Warfare: The Chariot (~2000BC)

Somewhat forgotten nowadays, the chariot was the first great weapons platform, remaining king of the battlefield for over a millenia:

Pharaoh Ramses II at the Battle of Kadesh

The chariot was an evolutionary development from earlier animal drawn vehicles such as wagons and carts.  They served first as mobile archery platforms and later, with the development of scythed chariots, on the charge they were able to deliver devastating shock attacks.  The chariot's speed and mobility were game changing and Maneuver Warfare became possible for the first time.

As you might expect, the history of the chariot is intimately tied to that of the horse.  Since an increasing amount of evidence supports the hypothesis that horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes during approximately 4000–3500 BC, it is unsurprising that the first true chariots were probably invented near the Ural Mountains around 2000 BC:

The steppe nomads likely used their new war machines for raids against other peoples, leading to the widespread dissemination and adoption of this new technology from China to Britain.

Coming at a time in the horse's domestication prior to the possibility of cavalry, these war machines were nevertheless able to harness equine speed and agility with the help of several Bronze Age inventions, including the invention of lighter spoked wheels.  The chariot was a single axle carriage drawn by a team of one or more horses.  The crew consisted of  two or three people: a driver, an archer/commander and sometimes a spearman/shieldman.

Another Bronze Age invention, the compound bow, helped the chariot to dominate battlefields by being able to deliver armor-piercing strikes up to 100 meters away and killing shots against unarmored foes up to 300 meters away.  Since the chariot provided the compound bow with a swift, agile, stable and raised firing platform, it was a marriage made in Hades.

The cost of the horses and the chariot were prohibitive to all but nobility and royalty, and unsurprisingly the chariot became a symbol of power and status.

With the further domestication of the horse, the chariot was eventually superseded by cavalry around the 5th century BC, although the Celts continued to use them into the 1st century AD.  Nevertheless, the first great weapons platform's influence was profound and can be felt to the present day from the latest combination of mobility and firepower dominating warfare, the Main Battle Tank.

Engineering: The Grand Canal of China (Completed in 609 and later extended)

Although China's best known engineering marvel is the Great Wall (萬里長城), equally impressive and perhaps even more important is the Grand Canal (大運河):

Stretching some 1,776 km (1,104 mi), the Grand Canal is the longest manmade waterway in the world.  The impetus for construction was that since China’s main rivers (the Yellow and the Yangtze) run west to east, the Sui Dynasty wanted a quicker and easier way to move foodstuffs from the fertile region around the Yangtze to troops on the northern border defending against nomadic tribes.

Their audacious answer was to combine and extend existing canals to create a new canal running from Hangzhou in the south to Beijing in the north.  In the process, the Grand Canal interconnected the Yangtze, Yellow, Huaihe, Haihe, and Qiantang Rivers, vastly improving China's transportation network.

As you might expect, the manpower required to build the Grand Canal was enormous: over six years, the government press-ganged five million people, mainly farmers, into service.  In addition, the human cost was equally massive: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people died during that period, not only from the actual labor but also from famine when there weren’t enough people left to harvest the crops.

This forced labor to build the Grand Canal, renovate the Great Wall, and for other public works projects, as well as costly and disastrous military campaigns against the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, led to the overthrow of the Sui Dynasty.

Nevertheless, the Grand Canal was a stunning engineering achievement that has had an important impact and that has helped to bring vastly distant parts of China together for more than a millennia.

Later dynasties would improve the Grand Canal, such as adding water-level-adjusting pound locks after they were invented in the 10th century AD:

Even until the present, parts of the Grand Canal are still in use, mainly as a water-diversion conduit, and the main commercial artery now spans the 325 miles from Jining to the Yangtze.

Still, if you had to pick the one engineering project that has affected the most people for the longest period of time, the Grand Canal has no rival, touching the lives of billions of people for more than 1400 years.

加油！

TV Review: Engineering an Empire (2005-07)

I wanted to express some love for the television program Engineering an Empire:

A big reason that I've set my Olde School Dungeons & Dragons campaign in a Sword & Sorcery version of Earth is that this both provides the players with instant basic familiarity and serves as a shortcut to establishing setting verisimilitude.  In fact, R.E. Howard used the same reasoning in placing his Kull and Conan stories in the Hyborian Age.

Produced by History Channel, Engineering an Empire is a great tool for learning more about some of history's greatest empires.  It's a fun and informative program that's easily accessible to non-engineers, covering some of the tools, structures, inventions and other technical advances that helped each featured nation rise to power.  The show also does a good job of grounding the innovations in context (e.g., political, military, economic, etc.) by following various important personages who utilize said innovations as their empire develops.

While not all of the episodes are about ancient empires, Engineering an Empire still covers the heavyweights of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age (e.g.,  Egypt, China, Greece, Persia, Rome, etc.)    The quality of the episodes is a bit uneven (the ones covering Egypt and Rome are probably the best), but the show is still quite solid overall.  Familiarity with the technology gives Dungeon Masters and other would-be world builders a great way to better understand these empires from a very practical and tactile point of view.  Moreover,  the show is filled with plenty of other background details to help bring these great powers to life at your gaming table (or elsewhere).

I also really got a kick out of seeing Peter Weller, Robocop himself, as the host!

Messr Weller, who picked up a Master's degree in Roman and Renaissance Art at Syracuse University and then a Ph.D. at UCLA in Italian Renaissance art history, spends some time as an adjunct faculty member at Syracuse University, where he is apparently "a very popular professor and his classes are rated by students as 'difficult' and 'not easy'."  I suppose it's something of a case of life imitating art, as Weller was a professor in his other iconic movie role:

So, if you're an antiquity buff, gear head, Sword & Sandal fan or are just have a bit of intellectual curiosity, I think you'll find that Engineering an Empire is an entertaining pop history mix of facts and technology.

SC's Parting Shot: 9 of 10