RascalPuff's Blog

Notes On Warfare - Causes & Effects, by K. B. Robertson

“Jericho, perhaps European civilization’s first walled city, with moat and a tower (citadel). Fortified against raids by inhabitants of the arid zone (grassland steppes of untillable soil) beyond Jericho’s agricultural base. The stored grains of farmers were probably not the raider’s goal, whereas, the farmer’s livestock - and people for slaves - probably was the incentive of the aggressors.”
- Paraphrased from John Keegan’s WAR AND OUR WORLD
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Excerpts from Gwynne Dyer’s WAR, Copyright 1985, follow:

“To begin quite close to the end: we may inhabit the Indian summer of human history, with nothing to look forward to but the ‘nuclear winter’ that closes the account. The war for which the great powers hold themselves in readiness every day may come, as hundreds of others have in the past. The megatons will fall, the dust will rise, the sun’s light will fail, and the race may perish.

Nothing is inevitable until it has actually happened, but the final war is undeniably a possibility, and there is one statistical certainty. Any event that has a definite probability, however small, that does not decrease with time will eventually occur - next year, next decade, next century, but it will come. Including nuclear war.

It is therefore the dilemma and the duty of our generation, and as many more as have time to be born, to learn how to make the probability of nuclear war shrink and eventually vanish. Since the scientific and organizational abilities that have swollen war to this monstrous scale cannot be forgotten, the task is even larger: to discover how to dispense with war altogether. The starting point must be to see the institution of war as a whole and to understand how it works.

Wars are not an interminable series of historical accidents, nor the product of the machinations of evil men, nor yet the result of some simple single cause like capitalism or overpopulation. Neither is warfare merely the heritage of our evolutionary past, as an outlet for our ‘natural aggressiveness’. War is a central institution in human civilization, and it has a history precisely as long as civilization.

For most of that history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering has always been great. In recent centuries it has begun to trouble our consciences occasionally, since the essence of war is killing other people in order to force the community they represent to do our bidding. But most people all down through history have accepted killing in war as legitimate, partly because it is hallowed by tradition, but also because those who do the killing are themselves willing to sacrifice their lives There is a heightened humanity, both good and bad, about the way soldiers behave in battle which seems to transcend ordinary morality and place them in a special category.

Only in this century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumptions of civilized societies about the usefulness and inevitability of war, as two mutually reinforcing trends have gained strength. One is moral: for all the atrocities we still practice on each other, the people of the twentieth century are nevertheless more able than their ancestors to imagine that war - that is, killing foreigners for political reasons - may be simply wrong. The same great changes in society that have made war so lethal have also enabled us to see broader categories of peple - even those on the far side of the nuclear palisade - as being essentially human beings like ourselves. And even if morality is no more than the rules we have made up for ourselves as we go along, one of those rules has always been that (*unnecessarily) killing (*murdering) people is wrong.

The other factor is severely practical: we will almost all die, and our civilization with us, if we continue to practice war. A civilization confronted with the prospect of a ‘nuclear winter’ does not need moral incentives to reconsider the value of the institution of war; it must change or perish.

This does not mean, of course, that we will change or that we will survive. The universe does not issue guarantees. But the time is certainly ripe for change, and change is certainly possible, so long as we understand the nature of the institution we are trying to change and are willing to accept the consequences of changing it.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, Introduction, Copyright 1985

“Our gravest error, in the late twentieth century is to overestimate our distance and difference from the past. We believe that the present round of competition between the great powers is different from all others in history, that it is invested with special significance because of its ideological dimension and because of its appalling consequences if it were to lead to war. But we are wrong: modern technology has changed only the results of war. Everything else about it is basically the same.

“... our present dilemma - the distinct possibility that we might destroy the world - is compounded by the fact that all the escape routes we have dreamed up to extricate ourselves from our predicament - ‘conventional’ war, ‘limited’ war, and the like - are blind alleys. The solution lies in understanding that our problem is a direct result of mankind’s 9,000 year old practice of ‘civilized’ war. Only by looking at this long history can we begin to understand that the institution of war is as much a part of civilized behavior as sculpture or computer programming. Dyer argues that war, like other such human activities, can (and indeed must) be modified. WAR is a remarkable and absorbing analysis of the greatest and most tragic human drama.” - Excerpt from overleaf cover of Gwynne Dyer’s documentary, WAR.

“....war has always had an innate tendency to expand to the absolute limit of the resources available to the societies waging it, and sometimes far beyond their capacity to accept punishment. Force is the ultimate argument and once it had been invoked, the only effective reply is superior force; the internal logic of war has frequently caused it to grow far bigger in scale than the importance of the issue originally in dispute would justify. World War I is a striking example; the third world war will be even more convincing, if there is anyone left to convince.

“Yet modern soldiers do not behave any more ruthlessly than their ancestors. The residents of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945 sufffered no worse fate than the citizens of Babylon in 680 BC, when the city fell to Sennacherib of Assyria, who boasted:
‘I levelled the city and its houses from its foundations to the top, I destroyed them and consumed them with fire. I tore down and removed the outer and inner walls, the temples and the ziggurats built of brick, and dumped the rubble in the Arahtu canal. And after I had destroyed Babylon, smashed its gods and massacred its population. I tore up its soil and threw it into the Euphrates so that it was carried by the river down to the sea.’

“It was a more labor intensive method of destruction than nuclear weapons but the effect was about the same (as modern warfare).” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 4 - 5

“But if the willingness of soldier to kill and tendency of war to become as destructive as the existing technology and resources will permit have both been relatively constant throughout human history, then we must consider an unwelcome possibility: that war is the inevitable accompaniment of any human civilization, and that a technologically advanced culture like our own will sooner or later become involved in a war in which all the available technology and resources are committed to the task of destruction. There is a daunting amount of evidence to support this belief, but there is also a fundamentally important fact that offers some kind of hope. War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p. 5

“Only a generation ago the Walbiri aborigines of Australia still lived in small bands in a hunting and gathering economy, as the entire human race did for at least 98 percent of its history, and although every male Walbiri was a warrior, their way of fighting did not resemble what we call ‘War’. Very few people got killed: there were no leaders, no strategy and no tactics: and only the kinship group affected by the issue at stake - most often revenge for a killing or a ritual offense committed by another group, and hardly ever territory - would take part in the fighting.

“We cannot directly examine the primitive societies from which the first civilizations have survived into the recent past or present in the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, in most parts of which ‘civilization’ arrived with the Eruopeans over the past few hundred years There is no reason to believe that these modern examples of hunting and gathering cultures are significantly different from those that inhabited the Middle East ten or fifteen thousand years ago, and almost all of them have the same attitude toward ‘war’: it is an important ritual, an exciting and dangerous game, and perhaps even an opportunity for self expression, but it is not about power in any recognizable modern sense of the word, and it most certainly is not about slaughter.

“It is no surprise that a race that lived largely by hunting and that knew effective techniques for killng animals would have the same techniques available for killing its own members. Since conflict is inevitable, it is also not surprising that people sometimes kill people. Some moralists suggest that this is the human race’s ‘original sin’, pointing out that few other higher species deliberately kill their own members, but the reason for our relative distinction in this area seems to be simply that man is an evolutionary latecomer to killing, sprung from a long line of non predators.

“That means the weapons our ancestors learned to use in hunting over the past few million years were not accompanied by the inhibitions against using them on our own species that hereditary predators generally have. No doubt this lack could prove to be the fatal flaw in human nature, but the important point about precivilized societies is that people (* with some exceptions) did not kill much.

“The dominant trend in the history (and prehistory) of human culture has been the creation of larger and larger groups within which each member is defined as ‘one of us’: a kinsman, a fellow tribesman, a fellow citizen. Ten thousand years ago the average human being’s social horizon was the fifty to two hundred members of his own band of hunter-gatherers, all of whom knew each other personally: there are ten states in the world today in which over one hundred million people are considered ‘one of us’. The advantages of living in societies where large numbers of people can cooperate with each other in innumerable ways and contribute all their individual and collective achievements to an ever growing pool of wealth and knowledge are beyond dispute: we owe almost everyting we have of value to this accumulated heritage (*recorded written and oral history). But there is also a dark side to living in large groups.

“Within each group, it has meant the creation of impersonal and often harsh controls to enforce cooperation and to keep the social peace. Most of the large scale societies of history (and the present) are to a greater or lesser extent tyrannies. And as the societies we live in have grown larger, so have the conflicts between them: indeed they have changed radically and have become the modern phenomenon of war. The logical end point of living in ever larger groups is the evolution of a politically united world society in which every human being is regarded as ‘one of us’, but the penultimate stage in which we live, with the world divided into about three dozen powerful states and over a hundred weak ones, is probably the most violent, and certainly the most dangerous, phase of human history.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 6 - 7.

“The oldest inscription that has survived from Mesopotamia is the Stele of the Vultures, which shows carrion birds fighting over the entrails of soldiers killed in the battle in which Eannatum of Lagash defeated the rival city state of Umma. War has been a constant companion of civilization and most of the time it has been waged with savage cruelty toward the defeated - far more remorseless and efficient cruelty than most of the world’s ‘savages’ have ever displayed. And the reason for this is contained in the way that civilization was born.

“There is practically no direct evidence regarding the political and military structure of the earliest civilizations, when various tribes in the Middle East were first learning how to grow crops and domesticate animals, and when the first villages began to grow into towns. But war must already have been changing into a disciplined business with political and economic purposes that we would understand, for as early as 7000 BC there was at least one fortified town: Jericho. The population was probably no more than two thousand, crammed into a space of about ten acres, but Jericho was surrounded by a massive wall twelve feet high and six and a half feet thick, flanked by a circular stone tower and encircled by a deep ditch. The citizens of Jericho felt they had wealth worth defending and they lived in a world where others would try to take it from them by force and could not be stopped by lesser defenses.

“It was in this earliest period, and over the next four thousand years - half of the history of civlization - that armies and states must have evolved into more or less the forms in which we know them today, but we know nothing about the details of the process, for writing had not been invented. By the time written records started about five thousand years ago, the state and the army were already fully formed institutions of great antiquity. Nevertheless, it is possible to deduce how these twin institutions emerged and grew steadily in scale and power until they towered above the mortal men who supported them.

“The basis of civilization is agriculture, which transforms the land into a valuable possession requiring protection. In many parts of the ancient Middle East this protection was probably divided at first simply by transforming the tribal warriors into a loosely organized militia. This is already a momentous change. Warfare had become a purposeful activity with serious consequences for the whole community in the case of defeat and so there was every incentive to apply human ingenuity to improving the organization and tactics of the tribal militia. But in the most fertile lands of all, in the great river valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, organization was needed on a far wider scale.

“Doubtless self interest provided some degree of voluntary cooperation among the small peasant communities living side by side in the river valleys, but it is equally certain that a significant degree of compulsion was necessary to unite their efforts We know that the compulsion was supplied by miitary force, because that was the dominant means of enforcing obedience at the time the historical record begins. It also makes logical sense the successful users of military force would gain control over a large area, which would prosper from better coordination of its efforts in farming the flood plain. The rulers of the area would then gain further power from having control over these increased resources, and so the system becomes self sustaining and self perpetuating. The state and the city were indeed Siamese twins.”
(‘War and civlization, which were born as Siames twins, may also end together’. - Gwynne Dyer, Ibid)

“Precisely who invented the first real armies, and how, we can never know. It may even have come about in different ways in different places. In one case a village militia may have discovered the rudiments of discipline and gained experience in a series of intervillage squabbles, and then been taken in hand by a prehistoric Napoleon who saw the possibilities in a systematic program or conquest. He may have been more interested in loot, slaves, and rape than in creating the basis for a complex and productive farming economy, but his conquests would nevertheless produce the latter effect.

“In another case, an agricultural area may have been conquered by warriors from a tribe of hungry nonfarmers who then turned themselves into a military ruling caste. It is even conceivable that in some cases the initial work of political and economic unification over quite large areas proceeded without violence, but in a world where armies have come into being, even such a pacific society will survive only if it rapidly develops an army of its own...

“There was also, in the ancient kingdoms, a persistent phenomenon that is all too familiar to the citizens of modern states: the intoxication of power. Though no man can have absolute power, the illusion of it is engendered at all levels in a state administration that is backed by the right and ability to punish or even kill those who disobey. The practical basis for ordinary moral behavior is the recognition of shared humanity and mutual vulnerability, which is precisely what is destroyed by the illusion of absolute power. Thus those who controlled the first civilized states - which were all, without exception, totalitarian tyrannnies - felt entitled to torture and kill their own subjects for any act of defiance and to massacre entire populations of foreigners who threatened their power. The former assumption is still very common, and the latter universal, in the states of today.”

‘After all, previous wars ended up in the besieging of major cities, and in besieging a city what was the idea? To cut off all supplies, and the city held out if it could until they’d eaten the last dog, cat, and sewer rat and were all starving, and meanwhile the besieging forces lobbed every missile they could lay their hands on into the city (*less modern wafare tactics included catapulting deteriorating human and animal bodies over the besieged cities walls, to spread disease), more or less regardless of where those missiles landed, as an added incentive to surrender.’
- Sir Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, 1942 - ‘45.

“...over 90% of all the states that have ever existed have been destroyed - and often their people with them - because they failed to have enough military power available at the critical moment. It is a lesson that is indelibly engraved in the consciousness of every government from Pharaoh Narmer’s to Premier Gorbachev’s.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 15, 16, 17, 19.
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“In the few generations before 2,000 BC, nomadic herdsmen from southern Russia, who had discovered the use of horse drawn chariots, began expanding in every direction. Within a couple of hundred years these ‘Indo-European’ peoples had spread over most of Europe and spilled over the mountain wall separating the great Eurasian plain from Asia Minor and northern India. Eventually they overran most of northern Asia Minor (and Semitic refugees fleeing before them conquered Egypt for the first time in its history). Further east, the Aryan branch of the IndoEuropeans extinguished the urban civilization of the Indus Valley so thoroughly that not even its language is known.

Prelude To Armageddon
“By about 1500 BC, however, the worst of the upheavals was long past. Egypt had thrown off foreign rule, and the indo-European conquests to the north, like the domain of the Hittites and the Mitanni, had become civilized kingdoms themselves. The Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world had never been so prosperous or so intimately interconnected by trade and travel: it was almost a golden age. And it was in this period, when historical records are relatively plentiful, that an Egyptian army marched north to a place called Armageddon and left us the first detailed account of a battle.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p 22

Armegeddon (also known as the city of Megiddo) 1480 BC:
(Armegeddon was located just west of the river Jordan, not far north of the ancient cities of Jericho and Jerusalem, near the shores of the extreme eastern Mediterranean (Aegean) sea; about 150 miles south of the Isle of Cyprus and in line with the shoreline cities of Antioch, Kadesh, Tyre and Damscus. Armageddon was also about three hundred miles north of Cairo, and Alexandria, Egypt.)

“For several generations past, the cities of Palestine and Syria had been vassals to Egypt, but in 1480 BC the king of Kadesh, a rich and strategically important city at the northern end of Bekaa valley in Lebanon, declared his independence. Most of the other cities in the region promptly acknowledged his rule, for the Egyptian army had not left the valley of the Nile in twenty two years. But by early the following spring there was a new pharaoh on the throne, and the army moved north.

“The Egyptian army that the young Pharoaoh Tuthmose III led into his first campaign at the the age of twenty two was noticeably different from the armies of five centuries (or five millennia) before Some twenty thousand strong, it still consisted mostly of infantrymen carrying spears, swords, and axes, but it also included archers with the relatively new and far more powerful composite (*’recurve’, ‘cupid’s’) bow. It was divided into divisions of about five thousand men and so had the ability to perform at least some modestly complicated maneuvers on the battlefield.

“Tuthmoses army also had horses, which had arrived in the Middle East with the Indo-European invaders about five hundred years before. They were not used as cavalry chargers - partly because the horses of this period were still too light and too weak in the back to be ridden for long by a man in armor and partly because before the invention of stirrups the back of a horse was not a stable fighting platform. But yoked in pairs the horses would pull light two wheeled chariots carrying a driver and a warrior armed with a bow and throwing spears.

“The Egyptian army, like others of this period, had hundreds of chariots which could maneuver in mass formations Chariots were attached to each division and were very useful to harass unbroken formations of enemy infantry from a distance, darting in, launching weapons, and swiftly withdrawing again They only tried to charge home, however, against troops already showing signs of flight: the best way to take or hold ground was still, as always, to mass infantrymen on it shoulder to shoulder.

“Tuthmose’s army took three weeks to march from the Egyptian frontier fortress at Tjel (approximently on the present Suez Canal) to a place called Yehem in northern Palestine, just the other side of the mountains from the city of Megiddo, also known as Armageddon, where the army of Kadesh was drawn up to meet him...

“There is no account of the tactics of the actual fighting.... once the battle has been joined, in armies like this, there is little for a leader to do. A commander’s role is to train his troops beforehand and position them as advantageously as possible before the battle begins, but the key phase is the head-on clash of massed formations of heavy infantry who can neither hear a commander’s orders over the noise, nor obey them if they could hear them.

“What really matters is what happens at the line of contact where the two disciplined mobs of soldiery crunch together. And there it is push and stab and shove and stumble in a sweating frenzy, with the leading edge of the two formations eroding moment by moment as men go down, until one side starts to panic and tries to break contact. But it cannot break contact, of course, for there are other lines of men behind who have not yet caught the panic and who continue to press forward. So the cohesion of the losing formation breaks, and once that happens it is doomed The men seeking to flee find themselves trapped in their own crowd and are cut down from behind.

“The Egyptian account of Armageddon contains no description of what happened at this crucial moment, when the forces of Kadesh lost their nerve and so were lost, but the same moment comes in almost every battle. Four or five centuries later, in one of the battles on the plain below Troy, a thousand miles to the northwest, a similar moment came and was remembered centuries afterward in Homer’s Iliad. Despite the typical emphasis on the deeds of individual heroes and the absence of any explicit discussion of tactics, it is quite clear what happened when the losers turned to flee.

Meritones pursued and overtaking (Pheraklos) struck in the right buttock, and the spearhead drove straight on and passing under the bone went into the bladder He dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist around him.

Meges killed Pedaios... struck him the sharp spear behind the head at the tendon and straight on through the teeth and under the tongue cut the bronze blade and he dropped in the dust gripping in his teeth the cold bronze.

Eurypylos killed brilliant Hypsenor running in chase as he fled before him struck in the shoulder with a blow swept from the sword and cut the arm’s weight from him, so that the arm dropped bleeding to the ground, and the red death and destiny the powerful took hold of both eyes.

So they went about their work all about the mighty encounter. - Homer

“Unless two armies were grossly dissimilar in numbers or weaponry, what decided most ancient battles was principally the morale and discipline of the troops - which side could hold its formation one minute longer - plus, as always in military affairs, a substantial element of chance. On the plain of Armageddon, it was the army of Kadesh that panicked ‘They fled headlong to Megiddo in fear, abandoning their horses and their chariots of gold and silver’. The people of the doomed city slammed the gates shut against the fugitives for fear that the Egyptians would follow them in, but it was an unnecessary precaution. At that point, greed overcame discipline in the Egyptian ranks, and the troops stopped to loot the fallen, leaving time for most of the Kadesh army’s survivors to be hauled up inside the walls on ropes fashioned from their own clothing.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR. p. 25

‘Megiddo’s (Armageddon’s) garrison, thus reinforced, withstood a long siege, in which Tuthmoses built a great wooden wall around the city to prevent any movement in or out. The city was eventually starved into surrender, and many of the citizens enslaved. The pharoah then went on to capture and plunder a number of other cities in Lebanon, and the rich loot that he gathered from them was more than enough to repay the costs of the expedition. Tuthmose was so favorably impressed by this return on investment that he waged fifteen more campaigns in Lebanon and Syria during his reign, all of them successful.

“The battle of Armageddon can stand as the model for almost all the battles fought in the world from 5000 BC to at least four thousand years later. The weapons became somewhat more effective with time, as stone spearheads gave way to bronze and then to iron, and the average numbers involved in a big battle probably rose gradually as empires grew bigger and richer. However, even at the end of the period, armies rarely exceeded twenty thousand men, and probably never got much bigger than fifty thousand, partly because these were all still subsistence agricultural societies which simply couldn’t afford to support large numbers of nonproductive members like soldiers, but more importantly because of the practical difficulties in supplying larger numbers of troops in the field or controlling them in battle.

“There must have been at least several thousand battles like Armegeddon over the millennia before 1479 BC and there have certainly been many thousands like it since For those who were there, each battle was a matter of life and death, with the whole future seeming to hang in the balance. And they were not entirely wrong in their perceptions If the future is defined simply as the rest of their lives. From the historian’s point of view empires rise and fall, whole peoples appear and disappear, and borders fluctuate like droplets of rain running down the windowpane as the centuries flicker past, but ordinary mortals do not enjoy such godlike perspective.

For ordinary men born in Egypt in 1500 BC, the wars in Syria that began when they were twenty were still the dominant foreign event in their lives in 1450 BC, when they had probably become grandfathers - unless of course, they died at Armegeddon when they were twenty. And the outcome of battles like that really mattered at the time, for although most were not decisive, a single catastrophic defeat, happening between dawn and sunset on a single day, could leave a whole empire exposed to invasion, plunder and massacre.

“It is little wonder that most of the history of those times that has come down to us is military history, for how an army of twenty or thirty thousand men fared on a single day of battle could determine the future of vast areas for generations or centuries. Military power had become not just the symbol but the real basis of political power across the whole civilized world, and war was the most important task a ruler had. And although the language we use today disguises the similarities, war is still our ruler’s most important task.

“Yet all the effort and sacrifice entailed in fighting wars - each of which seems so important at the time - doesn’t actually lead anywhere; in the end, it is virtually canceled out. The only thing that makes the battle of Armegeddon important to us is the fact that we know about it. It is hard to feel any real sense of regret about the men who lost the rest of their lives on that day, because they would have been dead for over 3,400 years now anyway. It is impossible to care much about who won the battle, because both sides lived long ago and far away, and most of what they cared for - their family and friends, their language, their religion, their personal and political hopes and fears - has vanished utterly. This is not at all the way we feel about the Normandy invasion of 1944, but if history goes on long enough, the day will come when Armageddon and Normandy will seem on a par: equally futile and equally meaningless.

“Naturally, we resist and resent that conclusion with all our strength. That war of 3,400 years ago was obviously a mere power struggle with no moral justification, whereas, any war our own nation becomes involved in today will be just and necessary. The soldiers who were killed on the battlefield in Armageddon died in vain, but if today’s generation of young men have to die in the Central Front in Europe, it will decide the moral fate of mankind forever. The man in the ranks of Tuthmose III’s army of Armageddon was deluded about the importance of his death, but the man in a Chieftain tank (or a T-62) in Germany today is not. And I am the Queen of Sheba.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 26-27

“It can never be proven, but it is a safe assumption that the first time five thousand male human beings were ever gathered together in one place, they belonged to an army. That event probably occurred around 7000 BC - give or take a thousand years - and it is an equally safe bet that the first truly large scale slaughter of people in human history happened very soon afterward.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p. 11

“... the question we rarely ask, because our history is replete with such scenes, is, How could men do this? After all, in the tribal cultures from which we all come originally, they could not have done it. (* As a rule, to which we are learning there were exceptions.) Being a warrior and taking part in a ritual ‘battle’’ with a small but invigorating element of risk is one thing: the mechanistic and anonymous mass slaughter of civilized warfare is quite another, and any traditional warrior would do the sensible thing and leave instantly. Yet civilized men, from 5000 BC or from today, will stay at such scenes of horror even in the knowledge that they will probably die within the next few minutes. The invention of armies required more than just working out ways of drilling large numbers of people to act together, although that was certainly part of the formula. A formation of drilled men has a different psychology - a controlled form of mob psychology - that tends to overpower the personal identity and fears of the individuals who make it up.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 12 - 13
(*Refer, Eric Fromm’s ANATOMY OF HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS, ‘conformist, group aggression’ - the most common, powerful, dangerous, and difficult to stop.’ )

“You’re dealing here with compllcated psychological states. No man in battle is really sane. The mind set of the soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind, and his is an epidemic of insanity which affects everybody there, and those not afflicted by it die very quickly.” - William Manchester, World War II veteran.

“To exert power in every form was the essence of civilization: the city found a score of ways of expressing struggle, aggression, domination, conquest and servitude.” - Lewis Mumford
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“When two large groups of men fight, using hand-held weapons or missiles that can be hurled at most a hundred yards or so, the possibilities are very restricted. This is all the more true because the highest priority for both sides is to keep their men disciplined and organized. A few hundred armed men acting in concert, moving in the same direction and with a common purpose, will always be more powerful than a mob ten times their number. In the battle of Mantinea, in 418 BC, ‘the Spartans came on slowly and to the music of many flute players in their ranks. This custom of theirs has nothing to do with religion; it is designed to make them keep in step and move forward steadily without breaking their ranks, as large armies often do when they are just about to join battle’. - Thucydides, History Of The Peloponnesian War


Notes On The Roman Empire
THE ARMY OF THE CAESARS
By Michael Grant, Copyright 1974 by Michael Grant, Scribner’s Publishers
Cover overleaf:

“...the first general history of the army in Roman society... shows how the rise and decline of Imperial Rome was intimately connected with the balance of political and military power.

The role of the army in the Roman empire was a formidable one: the emperor depended on the soldiers for his continued existence, as did the empire itself.
But an army powerful enough to defend the frontiers and keep the Roman peace also had the power to destroy the emperor. Against this ever-present danger the emperors took unceasing precautions, one of their principal methods being to surround themselves with bodyguards, the Praetorian Guard. But what began as a protective measure had wider repercussions, for the Guard came to play an ever greater part in the internal politics of the empire.

Thus, the Roman army was a two edged weapon: it maintained the existence of the empire, yet at the same time it very often weakened and damaged that empire by removing and setting up emperors amid savage civil strife. One of the climactic sections of The Army Of The Caesars occurs with Michael Grant’s description of the Year Of The Four Emperors, during which the whole imperial structure fell apart as a result of army interference.

The history of Rome’s military rulers is singularly relevant today, for there are still countries in the world where the army is in firm control of the administration. The story of The Army Of The Caesars provides a model of how civil strife, focused around the holders of military power, inevitably occurs, endangering the precarious equilibrium of large areas of the world.” - Michael Grant, The Army Of The Caesars

Notes On The Roman Empire,
It’s Army, Tactics & Weapons
The thrusting spear favored by the GrecoRoman phalanx was replaced by the more versatile pilum as a primary weapon of the Roman infantry. The standard pair of long and short range pilum type throwing spears was five to seven feet in length, with the pointed, fighting end of it inserted in a socket which in some cases could be turned to lock on contact or open on contact, leaving the option of a throwing lance or thrusting spear. Often the pilum was thrown as a lance, more to strike, remain stuck in, and bring down the shields of the opposing enemy that protected itself with hand held wooden shields. The thrown or thrusted and placed pilum would prevent the shield from being effectively deployed, exhausting its holder; bringing the impaled shield down; exposing the formerly protected shield employer to volleys of arrows and more pilums employed as thrown lances and thrusting spears, followed up by the short killing sword (gladius) and the long killing sword (‘spatha’ - pronounced with a silent ‘h’ - ’ spata’ <‘spotah’>). The standard issue Roman army dagger, or kris, is called a ‘pugios’. Often strapped in a sheath to the inside forearm.

At its peak of power the Roman army was almost always engaged in expansionist expeditions. It went through eras of complete ruthlessness toward its vanquished enemies and at other times showed much compassion and helpfulness once a given enemy was subdued. On the march in this era, it was probably the most formidable army the world had ever known up to that time. Although the armies of Rome had cavalry forces, they did not generally employ the tactics of the horsepeople; heavily relying on infantry, which traveled about 20 miles daily when on the march, always making an elaborately defended campsite and then intensively drilling with battle practices before retiring at the end of each day’s march. It was fairly impossible to successfully ambush such an army whether encamped or on the march, since they always skillfully deployed lookouts and scouts, elements of which made hourly reports to their home stations so as to insure that their superiors would be alerted if messengers didn’t return on schedule. - KBR

“They were calloused soldiers - the greatest entrenching army in history. In hostile land they halted each afternoon to build a fortified camp, an astounding labor that gave a night’s safety and a base for the next day’s operations.

“A tribune and centurions rode ahead to pick a hill site with water and grazing at hand. When weary legionaries arrived, they dug a 13 foot wide ditch, tossing dirt inward to form a wall. this they palisaded with stakes, carried as part of their 60 pound packs.

“A square camp, 2,000 yards (a mile) on a side sheltered two legions. Tents rose along a grid of streets. At night no one entered without the password, changed daily and passed from maniple to maniple (*hand to hand) on a tablet. In the morning three trumpet blasts signaled breakup of camp. At the first, tents were struck; at the second, mules loaded; at the third the army marched. Augustus studded the frontiers with watchdog colonies of veterans and their families; a 20 year hitch brought Roman cirtizenship to foreign recruits. Legionaries wield spades more than swords, building camps and bridges as they conquer.”
- The Story Of Man II, National Geographic, p. 394.

“Facing a Gallic or German army, Caesar had one supreme advantage - the Roman legions. No longer a citizen muster, they formed a force of professionals honed by his uncle Marius into a precision instrument for killing. ‘Their drills are bloodless battles; their battles bloody drills’, wrote Josephus, historian of the Jewish War (AD 66-70) in which Rome razed Jerusalem.

Unlike the unwieldy (Greek) phalanx, the legion could advance over broken ground and quickly shift units to threatened sectors. It was deep enough to provide constant support for the fighting front.

A Roman army went into action in three lines, each (linear wave of infantry) many ranks deep. Centurions in crested helms relayed the order to charge; trumpets blared, standards signaled. Legionaires showered the foe with barbed javelins; these stuck in shields, weighed them down. Closing in on the run, Romans drew short Spanish style swords, handier than the Gallic broadswords. Now it was man-to-man, a line of single duels - thrust and slash and pray you survive the day. Romans fought behind curved wooden shields covered with canvas and leather and rimmed in iron. They wore brass helmets with hinged face flaps, metal studded leather jerkins, sometimes a greave (*shin guard) on the unshielded right leg. If a man survived the enemy blows, exhaustion took him out of the line after about 15 minutes. The legionary behind stepped up to fill the gap. Fighting in relays, Romans faced combat with a steadiness unknown to barbarians.

On the flanks cavalry - mainly Gallic, German, or Spanish recruits - waited to pursue a broken foe. They usually dismounted to fight. Caesar’s rule was never to let routed troops rally. If his own lines wavered, he plunged in to hearten them.”
- The Story Of Man II, National Geographic, p. 392
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*Rome was troubled with intermittant civil wars before and after the advent of the Christian era, perhaps the most famous of which is the strife between Caesar I and the Republican Senate, just after the crucifixion of Christ. - KBR
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“With siegecraft learned from the Greeks of Sicily and southern Italy, the Romans battered, burrowed, pulled down walls stone by stone with hooks. Gauls dreaded the scraping of spades as much as the thud of siege engines. Sappers tunneled under a wall, doused the shoring timbers with pitch, and set them afire. Down came the wall.”
- The Story Of Man II, National Geographic, p. 391

* The Roman army employed a wide array of large and small missile projectors - catapults, mangonels, battering rams and wheeled siege towers with armored and oxhide roofs, with which to bring down and/or breach the walls of fortresses and citadels. - KBR
“Though each legion had its own service troops and the army’s mule train numbered thousands of animals, food supplies often dwindled in long siege operations. Foragers risked ambush, so Caesar got nearby tribes, enlisted by self interest or terror, to gather grain or drive in cattle.

“Caesar’s army in Gaul grew from four to eleven legions, each frequently well below its 6,000 man complement. A legion had ten cohorts. The cohort, basic tactical unit comparable to our battalion, was divided into three maniples, and the maniple into two centuries of 100 legionaries each; led by centurions.
“Legates of senatorial rank headed legions and independent commands; military tribunes handled the cohorts; centurions, veterans up from the ranks, led the centuries. When the battle came to sword’s length, these 60 seasoned centurions could spell the difference between defeat and victory.” - The Story Of Man II, National Geographic, p. 391
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* Castellation. The era - and motive - of castellation. The beseiged defenders having a general advantage over the siege makers, until the advent of gunpowder and flat trajectory, high velocity, tubularly contained (barrelled), explosive gas propelled, missiles. The defensive and offensive arts and techniques of siege warfare. Advantages and disadvantages, problems and solutions of offensive and defensive elements.
Castle keeps - castles within castles. Citadels within castle keeps. A citadel being a fortified tower, usually within the walls of a castle, designed as a last refuge in the event of it’s surrounding castle walls being breached. Citadels usually stored long term food stuffs and water supplies. Castle designs and architecture facilitating mutually supportive fields of fire, as in star shaped surrounding wall structures. Form followed function Long before modern architect, Frank Loyld Wright, made a by-word of form following function. - KBR
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The spiral staircases of any well designed castle always spiraled to the right, as the staircase was ascended, so as to disadvantage the predominantly right handed assailants moving up the staircase from a free space in which to wield and employ their predominantly right-hand-held long and short killing swords, as well as handicapping right handed archers and/or crossbowmen.

Until the advent of gunpowder and cannonfire to bring down castle walls, the castle was a fairly good defense system against offensive warmakers, especially horsepeople, who did not excel in siege warfare, preferring to meet the enemy in the field. On the other hand in the more recent history of the horsepeople, Genghis Khan hired subordinate military strategists such as the Chinese and the Persians to employ effective methods of undermining castle walls with digging and mining techniques, which caused heavily fortified walls to crumble or otherwise be successful breached.

Until fairly recently, the most fortified city in the world was ‘Constantinople’ - founded and named after Roman emperor Constantine I, in 330 AD, as new axis of the Empircal Roman realm, often called the Byzantine Empire, or Byzantium; the easternmost capital that long outlasted the otherwise declined Roman Empire. It’s triple construction of fortified walls were brought down in 1453 AD, by Turkish cannonfire. The Turkish Sultan Mohammad II re-named it Istanbul. - KBR
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The Dragon’s Jaws: Death From Above. Names attributed to the pincer movement entailing the heavy cavalry approaching from the south and making itself known to the enemy; fully engaging the enemy, and then the light cavalry - unknown to the enemy - falling down on same from the north - constituting ‘death from above’. Flanking the enemy between the heavy and light cavalry; between the metaphorically formed dragon’s jaws. - KBR ___________

Thermopylae: a fifty foot wide pass between Mt. Oeta and the swamps on the shore of the Malic Gulf. Here, in 480 BC the battle of the Persian Emperor Xerxes versus the Greek leader, Leonidas and the 300 Spartans, backed by about 7,000 allied infantry took place.

A Persian general is said to have offered Leonidas mercy if he surrendered, and that if he did not surrender, the massive Persian army of 50,000 would shower him with such a multitude of arrows and lances as to block out the sun. Leonidas is said to have reneged the offer to surrender with honor, and replied: “Then we’ll get to fight in the shade.” The 7,300 man Greek army perished to the last man, while covering the flank of the successfully retreating Greek army.

Other famous and strategic battles occurred at this same point. The Greeks long held back the Gauls (French barbarians) under Brennus at this pass in 279 BC. The Romans defeated Antiochus III of Syria in 191 BC. Today the narrow pass no longer exists, due to weathering and erosion. - KBR
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Hellespont. Crossing point from Asia to Southern Europe and conversely. Cite of many historic battles. Hellespont - just south of the Bosporous Straits - separates the southwest peninsula of Bulgaria from the northwest shores of Turkey - where the western and eastern worlds meet.

Likewise are the Straits of Bosporos, 20 miles long and only 1,800 feet wide at its narrowest. Separating Europe and Asiatic Turkey (Anatolia); joining the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara. Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) lies on both shores. Like the Straits of Hellespont, the Straits of Bosporous are the cite(s) of many historic battles, due to its (their) strategic geographic location(s). Both locations separate the northeastern Mediterranean (Aegean) Sea, from the Black Sea. Both Hellespont and the Bosporous Straits - only a few hundred miles separating them - have been traversed by pontoon boats to accomodate invading armies moving to and from Asia and Europe. - KBR
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Adrianople. A small town in European Turkey - Thrace; another strategic geographical point, said to be among the most historically war torn locations in Eurasia. Founded by Emperor Hadrian in 125 AD. The location of a fateful Visigothic victory over Emperor Valens inn 378 AD. There are said to be nine layers of previously destroyed communities under the existing one of today. - KBR
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Rome was founded as a republic - SPQR:
Senatus Populusque Romanus: Senate, People, Rome.
The original Caesar of Rome was Julius, in the year 46 BC he had created an empire. Having conquered Gaul, Asia Minor, Egypt and Africa, penetrated Britain and punished barbarian Germanic tribes. The Republican senate, fearing a monarchy under his Emperorship, demanded that he lay down his command and return as a citizen. His assassination occurred due to the senate’s fear that he would gain more power as one man than the collective senate - Rome having been founded as a Republic. “He was stabbed with three and twenty wounds”. - Suetonius.

Most of his senatorial assassins came to a bad end, as Caeser’s murder was avenged in may ways by the collective citizenry and officers he led in his invincible army.

Caesar launched the first invasion of Britannia in 55 BC. His bold amphibious raid swelled his repute in Rome. He returned to the island the next year with 30,000 men. But the Britons eluded Rome’s yoke for another century. Emperor Claudius triumphantly invaded unconquered portions of Britain in AD 43; gave his infant son the name Britannicus. Roman governor Agricola completed the conquest of Britain between 74 and 84 AD. London, originally named Londinium by the Romans, was established as a Roman stronghold about the time of Christ - at the commencement of the conversion of the annual standard of numerically counting years.

That is to say, BC can be translated to ‘Before Christ’, and AD translates to ‘After Death’ of Christ. In the BC standard the progressing annual numbers of history are retrogressive, that is to say, the last 5 years of the BC standard of annual measurement were 5,4,3,2 and 1 BC - ‘Before Christ’, then the annual numerical system of measurement became progressive, that is to say, After Death - AD - of Christ the years commenced 1,2,3,4,5, etcetera, to the present. - KBR

The Roman Colosseum:
“The emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in AD 80, the premiere spectacles lasted 100 days. Baptized in blood, it rang for four centuries to the roar of beasts, the screams of dying men, the clang of the gladius - the short (Spanish originated) sword of gladiators.” - Excerpted from The Story Of Man II, by National Geographic.
* The three architecturally stylized columnar levels of the Colloseum in Rome were Ionic, Doric and Corinthian. The Roman echo to their Greek Civilization Predecessors. The Peloponnesian (Greek Civil) wars having been the demise of what was the first and greatest of Western Civilizations. - KBR ....................

The following quote is excerpted from a Roman army manual instructing the use of the sword ( short sword - gladius, or long sword - spatha):
“A slash cut rarely kills, however powerfully delivered, because the vitals are protected by the enemy’s weapon’s, and also by his bones. A thrust going in two inches, however, can be mortal You must penetrate the vitals to kill a man. Moreover, when a man is slashing, the right arm and side are left exposed. When thrusting, however, the atttacking body is covered, and the enemy is wounded before he realises what has happened. So this method of fighting is especially favoured by the Romans.”

Roman civil wars, combined with Empirical compromises with barbarian adversaries and corrupt Roman leaderships, resulted in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the humble beginnings of which began in approximately 500 BC, and was functionally ended approximately a millennium later in 500 AD. Europe then dissipated into Feudalism and ‘the Dark Ages’, also known as ‘the Middle Ages’, which carried on until about the time of the Western European Renaissance, commencing in about 1400 thru 1600; otherwise known as the period of Reformation - a change in scholarship and fine arts fueled by the Gutenburg printing press, literacy and more liberal Christianity, though the Inquisition thrived through this period, peaking out in the late 1500’s. - KBR
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Hadrian’s Wall
Spans northern Britain, east to west, from the Irish to the North Seas. The wild northern Picts and Celts never yielded. Roman Emperor Hadrian cordoned off northern England with a mighty wall of stone, begun AD 122. Northern Britain and Scotland, like parts of Germania, were never completely subdued by the Roman Empire. Lesser than China’s Great Wall, Hadrian’s wall was more of a boundary marker than an obstacle; this also being true of the Great Wall Of China.
-KBR ________________

The Appian Way
“Appius Claudius began the web (of roadways) with the Via Appia from Rome to Capua in 312 BC. In time ‘all roads led to Rome’ and to Augustus’ golden milestone in the Forum of Rome. Mansiones (lodging places) offered beds, food, smiths, horses to travelers who rumbled in by chariot, wagon, or covered sleeping coach. Caesar traveled 800 miles in 10 days, and one courier sped 360 miles in 36 hours. Horse carts could average 5 or 6 miles an hour - a rate unsurpassed until the 19th century.”
From Britain to the Persian Gulf, Rome tied her worlds in a net of roads - 50,000 miles of military highways crosshatched with some 200,000 miles of secondary roads. Laid out by legions to move men, packtrains and siege engines, arteries of empire bore trade too. Silk and spice caravans traversed huge blocks that linked Aleppo to Antioch, capital of Syria.”
- The Story Of Man II, by National Geographic, p. 421

“In the battle line each man requires a lateral space of three feet, while the distance between ranks is six feet Thus, 10,000 men can be placed in a rectangle about 1,500 yards by twelve yards.”
- Vegetius on Roman tactics.
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Marcus Valerius Martialis. 40 - 104 AD. Roman writer. His witty, original verse became the model for the modern epigram. An epigram usually being a short, keenly satirical poem. - KBR
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As early as 400 BC the Scythians deified fish in their Greek subordinate handicrafted art. Some experts believe that the fish was to Scythians, symbolic of the horse, which vehicularized their armies on ‘the ocean of grass’, AKA the Euroasian steppes. The Mongolian word for fish is ‘Kala’, it is also among their many words for horse. Genghis Khan was known as ‘The Emperor of all men and the ocean of grass’. - KBR
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The barbarian wolf-boys, Romulus and Remus, founded Rome, one brother then murdering the other. Began a parity and a parody of Cain and Abel. The slayer and the slain. Pre Hammurabi, pre yehouiti (‘Yaweh’), pre Old Testament, orally historied volumes. Abraham and Isaac misunderstandings. Abraham was obliged to understand that he had a bad connection when his alleged hot-line to God told him to do murder. It isn’t like he shouldn’t have known better the moment his alleged god proffered homicidal instructions.

This has never been a real problem, though it is frequently misunderstood as problematical. Always an inexcusable misunderstanding. Abraham was personally obliged to know it was - had to be - a crank call. (‘You can do anything you like Abe. But. The next time you see me comin, you better run.’) Instead, he agreed to do murder, ‘in the name of God’. Who is said to have extorted Abraham. The Bible tells us this, and that the only reason Abraham didn’t carry out his ‘orders from God’ (suspend the ethical), is that an angel intervened to belay the order (‘This was only a test’...), at the moment Abraham was about to murder his son, Isaac.

‘To catch a Tartar.’ This historical maxim is said to have originated when the pre-declinated Roman Empire impinged upon Tartary (Central Asia - the horsepeople - mounted horse-archer warrior - cultures wherever it prevailed, east of the Roman Empire): a picket reported by messenger that he had actually captured a Tartar. When the response came back from his superiors for him to bring the captive in to camp and court, the picket sent back his answer that the ‘prisoner’ wouldn’t let him do that. This really happened. This Roman picket fellow is given no name in any history known to this author, but he had a name, and written history captured this event then and holds it now. - KBR
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*Philip II of Macedon. Father of Alexander The Great. *Warrior, statesman, diplomat. Aimed to unite by conquest the Western and Eastern civlizations. Assassinated - stabbed to death - by one of his own bodyguards in 336 BC, when his army began to successfully dominate the Near East. Some say his assassin was a mercenary paid by his devious wife, Olympias.

Alexander The Great (Alexander III) 356 - 323 BC. King of Macedon. Son of Philip II. Command authority of major military contingents at age 16. Assumed control of his fatther’s kingdom at age 20, when his father was murdered. Groomed by his father, to make his mission the unification of the known Western and Near Eastern civilized world. Alexander put down rebellion in Greece; often with ruthlessness to non-combatants including women and children.

In 334 BC Alexander III undertook what was to be the widest conquest of ancient times. Conquered Asia Minor. Benevolently ruled Egypt. Showed mercy toward, respected the gods of, and improved living standards of vanquished Persian and Near Asian enemies. Combined the military infantry and cavalry tactics and devises of east and west. Overthrew the Persian Emperor Darius III (Who led an army of about a half million). Married Roxana, a Bactrian princess and adopted Persian ways. Alexander was one of the greatest generals of all time.

Respected by all his troops for his unusual - even reckless - courage in the heat of intense battles. Historians are divided as to Alexander’s often questionable motives and wisdom, especially with regard to his goals, statesmanship and eccentric generalship. His army refused to carry out his orders to penetrate deeper into the east; finally and non-violently persuaded him to let them return home to Macedon and Greece. Died of a fever at age 33. - KBR
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Hannibal. 247 - 182 BC. Carthaginian general of Northern Egypt. Crossed the Alps. Lost over half his army; still went on to conquer portions of southern Italy.
Succeeded Hasdrubal. Hannibal’s brother-in-law, a lesser general commanding in Spain. Recalled to defend Carthage from Rome’s Scipio. Hannibal was decisively beaten in the battle of Zama, 202 BC. Went on to Govern Carthage (Northern Egypt). Rome demanded him as a prisoner and he went into exile, finally taking his own life to avoid capture by the Romans.
Carthage was stormed by Roman Troops in 146 BC, after a three year siege, at the end of the Third Punic War. - KBR
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Attila. King of the Huns from 434 - 453 AD. Attempted but failed to conquer major portions of middle and southern Europe, especially Gaul (France) and northern Italy. He extorted tribute payments from Rome, but in 450 AD, emperors Valentian and Marcian refused to pay. Was defeated by Aetius in 451 at Chalons. Aborted an effort to conquer the Italian capital of Rome. Some say due the pleas of Pope Leo I, though most historians agree that it was because Atilla’s logistic chain of support - especially grasslands and fodder for his cavalry horses - failed to extend that far into southern Italy.
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“To avoid death, he sank back into the host of his companions, but as he went back, Meriones, dogging him, threw the spear and struck between naval and genitals where beyond all places death in battle comes painfully to pitiful mortals There the spear struck fast driven and he, writhing about it... gasped for a little while, but not long, until until Meriones came close and wrenched the spear out from his body.”
- Homer, ILIAD.
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* Mesopotamia - present day Iraq (‘The cradle of civilization’).

Thrace - early Greece; directly associated with Anatolia - present day Turkey.

Dacia - early Hungary.
Gaul - early France.
Anatolia - early Turkey.
Gibral Taric - the Iberian North African general who conquered Spain in 711 AD. Gibralter is named after him. Said to be the origin of the Moors and the Basques of Spain.

Carthaginians - North Africans.
Carthage - North Africa.

Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Vandals - early Germanics.
Huns - Turko Mongol peoples, constituting all three race groups infused - Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid.

Celts (Kelts) - early Scots and Irish. Prehistorically known as Cimmerians; not to be confused with the Sumerians of the Mesopotamian Valley in the near East.

Caledonians - Picts: Scots & Irish from the north. ‘Picture’ is derived from this barbarian culture’s tradition of decoratively painting their bodies in times of war; esp. the color blue.

Saxons. Welsh.

Oxonia - early Persia (Iraq and Iran, not to be confused with Arabia, which is an entirely different culture).


Oxus - a major river in the Near East, now known as the ________ .
Xartes - a major river in the Near East, now known as the ______ .

Hegemony - political will asserted by military domination and expansionism.

The Hapsburg Empire - Austrian elite; associated with the Swiss. Perfecters of infantry battle tactics with firearms. - KBR

Major Historical Battles
Cannae. A village location in southern Italy, where occurred of major defeat of a principle Roman army in 216 BC, by Hannibal of Carthage (North Africa).

Adrianople - 378 AD. Visigoths and Ostrogoth barbarians decisively defeat a Roman army of 60,000. Slaying also Emperor Valens of Constantinople - capitol of the easternmost Roman - ‘Byzantine’ Empire.

Hastings - 1066 AD, Viking Norsemen conquer England.

Agincourt - 1415 AD, a small, northern French village, where Henry V of England routed French troops.

The Hundred Years War (Between England and France, 14th to 15th centuries - 1337 - 1453. An interval of transition between Medieval and Modern Warfare).

Ain Jalut (‘Goliath’s Well’), 1260 AD - Location of the first defeat of (the third generation of) an army of Genghis Khan’s Mongols - 30,000 extants under the command of Ked Buka (AKA ‘Kit Boga’), a subaltern general to Orkhon Hulegu, who was interrupted in his war against the Mamluks by the death of Mangu Khan, whereupon they went back to Kararorum, in accordance with tradition, to elect a new Kha Khan. A Mongol civil war broke out between Kublai and Arigh Boke. The Golden Horde of Sarai, in south Russia, along with Arigh Boke’s ordu (horde) in Mongolia, contested Kublai’s right to the Dragonthrone, since tradition held it to be located in Karakorum, Mongolia, and Kublia ruled from Peking (Beijing), adventing the 100 year Mongol - Yuan - Dynasty 1264 - 1364 AD, then to be eclipsed by the Ming Dynasty - the last Chinese dynasty, eclipsed by the Republic Of China in 1912 AD.

Ked Buka was left behind as a vanguard, he and his army were slain to the last man when the Mamluks (a Mongol people themselves, slave soldiers of Northern Egypt who eventually overwhelmed their masters) employed a ‘standard sweep’ - ‘tolughma’; deceiving Ked Bukha into thinking that he had them on the run when in fact it was a tactical retreat designed to draw him into a cul de sac. The Mamluk General Baybars had an army of 120,000, Ked Bukha knew he was outnumbered, but underestimated the size of Baybar’s cavalry and auxiliary infantry of Bedouins and Arabs, thinking he had encountered the main force of Baybars’ army, and defeating them soundly, then pursuing its remainder: into the main force of Mamluks.

Seven years later, Kublai, after defeating his brother, Arigh Boke in the field, died of alcoholism, ending the Mongol Dynasty of 100 years, in China. Thenceforth the third generation of Genghis Khan was absorbed by the cultures they had conquered. - KBR
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“Troy - Grecian state; destroyed in civil war, 12th century BC, the traditional date is 1183 BC. The legendary ‘Trojan horse’ was probably a wheeled siege tower. The semi-barbaric Achaen Greeks besiging Troy lacked such technology, but may have hired military engineers from one of the more civilized countries to the east: around this time the fall of the Hittite empire (under the onslaught of a new wave of nomadic invasion) would have left a lot of unemployed professional soldiers on the loose in Asia Minor. If Hittite mercenaries had built a proper siege tower for the attackers - a wooden structure several storeys high, mounted on wheels, with a hide covered roof to protect the men inside and a metal tipped battering ram slung in the interior - the Achaeans may well have dubbed it a ‘wooden - Trojan - horse’, leaving subsequent generations to