Home › Forums › Ancients › the Phalangites of Ur › Reply To: the Phalangites of Ur
Wrote a lot of stuff – then binned it and thought… hang on –
a) (someone else has already asked this) – do any rules unfairly differentiate Ur Phalangites and Macedonian ones?
and then
b) Shouldn’t they differentiate them if they don’t?
I mean – if your (anyone’s – not per se LM) rules are reflecting the historical thing with all its cultural and social input rather than arbitrarily reducing all pikemen to the bit of wood with pointy metal at the end – they should take into account the effects of the soldier’s culture and that of the actual opposition faced, on tactics and general approach to war. If you just say – long pointy sticks in a mob always beat a mob with short pointy sticks it misses quite a lot of the interesting bits of wargaming.
The problem with most ‘Ancients’ rules is not that they unfairly discriminate against particular weapons types in the ‘wrong’ hands but that they lump all weapons of certain types together over ridiculously long periods of time and use the weapon and not the man(and occasional woman) as the deciding factor.
Yep, Ur phalangites were probably brill (do we know?) but around a long time before Alex and his boys started being heavily propagandised as paragons of Western virtue. Can we compare them? Bit difficult really – were Sumerian Pike/long spear responsible for Sumerian supremacy? Or was it effective agriculture allowing spare capacity to build a group of warriors not committed to full time food production? I dunno – do you? Not being sarcastic, its not my period so I really don’t know.
Lots of good stuff in a simple question but not really about what the question asked up front I think.
As for Greek vs the Land between two rivers cultures – of course the former gets a bizarrely positive spin and the latter a grossly unfair negative spin – but that’s European hegemony in historical writing for at least a couple of hundred years. Revisionism obviously not helped by current geopolitical events but worth looking at.