by Dan Carlin
* Obviously, this is why some are willing to risk it. If there were never any good outcomes for a victorious state, the whole war idea seems somewhat pointless, doesn’t it?
* This does not include either the United States or imperial Japan, both of which came out of the First World War having arguably profited from their involvement in it.
* The Hittites also fought with and benefited from the decline of the state of Mittani. At times, the Hittites and Assyrians were almost fighting proxy wars and cold wars with each other by using rival claimants to the throne of Mittani. But Mittani was a buffer state between the Hittites and Assyrians, and when it was gobbled up, the predators that devoured it were left sharing a border with each other.
* Peons are how everyone but the palace elite is usually portrayed in this scenario.
* Something like a worst-case scenario with artificial intelligence or weapons technology, for example. Are we adding new horsemen to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Pestilence, War, Famine, Death, and Climate Change? Or Runaway Technology?
* Which then cascaded into many other areas of the interconnected system that kept Soviet society running.
* For example, if the United States fragmented into many nation-states, it certainly might count as a “decline” in some ways by local standards, but global knowledge and capabilities and the like might be affected only marginally. When the Bronze Age ended, no other society in the world existed to pick up the pieces or keep the lights on.
* About 1177 BCE is sometimes considered the period the Bronze Age’s civilizational stock market crashed.
* This could be as simple as, “The empire far away is letting us starve while the local warlord is feeding us.”
* It’s very possible some of these people were themselves of Assyrian stock. It’s also possible that the Assyrian remnant kept alive oral traditions of their great past even as the non-Assyrian locals forgot about it. Perhaps Xenophon was simply querying the wrong locals.
* This may not reflect historical reality, but it reflects what those people thought was reality. Such records go back to the mythical “great flood” period that made its way into the Hebrew Bible.
* In fact the Hebrew Bible can sometimes make them sound like evil personified.
* “Shades” is a reference to spirits or ghosts. The Assyrians were punishing the ancestors of their current enemies, and through them making the retribution that much worse. In a move common in the ancient world, the Assyrians would also snatch the statues that represented the deities of these societies and cart them off into captivity, too. That brings a whole new meaning to the term “Total War.”
* Eventually, Dananu’s head was put on a pole outside the gates of Nineveh to serve as a warning.
* The trade-offs of empire involve the military conquests, deaths, and repressions versus the stability, organization, and consolidating advantages the imperial state brings through conquests and incorporation. The idea that this moves “progress” forward may of course be culturally biased.
* At the time of Ashurbanipal’s reign, Assyria had recently added Egypt to its empire, which was a monumental conquest.
* It’s been said that the most dangerous armies the Roman Empire ever faced were its own during the civil wars. The same might be said for Assyria.
* The era is called the Neo-Assyrian Empire and is traditionally dated from about 911 to 609 BCE.
* Depends on how one classifies this. Other armies had councils of war, and the pharaohs of Egypt also had what might have amounted to general staffs of military advisers in an even earlier period.
* This isn’t easy for modern states to do today. In fact, how many nation-states can field fifty thousand soldiers and supply them while they’re fighting in distant lands?
* The mixed units would have allowed the archers to weaken advancing foes before the Assyrian spearmen engaged. They also would have been invaluable against foes who skirmished and fought in a hit-and-run style that could often frustrate and wear down heavy shock troops.
* Human beings riding on the backs of horses.
* These are commonly given as birth and death dates for Ashurbanipal.
* The Greek god of panic, Phobos, was believed to run rampant on human battlefields.
* There are a lot of long-running questions over how the actual physics of ancient battle worked. One would expect these things to be known, but they aren’t. Did troops or closely packed bodies of men actually crash into each other? The horses, too? Or did they instinctively halt at the last minute? Were opposing forces intermixed after charging? Or did both sides have an intervening “no-man’s-land” where troops threw things at each other and occasionally came to blows? The ancient sources that might help resolve this often are silent on many crucial details. They usually assumed contemporary audiences would understand the universal basics and often commented only on the unusual things.
* Cavalry appeared among the nomadic horsemen of the Eurasian steppe before the settled societies adopted it. First came chariots, then men on horseback followed later. The Assyrians began using men on horseback somewhere between 1000 and 900 BCE; the Chinese wouldn’t start using them in war until between 400 and 300 BCE.
* The Cimmerians and Scythians were some of the first peoples of the nomadic steppe culture of horse peoples who were themselves the cultural ancestors of the Mongols, Turks, and Huns.
* That Achaemenid Persian Empire was, in fact, known for its relative tolerance and leniency. Was this a lesson learned from the Assyrians? Or had the Assyrians, by “breaking the Near East to the yoke of empire,” made it less necessary?
* Or so the ancient sources say.
* Yet the Assyrians had smashed such multipower coalitions facing them in the past.
* In a weird way here, Caesar is part conqueror and part Age of Discovery or Star Trek galactic explorer. His written account of these events, read all over the Mediterranean world, is the first confirmed eyewitness report the Mediterranean world gets of this ancient equivalent of an alien planet. Caesar is introducing a new civilization to his readers. Think of how fascinated we would be today by anything comparable.
* Essentially modern-day France.
* That’s one way to view it. “The Romans create a desolation and call it peace” was another way “Roman civilization” was viewed by those who had it forcibly inflicted on them. The Europeans also brought “the blessings of civilization” to Aboriginal people on multiple non-European continents throughout history. It certainly is a mixed blessing.
* This phrase refers to the Western Roman Empire. The eastern chunk of the old Roman Empire (centered in modern-day Turkey) lasted a thousand more years after the western half of the empire fragmented.
* This number is unknown and argued about.
* This doesn’t mean that Rome could beat any army it faced, however. In boxing, there’s a phrase “styles make fights,” meaning that some styles naturally beat other styles. The same applies to warfare. But the Romans were as dominant a military force in their day as anyone will find anywhere.
* Rotating spent troops with fresh troops in combat was a part of the Roman system that, if not unique, was rare due to its difficulty, if nothing else. The advantage of being able to do the sports equivalent of “substituting” with reserves would wear down even the best and most highly motivated of foes.
* Considering the numbers of enemies the Roman army faced, this is a remarkably small number of soldiers.
* If for no other reason than the Romans would have had a far larger army than almost anyone in Europe. Charlemagne’s Carolingian army is sometimes estimated to have been very large, but other than that most post-Roman era European armies were tiny by comparison. The Normans invaded Saxon England with (maybe many) fewer than fifteen thousand men in 1066 CE. The Romans invaded Britain a thousand years before that with twenty thousand legionaries and about twenty thousand more auxiliary troops. How would William the Conqueror’s eight to twelve thousand or so ea
rly medievals have done on a battlefield against a likely better supplied forty-thousand-man ancient Roman army? Also, William probably couldn’t have raised or hired much more than this number, whereas the Roman invasion of Britain used but a percentage of the overall Roman army. On the grand strategy level it would have been a wipeout. The Roman Empire of seventy million or so people and immense money and resources steamrolls the Duke of Normandy’s minor provincial territory. The Romans would have given any tribally organized pregunpowder army in history a very tough fight. They would have beaten most of them.
* Mongol invasions anyone? Huns?
* It could even get more exclusive than that. Were Macedonians Greek? The Macedonians often liked to think so. The sniffy Athenians might disagree. It was they who labeled the king of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, “Philip the Barbarian.”
* Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Americas, Antarctica, and Australia were obviously unknown to them.
* That rationale can be debated, but conquer they did.
* Also often called/spelled Altai Mountains.
* Whatever “appeared” means. Aliens weren’t dropping them off from mother ships, so this is a bit of a historical trick the lack of sources plays on us. Hopefully, technology will solve the question of where all these wonderfully interesting people came from and to what other peoples in history they might be related.
* Many of these tribes had oral histories that told of a Scandinavian origin; work on DNA evidence is ongoing.
* In Latin, Germani. Trying to nail down what’s really going on here ethnicitywise is impossible. DNA tests may someday sort this all out, but for a thousand reasons, trying to figure out what’s a “German” versus what, for example, is a “Celt” or the supposedly mixed “Belgae” is impossible. The Roman writers were somewhat lazy ethnographers to begin with, and writers had their own reasons for describing these people as they did. Sometimes it may have been just to create a better story.
* Often the lines would blur at the borders where different peoples and cultures met, creating a sort of cultural estuary. So there could be a Germanic-Celtic tribe or a Thracian-German blend, etc.
* Of course, connected to the modern term “Teutonic.”
* The point of origin of these “Germanic” tribes is debated, but near the coasts of the North or Baltic Sea is a popular theory.
* It might be helpful to imagine the “barbarian” tribes the way the Romans and Chinese often saw them, on a sliding scale of how uncivilized they were seen. “Cooked” or “uncooked” was the Chinese way of describing the difference between tribes that had had the rough edges smoothed by contact with settled societies versus the totally wild ones that hadn’t. In the Roman version, the Cimbri and Teutons weren’t just uncooked, they were raw and still twitching.
* Including Celtic peoples. In fact, there’s been debate over how much these northerners were Germanic (the dominant opinion) and how much might have been Celtic. Some theories suggest some sort of amalgamation of the two peoples.
* Again, who knows on these figures. The ancient sources are so unreliable, and even the very best experts disagree. This is a pretty standard range usually given.
* “Celtic” identity is as argued about as “Germanic” identity. For our purposes, the terms “Gaul” and “Celt” might be considered interchangeable.
* Julius Caesar’s more than two-thousand-year-old account depicts what was essentially the earliest Franco-German conflict of the many over the centuries. He had all sorts of personal motivations for writing such a piece, and while it is considered a very important and valuable source, it needs to be treated with skepticism in many places. He may have created a wholly artificial distinction between peoples for his own purposes.
* By insisting in his account that such peoples be kept to the east of the Rhine, Caesar was laying out a conception of where the “Celtic” peoples belonged and where the “Germans” belonged. He may have been creating artificial boundaries for his own reasons, but it’s interesting to note that in many ways those boundaries have remained roughly in place to this day.
* There are elements of what we would call today racism, ethnocentrism, and stereotypes involved here. There may be truth mixed in with the bigotry, but it’s not always easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.
* The mileage may not be exact once you convert Roman distances to modern distances, but it was still a huge dead zone—nearly the distance from Inverness in the north of Scotland all the way to Bristol on the southern coast of England; or from Washington, DC, to Indianapolis.
* At some point while the legions were strung out for many miles on narrow muddy forest trails, the tribesmen sprang their ambush. The sources say that it was pouring rain, that the Roman shields and bows were waterlogged, and that the legionaries were surrounded in many places with missiles raining down on them. One gets a sense of panic and claustrophobia, as the Romans in any given position likely couldn’t see much more than what was directly around them and were prevented from forming up and fighting in any sort of traditional battle formation. They were deep in hostile country and the Germanic tribes were intimidating and frightening, especially on their home turf. In a running affair that would last several days, the three Roman legions were destroyed. Varus and many of his officers killed themselves rather than fall into their enemy’s hands.
* The battle site itself may have been found in the twentieth century; so far, archaeology seems to be confirming some of the general points of the written accounts.
* So says the ancient writer Suetonius.
* As opposed to being trained as Roman regular troops and incorporated into the standard drill and organization of the Roman army.
* “Treaties” is the more traditional term.
* And while this sounds very dangerous, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of the time the Germanic troops did this loyally and well. But it also meant the Germanic enemies were not “outgunned” as they were in earlier eras, either. If you were a Roman commander, would you rather have a whole bunch of first-century legionaries fighting a barbarian force, or would you rather be commanding one fifth-century barbarian force against another?
* And, as usual, there are differing opinions on the importance of this by the experts.
* The Germanic tribes on the borders with Rome were getting much wealthier than interior tribes through commerce and interaction with the Roman state directly. This created imbalances and may have prompted the poorer tribes to raid the wealthier ones, contributing to the unsettled dynamic in the Germanic interior.
* Rome sometimes had two emperors during this period, one in the West in Rome (or another Western capital), the other in the East in Constantinople.
* The numbers here are totally unknown, and speculation abounds. “More than a hundred thousand” for two large Gothic groups of entire families seems safe. But one can find both higher and lower estimates.
* One of several “Gothic wars.”
* Again, the Romans often used specific tribal names for each of these peoples rather than the generic term “Goth.”
* If that’s even true.
* Founded by the emperor Hadrian, Adrianople is located in the modern city of Edirne in northwest Turkey near the border with Greece.
* This is truer in quantity than quality. The troops were often still good, but the armies were generally getting much smaller and were harder to raise. The historian J. E. Lendon said that Roman armies of the fourth century were “small, expensive and fragile.”
* Again, the Goths’ numbers are said to have swelled, and some of the new friends the Goths traveled with were Huns and Alans, both powerful cavalry elements. The Alans were a mostly nomadic steppe tribe that seems to have acquired some Germanic characteristics over time.
* Most of this information, along with this quoted line, comes from the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus.