut and dry though? In the modern world we often consider Hinduism the only major polytheistic religion. But it's a lot more complicated than that--the various gods (at least in some versions, I am no Hinduologist) are all aspects of Brahman, a single deity. So there's a strong argument it's monotheistic. But with multiple gods.

Dalael posted:

I dont know. I always thought that "catch this" on a bomb or mortar round was really clever. I'm sure sometime in vietnam, "Burn baby burn!" was etched on a napalm bomb.

We're still as witty, just not as juvenile anymore.

Offler posted:

Because every time I think about them, they only really make sense as useful weapons if the schythes are made of lightsabres or something similar. Wouldn't regular schythe blades on a chariot running through a crowd get struck on some bone really quickly? I mean, I guess I can imagine a heavy blade going through a couple of bones if it hits them at full speed blade first. But sooner or later a blade hits bone at an awkward angle, or while the chariot isn't going that fast or wathever and get stuck. And when the blade gets stuck, the whole chariot is stuck, at least if there's a body attatched to the bone your blade got stuck in. And when the chariot is stuck, the driver would be killed in no time since he's presumably surrounded by hostiles he tride to get with his blades.

Xander77 posted:

Do you think a car would get stuck on a person after a collusion? Granted, the relative speed and weight are different, but still.

Xander77 posted:

In other news. Apparently, in the medieval period the entrails / tongues / eyes / hearts / tongues were considered to be the best parts of an animal, and the muscle fiber was either discarded, or left to the servants. Was that the case in Roman/Greek times as well? What changed between then and now?

GreyjoyBastard posted:

But hey, they were basically starting from "we would like Hindus to not be persecuted as much for religious reasons, how do we justify this", which from a practical standpoint is a very laudable goal.

Offler posted:

Huh? I....erm....what? I have no idea what you're trying to say here. What does that have to do with anything that I wrote about chariots?

quote:

nor after colluding with them.

Phobophilia posted:

When you have a personal connection to the animals, and know just how much time and labour goes into raising one of them, you'd want to utilise every calorie you can get out of an animal. That's the only respectful way.

And this "chunks of muscle meat" purity has not ended. I mean, look at the whole pink slime controversy recently. And this often came from self-described environmentalists: if you want to minimise the impact that agriculture has, then eat every part of the buffalo.

Kassad posted:

And honestly, liking meat so much more than entrails, tongues or hearts seems to be mostly a thing in the Anglosphere and Scandinavia,

Offler posted:

Huh? I....erm....what? I have no idea what you're trying to say here. No, I do not believe that cars generally get stuck on people after colliding with them, nor after colluding with them. What does that have to do with anything that I wrote about chariots?

Xander77 posted:

Cars are heavy and fast. Which is why bumping into people does not generally stop them. Heavier and faster than chariots, but still. That's the analogy.

HEY GAL posted:

Entrails are freaking delicious and my reading suggests anecdotally that people eat them less the farther away they are from freshly butchered animals--so, when cities get bigger and fewer people have their own pigs in the back yard or whatever

Edit: That's only about the early modern period, it doesn't touch how weirdly squeamish Americans are about which animals / parts of animals they'll eat. I think I blame the 50s for that, like for most of our food mistakes

Offler posted:

That's a really lovely analogy though. Cars are so much heavier, faster, more powerful and easier to controll than chariots that comparing them seems beyond useless. Not to mention that I was talking about the schythe blades slicing through limbs while you're talking about collistions so we're not even comparing the same function here! And the way you worded it made it seem like I'm some kind of idiot for not thinking about this useless comparison before posting. It's all a bit baffling to me.

Jamwad Hilder posted:

He's saying it's silly that you think two tons of animals (assuming a four-horse team), plus the weight of the chariot itself and the driver(s), is going to be stopped because part of the chariot got "stuck in a guy's leg" - they're just going to rip through him, dude.

I get what you're saying, but think of it this way: If you took one of those dinky little Smart Cars, took it to a hill with a gentle slope, tied your leg to it, and put it in neutral so it's rolling down the street at like, 3 mph, do you think your body weight is enough to stop the car from rolling? I mean, your leg is stuck to it after all.

Offler posted:

Maybe it's an example of something that sounds good in theory but is extremely difficult to make work in practice.