

The Disruption of Bronze, and Technological Diffusion - lionhearted
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/02/02/the-disruption-of-bronze

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electromagnetic
The author of this piece is right, very few people seem to comprehend how well
established our trade was at the time. The silk road was well established
between Rome and China at the time that Genghis Khan started his rise, to the
point that it was his desire to capture it to tax it.

They had two major technological innovations #1 was advanced horsemanship, #2
was the composite bow. They also had one major advancement in strategy derived
from their nomadic traditions - they knew how to hunt and how to do it
effectively. These modified their warfare tactics massively. For instance the
Mongols heavily favoured the tactic of attacking a vast swathe of outlying
villages and driving the populace toward the city they intended to siege. This
meant that the food stocks lasted very little time. They also knew how to
breach a castle by fooling the defender (they frequently attacked the gate and
fled, only to strike again), and more importantly they understood that a
hunted animal fights harder when it's trapped so they never encircled their
enemy, they always surrounded them in a crescent shape (IIRC it was noted that
the panic to escape often resulted in people being trampled to death) to allow
the people to escape. Once broken the Mongols simply followed on horseback and
picked their enemy off.

Khan has a shrewd warrior and anything he could use to help a siege he
acquired. They had catapults and ballista, but it was the Mongols who figured
out that the gunpowder of the Chinese combined with the metalurgy from the
European bell makers (yes bronze church bells) could be used to make a
cannon... so they built cannons. Genghis Khan established the worlds (first?)
best postal service for the time, to the degree of efficiency that likely
still put us to shame shortly before the invention of the car. This was
literally the internet of their day, especially as Khan recruited every
technologist his forces encountered.

This is why the barbarian invasions were so powerful against the Romans and
the ancient world, because they were fighting a civilization that had
exclusively predatory behaviour against city-states. One of their favourite
tactics was to divert a river to flood the city. Then it was just a matter of
time for the water to stagnate and infection and disease to go wild, even
though it rarely got to that point.

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iwwr
The horn-reinforced bow was known and used for millenia, even by the ancient
Egyptians. The specific innovation was the stirrup.

As for encirclement, the Mongols were decisively defeated in what is now
Israel by that very tactic (stopping their advance into Syria and Egypt).
Almost any general would prefer not to fight under encirclement.

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dspeyer
Stirrups first appeared in India around 500BCE. They were widespread by 500CE.
The mongols were 1200CE. You may be thinking of the Huns.

Incidentally, it is remarkable that it took 1000 years for the stirrup to
spread across eurasia. I have no good explanation for this.

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arethuza
I remember reading (I wish I could remember where) someone speculating whether
the story of invulnerable Achilles was a folk memory of a warrior using iron
armor or weapons.

What caught my eye in that article is that the timing of the disruption of
bronze by iron is timed at about 1200BC - which is pretty close to when there
is archeological evidence for Troy VIIa being destroyed in warfare. Not to
mention the catastrophic arrival of the Sea Peoples at about that time
destroying a lot of cultures in the Eastern Med at that time and leading to
what was pretty much a dark age for a few centuries until the rise of
Classical Greece - maybe the Sea Peoples were using disruptive iron
technology?

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cema

      maybe the Sea Peoples were using 
      disruptive iron technology?
    

They did. I think it is even mentioned in the Bible (the Tanakh, rather),
although I am not sure about the details. And archeological evidence seems to
support it rather strongly, afaik.

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iwwr
A similar revolution in horsemanship made the later barbarian invasions
possible and dealt the final blow to the Roman world.

