III. End as of 1/18/96
A. Connection between metals and armies a good one, the eternal link of new technology with immediate survival--winning wars or conquering your neighbors.
B. The horse--quite literally, for the HEAVY artillery.
1. Discuss equine psychology,
2. Missile-firing chariots (c. 2,500 B.C.)
a) Homer's chariots (APC--carrying armored personnel)
b) Hittite Chariots (4/3)
c) Egyptian Chariots (2/2)
d) Scythed chariots
e) The REAL reason for Chariots. Explain "shock," shock fallacy.
C. Same relief from Lagash that shows the chariot shows the phalanx (explain and don't forget the geese!) it was meant to help destroy. Conclusion about training required sanguine.
D. Weapons stable: function vs. refinement--mention the Arisaka bayonet vs. the M-1.
E. Wealth and warfare: basic inequality. Mention the boars' tusk helmet, boars, and chariots again.
F. Basic equipment:
1. Shield, what it requires in tactics and training (drift to the right)
2. Spear vs. sword vs. axe
3. Mace vs. helmet
G. Fortifications, again. What's the glacis?
1. Ramparts
2. Towers and archery
3. Ditch
4. Gates and sally-ports
5. WELLS vs. aqueducts/ditches
6. How can a fortress win a battle?
a) Strategic asset (sometimes just time, usually access-- Correigidor)
b) The enemy HAS to get in--Ada in Caria, Vercingetorix at Alesia
H. War, the mother of all things:
1. Census (explain the origin of THAT)
2. Taxes to build walls, support standing army, buy goodies
3. Writing, for the palace/castle/FORTRESS accounts
4. Coercion: explain pour encourage les autres and poor old Sir John Byng at Majorca, 1769.
5. Logic:
a) LogistICS, or, how will we keep them well-fed enough to fight?
b) Strategy--Megiddo, c. 1590 B.C., column into line vs. enemy attack. Thutmose III followed Rice's axiom of How to Win a War: Never let the enemy controll your movements.
6. PEACE--when it's better for group survival NOT to fight.
IV. End as of 1/23/96
1 Aristotle's statement (now we analyze us! Birth of "Natural History," c. 367) "man is a polis animal"-- absolutely right, from the Mediterranean point of view.
A. Ardrey's fish experiment--territoriality; Machiavelli's confirmation in The Prince
B. People seem, even now, to have an "ideal community" mind-set--how much territory and how many people they with whom they can comfortably associate.
C. In Greece, these community/territories are called poleis, in Rome vici, urbes, oppida (and are taken on the road in the form of temporary or permanent castra), you've got the Phoenician cities, Sumer, Ur, Akkad, Babylon, the great Egyptian cities/palaces, as Mycene and Crete, and whenever a nomadic people start showing up in the historical record, you'll note that they've built a city (Gordion, Sardis, Susa, etc.)
D. As noted, cities permit division of labor and accumulation of goods--they also allow an attacker to bring up as much force as he can in an effort to attack it.
1. Classic Greek division between astu and chorea.
2. Smaller villages feed into larger series-- Mayberry/Raleigh, anyone?
E. Because they grow up where one form of transportation shifts to another, or is aided (Jericho's oasis), you can destroy the buildings and the people, but the city is very hard to kill. Troy, anyone?
2 Accordingly, you're going to get a mindset that today we'd call "provincial," rather than urbane. My city is the most important thing to me (do 'where from' experiment).
A. A 'cosmopolitan' outlook was that of someone who could feel about the world the way the rest of us felt about our city/community.
B. What, then, does this have to do with the Assyrians and our central topics of war and peace?
C. Almost everything.
1. Remember what I said about angst--a critter needs security to live.
a) We don't actually exterminate the species we're wiping out with urban sprawl, etc. We just deprive them of what they need to live and breed, among which security.
b) Cleveland Amory and the Florida deer--killed them by stress trying to save them.
c) Again, the Tasmanians--O, Brave New World!
d) Even nomads need places to shelter and breed their flocks and themselves--and that's when they're vulnerable. Should I mention the execrable Wayland Drew? Probably.
2. You can defend a city, or lose everything you have when one falls.
a) Again, the Iliad
b) Jerusalem, anyone? How much of the Old Testament is concerned with the attacking or defending of that particular fortress?
c) Fires in Rome, enduring legends
d) The historian who broke into poetry while discussing the fall of one city--and read your Polybius carefully. What's going on when the battles aren't?
3. As the Ainias Tacticus will make abundantly clear, one of the big problems faced by intellectuals was keeping one's city alive to preserve that security.
D. And, how do the conquering nations--The Egyptians, Hyksos, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, etc. build those empires?
1. They took over the walled cities--the transportation centers, supliers of services and manufactured goods, and used them for their own purposes.
2. Facing nomads, they burned their villages, killed their flocks, and slaughtered their flocks.
3. That's basically our subject--war and peace, and how they were made and mattered to the people of our period.
4. Brief but important statement: Military history is social history--what we study affected EVERYBODY, all classes, all incomes.
3 The Assyrian came down...
A. The Assyrians moved fast and in overwhelming force against their tactics--Caesar's celeritas and Bedford Ft. Pillow Forrest's "fustest with the mostest men." Note that a great many of these axioms, but not quite all of them, don't change with time.
B. Full exploitation of availible technology"
1. Hyksos horses--advanced cavalry and special organization to draft and catalogue horses for military uses.
2. Iron weapons--advantage? Mass production! T-34 vs. Tiger.
3. Road network, administration to keep the army supplied with men, weapons,and food.
4. Intelligence--p. 40. What today we call C3-- command, control, and communication.
5. Not to mention the urban equivalent of the can- opener
a) Two improved models of siege-tower/cum battering rams--Ferril's relief of the douser.
b) The famous curved wicker shield
c) The escalade--never turn your back on a large number of men with ladders.
C. Understanding (horrid though it was) of pyschological warfare
1. The stela (read text from Ferril, p.69).
2. The horrible example (Ferril, p. 68!) Hard to keep a good city site down, as noted.
3. Promises of mercy--sometimes you got it
D. Failure of one important point: don't scare people so much that they make everything else subordinate to your destruction--Nineveh destroyed by Medes and Babylonians in 612.
4 Not too much to ask--what's this about Timoleon, d. 334. Answer: It's all urban, isn't it?
A. One of the most powerful and important tyrannies had grown up and died within the walls of Syracuse (founded 745), that of Dionyius I, of whom we will have much to say c. 2/20. MENTION ABOUT CORRECTED SYLLABUS
B. Without the tyrant, there had been a series of coups (Dion's, then Callipus's) and counter-coups, with Dionysius II trying to get back in and get even...
V. End as of 1/25/96