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Lesgoon posted:Does anyone have book recommendations for reconstruction after the US civil war? There are hundreds of works about the actual war, but the reconstruction seems glossed over so frequently. "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877", by Eric Foner, is the definitive text on the topic. It was first published in the 1980s, but an updated edition got put out a few years ago. Its over 700 pages and very detailed, so it might be a bit more then you are looking for.
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Dec 7, 2020 05:45
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Memento posted:It's not really a military history question, per se, but uhh, how big is the incoming SecDef Lloyd Austin? There's a picture of him with Robert Gates that is possibly even better: 
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Dec 9, 2020 06:22
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Anyone have any book recommendations on the Peloponnesian or Greek-Persian Wars?
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Dec 10, 2020 07:41
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Cincinnatus Being semi-mythical helps for this.
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Jan 29, 2021 06:27
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SubG posted:Are the PDF scans you can get from Columbia University/Google the most complete/legible digital version of The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies? It looks like Cornell has an open access scan up on Hathi Trust that is good quality and searchable: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924077725913&view=1up&seq=1
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Mar 7, 2021 07:12
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SubG posted:Their scan is actually somewhat lower quality than the scan done by google--a lot more faint and uneven parts, most of the pages are at a weird angle, and just generally looking like someone ran it off on an office photocopier. A lot of it is a little crooked, but the resolution is definitely higher. Comparing the quality when the text is zoomed in a lot, and the Cornell version is still perfectly clear, but the google one starts to get blurry. Not sure how important that is to you, it does have that going for it. The Library of Congress website does appear to have straight, very high quality scans of the atlas portion though: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701sm.gcw0099000/?sp=58&r=-0.133,-0.025,1.271,0.602,0
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Mar 7, 2021 09:09
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bewbies posted:I always found it kind of ironic that douhet ended up being absolutely right in his predictions, but the thing he didn't get is that a destructive potential of airpower would be so overwhelming it would eventually lead to a completely new framework of warfare and deterrence Nuclear deterrence isn't really a product of airpower though. It's a product the weapon itself, not the plane that can deliver it. Even if nuclear weapons could not be carried by planes, they would still have eventually reshaped warfare. Also, within 15 or 20 years of the first atomic bomb being deployed, nuclear deterrence had already begun to shift to missiles and submarines, with planes as only one of the three legs of the triad. I guess you could argue that missiles are a form of airpower, but that's certainly not what Douhet and his contemporaries were talking about.
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May 22, 2021 19:45
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bulletsponge13 posted:drat. Was hoping for something. Hoplites were definitely heavy infantry, not light. They fought with significant armor and large shields that prevented them from moving quickly on a battlefield. The Ancient Greek term for light infantry/skirmishers was peltast. The Greeks also used the term takabara to refer to Persian light infantry equipped similar to peltasts, if you prefer that term. Another Greek term for infantry is hypaspists, a word used in Homer to describe a soldier who fought with a shield, but which came by the 5th century BC to refer to an elite infantry unit of multiple types. The famous hypaspists of Alexander the Great ultimately changed their name to argyraspides (Greek for "silver shields"), after they coated the rims of their shields in silver.
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Jul 6, 2021 03:13
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wiegieman posted:Peltast was a name for a light shield, a Greek skirmisher was known as a psiloi. That's not quite right. The word for a small, light shield is pelte (πέλτη). (https://lsj.gr/wiki/%CF%80%CE%AD%CE%BB%CF%84%CE%B7) The word peltast (πελταστής) refers to the infantrymen who carried them, or oftentimes, to any light troops. (https://lsj.gr/wiki/%CF%80%CE%B5%CE%BB%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CF%82) Psiloi (ψιλικός) is a word that also refers to light troops. (https://lsj.gr/wiki/%CF%88%CE%B9%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%82). The difference between the use of Psiloi and Peltast is in era/dialect. Psiloi is only used by Roman era authors, such as Diodorus Siculus, Lucian, and Arrian. Classical-era Greek authors, such as Thucydides, Xenophon, Isocrates, Euripides, and Lysias, use the word peltast instead. Diodorus uses ψιλικός to refer to the same exact units that are described by Xenophon with πελταστής, such as Theban light troops at the battle of Mantinea in 362 BC. For example, Thucydides 2.29.5 says "a force of Thracian horse and light-armed infantry/peltasts," which in Greek is "Θρᾳκίαν... ἱππέων τε καὶ πελταστῶν." πελταστῶν is a plural form of πελταστής. Arrian 1.7.9 says "Alexander sent forth a party of his light-armed infantry and archers" which in Greek is "Ἀλέξανδρος ἐκπέμπει τῶν ψιλῶν καὶ τοξοτῶν." ψιλῶν is a plural form of ψιλικός. The word pelte is fairly uncommon, appearing only a couple dozen times in the corpus. However, its pretty clear that pelte is the word that is used to refer to the shield, not peltast. For example, Herodotus 7.75.1 says "they also had javelins and little shields and daggers," which in Greek is " πρὸς δὲ ἀκόντιά τε καὶ πέλτας καὶ ἐγχειρίδια." CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Jul 6, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2021 06:54
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Captain von Trapp posted:Oh hey, good opportunity for a random Greek question: how much crossover is there between biblical and classical Greek? I.e., if a person learns to read biblical Greek competently at a seminary or whatever, can they also read Thucydides, or people from different eras like Plato or Homer? They're quite similar, but its easier to go from Attic Greek (the language of classical Athens) to Biblical Greek than it is to go other way around. Most of the changes between the time of Plato/Thucydides and Biblical writings are things dropping out of the language, so if you learn Biblical Greek, it is a somewhat (but not a lot) simplified version. However, most of the aspects that "dropped out" still show up occasionally in Biblical texts, so if you are seriously studying Biblical Greek, you will pick up most of the key parts of Attic grammar eventually. Exclusively reading Biblical texts will not prepare you super well for the more complex syntax common in Attic texts however, since constructions that are rare in bible may be quite common in Thucydides. For example, Thucydides is notorious for his extensive use of participles (verbs used as a noun), and he frequently will write sentences with 4 or 5 of them. Participles are much rarer in the bible, and you probably will never see a sentence with 5 participles in the bible. Biblical texts also vary a fair amount in how often they employ Attic-style grammar. When the bible was written, it was very popular among educated authors to intentionally try to emulate the now archaic Attic dialect. Paul's letters and Acts both employ now-rare Attic forms much more then the Gospels (particularly Mark) do. If you spend a lot of time reading Acts, you will be better prepared for reading classical texts then you would be if you had focused on Mark. The vocabulary also shifted some, but not a ton. The vast majority of words used in the bible also appear in classical texts. Most are used the same way, but some words have shifted meaning, often due to Christian repurposing of generic words to mean something specific. For example, the word ekklesia is used by classical authors to mean "assembly" (Thucydides uses this word to refer to the Athenian Assembly). Biblical and later Christian texts use it to mean "church." Some new words enter the language used in the Bible, and some words also dropped out of use, but there aren't too many of either, and dealing with that issue just requires grabbing a dictionary. Overall, a person who has studied Greek seriously at seminary probably wouldn't find classical Athenian authors to challenging, at least not after spending some time reviewing the parts of grammar that rarely come up in the bible. Homer is a bit of a different story. Homer wrote in an archaic form of the Ionic dialect (which would be very influential for later poets, and is often just referred to as the Homeric dialect). There are some significant differences in vocabulary and grammar between Homeric and Attic texts. Jumping directly from Biblical Greek to Homer would be more difficult, and would require significant additional study. However, unless you have experience with Homer or similar poets, everyone needs additional study to read Homer, so you'd just have to do a bit more work then someone who had studied more Attic more then you would need to do.
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Jul 6, 2021 20:13
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zoux posted:About the other part of my question: have we seen any kind of rebuilding aid from the winners to the losers in wars prior to WWII After World War 1, the US set up the American Relief Administration, which provided food and medical aid to countries in Europe, including the Soviet Union. The initial budget was 100 million dollars (1.4 billion in inflation adjusted money), but ultimately the US spent 220 million on ARA between 1919 and 1923 (3.4 billion dollars in inflation adjusted money). The ARA was run by Herbert Hoover, who had run the predecessor organization that had been operating throughout the war.
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Jul 7, 2021 21:30
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SubG posted:Many years ago I was fluent-for-scholarship in Koine and in fact I picked up a copy of History of the Peloponnesian War and found it more or less only barely comprehensible. CrypticFox has provided details explaining the why, but personally I frequently felt like I could understand the majority of the vocabulary and frequently could understand the general sense but would feel more like I was decrypting rather than reading or even translating, if that makes sense. Part of the problem there is going to be the fact Thucydides is incredibly dense, and hard for everyone to understand. His syntax is very convoluted, since he doesn't really believe in ending sentences until he is absolutely forced to (one of his particularly bad sentences comes out to 134 words when translated). Since word order is flexible in Greek, and different from English, this leads to situations where there can be 20 or 30 words separating a verb and its subject. Other classical authors generally do not do this, at least not the same extent that Thucydides does, unless they are a philosopher or poet who is intentionally trying to be hard to understand. We looked at a passage from Thucydides briefly in my Greek class last quarter, and we were all going very slowly through it, even the people who had been doing Attic Greek for 4 years. I'm also no expert, I'm just an undergraduate student who has taken a little over a year of Greek, so I may have judged the difficulty of the jump incorrectly. I've only ever studied Attic in a class, I've never done anything specifically on Koine.
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Jul 8, 2021 08:10
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Libluini posted:We don't actually know, as we only have archaeological evidence and zero writing to go on. We only know that when ground and climate became less favorable, their culture cratered and something organized completely differently showed up later. Can you clarify what and when you are talking about? We have written records from Ur and the surrounding area that date to over 5,000 years ago so I am a little confused what you are referring to.
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Aug 16, 2021 02:23
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The way the US reacted to offing bin Laden or Baghdadi suggests your premise is off to me. It's not just those two either, quite recently the US killed one person who they said had planned the attack on the Kabul airport with the knife missile, in what was unquestionably an assassination. This was covered widely in the media, without any mainstream objections to the fact that it was an assassination.
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Sep 22, 2021 21:18
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SerCypher posted:I'm not sure what the modern verdict on him is, but John Keegan's (I think) face of battle goes into the concept of Shellshock/Battle Fatigue quite a bit. I'm not sure about ancient PTSD either, but I don't think that is a very good description of ancient warfare for this purpose. Pitched battles were not the only thing that might cause PTSD. Raiding, foraging (which frequently involved violence), and sieges were all very common. There were lots of potentially traumatic events occurring in the life of an ancient soldier, even if one would usually only fight in major battles a few times in their life. These kinds of things could also last a really long time. A pitched battle might be over in a day, but sieges were much more common and they could easily last more than 120 days. Many lasted years. And there was usually low level fighting occurring all the time in sieges, so it wasn't like people got much rest during a siege. This is especially true for the soldiers being besieged, they had to be constantly vigilant for an attack, and the onus was on them to man the defenses 24/7 for months or years while constantly in danger of being shot by archers and artillery. If PTSD and shellshock/battle fatigue is in fact a modern phenomenon that was not frequent in the ancient world, I don't think length of battles is the explanation for why.
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Dec 9, 2021 03:01
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The U-boat taunting on the radio was really the only over-the-top/dumb part of the movie. If you can look past those 30 seconds, the rest of the movie is not nearly as cheesy.
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Dec 19, 2021 01:37
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I've been reading a little bit recently about the air war in World War 2, and one thing I was wondering about is how the command structure of the massive late war bomber raids worked. Some of the raids on Germany and Japan included over a thousand planes. Did these giant air raids bring along a general as a commander? That many people in a single operation would normally require a general/admiral to command, but I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere so I have been assuming they did not.
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Dec 28, 2021 05:49
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The Lone Badger posted:If all 23 stab wounds were in the target and none into each other that's actually a very admirable level of accuracy for amateurs. Some of them did stab each other, several sources claim that multiple men were injured by conspirators accidentally stabbing each other.
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Jan 27, 2022 06:13
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grassy gnoll posted:Is there a decent primer for how naval warfare works? I had the weird realization recently that my knowledge of naval strategy and tactics boils down to "spend outrageous amounts of money on a hole in the water, wait until satellite observation is invented if you want to know where the enemy went." If you are looking for a book to read on that topic, a good high level overview covering a lot of different aspects of naval strategy, diplomacy, geopolitics/geography, and naval history, is Sea Power by James Stavridis, former US admiral and NATO Commander. I think that may cover a lot of what you are looking for, since it goes from the ground up starting with the geography of the oceans progressing from there.
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Mar 15, 2022 05:26
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Nenonen posted:It's also, uh, quite possible that he shed a bit of blood at that moment. It's amazing that he survived with the kind of medicine they had at the time and then lived for another 50 years. I'm sure being a general helped in getting good treatment, but still. Trauma medicine in the 19th century was more effective than you might think. The number of amputations seems very primitive to modern eyes, but 19th century doctors were very good at amputations, and it generally worked pretty well at keeping people alive. 74% of Union soldiers who received amputations survived: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4790547/. Doctors at this time could do amputations really fast (a simple case might take only 2 minutes), and they were usually done with anesthetic, which sped things up and helped the survival rate.
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Apr 7, 2022 21:32
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I read a post today from Bret Devereaux's blog about historical accuracy in video games that seems very relevant to the discussion this thread has been having about the topic: https://acoup.blog/2022/04/15/collections-expeditions-rome-and-the-perils-of-verisimilitude/. It's a long post, focused on the game Expeditions: Rome, but a lot of what it is talking is broadly applicable. His main argument is that a game that is visually accurate (in his example of Expeditions: Rome, because it uses accurate clothing, armor, names, and Latin pronunciations), can lure people into thinking the rest of the game is accurate, and present wildly incorrect information that people will assume is correct because the game looks right. One example he gives from Expeditions: Rome is how part of the plot of the game revolves around a trial of a consul in the late Republic. This is an event that could not have occurred, and if you wanted to learn more about the Late Roman Republic from the game, it would actually leave you worse off, since the fact that sitting magistrates could not be tried is a incredibly important fact that had a major impact on the events of the time period. However, since the game markets itself as being vey historically accurate, and it looks visually right (the scene with the trial has correct Latin words, with correct clothing, and other accurate visual details), someone could easily assume the rest of it is accurate as well. This is similar to some of the stuff Cyrano has talked about before, how people often focus on specific historical details in media at the expense of losing broader context.
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Apr 27, 2022 20:35
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zoux posted:Interesting, I wouldn't have thought that, given how bloody and destructive the fighting tends to be. The trouble is that unless people are willing to stop the bloody and destructive fighting, the civil war generally doesn't stop. It's very rare for civil wars to end with decisive victories like the American Civil War did, but the ACW was an extremely unusual civil war. To use a recent example, Columbia's long civil war (Between the Columbian government and FARC, a communist rebel group) recently came to an end after decades of fighting. The Columbian civil war was extraordinarily brutal, with massacres of all kinds committed by both sides. There is a huge amount of bad blood and distrust that has built up as a result of the decades of violence. However the war didn't end with Columbia executing every FARC leader. The war would still be going on if Columbia had insisted on that. The 2016 peace deal granted blanket amnesty to most FARC members and government soldiers, excluding only a fairly narrow number of people. Since then, FARC has taken seats in Columbia's legislature as a Marxist-Leninist party (although they have not been as electorally successful as they hoped they would be). Instead of mass executions, the Columbian peace deal calls for a Restorative Justice effort, modeled off of South Africa's post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The main goal of these kinds of efforts in Columbia, South Africa, and many other post-civil war nations, is to establish the truth and reconcile society, and this means accepting that most people who committed crimes will not receive harsh punishments. The assumption that underlies these kinds of initiatives is the belief that after many years of civil war punishing everyone who deserves punishment simply isn't possible without reigniting the civil war and/or crippling the recovery of society, so its better to let many people off so that the nation can move forward and rebuild in peace.
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May 20, 2022 02:41
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:
Adding on to this, its really tricky to call ancient events genocides because if you start doing that, you will rapidly come to the conclusion that a very large number of ancient wars involved genocides. People don't generally like doing this, because it can seem to devalue the use of the term in the modern world if genocide is actually something that's super common historically. If we look at just the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, we can find a bunch of instances of him boasting about acts that under modern definitions, amount to pre-planned, intentional genocide. quote:Moreover, they (my troops) cut down with the sword the people of the cities, as many as h[ad sided] with them (and) plotted evil plan(s), young and old, and they did not spare a single person among them. Furthermore, they brought them (Necho and Šarru-lū-dāri) to Nineveh, my capital city, before me. quote:(As for) the cities ...meš, Zarzāta, Šanḫara, Sissil, Adumānu, Ḫallāya, Šeliḫiram, Šaḫarasiʾ, GubBAD, Matuḫanzaḫ, Taziʾ, Lušanda, LULbasta, (and) Babsaḫ quote:(As for) the cities Sais, Mendes, (and) Tanis, which had rebelled (and) sided with Taharqa, I conquered those cities (and) I killed the people living inside them with the sword. I hung their corpses on poles, flayed them, (and) draped the city wall(s with their skins). quote:(As for) that city, I destroyed, demolished, (and) dissolved (it) with water; I annihilated (it). I laid waste that district (and) cut off the clamor of humans from it. With the support of the gods Aššur, Bēl (Marduk), (and) Nabű, the great gods, my lords, I killed my enemies (and) returned safely to Nineveh. quote:On my eleventh campaign, [I marched] t[o the land Elam. In the course of my campaign, I conq]uered the city Bīt-Imbî, a city upon which [the land Elam] relie[d]. (As for) the people living inside it, who [had not co]me out and inquired about the well-being of [my] royal ma[jesty], I killed (them). I cut off their heads, sliced off [thei]r lip[s], (and) t[oo]k (them) to Assyria to be a spectacle for the people of my land. quote:I killed the insubmissive people of the city Acco. I hung their corpses on poles (and) placed (them) around the city. I took the rest of them to Assyria. I conscripted (them) to (my royal) contingent and added (them) to my numerous troops that (the god) Aššur had granted to me. Ashurbanipal is in no way unique, his inscriptions are just unusually well preserved (and helpfully digitized in a searchable format). This kind of rhetoric is pretty standard for Ancient Near Eastern kings. What we now call genocide was a point of pride for many ancient kings. This fact doesn't sit easily with the modern idea of genocide as a rare, uniquely evil event, and so people generally don't call these kinds of ancient massacres genocides.
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May 21, 2022 06:48
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FishFood posted:I'm not sure I would agree with that, the Neo-Assyrians and Ashurbanipal specifically are noted for their focus on violence in their propaganda. That's not to say you don't see similar things elsewhere, but the Neo-Assyrian focus on atrocity is pretty unique and isn't entirely due to having more of their stuff preserved. Yeah that's true, my claim about Ashurbanipal's rhetoric being standard isn't quite right, he is rather more bloodthirsty than most. However the difference isn't that huge, while other kings were less likely to boast as gleefully about it, they didn't shy away from recording the massacres they committed either. I guess it would be better to say that Ashurbanipal's inscriptions aren't unique in describing pre-mediated massacres targeting whole populations, but they are uniquely detailed, and more focused on celebrating the massacres (rather than just dispassionately recording that a city was destroyed and its inhabitants were massacred). Edit: I found a good example of a non-Assyrian text that celebrates massacres in a very similar fashion. This is a passage from the Annals of the Babylonian King Nabopolassar: quote:In the month Arahsamna the king of Akkad took the lead of his army personally and marched against Ruggulitu. He did battle against the city and on the twenty-eighth day of the month Arahsamnu he captured it. He did not leave a single man alive. [lacuna] He went home. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 08:22 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 08:12
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Iraqi Army just ran away from Daesh in Mosul, but they assaulted the Peshmerga in Kirkuk with some intent. I would say that the local political interests saw the US-funded armies as a free leverage for their own aims, which aren't the same things the US expects from a standing army. While the Iraqi army did preform very poorly in Mosul in 2014, in 2016 and 2017 they acquitted themselves very well in the battle to retake the city. The Iraqi army suffered around 6000 casualties in the brutal street-by-street fighting, without any breakdown in discipline or willingness to fight resulting. I think its rather unfair to say that the Iraqi army is nothing but free leverage for local political interests when they actually have demonstrated real military capabilities.
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Jun 7, 2022 22:37
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I think looking at some medical anthropology ideas here is going to be useful for this discussion. Cultural differences can produce huge differences in the way that people experience physical and psychological changes/issues. One example that often gets brought up in anthropology is cultural differences in how menopause is understood and experienced. People from different cultures often experience the physical and psychological changes of menopause in extremely different ways. For example, women in Japan report experiences hot flashes at far lower rates than women in the United States do. Menopause isn't the only example of this, there's also a lot of research about how cultural differences produce extremely different experiences of schizophrenia. Anthropologists have observed that in some African cultures, schizophrenic auditory hallucinations often take the form of a playful, cheerful voice, which is extremely rare in the West. Our default assumption should not be that people across extremely different cultures will experience psychological responses in broadly the same way, since we can look at modern medical anthropology research and see how that's often not true.
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Jul 9, 2022 05:14
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Cyrano4747 posted:I mean yeah it’s literally West Virginians go back in time and teach 30YW Germans how to not suck so bad. It's also a very different view of what makes America exceptional than you often get in stuff like that. One of the first things that the characters in 1632 introduce to the 17th century is labor unions.
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Jul 18, 2022 21:57
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The series of actions leading to the emperor Julian's death have to be up there for stupid ways to get yourself (and lots of others with you) killed.
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Aug 30, 2022 03:43
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Another example of dubious reliability, Herodotus says that Cambyses, King of Persia immediately after Cyrus the Great, died of an infection after his scabbard broke when he was mounting a horse, stabbing his thigh. There's a good chance he was actually murdered by Darius though, and this story was concocted to cover up the regicide.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:03
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Even when he was talking about the Aztecs and Incas, Diamond was just wrong. Like, the guns and steel part of it doesn't even come into the picture with the Aztecs, the germs questionably so. Regarding the Inca, Diamond included his version of the Battle of Cajamarca, and tbh it was like a child's. He ascribes the Spanish victory again to guns and steel, and doesn't even seem to be aware that the battle was more like an ambush of an unarmed diplomatic procession. It's just a horrendously overstretched book, with gaping holes in Diamond's knowledge and argument wherever you look This is a really important point. Diamond is simply bad at doing historical analysis (or possibly malicious about ignoring sources he doesn't like). In his section about the conquest of the Incas, Diamond quotes a passage from an account written by Spanish priest for 4 or 5 pages without much break for analysis or context. Afterwards, he only briefly provides any context to the lengthy passage he quoted, and effectively takes this Spanish priest at his word, presenting his account of events as a generally reliable narrative of what happened. The trouble is, it's not - but it is one that supports his thesis. The source he quotes describes totally overwhelming Spanish technological and tactical superiority leading to the natives being completely overawed - but our priest is not a reliable witness. Even if he was, a single primary source should never be used alone with no context or comparison. If Diamond had compared other sources (which do exist, despite Diamond seeming to imply otherwise), instead of relying solely on this priest's account, his story would have been far more nuanced, but also less supportive of his thesis. This example is particularly egregious, but its reflective of the book overall. Diamond's sources are selectively chosen for ones that support his claim, and ones that don't support his ideas are completely ignored.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:49
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Xiahou Dun posted:Sure, but I think now the problem is that you've reduced "writing" to "cuneiform". Which is a tempting thing to do if you want to do look at how and why writing developed, since cuneiform is pretty much the only writing system we can trace the development of in detail. We know pretty well how cuneiform evolved, since we can compare thousands of different artifacts and texts from the several century long year formative period of the script and trace each step of the process. Egyptian hieroglyphs appear in our earliest texts in a fully formed system, so we are certainly missing the formative period of that script, and Mesoamerican texts are not well attested enough for us to begin to work out their process of development. I'm not as well versed in Chinese writing, but as far as I know, we only have a handful of early inscriptions to go off of for studying how the Chinese script initially developed. If you want to look at how writing initially evolved, non-cuneiform options don't give you that much to work with. That said, we of course shouldn't assume the same factors that we can observe in cuneiform's development existed elsewhere, but its also hard not to fall back on that when there is so little else to work with. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, sorry, super sloppy language on my part. The evidence we have of writing from that era involves things we're pretty sure were trade-related. Is that better? Which era are you talking about? Phoenicians are pretty late adopters of writing, they don't start producing written texts until over 2000 years after the first writing in the region appeared. By the early first millennium BC, the era of Phoenician colonial power, writing was already incredibly old, and was in use for just about every purpose imaginable.
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Sep 27, 2022 04:36
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Tulip posted:
This is not necessarily true with regards to Roman military administration. We actually have quite a few examples of logistical documents from the Roman army, mostly in fragmentary papyri from Egypt. Unfortunately a lot of this material has been mostly published in German, but here's a list of types of administrative documents that have been discovered in Egypt from the Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt: quote:tables of manpower at certain key dates (pridiana), staff lists, lists of cavalry units’ horses, official letters, tables of pay and the deposita of individual soldiers at particular times, and receipts from individual soldiers for pay or payment in kind, either for themselves or for supplies obtained locally The bibliography of the handbook chapter I got this from is mostly in German, and there are a bunch of footnote citations for lengthy German books that go into this topic (the website with the database of the papyri is also unsurprisingly in German, but there are at least 200 military papyri listed). Unfortunately my German is not good enough to get anything from them. However, there is a lot of evidence for the fact that the administration of the Roman army produced an enormous amount of paperwork, but we can generally only get a glimpse of this in Egypt, since papyrus is an extremely fragile material that breaks down in most climates within a few decades. This record keeping is also mentioned in literary sources too, Vegetius mentions a position in the army called scribendarius, which appears to be a person who was responsible for record keeping.
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Sep 30, 2022 02:07
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Xiahou Dun posted:Like half of the thread reads German if there's a specific thing you're looking for. There's not really, I was just trawling for examples of Roman military administrative documents existing, since Tulip was implying they didn't exist. I don't need to sic a 700 page monograph on papyrology on you.
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Sep 30, 2022 16:49
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Also there's some selection bias here, since generals historically have been reluctant to make contested river crossings because they knew how dangerous it could be. Using the small number of times when it has gone badly ignores all the other times that a general opted to not even attempt a contested river crossing.
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Oct 13, 2022 22:22
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The term "capital ship" only dates from--and this is purely a guess--around 1898, when large cruisers with side belts of armor began to rival battleships in size and fighting power. Looks like its a lot older than that, the OED has references to the term being in use in the mid 17th century, which surprises me a bit. 
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Oct 24, 2022 15:05
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One thing relevant to this discussion about the modern utility of trenches is that the US is unusual (unique? maybe also China) in the quantity of PGMs it maintains and is capable of manufacturing. When the NATO air campaign in Libya was going on, the US rapidly had to backfill ammunition for allies since most European countries don't actually keep many PGMs on hand. The same thing is true to a lesser extent for Russia. Russia doesn't have enough ordinance to bust every bunker, so Ukrainian trench lines remain extremely useful.
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Nov 15, 2022 23:36
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Another factor is that the new revolutionary French government was willing to mobilize resources and people in ways that had been unimaginable to the old government. Their new system of conscription, the levee en masse, was conducted at a scale an order of magnitude larger than it had been under the monarchy. Something like a million men were mobilized, the largest military mobilization Europe had ever seen. They went into the 18th century equivalent of a war economy, blowing past barriers that previously limited government action under the monarchy.
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Dec 5, 2022 18:21
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Yeah Napoleon didn't need to garrison every town in Russia, he just needed to knock over the government and replace it with a puppet/vassal. That's an objective that was within the realm of possibility.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:29
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Tulip posted:It's fiction but one of my favorite scenes from a war movie is from early in Kelly's heroes, where the unit the protagonists are in, a recon unit, is informed by a surrendering German that such and such German unit is in front of them, and the sergeant yells at him that he doesn't care where the Germans are, they're too busy taking friendly fire from like 6 different American units. Another great scene from fiction that illustrates this principle is one from HBO's Rome, where a young Octavian asks Mark Antony what's happening in the battle, and Antony says (paraphrasing) "I don't know, I'm going to attack with the cavalry, we'll see what happens." I've always appreciated that scene for showing how little control a pre-modern general had over their army once a battle began, which is rare in visual media.
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Jan 12, 2023 02:16
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Another reason chaotic melee scenes are easier to do is that you can do it a much smaller scale. Battles were often huge, and even relatively small ones often took place over a frontage of at least a mile. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to zoom in a few dudes fighting in a melee (where its clear what is going on, the good guys are stabbing the bad guys, and sometimes they are getting stabbed in return), than to try to convey how a realistic formation seen in a small area fits into the larger strategic picture of the army's deployment.
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Jan 12, 2023 15:55
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