Quote:Be very careful when using Hyland. She has little idea about ancient warfare and is very biased against "western" horses. Pretty much everything she writes has the subtext: "aren't Arabian horses wonderful compared to those nasty European ones".
Warning heeded!
Regards
Michael Kerr
Michael Kerr
"You can conquer an empire from the back of a horse but you can't rule it from one"
I suspect a translational error between "hurl" and "thrust." Also a probable confusion between "pike" and "lance." It would be good to see the original words in these cases.
I think "lancers" is literally "spearbearers", "lance" is "spear" (thrusting spear), and "pike" is "kontos" - what the people using spears and kontoi like the Sauromatians and Alans were doing during their assault was, literally, "pushing" with the weapons. So no "hurling" at all!
"The doratophoroi (spear-bearers) are those who approach the ranks of the enemy and fight them with dorata (spears) or kontoi, pushing against them (not necessarily physically pushing, the term simply denotes forcing the enemy back) like the Alans and the Sarmatians. Acrobolistae (missile users, we use the term "skirmishers" mainly to denote men in disperse formation which is not implied in Greek by "acrobolistae", they may as well be missile using cavalry in dense formations) are those who use missiles from afar, just like the Armenians and the Parthians, those who are not kontophoroi (kontoi-bearers)." 4.3
The full stop in the scanned text after the word καθάπερ is a mistake.
"Of the Roman horsemen, others bear kontoi spears and attack in the manner of the Alans and the Sarmatians, while the rest have logchae (javelins)." 4.7
The logchae here are definitely javelins, as clearly described in 4.9
"They bear logchae on both sides and hurl them from afar, whenever they have to"
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George C. K.
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Acrobolistae sounds an awful lot like Arcuballista, that's just an observation I'm not implying they were. Either way, what is the litteral translation of Acrobolistae?
Though "longche" may be the origin of the English word 'lance', strange how word meaning changes through time.
One problem is that in modern usage any spear used on horseback becomes a lance. The Ancients had different usages, a spear was still a spear even when used on horseback. Hence the ungainly modern use of the word 'pike' for what were 'longer lances'.
Quote:Acrobolistae sounds an awful lot like Arcuballista, that's just an observation I'm not implying they were. Either way, what is the litteral translation of Acrobolistae?
Yes, the words are connected. The verb "ballo" in Greek means "throw, hurl, discharge", so a ballista or a basllistrida are machines that are used to discharge missiles.
Acro- here means "from a distance", regulalry akre means "top (of a mountain for example) or edge"
So, an acrobolistes is someone who stands on the side/edge at a distance and discharges his missiles whether in dispersed formation (skirmisher) or in line.
You can compare this with the word acrobates (acrobat), which means "walking on an edge, on a high point" or acropolis, "the highest place of a city, the city citadel" .
As far as I know, arcus in Latin is "bow" (the shape, like an English arc/arch) and so the direct Greek equivalent would be a toxoballistra (which is indeed a Greek word , as toxon means "bow/arc in Greek)
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George C. K.
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That reminds me of the later Byzantine Akritae, essentially the Limitanei of the Thematic system.
I thought they were connected in terminology, but didn't think they were the same. I saw a similarity with Bolos (as in polybolos) and that's why I thought of it.
Is the term Toxoballistra ever used in greek/roman/byzantine text?
We use it today but I only found it in this form in a 10th century Byzantine text, in Theophanes Continuatus' Chronographia. The usual Byzantine term was actually toxobollistra, which, etymologically speaking, is the same thing. The latter is used by Leo VI, Heron, Constantinus Porphyrogenitus and others (after the 6-7th century AD).
And yes, the terms "akritas" and "polybolos" (poly- means multiple, many) are of course also derived from these roots.The verb ballo produces in Greek the noun bole (the act of discharging/hurling something) and the adjective suffix -bolos (the one who discharges something). Adjectives like polybolos often in Greek (as is the case in English too) become nouns. Today, a polybolo is a machine gun.
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George C. K.
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Quote:Ann Hyland once wrote a National Geographic article about how a group of bone-age people used huge nets to catch rabbits. Coincidentally, or not, these neolithic characters lived on a hill just above a lake. How inextricably ODD! :woot: :whistle:
Hyland was actually writing about a rare species of aquatic rabbit that used to populate the lake (called the "soggy-eared water wabbit"). It is extinct today because of over fishing with those big nets :whistle:
