I was reading Strategikon (of Maurice, not Kekaumenos), a handbook of military strategy probably authored by the Emperor Maurice. it occurred to me that the practical military knowledge it contained was effectively secret knowledge, not usually available to enemies of Byzantium. Sometimes because those enemies were illiterate, more often because various social and geographic barriers made sneaking out a copy of Strategikon pretty unlikely. So, secret knowledge, the wisdom of the Occident.
In principle, the United States ought to have whole secret libraries. I don’t mean nuclear data from hydrogen bomb tests – I mean the distilled essence of the greatest minds that have served the Republic. Nathanael Greene’s musing on how he beat Cornwallis by taking advantage of multiple definitions of victory. Sherman’s definitive analysis of Jackson’s Valley Campaign. Nimitz’s inside history of the Pacific war: he said he never wrote one, because it would hurt people (people like Halsey), but then he would say that, wouldn’t he. Can’t have people digging around for the secret history, available only to the War College’s star pupils…
Only they seem to have been misplaced somehow. Probably they’re all boxed up in that warehouse, next to the Ark of the Covenant.
This is an astute observation, and one of particular relevance in a time when information and its exchange have become astonishingly open to the uninitiated (for instance, access to KGB files, and the FOI Act).
In terms of a viable and credible ‘secret history’ I would suggest that a scholar would have to ‘triangulate’ between available sources, both oral and written, before coming to his own conclusion. A relevant example of this is the recent ‘Near-nuclear launch from Okinawa’ controversy. Who do you believe? What sound conclusions can you draw (about revision of command-and-control for the firing codes, for instance)?
Of course the contemporary curse is that of being overwhelmed, both with too much valid (if inconsequential) data and bullshit. Everybody has an agenda, like it or not.
(Observations from a 1950s SAC Air Force brat)
Emperor Maurice’s technical handbook contains nothing that the enemy did not know. The Greeks main enemy was the Persian Empire, and in their hundred years war they must have become familiar with each others armies in the field and through deserters and spies. The Persians were certainly a most literate people, although nothing is left of their works – the Muhammad’s followers burned it all.
Ultimately, the Greeks were forced to fight an asymmetric war against the Turks. The Greeks were sophisticated and wealthy, the Turks were illiterate and they and their ponies were used to hunger and fatigue, they could raze cities and kill (by hand) millions and sleep well at night. Maurice’s secrets did not work on them.
Arabs, Avars, Bulgars ,Catalans, Lombards, Moors, Normans, Ostrogoths,Pechenegs, Persians,Slavs,Turks,Vandals,Vikings
Catalans?
While true, the empire was already in a pathetically weak state, in terminal decline, though not yet confined to city states, I doubt that Maurician institutions survived
You forgot the Varangian Rus (Scandinavians) that fought many wars against the Greeks and also served them as mercenaries. No one doubts the staying power of the Greeks, the Eastern Empire lasted a thousand years more than the Western one. In fact they did have some secret weapons in addition to the organization of their military.
For an interesting take on the evolution of the Late Eastern Roman and Byzantine Empires, read Peter Turchin’s theory of Clyodinamics.
http://peterturchin.com/
A good article about this topic can be found here.
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5j8740dz#page-9
“In principle, the United States ought to have whole secret libraries… the distilled essence of the greatest minds that have served the Republic.”
Why? US military history is short and for the most part uninteresting: beat downs of grossly outmatched opponents (even in the Revolution, the US was one of the least important of Britain’s enemies), as well as all-too-common defeats by grossly outmatched opponents.
How did Nimitz win the Pacific War? By fighting an opponent that was weak as hell.
How did Westmoreland lose in Vietnam? The US still doesn’t quite know.
WWII was the greatest of all wars. There’s a lot to learn from it.
Nimitz beat the Japs when they were stronger.
There was something to learn from the Civil War, but Europe refused to. Armed mobs, they said.
“There was something to learn from the Civil War, but Europe refused to.” What was the something?
That the defense has a big advantage in a railroad war, so much so that you could end up with trench warfare. You can supply a bigger army with a railroad, but then the army is bound to the railroad – can’t get much in front of it. A few miles of shell-torn battlefield advance [ WWI] makes things even worse, logistically. While the defender is retreating onto his intact railnet. He has plenty of supplies and can move troops more rapid on those rails than the attacker can move across the torn-up, unrailed battlefield.
This was just emerging in the American Civil War – wasn’t fully developed, wasn’t true everywhere. Didn’t happen along the Mississippi & Tennessee rivers because they were better than any railroad.. Came pretty true in the siege warfare around Richmond and Petersburg. The defense had the tactical advantage in the Civil War, far more so in WWI: but it also had the strategic advantage in a railroad war.
Jan Bloch saw some of this , and wrote a good book, The Future of War, which was of course generally ignored. By generals.
On the contrary, the European armies did practice what they called “field fortifications”. What they hadn’t realised was that they’d end up with continuous lines of fortifications from the Alps to the Channel.
One reason that the British Army could survive intact a two hundred mile retreat in 1914 in the face of a much bigger army was that it was expert in entrenching whenever it had to stop and fight.
“What they hadn’t realised was that they’d end up with continuous lines of fortifications from the Alps to the Channel.”
I think that’s partly the point though – the interplay between maximum army size and the ability to supply them.
middle ages – single small army supplied by a single crappy road
napoleonic – army size outpaced the supply network so it had to be split into corps and supplied along different roads with the trick of it being to get them all concentrated in the same space and time for a battle
railroad – maximum army size that can be supplied explodes but restricted to where the railheads are
so WWI, Lawrence could be fighting a medieval type war, somebody out in Iraq/Caucasus maybe could be fighting a Napoleonic type war and trench lines in western Europe.
Greg said that the lesson that wasn’t learnt from the US civil war was that “the defense has a big advantage in a railroad war, so much so that you could end up with trench warfare.” But Bismarck’s wars were railroad wars. As far as I can see the allegation of ignoring the lessons of the US civil war is just one of those tall tales of history.
WKPD:
In 2001, Strachan wrote that it is a cliché that the armies marched in 1914 expecting a short war, because many professional soldiers anticipated a long war. …. Moltke (the Elder) was proved right in his 1890 prognostication to the Reichstag, that European alliances made a repeat of the successes of 1866 and 1871 impossible … Having mobilised and motivated the nation, states would fight until they had exhausted their means to continue.
… the prospect of a swift advance by frontal assault was remote, making battles indecisive. Major-General Ernst Köpke, the Generalquartiermeister of the German army in 1895, wrote that an invasion of France past Nancy would turn into siege warfare and the certainty of no quick and decisive victory.
So [me again] siege war was expected, but its scale, Alps-Channel, wasn’t, or at least wasn’t by everyone relevant. I suspect that the error comes from realising that the Germans strategy lay somewhere on the spectrum from long shot to doomed, and therefore, people surmise, the Germans must have ignored the evidence. People don’t seem to grasp that the outcomes of WWI and WWII teach that although the Germans were the best soldiers in the world, their superiority lay at the tactical and fighting level. As strategists they were god-awful. Their problem wasn’t ignorance, it was intellectual incoherence. In short, they proved to be bloody fools.
“US military history is short and for the most part uninteresting: beat downs of grossly outmatched opponents (even in the Revolution, the US was one of the least important of Britain’s enemies), as well as all-too-common defeats by grossly outmatched opponents.”
May the Good Lord continue to keep our enemies this stupid.
The European belief that the Americans were hopeless incompetents was pretty well confirmed by Prussia’s swift offensive victories in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. The Prussian system of universal conscription and pre-arranged mobilisation plans was far superior to what the American powers were doing and would have smashed either of them.
Taking WWI as the point of comparison ignores a full half century of wars between advanced and well-prepared powers working exactly how the European strategists of the 1860s predicted, and a full half century of population growth and technological advance, and even then the American Civil War doesn’t look very much like WWI.
“The European belief that the Americans were hopeless incompetents was pretty well confirmed by Prussia’s swift offensive victories in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars.”
Dunno. Don’t those victories simply confirm Prussian military superiority over the Austrian-led German Federation and the French……
“The Prussian system of universal conscription and pre-arranged mobilisation plans was far superior to what the American powers were doing and would have smashed either of them.”
A cross-Atlantic invasion in the 1860s-’70s? That would have been a rather ambitious venture…..
“Dunno. Don’t those victories simply confirm Prussian military superiority over the Austrian-led German Federation and the French……”
Yes, and when the things that made them superior (e.g. universal conscription, pre-planned mobilisation) are things that also made them superior to the American powers, it also confirms Prussian military superiority over the American powers.
In fact it’s worse than that because the French and the Austro-Hungarians, unlike the Americans, did have at least partial conscription and some mobilisation planning, their systems just weren’t as complete or as efficient.
Our host argues that the American Civil War had a lot of lessons for WWI but the fact is that any of the WWI powers, except perhaps Britain, would have smashed either American power because they had adopted the Prussian military system.
“A cross-Atlantic invasion in the 1860s-’70s? That would have been a rather ambitious venture…..”
If their places were swapped. Of course you can argue that the Americans didn’t need these things because they were insulated from danger by the sea. Sure, that’s why they could get away with being inferior, but it doesn’t mean they had anything to teach Europe.
“it also confirms Prussian military superiority over the American powers.”
With all due respect, this is a pretty daft comment, akin to arguing about what would happen if Superman and Batman got into a fight. Is the argument that, had the US of 1865 and the Prussia of 1865 gotten into a war, Prussia would have won? If so, this is absurd. The US had far greater manpower, a far larger industrial base, and an actual navy. The US would certainly have prevailed over Prussia, as indeed they did. Is the argument that,had Robert E. Lee’s army magically transformed into Von Moltke’s it would have won the Battle of the Wilderness? Where was this going to happen? Valhalla? A Gabrial Garcia Marquez novel? And of course, had the US been next door to Prussia, both the US and Prussia would have been very different…
This type of argument is somewhat akin to arguing about who was a better baseball player, Ty Cobb or some modern star, ignoring the fact that, had Ty Cobb lived today, he would have been a very different ballplayer. Armies and military systems do not exist in a void, or in some Platonic Milspace, but in the context of their places and times. Wehrmacht/Prussia worshipers tend to forget this – as did indeed the German High Command.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that anyone who doesn’t think that the American Civil War, the largest single military conflict that the world had seen up until that time, had any lessons to teach military professionals, is so blinded by contempt for America that they are not seeing straight. Hell, even the Chaco War and the Algerian War had lessons to teach, let alone a huge conflict like the Civil War.
And, oh, yeah, William Tecumseh Sherman or Robert E. Lee would have ripped Von Moltke a new one. Just sayin…
““A cross-Atlantic invasion in the 1860s-’70s? That would have been a rather ambitious venture…..”
If their places were swapped. Of course you can argue that the Americans didn’t need these things because they were insulated from danger by the sea. Sure, that’s why they could get away with being inferior, but it doesn’t mean they had anything to teach Europe.”
So, for your notions to work, we need to have the USA in Western Europe, not in North America…..Afraid that that’s getting into Alien Space Bats territory….
“Yes, and when the things that made them superior (e.g. universal conscription, pre-planned mobilisation) are things that also made them superior to the American powers, it also confirms Prussian military superiority over the American powers.
In fact it’s worse than that because the French and the Austro-Hungarians, unlike the Americans, did have at least partial conscription and some mobilisation planning, their systems just weren’t as complete or as efficient.
Our host argues that the American Civil War had a lot of lessons for WWI but the fact is that any of the WWI powers, except perhaps Britain, would have smashed either American power because they had adopted the Prussian military system.”
Dunno. The French Intervention in Mexico didn’t go so well for the French……
“With all due respect, this is a pretty daft comment, akin to arguing about what would happen if Superman and Batman got into a fight.”
It’s not at all about the two directly fighting one another. Give the USA (or CSA) Prussia’s system and they would outperform. Given Prussia the USA (or CSA) system and Prussia probably would not have existed by 1870.
“Armies and military systems do not exist in a void”
Certainly. The US and CSA didn’t need a good military system because their neighbours were weak as hell, while Prussia’s neighbours were the strongest military powers in the world. But the question is whether the US and CSA had anything to teach Prussia, not whether they are somehow morally blameworthy for having weaker militaries than some other country. They had good reasons for not being at the forefront of military developments; nonetheless, they weren’t at the forefront of military developments.
“…anyone who doesn’t think that the American Civil War, the largest single military conflict that the world had seen up until that time, had any lessons to teach military professionals, is so blinded by contempt…”
The fact that a conflict is big doesn’t make it conceptually important. Apart from the fact that the Napoleonic Wars already included larger armies, more geographically dispersed fighting, more political and social implications of fighting, fighting over a longer period, and were just bigger in any possible dimension than the American Civil War, size simply doesn’t correlate with conceptual importance. The Taiping Rebellion was the biggest war in well recorded history in 1865. Did the Taiping have something to teach the Prussians? The Taiping were eventually defeated by quite a small army organised by a British general along European lines. The Europeans had something to teach the Taiping, not vice.versa.
“The European belief that the Americans were hopeless incompetents was pretty well confirmed by Prussia’s swift offensive victories in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. ”
Dunno. Most of the military historians that I have read are pretty impressed by what Sherman did in 1864…..
And one should bear in mind the contrast between the Union Army in 1861-’62 vs what it had become by 1864…..
“How did Westmoreland lose in Vietnam? The US still doesn’t quite know.”
Not invading North Vietnam seems like a good place to start….Of course, there were political reasons for not doing that….
“How did Nimitz win the Pacific War? By fighting an opponent that was weak as hell.”
Dunno. Japan was pretty strong between Pearl Harbor and Midway….
In modern times we have mass publishing, and authors can make money off their writing.
What often happens at War College is that officers with no clue write unclassified papers that demonstrate they don’t know what has actually be done, and learned, on classified programs.
If you had seen “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” you would know the book is in the Library of Congress.
I can think of a couple examples of “secret histories” that have been leaked or declassified–the Pentagon Papers (about Vietnam), and I think there was also some report about the CIA-instigated coup in Iran in the 50s that was declassified. There are probably others. It would be interesting to look at those and see if there are any particularly deep insights, but I doubt there are. More likely, they’re just histories written with knowledge of some details that were classified.
This perspective assumes a kind of hero worship where a single ‘great mind’ can somehow offer insights that a wide selection of good minds working collaboratively over years can’t match.
Yes, armies need a single general and great generals make a huge difference. But what makes a general great, being able to boldly and intelligently choose from all the proffered options and evaluate the conflicting recommendations from experts, isn’t the same quality which makes them best able to analyze the strategy after the fact. Even if it was there is no reason to believe that they would be more effective than a community of war scholars analyzing the same information over time.
I mean just look at the way math and the sciences progress. Yes, there are great men like Einstein and Newton but which gives you more insight into physics or calculus? Reading their original work or looking at how a community of scholars digested that information. Indeed, I would go so far as to say even if England had kept Newton’s work a secret their knowledge of physics and math would have quickly been surpassed by the work of a multitude of scholars working collectively.
If this is true in subjects that study the immutable truths of mathematics and the universe it is surely much more true in a field where insights are highly technologically dependent and quickly become stale.
In science, a few top guys make most of the contributions. Which implies that it can barely exist in populations with lower average IQs – which is the case.
If England had kept Newton’s work secret while working hard at keeping up with everything developed on the Continent, they might have been ahead for some time. . But the overall development of science would have suffered, and since science is a positive -sum game, that would have been a mistake.
However, military science is not a positive-sum game. In war, what matters is not being good, but being better.
I’ve thought about this in relation to Asian v White IQ. They should have roughly three times as many geniuses as we do.
But they don’t outperform Whites by anything close to three times in the biggest intellectual endeavors that I happen to know of off the top of my head: they don’t bash us that badly for Nobel prizes or for patents per capita, and most of the people responsible for big recent discoveries/inventions GMOs, the transistor, the sequencing of the human genome, the creation of Mycoplasma laboratorium, the discovery of the CRISPR mechanism etc were of European descent.
Why aren’t they kicking our asses?
Not as creative, not as trusting, not as willing to openly share data, or perhaps any or all combination of the three.
The East Asian nation that does best (more or less) is Japan, with South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore not too far behind. Is it a matter of moolah in the research department? Who knows?
Clannishness – The Series: Zigzag Lightning in the Brain
Japan and Britain lead the world in sci-fi/fantasy, too. I guess people with the freakgene look for islands to live on.
islands are best
Maybe it’s because the smartest ones are steered into business rather than science and tech?
No. Blacks can speculate about weird stuff even if they can barely write; Chinese kids in the same classes can’t. Sample size: about 2000 Blacks and 500 Chinese in the past 10 years of adjuncting at 5th rate “colleges”. Or maybe 5000 Blacks and 1500 Chinese. A lot of both, anyway. Given an average of 6 classes per semester plus winter intersessions and up to 4 summer classes.
Those all sound realistic enough- can you think of ways to test them empirically?
Off the top of my head, I have a few other ideas: ‘Merica has a big fancy university system and China’s a dump. Perhaps the Japanese, S. Koreans, Taiwanese, and folks from Singapore really are overrepresented, but Asians don’t crush us simply because most of them live in China.
“Those all sound realistic enough- can you think of ways to test them empirically?”
Check the ancient DNA samples being tested for historical research reasons for genes that have been selected against over time.
You think that the creative and collaborative East Asians might’ve been weeded out? (Via gene-culture coevolution perhaps?)
Or perhaps that creative and collaborative Europeans had a lot of kids?
The criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and the contemporary psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, who specializes in the study of genius, have shown that the geniuses have tended to be celibate and childless. They also often have to be looked after and cared for by other people, and are less adept at navigating ordinary and social life. This has led some to hypothesize that genius may be a group selected trait.
“Not as creative, not as trusting, not as willing to openly share data,”
You have to be extremely insular or ignorant of human cultural history to claim that Asians lack creativity – Chinese civilisation was the world’s most prolific in terms of arts and letters prior to the modern era, and the only countries with soft power in the modern era outside of the Anglosphere are Asian – they produce the best quality pop culture.
Subtract the contributions of Ashkenazim, and the performance of the remainder of Whites aren’t lookin’ so hot relative to the Asians.
Untrue. Drastically wrong. Who has made a greater contribution to human knowledge – James Clerk Maxwell [ one guy !] , or East Asia over the past five hundred years?
And Newton wanted to be sure to get credit for everything. And never share credit.
Imagine the flame wars Newton could have had with Hooke and Leibniz if there had been an internet back then!
Perhaps there is a tale in adaptive optics research? The top people only managed to keep a few years ahead of the broader community, despite secrecy.
But did Newton’s work have that much practical payoff in his lifetime? The people who ruled England during his lifetime probably didn’t think that it was worth keeping a secret. In fact they probably knew little about it and cared less.
I’m not sure about Newton, but there is evidence that scientific work on air pressure eventually contributed to Newcomen’s steam engine. This isn’t the usual story you read in history-of-science-and-technology books, where Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are treated as independent, but Dennis Wooton’s recent book on the scientific revolution makes the case for a connection. The link between Huygens and Boyle, and Newcomen, was a guy named Denis Papin. He was French, but Protestant, so he had to spend his career outside France.
Early scientific work on air pressure wasn’t any kind of secret. So maybe a lesson is that your country can get ahead even without keeping stuff secret, when other countries are driving their creative minorities into exile.
Here’s a brief account from my blog: https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/steam-engine-time/
When people talk about the “Great Divergence”, they don’t seem to place much emphasis on the fact that at the very top, Western Europe was enormously more intellectually sophisticated than China. Europeans were using Jupiter’s moons as a clock in 1800 and directly measuring the gravitational force of a 12-inch lead ball. European physics & mathematics were far advanced over China’s at that point. Indeed, you could argue that Hellenistic science and mathematics were far advanced over those of China in 1800.
I’ve read that when Jesuit missionaries in China showed the Chinese Western globes of the world the Chinese were utterly astonished.
There’s a wonderful story of Japanese medical students coming across Dutch medical textbooks. The diagrams proved that European medicine was far more accurate than the Chinese medicine that they were studying. None of them could read the text though, Dutch traders having been expelled from Japan. So they treated Dutch as a code, and cracked it.
Hellenistic math and science were far advanced over those of China in 1800 because much of them, especially astronomy, were essentially modern mathematical science. Ptolemy’s models, like Maxwell’s equations, simply give a mathematical description of behavior, rather than try to explain or provide a theory about what is really going on. In this way, modern mathematical science is largely a resurrection of Hellenistic science and some aspects of Classical science, and the replacement of Aristotelian science.
This complicates somewhat the issue of the relationship between the scientific revolution and technical developments though, since obviously Hellenistic science did not spark an industrial revolution in its own time, and since you had guys like John Harrison, a clockmaker not versed in math and astronomy, beating out prominent scientists using moon observations and lunar distances to win the Longitude Prize. Newton himself had a low opinion of craftsmen like Harrison trying to win the prize, and believed that only astronomical methods by scientists like himself would solve the problem.
I’ve thought about how the cold war would have been different had America acted like it had a high chance of becoming hot. Lots of people tell me that everyone thought it was going to go hot(I was born in 1980, so I don’t really remember it) yet looking back, the actions speak louder than words. No fallout shelters, for instance. The liberals mocked those who built them, claiming everyone would die anyway, but that’s nonsense. Many millions would have survived, and millions would be saved by shelters. There’s other aspects, such as there being no attempt to increase America’s population.
I’ve never understood why Byzantine history isn’t more popular. It’s so fascinating.
Yes. The Roman Empire never fell, it just changed continents.
Yes although it’s becoming more popular now due to strategy games so that’s good.
Pity we have no good histories of the hundred years Byzantine-Sassanid war. Not that any conclusion could be extracted from them – wars never repeat themselves (except in the minds of old generals that are always fighting the last war) and the weapons have evolved. We too keep evolving very fast.
“Wars never repeat themselves” — but Hoplite-tactics would be easily adaptable for street-combat — say, Hassidim defending their turf from BLM-mobs, jabbing steel bars over plywood.
You must be joking. But BLM mobs are no joke – in 2016 there were a thousand casualties in Chicago alone.
Not really joking — it seems to me that Boro Parkers ought to be practicing shield-wall street-combat techniques, and maybe they are, in some of the larger shul basements after Maariv. Enemy snipers would be a problem, so you’d need your own counter-snipers on rooftops. I only focus on Hassidim because they have the social cohesion necessary for effective application of hoplite-tactics to street-combat situations. Sicilian group-spirit is gone in NYC, and of course the Park Slopers aren’t going to defend themselves. Possibly the Mexican/Central-American Pentecostals, though … actually, it’s occurred to me before (just remembering now) that the Mexican/Central-American Pentecostals are the only people who might be willing to fight the expanding Muslim population for control of Brooklyn in the long run.
There is no ethnic social cohesion nor institutions that could mobilize it. It’s up to the police.
Yeah, I guess. But it’s fun to imagine, especially when you’re familiar with the intersections where crucial street-battles might take place.
Can we tell the country’s greatest minds from people who just got lucky? Or who were at the right place at the right time?
For science, maybe. But when you’re talking war, some supposedly great generals built their reputations on just a handful of battles or encounters. It’s like trying to detect poker skill from 5-6 hands.
Moshe Dayan sure looked like a military genius after the Six Day War. Then the Yom Kippur War started, he did dumb stuff (like squandering Israel’s air superiority in raids against Egyptian SAM batteries), and soon he retired in disgrace.
Richard Nixon told Golda Meir that he would trade any three American generals for Israeli General Moshe Dayan. “OK,” she said, “I’ll take General Motors, General Electric and General Dynamics.”
All four “generals” have had their better and their lesser periods.
My favorite Moshe Dayan story is the argument Richard Dawkins had with Amotz Zahavi in the 70s. Dawkins said (regarding the handicap principle) “signalling strength through weakness doesn’t make sense. We don’t see species evolving so that they have weaker limbs, less strength, more deformities, etc.” Zahavi supposedly said something like “sir, our greatest general only has one eye!” (Moshe Dayan wears an eyepatch.)
He didn’t lose an eye to evolution. It took a bullet. And surviving a bullet and going back for more could be taken as a sign of strength.
pretty sure he was joking
About losing an eye???
The Israelis tend to be overrated. People forget that their victories were all won fighting against Arabs. They’ve never had to go up against a first class military.
Lucio Russo mentioned in his book The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn that some Greek states and Carthage had discovered various technologies related to open-water navigation- but they treated them as state secrets and they were subsequently lost after the Romans smushed them.
Supposedly, Carthage even managed to cross the Atlantic and found a colony somewhere in the Americas.
It seems to me that keeping such knowledge buried as a secret history- or perhaps I should call it a secret technology- was a terribly bad no good idea. If it had been more widely distributed perhaps the Greeks or Carthaginians would have been able to progress even more- and perhaps been advanced enough to defeat the Romans via technology when they needed to, later on.
Or not. But Russo wrote a fascinating book, in my opinion.
“Supposedly, Carthage even managed to cross the Atlantic and found a colony somewhere in the Americas.” Oh go on. The Canaries, sure. Madeira: perhaps. The Azores: a long, long shot.
But the Americas? The evidence is what?
According to The Sunbird</> the Carthaginians had a colony in South Africa. Blond temple priestesses diving into cenotes, a great Sunbird battle ax, a great mass hunt like the Romans did it, sabertooth vs homeric heroes, blond chicks with more Pimm’s Cups in them than suitable for perfect propriety, gold to airy thinness beat with immortal poetry on it writ, cursed ancient tombs like a shroom dream, I think there’s some of that girly characterization stuff but Wilbur Smith doesn’t let it get in the way of the story.
Actual evidence for this is essentially nonexistent- and it seems to me that the complete lack of any sign of human habitation of various Atlantic islands- aside from the Canaries- discovered early in the European age of exploration argues against it.
I hasten to add that Russo mentioned this only in discussing the possibility of ancient seafarers having knowledge of more advanced technology, later lost- and his mention was limited only to repeating a rumor reported by an ancient writer.
Unfortunately, I loaned the book out and haven’t gotten it back- so I can only rely on my hazy memory.
In any case, it still strikes me as a fascinating possibility, because obviously if the Greeks or Carthaginians did in fact discover the Americas and manage to sail back and forth then they potentially missed a great opportunity. But I would argue that this is a likely consequence of a civilization that keeps such knowledge limited to a special few- i.e., keeps secret histories- because if things go south then the knowledge can be lost- and per Russo it was, so thoroughly that we don’t even realize how much.
That’s the important lesson from his book, I think.
You could get blown to America by accident from the Canaries or points south. Getting back would be the tricky bit: Columbus managed it because the Portuguese explorers had determined the seasonal wind patterns in the Atlantic, and because he was using sailing ships not galleys with sails.
And then: to what end? Like the Vikings, they’d have found themselves without a large enough technological advantage over the natives. Unlike the Vikings, they might have gained from bringing in Old World diseases from a high population density city (Carthage), but it’s still hard to believe they’d succeed in anything but getting themselves killed (and possibly eaten.)
We simply don’t know enough to judge whether or not the Carthaginians were able to cross the Atlantic or not. I recall seeing claiming that Roman-era shipwrecks had been found on this side of the pond- but as you note they easily could have been blown here unwillingly. However, I certainly
find it suggestive to read accounts of “a great island, many days to the west, with mountains and navigable rivers.” We know what that might describe, but presumably Diodorus did not.
About any presumptive technological advantage, I’d presume horses and iron weaponry would be enough, given sufficient numbers. But I also recall historian Hugh Thomas writing in his history of the conquest of Mexico that absent disease events would have likely turned out similarly to history of the British in India.That is, cultural impact, but not demographic replacement.
That particular scenario for a hypothetical Carthaginian trans-Atlantic colony is not ruled out, in my opinion. Perhaps they merely traded, as in England, where they may have left a few place names as evidence of their presence- as suggested by Dr. Caitlin Green.
http://www.caitlingreen.org/
But forgive my off topic rambling.
The inability to prove something didn’t happen is not evidence that it did happen.
The Vikings had iron weapons. But a stone-tipped arrow could kill them just the same.
A Carthaginian could sail to England without ever going out of sight of land.
Russo wrote a whole book on the topic, Forgotten America (2013) that hasn’t been translated. It seems to be based largely on the coordinates in Ptolemy’s Geography.
In Forgotten Revolution (1996?), he mainly talks about how we have inherited from the medievals the rejection of ancient claims about their navigation that are quite plausible when we consider technologies that we know that the ancients had (astrolabe, barnacle protection) that the medievals lacked. eg, open-ocean travel in the Indian Ocean.
The passage Xennady mentions:
Thank you!
This is indeed the exact passage I was thinking of in my comments.
off-topic but mentioned on here before…
hispanic longevity
black longevity (after a mortality hurdle)
and
black twitter mocking white people over aging fast (to their eyes)
alt-right twitter mocking black people over fried chicken
what if as people moved north they needed a higher metabolism* – might that explain the longevity issue?
(* and hence more iodine to fuel it)
why the difference between black and hispanic if it’s climate based metabolism? why would black people be adapted to european diet? they wouldn’t. (hence maybe the chicken – is it very neutral as a food?)
also meds – drugs tested on white or asian people might (and almost certainly will imo) work differently on black people (on average)
so maybe the black longevity paradox is they need to survive the diet and the meds first and if they do then the natural low metabolism / greater longevity thing kicks in
separate to that might populations evolved to have a higher metabolism (and thus need for iodine) have a general sluggish effect from iodine deficiency?
ME?
The ranking on mortality from most causes in the US from lowest to highest is Asian, Amerindian, Hispanic, White, Black. The main drivers of lower death rates are cardiovascular disease and cancer. Though generally Amerindians and Hispanics have lower death rates than whites for most diseases, alcohol related diseases are an exception. Also whites have lower death rates for diabetes.
if there was a “live fast, die young” metabolism effect i wonder what organs would be most affected?
What do you think of Michael Woodley’s argument that genius is a group selected phenotype, which he claims was originally W.D. Hamilton’s idea? He discusses it at around 17:00 here:
whyteablog
“You think that the creative and collaborative East Asians might’ve been weeded out?”
yeah, if “genius” traits had other negative consequences then seems like a possibility
See Dean Keith Simonton’s work on geniuses. Geniuses have tended to be celibate and childless. Older researchers like Lombroso noted this as well.
yeah – so a population might have a stock of geniuses who eventually run out
or rather a stock of gene genies that can run out
Melchizedek
“Subtract the contributions of Ashkenazim, and the performance of the remainder of Whites aren’t lookin’ so hot relative to the Asians.”
which centuries are you including in that?
(also did the recent disproportionate contribution coincide with adopting the western marriage model?)