Really nice, great detail on the chariot.
Really nice, great detail on the chariot.
Amasing post, very creative and informative
how the assyrians would sustain a so much big empire and where they could find navy??
Last edited by Ishan; November 11, 2011 at 11:03 AM. Reason: name calling
Read the goddamn post.
TLDR version:
1. Ashurbanipal crushes a Babylonian revolt before invading Greece
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia
you know that the phoenician cities were much autonomus because they couldnt be easily conqeured due to their navy.....
Last edited by Ishan; November 11, 2011 at 11:02 AM. Reason: Insult removed
15 posts deleted.
Stay on-topic people and don't insult anybody please, up till now i wasn't interfering in ROP forums but due to the lack of local moderation here, i will be personally handling this forum now.
This forum is only for mod's development and its general discussion so any trolling, flame wars or promotion of flame wars will result in serious infractions and ROP forum suspension for one month.
Historical discussion are allowed here but debating is for D&D forums only.
Well done. You learned how to copy and paste someone else's ideas. Now for the real information.
The Assyrians had iron weapons and iron armor, and were the first to use them for all of their soldiers. This was a major factor in the reason for their string of victories over their foes. The Assyrians were also the first to introduce heavy horsemen and heavy horse archers in their military. The entire history of ancient warfare in terms of mobility can be seen as the era before the Assyrians and the era after the Assyrians, because before the Assyrians the chariot archer was the ultimate weapon. After the Assyrians, the heavy horsemen/horse archer replaced the chariot.
The Assyrians could easily muster nearly 200,000 soldiers for their sieges. They were, by all accounts, the ancestors to the Persian Empire. Their archers were also superb, and were the first to have heavily armored archers in their armies. They also used many swordsmen in their infantry lines, instead of a majority of spear-men like other nations did in the past. They were well-known and feared throughout the Middle East for their siege warfare and psychological terror tactics they employed upon their foes. They didn't really have much of a navy, but they didn't need to since their entire empire was land based. If anything, their navy would be made up of mercenaries, the Phonecians and Egyptians.
If indeed, Assyria was led by strong rulers, and if Assyria continued to have strong rulers who didn't squabble over their existing empire and if they tried to expand further, the Assyrian Empire could've easily conquered the Medes and Persians, and possibly even extend into India. At this time, the warriors of Greece were not as well-disciplined as when they fought the Persians, and Athens was still a monarchy, with no uprisings in sight. They also had no fleet. The reason why they were able to afford a fleet to fight the Persians was because around that time the Athenians discovered a silver mine in their lands and used the silver to build a fleet.
If Assyria chose to conquer the rest of Asia Minor and continue on into Greece, they would find a dis-unified rabble of bronze-wearing hoplites and superstitious mystics, who had a low reliability on archers and horsemen. Or iron armor and weapons. Cockroach most likely copied and pasted what someone else believed would happen, but from a historical standpoint, it's highly inaccurate. The Greeks would never put forth such large numbers, they wouldn't be able to, not as a unified force. Athens would have no navy. Sparta wouldn't have the powerful warriors they were known for in Xerxes' time. Every soldier would be wearing bronze or leather.
However, the Assyrians were never able to expand further, because there was constant civil strife in the heartland of the empire, and the successors of the Assyrian Royal Family were often spoiled and greedy, and squabbled over the current wealth of their empire, never seeking to make what they had any greater than it already was. Like all empires that remain stagnant, the Assyrian Empire grew stagnant, and it was eventually overcome by an alliance of nations. The Assyrians could've conquered the Medes, but they allowed many nations to exist as vassals, including Judah, which was a mistake.
The Assyrians learned their warfare somewhat from their predecessors, the Urartu Empire, and mostly from the Mesopotamian cycle of warfare that had existed for thousands of years. But after the Assyrians were conquered, the chariot began to lose all meaning in favor of the heavy horseman and the heavy horse archer, and the Babylonians integrated much of the Assyrian military into its own, but still kept some chariots in their forces. The Medes also absorbed different aspects of the Assyrian Empire into their military, but not completely. Only until the Persians came, did they absorb the Assyrian war machine as their own. They absorbed the Medes and the Babylonians and focused strongly on powerful infantry, powerful archers, and powerful horsemen. And siege warfare.
But unlike the Assyrians, the Persians conquered their enemies; they didn't keep them as vassals who "swore" fealty, they absorbed them into their empire as provinces. This, among other reasons, is why the Persian Empire lasted longer than both the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.
There are also various records that state that Assyrian kings, especially Sennacherib, could field 2,000 heavy horsemen with ease. Back in those days, that was an incredibly impressive number, since horses were very expensive and hard to maintain. They also plundered hundreds, even thousands of chariots from various nations in their conquests.
However, the Assyrian Empire's decline could be marked by the biblical story of the siege of Jerusalem, when Sennacherib was destroying all of Judah and finally came to siege Jerusalem. The only real account states that the 185,000 soldiers who were besieging the city via starvation all suddenly died of plague, and the city was spared. Seeing as how the Jews were in no way able to defeat the Assyrian force, and the Assyrians had no need to stop the siege and were intent on ransacking the place, plague is the only viable reason for such total defeat..
After the loss of 185,000 soldiers, when Sennacherib returned to Nineveh, his two sons stabbed him to death and took power themselves. And that is when the expansions of the Assyrian Empire ceased.
Also, the Persians had a tremendous advantage in terms of navy as well as on land, you would know this Cockroach, if you actually studied the history. The Athenian navy numbered roughly 100 ships. The Persian fleet numbered a little over 1,000 ships. The Athenians lured them into a craggy corner of one of the many inlets of southern Greece, and due to the Persian fleet's size, all of the ships jammed in the crag to get to the "cowering" Athenians. They caused a "traffic jam" of ships, and no ship could maneuver its way out of the crag. Then the Athenians sent 1 of their ships, a fire ship, and set its course towards the jammed Persian fleet. As more Persian ships in the front caught on fire, the ships at the very back saw the flames and thought the Athenians were being crushed. Persian captains urged their ships to get closer and move forward before all the fighting was over, since they didn't want to miss it.
The fire spread rapidly, and the Persians lost more than 500 ships from this disaster. Hundreds of those ships were also carrying supplies and reinforcements for the land army, and when those supplies were cut off, the already demoralized Persians on the land decided it was time to head home.
The Persian records and Xerxes himself recorded the Persians as losing 9,000 men to the 300 Spartans who stayed behind to defend the hot gates. However, if Xerxes would claim such a vast number being lost to such a small force, the most likely possibility is that Xerxes' force actually lost a great deal more than that number, and then recorded it as losing "only" 9000 men. I believe the rough estimate was around 20,000 by some Greek scholar...
And there you have it, my good friends, the real information provided to you by a real historian.
Last edited by YuilenZ01; November 27, 2011 at 03:53 AM.
Apart from the fact that my post doesn't contain any copy&paste, and that you have no lack of hubris, you are still quite incorrect. Assyria faltered because the sons of Ashurbanipal fought a long and bloody civil war, which led to revolts and foreign incursions going by unchecked. Further still, Athens could float around 450-500 triremes, nearly all of which took part at Salamis. The Persian fleet, however, was no more than 600 strong at the outset according to modern historians.
Overall, one must say you are either very arrogant, or just trolling.
Laughed my ass off at "Persian records". Xerxes' records merely say that he crushed the Athenian rebels and burned their city.
For a real historian, you sure have a great stache of things up your rectal cavity to pull out, it seems.
P.S. Urartian empire - predecessor of the Assyrians? Heh, so Ireland is the predecessor of the UK.
You don't really believe they lost 185k do you? The Assyrians didn't have to take every city in Judah, just enough to force Hezekiah to resume tribute, which they did by taking the strongly fortified Lachish. Sennacherib was probably assassinated for his perceived sacrilege in destroying much of Babylon and rmoving their gods. Also Sennacherib's successors, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, were very successful in their own right, conquering Egypt and destroying Elam.
The Bible also says that Yahweh helped the Hebrews by causing the Philistines to kill each other and then scaring them with an earthquake so it should probably be taken with a grain of salt...