Rome vs Han essay- want get some opinions

[Chariovalda]

Thanks, Tarbicus, for the link to Curzon's essay. Whittaker quoted him in his "Frontiers of the Roman Empire", and now I was able to read the original.

Now, concerning the article in the People's Daily, I wasn't impressed to be honest. Perhaps Visy knows something others don't, or he was being politie, or the People's Daily is misrepresenting comments concerning the parallels between Roman and Han frontier systems.

Fortified frontier zones are hardly uncommon. Prior to the various Chinese walls and the Roman limes, there were wall systems along Achaemenid Persia's northern frontiers; Alexander is supposed to have built one, and the Seleucids constructed a 250 km long wall system protecting Antiochia Margiana (Merv). From what I know of the Roman limes - with its great variety over time and place - it seems to have "organically grown" as a (possibly partly culturally conditioned) reaction to practical problems on the frontier, and it never physically resembled the Great Wall.
As for the similarities, I suspect it's simply a matter of similar problems leading to similar solutions.

Finally, the article erroneously claimed the Great Wall was first constructed in the 7th century BC (it wasn't - that happened in the late 3rd century BC, the work of the "First Emperor") and got the starting date of the Han dynasty 20 years too early (it was 206 rather than 226 BC).

Way to go for a Chinese newspaper... :roll:

[Eleatic Guest]

Western Han Troops ( 206 BC- AD 8 ) : Spearman, swordsman, crossbowmen

[D B Campbell]

The Roman limes ... never physically resembled the Great Wall.

Even the Great Wall didn't always resemble the Great Wall!

As I pointed out many years ago (Historia 38, 1989, 371-6, an article that seems to have been universally ignored ), the Chinese frontier wall built during the reign of Wu-Ti (c. 100 BC) -- which modern scholars call the Tun-huang limes -- was no "Great Wall of China". Sir Aurel Stein's excavations there revealed a simple earthwork barrier covering a chain of detached watch-towers.

The comparison between the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall is a chestnut that crops up again and again. But the Great Wall as we know it is, as far as I know, a medieval construction of the Ming dynasty.
Stein reckoned that his earthwork barrier (the Tun-huang frontier) was still being maintained in the 2nd C AD, but I would hesitate to call it "a special, complicated structure of frontier defence".

But perhaps some amazing new evidence has appeared since 1989.
Is there a Sinologist in the house?!

[Eleatic Guest]

As I pointed out many years ago (Historia 38, 1989, 371-6, an article that seems to have been universally ignored ), the Chinese frontier wall built during the reign of Wu-Ti (c. 100 BC) -- which modern scholars call the Tun-huang limes -- was no "Great Wall of China". Sir Aurel Stein's excavations there revealed a simple earthwork barrier covering a chain of detached watch-towers.

CJ Peers, Imperial Chinese Armies (1) 200 BC - AD 589 Osprey, p.17 (trustworthy source, I hope, hehe) on the Han fortifications from the Ordos region to Kansu:

Wall building was a fairly quick and simple operation - a single man was said to be able to erect 18 feet of rampart per month - and the walls were probably no more than low earth banks, using loose stones or even bundled twigs as a core, which acted more as boundary markers and lookout posts than as serious fortifications. Rectangular brick watchtowers were placed at intervals of slightly less than a mile, and banks of raked sand outside the defences were used to reveal any nocturnal incursions. A system of signalling between the towers by means of red and white flags, smoke or bonfires was in operation by about 160 BC.

On the other hand, I have seen in more than one serious publication stone walls specifically dated to the Qin and Han era, lines of stone 3-4 meter high with no battlements. Still impressive, but a far cry from the Ming wall, and also of less sophisticated workmanship than the Hadrian's wall since the sections depicted showed stones which were are at best crudely worked without any mortar.

The signalling system is kind of more interesting, since surviving records suggest that it must have been very professionally managed.

[MARCvSVIBIvSMAvRINvS]

China???? WOEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Rome? We'll see about that!

BANZAI!

:twisted:

M.VIB.M.

[Matthew]

I can't see why on earth the Gladius is being compared to the Jian and the Spatha to the Dao as though they were obvious equivalents. It seems to me that the Jian, Gladius and Spatha all belong to the same family of swords with straight double edged blades and pointed tips of varying length, width, weight and design, whereas the Dao is more closely related to a Falchion or Seax (especially this latter, which, if Wikipedia is to be believed, is a word that corresponds exactly to Dao, being derived from a word for 'knife' and eventually used for single edged blades of all sizes, generally in combination with an adjective of some sort, such as 'lang' or 'hond'...)], being a single edged sword with a blade of varying length, width, design and curvature.

I said a gladius is better at thrusting than cutting.

It's my understanding that with a curved blade the emphasis is on the cut, whilst a straight blade puts more emphasis on the thrust (given that it doesn't have a rounded tip), but is not better at thrusting than cutting. Rather, straight blades are better at thrusting than curved blades and curved blades are better at cutting than straight blades. To say that a straight blade is better suited to thrusting than cutting seems odd, would it not be more sensible to say that it is a compromise between the two?


On the subject of frontage for Romans, my reading of Polybius was that it was a frontage of six feet for each individual Republican Soldier and three feet for each member of the Macedonian Phalanx, which would make perfect sense for Polybius' one Roman to two Greeks / ten Spears. It all sounds a bit too neat to me, but not too implausible. Can anybody with access to the original Greek give the original measurements?

My Reference:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/ ... niple.html


As a sidenote on frontages, if Vegetius advised an individual frontage of three feet (as I read somewhere else on this forum, but am too lazy to check upon at the moment), did he have in mind the Gladius (in the sense of Short Sword, of course, not just Sword) or a longer blade? Or is he just thinking of Spears? If Vegetius has the longer Spatha in mind (the more common sword of the period?) when writing, it would imply that he regards it as both suited to thrusting and use in close order... Could just be more evidence for his lack of practical military experience, but interesting nonetheless, in my opinion... maybe I should start a thread for this...


Anyway, an interesting, if sometimes heated, discourse. I learned a lot about Han armies...


Matthew James Stanham

[MARCvSVIBIvSMAvRINvS]

Matthew, that is actually a tantalising idea! to start a new thread!

of course i cannot really compare the Han army, or the Roman legions to the Samurai armies....

also because there is a giant time difference, but your remarks on the weapons and their difference in use is very spot on!

love the quote under your postings!

M.VIB.M.

[Eleatic Guest]

The comparison between the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall is a chestnut that crops up again and again.

Yes. Unfortunately, it seems your article wasn"t quite registered at the other side of the globe. ;-) )

Romans may have learned from Chinese Great Wall: archaeologists

Discussion on the article

I liked the reactions of some posters on the article, as they reflect also my view in this matter. Quote from post no. 3: If you build a wall, and I build a wall, utilizing the construction materials of the same time, for the same purposes, then it isn't out of the realm of possibility that your wall and my wall would be similar is size, shape and basic design.........

I also have to add that the poster below (post #3) is not far off the mark. Chinese archaeology is state-sponsored and beside the excellent work many Chinese archaeologists do, you have quite a nationalistic undercurrent as the ChCP is currently phasing out the communist ideology in favour of a more national stance and archaelogy seems to be considered as one legitimate tool: Keep in mind that Chinese archaeology is notorious for misrepresenting history for Chinese propaganda purposes.

Following regularly archaeological news, I have already read claims that ancient Chinese invented football, golf and what not.

This more-ingenious-than-thou stance even does not stop before ...flushing toilets! :oops:

Apparently, the involved archaeologists never read about the ubiquitous Roman flushing toilets which were even found at the very periphery of the Roman world (Housesteads, Hadrian"s Wall, e.g.). Peter Connolly: The Roman Fort, p. 22f.: Roman public toilets have been excavated all over the Roman world. They all work on the same basic as the Housesteads example.

Just settting the record on WCs straight here. I feel...relieved...

[Chariovalda]

As I pointed out many years ago (Historia 38, 1989, 371-6, an article that seems to have been universally ignored ), the Chinese frontier wall built during the reign of Wu-Ti (c. 100 BC) -- which modern scholars call the Tun-huang limes -- was no "Great Wall of China". Sir Aurel Stein's excavations there revealed a simple earthwork barrier covering a chain of detached watch-towers.

CJ Peers, Imperial Chinese Armies (1) 200 BC - AD 589 Osprey, p.17 (trustworthy source, I hope, hehe) on the Han fortifications from the Ordos region to Kansu:

Wall building was a fairly quick and simple operation - a single man was said to be able to erect 18 feet of rampart per month - and the walls were probably no more than low earth banks, using loose stones or even bundled twigs as a core, which acted more as boundary markers and lookout posts than as serious fortifications. Rectangular brick watchtowers were placed at intervals of slightly less than a mile, and banks of raked sand outside the defences were used to reveal any nocturnal incursions. A system of signalling between the towers by means of red and white flags, smoke or bonfires was in operation by about 160 BC.

On the other hand, I have seen in more than one serious publication stone walls specifically dated to the Qin and Han era, lines of stone 3-4 meter high with no battlements. Still impressive, but a far cry from the Ming wall, and also of less sophisticated workmanship than the Hadrian's wall since the sections depicted showed stones which were are at best crudely worked without any mortar.

The signalling system is kind of more interesting, since surviving records suggest that it must have been very professionally managed.

The thing was probably that the Ch'in and the Han used whatever materials were available: rammed earth walls (also used commonly for civilian architecture, one of the reasons early Chinese dynasties left very little in terms of architectural remains) mostly, stone where feasible. And yes, the Wall we know is a 16th century edifice.

A propos wall systems, I am currently reading "Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC" by William J. Hamblin (Routledge 2006). In it, I stumbled upon a description of a wall system constructed on the orders of Shusin, a king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2034 BC. This wall was about 270 km. long and was constructed between Euphrates and Tigris to keep Amorite nomads out of central and southern Mesopotamia. The wall also had a name: "It keeps the Tidnum (Amorite tribal confederacy) at a distance".

Shusin's grandfather, King Shulgi, had also ordered the construction of a wall to keep highland nomads at bay, called "The Wall Facing the Highland".

Again, similar problems, similar solutions...

[Eleatic Guest]

In it, I stumbled upon a description of a wall system constructed on the orders of Shusin, a king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2034 BC. This wall was about 270 km. long and was constructed between Euphrates and Tigris to keep Amorite nomads out of central and southern Mesopotamia.

I also read about this wall in Roman Herzog: Staaten der Frühzeit. Ursprünge und Herrschaftsformen as an early example of a major state-concerted defensive effort.

The general problem with these Chinese claims is that they are still heavily influenced by the opus of Joseph Needham who greatly overemphasised the importance of technological diffusion and thus ran in his work from one post hoc, ergo propter hoc error in another.

The following feature I found however interesting:

...and banks of raked sand outside the defences were used to reveal any nocturnal incursions.

Any sources on similar Roman practices around?

[Komet]

Fortunately, I'm not coming into this argument too late. The beginning and latter parts of this thread are more closely aligned with one of my fields of research, so I feel I can add something there. I won't really bother commenting the the original poster's research paper since everyone else has already said everything that needs to be said. I'll just add that I wrote a few papers in high school (I assume he's in high school) that weren't exactly "academic" in nature, but I evened out in college eventually.

With that said, I take any Chinese article on ancient Han connections with the Roman Empire with a grain of salt. Their articles are incredibly nationalistic in nature, and the research is shoddy and generally one-sided. They seem to be grasping at straws to connect their ancient history with the West's ancient history, and I'm not quite sure why.

I'll use for an example that I know a fair amount about, the "Roman" city of Li-chien in western China (I was the person who wrote the paper that someone linked on the first page).

Take this article for exampe:

Archaeologists from China and other countries have verified a Roman connection with Lijian, an ancient city built during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-23), located in Zhelaizhai Village, 10 km south of the county seat of Yongchang, Gansu Province. According to archaeologists, the Roman Republic was called "Lijian" in ancient China, and the city "Lijian" was built to accommodate a group of Roman captives.

I know I shouldn't hold journalists to objective writing, but what archaeologists are we talking about here? The ones that have to support the state's agenda? That sort of biased research coming out of supposed academics strikes me as extremely unprofessional. It reminds me of historians from the peak of the Victorian era in Britain who used the notion of Rome's expansion as being entirely defensive in nature for the justification of Britain's colonial policies throughout the world. Or it reminds me of some of the early archaeologists who used their science to verify tales in the Bible or ancient mythology (finding the grave of a Mycenaean king doesn't mean you have found Agamemnon).

Considering that Li-chien is in the general area of an "Alexandria" that we know Alexander the great established in northeastern Bactria, it would make more sense that these were Greek descendants of some sort. Not only that, this town was located on the Silk Road, so the current residents could be desendants of just about anything that isn't purely Chinese.

I find the Chinese media highly frustrating.

[Eleatic Guest]

With that said, I take any Chinese article on ancient Han connections with the Roman Empire with a grain of salt. Their articles are incredibly nationalistic in nature, and the research is shoddy and generally one-sided. They seem to be grasping at straws to connect their ancient history with the West's ancient history, and I'm not quite sure why.

I think I may give you some hints there, or rather the following author, with whose accurate observations I fully agree. The main subject of the article is about the question who discovered and described first the circulation of blood with the Chinese (or rather Needham) maintaining them being the first during Han dynasty. But while the author - by the way apparently of Chinese origin, while Needham in actually Englishman - refutes this claim in what I find to be in a clear & convincing manner, the really interesting part of his article begins when he raises the deeper question as to why Chinese scholars are so overly eager to demonstrate the quality and alleged superiority of ancient Chinese science. Allow me quote from the last chapter:



[quote]A CRITIQUE OF SCIENTISM IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CHINESE MEDICINE
The above presentation, I believe, has proven that interpreting the relevant statements and passages in Neijing as descriptions of the circulation of blood is unfounded. The speciousness of the claim is so obvious that one cannot help wondering why so many scholars have advocated it and why it has been accepted so widely. Undoubtedly, there are technical or scholarly reasons forthis. Technically speaking, the mistake results from the habit of garbling a statement or passage from the historical literature to understand and interpret it out of context. This tendency is one of the ever-lasting problems in studying and writing history. In Chinese there is a special phrase to describe this problem: duanzhang quyi (garble a statement or quote out of context). In the footnote to his refutation to the Lu and Needham’s claim that the heart was understood as a bellow in the Neijing, Paul Unschuld has pointed out that the argumentation represents "n example of the approach not unfrequently employed by these authors when they cut out short statements with a particular meaning from longer passages conveying, as a whole, a rather different meaning, and also when they confuse the ideas conveyed by commentaries added many centuries later with the concepts conveyed by an original source.

Of course, distorting the meanings of historical texts cannot always be easily distinguished from imaginatively and creatively interpreting these texts. The latter is an essential element of any good historical study. Nevertheless, the specious claim that Chinese discovered the circulation of blood does not represents simply a technical mistake in the modern historiography of Chinese medicine and science. As a matter of fact, the origin, spread and wide acceptance of the specious claim in the historiography of Chinese medicine constitutes a glaring example on how strongly what people want to see influences and even determines what they actually see in their historical studies. Socio-cultural discourse can often define or influence our perceptions of the past. For example, [b] socio-politically and culturally speaking, the popularity of the historical claim in China relating to the discovery of the circulation of blood is closely related to the prevalence of nationalism in the social and academic life of twentieth-century China. In other words, many Chinese scholars and lay-people, proceeding from a sense of pride in China and its cultural heritage, want almost by “instinctâ€

[Anthrophobia]

Another thing is the draw weight of Han crossbows. Rick cheerfully mentions 350 pounds as typical, and I presume again based on literary references.
Personally, I would prefer data based on archaeological finds and practical tests with reconstructed bows. Two members of the Atarn forum had ancient Chinese crossbows reconstructed, and these had draw weights of respectively 60 and 55 pounds. Stephen Selby, the author of a book on Chinese archery, did intend to have a more powerful one made with a draw weight of 100 pounds (I sure hope this was done and that he will publish the results), but all three figures are still a far cry from 350.

Their reconstructions are a little far from accurate. First of all is the fact that their bows aren't recurve(and I doubt that they stringed it tight enough). Second is the fact that they are missing the belt-hook device neccessary for getting up to 350 pounds. Chinese crossbows without the belt-hook device was said to be only abe to reach up to 2 to 3 tan, or 120 to 180 pounds. With the belt device, the poundage can be increased by more than twice. I seriously doubt that they made the bow to be the exact poundage of avg Han bows, just like those 40 lb longbow reconstructions.

[Commilito]

interesting argument guys. Really a neat topic, and one that I have thought about alot myself.

But let's focus on the generalship. While Rome had great generals, even military geniuses for all time such as Gaius Caesar, Scipio, and others, keep in mind that China had a much more regular system of generalship. The system from the Warring States period would have most likely carried over, with professional generals, drawn from a seperate class than the aristrocracy leading their men.

While I am not trying to demean the average Roman general, I believe that the Chinese generals were of a higher average caliber, discounting the occasional geniuses on both sides.

[floofthegoof]

interesting argument guys. Really a neat topic, and one that I have thought about alot myself.

But let's focus on the generalship. While Rome had great generals, even military geniuses for all time such as Gaius Caesar, Scipio, and others, keep in mind that China had a much more regular system of generalship. The system from the Warring States period would have most likely carried over, with professional generals, drawn from a seperate class than the aristrocracy leading their men.

While I am not trying to demean the average Roman general, I believe that the Chinese generals were of a higher average caliber, discounting the occasional geniuses on both sides.

Clearly, the writings of Sun Tzu are of a much more pragmatic nature than anything I've read from ancient Rome. Most of the famous Roman generals seemed to believe that battles are won by courage and force of will, since it worked for them so well.

Concepts such as 'knowing when to fight, and when not to fight' were deemed absurd in Rome, and derided even when restraint was necessary. I think the Chinese generals would make the Romans pay heavily for any mistakes.