Obsessed with the Tang Dynasty

[Justin Swanton]

For fun I tried AI, comparing a T'ang army and a Byzantine army of the 10th century. I got this. Input anyone?

The AI needs to up its "research" as the bow not the crossbow was the main missile weapon of the Tang infantry.

There's the problem with AI. It absolutely makes it up too often.

[Duncan Head]

For fun I tried AI, comparing a T'ang army and a Byzantine army of the 10th century. I got this. Input anyone?

You want David A Graff's The Eurasian Way of War. Military Practice in Seventh-Century China and Byzantium (2016), which is one of the sources the AI is drawing on. The two have a lot in common.

[Justin Swanton]

For fun I tried AI, comparing a T'ang army and a Byzantine army of the 10th century. I got this. Input anyone?

You want David A Graff's The Eurasian Way of War. Military Practice in Seventh-Century China and Byzantium (2016), which is one of the sources the AI is drawing on. The two have a lot in common.

....and? T'ang or Byzantium?

[Keraunos]

Personally, I think the T'ang would grossly outnumber any of the opponents you might be thinking of.  I mean, the side with the big battalions generally wins.   

The impression I get from my son (a graduate student of Chinese history with deep interest in military affairs) is that the Chinese records of military actions and the numbers involved in them are deeply unreliable and implausible.  Just because pre-modern China was a bigger, more populous place than most other powers did not mean that it was exempt from the same logistical limitations that constrained the size of armies that could be put into the field or the duration that they could be maintained once gathered.

[Justin Swanton]

Personally, I think the T'ang would grossly outnumber any of the opponents you might be thinking of.  I mean, the side with the big battalions generally wins.   

The impression I get from my son (a graduate student of Chinese history with deep interest in military affairs) is that the Chinese records of military actions and the numbers involved in them are deeply unreliable and implausible.  Just because pre-modern China was a bigger, more populous place than most other powers did not mean that it was exempt from the same logistical limitations that constrained the size of armies that could be put into the field or the duration that they could be maintained once gathered.

Which resurrects the Achaemenid Persian army debate (any takers?  ). Primary sources from China, India and the West all speak of really big armies (in the hundreds of thousands) and all are dismissed by modern scholars based purely on the assumption that armies in Antiquity travelled and were supplied like 19th century European armies, i.e. the armies travelled entirely by road and carried all their supplies with them. But if you look at the primary sources they make clear that large armies could be supplied by pre-prepared food dumps or by sea and that armies travelled cross-country, not by road. The limitations on their size imposed by contemporary scholars then disappear.

[stevenneate]

And I thought the Sui dynasty never fell, because I had the army in 15mm. Hell will freeze over before I acknowlege those Tang usurpers!

[Keraunos]

Personally, I think the T'ang would grossly outnumber any of the opponents you might be thinking of.  I mean, the side with the big battalions generally wins.   

The impression I get from my son (a graduate student of Chinese history with deep interest in military affairs) is that the Chinese records of military actions and the numbers involved in them are deeply unreliable and implausible.  Just because pre-modern China was a bigger, more populous place than most other powers did not mean that it was exempt from the same logistical limitations that constrained the size of armies that could be put into the field or the duration that they could be maintained once gathered.

Which resurrects the Achaemenid Persian army debate (any takers?  ). Primary sources from China, India and the West all speak of really big armies (in the hundreds of thousands) and all are dismissed by modern scholars based purely on the assumption that armies in Antiquity travelled and were supplied like 19th century European armies, i.e. the armies travelled entirely by road and carried all their supplies with them. But if you look at the primary sources they make clear that large armies could be supplied by pre-prepared food dumps or by sea and that armies travelled cross-country, not by road. The limitations on their size imposed by contemporary scholars then disappear.

My understanding is that modern scholars do not make assumptions that ancient armies travelled by a modern type of road network or were incapable of creating supply depots.  Rather, they are aware that, among other things, in the pre-modern age (i.e pre Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation and Mendel's opening of the doors to dramatic improvement in ability to select crops for improved yields) the surplus capacity of agricultural systems that could be drawn on by armies in a given region plus the peasants reserves that they could steal if needs be were not adequate to sustain the size of armies that ancient records claim to have been fielded with great regularity.  This is not to mention the literary tropes/subtle hints that encouraged ancient historians to increase the armies of their master's enemies much as modern fishermen increase the size of the fish they nearly caught.

[Justin Swanton]

Personally, I think the T'ang would grossly outnumber any of the opponents you might be thinking of.  I mean, the side with the big battalions generally wins.   

The impression I get from my son (a graduate student of Chinese history with deep interest in military affairs) is that the Chinese records of military actions and the numbers involved in them are deeply unreliable and implausible.  Just because pre-modern China was a bigger, more populous place than most other powers did not mean that it was exempt from the same logistical limitations that constrained the size of armies that could be put into the field or the duration that they could be maintained once gathered.

Which resurrects the Achaemenid Persian army debate (any takers?  ). Primary sources from China, India and the West all speak of really big armies (in the hundreds of thousands) and all are dismissed by modern scholars based purely on the assumption that armies in Antiquity travelled and were supplied like 19th century European armies, i.e. the armies travelled entirely by road and carried all their supplies with them. But if you look at the primary sources they make clear that large armies could be supplied by pre-prepared food dumps or by sea and that armies travelled cross-country, not by road. The limitations on their size imposed by contemporary scholars then disappear.

My understanding is that modern scholars do not make assumptions that ancient armies travelled by a modern type of road network or were incapable of creating supply depots.  Rather, they are aware that, among other things, in the pre-modern age (i.e pre Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation and Mendel's opening of the doors to dramatic improvement in ability to select crops for improved yields) the surplus capacity of agricultural systems that could be drawn on by armies in a given region plus the peasants reserves that they could steal if needs be were not adequate to sustain the size of armies that ancient records claim to have been fielded with great regularity.  This is not to mention the literary tropes/subtle hints that encouraged ancient historians to increase the armies of their master's enemies much as modern fishermen increase the size of the fish they nearly caught.

We covered this in the Persian monster thread (and somewhere else if I remember correctly). One needs to keep in mind that you don't need a huge surplus of crop production to support massive armies since the number of mouths the state had to feed was exactly the same during peace or wartime. What you needed to do was move the food to where it could supply a huge army on the march and we examined how that could be done (well, examined/scoffed at).

As regards literary exaggerations, that's true but not by orders of magnitude. If the real army size was, say 60 000 men, you might exaggerate it up to 100,000 but not to 1,000,000. That's no longer propaganda - it's stupidity. Furthermore historians in the past did show more concern for the facts than perhaps the moderns give them credit for. Especially someone like Herodotus who didn't really have a dog in the fight.

[Nick Harbud]

Just a slightly deranged,  off-topic thought...

...How does one write 1,000,000 in Roman numerals when the largest numeral value = 1,000?  I mean, can we rely upon the scribes (or their copyists) to put exactly 1,000 Ms onto the page correctly?

Perhaps all the learned ones recorded such things in Greek myriad notation?  Thus,

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[Justin Swanton]

Just a slightly deranged,  off-topic thought...

...How does one write 1,000,000 in Roman numerals when the largest numeral value = 1,000?  I mean, can we rely upon the scribes (or their copyists) to put exactly 1,000 Ms onto the page correctly?

Perhaps all the learned ones recorded such things in Greek myriad notation?  Thus,

You cannot view this attachment.

Apparently (never had to think about it before) a million in Latin notation is M̅ or M̲. Two bars above or below the M is a billion.

[Andreas Johansson]

When Caesar claimed that eight thousand cavalry and a quarter million infantry marched to the relief of Alesia, he expressed this as equitum VIII milibus et peditum circiter CCL,* painfully literally "of horsemen 8 thousands and of footmen circa 250".

I therefore suspect he'd expressed one million simply as M milibus "a thousand thousands".

Greek numerals were used for serious mathematics, but not, AFAIK, in "normal" texts. Justin's over- or underline is a Renaissance invention, acc'd WP. ETA: Or from the Late Republic acc'd another WP page.  So maybe it was known to Caesar after all, but if so he evidently didn't feel like using it in this passage.



* De Bello Gallico 7.76

[Justin Swanton]

therefore suspect he'd expressed one million simply as M milibus "a thousand thousands".

To be really stuffy, he'd write a million as M mil(l)ia. Accusative plural and all that. 

[Erpingham]

Didn't we comprehensively deal with this in the Persian giant army thread, which took longer than a Chinese dynasty to resolve?

One of the problems we faced was the uncritical reading of ancient historical accounts.  Advocates failed to allow for social forces which shaped accounts and the literary conventions in play. Now, I know virtually nothing of these factors in Chinese society, but I doubt we can assume the authors were pursuing literal truth in their numbers or taking to the field to individually count soldiers.

[Andreas Johansson]

therefore suspect he'd expressed one million simply as M milibus "a thousand thousands".

To be really stuffy, he'd write a million as M mil(l)ia. Accusative plural and all that. 

Well, he'd write it in the case appropriate to the context. The actual Caesarian numeral I quoted was in the dative-ablative plural, so I used the same form - the one he'd used if he'd wanted to say one million rather than 250 thousand there.

[Justin Swanton]

Didn't we comprehensively deal with this in the Persian giant army thread, which took longer than a Chinese dynasty to resolve?

Oh we did, and didn't resolve anything. 

One of the problems we faced was the uncritical reading of ancient historical accounts.  Advocates failed to allow for social forces which shaped accounts and the literary conventions in play. Now, I know virtually nothing of these factors in Chinese society, but I doubt we can assume the authors were pursuing literal truth in their numbers or taking to the field to individually count soldiers.

Which is one thing we didn't resolve: if authors in antiquity are all consistently out by an order of magnitude (or two orders of magnitude depending on modern corrected estimates) in their figures for army sizes from the Fertile Crescent to China, then they can't be trusted at all for anything else they affirm. Herodotus describes how Xerxes used an enclosure that could hold 10,000 men a time to calculate the size of his army, but if that's entirely invented then you might as well toss all of Herodotus into the wastepaper basket. Or maybe treat him as an alt history novelist.

My own approach has been to start by accepting the figures then seeing if there are any serious practical objections to them. So far I haven't found any.

But let's not resurrect that thread. It'll just be a rehash of the old arguments.