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🗓️ 7 May 2021
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Murray answers this question from one of our patrons, Mythic Lore; 'What is known / reasonably theorised about the formations and tactics used during the late bronze age (Mycenaeans, Hittites, Luwians - Trojan War, etc)?'
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0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Ancient Warfare Answers. |
0:04.2 | This is episode of 149. |
0:07.4 | And today we have a question from someone who calls himself Mythic Law. |
0:12.4 | He is. |
0:12.9 | And he wants to know Murray, my assistant editor of ancient warfare. |
0:16.7 | I am Jasper Ortiz, editor of Ancient Warfare, by the way. |
0:19.5 | Murray, he wants to know, what do we know about tactics and formations of the late Bronze Age? |
0:25.8 | That's a rather specific question. |
0:27.8 | Yes, well, we can be relatively specific about the answer is not a lot. |
0:33.9 | But, of course, the late Bronze Age is a very, very wide and all-encompassing title. |
0:41.0 | So the reality of the late Bronze Age is you're dealing with the period around about 1,200 BC. |
0:49.6 | So you've got cultures in Egypt and the Near East. We've also got Greek and other cultures as well. |
1:00.4 | So we're dealing with a lot of material in terms of the evidence that isn't really aimed at telling us the tactics or the formations. |
1:11.9 | So we do indeed get inscriptions or reliefs that show us infantry, cavalry, and chariots. |
1:19.3 | And, you know, in the Assyrian world, we absolutely get siege equipment as well. |
1:25.1 | Whether you can then create formations and tactics from that is something that tends to |
1:33.7 | involve a lot of extrapolation. You've of course got literary sources from a much later age |
1:39.7 | telling you what was happening in an earlier age, specifically Homer in terms of Greek warfare, |
1:45.8 | but it's very, very hard to then talk about formations and tactics in terms of any kind of |
1:51.7 | definitive idea. By the end of the late Bronze Age, whether you accept the idea of a dark |
1:58.9 | age or not, one of the things, of course, about the |
2:01.4 | dark ages is that they tend to be called that because at a certain period generally in |
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