#herodotus — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #herodotus, aggregated by home.social.
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There's a bit in Herodotus' book where he describes Xerxes weeping because everyone in his great army will be dead in a hundred years time. Taken on its own you might think how sensitive he is, but a few pages earlier he had someone he had never met cut in half to make a point to someone else.
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I did not expect to actually enjoy reading #Herodotus #Histories so much.
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The Law of War in Ancient Greece: Ideals and Their Failure in Practice
War was common in ancient Greece, but there were some customary laws to curtail the destruction. Credit: mharrsch.…
#Greece #GR #Europe #Europa #EU #AncientGreece #Athens #Evergreen #greece #Herodotus #PeloponnesianWar #sparta #Thucydides #Ελλάδα #νεα
https://www.europesays.com/2853491/ -
Father of History and Father of Lies
https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1856753/father-of-history-and-father-of-lies
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So Mossad and Saudis joined forced to run a psy-op on POTUS to light up Persia?
This #TomClancy remix of #Herodotus is wild af.
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Noumenia: The New Moon Day Was the Holiest in Ancient Greece
Ancient Greeks celebrated the new moon calling it Noumenia. Credit: Carl Young CC BY-SA-4.0 In Ancient Greece, Noumenia,…
#Greece #GR #Europe #Europa #EU #Acrópolis #Aristophanes #Evergreen #greece #Herodotus #Noumenia #Plutarch #Ελλάδα #νεα
https://www.europesays.com/2745224/ -
Noumenia: The New Moon Day Was the Holiest in Ancient Greece https://www.byteseu.com/1761423/ #acropolis #Aristophanes #Evergreen #Greece #Herodotus #Noumenia #Plutarch
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https://theconversation.com/authoritarian-rulers-arent-new-heres-what-herodotus-an-early-greek-historian-wrote-about-them-259127 #Authoritarian rulers aren’t new – here’s what #Herodotus, an early Greek historian, wrote about them
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AO THROWBACK - Herodotus describes the Scythians living in the area north of the Black Sea about three thousand years ago. https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/tattooed-scythian-warriors-descendants-amazons-part-one-001155
#archaeology #ancient #history #AncientOrigins #historymatters #historylovers #historyfacts #mythology #Scythians #Herodotus #BlackSea
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[Thread] So, my "homework" assignment has to do with #Amazons -- one of my favorite topics to focus on (since I was 11 years old). I was recently gifted a new book about Amazons, and also had one that I picked up for myself years ago, but hadn't gotten around to reading yet. The books are: "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across The Ancient World" by Adrienne Mayor (2014), and "Amazons: The History Behind the Legend" by David Braund. Both of them are Classics scholars, but they seem to have completely different takes on Amazons (from what I've read in the reviews). And yes, I am planning on diving into both books, but first, I'm going to work on my own translations of certain passages in #TheIlliad and #Herodotus' "Histories"!
#Classics #Histodon #AncientGreece #BronzeAge #WarriorWomen #AncientHistory #WomenInTheAncientWorld
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Recently found this copy of The Histories by Herodotus at Goodwill. I love thrift stores and buying secondhand. 😃📚 I should start reading it... :blobcatread:
#thrifting #books #bookstodon #history #herodotus #reading #Photography
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“Herodotus went HARD”, archeologists say.
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The horse in the grave, or: Where did (later) #Scythian #burial tradition (most prominently described by #Herodotus) originate? 🐴🏺
Huge congrats on some really exciting research! 👏
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/2800-year-old-burial-mound-with-sacrifices-unearthed-in-siberia-is-eerily-similar-to-scythian-graves via @LiveScience
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The Greek historian #Herodotus wrote, "There is nothing in the world that travels faster than these Persian couriers." Herodotus's praise for these messengers— "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"— was inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York and is sometimes thought of as the United States Postal Service creed.
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#LaconicPhrase
#Spartan
#humor
#Wiki#Herodotus: "When the banished Samians reached Sparta, they…made a long speech, … greatly in want of aid. …the Spartans averred that they could no longer remember the first half of their speech, and thus could make nothing of the remainder. Afterwards the Samians … simply said, showing a bag which they had brought with them, 'The bag wants flour.' The Spartans answered that they did not need to have said 'the bag'; however, they resolved to give them aid."
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#LaconicPhrase
#Spartan
#humor
#Wiki#Herodotus: "When the banished Samians reached Sparta, they…made a long speech, … greatly in want of aid. …the Spartans averred that they could no longer remember the first half of their speech, and thus could make nothing of the remainder. Afterwards the Samians … simply said, showing a bag which they had brought with them, 'The bag wants flour.' The Spartans answered that they did not need to have said 'the bag'; however, they resolved to give them aid."
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#LaconicPhrase
#Spartan
#humor
#Wiki#Herodotus: "When the banished Samians reached Sparta, they…made a long speech, … greatly in want of aid. …the Spartans averred that they could no longer remember the first half of their speech, and thus could make nothing of the remainder. Afterwards the Samians … simply said, showing a bag which they had brought with them, 'The bag wants flour.' The Spartans answered that they did not need to have said 'the bag'; however, they resolved to give them aid."
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#LaconicPhrase
#Spartan
#humor
#Wiki#Herodotus: "When the banished Samians reached Sparta, they…made a long speech, … greatly in want of aid. …the Spartans averred that they could no longer remember the first half of their speech, and thus could make nothing of the remainder. Afterwards the Samians … simply said, showing a bag which they had brought with them, 'The bag wants flour.' The Spartans answered that they did not need to have said 'the bag'; however, they resolved to give them aid."
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#LaconicPhrase
#Spartan
#humor
#Wiki#Herodotus: "When the banished Samians reached Sparta, they…made a long speech, … greatly in want of aid. …the Spartans averred that they could no longer remember the first half of their speech, and thus could make nothing of the remainder. Afterwards the Samians … simply said, showing a bag which they had brought with them, 'The bag wants flour.' The Spartans answered that they did not need to have said 'the bag'; however, they resolved to give them aid."
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Ancient Scythians used human skin for leather, confirming Herodotus' grisly claim
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StarkWare, Herodotus launch tech to verify data from any point in Ethereum's history - Storage Proofs could prove useful for services like account recov... - https://cointelegraph.com/news/stark-ware-herodotus-launch-tech-to-verify-data-from-ethereum-blockchain #storageproof. #herodotus #starkware #zk-proof
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So who in @bookstodon world has read much in the way of #Greek classics? Any favourites, recommended translations, etc.? I've barely tried any but on a recommendation I recently bought the #Waterfield translation of #Herodotus and the #Lattimore version of #Thucydides. I'm slightly daunted but looking forward to getting stuck in! #bookstodon
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So who in @bookstodon world has read much in the way of #Greek classics? Any favourites, recommended translations, etc.? I've barely tried any but on a recommendation I recently bought the #Waterfield translation of #Herodotus and the #Lattimore version of #Thucydides. I'm slightly daunted but looking forward to getting stuck in! #bookstodon
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So who in @bookstodon world has read much in the way of #Greek classics? Any favourites, recommended translations, etc.? I've barely tried any but on a recommendation I recently bought the #Waterfield translation of #Herodotus and the #Lattimore version of #Thucydides. I'm slightly daunted but looking forward to getting stuck in! #bookstodon
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So who in @bookstodon world has read much in the way of #Greek classics? Any favourites, recommended translations, etc.? I've barely tried any but on a recommendation I recently bought the #Waterfield translation of #Herodotus and the #Lattimore version of #Thucydides. I'm slightly daunted but looking forward to getting stuck in! #bookstodon
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So who in @bookstodon world has read much in the way of #Greek classics? Any favourites, recommended translations, etc.? I've barely tried any but on a recommendation I recently bought the #Waterfield translation of #Herodotus and the #Lattimore version of #Thucydides. I'm slightly daunted but looking forward to getting stuck in! #bookstodon
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τὰ δὲ μοι παθήματα ἐόντα ἀχάριτα μαθήματα γέγονε
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/03/24/%cf%84%e1%bd%b0-%ce%b4%e1%bd%b2-%ce%bc%ce%bf%ce%b9-%cf%80%ce%b1%ce%b8%e1%bd%b5%ce%bc%ce%b1%cf%84%ce%b1-%ce%bc%ce%b1%ce%b8%e1%bd%b5%ce%bc%ce%b1%cf%84%ce%b1-%ce%b3%e1%bd%b3%ce%b3%ce%bf%ce%bd%ce%b5/Croesus, addressing Cyrus, says —
• τὰ δὲ μοι παθήματα ἐόντα ἀχάριτα μαθήματα γέγονε.
• My sufferings, though painful, have been my lessons.
— Herodotus • 1.207
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Tell me I'm wrong.
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My historical interests include #PlinyTheYounger, #Tacitus, #RomanHistory, #Classics, #Herodotus, #AmericanCivilWar, #Reconstruction, #UlyssesSGrant, #WWI, #WWII, #DwightDEisenhower, #MilitaryHistory, #MedicalHistory, #Memory, #Propaganda, #Memoirs, #Epistolography
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Herodotus Didn’t Say That, Eduard Meyer Did
When I walked along the breakwater at Bregenz, I did not meet any old drunks willing to tell me the town’s terrible secrets for a tot of Schnapps, but that is a different winter story.It has been too long since my last cheerful winter story, so on this Winter Solistice I will tell another.
Like the protagonist of a H.P. Lovecraft story, I came to Innsbruck to look for answers. The scholarship on Achaemenid armies in English was repetitive and fell apart at the first gentle question, but was there something more trustworthy in German? Duncan Head and Nicholas Sekunda cited all kinds of people who nobody else I was reading talked about. So I visited the wood-panelled Law Library reading room on the banks of a river named in a dead tongue, and borrowed an old copy of Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums from a librarian who seemed surprised to have visitors. The first edition of Meyer’s Geschichte was completed in 1902, the last revision was in 1965 a generation after his death. Meyer tried to integrate the history of early Greece into the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And when I came to the following passage, I realized that the horrors were deeper and older than I had thought:
Among the Persians both infantry and cavalry were armed with large bows and reed arrows, lances of about six feet long and small daggers carried in their belt. Although Darius boasts that the Persian lance had gone forth far, nevertheless the bow was the characteristic national weapon. The king carries it on monuments and coins, where he is portrayed as a warrior; the Persian youths learned to speak the truth, ride the horse, and shoot the bow.
It was the hail of arrows, with which they overshadowed the enemy, and the assault and energetic pursuit of the cavalry to which the Persians owed their victories over the lancers on horseback and the footmen of the Lydians and over the Babylonian army, which was in part only armed with lances and short weapons and also wore iron helmets. The combat between Persians and Greeks is a struggle between bow and lance … The Persians threw together great masses of people for war, but they did not understand how to properly use them. The separation of the horsemen, bowmen, and spear fighters into separate divisions dated back to Kyaxares (Hdt. I.103); but we do not know of a further organizational arrangement. The contingents of the individual nations and the Persian corps were arrayed for battle in large rectangles; in the center the king or the general took his position. The majority of the troops could not participate in the fighting and could only have effect through their mass. In great plains one sought to outflank the enemy and attack them in the flanks and rear, in narrower terrain the monstrous numbers became rather a hindrance and hemmed in the free deployment and movement of the core troops. The decision was achieved by the Persian and Saka horsemen and the bowmen of the infantry. In order to reinforce the attack one placed scythed chariots in front of the battle line, to throw the enemy squadrons into disorder and mow them down. A special type of troops was the camel riders composed of Arabs, who Kyros had used effectively against the Lydian horsemen in his battle against Kroesos.
There are three remarkable things about this passage. The first is that while at first it seems to be based on the classical literary sources, in fact it erases much of what they say and adds things which are not in any ancient writer. No ancient text says that the Persians relied on archers and cavalry, that Babylonian infantry were mostly spearmen, or that the Persians tried to outflank and encircle their enemies more than other nations did. Both Herodotus and Xenophon suggest that the Persians of Cyrus were not particularly good horsemen: Herodotus’ Cyrus needed to use a trick to defeat the Lydian horsemen, and Xenophon’s Cyrus has his big men learn to fight on horseback like the Medes. I can’t think of anything in the ancient sources like the French charge at Courtrai or Marshal Ney’s charge at Waterloo where Persian cavalry rush forward after a preliminary bombardment by the rest of the army. Herodotus’ and Aeschylyus’ Persians don’t have scythed chariots or put the general in the centre of the line, and Xenophon’s and Arrian’s Persians do not have camel riders or lack hoplites. Meyer’s Persian army is not Herodotus’ Persian army, Xenophon’s Persian army, or Curtius’ Persian army. It is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, made by breaking up the classical sources into isolated ‘facts,’ choosing a few of them, and reassembling them according to the author’s vision. The result is impressive until you notice the sutures and start to smell the parts which were not chosen rotting in a back room.
The second remarkable thing is that nothing in this passage is based on indigenous sources, even though documents mentioning soldiers in Babylonia and Egypt were published during Eduard Meyer’s lifetime. It alludes to Darius’ tomb inscription at Naqš-e Rustam, to the Achaemenid ‘archer’ coins, and to the reliefs at Susa and Persepolis, but these are used to confirm ‘facts’ in the classical literary sources, not as independent sources of information. When Darius’ tomb inscription seems to contradict Herodotus and Aeschylus, Meyer tells his readers not to doubt the Greek authorities. Meyer does not believe that texts, artefacts, or artwork from the Achaemenid Empire show us any aspect of the army which classical writers do not mention or force us to reject any statement by those authors.
The third remarkable thing is that modern writer after modern writer says very similar things, whether they are in the habit of reading Wilhelmine German tomes or not. J.M. Cook in 1983 (English, an archaeologist by profession):
The Persian infantry’s normal procedure seems to have been to advance and set up their wicker shields as a hedge from behind which they fired their arrows into the enemy. When these were exhausted they engaged the foe in hand-to-hand fighting. Herodotus describes two battles which went to the second stage and were long drawn out- that of Cyrus with the Massagetai on the Jaxartes and Cambyses’ against the Egyptians at Pelousion. But usually the Persian infantry seems to have expected to make short work of an enemy who had already been harassed and softened up by cavalry and missiles.
Dandamayev and Lukonin 1989 (Soviet, Assyriological):
The combined operations of the cavalry and bowmen assured the Persians victory in many wars, and until the beginning of the Graeco-Persian wars there was no army that could withstand the Persian army. The bowmen would throw the ranks of the opponent into disarray, and after this the cavalry would annihilate them.
And I could go on and on as my hollow voice drilled into your brain like the wind off the Antarctic Plateau.
When I shut the volume in that grey winter I had learned a terrible truth. What looks like a consensus amongst experts is actually 100 years of writers repeating what their teachers and textbooks told them in the latest fashionable phrasing. The standard picture of how Persian armies fought falls apart under a few minutes of gentle questioning, but very few people have posed those questions in print. Much of what we tell ourselves about Persian armies comes from Eduard Meyer (or Michael Caine!) not Herodotus.
Help keep me reading books I should not be reading with a donation through Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Further Reading: Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4. Book, 1. Band Das Heerwesen http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/
This post is based on chapter 6 of my PhD thesis, Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire (2018), soon to be published with a European academic press.
Edit 2022-10-08: added link to the European academic press
#AchaemenidEmpire #ancient #EduardMeyer #Herodotus #researchHistory #whimsy -
Herodotus Didn’t Say That, Eduard Meyer Did
When I walked along the breakwater at Bregenz, I did not meet any old drunks willing to tell me the town’s terrible secrets for a tot of Schnapps, but that is a different winter story.It has been too long since my last cheerful winter story, so on this Winter Solistice I will tell another.
Like the protagonist of a H.P. Lovecraft story, I came to Innsbruck to look for answers. The scholarship on Achaemenid armies in English was repetitive and fell apart at the first gentle question, but was there something more trustworthy in German? Duncan Head and Nicholas Sekunda cited all kinds of people who nobody else I was reading talked about. So I visited the wood-panelled Law Library reading room on the banks of a river named in a dead tongue, and borrowed an old copy of Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums from a librarian who seemed surprised to have visitors. The first edition of Meyer’s Geschichte was completed in 1902, the last revision was in 1965 a generation after his death. Meyer tried to integrate the history of early Greece into the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And when I came to the following passage, I realized that the horrors were deeper and older than I had thought:
Among the Persians both infantry and cavalry were armed with large bows and reed arrows, lances of about six feet long and small daggers carried in their belt. Although Darius boasts that the Persian lance had gone forth far, nevertheless the bow was the characteristic national weapon. The king carries it on monuments and coins, where he is portrayed as a warrior; the Persian youths learned to speak the truth, ride the horse, and shoot the bow.
It was the hail of arrows, with which they overshadowed the enemy, and the assault and energetic pursuit of the cavalry to which the Persians owed their victories over the lancers on horseback and the footmen of the Lydians and over the Babylonian army, which was in part only armed with lances and short weapons and also wore iron helmets. The combat between Persians and Greeks is a struggle between bow and lance … The Persians threw together great masses of people for war, but they did not understand how to properly use them. The separation of the horsemen, bowmen, and spear fighters into separate divisions dated back to Kyaxares (Hdt. I.103); but we do not know of a further organizational arrangement. The contingents of the individual nations and the Persian corps were arrayed for battle in large rectangles; in the center the king or the general took his position. The majority of the troops could not participate in the fighting and could only have effect through their mass. In great plains one sought to outflank the enemy and attack them in the flanks and rear, in narrower terrain the monstrous numbers became rather a hindrance and hemmed in the free deployment and movement of the core troops. The decision was achieved by the Persian and Saka horsemen and the bowmen of the infantry. In order to reinforce the attack one placed scythed chariots in front of the battle line, to throw the enemy squadrons into disorder and mow them down. A special type of troops was the camel riders composed of Arabs, who Kyros had used effectively against the Lydian horsemen in his battle against Kroesos.
There are three remarkable things about this passage. The first is that while at first it seems to be based on the classical literary sources, in fact it erases much of what they say and adds things which are not in any ancient writer. No ancient text says that the Persians relied on archers and cavalry, that Babylonian infantry were mostly spearmen, or that the Persians tried to outflank and encircle their enemies more than other nations did. Both Herodotus and Xenophon suggest that the Persians of Cyrus were not particularly good horsemen: Herodotus’ Cyrus needed to use a trick to defeat the Lydian horsemen, and Xenophon’s Cyrus has his big men learn to fight on horseback like the Medes. I can’t think of anything in the ancient sources like the French charge at Courtrai or Marshal Ney’s charge at Waterloo where Persian cavalry rush forward after a preliminary bombardment by the rest of the army. Herodotus’ and Aeschylyus’ Persians don’t have scythed chariots or put the general in the centre of the line, and Xenophon’s and Arrian’s Persians do not have camel riders or lack hoplites. Meyer’s Persian army is not Herodotus’ Persian army, Xenophon’s Persian army, or Curtius’ Persian army. It is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, made by breaking up the classical sources into isolated ‘facts,’ choosing a few of them, and reassembling them according to the author’s vision. The result is impressive until you notice the sutures and start to smell the parts which were not chosen rotting in a back room.
The second remarkable thing is that nothing in this passage is based on indigenous sources, even though documents mentioning soldiers in Babylonia and Egypt were published during Eduard Meyer’s lifetime. It alludes to Darius’ tomb inscription at Naqš-e Rustam, to the Achaemenid ‘archer’ coins, and to the reliefs at Susa and Persepolis, but these are used to confirm ‘facts’ in the classical literary sources, not as independent sources of information. When Darius’ tomb inscription seems to contradict Herodotus and Aeschylus, Meyer tells his readers not to doubt the Greek authorities. Meyer does not believe that texts, artefacts, or artwork from the Achaemenid Empire show us any aspect of the army which classical writers do not mention or force us to reject any statement by those authors.
The third remarkable thing is that modern writer after modern writer says very similar things, whether they are in the habit of reading Wilhelmine German tomes or not. J.M. Cook in 1983 (English, an archaeologist by profession):
The Persian infantry’s normal procedure seems to have been to advance and set up their wicker shields as a hedge from behind which they fired their arrows into the enemy. When these were exhausted they engaged the foe in hand-to-hand fighting. Herodotus describes two battles which went to the second stage and were long drawn out- that of Cyrus with the Massagetai on the Jaxartes and Cambyses’ against the Egyptians at Pelousion. But usually the Persian infantry seems to have expected to make short work of an enemy who had already been harassed and softened up by cavalry and missiles.
Dandamayev and Lukonin 1989 (Soviet, Assyriological):
The combined operations of the cavalry and bowmen assured the Persians victory in many wars, and until the beginning of the Graeco-Persian wars there was no army that could withstand the Persian army. The bowmen would throw the ranks of the opponent into disarray, and after this the cavalry would annihilate them.
And I could go on and on as my hollow voice drilled into your brain like the wind off the Antarctic Plateau.
When I shut the volume in that grey winter I had learned a terrible truth. What looks like a consensus amongst experts is actually 100 years of writers repeating what their teachers and textbooks told them in the latest fashionable phrasing. The standard picture of how Persian armies fought falls apart under a few minutes of gentle questioning, but very few people have posed those questions in print. Much of what we tell ourselves about Persian armies comes from Eduard Meyer (or Michael Caine!) not Herodotus.
Help keep me reading books I should not be reading with a donation through Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Further Reading: Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4. Book, 1. Band Das Heerwesen http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/
This post is based on chapter 6 of my PhD thesis, Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire (2018), soon to be published with a European academic press.
Edit 2022-10-08: added link to the European academic press
#AchaemenidEmpire #ancient #EduardMeyer #Herodotus #researchHistory #whimsy -
Herodotus Didn’t Say That, Eduard Meyer Did
When I walked along the breakwater at Bregenz, I did not meet any old drunks willing to tell me the town’s terrible secrets for a tot of Schnapps, but that is a different winter story.It has been too long since my last cheerful winter story, so on this Winter Solistice I will tell another.
Like the protagonist of a H.P. Lovecraft story, I came to Innsbruck to look for answers. The scholarship on Achaemenid armies in English was repetitive and fell apart at the first gentle question, but was there something more trustworthy in German? Duncan Head and Nicholas Sekunda cited all kinds of people who nobody else I was reading talked about. So I visited the wood-panelled Law Library reading room on the banks of a river named in a dead tongue, and borrowed an old copy of Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums from a librarian who seemed surprised to have visitors. The first edition of Meyer’s Geschichte was completed in 1902, the last revision was in 1965 a generation after his death. Meyer tried to integrate the history of early Greece into the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And when I came to the following passage, I realized that the horrors were deeper and older than I had thought:
Among the Persians both infantry and cavalry were armed with large bows and reed arrows, lances of about six feet long and small daggers carried in their belt. Although Darius boasts that the Persian lance had gone forth far, nevertheless the bow was the characteristic national weapon. The king carries it on monuments and coins, where he is portrayed as a warrior; the Persian youths learned to speak the truth, ride the horse, and shoot the bow.
It was the hail of arrows, with which they overshadowed the enemy, and the assault and energetic pursuit of the cavalry to which the Persians owed their victories over the lancers on horseback and the footmen of the Lydians and over the Babylonian army, which was in part only armed with lances and short weapons and also wore iron helmets. The combat between Persians and Greeks is a struggle between bow and lance … The Persians threw together great masses of people for war, but they did not understand how to properly use them. The separation of the horsemen, bowmen, and spear fighters into separate divisions dated back to Kyaxares (Hdt. I.103); but we do not know of a further organizational arrangement. The contingents of the individual nations and the Persian corps were arrayed for battle in large rectangles; in the center the king or the general took his position. The majority of the troops could not participate in the fighting and could only have effect through their mass. In great plains one sought to outflank the enemy and attack them in the flanks and rear, in narrower terrain the monstrous numbers became rather a hindrance and hemmed in the free deployment and movement of the core troops. The decision was achieved by the Persian and Saka horsemen and the bowmen of the infantry. In order to reinforce the attack one placed scythed chariots in front of the battle line, to throw the enemy squadrons into disorder and mow them down. A special type of troops was the camel riders composed of Arabs, who Kyros had used effectively against the Lydian horsemen in his battle against Kroesos.
There are three remarkable things about this passage. The first is that while at first it seems to be based on the classical literary sources, in fact it erases much of what they say and adds things which are not in any ancient writer. No ancient text says that the Persians relied on archers and cavalry, that Babylonian infantry were mostly spearmen, or that the Persians tried to outflank and encircle their enemies more than other nations did. Both Herodotus and Xenophon suggest that the Persians of Cyrus were not particularly good horsemen: Herodotus’ Cyrus needed to use a trick to defeat the Lydian horsemen, and Xenophon’s Cyrus has his big men learn to fight on horseback like the Medes. I can’t think of anything in the ancient sources like the French charge at Courtrai or Marshal Ney’s charge at Waterloo where Persian cavalry rush forward after a preliminary bombardment by the rest of the army. Herodotus’ and Aeschylyus’ Persians don’t have scythed chariots or put the general in the centre of the line, and Xenophon’s and Arrian’s Persians do not have camel riders or lack hoplites. Meyer’s Persian army is not Herodotus’ Persian army, Xenophon’s Persian army, or Curtius’ Persian army. It is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, made by breaking up the classical sources into isolated ‘facts,’ choosing a few of them, and reassembling them according to the author’s vision. The result is impressive until you notice the sutures and start to smell the parts which were not chosen rotting in a back room.
The second remarkable thing is that nothing in this passage is based on indigenous sources, even though documents mentioning soldiers in Babylonia and Egypt were published during Eduard Meyer’s lifetime. It alludes to Darius’ tomb inscription at Naqš-e Rustam, to the Achaemenid ‘archer’ coins, and to the reliefs at Susa and Persepolis, but these are used to confirm ‘facts’ in the classical literary sources, not as independent sources of information. When Darius’ tomb inscription seems to contradict Herodotus and Aeschylus, Meyer tells his readers not to doubt the Greek authorities. Meyer does not believe that texts, artefacts, or artwork from the Achaemenid Empire show us any aspect of the army which classical writers do not mention or force us to reject any statement by those authors.
The third remarkable thing is that modern writer after modern writer says very similar things, whether they are in the habit of reading Wilhelmine German tomes or not. J.M. Cook in 1983 (English, an archaeologist by profession):
The Persian infantry’s normal procedure seems to have been to advance and set up their wicker shields as a hedge from behind which they fired their arrows into the enemy. When these were exhausted they engaged the foe in hand-to-hand fighting. Herodotus describes two battles which went to the second stage and were long drawn out- that of Cyrus with the Massagetai on the Jaxartes and Cambyses’ against the Egyptians at Pelousion. But usually the Persian infantry seems to have expected to make short work of an enemy who had already been harassed and softened up by cavalry and missiles.
Dandamayev and Lukonin 1989 (Soviet, Assyriological):
The combined operations of the cavalry and bowmen assured the Persians victory in many wars, and until the beginning of the Graeco-Persian wars there was no army that could withstand the Persian army. The bowmen would throw the ranks of the opponent into disarray, and after this the cavalry would annihilate them.
And I could go on and on as my hollow voice drilled into your brain like the wind off the Antarctic Plateau.
When I shut the volume in that grey winter I had learned a terrible truth. What looks like a consensus amongst experts is actually 100 years of writers repeating what their teachers and textbooks told them in the latest fashionable phrasing. The standard picture of how Persian armies fought falls apart under a few minutes of gentle questioning, but very few people have posed those questions in print. Much of what we tell ourselves about Persian armies comes from Eduard Meyer (or Michael Caine!) not Herodotus.
Help keep me reading books I should not be reading with a donation through Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Further Reading: Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4. Book, 1. Band Das Heerwesen http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/
This post is based on chapter 6 of my PhD thesis, Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire (2018), soon to be published with a European academic press.
Edit 2022-10-08: added link to the European academic press
#AchaemenidEmpire #ancient #EduardMeyer #Herodotus #researchHistory #whimsy -
Herodotus Didn’t Say That, Eduard Meyer Did
When I walked along the breakwater at Bregenz, I did not meet any old drunks willing to tell me the town’s terrible secrets for a tot of Schnapps, but that is a different winter story.It has been too long since my last cheerful winter story, so on this Winter Solistice I will tell another.
Like the protagonist of a H.P. Lovecraft story, I came to Innsbruck to look for answers. The scholarship on Achaemenid armies in English was repetitive and fell apart at the first gentle question, but was there something more trustworthy in German? Duncan Head and Nicholas Sekunda cited all kinds of people who nobody else I was reading talked about. So I visited the wood-panelled Law Library reading room on the banks of a river named in a dead tongue, and borrowed an old copy of Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des Altertums from a librarian who seemed surprised to have visitors. The first edition of Meyer’s Geschichte was completed in 1902, the last revision was in 1965 a generation after his death. Meyer tried to integrate the history of early Greece into the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And when I came to the following passage, I realized that the horrors were deeper and older than I had thought:
Among the Persians both infantry and cavalry were armed with large bows and reed arrows, lances of about six feet long and small daggers carried in their belt. Although Darius boasts that the Persian lance had gone forth far, nevertheless the bow was the characteristic national weapon. The king carries it on monuments and coins, where he is portrayed as a warrior; the Persian youths learned to speak the truth, ride the horse, and shoot the bow.
It was the hail of arrows, with which they overshadowed the enemy, and the assault and energetic pursuit of the cavalry to which the Persians owed their victories over the lancers on horseback and the footmen of the Lydians and over the Babylonian army, which was in part only armed with lances and short weapons and also wore iron helmets. The combat between Persians and Greeks is a struggle between bow and lance … The Persians threw together great masses of people for war, but they did not understand how to properly use them. The separation of the horsemen, bowmen, and spear fighters into separate divisions dated back to Kyaxares (Hdt. I.103); but we do not know of a further organizational arrangement. The contingents of the individual nations and the Persian corps were arrayed for battle in large rectangles; in the center the king or the general took his position. The majority of the troops could not participate in the fighting and could only have effect through their mass. In great plains one sought to outflank the enemy and attack them in the flanks and rear, in narrower terrain the monstrous numbers became rather a hindrance and hemmed in the free deployment and movement of the core troops. The decision was achieved by the Persian and Saka horsemen and the bowmen of the infantry. In order to reinforce the attack one placed scythed chariots in front of the battle line, to throw the enemy squadrons into disorder and mow them down. A special type of troops was the camel riders composed of Arabs, who Kyros had used effectively against the Lydian horsemen in his battle against Kroesos.
There are three remarkable things about this passage. The first is that while at first it seems to be based on the classical literary sources, in fact it erases much of what they say and adds things which are not in any ancient writer. No ancient text says that the Persians relied on archers and cavalry, that Babylonian infantry were mostly spearmen, or that the Persians tried to outflank and encircle their enemies more than other nations did. Both Herodotus and Xenophon suggest that the Persians of Cyrus were not particularly good horsemen: Herodotus’ Cyrus needed to use a trick to defeat the Lydian horsemen, and Xenophon’s Cyrus has his big men learn to fight on horseback like the Medes. I can’t think of anything in the ancient sources like the French charge at Courtrai or Marshal Ney’s charge at Waterloo where Persian cavalry rush forward after a preliminary bombardment by the rest of the army. Herodotus’ and Aeschylyus’ Persians don’t have scythed chariots or put the general in the centre of the line, and Xenophon’s and Arrian’s Persians do not have camel riders or lack hoplites. Meyer’s Persian army is not Herodotus’ Persian army, Xenophon’s Persian army, or Curtius’ Persian army. It is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, made by breaking up the classical sources into isolated ‘facts,’ choosing a few of them, and reassembling them according to the author’s vision. The result is impressive until you notice the sutures and start to smell the parts which were not chosen rotting in a back room.
The second remarkable thing is that nothing in this passage is based on indigenous sources, even though documents mentioning soldiers in Babylonia and Egypt were published during Eduard Meyer’s lifetime. It alludes to Darius’ tomb inscription at Naqš-e Rustam, to the Achaemenid ‘archer’ coins, and to the reliefs at Susa and Persepolis, but these are used to confirm ‘facts’ in the classical literary sources, not as independent sources of information. When Darius’ tomb inscription seems to contradict Herodotus and Aeschylus, Meyer tells his readers not to doubt the Greek authorities. Meyer does not believe that texts, artefacts, or artwork from the Achaemenid Empire show us any aspect of the army which classical writers do not mention or force us to reject any statement by those authors.
The third remarkable thing is that modern writer after modern writer says very similar things, whether they are in the habit of reading Wilhelmine German tomes or not. J.M. Cook in 1983 (English, an archaeologist by profession):
The Persian infantry’s normal procedure seems to have been to advance and set up their wicker shields as a hedge from behind which they fired their arrows into the enemy. When these were exhausted they engaged the foe in hand-to-hand fighting. Herodotus describes two battles which went to the second stage and were long drawn out- that of Cyrus with the Massagetai on the Jaxartes and Cambyses’ against the Egyptians at Pelousion. But usually the Persian infantry seems to have expected to make short work of an enemy who had already been harassed and softened up by cavalry and missiles.
Dandamayev and Lukonin 1989 (Soviet, Assyriological):
The combined operations of the cavalry and bowmen assured the Persians victory in many wars, and until the beginning of the Graeco-Persian wars there was no army that could withstand the Persian army. The bowmen would throw the ranks of the opponent into disarray, and after this the cavalry would annihilate them.
And I could go on and on as my hollow voice drilled into your brain like the wind off the Antarctic Plateau.
When I shut the volume in that grey winter I had learned a terrible truth. What looks like a consensus amongst experts is actually 100 years of writers repeating what their teachers and textbooks told them in the latest fashionable phrasing. The standard picture of how Persian armies fought falls apart under a few minutes of gentle questioning, but very few people have posed those questions in print. Much of what we tell ourselves about Persian armies comes from Eduard Meyer (or Michael Caine!) not Herodotus.
Help keep me reading books I should not be reading with a donation through Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Further Reading: Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4. Book, 1. Band Das Heerwesen http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/
This post is based on chapter 6 of my PhD thesis, Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire (2018), soon to be published with a European academic press.
Edit 2022-10-08: added link to the European academic press
#AchaemenidEmpire #ancient #EduardMeyer #Herodotus #researchHistory #whimsy -
The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 1 Flooding and Water-waves
Two weeks ago we had a bible study in Newburry, Mons and Leefdaal, about The Great Flood and the floods in this world and time system.
Today we are going to look at more than just some floods or water rises which took place on this globe.
We are going to talk about more than ordinary high-water stages in which water overflowed its natural or artificial banks onto normally dry land, such as a river inundating its floodplain.
Gran Chaco floodplain (Encyc. Britannica)Throughout the ages there have always been several floods or periods where water streamed over land or bringing an overflow to fields. In such instances the water submerging the agricultural planes brought wellbeing of man, though inundation did also bring disasters or catastrophes to mankind.
Flooding having become part of man’s life, since his exclusion from the Garden of Eden. It can well be the four streams of the Royal Garden sometimes also had their waters deluged part of lands, but never to bring harm over the living beings. After the fall of man danger of flooding entered the life of human beings. Man also came to know the good of flooding and as such also made use of it, having also controlled floodings.
Recharting rivers caused uncontrolled floodings which caused several people to suffer.
Storms or excessive rainfall over brief periods of time as, for example, the floods of Paris (1658 and 1910), of Warsaw (1861 and 1964), of Frankfurt am Main (1854 and 1930), and of Rome (1530 and 1557) caused considerable damage and where in most cases uncontrollable.
A picture of the 2004 tsunami in Ao Nang, Krabi Province, Thailand.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Potentially disastrous floods may, however, also result from ice jams during the spring rise, as in the case of the Danube (1342, 1402, 1501, and 1830) and of the Neva (in the Soviet Union, 1824); from storm tides such as those of 1099 and 1953 that flooded the coasts of England, Belgium, and The Netherlands; and from tsunamis or water waves, the mountainous sea waves caused by earthquakes, as in Lisbon, Portugal in 7000–6000 BCE, 60 BCE, 1531 CE and in 1755, the Storegga Slide ≈6225–6170 BCE. For the Common Era the earliest recorded tsunami was during the Persian siege of the sea town Potidaea, Greece. The Greek historian Herodotus reports how the Persian attackers who tried to exploit an unusual retreat of the water were suddenly surprised by “a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before”. Herodotus attributes the cause of the sudden flood to the wrath of Poseidon. The Greek historian Thucydides (3.89.1–6) also describes how a tsunami and a series of earthquakes affected the raging Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and, for the first time in the history of natural science, associated quakes with waves in terms of cause and effect. Hawaii (Hilo, 1946),the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, killing 230,000–280,000 people in 14 countries, and inundating coastal communities with waves up to 30 metres (100 ft) high being one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. The 2009 Samoa earthquake and tsunami, bringing damage to American Samoa, Samoa and Tonga (Niuatoputapu) where more than 189 people were killed, especially children, most of them in Samoa. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami with the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have hit Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900. Japan really had already a big portion of tsunamis, being hit in 684 CE (Hakuhō Nankai earthquake), 869 (Jogan Sanriku earthquake), 887 (Ninna Nankai earthquake), 1293 (Kamakura earthquake), 1361 (Shōhei Nankai earthquake), 1498 (Nankai earthquake), 1605 (Nankai earthquake), 1707 (Hōei earthquake), 1741 western side of Oshima Peninsula, Ezo (Hokkaido) hit by a tsunami associated with the eruption of the volcano on Oshima Ōshima island, 1771 (Great Yaeyama Tsunami), 1792 (Unzen earthquake and tsunami), 1854 Ansei great earthquakes with 80,000–100,000 deaths, 1855 Edo (Tokyo) region Ansei Edo earthquake, 1896 Sanriku earthquake also hit in 2005, 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, 1933 Sanriku earthquake, 1944 Tōnankai earthquake, 1946 Nankai earthquake, 1964 Niigata earthquake, 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
Marina Beach i Chennai efter den första tsunami vågen den 26 december 2004. Fotograferad av Henryk Kotowski. GFDL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Floods can be measured for height, peak discharge, area inundated, and volume of flow. These factors are important to judicious land use, construction of bridges and dams, and prediction and control of floods.
The floods of an individual stream are often highly variable from month to month and year to year. A particularly striking example of this variability is the flash flood, a sudden, unexpected torrent of muddy and turbulent water rushing down a canyon or gulch. It is uncommon, of relatively brief duration, and generally the result of summer thunderstorms in mountains. A flash flood can take place in a single tributary while the rest of the drainage basin remains dry. The suddenness of its occurrence causes a flash flood to be extremely dangerous.
A village near the coast of Sumatra lies in ruin on January 2, 2005 after the devastating Tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)A flood of such magnitude that it might be expected to occur only once in 100 years is called a 100-year flood. The magnitudes of 100-, 500-, and 1,000-year floods are calculated by extrapolating existing records of stream flow, and the results are used in the design engineering of many water resources projects, including dams and reservoirs, and other structures that may be affected by catastrophic floods.
A landslide of 120,000,000 tonnes of rock, much of which displaced water from Lake Lauerz causing a tsunami that flooded lake side villages and resulted in the confirmed death of 457 people at the 1806 Goldau landslide.
The powerful typhoon Emma (1956), one of several typhoons to cause significant damage to Okinawa during the mid-1950s, brought 140 mph (230 km/h) winds and 22 inches (560 mm) of rain to Okinawa (then US territory of the Ryukyu Islands) and South Korea.
Snake Gorge, also called Wadi Bimah, a gorge or wadi in the Ad Dakhiliyah Region of Oma, presented also its water rising bringing people in danger (1996, 2006, 2014).
Flood radar for May 2004 Caribbean floods (Photo credit: Wikipedia)+
Preceding:
To be continued with: The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 2 Mythic theme 1 God or gods warning
++
Additional reading
- Certainty in a troubled world
- Reacting to Disasters
- Weekly World Watch 24th – 30th Oct 2010
- Syrian capital facing total destruction in the coming months
- Newsweek asks: How ignorant are you?
- We are ourselves responsible
+++
Related articles
Rate this:
#AdDakhiliyahRegionOfOma #AncientGreece #Belgium #Catastrophes #Earthquake #England #FlashFlood #Flooding #Floodplain #FloodsOrWaterRises #France #GardenOfEden #Germany #GoldauLandslide #Greece #Herodotus #IceJamsOrIceDams #India #IndianOceanEarthquake #Inundation #Italy #Japan #Landslide #Nankai #Netherlands #Okinawa #PeloponnesianWar #PersianEmpire #Portugal #Poseidon #Rainfall #RechartingRivers #RoyalGarden #RyukyuIslands #Samoa #SouthKorea #SovietUnion #SriLanka #Storms #Thailand #Thucydides #TongaNiuatoputapu_ #Tsunami #TyphoonEmma1956_ #Water
-
The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 1 Flooding and Water-waves
Two weeks ago we had a bible study in Newburry, Mons and Leefdaal, about The Great Flood and the floods in this world and time system.
Today we are going to look at more than just some floods or water rises which took place on this globe.
We are going to talk about more than ordinary high-water stages in which water overflowed its natural or artificial banks onto normally dry land, such as a river inundating its floodplain.
Gran Chaco floodplain (Encyc. Britannica)Throughout the ages there have always been several floods or periods where water streamed over land or bringing an overflow to fields. In such instances the water submerging the agricultural planes brought wellbeing of man, though inundation did also bring disasters or catastrophes to mankind.
Flooding having become part of man’s life, since his exclusion from the Garden of Eden. It can well be the four streams of the Royal Garden sometimes also had their waters deluged part of lands, but never to bring harm over the living beings. After the fall of man danger of flooding entered the life of human beings. Man also came to know the good of flooding and as such also made use of it, having also controlled floodings.
Recharting rivers caused uncontrolled floodings which caused several people to suffer.
Storms or excessive rainfall over brief periods of time as, for example, the floods of Paris (1658 and 1910), of Warsaw (1861 and 1964), of Frankfurt am Main (1854 and 1930), and of Rome (1530 and 1557) caused considerable damage and where in most cases uncontrollable.
A picture of the 2004 tsunami in Ao Nang, Krabi Province, Thailand.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Potentially disastrous floods may, however, also result from ice jams during the spring rise, as in the case of the Danube (1342, 1402, 1501, and 1830) and of the Neva (in the Soviet Union, 1824); from storm tides such as those of 1099 and 1953 that flooded the coasts of England, Belgium, and The Netherlands; and from tsunamis or water waves, the mountainous sea waves caused by earthquakes, as in Lisbon, Portugal in 7000–6000 BCE, 60 BCE, 1531 CE and in 1755, the Storegga Slide ≈6225–6170 BCE. For the Common Era the earliest recorded tsunami was during the Persian siege of the sea town Potidaea, Greece. The Greek historian Herodotus reports how the Persian attackers who tried to exploit an unusual retreat of the water were suddenly surprised by “a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before”. Herodotus attributes the cause of the sudden flood to the wrath of Poseidon. The Greek historian Thucydides (3.89.1–6) also describes how a tsunami and a series of earthquakes affected the raging Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and, for the first time in the history of natural science, associated quakes with waves in terms of cause and effect. Hawaii (Hilo, 1946),the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, killing 230,000–280,000 people in 14 countries, and inundating coastal communities with waves up to 30 metres (100 ft) high being one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. The 2009 Samoa earthquake and tsunami, bringing damage to American Samoa, Samoa and Tonga (Niuatoputapu) where more than 189 people were killed, especially children, most of them in Samoa. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami with the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have hit Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900. Japan really had already a big portion of tsunamis, being hit in 684 CE (Hakuhō Nankai earthquake), 869 (Jogan Sanriku earthquake), 887 (Ninna Nankai earthquake), 1293 (Kamakura earthquake), 1361 (Shōhei Nankai earthquake), 1498 (Nankai earthquake), 1605 (Nankai earthquake), 1707 (Hōei earthquake), 1741 western side of Oshima Peninsula, Ezo (Hokkaido) hit by a tsunami associated with the eruption of the volcano on Oshima Ōshima island, 1771 (Great Yaeyama Tsunami), 1792 (Unzen earthquake and tsunami), 1854 Ansei great earthquakes with 80,000–100,000 deaths, 1855 Edo (Tokyo) region Ansei Edo earthquake, 1896 Sanriku earthquake also hit in 2005, 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, 1933 Sanriku earthquake, 1944 Tōnankai earthquake, 1946 Nankai earthquake, 1964 Niigata earthquake, 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
Marina Beach i Chennai efter den första tsunami vågen den 26 december 2004. Fotograferad av Henryk Kotowski. GFDL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Floods can be measured for height, peak discharge, area inundated, and volume of flow. These factors are important to judicious land use, construction of bridges and dams, and prediction and control of floods.
The floods of an individual stream are often highly variable from month to month and year to year. A particularly striking example of this variability is the flash flood, a sudden, unexpected torrent of muddy and turbulent water rushing down a canyon or gulch. It is uncommon, of relatively brief duration, and generally the result of summer thunderstorms in mountains. A flash flood can take place in a single tributary while the rest of the drainage basin remains dry. The suddenness of its occurrence causes a flash flood to be extremely dangerous.
A village near the coast of Sumatra lies in ruin on January 2, 2005 after the devastating Tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)A flood of such magnitude that it might be expected to occur only once in 100 years is called a 100-year flood. The magnitudes of 100-, 500-, and 1,000-year floods are calculated by extrapolating existing records of stream flow, and the results are used in the design engineering of many water resources projects, including dams and reservoirs, and other structures that may be affected by catastrophic floods.
A landslide of 120,000,000 tonnes of rock, much of which displaced water from Lake Lauerz causing a tsunami that flooded lake side villages and resulted in the confirmed death of 457 people at the 1806 Goldau landslide.
The powerful typhoon Emma (1956), one of several typhoons to cause significant damage to Okinawa during the mid-1950s, brought 140 mph (230 km/h) winds and 22 inches (560 mm) of rain to Okinawa (then US territory of the Ryukyu Islands) and South Korea.
Snake Gorge, also called Wadi Bimah, a gorge or wadi in the Ad Dakhiliyah Region of Oma, presented also its water rising bringing people in danger (1996, 2006, 2014).
Flood radar for May 2004 Caribbean floods (Photo credit: Wikipedia)+
Preceding:
To be continued with: The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 2 Mythic theme 1 God or gods warning
++
Additional reading
- Certainty in a troubled world
- Reacting to Disasters
- Weekly World Watch 24th – 30th Oct 2010
- Syrian capital facing total destruction in the coming months
- Newsweek asks: How ignorant are you?
- We are ourselves responsible
+++
Related articles
Rate this:
#AdDakhiliyahRegionOfOma #AncientGreece #Belgium #Catastrophes #Earthquake #England #FlashFlood #Flooding #Floodplain #FloodsOrWaterRises #France #GardenOfEden #Germany #GoldauLandslide #Greece #Herodotus #IceJamsOrIceDams #India #IndianOceanEarthquake #Inundation #Italy #Japan #Landslide #Nankai #Netherlands #Okinawa #PeloponnesianWar #PersianEmpire #Portugal #Poseidon #Rainfall #RechartingRivers #RoyalGarden #RyukyuIslands #Samoa #SouthKorea #SovietUnion #SriLanka #Storms #Thailand #Thucydides #TongaNiuatoputapu_ #Tsunami #TyphoonEmma1956_ #Water
-
The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 1 Flooding and Water-waves
Two weeks ago we had a bible study in Newburry, Mons and Leefdaal, about The Great Flood and the floods in this world and time system.
Today we are going to look at more than just some floods or water rises which took place on this globe.
We are going to talk about more than ordinary high-water stages in which water overflowed its natural or artificial banks onto normally dry land, such as a river inundating its floodplain.
Gran Chaco floodplain (Encyc. Britannica)Throughout the ages there have always been several floods or periods where water streamed over land or bringing an overflow to fields. In such instances the water submerging the agricultural planes brought wellbeing of man, though inundation did also bring disasters or catastrophes to mankind.
Flooding having become part of man’s life, since his exclusion from the Garden of Eden. It can well be the four streams of the Royal Garden sometimes also had their waters deluged part of lands, but never to bring harm over the living beings. After the fall of man danger of flooding entered the life of human beings. Man also came to know the good of flooding and as such also made use of it, having also controlled floodings.
Recharting rivers caused uncontrolled floodings which caused several people to suffer.
Storms or excessive rainfall over brief periods of time as, for example, the floods of Paris (1658 and 1910), of Warsaw (1861 and 1964), of Frankfurt am Main (1854 and 1930), and of Rome (1530 and 1557) caused considerable damage and where in most cases uncontrollable.
A picture of the 2004 tsunami in Ao Nang, Krabi Province, Thailand.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Potentially disastrous floods may, however, also result from ice jams during the spring rise, as in the case of the Danube (1342, 1402, 1501, and 1830) and of the Neva (in the Soviet Union, 1824); from storm tides such as those of 1099 and 1953 that flooded the coasts of England, Belgium, and The Netherlands; and from tsunamis or water waves, the mountainous sea waves caused by earthquakes, as in Lisbon, Portugal in 7000–6000 BCE, 60 BCE, 1531 CE and in 1755, the Storegga Slide ≈6225–6170 BCE. For the Common Era the earliest recorded tsunami was during the Persian siege of the sea town Potidaea, Greece. The Greek historian Herodotus reports how the Persian attackers who tried to exploit an unusual retreat of the water were suddenly surprised by “a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before”. Herodotus attributes the cause of the sudden flood to the wrath of Poseidon. The Greek historian Thucydides (3.89.1–6) also describes how a tsunami and a series of earthquakes affected the raging Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and, for the first time in the history of natural science, associated quakes with waves in terms of cause and effect. Hawaii (Hilo, 1946),the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, killing 230,000–280,000 people in 14 countries, and inundating coastal communities with waves up to 30 metres (100 ft) high being one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. The 2009 Samoa earthquake and tsunami, bringing damage to American Samoa, Samoa and Tonga (Niuatoputapu) where more than 189 people were killed, especially children, most of them in Samoa. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami with the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have hit Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900. Japan really had already a big portion of tsunamis, being hit in 684 CE (Hakuhō Nankai earthquake), 869 (Jogan Sanriku earthquake), 887 (Ninna Nankai earthquake), 1293 (Kamakura earthquake), 1361 (Shōhei Nankai earthquake), 1498 (Nankai earthquake), 1605 (Nankai earthquake), 1707 (Hōei earthquake), 1741 western side of Oshima Peninsula, Ezo (Hokkaido) hit by a tsunami associated with the eruption of the volcano on Oshima Ōshima island, 1771 (Great Yaeyama Tsunami), 1792 (Unzen earthquake and tsunami), 1854 Ansei great earthquakes with 80,000–100,000 deaths, 1855 Edo (Tokyo) region Ansei Edo earthquake, 1896 Sanriku earthquake also hit in 2005, 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, 1933 Sanriku earthquake, 1944 Tōnankai earthquake, 1946 Nankai earthquake, 1964 Niigata earthquake, 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
Marina Beach i Chennai efter den första tsunami vågen den 26 december 2004. Fotograferad av Henryk Kotowski. GFDL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Floods can be measured for height, peak discharge, area inundated, and volume of flow. These factors are important to judicious land use, construction of bridges and dams, and prediction and control of floods.
The floods of an individual stream are often highly variable from month to month and year to year. A particularly striking example of this variability is the flash flood, a sudden, unexpected torrent of muddy and turbulent water rushing down a canyon or gulch. It is uncommon, of relatively brief duration, and generally the result of summer thunderstorms in mountains. A flash flood can take place in a single tributary while the rest of the drainage basin remains dry. The suddenness of its occurrence causes a flash flood to be extremely dangerous.
A village near the coast of Sumatra lies in ruin on January 2, 2005 after the devastating Tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)A flood of such magnitude that it might be expected to occur only once in 100 years is called a 100-year flood. The magnitudes of 100-, 500-, and 1,000-year floods are calculated by extrapolating existing records of stream flow, and the results are used in the design engineering of many water resources projects, including dams and reservoirs, and other structures that may be affected by catastrophic floods.
A landslide of 120,000,000 tonnes of rock, much of which displaced water from Lake Lauerz causing a tsunami that flooded lake side villages and resulted in the confirmed death of 457 people at the 1806 Goldau landslide.
The powerful typhoon Emma (1956), one of several typhoons to cause significant damage to Okinawa during the mid-1950s, brought 140 mph (230 km/h) winds and 22 inches (560 mm) of rain to Okinawa (then US territory of the Ryukyu Islands) and South Korea.
Snake Gorge, also called Wadi Bimah, a gorge or wadi in the Ad Dakhiliyah Region of Oma, presented also its water rising bringing people in danger (1996, 2006, 2014).
Flood radar for May 2004 Caribbean floods (Photo credit: Wikipedia)+
Preceding:
To be continued with: The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 2 Mythic theme 1 God or gods warning
++
Additional reading
- Certainty in a troubled world
- Reacting to Disasters
- Weekly World Watch 24th – 30th Oct 2010
- Syrian capital facing total destruction in the coming months
- Newsweek asks: How ignorant are you?
- We are ourselves responsible
+++
Related articles
Rate this:
#AdDakhiliyahRegionOfOma #AncientGreece #Belgium #Catastrophes #Earthquake #England #FlashFlood #Flooding #Floodplain #FloodsOrWaterRises #France #GardenOfEden #Germany #GoldauLandslide #Greece #Herodotus #IceJamsOrIceDams #India #IndianOceanEarthquake #Inundation #Italy #Japan #Landslide #Nankai #Netherlands #Okinawa #PeloponnesianWar #PersianEmpire #Portugal #Poseidon #Rainfall #RechartingRivers #RoyalGarden #RyukyuIslands #Samoa #SouthKorea #SovietUnion #SriLanka #Storms #Thailand #Thucydides #TongaNiuatoputapu_ #Tsunami #TyphoonEmma1956_ #Water
-
The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 1 Flooding and Water-waves
Two weeks ago we had a bible study in Newburry, Mons and Leefdaal, about The Great Flood and the floods in this world and time system.
Today we are going to look at more than just some floods or water rises which took place on this globe.
We are going to talk about more than ordinary high-water stages in which water overflowed its natural or artificial banks onto normally dry land, such as a river inundating its floodplain.
Gran Chaco floodplain (Encyc. Britannica)Throughout the ages there have always been several floods or periods where water streamed over land or bringing an overflow to fields. In such instances the water submerging the agricultural planes brought wellbeing of man, though inundation did also bring disasters or catastrophes to mankind.
Flooding having become part of man’s life, since his exclusion from the Garden of Eden. It can well be the four streams of the Royal Garden sometimes also had their waters deluged part of lands, but never to bring harm over the living beings. After the fall of man danger of flooding entered the life of human beings. Man also came to know the good of flooding and as such also made use of it, having also controlled floodings.
Recharting rivers caused uncontrolled floodings which caused several people to suffer.
Storms or excessive rainfall over brief periods of time as, for example, the floods of Paris (1658 and 1910), of Warsaw (1861 and 1964), of Frankfurt am Main (1854 and 1930), and of Rome (1530 and 1557) caused considerable damage and where in most cases uncontrollable.
A picture of the 2004 tsunami in Ao Nang, Krabi Province, Thailand.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Potentially disastrous floods may, however, also result from ice jams during the spring rise, as in the case of the Danube (1342, 1402, 1501, and 1830) and of the Neva (in the Soviet Union, 1824); from storm tides such as those of 1099 and 1953 that flooded the coasts of England, Belgium, and The Netherlands; and from tsunamis or water waves, the mountainous sea waves caused by earthquakes, as in Lisbon, Portugal in 7000–6000 BCE, 60 BCE, 1531 CE and in 1755, the Storegga Slide ≈6225–6170 BCE. For the Common Era the earliest recorded tsunami was during the Persian siege of the sea town Potidaea, Greece. The Greek historian Herodotus reports how the Persian attackers who tried to exploit an unusual retreat of the water were suddenly surprised by “a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before”. Herodotus attributes the cause of the sudden flood to the wrath of Poseidon. The Greek historian Thucydides (3.89.1–6) also describes how a tsunami and a series of earthquakes affected the raging Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and, for the first time in the history of natural science, associated quakes with waves in terms of cause and effect. Hawaii (Hilo, 1946),the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, killing 230,000–280,000 people in 14 countries, and inundating coastal communities with waves up to 30 metres (100 ft) high being one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. The 2009 Samoa earthquake and tsunami, bringing damage to American Samoa, Samoa and Tonga (Niuatoputapu) where more than 189 people were killed, especially children, most of them in Samoa. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami with the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have hit Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900. Japan really had already a big portion of tsunamis, being hit in 684 CE (Hakuhō Nankai earthquake), 869 (Jogan Sanriku earthquake), 887 (Ninna Nankai earthquake), 1293 (Kamakura earthquake), 1361 (Shōhei Nankai earthquake), 1498 (Nankai earthquake), 1605 (Nankai earthquake), 1707 (Hōei earthquake), 1741 western side of Oshima Peninsula, Ezo (Hokkaido) hit by a tsunami associated with the eruption of the volcano on Oshima Ōshima island, 1771 (Great Yaeyama Tsunami), 1792 (Unzen earthquake and tsunami), 1854 Ansei great earthquakes with 80,000–100,000 deaths, 1855 Edo (Tokyo) region Ansei Edo earthquake, 1896 Sanriku earthquake also hit in 2005, 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, 1933 Sanriku earthquake, 1944 Tōnankai earthquake, 1946 Nankai earthquake, 1964 Niigata earthquake, 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
Marina Beach i Chennai efter den första tsunami vågen den 26 december 2004. Fotograferad av Henryk Kotowski. GFDL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Floods can be measured for height, peak discharge, area inundated, and volume of flow. These factors are important to judicious land use, construction of bridges and dams, and prediction and control of floods.
The floods of an individual stream are often highly variable from month to month and year to year. A particularly striking example of this variability is the flash flood, a sudden, unexpected torrent of muddy and turbulent water rushing down a canyon or gulch. It is uncommon, of relatively brief duration, and generally the result of summer thunderstorms in mountains. A flash flood can take place in a single tributary while the rest of the drainage basin remains dry. The suddenness of its occurrence causes a flash flood to be extremely dangerous.
A village near the coast of Sumatra lies in ruin on January 2, 2005 after the devastating Tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)A flood of such magnitude that it might be expected to occur only once in 100 years is called a 100-year flood. The magnitudes of 100-, 500-, and 1,000-year floods are calculated by extrapolating existing records of stream flow, and the results are used in the design engineering of many water resources projects, including dams and reservoirs, and other structures that may be affected by catastrophic floods.
A landslide of 120,000,000 tonnes of rock, much of which displaced water from Lake Lauerz causing a tsunami that flooded lake side villages and resulted in the confirmed death of 457 people at the 1806 Goldau landslide.
The powerful typhoon Emma (1956), one of several typhoons to cause significant damage to Okinawa during the mid-1950s, brought 140 mph (230 km/h) winds and 22 inches (560 mm) of rain to Okinawa (then US territory of the Ryukyu Islands) and South Korea.
Snake Gorge, also called Wadi Bimah, a gorge or wadi in the Ad Dakhiliyah Region of Oma, presented also its water rising bringing people in danger (1996, 2006, 2014).
Flood radar for May 2004 Caribbean floods (Photo credit: Wikipedia)+
Preceding:
To be continued with: The flood, floods and mythic flood stories 2 Mythic theme 1 God or gods warning
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Additional reading
- Certainty in a troubled world
- Reacting to Disasters
- Weekly World Watch 24th – 30th Oct 2010
- Syrian capital facing total destruction in the coming months
- Newsweek asks: How ignorant are you?
- We are ourselves responsible
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