Hi everyone and welcome to yet another ancient warfare answers with Murray.

I will be your host to give you your fill of ancient warfare this week, 10 minutes of thick, fast ancient warfare history.

And the question we have today is from Doug, but before that, of course, you can ask a question.

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burning question about ancient warfare. Now, the question that we have today is from Doug Fulkeson,

and I've split your question into two, Doug, which is, I have a question about the wars between

Carthage and Syracuse in the three and four hundreds

BC. What kinds of armies, weapons and tactics were used on both sides? So there's a PhD thesis

in itself. And the, I'm going to try and give a 10 minute answer without speaking at

light speed. One part of that answer is we don't know.

And the reality is that we have much less information on the armies of Carthage than we would

have if we had a Carthaginian source that survived. One of the problems we have is, of course,

that we have Roman sources which talk about the

Carthaginians but they don't really give us any detail. We've got some archaeology which

tells us and then on the other hand we've got several bits of information which seem to

paint a picture but can we rely on it? For instance we're told about the Carthaginian phalanx. Now, phalanx is

one of those words where it has a specific meaning when it comes to, when it comes to the Macedonian

...