Quote:Please feel free to read the book yourself and post your opinion on it.
Well, I got it through ILL and I must say I'm not entirely impressed. It's not so much the state of knowledge (it is from 1991, after all) as the fact that the authors see to be unaware of the thin ice their assumptions move on much of the time. I haven't caught them out in many outright errors, but I very much doubt their conclusions and am not very impressed with their research depth (if I had presented that level of credulity in secondary sources for my MA thesis, my professor would have given me a serious dressing-down). Given that Junkelmann had presented his 'Legionen' five years before, I would have hoped for better.
My main problem is that many of the things the book asserts as facts footnote directly to single publications, often from the 1950 and 1960S, with no references to either primary sources or excavated objects. Good though they may be overall, any serious student of ancient military affairs should have known even in '91 that the small technical detail is where many such books have their weaknesses. I do not know most of them (and so far don't think I want to go through the trouble of tracking them down), but it's poor craftsmanship to not even discuss how the authors are sure of the thickness of a leather collar or the material od the discs that stud an armoured cloak. Especially if an entire chapter of the book depends on these data.
(I'm halfway tempted to snark at the fact that one of the authors is a retired military intelligence officer, but that probably wouldn't be fair)
Another point of criticism is their happiness to statiscically calculate things that are almost certainly unknowable. They design a casualty profile for a Roman legion engaged in battle based on figures derived from averaging casualty numbers reported in ancient literary sources and field medical statistics from the Civil War, for example. The calculation of the ratio of killed to wounded is based on subtracting the number of killed and prisoners (presumed unwounded) from the total number engaged on the losing side to derive the number of wounded (with a Pompeian force of 45,000 engaged at Pharsalus of which 15,000 were killed and 24,000 taken prisoner, they arrive at 6,000 wounded for that battle, a relatively low 13.3% - down to the decimal point!). Again, all of this based on literary sources. All my instincts are crying out 'false accuracy' here. To be fair, they do occasionally admit that these values are at best approximations, but they treat them as accurate for the purpose of further calculations.
A much bigger problem affects their calculation of weapon effect and armour. Without producing replicas of most equipment for testing, they calculated the force exerted by weapons and that required to penetrate pieces of armour based on technical data derived from modern materials. The biggest flaw lies in calculating the impact force of a weapon from its weight, speed and impact surface alone. To derive their figures, they consistently neglect a host of variables that are very variable indeed such as using a single arrow as their sample to calculate impact force and range, or making general assumptions about the type of armour worn over centuries (uniform metal quality and thickness, for example). Since the great appeal of their work lies in these figures, it comes as a disappointment to see that they are almost entirely untrustworthy in detail. Their figures on medical issues are better, but also suffer from false accuracy and the assumption that modern data project back (the high incidence of tetanus in pre-vaccination modern armies is closely linked to the wound profile of black powder weapons and the manuring habit of modern European farming and can not simply be taken as a natural constant)
What is good about the book is that it collects information from over a broad range of issues and puts it together in an accessible format. Especially at its time it must have been very difficult to get good reading matter on ancient armies. The constant habit of comparing ancient and modern armies weakens what would otherwise be a compelling read on many often neglected aspects of warfare, though.
Altogether, I'm a bit disappointed. Mind you, their records stand because they invariably state that these feats were unmatched by *Western* armies until Napoleon, Moltke or the 18th century. Given the state of information on warfare in Asia and Africa at the time, that was likely as giood as non-experts could manage.
On the Assyrian army, I've just startted on Walter Mayer: Politik und Kriegskunst der Assyrer (Ugarit-Verlag Münster 1995) and I am - so far - much more favourably impressed.
