Dojo Darelir, the School of Xenograg the Sorcerer

…As a group [the Greek hero-kings of the Iliad] represent the Bronze Age art of war. Their hands were battle-wise with blood and calloused from stealing cattle. They could trample the enemy like a carpet under their feet or calm the heart of a nervous army under attack. They knew horses like a stable hand and ships like a boatswain, but most of all they knew men and how to lead them. They could be as smooth as the ghee-and-honey paste with which Assyrians cemented rows of mud brick or as rough as the gnarled limbs of an old olive tree. They knew which soldiers to reward with silver rings and which to punish with prison or mutilation. They could inspire the men to follow on foot while they rode in their chariots and to compete for the honor of fighting bravely in their presence.

They could break an enemy’s lance or deceive him with words. They knew how much flour it took to feed an army and how much wood was needed to burn a corpse. They knew how to pitch camp or launch a fleet, how to debrief a spy or send out an informer. They could draw a bow and split a copper ingot like a reed or hurl a spear and pierce the seam in an enemy’s armor. They shrugged off mud and snow, towering waves or buckets of rain. They could appraise lapis lazuli with a jeweler’s eye or break a merchant’s neck with a hangman’s hands. They could court a milkmaid or rape a princess. They relished ambushes after dark and noontime charges. They feared the gods and liked the smell of death.

— Barry Strauss, The Trojan War, pp. 34-35

A very vivid description of a hands-on leader in a brutal era.

[Bronze Age] composite bows were also notoriously expensive. Such a bow was a very effective weapon, having double or triple the range of a self bow, but its manufacture was costly and difficult (the layering and lamination of wood, horn, and sinew was done at long intervals, and a properly aged bow would leave a bowyer’s shop five or ten years after he had brought in the raw materials from which it was made).

— Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age, p. 110

The Byzantine horsed archer was an expert, capable of loosing arrows from either side of the horse while at full gallop, either shooting a fleeing opponent, or defending himself by a ‘Parthian’ shot over the horse’s rearquarters if he himself was fleeing. The method used was a full draw to the right ear which imparted greater poundage to the arrow. The penetrative quality of Roman equipment used at the battle of Callinicum was due to the adoption of the Hunnic bow and the Mongolian release. The Mongolian release, which uses a thumb lock, is faster, whereas the Mediterranean release, using the fingers to draw, is slower and with an oriental bow the fingers would be crushed. Procopius says the bow used by the Persians at Callinicum was much weaker and the arrows unable to pierce armour, even though the rate of delivery was greater.

— Ann Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, p. 22

Emphasis mine.

A journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risks because we may not be able to endure what we find there. That is why all religions have insisted that the mystical journey can only be undertaken under the guidance of an expert. The master monitors the experience, guides the novice past the perilous places, and makes sure he is not exceeding his strength. All mystics stress the need for intelligence and mental stability. Zen masters say that it is useless for a neurotic person to seek a cure in meditation, for that will only make him sicker. Jewish mystics also had to be married to insure that he was in good sexual health.

— Karen Armstrong, A History Of God, p. 213

Little distinction was made between science and magic. They have at least one goal in common: control of the natural world. Magic makes use of observation, systems of classification, even experimentation. But while magic is just as interested in practical results as science is, it is much less interested in discovering and testing causes. It is far more tolerant of failure, partly because its aims are far more grandiose. An alchemist following a recipe for making gold would not complain of a thousand failures if he had one success; a chemist following a recipe for making aspirin demands success each time.

— Richard Smith, Prelude to Science, p. 16

Who was included in the ancient elite? Its members and size varied, of course, from place to place and time to time, but it always included government officials, priests, and army officers. In the great cities of the Hellenistic empires, wealthy merchants and businessmen were marginal members of the ruling class, or hoped to be. They were literate, rich, and powerful, and generally were accepted into the elite. The most important group within the ruling class was the landlords, whose role as suppliers of food was essential. In the ancient Near East not much was needed in the way of shelter or clothing; with a secure food supply the land could support a large population. Some of the subjects of the pharoahs might live miserably but they survived as long as the food supply was maintained. Landlords were essential in preindustrial society, and as the dominant group within the elite they set the tone of the ruling class.

— Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 8

Emphasis mine.

There are nine types of generals:

Those who guide with virtue, who treat all equally with courtesy, who know when the troops are cold and hungry, and who notice when they are weary and pained, are called humanistic generals.

Those who do not try to avoid any task, who are not influenced by profit, who would die with honor before living in disgrace, are called dutiful generals.

Those who are not arrogant because of their high status, who do not make much of their victories, who are wise but can humble themselves, who are strong but can be tolerant, are called courteous generals.

Those whose extraordinary shifts are unfathomable, whose movements and responses are multifaceted, who turn disaster into fortune and seize victory from the jaws of danger, are called clever generals.

Those who give rich rewards for going ahead and have strict penalties for retreating, whose rewards are given right away and whose penalties are the same for all ranks, even the highest, are called trustworthy generals.

Those who go on foot or on a war-horse, with the mettle to take on a hundred men, who are skilled in the use of close-range weapons, swords, and spears, are called infantry generals.

Those who face the dizzying heights and cross the dangerous defiles, who can shoot at a gallop as if in flight, who are in the vanguard when advancing and in the rear guard when withdrawing, are called cavalry generals.

Those whose mettle makes the armies tremble and whose determination makes light of powerful enemies, who are hesitant to engage in petty fights while courageous in the midst of major battles, are called fierce generals.

Those who consider themselves lacking when they see the wise, who go along with good advice like following a current, who are magnanimous yet able to be firm, who are uncomplicated yet have many strategies, are called great generals.

— Thomas Cleary (translator and editor), Mastering the Art of War, pp. 40-41

The feudal system of the Parthians had a Scythian as well as an Achaemenid background, and roughly resembled feudalism as developed in Europe during the “Dark Ages.” Society was headed by seven powerful clans. This upper stratum supported a petty aristocracy of varied socio-economic status who, together with their retainers, enjoyed status well above the peasants and serfs who were native Persians. Loyalty was strongest between the great clan leaders and their small vassals. The king, as a member of one of the clans, could usually command complete loyalty from his own clan and its vassals, less from other Parthians.

— Peter Wilcox and Angus McBride, Rome’s Enemies 3, p. 6

Naturally, there were many ryu and many sensei of bujutsu who specialized, often exclusively, in the use of the spear in combat. Famous among the former was the ancient Hozo-in ryu, named after the Hozo monastery where spear fighting was widely practiced. The Shinkage ryu, famed for its skillful swordsmen, also included spear fighting in its program of instruction. According to the literature of bujutsu, an expert spearman trained in any of these schools was studiously avoided not only by single warriors armed with the formidable katana but even by groups of warriors whom he could scatter with an intricate, yet impenetrable and deadly circular dance—his long weapon cutting, thrusting, slashing, and parrying as it cut through the air around him in a series of murderous whorls….

According to the major types of spears, there were two major arts or methods of using them: yarijutsu, the art of the straight spear, and naginatajutsu (or simply naginata), the art of the curved spear. Each art was practiced in accordance with innumerable styles, and there were subspecializations centered upon the use of all the various types of long and short spears and javelins. All shared a substantial number of basic techniques, such as the thrusts (tsuki), strikes (kiri), and parries which, in common with all cutting weapons, were also found in swordsmanship. Postures of readiness, introductory movements, styles of moving in toward an opponent or of sliding out of range of his blade, manners of reaching a target or of evading an attack, varied from school to school and even, within each, from expert to expert….

…In feudal times every part of the yari was used, including the bottom, which was usually capped with a pointed metal head; and that the position of readiness with the spear kept close to the side (in one of the predominant styles) was known as kai-kumi. We also know that several schools taught intricate patterns, high and low (jumonji-yari), in order to be able to strike not only from the front but also with characteristic sweeps directed at the opponent’s rear, while other schools specialized in parrying, hooking, and deflecting techniques known as kagi-yari. Naginatajutsu added to the techniques of the yari those circular cuts particularly appropriate to the curved shape of the naginata.

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, pp. 250-253

Emphasis mine.

In ancient mythology, Japan was known as "the country of one thousand fine halberds," and very seldom did an illustration of the ancient bushi outfitted for war fail to show him holding his spear—a weapon second in traditional significance only to the bow and arrow….

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, p. 241

In both design and structure, the true Japanese spear (known generally as the yari) was similar to all Japanese blades in the high quality of its tempering, its lightness, and the ease with which it could be maneuvered. The great artists of steel forged these spears for the bushi with the same care and imagination they lavished on his swords. The spear blades were carefully protected by sheaths (a requirement included among military laws of the clans). The shafts (nakae) of these spears came in almost every weight and length imaginable. They were made of excellent wood, carefully seasoned and treated, usually reinforced by and decorated with strips or rings of metal (sujigane) at the points that would be under pressure when leverage was applied or a blow parried.

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, p. 241

Spearheads…were cast of the same high quality steel used for swords and came in many lengths and shapes. They can be divided, however, into three major groups: straight spearheads, curved spearheads, and the variously shaped spearheads. The straight spearhead was the most common. It was double-edged, almost like an abbreviated version of the archaic Japanese sword (ken)….

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, p. 244

At a point of transition between the straight spearhead and the curved spearhead is the blade of the nakamaki, which resembles that famous spear which gained great popularity among the bushi: the naginata, often erroneously referred to in English as a halberd. This term, however…

is a defective translation, for the Japanese naginata (literally, long sword) was not a pole terminating in a battle-axe and spear-head as the English name implies. It was a [scimitar]-like blade, some three feet in length, fixed to a slightly longer haft. Originally, the warlike monks alone employed this weapon, but from the [eleventh century C.E.], when the Minamoto and the Taira clans began their long struggle, the naginata found much favor among the military men, its combined powers of cutting and thrusting being fully recognized.

The blade of the naginata, in fact, was like that of a sword, curved near the point, where its shape became even more pronounced. Stone writes that there were three varieties: the first appears to have been the ancient tsukushi-naginata, the shaft of which was inserted into a metal loop on the back of the blade; the second and most common had the tang or base secured to the shaft; and the third and rarest had a socket at the base into which the shaft was inserted (ta-no-saki). They were all carried appropriately sheathed and their shafts, as might be expected, were heavily lacquered and decorated with metal mountings. The naginata became famous not only because of its tremendous versatility in combat but also because of the many individual schools which developed intricate styles and remarkable proficiency in its use. Certain authors, in fact, even believe that the introduction of protective armor for the legs and the lower part of the body was in answer to the development and lethal use of the naginata….

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, pp. 244-247

The third group of spearheads includes a confusing variety of shapes, usually highly specialized. The sasu-mata, for example, was a spear with a forked head and hooks or spikes at its base that could be used to cut and pierce a target not only in front but also returning behind it…. The futamata-yari was also a spear with a forked head, and the magari-yari was a beautiful trident, with the side-blades set at right angles to the central blade, their points turning slightly inward….

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, pp. 247-248

All emphasis mine.

The breeding ground of honor [was] the state of semi-anarchy (when it was not complete anarchy) that prevailed in most of the world before the invention of the nation-state in early modern Europe. In such an environment, personal honor and the respect it elicited from others was almost the only instrument of social control, and this was still true to a considerable extent right through the [English] Tudor period. Describing the feud between two grandees in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, Lawrence Stone writes that “Both in the brutality of their tactics and in their immunity from the law, the nearest parallels to the Earl of Oxford and Sir Thomas Knyvett in the London of Queen Elizabeth are Al Capone and Dion O’Banion, Bugs Moran and Johnny Torrio in the Chicago of the 1920s.” Among such people, honor was a matter of grim necessity, a workaday proposition by which their power and status in the world were measured and on which their very lives depended.

— James Bowman, Honor: A History, p. 54

Emphasis mine.

Death is the great black wall against which all of our lives shatter. It is the end toward which each of us is racing with our achievements, our hopes and disappointments, our loves and hates, our cherished identities. And when we hit that unyielding wall of impenetrable silence we break apart, we dissipate; we, as we have known ourselves, cease to be.

All of us live under a death sentence. How we deal with it is the most defining thing about us. Death is the great stumbling block, and the beginning and end of all our myths and religions.

In death we must leave all our earthly possessions in the world of the living, and face the Black Transformer alone, naked before the darkness. If any part of us survives this terrible denuding, if we take anything with us into the Void, surely it can only be the spiritual qualities we’ve developed, the characteristics of soul we’ve internalized through our earthly experiences.

As the wisdom teachings of all religions proclaim, far more serious than physical death is the death of the soul that all too often destroys human lives long before our bodies fail. The Maya shamans believed that soul-death is so seductive and diabolically clever that, without our knowledge or conscious consent, it often gains our fullest cooperation. It uses our personal weaknesses to attack our own souls and those of the people around us. In the end, the most subtle of death’s strategies for killing the soul is to persuade us that death itself does not exist. If death can hide in the shadows while we are distracted by the daylight world of our earthly concerns, it can ambush us. But if we can learn to see death—its reality, its lies, the seriousness of its threat, as well as its potential life-generating boon—it becomes the great awakener of a more vital and whole earthly existence and ora blissful eternal life.

The Maya feared death—physical and spiritual. Like the ancient Egyptians with their elaborate mummification practices, their morbid Underworld fantasies, and their books of incantations and spells, the Maya were fascinated by the darkness. But their morbidity, like that of the ascetics, warriors, and sages of other religions, had a purpose. It helped them to stay awake to death. When it was no longer invisible, it could be faced; and if it could be faced, it could be overcome. Seeing in this way helped the Maya shamans unmask death’s crafty, tricksterish ways and expose its life-imitating pretensions. When they could see as the gods saw, false suns could be destroyed, the demons of Xibalba could be defeated, and severed heads could erupt in torrents of ch’ulel.

— Douglas Gillette, The Shaman’s Secret, pp. 132-33

Emphasis mine.

In their structural relations [shamans] exercise a dual influence. Within their own group they tend to be a consolidating force inasmuch as they may use their good offices to settle disputes, guide opinion, persuade or coerce the spirits to promote the well-being of individuals and the body politic, and to establish and maintain harmony between the human and the divine orders. On the other hand, they may be malevolent in their intentions towards hostile neighbours, and therefore be regarded by them as a potent source of the evils that befall them. Consequently, there is a disruptive element in shamanism fostering ill-will and not infrequently causing prolonged enmity between opposed groups. But in either capacity, whether consolidating or disintegrating in his influence, the shaman is a central figure in structural relations and in social affairs, both reflecting and producing the existing organization and determining the attitudes of the spirits under his control for good or ill towards friends and foes alike.

— E. O. James, The Nature and Function of Priesthood, p. 35

Emphasis mine.

…The shaman derives his occult power and insight from the ghosts or spirits with whom he is en rapport, and it is upon them that he depends for his special endowments. Sometimes he may be also a professional magician, but when he shamanizes he is under the influence of supernatural forces external to himself. Notwithstanding the fact that the functions of the worker of magic may be combined in one and the same person, the distinction between the medicine-man and the shaman, the magician and the priest, is fundamental because the one relies solely upon the exercise of his own psychic power; the other seeks the aid of the spiritual beings with whom he is in constant intercourse. But while the shaman is in this way differentiated from the magician or medicine man, he is also distinguished from the priest by the very considerable measure of control that he is able to bring to bear upon the transcendental agencies he subordinates to his will. While on occasions he may engage in sacerdotal functions his real work is in connexion with healing and divination, and inasmuch as he has direct access to the spirit world and derives his powers from particular tutelary spirits who are more or less at his command, his marvellous feats are performed by virtue of supernatural gifts and exploits deriving from his power over or influence with spirits.

Therefore, [the shaman] occupies an intermediate position between the magician who acts exclusively on his own authority and initiative, and the priest who supplicates and conciliates forces superior to himself, guards the sacred tradition in his care, and acts as the master of its sacrificial technique strictly within the limits of his office. The one officiates in his own name and by his occult methods; the other serves at the altar and in the temple or shrine as the representative of the community in its relations with the gods and the unseen world. Both have to undergo a specialized training and receive formal initiation, but the shaman virtually must have the right disposition and temperament, whether hereditary or chosen, whereas neither the magician nor the priest has to exhibit psychopathic tendencies because they are masters of a technique, or holders of an office, conferred upon them by consecration. The medicine-man must be efficient in his craft, while the priest must have an expert knowledge of sacred learning and of all that pertains to the sacerdotal office, its ritual, mythology, law, doctrine and organization. The shaman and the magician may both be individualists, but since the priest is responsible for maintaining a right relationship between the community and its gods, he exercises his functions in a corporate capacity. As sacrifice is the vital bond of union in this relationship, the altar is his cult centre as against the shamanistic séance, visionary experience and ecstatic utterance, or the rite and spell of the magician put into operation either publicly or in secret for licit or illicit ends. In the shaman all three disciplines—inspiration, magic and religion—are loosely combined, but prophecy and divination, and the exercise of occult power, are the determining characteristics of the office.

Individuals richly endowed with these psychic gifts acquire considerable prestige, but shamans seldom, if ever, have an assured position in society comparable to that of an organized hierarchy, or of an outstanding magician, like for instance a renowned rain-maker. They are held in varying degrees of respect and fear according to their powers, but they do not constitute a distinct order, and unless they are also medicine-men or cult leaders, they do not exercise administrative functions, even though they may be honoured after death and become the centre of a cultus. They may, however, combine the functions of a healer and an expert in the occult technique. Being in possession of a considerable psychological knowledge acquired by long training and experience in the exercise of their gifts, they occupy a key position in society. Their failures do not seriously diminish their prestige because it is recognized that like our own medical practitioners they have their limitations. The system is too firmly established to break down when their efforts do not succeed, the inability to effect a cure, as in the case of the medicine-men previously considered, being explained by the intervention of a more powerful shaman.

— E. O. James, The Nature and Function of Priesthood, pp. 33-35

Emphasis mine.

If a gentleman issued or accepted a challenge in proper form and, fought like a gentleman, with a gentleman, then to be vanquished; was no defeat. Certainly it was nobler than suffering the insult or refusing the fight. And to be killed in a duel by your equal was, if not exactly a pleasure, at least honorable. Your grandchildren could tell of it proudly.

Courage, not manners, was the hallmark of a gentleman. As the duel epidemic spread, courage came to mean a thin skin and an unruly temper, the thinner and more unruly, the more gentlemanly. A gentleman was proud of his temper and indulged and cherished it. There may have been, off in remote country estates, phlegmatic gentlemen landowners, waistcoats bulging with good claret and venison, who chuckled at insults, waved them away, and opened another bottle, but in the cities, the armies, and the universities, prickliness was a point of pride, as proud youths in tough neighborhoods are quick to avenge being “dissed.” An easygoing temperament meant your blood was slow, and cold, and lowly.

In The Three Musketeers, the noble Aramis studies in the seminary for ten years to fulfill his dream of becoming an abbé, but a jealous officer insults him, and he quits the seminary and goes off to take fencing lessons daily for a year. Then he finds the officer, calls him out, and strikes him dead. “I am a gentleman born—my blood is warm,” he explains.

In The Tempest, Prospero threatens Ferdinand, son and heir to the king of Naples, and Ferdinand promptly draws his sword. Miranda cries, “0 dear father, make not too rash a trial of him, for he’s gentle, and not fearful.” By gentle, she doesn’t mean he’s kind to dogs and small children. She means he’s well-bred, and therefore bad tempered, armed and dangerous. Not to be trifled with.

As its first definition of “gentle,” the Oxford English Dictionary, both feet stubbornly planted in the past, gives “well-born, belonging to a family of position; originally used synonymously with noble, but afterwards distinguished from it, either as a wider term, or as designating a lower degree of rank. Also, in heraldic use: Having the rank or status of ‘gentleman,’ the distinguishing mark of which is the right to bear arms.”

Gentlemen bore arms. In the Scottish Highlands, where nobody would think of leaving the house without a sword, or perhaps even sitting down to dinner without one, true gentlemen distinguished themselves from their lowlier neighbors by a feather in the bonnet as well—as in “a feather in his cap”—but elsewhere only gentlemen were entitled to the sword. Swords were the badge of a man who needed no help “beyond that of his heart, his sword, and his valor.” The French called it “la noblesse de l’epee.”

— Barbara Holland, Gentlemen’s Blood, p. 28-29

To rule, after all, is to have power, whether over things, over men (by other men or some god), or over men and gods together (by Zeus). But the bardic formulas sometimes add a little touch that is extremely revealing. In five instances anassein is qualified with the adverb iphi, ‘by might’, so that king’s rule (but never the householder’s) becomes rule by might. This must under no circumstances be taken to imply tyranny, forcible rule in the invidious sense. When Hector prayed for his son to ‘rule by might in Ilion’ ([The Iliad, Book] VI 478), he was asking the gods that the boy succeed to the throne, not that he be endowed with the qualities of a despot….

Iphi quietly directs attention to the limits upon the parallel between head of a household and king. One critical test lay in the succession. The kings, like Hector, were personally interested in pushing the family parallel to the point at which their sons could automatically follow them on the throne as they succeeded them in the oikos. ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ That proclamation is the final triumph of the dynastic principle in monarchy. But never in the world of Odysseus was it pronounced by the herald. Kingship had not come that far, and the other aristocrats often succeeded in forcing a substitute announcement: ‘The king is dead! The struggle for the throne is open!’ That is how the entire Ithacan theme of the Odyssey can be summed up. ‘Rule by might’, in other words, meant that a weak king was not a king, that a king either had the might to rule or he did not rule at all.

— M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, pp. 83-84

Emphasis mine.

Despite repeated laws forbidding dueling, to deny a challenge marked one as unworthy. The abbé de Saint-Pierre charged in 1715 [C.E.] that [a military] officer who refused a challenge would “find himself forced by the other officers and by the commander himself to leave the regiment.”

One counts for nothing that an officer would rather pass for a coward…than to commit a mortal sin and a capital crime in formal disobedience of the law and the will of the prince; one counts for nothing that he does not want to risk his safety and the loss of the good graces of his king; he does not fight, therefore he is a coward; he is a coward, therefore he must be driven away.”

The explanation for duels lay much more in the symbolic than in the real, for by their nature, duels were irrational. Ultimately, the aristocracy’s fighting spirit was driven by the individual’s drive to prove himself within the standard of his own class and thus win gloire. The nobility set standards that must be obeyed, or else the individual would lose caste. As one historian of the duel insists, dueling was “another religion.” A duel was a human sacrifice to the god of peer opinion, and so was a battle.

— John A. Lynn, Battle, p. 143

…Taken together the data [on ancient battles] suggest that seven of every ten soldiers of the defeated force would become casualties by day’s end. About one-third of the force would be killed and another third wounded severely enough to be left behind to die or shift for themselves on the battlefield. The victors could expect to lose to enemy arms approximately one in every ten men, either killed or wounded.

— Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, From Sumer To Rome, p. 88

Disease has to be counted as one of the wild cards of history, an unforeseen factor that can, in a matter of days or weeks, undo the deterministic sure thing or humble the conquering momentum. History is full of examples. There was the plague that ravaged Athens for more than a year and led to its capture and the dismantling of its empire in 404 [B.C.E.]. An outbreak of dysentery weakened the Prussian force invading France in 1792 [C.E.] and helped to convince their leaders to turn back after losing the battle of Valmy, thus saving the French Revolution. The ravages of typhus and dysentery are the hidden story of Napoleon’s calamity in Russia. The war-vectored influenza epidemic of 1918 [C.E.] may not have changed immediate outcomes, but how many potential reputations did we lose to it—people who might have made a difference to their generation? Bacteria and viruses may thus redirect vast impersonal forces in human societies, and they can also become forces in their own right.

— Robert Cowley (editor), What If?, p. 2

The army relied mainly upon archers and pikemen, some very lightly armored, some protected by a cuirass and a conical helmet, and carrying a short sword for close fighting. Coordinated with this infantry was the cavalry, which at first fought from chariots. Later on, when the warrior rode the horse (about 700 [B.C.E.]), he had the infantryman’s bow and spear. Still later came the most original Assyrian contribution to the art of warfare, siege artillery. No fortified city could withstand the assault of Assyrian engines. A choice body of troops fought beside the king, but it was the foot-bowmen who wrought havoc on the enemy.

The Assyrian army’s power cannot be entirely explained by the bravery of the individual soldier, the competence of the king-general, or the sheer numerical strength so easy to attain in a country where every able-bodied man was subject to military service. Perhaps it is better explained by the theory that the Assyrians used iron extensively. Indeed something like a revolution in the metal industry apparently took place under Sargon II (722-705 [B.C.E.]) when he invaded Urartu and exploited its iron mines. Cunning, too, aided Assyrian armies: an efficient espionage and intelligence service was conducted by the royal governors and bureaucrats in the provinces and centered in the king’s palace. Frequently when the troops entered a country they were aided by carefully organized fifth columns.

— Vincent Scramuzza, The Ancient World, p. 89-90

Emphasis mine.

The Assyrian army in the Sargonid period had a potential magnitude of several hundreds of thousands of troops, although a call-up of the entire force for a campaign was extremely rare. Supreme command of the army rested with the king and, immediately under him, the “field-marshal”…. The army was divided into units of various sizes and types; but the basic division was the “company”…of fifty men under a “captain”…and this unit was in turn broken down into files of ten men. An officer carried a mace as a symbol of his authority.

The levying of troops was the primary responsibility of the captains, each of whom had a certain number of villages under his command, and the captains were in turn responsible to the provincial governor. By the Sargonid age there was also a standing army which was under the direct authority of the king, no doubt created as a counter-balance to the potential misuse of military power by the provincial governors. The king also had his own bodyguard of infantry and cavalry. The troops recruited within Assyria proper were spread around the empire as much as possible, since they were the most loyal, and they constituted the chariotry and cavalry divisions. The infantry consisted largely of foreigners, mainly Aramaeans. Some foreign groups became specialized units. For example, the Ituaeans, an Aramaic people, were entrusted with special tasks such as escort duty throughout the empire.

Garrisons and barracks were scattered over the empire, but the military headquarters was a massive armoury in the Assyrian capital. Here was stationed a large portion of the troops, animals, and equipment of the standing army, and there were, in addition, royal apartments for the king to occupy when he wished. At each New Year there was a grand inspection at the armoury when the king reviewed his troops and their equipment….

— The Cambridge Ancient History, volume III, part 2

Magicians never invent or create power spots. They only discover them. Once a spot has been recognized by a magician, he will often build an altar, pillar, or pole atop it, or leave a statue of the god who appeared to him there, or mark out a boundary. This boundary can be as simple as…[a] circle in the sand, or as spectacular as Imhotep’s massive, ornate Saqqara wall.

An altar placed on a power spot serves to mark an axis mundi. Along this central point the chaotic energies of the profane world can rush into extraordinary space. And the boundary helps to keep the energies of the sacred and profane worlds discrete—to protect the profane world from being overloaded with sacred energy, and to shield people from unintentional travels into what can be a crazy reality. If sacred space were poured freely into the profane world, it would be contaminated by it, and lose its energy.

As magicians have always known, keeping a place sacred is difficult. For all its power, sacred space is elusive and tentative. It cannot be willed to remain intact, any more than it can be commanded to appear—it is always a hierophany, a sudden, unforeseen appearance of a god. Although the great shamans could move in and out of sacred space at will, even they could not fully control extraordinary reality time. A shaman’s task was not to control but to maintain those places where sacred and profane worlds met. He was to keep the boundaries in good repair, and keep the center fresh and strong. The rest was up to the divine powers.

— Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette, The Magician Within, pp. 138-39

The history of the Maya is shrouded in the mists of antiquity…. We know that they were the inheritors of the spiritual traditions of the first Asiatic hunters who crossed the ancient land bridge from Asia into Alaska and then made their way through this uninhabited hemisphere to the tip of South America. The possibility of sea crossings from Asia becomes more and more likely too as archaeologists and anthropologists gain new respect for the seafaring capacities of ancient peoples.

We don’t know when these people first set foot in what was then a truly new world for human beings, but there are sites in South America that could date back over fifty thousand years. We do know that the first Indians brought with them from their Asian homeland important aspects of their spiritualities: shamanism; ancestor worship; a belief in the quadrated nature of the universe with a vertical fifth dimension at its center; the idea that various levels of spiritual reality exist above and below the earth; the conviction that jade, flint, and pyrite crystals could be used to communicate with the spirits; the tradition of ecstatic trancing to open the Otherworld and release its deadly and life-bearing energies; the practice of human sacrifice; and an unshakable belief in the survival of the soul after death.

— Douglas Gillette, The Shaman’s Secret, pp. 7-9

Emphasis mine.

The Greeks…are on man’s side, both in sympathy and in loyalty; the Hebrews, on the contrary, on God’s. Never would we have heard from a Greek such words as those of the sorely beaten “blameless and upright” Job, addressed to the god who had “destroyed him without cause” and who then came at him in the whirlwind, boasting of his power.

“Behold,” pleaded Job, “I am of small account…I know that thou canst do all things…. I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Repent! Repent for what?

In contrast, the great contemporary Greek playwright Aeschylus, of about the same fifth-century [B.C.E.] date as the anonymous author of the Book of Job, puts into the mouth of his Prometheus—who was also being tormented by a god that could “draw Leviathan out with a fishhook, play with him as with a bird, and fill his skin with harpoons”—the following stunning words: “He is a monster…. I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do as he likes.”

— Joseph Campbell, Myths To Live By, p. 81

Emphasis mine.

The few demigods, such as Aineias, who receive miraculous rescue [in the Iliad] are saved only by the direct intervention of a patron divinity, not by any special ingredient of their own semidivine nature. The flesh of the demigods is wholly vulnerable, the blood is the blood of mortals, the pain of injury that of ordinary mortal men, as is the inevitability of death. Nothing the men have inherited from their divine parents is itself protective; what saves them is the physical removal from the danger of the battlefield. The vividly evoked vulnerability of demigods such as Aineias will also have bearing upon the nature, and limitations, of the epic’s most outstanding demigod—Achilles.

— Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles, p. 68

The Olympians of the Iliad know everything about the mortals they look down upon; Zeus himself is eurúopa, “far-seeing,” a direct legacy of his origins as the all-seeing God of the Bright Sky, to whose celestial vantage the events on earth are laid bare. Rarely indolent, usually zestful and opinionated, the extended family of Zeus aggressively engages with the mortal world. In disguise, the Olympians move, speak, and act freely among men, partaking of the human experience. There is nothing about the men and women at Troy that the gods do not know, even to foreknowledge of their individual fates.

By contrast, despite the busy flow of divine activity that drums through their lives, the Homeric heroes and heroines know very little about their gods. Few could claim to know what a god looks like, as most encounters take place with the deity in disguise. There are exceptions: Helen famously recognizes Aphrodite, despite her masquerade as an old servant woman, by the “round, sweet throat of the goddess / and her desirable breasts and her eyes that were full of shining.” Likewise, Poseidon’s disguise as the seer Kalchas is betrayed by his footprints: “‘this is not Kalchas, the bird interpreter of the gods,’” Aias the son of Oïleus says to Telamonian Aias, “‘for I knew / easily as he went away the form of his feet, the legs’ form / from behind him. Gods, though gods, are conspicuous.’”

By and large, however, the men at Troy fight in a kind of fog of existential ignorance, never knowing where or who the gods are or what divine activities and plans already under way may affect their own actions. Nor do they know what they must do for their supplications and prayers to be received. A very few incidents appear to suggest that Zeus, at least, punishes the wicked, which, if true, would furnish some minimal guidance for gaining his favor and avoiding his wrath. Menelaos, for example, rants at the Trojans for taking Helen away: “‘wretched dogs, and your hearts knew no fear / at all of the hard anger of Zeus loud-thundering, / the guest’s god, who some day will utterly sack your steep city.’” On closer look, however, in this and other such cases, it is clear that punishment is to be meted out by Zeus only in his capacity as patron of a specific institution: he is Zeus Orkios, “Zeus who upholds oaths,” or Zeus Xenia, the god of guest friendship. Zeus’ loyalty, then, is in fact to himself in his particular cultic aspects, not to a principle of overarching justice.

— Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles, pp. 116-17

Emphasis mine.

Great generals do not repeat what has failed before. They do not send troops directly into a battle for which the enemy is prepared and waiting. On the contrary, great generals strike where they are least expected against opposition that is weak and disorganized.

One of the remarkable facts about great generals throughout history is—except in cases where they possessed overwhelming power—practically all their successful moves have been made against the enemy’s flank or rear, either actual or psychological. Great generals realize that a rear attack distracts, dislocates, and often defeats an enemy physically by cutting him off from his supplies, communications, and reinforcements; and mentally by undermining his confidence and sense of security. Great generals know a direct attack, on the other hand, consolidates an enemy’s defenses and, even if he is defeated, merely forces him back onto his reserves and his supplies.

— Bevin Alexander, How Great Generals Win, p. 23

People who have grown up in the Judeo-Christian and Moslem spiritual traditions have usually been taught to believe that the concept of one god is more advanced than the idea of many. But there are advantages to the many-faceted experience of the Divine Being. One is that by celebrating the rich diversity of supernatural forces within God, the believer is allowed to realize that the struggle between good and evil, creation and destruction, and life and death is not something that takes place outside the Divine Being, between a finite God and an external force like Satan. Not only is this way of looking at the Divine Being more honest, it also helps remind us of Its immensity. Unable to simplify the struggle between life and death to a “Good Guy/Bad Guy” scenario, we are forced to face the truth that the “God beyond God” is far more mysterious than our human comforts and discomforts.

In addition, polytheistic spirituality works against our normal human tendency to reduce God to a cardboard caricature of ourselves, our parents, or our tribes and nations. By maintaining the diversity within The Holy Thing and, at the same time, by recognizing Its ultimate unity, the believer can experience a Being whose very complexity blocks his or her attempts to trivialize, idolatrize, or domesticate It. The soul simply cannot grasp such complexity or shrink It to monoscopic proportions. Instead, it is forced to experience the Divine Being from a dazzling, multiscopic perspective. It is also forced to confront the absolute limits of all human ways of thinking. This can have the same effect on the soul that Buddhist koans do. Buddhist koans force the mind to imagine the unimaginable—“the sound of one hand clapping”—then to snap and release the soul into an ecstatic experience of oneness with its Source and final Destiny. That was the goal of the ancient Maya shamans and all those who, meditating on the complex unity of The-Holy-First-Father-Decapitated-Dead-Creating-Thing, tried to achieve oneness with the Mystery from which they had come and to which they hoped to return.

— Douglas Gillette, The Shaman’s Secret, pp. 93-94

Emphasis mine.

Anthropologists commonly use the term “chiefdom” for a primitive culture that has developed a formal social hierarchy in which the war leader holds a unique and permanent rank above all his tribesmen, often with theocratic and redistributive functions as well…. They provided a transitional stage in social development between the tribe and the state. At the level of the chiefdom, the causes of war become more complicated and the motives for war become separable. We can now distinguish among ideological, economic, and political motives.

1. The articulated motives for war are still revenge and prestige. The difference is that wars are now fought to avenge wrongs against the chief and for the honor and glory of the chief. Primitive militarism is being replaced by kingly or theocratic militarism, an ideology that continues without much change until the time of Louis XIV [of France].
2. The economic causes of war become more compelling. Genuine conquests and occupations are now possible, so wars can be fought more openly and directly to gain territory. The values of honor and glory may become a pretext, masking a chief’s grab for land and wealth.
3. Finally, war becomes an organizational source of power. It is now possible to fight wars simply for political reasons, and the martial values may become a pretext for a chief’s grab at power for its own sake.

The more advanced chiefdoms appear to practice what is today called warfare in every sense, except for the lack of an ideology that permits self-conscious strategic thinking. The history of political warfare should therefore begin with these chiefdoms, except that they have no history. In spite of their efficiency, chiefdoms do not seem to last. Only a bare handful of chiefdoms have ever made the full transition to bureaucratic state. The process of military escalation and political centralization is reversible, and normally, it is reversed. The disadvantages of losing freedom to the chief are as obvious as the advantages of military superiority, so the chiefdom rarely survives the death of the chief, which is likely to be premature. Countless societies may have come to the edge of statehood and drawn back from that brink. Chiefdoms do not last because of their efficiency.

— Doyne Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare, pp. 35-36

With heavy infantry specialized to resist heavy cavalry and light infantry indispensable in sieges and finding its most effective employment in the field against light cavalry, the art of war about the year 1200 [C.E.] had these clearly distinguishable capabilities (using the symbol → to mean was superior to):

heavy infantry → heavy cavalry
heavy cavalry → light infantry
light infantry → light cavalry
light cavalry → both heavy infantry and heavy cavalry.

These relationships are conveniently summarized in schematic [above], in which A means ability to attack successfully in the direction of the arrow and D means ability to defend successfully in the direction of the arrow. Attack includes the capability to compel the attacked to fight; defend implies only the capacity for successful resistance but no ability to force action. The schematic assumes a flat surface.

The ability of the cavalry to dismount modifies this diagram. When the heavy cavalry dismounted it became heavy infantry, and confirmed the generalizations that the man on foot is superior to the mounted man and [that] the defensive is stronger when the same weapon systems confront one another. Light cavalry could gain comparable advantages by dismounting, and in each case the dismounted cavalry in the defense could easily take advantage of terrain or artificial obstacles, something more difficult to do mounted. Medieval soldiers grasped and often exploited the value of dismounting heavy cavalry but, lacking light cavalry, could never make use of this transformation. They did occasionally mount bowmen, giving them the strategic mobility of the light cavalry. They more rarely resorted to a similar mounting of heavy infantry, probably because of their ample supply of heavy cavalry. Yet to have mounted heavy infantry on nags would have been a far more economical solution had knights customarily fought on foot. It would have saved the considerable cost of a robust war horse and the expensive, but unused, skill in fighting mounted.

— Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World, p. 145-46

Fortune-telling was a central part of many ancient classical religions, knowledge of the future, or a least a belief in having knowledge of the future, providing some bulwark against the fragility of life. Whole cities and states officially consulted the great oracles such as the Pythia at Delphi. The fabulously wealthy King Croesus of Lydia had many centuries before, according to Herodotus, asked the Pythia whether he should attack Persia. He had received a typically ambiguous response: “If you do, you will destroy a great empire.” Heartened by this, he immediately attacked, only to discover that the empire the Pythia was referring to was his own.

Even Alexander had sought the oracle at Siwa to discover if his campaigns would be successful. This may seem like a piece of stage magic today, but the word of the Siwa oracle not only helped Alexander to resolve his course of action, but likely paved the way for his conquests. In the same way, not long after the Chaldean oracles of Babylon began predicting his doom, he did indeed die, and the same doleful prophesying had probably helped to oust Darius before that. Prophecies could be self-fulfilling. Enemies would attack a man marked out for bad luck. A man apparently blessed would be left alone. Oracles, to put it simply, worked, and many of all types and importance vied with each other. At the greatest, such as at Delphi and Siwa, kings themselves might send for answers, receiving back those cryptic messages from the god via a human intermediary, usually a priest or priestess absorbed in an ecstatic trance or under the influence of psychotropic drugs. Romans would seek answers in the entrails of sacrificed animals, as interpreted by their augurs.

— Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, pp. 182-183

Emphasis mine.

Among [a general's] skills, the one by which the eighteenth century [C.E.] set the greatest store was that of coup d’oeil, a facility which enabled a commander to grasp the essentials of a situation and make a speedy and appropriate decision [in a glance].

The process of acquiring coup d’oeil began in peacetime, while the officer was out walking, riding, or hunting. One of the fundamental exercises was to fix a particular measurement in your mind, and the apply it over successively greater distances. The ordinary human pace was assumed to be about 2 feet, and the Prince de Ligne discovered that 80 such paces approximated to the maximum range at which he would consider shooting a hare. Three 80-pace units in turn yielded the length of an Austrian battalion, which came to 240 paces, including the 6 paces allowed for the battalion artillery. The estimation of numbers also demanded practice:

When you see laborers or a herd of cattle in a field, you should guess their number from a distance, then approach more closely and count them, so as to find your margin of error. By repeating this exercise over and over again you acquire a certain assurance of judgment, which will enable you afterwards to make an accurate assessment of a force of infantry or cavalry.

Eventually it became possible to envisage the most peaceful landscape in military terms….

— Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 140-41

The Assyrians had made major and highly effective use of a tactical feature common in Near Eastern warfare for many centuries. This was the archer-pair, consisting of a spearman bearing a very large, light but sturdy shield made of leather and wicker, and an archer; the spearman faced the enemy and held up the shield, behind which the archer hid and fired off volleys of arrows. The Persians called such shields spara and so named these tactical units sparabara, or “shield-bearers.” Typically, the Assyrians had lined these units up side by side, forming a single row of shield carriers backed by a single row of archers. [The Persians] increased the depth of the formation and also the number of archers per shield, producing a heavier concentration of arrow shot.

— Don Nardo, The Persian Empire, pp. 27-28

The cult of the hero was a unique feature of Greek religion. The mortal hero was the chthonian counterpart of the immortal gods. By the end of the eighth century [B.C.E.], the grave of an outstanding warrior would occupy a place of honor in most of the poleis. A constant reminder of the superior race of mortals who had lived in the heroic age, the hero was revered as a demigod. Now that he was dead, he lived a shadowy life in the depths of the earth, but his spirit was still an active presence in the community; the qualities that had made him so exceptional lived on. But his death had filled the hero with rage, and an unpredictable, disturbing aura emanated from his grave, which people passed in reverent silence. Unlike the gods, who lived on the heights of Mount Olympus, the mortal hero was close at hand. The rites at his tomb were designed to appease his anger and enlist his help. Worshipers visited his shrine without garlands, unkempt, with hair unbound, yet each polis was proud of its hero, who symbolized its special qualities. His grave was often placed next to the temple of the patronal deity, as its dark, chthonian complement.

— Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, p. 105

In warfare the plain—a relatively large, open, and uninterrupted battleground—is like a giant chessboard. With room to maneuver, opposing commanders may have many options. They must weigh up strengths and weaknesses—their own as well as the enemy’s. Flanking, probing, enveloping, it is a game in which numbers and maneuverability are often critical. As in chess, the battle often involves the constriction and isolation of key elements of the opposing force. But like all geographic features, the picture is not quite as two dimensional as the word “plain” might suggest. We are not talking about beautifully smooth playing fields, but individual sites with their own unique characteristics. For example…Issus was fought on a coastal plain in what is now Turkey where movement was constricted on both flanks: one by the sea, the other by inland foothills. As it happened, these geographic “bookends” worked in Alexander’s favor, as they boxed in the larger number of his Persian foe and to some extent neutralized the numerical discrepancy. Some 2,000 years later General George Custer was to learn a different lesson about numbers and maneuverability on the plains of Montana. In open spaces, movement and superior numbers are king. Brought to bay on his lonely, isolated knoll, outgunned and overrun, there could be only one, grisly, outcome. He was also to learn that plains have their own wrinkles and folds. At Little Big Horn the numerous ravines (coulees) were capable of hiding significant numbers of his enemy….

— Stephenson, Michael (editor), Battlegrounds: Geography and the History of Warfare, p. 13

Emphasis mine.

Copper was the first metal regularly exploited by humans, smelted far back into the Neolithic. For use in large tools and weapons, it was characteristically cast as a substitute for stone in ax and mace heads along with dagger blades. Yet its softness precluded much more in the way of new types of arms.

This changed dramatically with the discovery that copper could be combined effectively with arsenic or tin to produce a far harder but still ductile alloy, bronze. Not only could it be cast into the most complex shapes, but after cold-working, yielded weapons of a hardness and tensile strength rivaling those of iron, until Roman times, when tempering came to be understood. The toughness and ductility of bronze made it possible for the dagger form to be stretched to generate a true sword by the middle of the third millennium [B.C.E.] Such an instrument, by virtue of its superior reach, maneuverability, and capacity to inflict both slashing and puncture wounds, was ideal for the kind of close combat that was the specialty of the elite warrior class. Bronze also substantially increased the penetration of holdovers like the spear, arrow, and battle-ax, which, in combination with the sword, rather quickly brought forth defensive reciprocals in bronze and bronze-reinforced helmets, shields, cuirasses, and greaves, to produce a metal-clad combatant largely immune to any but similarly accessorized adversaries.

War’s appetite for bronze fed on itself further encouraging political centralization and the dominance of military elites intent upon controlling the sources of supply: Deposits of tin, in particular, were scattered and relatively difficult to extract. Literary allusions and other records from the Bronze Age make it clear that the metal and its constituents remained valued, rare, and monopolized by those in control.

Iron changed things somewhat. Anatolian armorers had experimented with the metal, probably derived from meteoric deposits, to produce blades as far back as 2500 [B.C.E.]. Iron weapons were tough and held an edge, but were subject to rapid and continuous deterioration through rust. Rather than superiority, its large-scale use was driven more by the relative abundance of ferrous deposits. Once the higher heats required for extracting terrestrial iron were mastered, it could be produced in quantities necessary to begin to provide whole armies with at least some metallic implements.

But bronze had staying power. Because it was only minimally affected by corrosion, it could be used repeatedly and for different purposes simply by melting and recasting. Iron emerged as a red-hot pasty ball that had to be worked by hammering, rather than as a liquid that could be poured into molds. Shaping remained difficult and labor-consumptive. Gradually, a better understanding of metallurgy—basically tempering and the development of steel—led to an increased reliance on ferrous-based weapons, particularly during the [European] Middle Ages.

Yet in the age named for bronze there was no question who and what ruled the battlefield. Here there were two classes of opponents: a relative few wielding and protected by bronze, and the nonmetallic masses, essentially designated victims. Although armies ranged from the low thousands up to around 20,000, battles could be and were decided by several hundred elite fighters. A combat environment in the Bronze Age typically consisted of opposing lines of archers (often supplemented by slingers and javelin throwers) exchanging desultory fire, while champions on each side sought each other out to wage what amounted to individual combat. Yet prior to and particularly after the leadership fought each other, common soldiers were subject to promiscuous killing.

— Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, pp. 70-71

Emphasis mine.

The Macedonian cavalry [of the fourth century B.C.E.] was not markedly different from the Greek cavalry. In particular, the Thessalians were comparable in individual and unit capability. The employment of the Macedonian cavalry was what made it superior to anything seen prior, or for a millennium afterward. Boldness, vision, and exquisite timing, derived from the inspired and personal leadership of Alexander, were the characteristics of Macedonian cavalry success. Several battles illustrate the distinctive employment of Macedonian cavalry: Philip II‘s decisive victory at Chaeronea, and Alexander III’s string of victories at Granikos, Issus, and Gaugamela. These battles became the model for the employment of cavalry that other armies tried to emulate into the twentieth century [C.E.]

— Louis A. DiMarco, War Horse, p. 42

Emphasis mine.

Coming from who knows where, a lucky find is potentially unsettling to whatever world it enters. The moralists will be likely to complain, the gamblers will be pleased, while everyone else will wait to see if it really is amusing, this new thing. Whatever the case, before we can have a full sense of the disruptions and delights that come in the wake of a lucky find, we need fuller examples to work with. In 1965 [C.E.] George Foster, an anthropologist who had worked in Mexico and Italy, published an essay that is partly about how peasants respond when their neighbors’ fortunes suddenly change. In “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,” Foster argues that many othervise perplexing details of peasant behavior can be understood by assuming that peasants believe there is a fixed quantity of wealth in the community and therefore that if someone in the group suddenly becomes richer it must be because someone else, or the group as a whole, has become poorer. The idea holds if we imagine, as Foster does, a closed community, or—to put it the other way—the idea finds its exceptions in cases in which wealth clearly comes from outside the nominal bounds of the group. Peasants do not feel ripped off if one of their number becomes richer as “a result of selling labor as a migrant worker, for it is clear that wages so earned come from across the border. More telling for my purposes are the other ways to get wealth without being subjected to group opprobrium. In peasant communities in southern Italy, for example, the neighbors won’t harass someone whose sudden success comes as a “gift of Fortune,” as, for example, when “a rich gentleman gave a poor boy a violin,” or when “a rich gentlewoman adopted an abandoned child,” when a man “hit upon a hidden treasure” buried in the woods, and when “another was lucky enough to win in the lottery.”

— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, pp. 131-32

Emphasis mine.

Pure copper…is a soft metal and cannot be given an effective cutting edge. It is made up of layers of minute crystals; to hold the crystals together, one needs grit. Yet if one adds a particular, yet softer metal—tin—one obtains bronze; tin’s impurities combine with copper to make a far stronger alloy. Much stronger, in fact: about 5 percent tin to 95 percent copper makes bronze three times as hard as the copper alone. Bronze was discovered in the Middle East around 3800 [B.C.E.] and became…”a material for all purposes, the plastic of its age.”

— Richard Cohen, By The Sword, p. 110

In 1964 [C.E.], Mac Linscott Ricketts finished a doctoral thesis that is a remarkably wide-ranging survey of North American trickster tales. There and in later essays Ricketts has argued that the tales locate the trickster in opposition to the practice and beliefs of shamanism. To Ricketts’s way of thinking, humankind has had two responses when faced with all that engenders awe and dread in this world: the way of the shaman (and the priests), which assumes a spiritual world, bows before it, and seeks to make alliances; and the way of the trickster (and the humanists), which recognizes no power beyond its own intelligence, and seeks to seize and subdue the unknown with wit and cunning. “The trickster…embodies [an] experience of Reality…in which humans feel themselves to be self-sufficient beings for whom the supernatural spirits are powers not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.” The shaman enters the spirit world and works with it, but “the trickster is an outsider…. He has no friends in that other world…. All that humans have gained from the unseen powers beyond—fire, fish, game, fresh water, and so forth—have been obtained, by necessity, through trickery or theft….” In obtaining these goods, the trickster, unlike the shaman, “did not also obtain superhuman powers or spiritual friendship…. He seems to need no friends: he gets along very well by himself….”

To explore this idea, Ricketts shows how a number of trickster stories can be read as parodies of shamanism. In shamanic initiation, for example, the spirits kill and resurrect the initiate, often placing something inside the resurrected body—a quartz crystal, for example—which the shaman can later call forth from his body during healing rituals. If someone in your group claims such powers, you might find wry humor in stories which have Coyote, when he needs advice, calling forth (with much grunting) his own excrement. Likewise, dreams of flying are said to be premonitions of shamanic initiation, and the shaman in a trance can supposedly fly into the sky, into the underworld, into the deepest forest. With this in mind, it’s hard not to hear the parodic tone in the almost universal stories of trickster trying to fly with the birds, only to fall ignominiously to earth. Trickster’s failure implies that shamanic pretensions are daydreams at best, fakery at worst. “Humans were not made to fly…. Trickster, like the human being, is an earth-bound creature, and his wish to fly (and to escape the human condition) is…a frivolous fancy.”

— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, pp. 293-94

Emphasis mine.

Sophisticated weapons and complex techniques (the outer factors of bujutsu…), although admittedly impressive, might be compared to the visible part of an iceberg which catches the eye, and often the imagination, but is only a projection of the power hidden below in the depths of the icy waters. Although the possession of a certain weapon and basic training in its functional use often satisfied the individual bujutsu practitioner (bujin) of limited ambition and imagination, there were others, many others, who perceived, beyond those outer factors of the various arts, other, more complex factors, less evident perhaps to the naked eye but no less important in determining the practical efficiency of those weapons and their relative techniques. Failure to perceive these inner factors could prove disastrous, as it did for many a complacent bujin who had been trained only in the technical ways of handling a spear, a sword, or any other weapon, including his own anatomy. Centuries of experience in the ancient art of combat, in fact, had confronted the bujin and his sensei with a series of demanding questions, among which the following were of primary importance: When should an opponent be engaged? How was he (as well as oneself) to be controlled? What type of energy was to be used, and how employed to the best advantage? Finally, what was to be the bujin‘s motivation? All these considerations involved factors of a decidedly interior nature which activated the techniques of bujutsu from within, provided them with an effective source of power, and justified their use in a manner calculated to provide the bujin with controlled determination, calmness, and clarity of purpose, as well as with a moral justification to sustain him in combat. Bujutsu masters confronted these interrogatives (and others), explored their range and depth, and tried to provide satisfactory answers for themselves and their disciples.

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, p. 375

Emphasis mine.

This is the kind of sensei I see—and attempt to role-play—Xenograg as.

Traditional prophecy has a distinct relationship to time, but telling the future is only part of it. The prophet does not say that the stock market will fall next October, or that some celebrity will soon marry. Rather, the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time. The prophet disrupts the mundane in order to reveal the eternal.

— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, p. 284

For centuries in Egypt there had been no true currency with which to buy and sell goods. Most markets operated on a barter-and-exchange system. For very large-scale transactions it was possible to pay in gold or other precious metals, but the idea of coinage was still relatively new. True monetary economies had emerged in the city-states of the Mediterranean beginning around 650 [B.C.E.], probably first in Lydia, whose later King Croesus had made himself a byword for fabulous wealth. Ptolemy I had made some attempts to follow suit, issuing coins called staters just as Alexander had, but outside Alexandria these were as much demonstrations of royal power as they were useful coins. His son, however, now massively extended this scheme with the creation of a state-run banking system with local branches throughout the towns and villages of the country, all reporting back to the central bank in Alexandria. From these banks a coin-based currency was introduced, backed up by a system of written “bills of exchange”—promissory letters which could be exchanged for real money, or, as we would call them, banknotes. The entire rural economy was to be centered on these local branches, which provided the capital—seed grain and tools—that the farmers needed. They also provided massive state-aided infrastructural schemes such as the creation of a reservoir in the Southern Fayyum oasis which held 360 million cubic yards of water and irrigated 60 square miles of arable land. This was not pure largesse, however. Nearly all the grain produced by farmers was taken into the royal treasury in the form of tax. More land under cultivation meant more grain, and more grain meant more money in the Alexandrian coffers.

The driving force behind this economy was, of course, the immense quantity of grain produced in the Nile Valley. The annual flooding of the Nile, which ran through an almost rainless desert, made this the most productive agricultural land in the known world, where the sun always shone on the crops, but never dried their roots. Such valuable land was largely owned by the crown or the temples and leased to farmers, who were free men and women who often used slave labor to maintain their estates. Such estates produced a vast surplus, much of which the state took. Yet Ptolemy’s system also allowed for a degree of individual enterprise, as banks could handle private financial transactions, provide loans, and broker deals.

Whatever capital was left could be spent in the thriving open markets. Traditionally Egyptians had acquired the necessities of life they couldn’t produce for themselves by direct barter—effectively swapping a loaf for a pint of milk. The Greek immigrants, however, greatly encouraged the development of markets throughout the whole country. These were often held in the precincts of temples, and records exist of the temple taxes levied on the traders. In the town of Oxyrhynchus, for example, had you taken a stroll into the courtyard of the temple of Serapis on market day, a chaotic vista would have opened up as you passed through the first pylon. That day the peace of the temple would have been shattered by the cries of stallholders, all hoping to relieve you of some of the coins in your pocket. Here the local farmers and traders sold local vegetables, wood, olives, rushes, bread, fruit, wool yarn, and plaited garlands from wooden stands, each of which had been licensed (for a fee) by the temple. Among the crowd you might pick out the priests of Serapis, moving between the stalls, checking their goods and imposing the appropriate import duty on everything from olives, dates, cucumbers, squashes, beans, spices, and rock salt to pottery, green fodder, wood, and dung. The throng would also have attracted other traders offering more sophisticated wares, from the bulk grain dealers looking to turn a profit back in Alexandria, to the tailors, leather embroiderers, tinsmiths, butchers, and brothel keepers who always gravitated toward a crowd.

— Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, pp. 77-78

…In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

That trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line, but…there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven. Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth; when he becomes the messenger of the gods it’s as if he has been enlisted to solve a problem he himself created. In a case like that, boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.

— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, pp. 7-8

Emphasis mine.

Henry, Duke of Lancaster, called the “Father of Soldiers,” was England’s most distinguished warrior, who had not missed a battle in his 45 years. He was a veteran of the Scottish wars, of Sluys, of Calais and all the campaigns in France, and when his country was quiescent he rode forth in knightly tradition to carry his sword elsewhere. He had joined the King of Castile in a crusade against the Moors of Algeciras and journeyed to Prussia to join the Teutonic Knights in one of their annual “crusades” to extend Christianity over the lands of Lithuanian heathen. In 1352 [C.E.], while the truce still held between England and France, he was the star of a remarkable event in Paris. On returning from a season in Prussia, he had quarreled with Duke Otto of Brunswick and accepted his challenge to combat, which was arranged under French auspices. Given a safe-conduct, escorted by a noble company to Paris, magnificently entertained by King Jean, the Duke of Lancaster rode into the lists before a splendid audience of French nobility; but his mere reputation proved too much for his opponent. Otto of Brunswick trembled so violently on his warhorse that he could not put on his helmet or wield his spear and had to be removed by his friends and retract his challenge.

— Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, pp. 146-47

…From the late seventeenth to the late thirteenth century [B.C.E.], for the eastern Mediterranean kingdoms warfare was a contest between opposing chariot forces, and the only offensive infantrymen who participated in battle were the ‘runners’—the skirmishers who ran among the chariots…. Although there is distressingly little information for the centuries following the Catastrophe [in the 12th century B.C.E.], what there is suggests that all over the eastern Mediterranean the principal role in battle was now borne by offensive infantrymen. Thus chariot warfare, which in the Late Bronze Age had distinguished cities and kingdoms from the barbarous hinterlands (where horses and a chariot were a luxury that few, if any, could afford), did not survive into the Iron Age, and even the wealthiest kings had now to depend primarily upon footsoldiers.

It is generally recognized that the chariot was less important in the Iron Age than in the Late Bronze Age. By the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III [of Assyria] (745-27 [B.C.E.]) the light, two-horse chariot rarely appeared on the battlefield, since by that time the tasks hitherto assigned to chariots were normally carried out by cavalry. As a result, the Neo-Assyrian chariot became an enormous and cumbersome vehicle, carrying a variety of passengers and drawn by three or four horses. Such vehicles had little in common with the war chariot of the Bronze Age and seem to have served as prestige conveyances for the king and lesser dignitaries. In classical times (if we except the dreadful but ineffective ‘scythed’ chariots of the Persians) the chariot was associated almost entirely with status, parades, and recreation. We may thus say that in the Iron Age cavalry ‘replaced’ chariotry as an effective military arm.

The earliest representations of archers shooting from the backs of galloping horses are ninth-century Assyrian reliefs. These reliefs show the cavalry archers operating in pairs: one cavalryman holds the reins of both his own and his partner’s horse, allowing the partner to use his hands for the bow and bowstring. The early cavalry teams thus parallel exactly the charioteer and chariot archer. The cavalry archer was undoubtedly less accurate than his counterpart on a chariot (bouncing on a horse’s back was less conducive to a good shot than standing—knees bent—on the leather-strap platform of a chariot). But in other respects the cavalry teams were surely superior. They were able, first of all, to operate in terrain too rough for wheeled vehicles. And their chances for flight, when things went wrong, were much better: when a chariot horse was injured, both crewmen were in immediate danger, but if a cavalryman’s horse was killed or injured the cavalryman could immediately leap on the back of his partner’s horse and so ride out of harm’s way. Yet another advantage of cavalry over chariotry was economic, since the cost of purchasing and maintaining a vehicle was considerable. The Chronicler claims…that in the tenth century [B.C.E.] the chariot itself cost twice as much as the team that pulled it.

How early in the Iron Age kings began to use cavalries in place of or alongside chariotries cannot be determined, since there is so little documentary and pictorial evidence for the period 1150-900 [B.C.E.]. By the middle of the ninth century cavalries were obviously well established, since at the Battle of Qarqar Shalmaneser III faced many men on horseback (and some on the backs of camels) and since he himself claimed to have 2,002 chariots and 5,542 cavalrymen. For earlier centuries all we have are Hebrew traditions, and although they are hardly trustworthy it must be noted that they routinely associate cavalries with the kings of the period. Solomon was said to have maintained twelve thousand parashim; David was believed to have defeated enormous horse troops consisting of both chariots and cavalrymen; and Saul was reported to have been slain on Mt. Gilboa by Philistine parashim.

— Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age, pp. 164-65

After the conquest of northern China, the Mongols were issued silk shirts to wear under their clothing. Silk is tough and will generally follow an arrowhead into the wound without breaking. The silk can then be tugged gently from the wound, drawing out the arrowhead without enlarging the injury.

— Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe, Chapter 7, p. 121

Furthermore, as the silk did not break or tear, no foreign matter was left in the wound. This greatly reduced the chance of dying from infection.

The Meditations [by Marcus Aurelius] is customarily, and no doubt rightly, classified by librarians under the heading of “Philosophy” But this may give the reader a misleading impression, unless he understands the place which philosophy held in the ancient world. From what he knows of the writings of its twentieth-century [C.E.] exponents, he is unlikely to conclude that its chief aim and end is the attainment of personal virtue. This, he imagines, is the province of religion, not of philosophy. But in classical times things were different. Morality, the good life, man’s relations with the gods—all these were the domain of the philosopher, not the priest. Roman religion in the Imperial age had no concern with moral problems. Its business was simply the performance of such appropriate rites as would ensure the gods’ protection for the State, or avert the effects of their displeasure. It was a formal system of public ceremonies carried out by State officials, and provided no answers to the doubts and difficulties of human souls. Yet then, as now, men found themselves perplexed by the great questions that are the common concern of us all. What is the composition of this universe around us, and how did it come into being? Is it ordered by blind chance, or a wise Providence? If gods exist, do they interest themselves in mortal affairs? What is the nature of man, and his duty here, and his destiny hereafter? It was not the priests but the philosophers who claimed to supply the answers to such inquiries. Their answers, it is true, were not unanimous; there were rival systems of philosophy, and each proffered its own solution (as, for that matter, the different world-religions of our own day still do); But all were agreed that the sole right to pronounce with authority in the fields of metaphysics, theology, and ethics belonged to philosophy.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translator’s introduction

Emphasis mine.

To accomplish his mysterious purposes, a wizard would arm himself with an understanding of all the interwoven occult disciplines. But before he could put this knowledge into practice, he also required an arsenal of implements to enhance his powers and protect him in his dealings with spirits and demons. Robe and headdress, sword, dagger, and wand were the foremost tools of his trade. With these and the arcane knowledge enshrined in his library of manuscripts, charts, and books, the priest of the night could span the abyss between the seen and unseen worlds.

White, not the black of fairy tales, was the proper color for a wizard’s robe. Cornelius Agrippa, the German scholar whose celebrated Occult Philosophy became a textbook for 16th-century [C.E.] mages, said the wizard should dress in a gown of the finest linen, covering the whole body from head to foot, close-fitting and tied only with a girdle. Buckles and button would obstruct the free flow of supernatural energy. The headdress, whether tall or flat, pointed or round, should also be white, with YHVH, the Hebrew name of God, embroidered on the front. Both robe and headdress should be adorned with sacred emblems—stars, pentacles, and circles.

Once equipped with headdress and robe, the wizard’s most vital task was to forge a sword and dagger. This operation was best conducted when the moon was rising in the sphere of Jupiter, planet of good fortune and success. The mage would then burn incense of ambergris and peacocks’ feathers, saffron, aloe wood, cedar, and lapis lazuli—the scents associated with Jupiter—and chant in the name of God, heaven, and the stars to infuse his weapons with mystic strength.

Only then could the wizard prepare his wand, the most precious of all the magic implements. A slim wooden rod, some twenty inches long, the wand was ideally cut from a solitary bush that had never fruited. On the first night of the new moon, in the hour before dawn, the magician should dip his knife in blood. Facing the eastern horizon, he should cut the shoot with a single stroke of his dagger then peel its soft green bark in the first rays of the reborn sun. The three sacred instruments—sword, knife, and wand—should then be wrapped in a silken cloth until they were required.

Delicate though it seemed, the slender wand was by far the most formidable weapon in the sorcerer’s arsenal. With it he could summon spirits, cast spells, or wreak destruction; he could make objects disappear, or reveal to the naked eye things that were otherwise invisible. If he were a beneficient practitioner, he might use the wand to liberate the victims of dark forces from the curses laid upon them….

— Time-Life Books, The Secret Arts, pp. 114-16

In a world so shifting and uncertain, it is not surprising that great store was set on all things that were not clearly one thing or another. At the inbetween places—rivers and borders—and at all edges, verges, brinks, rims, fringes, and dividers, anything might happen, and chaos could be loosed upon the world. It made no difference whether these were borders of space or of time. Caves, the thresholds between open air and the solidity of earth, were often entrances to the world of spirits. Wells linked the visible world with subterranean realms and had an innate enchantment that might give awareness of the future or restore the dead to life. In the space dividing foam and water or bark and tree, devils could be confined by those who knew how. Dawn and dusk were magical times, for they divided the fundamental elements of existence: night from day, darkness from light, the period when evil was abroad from the time when it was banished to its secret sanctuaries.

— Time-Life Books, Wizards and Witches, p. 12

People often ask me if I believe in the Goddess. I reply, “Do you believe in rocks?” It is extremely difficult for most Westerners to grasp the concept of a manifest deity. The phrase “believe in” itself implies that we cannot know the Goddess, that She is somehow intangible, incomprehensible. But we do not believe in rocks—we may see them, touch them, dig them out of our gardens, or stop small children from throwing them at each other. We know them; we connect with them….

— Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, Chapter 5

Manifest deities are not just a staple in role-playing games; they are usually the default cosmology. Characters do not have belief or unbelief in deities, but rather trust or lack trust in them.

Other men [than Alexander the Great] were great battle leaders, but not necessarily great strategists; their victorious battles did not always determine the outcome of the war. Pyrrhus of Epirus, who approached Alexander in tactical ability, defeated the Romans in two battles, drew a third, and was driven from Italy. Hannibal crossed the Alps, invaded Italy, defeated the Romans in three massive battles in which the Romans may have lost as many as 100,000 men, and could not win the war. Hannibal has been criticized, in the ancient world and the modern, for not marching on Rome after the battle of Cannae, but his objective—to break apart the Roman "confederation" and reduce Rome in status—was unattainable because it was based on a misunderstanding of the Italian situation. Hannibal could not win without destroying Rome, and he did not have the resources, nor could he acquire the resources, to accomplish that objective; thus his campaign, though spectacular, was futile—no offensive, no matter how brilliant, can overcome an ill-conceived objective. Similarly Li Kuang led more than seventy successful campaigns against the Huns, and yet upon his death China was hardly more secure from the Huns than it had been before him.

Objective is the first principle of war and rightly so. Hannibal’s objective was misconceived and unattainable, whereas the objective as conceived by Alexander was so brilliant, so logical, and so simple that it has received too little attention from modern historians; he did not just define his objective as the Persian king nor state his objective in the most simple terms—Alexander would meet Darius in battle, kill him, and thus become king in his stead—but he defined the war for the enemy as well—the Persians were fighting to protect the right of their king to rule; they were not fighting for their independence or to avoid subjugation or to preserve their personal power. They were not the enemy of Alexander. When they accepted him as their king, they became his subjects no less than the Macedonians were his subjects. Alexander’s defined objective echoes the spirit of Sun-Tzu‘s precept never to corner your enemy and drive him to desperation.

Societies—be they a radical democracy or the monarchy of a god-king—lose wars when they have no clear objectives or their objectives are beyond their resources. Stated so baldly, it might seem that no society would ever enter a war without a clear understanding of what it wanted and how it meant to gain what it wanted, but many did. The Athenian democracy, for one, fought—and lost—just such a war against the Spartans. By contrast, the early republic of Rome fought always for a defined objective. Neither success nor failure diverted the Romans from their stated objective, and so the enemies of Rome who, at the beginning of a war rejected Roman terms, by the end considered them generous. Moreover, the Romans saw objectives beyond the immediate war (as did Alexander)—the enemies of the moment would be the allies, associates, and citizens of the future….

— Alfred S. Bradford, With Arrow, Sword, and Spear, pp. 274-75

Emphasis mine.

Alexander [the Great] was a military genius. No other ancient commander was so quick to understand and defeat his enemies’ plans, so quick to analyze a problem and grasp the solution—and, not coincidentally, no other ancient commander was as well educated as Alexander, by the greatest soldier and diplomat of his age, [King] Philip [of Macedon], and by the greatest philosopher, humanist, and scientist of any age, Aristotle. In every aspect of warfare Alexander outthought and outfought his enemies. He enunciated his military objective in the simplest and most forceful terms: he would meet Darius on the battlefield, fight him, and kill him. He forced Darius to react to him, and although Darius and the Persians chose where to fight, Alexander seized the initiative by doing the unexpected—by attacking in the evening instead of the morning at the Granicus or by maneuvering off the prepared battlefield at Gaugamela. He brought together a large enough force to defeat the Persians but kept it small enough to be supplied and to be mobile. As bold as he was in the attack, just so cautious was he in securing his troops against attack. He was the complete commander.

— Alfred S. Bradford, With Arrow, Sword, and Spear, pp. 273-74

Emphasis mine.

Assyria paid a heavy and increasing price for its warlike ways. Although military expeditions were still undertaken for strategic reasons, after 800 [B.C.E.] they began to resemble gangsters collecting protection money. At times, through lax management, they even seemed to encourage revolt, enabling them to squeeze the perpetrators all the harder—Metenna of Tyre was forced to pay Tiglath-Pileser III 150 talents of gold, while Sargon II relieved the city of Musasir of in excess of five tons of silver and more than a ton of gold. Unquestionably Assyria’s lords of extortion profited handsomely; but the evidence also indicates that most of the take was consumed by the army and relentless combat—180 of the 250 years between 890 and 640 [B.C.E.] were devoted to war. Combined arms proved prodigally expensive—plainly exceeding the resources of an economy ultimately based on near-subsistence farming. So the army had to keep on fighting and sacking, and in the process war became an end in itself.

— Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, p. 78

Emphasis mine.

I have previously posted on Hunting as War Training. Both this and that excerpt reference the medieval European experience, but the concept is not exclusive to that period.

Hunting in all its forms was strongly recommended by chivalric writers as the perfect preparation for military life. The typical argument was put forward in the first half of the fourteenth century [C.E.] by [King] Alfonso XI, who found time between ruling his kingdom of Castile and fighting the Moors to write a book about the sport.

For a knight should always engage in anything to do with arms and chivalry, and if he cannot do so in war, he should do so in activities which resemble war. And the chase is most similar to war, for these reasons: war demands expense, met without complaint; one must be well horsed and well armed; one must be vigorous, and do without sleep, suffer lack of good food and drink, rise early, sometimes have a poor bed, undergo cold and heat, and conceal one’s fear.

Different types of hunting required different skills, all relevant to warfare, including knowledge of the quarry’s habits, handling a pack of hounds, complete control of an often-frightened horse and the use of various weapons, including spears and swords to perform the kill.

— Juliet Barker, Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England, Chapter 2

In the fifteenth century [C.E.], [the English] one pound sterling (£1) was divided not just into twenty shillings (20s), or two hundred and forty pence (240d), but also into six parts: one sixth (3s 4d) was known as a crown, a third (6s 8d) as a noble and two thirds (13s 4d) as a mark. To give the reader a rough idea of the current values of these sums, I have used figures supplied by the Office for National Statistics, which equate £1 in 1415 with £414 ($666.54) in 1999.

— Juliet Barker, Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England, p. xv

Each member of the Greek phalanx brought his own weapons and armor, an expensive and weighty proposition made largely of rust-free and easy-to-cast bronze—a quarter-inch-thick breastplate and helmet (thirty and twenty pounds respectively), greaves to protect the lower leg (three pounds apiece), a round wooden shield three feet in diameter (twenty pounds), an eight-foot thrusting spear, and a short secondary sword—a total of about seventy-five pounds, far more burdensome than the Sumerian equivalent. This was heavy infantry with a vengeance, so heavy that the most common cause of death in battle was getting knocked down and trampled. The very weight and imperviousness of this armor conditioned the whole nature of Greek phalanx warfare, slowing it down to a crawl and insuring that victory would come not through tricky maneuvers but sheer stubborn pushing.

— Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, p. 36

Emphasis mine.

Assyria was unstrategically located. Between it and Akkad to the south was a plain where no invader could possibly be stopped except by stronger forces. The precipitous Zagros range to the east and the formidable Armenian plateau to the north, both sloping towards Assyria, made attack from those dimensions easy but defense difficult. The western steppe was no effective barrier either, for it was easy for a foe to traverse as for Assyrians. In its early history, and intermittently afterwards, Assyria was therefore ruled by foreign invaders.

There was only one means to overcome these geographical handicaps: a strong army. Assyria therefore proceeded to build up the most powerful military machine the world had yet seen, and to use it not only for defense but for expansion abroad. But unlike the Roman legions, which were formidable even when led by mediocrities, the Assyrian army depended for victory on brilliant generals, so that Assyrian power depended on the prowess of the king.

— Vincent Scramuzza, The Ancient World, p. 89-90

Emphasis mine.

As it was for other contemporary armies of the region, the bow was at the center of the Assyrian arsenal. But theirs was a carefully crafted composite weapon of extraordinary power, ends characteristically curled forward to resemble the bill of a duck. These bows were primarily in the hands of foot archers, either deployed as skirmishers or in massed formations. But the Assyrians departed from their rivals in their protection and the care which was taken to integrate them with other functions. After the reign of Ashurnasir-pal (885-860 [B.C.E.]), ranks of archers were depicted as not only screened by shield bearers and heavily armed spearmen, but themselves dressed in long coats of mail and conical helmets. Such measures consumed metal on a grand scale, especially iron, which the Assyrians pioneered using in quantity. Yet ironcladding achieved an important result—sufficient stability in these formations to exploit other tactical possibilities.

— Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, p. 77

Emphasis mine.

That the Romans clearly understood the source of their strength is readily understood from one of the introductory sentences of Vegetius: “We see that the Roman people have conquered the world by nothing other than drill in arms, camp discipline, and experience in campaigning.” The Gauls surpassed them in numbers, the Germans in height, the Spaniards in strength, the Carthaginians in craftiness and resources, the Greeks in the sharpness of their wits, yet the Romans were able to beat them all because of the thorough and rigorous training they gave their recruits, their meticulous attention to the smallest details, and the business-like manner in which they provided materials of war. Results that the Greeks achieved by inspiration, the Romans gained by labored effort. They made war as much a business as an art.

— Eugene S. McCartney, Warfare by Land and Sea, p. 93

Emphasis mine.

Among the reforms of the army begun before the [French] Revolution was the development of the corps d’armée. Napoleon saw the value of this reform, adopting and developing it into what has been called his secret weapon. The Napoleonic army corps was a well-balanced unit comprising all arms: infantry, cavalry and artillery, with attached engineers, auxiliary trains and a headquarters staff. The corps was in effect an army in miniature, although its size, anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000 men, could rival that of many 18th-century armies. The corps would be made up of a number of infantry and cavalry divisions, each of two or more brigades with attached artillery. As Napoleon’s corps structured army went into battle against a traditionally organized enemy force, each of his corps, being a complete fighting force, could go into action without delay as soon as it arrived on the field. When [Marshal Louis-Nicolas] Davout, one of the pre-eminent corps commander of the period, brought his men by an epic forced march directly into the fray at Austerlitz, he undoubtedly stopped the great Russian envelopment of the French right which would have threatened to cut across Napoleon’s line of communication and make his position untenable. The size of a corps could vary and would depend on several factors, such as its particular task and the ability of its commanding general. To his step-son, Eugéne de Beauharnais, Napoleon in 1809 commented, ‘…a corps of 25,000-30,000 men can be left on its own. Well handled it can fight or alternatively avoid action…an opponent cannot force it to accept an engagement, but if it chooses to do so it can fight alone for a long time.‘

— David Hamilton-Williams, Waterloo: New Perspectives, p. 115

Emphasis mine.

Certainly the oldest military title that survives in most modern armies is that of captain, from the Latin caput, "head," and thus the head man. It is notable that in the German army the word for captain is hauptmann, which means precisely "head man." Almost all modern military titles are drawn from the period when feudalism was dying and when the power of central governments was crystallizing, forming in the process royal or regular armies for the service of the state.

At that time, the title of captain was usually given to the commander of a company, which was the largest and about the only recognized subdivision of these new armies and usually numbered 300 or 400 men, or about as many as could be controlled by one leader on the battlefields of that time. The title itself, however, was of feudal origin. In feudal times, it had been customary for each lord to retain a certain number of armed men to guard his castle; these gradually came to be commanded by a captain, who was not usually a knight or of noble blood but a hired mercenary, trained and experienced in war, who, in most cases, had fought his way up from the ranks. His men, the only trained soldiers of the feudal period, were used to drill the raw levies that were mustered whenever the lord’s suzerain called on him to take the field with his allotted quota of men for war. The complete quota was almost never kept under arms in time of peace. The trained soldiers were known as the lord’s servants, or serventes, which, in military parlance, became corrupted into sergentes, or sergeants. Thus, a feudal levy had not only a group of knights and squires at its head but a captain and several sergeants over a body of more or less raw recruits. The richer the lord, the larger the proportion of trained men at his disposal.

When the royal armies began to appear, the captain became a much more important person. He commanded a company of royal troops instead of the scratch castle guard of a baron or an earl. The jobs were better paid, and consequently were sought after by young men seeking both money and a chance for distinction. Sergeants were also a part of these troops and did much the same work that sergeants have done ever since. As the centralization of power in the king’s person grew, the new and noble captains found that their personal interests required them to spend more time at court and less in the field, and to accomplish this, they hired officers to take their place in the actual command of their companies. These were called placeholders, or, in the term derived from the French, lieutenants.

As the armies grew in size, the number of companies became greater and it was usual to find several companies marching together in column on the same road. The senior officer present commanded the whole column, called colonne in French, and from this source he came to be known as the colonel, or column commander. Later, these columns became permanent regiments, and the same thing happened as with companies; the colonels, to retain their lucrative jobs, frequented the court and secured the services of lieutenant colonels to command their regiments on active service.

Finally, the command of the whole army was given to an officer who originally was called the general captain, or captain general, in distinction to the company captain, who commanded just one company. He, too, had to have a lieutenant general to command for him, or at any rate to assist him, and to this end, the "captain" part of this title was dropped, and officers included generals and lieutenant generals, as well as colonels and lieutenant colonels and captains and lieutenants. At the lowest command level were the usual sergeants. This is the framework of the modern military order, although there have been some later additions, notably the ranks of major general and major.

In the time of Oliver Cromwell, the "new model" army was organized with just about the ranks noted above. In each regiment, however, the need was found for an administrative and supply officer to look after the accounts and the paper work, which Cromwell insisted be carefully kept. Cromwell was doubtless influenced by the example of the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632 [C.E.]), in whose army many English officers had served out of sympathy for the Protestant cause. Gustavus Adolphus provided his army with a complete administrative organization, which Cromwell adapted to English requirements. In each company a sergeant was appointed to perform the duties of both administration and supply, but at the regimental level an officer was so detailed, and was called the great sergeant, or sergeant major. He took rank next after the lieutenant colonel, being senior to all the captains. Then a corresponding appointment was made for the whole army, as the sergeant-major-general, but the "sergeant" part of both titles was dropped later because the officers concerned doubtless considered it somewhat belittling, and the designations became major and major general. These titles have persisted in the British and American armies to this day. This series of transitions explains, incidentally, why the modern major general ranks one grade below a lieutenant general, while a major is two grades higher than a lieutenant. The grade of sergeant major, in its actual meaning, was later revived for a senior sergeant, a noncommissioned officer.

The title of field marshal, as applied in the British and German armies, or marshal, in the French and [Russian] armies, comes from the old French mareschal, which originally meant a blacksmith or tarrier. In the French army a farrier still has the title of maréchal ferrant. As time went on, the king’s horseshoer, or farrier, rose in importance until the title became equivalent to "master of the horse" at the French court and gradually assumed great military importance. Later, in the French royal armies of the 18th century [C.E.], the need was felt for a rank of subordinate general officers, as in Cromwell’s army, to take charge of the camp, administration, the divisions of the army, and so forth. By that time, the original importance of the title had been lost, but it was revived as maréchal de camp, which was about the equivalent of the major general of the British Army in status, ranking below the lieutenant general but senior to all colonels. This title disappeared under Napoleon, who, however, created the higher title of marshal of the empire, for a senior general officer ranking all generals and serving generally as the commander of an army or an army corps. In the British Army, the title of field marshal as the highest ranking grade was first known in 1736.

The origin of the title or corporal is somewhat obscure. The word seems to have an Italian source, corporale, from the Latin corpo, meaning body, and hence the person in charge of a small body of troops. It appeared in Cromwell’s time in the British cavalry, who, feeling superior to the infantry, wanted a title of their own for noncommissioned officers; they called them corporals instead of sergeants, and, in the British household cavalry regiments, the sergeants are still officially called corporals of horse. Later the title was used to fill the need for an inferior grade of noncommissioned officer….

The ranks of first and second lieutenant developed as companies grew in size and weapons in range and power, so that a company needed three officers instead of two for proper control. Originally, the third officer of an infantry company was called ensign, because part of his duty was to carry the company flag; for the same reason the third officer of a troop of cavalry was the cornet, because he carried a little pennon known then by that name. Later, the flags were laid aside, and these junior officers became known as second lieutenants.

The British titles of lance corporal and lance sergeant, which mean "acting corporal" and "acting sergeant," were derived from the old lance-pesade, a term used during the 17th century [C.E.] for a full-trained soldier of a grade superior to the common men, or private men, as they came to be called.

— [undocumented encyclopedia entry]

Emphasis mine.

Although the origin and significance of sacrifice has long been a matter of debate, the essential element in the institution clearly is centred in the offering of a sacred victim for the purpose of establishing beneficial relations between a source of spiritual strength and those in need of such strength. This relationship may be one of communion, when strength is imparted to man or to a deity and a bond of union is effected with the beneficent powers who either participate in a communal meal, or become the actual sacrifice by a process of identification. Conversely, it may be one whereby a human weakness, error or transgression is held to be "covered", "wiped out", neutralized or carried away by a piacular offering. From these primary considerations secondary motives have arisen, such as the notion of securing the favour of an offended god by offerings which are in the nature of fines rather than of efficacious oblations, made either in kind or money, as in the later Hebrew ritual. Honorific free-will or thank-offerings also have been made in grateful recognition of the mercies and blessings received. Thus, the first-fruits of the crops and the firstlings of man and beast, and many other gift sacrifices, have been conceived more in the nature of honoraria, sometimes not far removed from bribes, on the utilitarian do-ut-des principle—"I give that thou mayest give".

The fundamental conception of the institution of sacrifice seems to have been the giving of life to promote and preserve life, and to maintain a vital relationship between the worshipper and the object of worship in order to gain free communication between the natural and the transcendent orders. When [Edward] B. Tylor enunciated his "gift theory" of the origin of sacrifice in terms of offerings to secure the favour or minimize the hostility of supernatural beings he forgot that the word dare, employed in Ovid’s maxim, do-ut-des, contains the implication of placing oneself in relation to, and participating in, a second person by an instrumental agent which is part of oneself. As [Gerardus] van der Leeuw has pointed out, "to give is to convey something of oneself to the strange being, so that a firm bond may be forged." Thus, a victim is first consecrated to the service of the altar and so identified with both the offerers and the recipient of the oblation. It is then killed in order that its life-giving blood may be poured out sacrificially to establish a "blood covenant" between them. The gift is the inherent vital principle and the ritual shedding of blood is the giving rather than the taking of life, death being merely incidental in the process of liberation….

— E. O. James, The Nature and Function of Priesthood, pp. 145-46

Emphasis mine.

For centuries, the bow and arrow was "the chief weapon of the fighting man in Japan". Even after the introduction of firearms and the extended period of enforced peace under the Tokugawa [Shogunate] had greatly reduced its strategic relevance, archery was still considered a noble art. Known generally as shagei (accomplishment in archery) or, more specifically, as kyujutsu (the art, or technique, of the bow), it was a fully developed art with a complex system of practices and techniques, an initially wide variety of styles which slowly merged into a few major ones, and a deep theory linking the art to the very birth of the Japanese nation. Inspired as it was by the mystical, esoteric dimension of that culture, it is not surprising to learn that, in the twelfth century [C.E.]…"people in high positions were delighted when their ability as archery was acclaimed but made every endeavor to have their prowess with the sword hushed up."

— Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai, p. 226

Emphasis mine.

Armies that were fed from an agricultural surplus and limited in range of maneuver by their pace and endurance on foot simply could not undertake free-ranging campaigns of conquest. Nor did they need to; enemies similarly constrained could threaten them with defeat in battle but not by Blitzkrieg. The horse people were different. Attila had shown an ability to shift his strategic center of effort between fronts 500 miles or more apart. No such strategic maneuver had been attempted or had been possible before. Freedom of action on this scale lay at the heart of the ‘cavalry revolution.’

The horse people fought unconstrained in another sense. They did not seek to inherit or adapt to the half-understood civilizations they invaded. Nor did they seek to supplant others’ political authority with their own. They were warriors for war’s sake, for the loot it brought, the risks, the thrills, the animal satisfactions of triumph; all the spoils with strings.

— John Keegan, A History of Warfare, p. 188

Emphasis mine.

The considerable military literature of the Warring States Period [of ancient China] also illustrates greater professionalism in command as armies grew, employed more complex tactics, and required great skill of their leaders. Control of an army with drums, bells, and banners, rather than fighting in the first rank, became the true mark of a general. When offered a sword by his officers just before a battle, General Wu Ch’i refused it, explaining, “The general takes sole control of the flags and drums, and that is all. Approaching hardship he decides what is doubtful, controls the troops, and directs their blades. Such is the work of the general. Bearing a single sword, that is not a general’s affair….”

— John A. Lynn, Battle, pp. 39-40

Emphasis mine.

During the period of anarchy in the public affairs of al-Andalus between 1008 and 1031 [C.E.], as the centre failed to hold, Spain’s centrifugal, fissile tendencies were able to develop unchecked. The poet al-Shaqundi, looking back at this process from the early thirteenth century [C.E.], wrote of “the breaking of the necklace and the scattering of its pearls.” The frail unity of al-Andalus disintegrated into a number of regional successor-states known to historians as the taifa kingdoms—the name is derived from the Arabic word ta’ifa, which means “faction” or “party”. The ruler of one of these states, ‘Abd Allah of Granada, has left us a description in his remarkable book of memoirs of what happened:

When the Amirid dynasty [i.e. Almanzor's] came to an end and the people were left without an imam [the use of this word recalls the divine sanction claimed by the Umayyad caliphs] every military commander rose up in his own town and entrenched himself behind the walls of his own fortress, having first secured his own position, created his own army, and amassed his own resources. These persons vied with one another for worldly power, and each sought to subdue the other.

Each taifa kingdom was typically based on a town which had previously been the capital of a province or march, such as Seville or Zaragoza, where there already existed a machinery of local administration and a degree of regional solidarity which an opportunist could exploit; Initially, in the period of maximum confusion down to about 1040 [C.E.] or so, there existed some three dozen of these petty principalities. But the big fish swallowed the little ones, and by the mid-century half-a-dozen larger states stood out as pre-eminent: Seville and Granada in the south, Badajoz to the west, Toledo in the centre, Valencia on the east coast, and Zaragoza in the northeast. We are presented with a political scene in mid-eleventh century Spain, the age of [El] Cid‘s boyhood and youth, in some ways reminiscent of pre-Alexandrian Greece or Renaissance Italy or the Germany of the Enlightenment: diverse principalities in a state of constant rivalry with one another.

— Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, pp. 27-28

Emphasis mine.

Magicians are concerned with forces of Nature, even if they are peculiar, generally unrecognized, or even, to a sceptic’s eye, non-existant forces…. The feats claimed by or attributed to magicians…may be “supernatural” in that they seem to break natural laws, as these laws are understood at any given time. But either the feats are unreal and impossible or, if real, they are within the order of Nature as all reality must be.

But a magician is not a scientist or psychical researcher who has gone off along an odd track. He does theorize about his secret forces but he is much more interested in employing them. Magic is concerned above all else with the acquisition and exercise of power.

— Richard Cavendish (editor-in-chief), Man, Myth, and Magic, pp. 1682-83

Emphasis mine.

The Iliad is not just a glorious poem—it is a textbook, and was taken as such throughout the history of the ancient world. How should you defend a gate? Like Telamonian Ajax. How should you follow up an attack? Like Hector, “flame-like,” when he drove the Danaans back on their ships. How should you handle your most powerful weapon? Not, presumably, as Agamemnon handled Achilles.

— Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Chances Are…, pp. 239-40

Reality mapping allows individuals, organizations, and nations to use belief systems to chart a path through the universe. A reality map is a set of conceptual boundaries that determine the limits of expectations, what is—and is not—possible in a particular belief system.

Around 1300 [B.C.E.], a Hittite king used his reality map and the excuse of a timely eclipse to declare a politically meddlesome queen guilty of witchcraft and have her executed, in accordance with the belief system of his people. Homeric Greeks never sailed out of sight of land in their long ships. They hugged the coast, because their reality maps told them that any seagoing ship would be lost and their belief systems peopled the sea with deadly sirens, monsters, and gods. In the time of Alexander the Great, when his archrival, the Persian king Darius, wanted to cross a river with his army, the entire army stopped while the king threw hot manacles into the river and disciplined it according to the reality map of the day. If the river gods where not beaten and shamed into submission, said the belief system of the Persian army, any attempted crossing would end in disaster.

The wrong reality map can kill you, because your reality map sets your expectations. The right reality map can free you, vindicate you, or make you a hero. For individuals, nations, and cultures, all empowered by belief systems, reality maps are often the place where history is made and fates decided. The reality map of a nation defines its character and charts its destiny. Your reality map comprises the boundary conditions of your personal universe. It defines for you what is possible and impossible. It is the reference system you use to determine whether a phenomenon is real or unreal—or whether an event is an act of God, a trick of fate, or a simple coincidence.

— John B. Alexander, Richard Groller, and Janet Morris, The Warrior’s Edge, p. 103-105

Emphasis mine.

In Book I of Thucydides’ history Pericles outlines the limitations of the Peloponnesian adversaries. They had no capital. Unlike the Spartiates, most of the allies in the Peloponnesian coalition were agrarians who needed to farm at precisely the time it was best to fight. In contrast, Athens was a sophisticated polis with vast sums of coinage in both circulation and as specie on reserve. Pericles’ adversary, King Archidamus of Sparta, agreed, and so warned his rural Peloponnesians that they were not equipped to fight a long, multifaceted war with even a seasonal militia. This new conflict, he warned, was quite different: “War is not so much a matter of men as of monetary expense.” He proved absolutely right.

The great irony of the war was that the very requisites for victory—an enormous fleet, money for rowers’ pay, and officers deployed overseas for long periods of imperial service—were inimical to the historic assumptions of rural and isolated Sparta, which heretofore had had no monetary economy. Persia finally filled the void, gave Spartan generals untold amounts of gold, and made up losses in men and materiel almost immediately. As long as Greeks were killing Greeks, the satraps of the Persian Empire were happy to subsidize the carnage.

Yet in the war’s aftermath, with the Persian subsidies gone, the implosion of the Spartan empire was directly attributable to its new financial responsibilities of administering a fleet and distant subject states that were so at odds with its old insular moral code. Money and manpower, not always just courage and class, quite literally won wars. The Peloponnesian War offered another bitter lesson, one that would also arise during the transition of Rome from republic to empire. Consensual government started in Greece as a limited enterprise. These constitutional states were predicated on a civic militia cloaked in amateurism and localism, and determined to protect the property of a minority of its citizens. But as the invective of Athenian conservatives from Plato to Aristotle illustrated, war over decades and across thousands of miles required mobilization, weaponry, and capital—and only the new resources of a more centralized and powerful state could meet those vast burdens.

— Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other, pp. 303-304

Emphasis mine.

Protected by plate armor and the pride of chivalry, the noble felt himself invulnerable and invincible and became increasingly contemptuous of the foot soldier. He believed that commoners, being excluded from chivalry, could never be relied upon in war. As grooms, baggage attendants, foragers, and road-builders—the equivalent of engineer corps—they were necessary, but as soldiers in leather jerkins armed with pikes and billhooks, they were considered an encumbrance who in a sharp fight would “melt away like snow in sunshine.” This was not simple snobbism but a reflection of experience in the absence of training. The Middle Ages had no equivalent of the Roman legion. Towns maintained trained bands of municipal police, but they tended to fill up their contingents for national defense with riff-raff good for nothing else. Abbeys had better use for their peasants than to employ their time in military drill. In any epoch the difference between a rabble and an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.

— Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, p. 89

Emphasis mine.

It is common to assume that battles involving masses of men engaged in close combat were horrifically bloody; in fact, they were rarely so, at least as long as the units remained engaged. When the infantry was arrayed in close phalanx formation, only the first two ranks could actively engage in any fighting, and then not for very long. It has been estimated that the lines of the phalanx could remain engaged in actual combat for less than thirty minutes before exhaustion began to take its toll. Men in the front ranks would be quite fortunate to remain in contact for half that time before being overcome by exhaustion. Moreover, until the introduction of the Marian reforms in the Roman army (100 [B.C.E.]), no army had learned the technique of having its front ranks break contact, withdraw in good order through the other ranks, and be replaced with a fresh line of infantry. For the most part, stamina governed the tempo of the battle….

As long as the men within the phalanx held their ground and remained together, it was difficult for any significant killing to occur. Even the cavalry could not be decisive against infantry formations that held their ground. Cavalry charges were inherently unstable to begin with due to the absence of the stirrup, and horses would not throw themselves against a packed wall of humanity, especially if the spears of the formation were raised against them. Yet, in every army there is a mob waiting to escape, and its motivation is fear. The real killer on the ancient battlefield was fear. Men in combat have their instinctive flight or fight responses held in delicate balance by the thin string of intellect. Continued stress increases the probability that someone within the ranks will lose his nerve and run. Sometimes the actions of a single soldier are sufficient to forge the onset of panic in an entire unit. Once the integrity of the formation began to erode, the ancient soldier was at very great risk of death or injury.

— Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, From Sumer To Rome, pp. 83-84

Emphasis mine.

The Sumerians and Babylonians invented an elaborate demonology. They believed that the world was full of spirits and that most of them were hostile. Each person had a tutelary spirit to protect him from demonic enemies. Against such enemies every kind of magic was needed, including amulets, incantations, and exorcisms, but especially the protection of the tutelary deity, for “the man who hath not a god as he walketh in the street the demon covers him as a garment.”

The worldview of ancient Egypt was less terrifying. Gods and spirits were all part of the one living cosmos and no distinction was made between natural and supernatural. The sorcerer used his wisdom and knowledge of amulets, spells, formulae, and figures to bend the cosmic powers to his purpose or that of his clients. As all spirits were part of the cosmic whole, none was evil, but the sorcerer could turn spiritual powers in ways that could harm his adversaries as well as benefitting himself.

— Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft, p. 29

Emphasis mine.

It is in the nature of honour that it must be exclusive, or at least hierarchic. When everyone attains equal honour, then there is no honour for anyone. Of necessity, therefore, the world of Odysseus was fiercely competitive, as each hero strove to outdo the others. And because the heroes were warriors, competition was fiercest where the highest honour was to be won, in individual combat on the field of battle. There a hero’s ultimate worth, the meaning of his life, received its final test in three parts: whom he fought, how he fought, and how he fared…. The Iliad in particular is saturated in blood, a fact which cannot be hidden or argued away, twist the evidence as one may in a vain attempt to fit archaic Greek values to a more gentle code of ethics. The poet and his audience lingered lovingly over every act of slaughter: “Hippolochus darted away, and him too [Agamemnon] smote to the ground; slicing off his hands with the sword and cutting off his neck, he sent him rolling like a round log through the battle-throng.”

…But what must be stressed about Homeric cruelty is its heroic quality, not its specifically Greek character. In the final analysis, how can prepotence be determined except by repeated demonstrations of success? And the one indisputable measure of success is a trophy. While a battle is raging only the poet can observe Agamemnon’s feat of converting Hippolochus into a rolling log. The other heroes are too busy pursuing glory for themselves. But a trophy is lasting evidence, to be displayed at all appropriate occasions. Among more primitive peoples the victim’s head served that honorific purpose; in Homer’s Greece armour replaced heads. That is why time after time, even at great personal peril, the heroes paused from their fighting in order to strip a slain opponent of his armour. In terms of the battle itself such a procedure was worse than absurd, it might jeopardize the whole expedition. It is a mistake in our judgement, however, to see the end of the battle as the goal, for victory without honour was unacceptable; there could be no honour without public proclamation, and there could be no publicity without the evidence of a trophy.

— M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, pp. 118-19

Emphasis mine.

Theories of demons predating divinities aside, most modern thinking on the origin of God tends to stick to the evidence of cave paintings and early burial rituals. These had generated a pantheon of vague hypotheses of creation myths and divine forms, but no one was really sure which had come first, gods, souls, or the afterlife. The basic belief was that religion had assumed a complex form including all these elements by the fifth or sixth millennium [B.C.E.].

[Julian] Jaynes disagreed with all of that, and, really, [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind] set out to explain more than just the birth of God. His main proposition came as a shock. Early man, he argued, exhibited a kind of split-mindedness, the hemispheres of the brain unevolved and operating independently. In short, everyone before roughly 3000 [B.C.E.] was operationally schizophrenic, effectively unconscious, ruled over by hallucinatory inner voices. This was the bicameral mind….

It’s an exaggeration to say that Jaynes likened his bicameral mind strictly to schizophrenia. Rather, he described an earlier physiology of the brain that was more susceptible to the kind of auditory hallucinations known to occur in healthy people exposed to stresses…. And hallucinations were where Jaynes’s god came into the picture. Split into distinct sections, the bicameral mind, in moments of stress or need, essentially consulted itself, perceiving hallucinations that took the form of self-commands. Men understood this as gods. The mind was split between an executive-god portion and a lower, more common portion that was just the man…. [B]rain cartography had discovered physiological linkages between that part of the brain responsible for language and that part tied to hallucinations. “Here then,” Jaynes wrote, “is the tiny bridge across which came the directions which built our civilizations and founded the world’s religions.”

Jaynes turned literary critic to show that the bicameral mind had been possible five thousand years ago. The theory made easy work of the characters of the Iliad and the Gilgamesh legend. The old epics’ action-packed plots were just what one would expect from a bicameral people. The texts lacked words for conscious thought, and characters openly consulted gods. Gods, then, were man’s volition. Deaths triggered hallucinations; the dead were often called gods. Jaynes’s first god was a dead king whose voice echoed in those who remembered him. This explained the primitive practice of burying the dead with food and provisions—dead kings particularly so.

The breakdown of the bicameral mind—the emergence of consciousness—took a thousand years and had multiple causes…. A 1230 [B.C.E.] Assyrian carving depicting a living king kneeling before an empty throne was the first evidence of the departure of the gods. “The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time,” Jaynes wrote. The gods receded into the sky, and prayer and worship emerged as men tried to communicate with a force that seemed to have forsaken them. Consciousness evolved to contend with growth that felt like abandonment. The character and plot of the Odyssey—strikingly different from the Iliad—revealed the subterfuges available to minds bursting into conscious awareness. “The whole long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity,” Jaynes wrote….

— J. C. Hallman, The Devil Is a Gentleman, pp. 150-153

Emphasis mine.

Nothing epitomized the outlook and performance of the [nineteenth-century C.E.] German General Staff, and of the German Army which it coordinated, more than this concept of mission tactics: the responsibility of each German officer and noncommissioned officer—and even Moltke‘s ‘youngest soldier’—to do without question or doubt whatever the situation required, as he saw it. This meant that he should act without awaiting orders, if action seemed necessary. It also meant that he should act contrary to orders, if these did not seem to be consistent with the situation.

To make perfectly clear that action contrary to orders was not considered either as disobedience or lack of discipline, German commanders began to repeat one of Moltke’s favorite stories, of an incident observed while visiting the headquarters of Prince Frederick Charles. A major, receiving a tongue-lashing from the Prince for a tactical blunder, offered the excuse that he had been obeying orders, and reminded the Prince that a Prussian officer was taught that an order from a superior was tantamount to an order from the King. Frederick Charles promptly responded: “His Majesty made you a major because he believed you would know when not to obey his orders.” This simple story became guidance for all following generations of German officers.

— Trevor N. Dupuy, A Genius For War, p. 116

Emphasis mine.

Chivalry’s finest military expression in contemporary eyes was the famous Combat of the Thirty in 1351 [C.E.]. An action of the perennial conflict in Brittany [part of the Hundred Years War], it began with a challenge to single combat issued by Robert de Beaumanoir, a noble Breton on the French side, to his opponent Bramborough of the Anglo-Breton party. When their partisans clamored to join, a combat of thirty on each side was agreed upon. Terms were arranged, the site was chosen, and after participants heard mass and exchanged courtesies, the fight commenced. With swords, bear-spears, daggers, and axes, they fought savagely until four on the French side and two on the English were slain and a recess was called. Bleeding and exhausted, Beaumanoir called for a drink, eliciting the era’s most memorable reply: “Drink thy blood, Beaumanoir, and thy thirst will pass!” Resuming, the combatants fought until the French side prevailed and every one of the survivors on either side was wounded. Bramborough and eight of his party were killed, the rest taken prisoner and held for ransom. In the wide discussion the affair aroused, ‘some held it as a very poor thing and others as a very swaggering business,’ with the admirers dominating. The combat was celebrated in verse, painting, tapestry, and in a memorial stone erected on the site. More than twenty years later Froissart noticed a scarred survivor at the table of Charles V, where he was honored above all others. He told the ever-inquiring chronicler that he owed his great favor with the King to his having been one of the Thirty. The renown and honor the fight earned reflected the knight’s nostalgic vision of what battle should be. While he practiced the warfare of havoc and pillage, he clung to the image of himself as Sir Lancelot.

— Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, pp. 137-38

Emphasis mine.

The old original war sword was so massive it sometimes required both hands. It had been designed—and worked splendidly if you were strong enough—for knocking an armored knight off his horse, but it was useless at close quarters except as a bludgeon. The duel of honor refined it.

From the mid-sixteenth century [C.E.] through the seventeenth, the rapier was the blade of choice. It was sharp-edged but used primarily for thrusting, not cutting, and it was a formidable piece, often nearly four feet long, topped by an elaborate hand guard, and weighed two and a half pounds. Wearing it advertised how tall as well as how brave you were: Four feet of steel hanging from your waist, and you swaggering around with it, made a statement.

Elizabethan London passed an ordinance against strolling the streets with more than a three-foot blade; if you came into the city with something longer, the gatekeepers were under orders to break off the extra inches. Even so, that’s a lot of blade, and it was often used in combination with a dagger for close work.

In 1599 [C.E.], a gentleman named George Silver published an attack on this newfangled monster, developed, he says, as a purely civilian weapon with no distinguished military history. It was, in effect, a costume accessory, ineffective for serious fighting. Once your opponent is past your point, he complained, it is too difficult to clear your weapon and bring the point to bear again; the length of the blade drags in the hand, and it tends to favor the thrust, which can be turned aside easily, over the cut that takes manly strength to avoid.

Not everyone agreed. Long after the rapier had evolved into lighter, shorter versions, some still swore by it. Late in the nineteenth century, Captain Sir Richard Burton, in The Sentiment of the Sword, wrote of it with passion:

Amongst all weapons the rapier alone has its inner meanings, its arcana, its mysteries. See how it interprets a man’s ideas. and obeys every turn of his thoughts! At once the blade that threatens and the shield that guards, it is now agile, supple, and intelligent; then slow, sturdy, and persevering; here, light and airy, prudent and supple; there, blind and unreflecting, angry and vindictive; I am almost tempted to call it, after sailor fashion, ‘she.’

— Barbara Holland, Gentlemen’s Blood, pp. 59-60

Emphasis mine.

In the year 948 [C.E.] an Arab traveller named Ibn Hawkal visited Spain. About twenty years later he composed a geographical handbook, ambitiously called the Description of the World, which included an account of Spain based on his travels there. He was an intelligent and observant man, and if we wish to discover what al-Andalus was like in the tenth century we can do no better than to put ourselves in his hands.

Ibn Hawkal was struck in the first place by the general prosperity of al-Andalus:

There are uncultivated lands, but the greater part of the country is cultivated and densely settled…. Plenty and content govern every aspect of life. Possession of goods and the means of acquiring wealth are common to all classes of the population. These benefits even extend to artisans and workmen, thanks to the light taxes, the good state of the country and the wealth of its ruler—for he has no need to impose heavy levies and taxes.

He correctly saw an indicator of this prosperity in the great amount of money in circulation. From the eighth century [C.E.] the only coin struck in Muslim Spain was the silver dirhem, but in the 920s ‘Abd al-Rahman III inaugurated a period of bimetallism by undertaking the minting of gold coins called dinars. The ratio was seventeen dirhems to one dinar, which was in line with the ratio in the rest of the Islamic world and in the Eastern Roman empire—in itself an indication that al-Andalus was now part of a larger commercial community. The state mint at Cordoba exercised control over the weight, fineness and design of the coinage. The volume of coin in circulation seems to have been very large, and this is another indicator of commercial prosperity, for only a favourable trade balance could account for the inflow of bullion to sustain an ample monetary circulation.

— Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, pp. 17-18

Emphasis mine.

From time immemorial, man has felt himself to be confronted with evil supernatural beings, and his weapon against them has been the use of magical rites. Spirits lurked everywhere. Larvae and lemures lived beneath the earth; vampires escaped from the dead to attack the living; Namtar (pestilence) and Idpa (fever) plagued the cities. Night was ruled by the demons of evil, of the desert, of the abyss, of the sea, of the mountains, of the swamp, of the south wind. There were the succubi and incubi, carriers of obscene nightmares; the snare-setting Maskim; the evil Utuq, dweller of the desert; the bull demon Telal; and Alal the destroyer. People’s minds were dominated by malign demons who demanded sacrifices and prayers. But the sages of ancient civilizations knew also that good spirits existed, ever ready to come to the rescue of the afflicted. In the higher magical religions, the priests conceived a supreme deity, a wise controller of the world’s harmony….

In the broad plains [of Mesopotamia], on terraces of temples and towers, the priests scanned the night sky, pondering over the riddle of the universe—the cause of all being, of life and death. They offered their prayers to the spirit of Hea, the earth, and to the spirit of Ana, the sky. By conjuration, by the burning of incense, by shouts and by whispers, by gesture and by song, the priests sought to attract the attention of the fickle gods who had forever to be reminded of the misfortunes of mortals. “Remember,” the incantations were always reiterating: “Remember him who makes sacrifices—may forgiveness and peace flow for him like molten brass; may this man’s days be vivified by the sun!—Spirit of the Earth, remember! Spirit of the Sky, remember!”

— Kurt Seligmann, The History of Magic and the Occult, p. 1

Emphasis mine.

By Kirke L. Simpson

Washington, November 11, 1921 (UP) —

Under the wide and starry skies of his own homeland America’s unknown dead from France sleeps tonight, a soldier home from the wars.

Alone, he lies in the narrow cell of stone that guards his body; but his soul has entered into the spirit that is America. Wherever liberty is held close to men’s hearts, the honor and the glory and the pledge of high endeavor poured out over this nameless one of fame will be told and sung by Americans for all time.

Scrolled across the marble arch of the memorial raised to American soldier and sailor dead, everywhere, which stands like a monument behind his tomb, runs this legend: We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

The words were spoken by the martyred Lincoln over the dead at Gettysburg. And today with voice strong with determination and ringing with deep emotion, another President echoed that high resolve over the coffin of the soldier who died for the flag in France:

There must be, there shall be, the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare.

Far across the seas, other unknown dead, hallowed in memory by their countrymen, as this American soldier is enshrined in the heart of America, sleep their last. He, in whose veins ran the blood of British forebears, lies beneath a great stone in ancient Westminster Abbey; he of France, beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and he of Italy under the alter of the Fatherland in Rome.

And it seems today that they, too, must be here among the Potomac hills to greet an American comrade come to join their glorious company, to testify their approval of the high words of hope spoken by President Harding. All day long the nation poured out its heart in pride and glory for the nameless American. Before the first crash of the minute guns roared its knell for the dead from the shadow of Washington Monument, the people who claim him as their own were trooping out to do him honor. They lined the long road from the Capitol to the hillside where he sleeps tonight; they flowed like a tide over the slopes about his burial place; they choked the bridges that lead across the river to the field of the brave, in which he is the last comer.

As he was carried past through the banks of humanity that lined Pennsylvania Avenue a solemn, reverent hush held the living walls. Yet there was not so much of sorrow as of high pride in it all, a pride beyond the reach of shouting and the clamor that marks less sacred moments in life.

Out there in the broad avenue was a simple soldier, dead for honor of the flag. He was nameless. No man knew what part in the great life of the nation he had filled when last he passed over his home soil. But in France he had died as Americans always have been ready to die, for the flag and what it means. They read the message of the pageant clear, these silent thousands along the way. They stood in almost holy awe to take their own part in what was theirs, the glory of the American people, honored here in the honors showered on America’s nameless son from France.

Soldiers, sailors, and marines—all played their part in the thrilling spectacles as the cortège rolled along. And just behind the casket, with its faded French flowers on the draped flag, walked the President, the chosen leader of a hundred million, in whose name he was chief mourner at his bier. Beside him strode the man under whom the fallen hero had lived and died in France, General Pershing, wearing only the single medal of Victory that every American soldier might wear as his only decoration.

Then, row by row, came the men who lead the nation today or have guided its destinies before. They were all there, walking proudly with age and frailties of the flesh forgotten. Judges, senators, representatives, highest officers of every military arm of government, and a trudging little group of the nation’s most valorous sons, the Medal of Honor winners. Some were grey and bent and drooping with old wounds; some trim and erect as the day they won their way to fame. All walked gladly in this nameless comrade’s last parade.

Ahead, the white marble of the amphitheater gleamed through the trees. It stands crowning the slope of the hills that sweep upward from the river and just across was Washington, its clustered buildings and monuments to great dead who have gone before, a moving picture in the autumn haze.

People in the thousands were moving about the great circle of the amphitheater. The great ones to whom places had been given in the sacred enclosure and the plain folk who trudged the long way just to glimpse the pageant from afar were finding their places.

Faint and distant, the silvery strains of a military band stole into the big white bowl of the amphitheater. The slow cadences and mourning notes of a funeral march grew nearer amid the roll and mutter of the muffled drums.

And the arch where the choir waited the heroic dead, comrades lifted his casket down and, followed by the generals and the admirals, who had walked beside him from the Capitol, he was carried to the place of honor. Ahead moved the white-robed singers, chanting solemnly. Carefully, the casket was placed about the banked flowers and the Marine Band play sacred melodies until the moment the President and Mrs. Harding stepped to their places beside the casket; then the crashing, triumphant chords of The Star-Spangled Banner swept the gathering to its feet again.

A prayer, carried out over the crowd by amplifiers so that no word was missed, took a moment or two, then the sharp, clear call of the bugle rang Attention! and for two minutes the nation stood at pause for the dead, just at high noon. No sound broke the quiet as all stood with bowed heads. It was much as though a mighty hand had checked the world in full course. Then the band sounded and in a mighty chorus rolled up the words of America from the hosts within and without the great open hall of valor.

President Harding stepped forward beside the coffin to say for America the thing that today was nearest to the nation’s heart, that sacrifices such as this nameless man, fallen in battle, might perhaps be made unnecessary down through the coming years.

Mr. Harding showed strong emotion as his lips formed the last words of the address. He paused, then with raised hand and head bowed, went on in the measured, rolling period of the Lord’s Prayer. The response that came back to him from the thousands he faced, from the other thousands out over the slopes beyond, perhaps from still other thousands away near the Pacific, or close packed in the heart of the nation’s greatest city, arose like a chant.

Then the foreign officers who stand highest among the soldiers or sailors of their flags came one by one to the bier to place gold and jeweled emblems for the brave above the breast of the sleeper. Already, as the great prayer ended, the President had set the American seal of admiration for the valiant, the nation’s love for brave deeds, and the courage that defies death, upon the casket.

Side by side he laid the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross. And below, set in place with reverent hands, grew the long list of foreign honors: the Victoria Cross, never before laid on the breast of any but those who had served the British flag; all the highest honors of France and Belgium and Italy and Rumania and Czechoslovakia and Poland.

To General Jacques of Belgium it remained to add his own touch to these honors. He tore from his own tunic the medal of valor pinned there by the Belgian king, tore it with a sweeping gesture, and tenderly bestowed it on the unknown American warrior.

Through the religious services that followed, and prayers, the swelling crowd sat motionless until it rose to join in the old, consoling Rock of Ages, and the last rite for the dead was at hand. Lifted by his hero bearers from the stage, the unknown was carried in his flag-wrapped, simple coffin out to the wide sweep of the terrace. The bearers laid the sleeper down above the crypt on which had been placed a little of the soil of France. The dust his blood helped redeem from alien hands will mingle with his dust as time marches by.

The simple words of the burial ritual were said by Bishop Brent; flowers from war mothers of America and England were laid in place.

A rocking blast of gunfire rang from the woods. The glittering circle of bayonets stiffened to a salute to the dead. Again the guns shouted their message of honor and farewell. Again they boomed out; a loyal comrade was being laid to his last, long rest.

High and clear and true in the echoes of the guns, a bugle lifted the old, old notes of Taps, the lullaby for the living soldier, in death his requiem. Long ago some forgotten soldier poet caught its meaning clear and set it down that soldiers everywhere might know its message as they sink to rest:

Fades the light;
And afar
Goeth day, cometh night,
And a star
Leadeth all, speedeth all,
To their rest.

The guns roared out again in the national salute. He was home. The Unknown, to sleep forever among his own.

Experience has shown that last-minute maneuvers were likely to create dangerous gaps in the lines, or to expose a marching flank to missile or shock attack. Therefore tactical ingenuity was not often attempted beyond the point where an enemy would be forced to enter battle on unfavorable ground, or with only a portion of his available forces. The usual objective in battle was to outflank the enemy, since only the flanks and rear of well-armed infantry—10 to 30 ranks deep—were sensitive and vulnerable. Though we shall note a few examples of successful deviation from the parallel order of battle, such deviations more often led to failure.

— R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History, p. 17

…Fire, then, may well have been the first enshrined divinity of prehistoric man. Fire has the property of not being diminished when halved, but increased. Fire is luminous, like the sun and lightning, the only such thing on earth. Also, it is alive; in the warmth of the human body it is life itself, which departs when the body goes cold. It is prodigious in volcanoes, and, as we know from the lore of many primitive traditions, it has been frequently identified with a demoness of volcanoes, who presides over an afterworld where the dead enjoy an everlasting dance in marvelously dancing volcanic fires.

— Joseph Campbell, Myths To Live By, p. 36

The savage fails to recognize those limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are not regarded as greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be frightened and coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage of thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; All beings in it, whether natural or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing of tolerable equality.

— James G. Frazer, The Illustrated Golden Bough, p. 65

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 [C.E.] when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortège left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August, p. 1

Standing, from left to right: King Haakan VII of Norway, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manoel of Portugal, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George I of Greece, King Albert of the Belgians. Seated, from left to right: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King George V of England, King Frederik VIII of Denmark.

The photograph is not from The Guns of August. I failed to record what book I found it in. Imagine if it was a color photograph.

The power of the steppe was based on the individual pastoral unit, the man on horseback. By all accounts, he was a unique creation, singular in his abilities and outlandish and terrifying in the eyes of victims, so much so he frequently defied description. Aesthetically, he left much to be desired. Clad shabbily in boots and trousers—both inventions of the steppe—kept supple through liberal portions of leftover butter and grease, he was likely a pungent warrior, especially since he himself never bathed. Upper garments were composed of crudely stitched pelts, valued only for warmth and protection. Strapped to his back was a quiver full of carefully crafted arrows and his formidable bow, both encased against the elements due to their extreme vulnerability to moisture. A well-cast bronze dagger would have completed his personal arsenal, since the steppe’s rich copper and tin deposits were exploited almost from the beginning of penetration.

It was horsemanship that set the pastoral trooper apart. Under ordinary circumstances control was exerted by reins attached to a bit—sometimes copper or bronze, but also bone or hemp. Saddles were blankets and hides. There were no stirrups, not before 500 [C.E.] at the earliest, so balance was based on experience and skill. Over time a horseman’s thighs and knees grew so sensitive to his mount’s movements that it became possible to maintain a firm seat at full speed using legs alone. The net effect was a union that left some wondering where the man left off and the horse began—the Greeks, for instance, imagined a race of centaurs, wild and unpredictable, humans and equines joined at the hip. Others were less fanciful, but nearly all who crossed his path were amazed by the steppe horseman’s ability to let go the reins and launch a rapid-fire barrage of arrows at full gallop through an arc of 270 degrees or more. He was as dangerous in retreat as moving forward—his fabled rearward Parthian shot brought an end to a legion of pursuers. No one was more lethal in the ancient world.

— Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, p. 50

Emphasis mine.

I never understood why centaurs were envisioned as forest creatures. Horses and ponies live on plains, steppes, and savannas.

I occasionally regret creating the Rellugai as turkic humans instead of centaurs. They would have been more difficult to write, but my writing can sometimes be too human-centric.

In the century before the fall of Rome, the unwieldy 12-foot-long papyrus scrolls of Alexandria had started to cede room on the shelves to a new form of document: the codex book, so named because it originated from attempts to “codify” the Roman law in a format that supported easier information retrieval. The new format boasted a more navigable interface, featuring leafed pages bound between durable hard covers. Not only was the new format more resilient than the carefully wound scrolls that preceded it, it facilitated a new way of engaging with the text. Scrolls, by their physical nature, demanded linear reading from start to finish. They required a commitment on the part of the reader and resisted attempts to extract individual nuggets of information. But with a codex book, readers could now flip between pages easily to pinpoint any passage in a text. As Hobart and Schiffman write, “The codex had the potential to transform the manuscript from a cumbersome mnemonic aid to a readily accessible information storehouse.”

The new technology of the book ushered in a whole new way of reading: random access. A document no longer had to be read from top to bottom; its pages could be flipped, allowing the reader to move around at will. By letting users move freely from page to page, the new book allowed readers to form their own networks of association within a particular text. Scrolls, on the other hand, encouraged linear reading. The book also had one more considerable advantage over the old scrolls: portability. While collections of papyrus scrolls and codex books coexisted in late Roman libraries, the destruction of the empire saw most of the great old library collections burned, plundered, or scattered. The codex book format proved hardier and more portable than the old scrolls; as a result, many scrolls failed to survive the fall of the Roman empire, and a great deal of the literature that lived on did so between the covers of bound books.

— Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages, p. 79

Emphasis mine.

The earliest libraries were first and foremost vessels of political power, consolidating the accumulated intellectual capital of the early nation-states and providing a durable link with the past by invoking religious authority and asserting a relationship to the gods. The gods, by extension, protected the library, and the genealogical relationships of the gods, echoing old folk taxonomies, found a new manifestation in the nested hierarchies of state institutions.

The first libraries existed primarily to support these growing imperial hierarchies. In China, the earliest known library dates to 1400 [B.C.E.]. In Egypt, Rameses II established a sacred library at Thebes in 1225 [B.C.E.]. The first Indian manuscript collections date as far back as 1000 [B.C.E.]. Each of these great imperial civilizations seems to have progressed along a markedly similar (though far from identical) path: Agricultural settlements developed a commercial facility for writing, enabling them to make the transition from tribal societies to nation-states. As some of those nation-states grew into empires, they began producing more varied forms of literature that were eventually gathered into libraries.

The fates of those libraries would prove no less turbulent than the empires that built them. Indeed, the advent of literacy and book making has invariably been accompanied by violence and political turmoil. When the Emperor Shi Huangdi consolidated power over the Chinese Empire in 213 [B.C.E.], he promptly ordered an imperial biblioclasm, commanding the destruction of every book in the kingdom. Soldiers demolished the old royal library, a priceless trove of early Confucian and Taoist texts known as the Heavenly Archives (whose most famous curator was Lao Tzu). After clearing the brush of the prior regime’s intellectual legacy, the emperor created a new library, complete with a new classification system to reflect the new imperial order….

— Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages, p. 55

The relationship between written language and political legitimacy stretches deep into antiquity. Just as the earliest literate cultures had invented fables to explain the spellbinding power of the written word, later civilizations would invoke mythologies to assert the bond between writing and the political authority of the state. Ancient Romans attributed the prosperity of their empire in part to the purchase of three divine books by the ancient King Tarquin. According to the story, Tarquin bought the volumes from the Prophetess Sibyl only after spurning her original offer of nine books, six of which she proceeded to burn out of spite. Realizing his mistake, Tarquin quickly came to his senses and snapped up the remaining volumes. Those books would later occupy a place of honor in the Roman forum, providing a tangible bridge from the mythic world to the present, until they were finally destroyed along with the empire during the great sieges. The Assyrians assigned a similar mythological significance to the power of writing in their tale of Zu, a lesser god who steals a divine tablet from the ruling god Enlil and brings it to Assyria. The tablet is said to reveal the fate of the gods, thus granting the Assyrian kingdom a measure of power over the gods themselves.

— Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages, p. 54

Greece was coming back to life, but the people remained in a spiritual limbo. A few elements of the old Minoan and Mycenaean cults remained: there was, for example, a sacred olive tree on the Acropolis. But the thirteenth-century [B.C.E.] crisis had shattered the old faith. The Greeks had watched their world collapse, and the trauma had changed them. The Minoan frescoes had been confident and luminous; the men, women, and animals depicted had been expectant and hopeful. There were apparitions of goddesses in flowery meadows, dancing, and joy. But by the ninth century [B.C.E.], Greek religion was pessimistic and uncanny, its gods dangerous, cruel, and arbitrary. In time, the Greeks would achieve a civilization of dazzling brilliance, but they never lost their sense of tragedy, and this would be one of their most important religious contributions to the Axial Age. Their rituals and myths would always hint at the unspeakable and the forbidden, at horrible events happening offstage, just out of sight, and usually at night. They experienced the sacred in catastrophe, when life was turned inexplicably upside down, in the breaking of taboos, and when the boundaries that kept society and individuals sane were suddenly torn asunder.

— Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, p. 53

emphasis mine.

The Iliad describes one small incident in the Trojan War—a quarrel, a bitter clash of egos, between Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greek army, and Achilles, captain of one of its squadrons. Once he felt that his honor had been impugned, Achilles endangered the entire Greek cause by withdrawing all his men from the fray. In the course of the ensuing conflict, Achilles’ best friend, Patroclus, was tragically killed by Hector, son of King Priam of Troy. The Odyssey was set after the war and described the ten-year voyage of Odysseus, who had to journey through many strange lands until he was finally reunited with his wife in Ithaca. In both poems, Homer celebrated the excitement of battle, the joy of comradeship, and the glory of the aristeia, when a warrior lost himself in a “victorious rampage” and became an irresistible force, sweeping all before him. In war, Homer seemed to suggest, men lived more intensely. If his glorious deeds were remembered in epic song, the hero overcame the oblivion of death and achieved the only immortality that was possible for moribund human beings.

Fame was thus more important than life itself, and the poems show warriors desperately competing with one another in order to acquire it. In this quest for glory, every man was out for himself. The hero was an egotist, obsessed with questions of honor and status, loudly boasting about his exploits, and prepared to sacrifice the good of the whole to enhance his own prestige. There was no kenosis, no self-surrender; the only way a warrior could “step outside” the confines of self was in the ekstasis of killing. When possessed by Ares, god of war, he experienced a superabundance of life and became divine, losing himself in aristeia and slaughtering anything that stood in his way. War was, therefore, the only activity that could give meaning to life. Every warrior was expected to excel, but to be the “best” (aristos) meant simply to excel in battle. No other quality or talent counted. In the heightened state of aristeia, the hero experienced a superabundance of life that flared up gloriously in contempt of death.

In India, priests and warriors alike were gradually moving toward the ideal of ahimsa (nonviolence). This would also characterize the other Axial spiritualities. But the Greeks never entirely abandoned the heroic ethos: their Axial Age would be political, scientific, and philosophical—but not religious. In presenting a warrior like Achilles as the model of excellence to which all men should aspire, Homer seems to have nothing in common with the spirit of the Axial Age. Yet standing on the threshold of a new era, Homer was able to look critically at the heroic ideal. He could see a terrible poignancy in the fate of the warrior, because in order to achieve the posthumous glory that was his raison d’etre, the hero had to die. He was wedded to death, just as, in the cult, he was confined to the dark chthonian regions, tortured by his mortality. For Homer too, death was a catastrophe.

The Iliad was a poem about death, its characters dominated by the compulsion to kill or be killed. The story moved inexorably toward inevitable extinction: to the deaths of Patroclus, Hector, Achilles, and the beautiful city of Troy itself. In the Odyssey too, death was a black transcendence, ineffable and inconceivable. When Odysseus visited the underworld, he was horrified by the sight of the swarming, gibbering crowds of the dead, whose humanity had obscenely disintegrated. Yet when he met the shade of Achilles, Odysseus begged him not to grieve: “No man has ever been more blest than you in days past, or will be in days to come. For before you died, we Achaeans honoured you like a god, and now in this place, you lord it among the dead.” But Achilles would have none of this. “Don’t gloss over death to me in order to console me,” he replied, in words that entirely discounted the aristocratic warrior ethos. “I would rather be above ground still and labouring for some poor peasant man than be the lord over the lifeless dead.” There was a fearful void at the heart of the heroic ideal.

— Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, pp. 107-108

Emphasis mine.