Tag: Ancient World

This first civilization came to be known as Sumer. By about the year 3000 [B.C.E.], a city called Uruk near the mouth of the Euphrates River, just inland of the head of the Persian Gulf, had eighty thousand residents. A thousand years later Iraq, the land along the Euphrates and its sister stream, the Tigris, would be named for this early metropolis of Uruk. Sharing the land of Sumer, about the size of [modern] Belgium, with a dozen other city-states, Uruk was not always the foremost among its rivals in the land. But for most of its existence, spanning the two millennia of the Sumerian world, Uruk was the greatest city on earth.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

A dozen (small) cities in such a small area. Every square meter of arable land was claimed and constantly fought over. I do not see much of this in fantasy roleplaying campaigns.

Another factor that strengthened the unity of the early village was the temple and its service. The immigrants from the north either brought with them or developed not long after their arrival an abiding faith in one special deity as the protector of their settlement, and with the building of their first houses they also erected a home for their divinity. For example, underlying the ruins of Eridu, one of Sumer’s most venerated cities, archeologists unearthed a mud-brick temple built on virgin soil by the original Ubaidian inhabitants. It was a small rectangular shrine, about 15 feet long, and its furnishings consisted of nothing more than a crude altar and an offering table. But as the villages prospered through agriculture and expanded into sizable towns, such humble shrines were enlarged into elaborate structures each set atop a lofty mud-brick platform, a prototype of the future ziggurat, or temple-tower. Each temple served an entire community, rather than an individual family or clan, and thus generated and intensified local patriotism, pride and effort.

Nor was the temple merely an edifice of lifeless brick and mortar; it was a holy place that had to be tended and cared for every day, year in and year out. Hymns and prayers had to be composed, formalized and recited; rites and rituals had to be performed; sacred festivals had to be celebrated. And so a specialized priesthood came into being, starting no doubt with the selection of one or two individuals noted for their learning and spiritual powers and proliferating in number and function over the centuries. In the course of time the temple and its priestly coterie naturally became the intellectual center of each community, and it is therefore not surprising that it was in the temple that writing was later invented and developed.

— Cradle of Civilization, pp. 33-34

The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. The Sumerians established the outlines of our political, legal, and temporal structures too, with the first kings and assemblies, the first written laws, the first legal contracts, and the sexagesimal system of counting that regulates the hours and seconds of our days.

The Sumerians wrote the first epics and constructed the first monumental buildings. They invented the wheel, the sailing boat, the dome, and the arch. They were the first people to cast, rivet, and solder metals. They were the first to develop mathematics, calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle two thousand years before Pythagoras and enabling extraordinary achievements in civil engineering. Compiling methodical lists of plants and animals, the Sumerians were the first people to apply rational order to our knowledge of the natural world.

The Sumerians wrote down almost everything they knew, much of it on disposable clay tablets that have survived the millennia. Some thirty-nine centuries after the last of the Sumerians died, another inventive and curious people, the Victorians of the nineteenth century [C.E.], initiated a remarkable period of foreign exploration in Iraq. Thanks to this colorful and dramatic intellectual adventure, which began in the 1840s, today we can follow the course of Sumerian lawsuits, track Sumerian inventories, and study the terms of Sumerian marriages, wills, and loans. We read the overtures of Sumer’s diplomats. We follow in detail the provisioning of Sumer’s armies and the triumphs or disasters of their expeditions. We know intimately the pleadings of Sumerian students for more money from their fathers, and the pleadings of their fathers for more diligence from their sons. We track the transactions of Sumerian merchants in copper or onions. We admire the complex and perfect calculations of Sumerian engineers.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

In the ancient world, people did not stand apart from the cosmos. Instead ancient states and societies explored how people were partners with a sentient universe. The cosmos operated through regular rhythms and periodic events. Much effort went into understanding the regularities of the seasons or the movements of astral bodies, as well as the generally prescribed life course of people, plants and animals. Disrupting regular changes were events, many of which were dangerous, such as famine, flood, disease, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Once it had come into being, the pantheon of gods humanized the world, both in its cyclical processes and periodic events.

— Magic: A History, p. 74

All mines are full of spirits. In the lead mines in County Durham, the men always spoke of the rock as an animal, ready to push at you as you made your way along an adit or down a shaft. In Cornwall the tin miners called the mine spirits the Knockers, as they knocked back at any man cutting away at the metal-bearing veins. They were the mine itself speaking. In sixteenth-century Germany, according to the great Renaissance theorist Georgius Agricola, these spirits were “called the little miners, because of their dwarfish stature, which is about two feet. They are venerable looking and clothed like miners with a leather apron about their loins.”

Most of the time the Knockers were gentle and friendly, hanging about in the shafts and tunnels, only turning vicious if the miners ridiculed or cursed them. You needed to treat them with respect. Whistling could offend them, as could intentionally spying on what they were doing. They liked to be left in the shadows or the depths of the mines, or even behind the rock, knocking from inside it. Many miners placed small offerings of food or candle grease in the mine to feed and satisfy them. If you were good to them, they would show you where to find the metal.

As Ronald Finucane, the historian of the medieval subconscious, has said, ghosts “represent man’s inner universe just as his art and poetry do.” Ghosts are what you fear or hope for. The mine, if the gods favored you, could provide a sort of magically immediate richness not to be found in the surface world. But all was hidden until you found it. And that reward-from-nothing was reflected in the miners’ attitudes toward metals. In Cornwall, they thought that iron pyrites when applied to a wound would cure it. Even water that had run over iron pyrites was said to be medicinal. Cuts washed in it would heal without any other intervention. But also in Cornwall, and in the parts of the United States where Cornish tinners immigrated and took their ancient beliefs with them, Knockers were thought to be ugly and vindictive. Miners who were lamed were known to be victims of the Knockers’ rage. Insult them, and they could damage you for life.

It is a commanding cluster of images: lightlessness, the spirits of the underworld, the hope for treasure and happiness, wounding, cures, the half-glimpsed, the dreaded, a realm of pain and power. This is the dark basement of the [Heroic] world, the place that metal came from, emerging through processes that were unknown and unintelligible to most of the population, but somehow providing the power-soaked tools with which the killer-chiefs dominated the landscape.

It is at least a possibility that Homer’s Hades is a nightmare fantasy fueled by the Bronze Age experience of the mine: a place in which spirits are clearly present but not to be grasped; where life has sunk away from the sunlight to the mute and the insubstantial; to beings that are only half there, regretting the absence of the vivid sunlight above; where a mysterious sense of power lurks in the dark. “When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit,” Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space. When you are underground, “darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows standing on the dark walls … The cellar is buried madness.”

— Why Homer Matters, Chapter 8

Imagine a Highland Napoleon. Imagine a Bonny Prince Charlie with European ambitions who, having won back Scotland from King George II, sets off at the head of his clans not just to conquer England—a mere preliminary—but to cross the Channel, to meet and beat the French army on the River Somme, then journey south into Spain to besiege and subdue its principal fortresses, return north to challenge the Holy Roman Emperor, twice confront and defeat him at the head of his forces, seize his Crown, burn his capital, bury his corpse and finally depart eastward to cross swords with the Tsar of Russia or the Sultan of Turkey. Imagine all this compressed into, say, the years 1745-56 [C.E.], between the princeling’s twenty-second and thirty-third birthdays. Imagine on his death, at the age of thirty-two, the crowns of Europe shared between his followers—Lord George Murray ruling in Madrid, the Duke of Perth in Paris, Lord Elcho in Vienna, John Roy Stewart in Berlin, Cameron of Lochiel in Warsaw, a gaggle of tartaned chieftains braying for whisky in the small courts of south Germany and London garrisoned by a crew of bare-kneed highlanders. Finally, imagine most of the Jacobite empire enduring into the nineteenth century, parts of it into the twentieth, and its last fragment into the twenty-first.

Or imagine, if you prefer, a George Washington Bolivar, a Founding Father who determines also to be the Liberator of Latin America; who, having endured the long winter of Valley Forge and the setbacks of the middle years of the War of Independence, to exult at last in the capitulation of Yorktown, conceives the ambition of ridding all the Americas of foreign governments. Imagine him embarking the Continental Army in the ships of the new-born United States Navy to voyage south, clear Mexico of Spanish troops, garrison the West Indies with Virginians or New Englanders and make a landing on the shores of South America. Then, victorious in Peru, he crosses the Andes, defeats the Spanish army of the east, and expires on the approaches to the empire of Brazil.

Thus is it just possible to grasp how extraordinary was the career of Alexander the Great. The distances and obstacles of either enterprise defeat the imagination—and they have, indeed, no parallel in any reality except that of Alexander’s own life. The world has, of course, known conquerors of extraordinary ambition in its time: Attila the Hun whose horsemen rode from Central Asia to the gates of Rome in the fifth century; the Arab successors of Mahomet turned back into Spain by defeat on the banks of the Loire in the eighth century; and the sons of Genghis Khan, whose Mongols menaced Venice and Vienna in the thirteenth. Napoleon, a devotee of the Alexander epic, came close to re-enacting it in the years between Rivoli, 1797, and Moscow, 1812, as again did Hitler, in whom some gobbet of classical learning also nourished an admiration for Alexander. His orgy of victory was, of course, even more telescoped in time than Napoleon’s, who in turn gave battle oftener than Alexander ever did. Yet the achievements of none of these earthshakers quite match those of the original. Napoleon and Hitler scarcely ventured beyond their own continent. Attila, the Arabs and the Mongols broke the boundaries of Asia but only scratched the heartland of Europe. Alexander, by contrast, first made himself master of the Greek world, then translated himself to another, the Persian Empire, and finally ventured into a third in India. At his death in June 323 BC, he had subdued the largest tract of the earth’s surface ever to be conquered by a single individual—Genghis Khan’s short-lived empire excepted—and ruled as overlord, emperor or king from Mount Olympus to the [Himalayas]….

— Mask of Command, Chapter 1

Emphases mine.

More than two decades passed between the meeting of Sulla and Orobazus [in 96 B.C.E.] and the next diplomatic contact between Rome and Parthia. Ancient states did not maintain permanent embassies in each other’s capitals or feel the need to be in constant touch, and instead sent ambassadors only when there was something that they wished to say. Preoccupied with bitter internal strife and with enemies and friends closer to their territory, neither the Romans nor Parthians chose to seek out the other.

— Rome and Persia, pp. 63

Gamemasters who set their campaigns in any pre-industrial period frequently fail to understand that everything is handmade—including tools and the tools to make tools. Even in places with high population, the vast majority are primarily engaged in producing food. The number of artesans in a population is always low. Manufactured items could be stockpiled in great amounts, but that took much time (i.e., years) and dedicated effort—usually at the expense of other things being deprioritized.

Artesans can command high wages, but that is far outstripped by the value of what they make. Their small numbers get lost in the sea of poverty-wage labor. What they have made outlives them—possibly by centuries, sometimes.

Even animals are worth more than people. A dead cow is a greater loss than that of a peasant, let alone a horse. Sad but true.

In such a society, people are cheap while things are expensive. Among other things, the equipment lists in games should better reflect this.

For further reading:

• The Cost of Plate Armor in Modern Money
• Normalizing Skerples’ Medieval Price List
• Why Medieval Warfare was Expensive Business

Romans loved spectacle. The same was true of most societies in the ancient world, and, whatever else Hollywood has got wrong, the fondness of historical epics for grand processions, parades, and casts of thousands reflects something of this reality. Important events in the life of a community or leader were marked publicly and choreographed with great care, usually following well-established traditions. Thus, when for the first time a representative of the Parthian king met a representative of the Roman Republic, the occasion had to be marked by a ceremony where discussions were held in plain view, even if some or most of the real negotiation happened behind the scenes. A willingness to bargain in public was seen as a sign of good faith.

— Rome and Persia, p. 25

…The simple wooden bow was a very old weapon which showed some important affinities with “civilian” devices used for kindling fire and for boring holes as well as with certain musical instruments. Its emergence as a specialized tool took place at some unknown time and place, and for millennia it was employed for hunting as well as for war. It so happened, however, that the rise of the chariot was soon followed by—if indeed it did not coincide with—the invention of the composite reflex bow, a very different weapon. Made of wood, sinew, and horn glued together, with each material carefully coordinated with all the others so as to yield the optimum combination of strength and flexibility, the composite bow represented as great an advance over its simple predecessor as did the breech-loading rifle over the muzzle-loading flintlock musket. Capable of firing arrows rapidly to an effective range of 200-300 yards, its power and effectiveness remained unsurpassed for several thousand years.

— Technology and War, Chapter 1

Emphasis mine.

Ritual sacrifice is the most clear-cut instance of violence made sacred. When the victim is nonhuman, the central act of violence is essentially a familiar and understandable one: the slaughter of animals for food. The fact that the simple act of butchery has so often been sacralized hints at a sinister side to the deities so honored and is suggestive, as we shall see, of an anxiety far older than either religion or war, and possibly central to both.

Few religions today openly practice blood sacrifice…. But contemporary historians of religion remind us of what religious practitioners often prefer to ignore or forget: that blood sacrifice is not just “a” religious ritual; it is the central ritual of the religions of all ancient and traditional civilizations. For thousands of years, the core religious ritual from the highlands of the Andes to the valley of the Ganges was the act of sacrificial killing. The temple that housed the altar, or the raised platform or stone circle that constituted a holy place, was also an abattoir….

“Animal sacrifice…was an all-pervasive reality in the ancient world.” Hebrew sacrificial ritual resembled that of the Greeks, which in turn resembled that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, the Babylonians and Persians, the Etruscans, and the Romans. The names of the gods who were the recipients of the sacrifices varied from culture to culture, but the main elements of the ritual were everywhere recognizable and familiar to the ancients: the procession, the climactic throat-slitting or beheading, the butchering, the examination of entrails, the ritual uses of the fresh blood, the burning or cooking of the remains.

— Blood Rites, pp. 23, 28

Emphases mine.

Command in ancient armies was a collective as much as an individual endeavour, because the primitive communications made it hard for one man to exercise control even over the relatively short distances involved. Indeed, command limitations seem to have been a major reason why large armies formed up in greater depth, rather than trying to coordinate operations across an unpractically long front. Pre-planning and delegation of authority to local subordinates were the norm, and some forces did not even have a single overall general. It was because command was so problematic that most ancient armies achieved so much less than the troops themselves were theoretically capable of, as inertia and confusion reduced movement rates and inhibited decisive attacks. This meant that asymmetries in command, which allowed one army to suffer less than its opponents from the restrictions involved, could have a major impact on fighting performance.

Perhaps paradoxically, given the difficulties for any single individual of maintaining real-time control of anything more than a small segment of the battle line, this was the golden age of ‘great captains’ like Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio and Caesar whose generalship was a very significant determinant of victory. The explanation seems to be that there were many other ways in which such individuals contributed to success besides their personal influence during the battle itself. Training and motivating their troops and building up capable subordinates in the months and years beforehand could significantly improve the quality of the army as a whole. Winning the intelligence contest could allow novel pre-planned deployments and manoeuvres precisely tailored to counter the enemy battle line, and seizing the initiative could panic or provoke the enemy into hurried reactions that left their army vulnerable and unprepared. The actual fighting was thus only the culmination of an overall process that stacked the odds heavily in favour of the better-commanded side.

— Lost Battles, p. 224

Emphasis mine.

In one respect at least, ancient war was more civilized than our own. The aim of ancient war was generally to kill or capture the opposing chief and display him in a cage. Because of the primitive state of technology, the only way to get to the opposing leader and his inner circle was to cut through the mass of his people and army, necessitating bloody battles and great cruelty. But since the Enlightenment, Western leaders have exempted themselves from retribution and have sought to punish each other indirectly: by destroying each other’s armies and—since Grant and Sherman—by making the civilian populations suffer as well. But is it really more honorable to kill thousands by high-altitude bombing than by the sword and ax?

— Warrior Politics, pp. 122-23

Assaulting cities is the oldest, and often the most brutal, expression of warfare. The earliest Western literature begins with the biblical siege of Jericho and the Achaeans’ attack on Troy. The most moving passages in Thucydides‘ entire history of the [Peloponnesian] war—the Plataeans’ pleas for mercy, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus over the fate of the Mytileneans, the Melian Dialogue, the butchery of the boys at Mycalessus, and the great siege at Syracuse—revolve around the assault on communities of men, women, and children when war came to the very doorstep of the Greek family. Indeed, Mycalessus proved horrific precisely because the Thracian mercenaries sought no real military objective other than the psychological terror of slaughtering children at school—the ancient version of the Chechnyan terrorist assault on the Russian school in Belsan during early September 2004, which shocked the modern world and confirmed Thucydides’ prognosis that his history really was a possession for all time, inasmuch as human nature, as he saw, has remained constant across time and space.

There is something surrealistic about storming a city. Sieges are final, ultimate verdicts about not merely the fate of soldiers but of a very people. Nothing is more chilling, for example, than the final hours of Constantinople—10,000 people huddled under the dome of St. Sophia, praying in vain for the angel of deliverance on the early afternoon of May 29, 1453 [C.E.], as the sultan’s shock troops burst in to end for good the thousand-year culture of Byzantium. In sieges, women and old men fight from the walls. Ad hoc genius is manifested in countermeasures—history’s array of missiles, flame, cranes, and flying roof tiles—as the fate of thousands sometimes depends solely on their own collective intelligence and resolve. In the age of bombers, whose aerial weapons can make walls superfluous, sieges might seem a thing of the past, until one recalls that Leningrad and Stalingrad were two of the greatest and most costly sieges of the ages.

— A War Like No Other, pp. 179-80

Right up to and through the Renaissance, magicians were classed among what we today would call intellectuals. They were learned men, familiar with ancient lore and languages, with the obscure symbolism of signs and numbers. They read the stars and dabbled in the mysticism that surrounded alchemy. They were respected. In the early centuries of Christianity, magic was not considered an evil thing. In a world thought to be inhabited by men and angels and devils, men also believed in spirits neither good or bad; spirits of the air, of fire, of the sea, of the mountains, of the woods, of the winds. It was believed that if a person was sufficiently learned in the art of magic, he could summon and control these powers; make them do his bidding. It was only at the very end of the Middle Ages, and particularly in the Renaissance enlightenment, that animism lost its hold on men’s minds.

— The Wonderful World of Magic and Witchcraft, p. 2