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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You (slightly) misunderstand my point. Take the Spitfire versus the Bf109. It is always worth spending the extra on the supercharger even though it's only twenty miles an hour in 350 because slightly faster is decisively faster. On the other hand, qua your example, are 100 Sherman tanks better than, for the same cost, ten German Tigers?
Clearly, 100 iron-shod warriors are superior but why weren't the officers in bronze? Why wasn't the Sacred Band in bronze? Why wasn't Richard the Lionheart in bronze? The answer, and this is an AE matter, is that as soon as iron becomes the orthodoxy, all the military technology goes into iron.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Leon, try to avoid repeating unvarnished orthodoxy unthinkingly. Since it is generally agreed |(unless you want to take issue) that bronze is better than iron and remained so until modern alloy steels |
Woops! Quite a blunder on my part then concerning the qualities of iron and bronze. But I wasn't repeating anything, never heard the question before, it just seemed a logical reply. Too obvious, obviously. The operation was successful, but the patient died.
| Britain, arguably (by us) the main sources of both tin and copper at the time. |
Surely Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia had sources of tin and copper closer than Britain at a point when the Bronze Age had been on the go for 600 years, longer as some calculate it. There was a copper mine at Varna, Bulgaria, which produced at least 30,000 tons of copper in the 4th millennium BC. From that perspective the whole of the Balkans becomes a prime candidate. What about the Alps, the Appenines, the Carpathians, Anatolia, the Caucasus? Not enough tin or copper in all those quite extensive mountainous regions to serve local demand?
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | He goes from the Azores to the Kattegat? Didn't he spot anything on the way? |
Other possibilities are Iceland, one of the Faroes, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the Hebrides. Not a lot of sightseeing to be done on those routes from the Azores.
And it's fiction, whose structure at that point requires getting Odysseus to Phaeacia to tell the first part of the story: whether there was something to see along the way was evidently of no interest to Homer, whose knowledge of the North Sea region was second-hand and probably rather sketchy. Even in the early 17th century AD when - I suppose, correct me if I'm only echoing orthodox thinking - there was more information available in the Mediterranean, Cervantes makes some geographical blunders concerning Northern Europe.
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Grant
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| It is always worth spending the extra on the supercharger even though it's only twenty miles an hour in 350 because slightly faster is decisively faster. |
Doesn't the Lanchester Square Law apply to this situation. I know little about military things but doesn't this say that the relevant strength of two forces can be ascertained accurately by using the squares of the opposing forces, provided that they are using equally lethal equipment? In other words, 110 iron wielding soldiers would not be 10% better than 100 bronze wielding ones, but 21% better. Once we discovered cheap iron, there would be no point in bothering with expensive bronze.
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Damn! I mean Scheria, the island. The Phaeacians are the people. Sorry...if anyone happens to be paying attention to this tangential item.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Dan Wrote:
| Can we get comparative figures for the rest of Britain/Europe/the world? |
No greater concentration of bronze artefacts has been found to surpass the more than 100,000 items found on the Fenlands flood plain.
The most concentrated finds are between Fleam Dyke and Littleport; 6500 bronze artefacts from Isleham alone.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Mick wrote:
| Clearly, 100 iron-shod warriors are superior but why weren't the officers in bronze? Why wasn't the Sacred Band in bronze? Why wasn't Richard the Lionheart in bronze? The answer, and this is an AE matter, is that as soon as iron becomes the orthodoxy, all the military technology goes into iron. |
Mick is correct to an extent. Though I seriously doubt that Richard's mail, armour and sword were the same quality as those of the Grunts.
War is about arming as many combatants as possible in the shortest amount of time and iron/steel was cheaper and easier to find and manufacture into weapons. Bronze-making requires a much higher degree of manufacturing with limited resources. Why make weapons out of gold when you can make them out of dirt.
The AK47 is made out of tree trunks and tin foil but it is the most widely used weapon in the world. Is it better than a WWI .303 or a WWII M1 -- no, it's not, but it does just as much damage and can be cobbled together in third world garages and repaired with a paperclip and rubber band.
It's all about firepower and creating as many injuries as you can. You don't have to worry about the dead. It's the wounded that drains an opponent's resources.
Iron became the orthodoxy not because it was better but because it was more effective in battle. This fact ended the monopoly on bronze and effectively changed the balance of power -- any tinpot ruler with access to iron could now become a Player.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Then there are those who say the Bronze Age came after the Iron Age.
That's one way to solve the anomaly.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Ishmael wrote: | Then there are those who say the Bronze Age came after the Iron Age.
That's one way to solve the anomaly. |
Why, Ish, does better have to come "after"? Is it so unacceptable that scientific understanding including metallurgy was more advanced?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Komorikid wrote: | No greater concentration of bronze artefacts has been found to surpass the more than 100,000 items found on the Fenlands flood plain.
The most concentrated finds are between Fleam Dyke and Littleport; 6500 bronze artefacts from Isleham alone. |
Indeed, but parts of the Fens have been drained and channelled from Roman times onwards, it's arguably the most extensively dug region in recent years of the country. To state there are more bronze artefacts here than anywhere else you would need to be able to compare like with like, perhaps the Somerset Levels.
The paucity of finds, of bronze or any other material, is almost certainly related to the piecemeal nature of excavations and of course there's no telling what was found before archaeology was 'invented'.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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I wonder why Isleham. Must admit I'd never heard of it but a very quick look at wiki tells me it's situated somewhere between the horse-racing town of Newmarket and the cathedral city of Ely and has a church dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch owned by a French priory and a pub called the Rising Sun.
First impressions are screaming megalithic and probably Michael Line (Margaret is another dragon-slayer). Does not a huge hoard of bronze artefacts bring to mind rows of stones waiting to be shipped out? Isleham is near enough the flint mines, the other end of the (trading) line.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Hatty wrote: | | That's one way to solve the anomaly. |
Why, Ish, does better have to come "after"? Is it so unacceptable that scientific understanding including metallurgy was more advanced? |
It is always anomalous when things get worse.
Everything always gets better TM
(I am trademarking the phrase so Mick won't credit it to himself one day)
If something gets worse, you must provide a reason why -- and the reason must be strongly evidenced -- not just some rationalization that makes sense.
But it is far simpler just to eliminate the anomaly.
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| Ishmael wrote: | Everything always gets better TM
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Don't you mean...... technology always gets better?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| nemesis8 wrote: | | Don't you mean...... technology always gets better? |
I mean what I write.
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I just can't get my head round this....
In 1543 a couple of Portuguese travellers arrive in Japan with arquebuses. The Japanese are suitably impressed and commence mass production.... by the end of the century they have more guns per head than anywhere.... brilliant....they then proceed to do away with all guns until they have none.... the Europeans of course keep on developing their weaponry...
Why?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_of_Japan
Wiki says dense population.....really?
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