why do we believe the ancient sources when they claim army sizes? It makes no sense that rome and china were deploying napoleonic age sized armies in the 2nd century BC
>>17282785why would it not make sense? rome and china were far larger and more centralised states than just about anything that existed in the intervening period. Every state in europe between the fall of rome and like the 17-18th centuries was basically a loose coalition of quarreling lords, at least compared to rome and china. It's almost surprising they ever managed to get more than a few thousand people together to fight a battle
we don't, no one takes Herodotus' estimate of the size of the Persian army seriouslywe believe some ancient sources when they're detailed and have reason to believe they know what they're talking about (i.e. written by a former senator/courtier who has access to government registers) but no one's taking their numbers on faith
ancient army sizes probably included those involved in logistics and the baggage train
>>17282830not herodotus no, but I think OP was talking more about stuff like the punic wars where the romans are recorded to have fielded armies of 80,000 and shit like that
>>17282846some (not all) ancient sources give breakdowns of army sizes which specify what people were armed with, e.g. X with spears, Y on horses, Z amount of slingers, etc. and still end up with incredible figures. Just off the top of my head, herodotus spends pages itemising each different part of the persian army and their numbers, even separately enumerating those involved in logistics iirc.obviously herodotus is not a good example because that's the one instance where kind of everybody agrees it wasn't that big but this seems to be a thing that greek sources didroman sources tend not to do this and will just boil everything down into "a legion" vs "a horde of unwashed barbarians" and rarely bother giving any kind of numbers for either. Obviously when they give numbers for the barbarian hordes that includes all sorts of non combatants. Some battlefields are recorded to have had the women and children show up too
>>17282785>it doesn't make sense that sub-continent spanning empires with an extreme cultural focus on bureaucracy and logistics would field orders of magnitude more men than piddleshit petty kingdoms whose influence barely extends 100km away from the capitalReally?>but napoleonic France..Had less than half the population of peak Rome and Han.
revisionists downsize the traditional reports of population size and military strength based on projections from archaeology and their own ideas about what agriculture must have been like at the timebut that's bullshit because archaeology only has access to a small remnant of what once was, their data is incomplete, and most of these people don't come from traditionally agricultural backgroundsthere were a lot more people alive in the distant past than they are willing to admit, entire populations totally forgotten to time
>>17282830>no one's taking their numbers on faithI am.
