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Telsa Cola posted:Well its a little more complex than that as we don't call every permanent settlement a city. There's a complexity/density criteria that generally needs to be hit.
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Mar 6, 2024 20:14
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I thought the current thinking is that Oppida were more like castle towns than cities, with economic activity being much more diffuse through smaller villages or manors. Again, that isn't to say that La Tene/Gaulish people weren't sophisticated and organized, just different.
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Mar 6, 2024 20:37
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If we're talking about differences in degree then the big innovation of the latins was they had many big city in which all the local chiefs could organize themselves and their patrons, and they had some forms of civic religions to diffuse inter-chief aggression and avoid civil war and divert that aggression towards outside communities
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Mar 6, 2024 22:24
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FishFood posted:I thought the current thinking is that Oppida were more like castle towns than cities, with economic activity being much more diffuse through smaller villages or manors. Again, that isn't to say that La Tene/Gaulish people weren't sophisticated and organized, just different. Yeah I think its important to say while there are some key things that any "city" requires, what is deemed a city is going to vary by culture. It's not fair or appropriate to directly compare Çatalhöyük with like, Rome, or something. My random half assed catgeorization is notably large population density/size for the culture and the development of some sort of administrative class/body to deal with all that.
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Mar 6, 2024 23:49
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I think fairly often about how we've had agriculture for a good twice as long as we've had cities. And to some extent "what is a city" is culturally local - in terms of absolute population size, Uruk would probably not be considered a major city by most 21st century standards. My impression is that even if the Gauls built fortified villages of decent population, they weren't nearly as much of density 'spikes' as cities like Rome or Luoyang would be at the same time, and didn't have the attendant cultural and political weight over the countryside. Totally just a vague impression I have that Gallish culture and power was not really in or about cities, but much more spread through the farming countryside.
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Mar 7, 2024 10:50
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I imagine the lands the people live in are a factor, too. Northern France / western Germany / the low countries are remarkably flat, get a good amount of rain/have lots of rivers, and the soil is fertile enough that I imagine it just naturally happened that the cultures living there were naturally more spread out simply because they could and prosper while doing it.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:25
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sorry to get all jared diamond but its also the nature of the mediterranean vs northern europe. having a large relatively calm and easily transversible sea where fishing villages and later trading towns could flourish lends itself towards cities far more than dense forests that get covered in snow for a giant part of the year and seas that are dangerous and subject to intense storms. plus just the proximity or distance to the fertile crescent, the silk road, and the connections between china and the persians.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:39
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It might be telling that Roman and Greek writers identify Italian and Greek peoples by the names of their cities, but do not do so for Gauls and Germans.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:41
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Latins and Greek settle like this But Gauls and Germanics settle like this
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Mar 7, 2024 17:48
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Communication across a sea of water like the Mediterranean is also far easier compared to overland travel, barring river travel of course. So this means that people inland can potentially be far more reclusive despite being nearest in matter of miles simply due to the longer time it takes to travel inland compared to across the sea.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:59
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ChaseSP posted:Communication across a sea of water like the Mediterranean is also far easier compared to overland travel, barring river travel of course. So this means that people inland can potentially be far more reclusive despite being nearest in matter of miles simply due to the longer time it takes to travel inland compared to across the sea.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:29
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WoodrowSkillson posted:sorry to get all jared diamond but its also the nature of the mediterranean vs northern europe. having a large relatively calm and easily transversible sea where fishing villages and later trading towns could flourish lends itself towards cities far more than dense forests that get covered in snow for a giant part of the year and seas that are dangerous and subject to intense storms. plus just the proximity or distance to the fertile crescent, the silk road, and the connections between china and the persians. Eh Diamond doesn't have a monopoly on "geography affects culture." He's neither the first (ancient greeks clearly did it), nor is he the most thorough or committed. He's just the most famous, which is probably just an affect of him probably being the most famous history writer today, based on my metric of "If I make fun of [x] at a party of non-historians, will people know who [x] is?" e: Anyway it makes perfect sense to me that people would adapt their form of building settlements and collecting food and doing trade to the physical environment they are doing it in. The alternative would be pretty silly.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:43
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It's much easier to travel and trade over water and if you're in a particularly mountainous area like Greece it makes perfect sense most places will be on or near the water.
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Mar 8, 2024 00:06
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Semi related Deveraux got around to talking about the record of the Macedonian phalanx and, to my relief, was unspairing about the myth that Macedonian and Greek phalanxes fall apart if they see a rock, which always seemed like an insane part of video game logic to me that the Greek fighting style would only work on extremely level, flat plains. Y'know, those wide expanses of level fields in Greece.
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Mar 8, 2024 02:46
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Geography affecting culture is one of those things that while it's easy to get way into the weeds and/or weird with, it DOES make sense. It's material conditions, after all. And we can see in our own present day how people who live in isolated rural areas often end up quite different from people living in cities even when they're in the same culture and civilization by every other metric. (even with some deliberate cultivation, you can see it, I've lived it) And in some cases I wonder if you do see some aspects of 'Well, they're different from us, but they're clearly doing what works for them' rather than the usual bafflement and bluster of cultural posturing. I suppose it tends to become the latter when there's active conflict between people rather than those people just being over there. And also sometimes clear like with the Mongols when they had to return to Mongolia to recruit new horsemen to replace losses, because you simply couldn't get people of the same level and type of skill who hadn't been brought up in the same environment and been trained all their lives in that way. (And of course, the Mongols famously valued wise men from other cultures and actively recruited them to make their skills and knowledge an asset) Tulip posted:Semi related Deveraux got around to talking about the record of the Macedonian phalanx and, to my relief, was unspairing about the myth that Macedonian and Greek phalanxes fall apart if they see a rock, which always seemed like an insane part of video game logic to me that the Greek fighting style would only work on extremely level, flat plains. Y'know, those wide expanses of level fields in Greece. Also come to think of it, related given level, flat plains are the kinda terrain where phalanxes would absolutely eat poo poo to more mobile forces even without the near cheat code that is horse archers. Like, the entire premise of The Three Hundred is that a small pass in mountainous territory is perfectly ideal for Greek phalanxes to hold ground with their signature shield wall against a much larger force.
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Mar 8, 2024 08:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:
Deveraux goes to pains to note that horse archers are not a hard counter to Hellenistic phalanxes, or at least not a hard enough one to just totally defeat Hellenistic armies regularly. We don't have tons of detail about the battles between Hellenistic armies and either steppe peoples or the Parthians, but nothing in the record suggests that phalanxes just melted under horse archer fire. And the Hellenistic normal battle plan is to use the phalanxes as pinning forces so that other arms can break weaker parts of the enemy army and force a route. Your phalanxes having less offensive effect than you hoped isn't a big deal because they aren't the offense anyway. He cites the battles of Mount Labus (Seleucids vs Parthians) and Jaxartes (Alexander vs Saka) as examples where the Hellenistic plan worked quite well even with horse archers present. Not that the Hellenistic armies just win constantly, but it's not like there's a simple "this counters that" logic IRL. Or if there is it only serves to justify the wisdom of their diverse, combined-arms forces.
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Mar 8, 2024 09:22
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Tulip posted:Semi related Deveraux got around to talking about the record of the Macedonian phalanx and, to my relief, was unspairing about the myth that Macedonian and Greek phalanxes fall apart if they see a rock, which always seemed like an insane part of video game logic to me that the Greek fighting style would only work on extremely level, flat plains. Y'know, those wide expanses of level fields in Greece. I had always heard that the phalanx didn't work on open ground, that you needed the rocky terrain to guard your flanks
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Mar 8, 2024 15:41
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zoux posted:I had always heard that the phalanx didn't work on open ground, that you needed the rocky terrain to guard your flanks Ghost Leviathan posted:Also come to think of it, related given level, flat plains are the kinda terrain where phalanxes would absolutely eat poo poo to more mobile forces even without the near cheat code that is horse archers. Like, the entire premise of The Three Hundred is that a small pass in mountainous territory is perfectly ideal for Greek phalanxes to hold ground with their signature shield wall against a much larger force. Phalanxes did just fine in big open ground, see Alexander. The greek city-states fighting in valleys were not stretching their phalanxes out from mountain to mountain, and the Romans abandoned the phalanx after eating poo poo against the Samnites in the central Italian hill country vs the flat terrain around Rome itself. The key for those major engagements was combined arms, notably cavalry and non-phalanx troops on the wings to guard the flanks. Alexander's phalanxes were also extremely well drilled and the sides would just rotate out to address a flanking threat and now its a tercio. So in those battles the phalanx was not some slowly moving behemoth that could not address flanking. Another point is there was a degradation in the quality of phalanxes between the time of Alexander and then the successor states and their eventual losses to Rome. They fought each other for a century and over that time the overall amount of training and such afforded to their soldiers was drastically reduced, and to compensate for that, they made their phalanxes deeper and their sarissas longer, going from ~17 feet to as much as ~23 feet long. Their shields also got smaller to accommodate the added weight and encumbrance on the soldier. This made the phalanx more unwieldy overall, and those were the ones the Romans ended up fighting against Macedon and Seleucia. The amount of cavalry and screening troops was also reduced by that time. Obviously they still had all those things, and had good well trained phalanxes as well, but overall the quality had reduced and by the time Rome showed up they were not going to win full on wars. The idea that the legions were some kind of hard counter is also totally wrong as we have plenty of accounts of legions getting wrecked when they are forced to fight phalanxes head on, with accounts of sarissas just punching through scutums and whatnot. They still did their jobs just fine, it was that once something went wrong, the greeks no longer had the same ability to respond. and over the course of a campaign, weaknesses got exploited by the more mobile and capable legions. WoodrowSkillson fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 16:35
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I imagine the lands the people live in are a factor, too. Northern France / western Germany / the low countries are remarkably flat, get a good amount of rain/have lots of rivers, and the soil is fertile enough that I imagine it just naturally happened that the cultures living there were naturally more spread out simply because they could and prosper while doing it. So that's why the Gauls don't build districts next to the cities.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:52
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Another point is there was a degradation in the quality of phalanxes between the time of Alexander and then the successor states and their eventual losses to Rome. They fought each other for a century and over that time the overall amount of training and such afforded to their soldiers was drastically reduced, and to compensate for that, they made their phalanxes deeper and their sarissas longer, going from ~17 feet to as much as ~23 feet long. My understanding is that this isn't the case, it's just that the successor states had to get really good at fighting each other, not that their quality declined per se. It was because they had to fight against a copy of themselves that changed the tactics, but individually we don't have evidence that they were worse by any stretch.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:48
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Carillon posted:My understanding is that this isn't the case, it's just that the successor states had to get really good at fighting each other, not that their quality declined per se. It was because they had to fight against a copy of themselves that changed the tactics, but individually we don't have evidence that they were worse by any stretch. I always hated the mirror match.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:02
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Crab Dad posted:I always hated the mirror match. Especially blue phalanx vs. blue phalanx. I'm reading a fantasy novel series and a guy sees a bunch of army ants and invents the shield wall. This is in a society roughly at an early middle ages level of tech. Prior to this the battles were described as a whole bunch of dudes charge at each other and basically pairing off into a series of hundreds of 1v1 duels. It's also got back scabbards and poo poo so I'm not holding it up as some historically accurate example, but that sticks out to me as weird. My assumption is that organized tactics would be invented almost immediately after you had groups of 30+ dudes fighting each other, is that true? Or was there a period in which polities dominated their rivals because only they figured out "arranging guys in a line is better"? Also why the goddamn back scabbards all the time, I get that it looks cool in movies and TV but you can't see it on the page and it's a big flashing Watch Out For Other Bullshit flag whenever it shows up
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Mar 8, 2024 18:09
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Getting the dudes in to a line is relatively easy. Keeping the dudes in line after contact is the real battle-winning part and what separates winners and losers.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:14
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the romans were also simply insanely militaristic by the standards of the ancient world. as a society they could muster an army, have that army completely eat poo poo, muster another one, have that one eat poo poo, and still have the capability to raise a third - and that was before they extended their reach and population all that far away from italy. most ancient states of rome's size during the middle republic were not able to do that - the army they had was the army they had, and bouncing back from a devastating loss was often just not possible. regardless of any tactical advantages, persistence was the main thing that let them take down the successor states
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Mar 8, 2024 18:17
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zoux posted:Especially blue phalanx vs. blue phalanx. Got a better place to put your sword so you don’t trip when you run?
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Mar 8, 2024 18:22
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Jazerus posted:the romans were also simply insanely militaristic by the standards of the ancient world. as a society they could muster an army, have that army completely eat poo poo, muster another one, have that one eat poo poo, and still have the capability to raise a third - and that was before they extended their reach and population all that far away from italy. most ancient states of rome's size during the middle republic were not able to do that - the army they had was the army they had, and bouncing back from a devastating loss was often just not possible. regardless of any tactical advantages, persistence was the main thing that let them take down the successor states
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Mar 8, 2024 18:25
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Tulip posted:Deveraux goes to pains to note that horse archers are not a hard counter to Hellenistic phalanxes, or at least not a hard enough one to just totally defeat Hellenistic armies regularly. We don't have tons of detail about the battles between Hellenistic armies and either steppe peoples or the Parthians, but nothing in the record suggests that phalanxes just melted under horse archer fire. Well, we know that phalanges were weak to Roman legions, and legions were weak to horse archers. So it's reasonable to make horse archers weak to phalanges, for a balanced game.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:30
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Carillon posted:My understanding is that this isn't the case, it's just that the successor states had to get really good at fighting each other, not that their quality declined per se. It was because they had to fight against a copy of themselves that changed the tactics, but individually we don't have evidence that they were worse by any stretch. My understanding might be outdated then, I'm certainly not a historian.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:44
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Nessus posted:How were they able to manage this? Was the area around Rome unusually productive? Innovative recordkeeping? The favor of Jupiter? Deveraux has gone into more detail about it on his blog, but it basically boils down to the fact that they were using an enormous militia rather than a professional military class, and then basically built their nascent empire all around maximizing the size and prosperity of this middle class to make them both available for recruitment and well equipped. This is all pretty specific to the Middle Republic, by the time you get to the Late Republic the small farms that were so good at providing manpower are being bought up and converted to latifundia, which eventually leads to the professionalization of the Roman army. Carillon posted:My understanding is that this isn't the case, it's just that the successor states had to get really good at fighting each other, not that their quality declined per se. It was because they had to fight against a copy of themselves that changed the tactics, but individually we don't have evidence that they were worse by any stretch. Yeah, this is a somewhat outdated model at this point. I think a good argument could be made that the militaries of the successor states were better than that of Alexander, they were certainly larger. Their big problem isn't really tactical, either: phalanxes beat legions on more than one occasion, but the militaries of the successors were ruinously expensive and incredibly brittle. If they lost a battle, raising another army could take years, while the Romans would just call up the next draft class. The successors relied on professional or semi-professional militaries drawn from a small subset of their population, usually a core of Greek-speaking settlers that were granted land in exchange for military service, supplemented by other troops drawn from subject peoples' aristocracies. This means that while when fully mobilized, a successor state can raise an enormous, well equipped army, they just don't have the reserves that the Romans do. FishFood fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 18:49
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zoux posted:Especially blue phalanx vs. blue phalanx. IIRC, there are depictions of shield walls from the 3rd millennium BCE.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:59
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Nessus posted:How were they able to manage this? Was the area around Rome unusually productive? Innovative recordkeeping? The favor of Jupiter? The short answer is that from the third century or so their entire foreign policy was oriented around military manpower. First of all they're doing an annual conscription drive (and running a census to enable it, so record keeping is part of it). Secondly, areas that Rome subjugated within Italy were not made into tributaries (who might organize their own military forces occasionally but are primarily about extracting revenue), but instead they are turned into socii (generally translated as Allies). The treaties with Rome (the only foreign treaties they are allowed to maintain) specify how many men they must supply to the army each year, along with their equipment. This system is something no other state in the Mediterranean (possibly anywhere?) is doing, and it allows them to mobilize a staggering amount of military force, something like 200,000 men under arms during the worst periods of the Second Punic War. Roman armies by the time we can really see them are composed of 50% of socii, generally composed of two Roman legions in the center, and one socii legion on either wing. These guys are armed the same and fight the same (there is a big convergence in how Italian armies are equipping and fighting themselves, apparently as a consequence both of the interstate-anarchy and Rome imposing her methods on hold-outs), and to their opponents probably seem just like Romans, though legally they're drawn from non-Romans. All of that, plus the fact that they're fighting every year means there is a huge amount of manpower available, most of it well equipped and with previous experience, and this is the system that lets them rally back continuously after bad losses (Pyrrhus, Hannibal, etc.) and keep on fighting, and winning. By the end of the Punic wars there's also a well developed logistical operation that seems to be happening, with a lot of grain being shipped around to supply armies in the provinces, though this is much harder to see in the sources. zoux posted:Especially blue phalanx vs. blue phalanx. Yeah I don't think "have everybody descend into a chaotic melee" is ever the planned outcome for any society for as far back as the written record goes, suggesting that it's probably something you either figure out very quickly, or else someone who has rapidly educates you. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 19:10
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Re: hollywood back scabbards and the like, more than anything its continuity and ease of use on set. It keeps them up and out of the way, and they are always in the same place so reshoots are easier. It also knocks over less things around set, etc. it also means the cool sword hilt you paid someone to make is right there in the shot all the time. Tod from Todcutler has worked with TV shows and such, notably forging the hero versions of Geralt's swords for the Witcher tv show, he breaks down some of that stuff here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF1VFlCnLQ4 for shield walls, i think there are shield walls and there are Shield Walls. Standing near your buddies and trying to keep close is one thing, having the discipline and cohesion to have the dude in the 2nd rank step over his neighbor's body and replace him in the wall when he gets an arrow in the eye is another. It is also the intent to cover part of your buddy with your shield, and to trust the guy on your other right to do the same. That requires specific training and the right kind of weapons to use with it, spears being the obvious choice. The Romans notably did not use a true shield wall (the testudo is different) since a scutum literally can't overlap the guy next to you. So yeah "everyone charges in and fights 1v1 is not accurate at all, but not everyone was using shield walls for a million potential reasons. Or they only used it sometimes and fought differently at other times, with again the Romans as a decent example where they had their standard deployments but also a ton of other ones, like the testudo or the weird /\/\/\/\/\ wedge shape that they used against Boudica.
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Mar 8, 2024 19:15
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I read a book once that argued essentially that in the ancient Mediterranean, you had a sliding scale between taxing and conscripting conquered peoples; the Ptolemies went hard on taxation, Rome went hard on conscription, and the rest of the powers were somewhere in between. The rest of the book was an in depth analysis basically saying that when two powers went to war, the one that did more conscription almost always won
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Mar 8, 2024 20:49
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zoux posted:My assumption is that organized tactics would be invented almost immediately after you had groups of 30+ dudes fighting each other, is that true? Or was there a period in which polities dominated their rivals because only they figured out "arranging guys in a line is better"? Doing anything beyond individual combat requires at least some training as a group. In general, the militaries of premodern societies were just Some Guys who you pulled off the farm and went to fight with. There was very little training involved, not enough to get good. The thing is that "stand together in a line and fight" sounds extremely simple and it is not. It requires a lot of drill and training to do it properly, and even more to be able to keep doing it during battle. There just aren't a ton of non-professional militaries that have the training. They do exist; the Romans, notably, are able to do this with the citizen militia. But the Romans are also not typical of ancient societies at all. Does that mean we should view these mostly untrained armies as just a mob? No, sticking together in a formation is pretty obvious and people do that. It wasn't just a field of individual fights. The difference is being effective at complex formation fighting. A good illustrative example is the Greek phalanx, actually. A phalanx requires forming up in a roughly equal spacing and being able to advance forward while maintaining that spacing and fighting. More or less everyone in a Greek militia has enough training/experience to do this. When you get professional, well-trained phalanxes like the Macedonian model, suddenly your phalanx can do all kinds of crazy poo poo like changing direction while maintaining formation. You can move backwards, can turn, and the Macedonian one is broken into smaller formations that can maneuver somewhat independently, not to the extent of Roman maniples but in that direction. Being able to do this requires a lot more training, as well as a relatively high number of officers to issue orders throughout the ranks and keep stuff organized. And, generally, a professional force that is just training for war rather than farming most of the time. The movie thing of two armies running into each other full speed and devolving into a chaotic melee is a movie thing. If a real battle turns into that, poo poo is not going the way you planned it. It's not like it never happens but that's not what you are intending when you head in to fight.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:54
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Crab Dad posted:Got a better place to put your sword so you don’t trip when you run? Waist scabbards that are either short enough not to get in the way or are hung from a sling so they're not just poking down into your legs. If the sword is long enough that it will bang your legs when you're running, it's long enough that it's going to be difficult to draw and sheath on your back, especially if you don't want it flopping down. Video games and TV gloss over the mechanics of drawing from your back, but if you hold a tape measure and extend your arm like you're drawing over your shoulder you'll see that it's hard to clear more than about a 2 foot blade from a scabbard without either hitting your neck or forcing the whole scabbard over your head so you can draw downward. Since your sword is a backup weapon, you're probably going to be drawing it quickly in the heat of battle, so you really don't want the draw to be awkward. There's evidence back scabbards were used occasionally by some people, but waist scabbards turn up vastly more often.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:19
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Here’s a problem that was most likely already solved. On your back for long marches and switched to you wast when combat is eminent. It’s just a belt and doubt there’s any right or wrong way to do it in the past just whatever works for you.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:22
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This guy (who sucks and is probably a groyper) made one that works and it does not look cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZq8BCum7DA
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Mar 8, 2024 23:23
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Yeah the scabbard is higher than you think, the hilt is around the bottom of your rib cage IIRC. That is for Europe though. There's a fair amount of art of people in east/southeast Asia carrying swords on their backs. A lot of Asian swords were shorter than the typical European size so it would've worked better. I just tried back scabbarding with my gladius and it's no problem. A spatha wouldn't work.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:28
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Anyone ever seen a sword scabbard like the old clamshell gun holsters?
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Mar 8, 2024 23:39
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zoux posted:This guy (who sucks and is probably a groyper) made one that works and it does not look cool. I pray to God Drachinifel never turns out to be a secret chud, I could listen to that man talk all day.
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Mar 8, 2024 23:50
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