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This portal is dedicated to the knowledge of ancient warfare in ancient times, focusing on the early antiquity up to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, roughly 3500 years of warfare. With the help of the best web sources, ancient authors, archaeological evidences, recreations, illustrations, maps, animations, and screenshots from the highly praized Total War video game serie, choosed by history channel (Sega(r) - Creative assembly(r))

Ancient-battles peeks into the ancient "sea peoples" or the achaeans and minoans from the bronze age and homeric times, but also the Mauryan empire and T'sin armies, the steppe peoples, the Celts, as the early, or at the opposite, very late romans, like the western "barbarized" ones, or the Byzantine, "Hellenized" romans. What we know apart the famous "triplex acies" of pre-marian times, triarii, principes, hastati, equites, and velites? Before this was the very early roman army composed of aristocratic cavalry or Celeres, derived from the Etruscan nobility, and a heavy phalanx composed mainly on spearmen by classes, and a reformed army by Dictator and general Marcus Furius Camilius, with six Censes classes, with rorarii, leves and accensii...

casque d'Agris

Two splendid examples of cross-culture in the IVth Century BC, two ceremonial Gallic helmets of the era, widely decorated in Greek and Celtic patterns.

And what we know about the greek classic armies at this time, with hoplites and meprised psiloi and hippiko, and their opponents, the persians, and beyond the sparabara, takabara, kardaka and other troops ? -The greek-city states age became, with the Macedonian rise, the Hellenistic era, which created terms like "phalangitai, hypaspistai, chalkaspidai, argyraspidai, Leucaspidai, akontistai, peltastai, thureophoroi, toxotai, sphendonetai, thorakitai, hetairoi, prodromoi" were known and became a model for all combined army from the Herakles columns to the Indus river... A true encyclopedia of ancient warfare.

Suebian warrior

October 2018: The germanic spearman

Gerimmanoz

The archetypal ancient germannic warrior was the Suebian spearman. This is calling for a study of the whole Germanic warrior tradition prior or at the very beginning of the Empire (around 50 BC to 50 AD) with the historical, decisive battle that was Teutoburg as an historical landmark. "German" has nothing to do with "n hypothetic "land of spearman", this was a loose interpretation of the celtic prefic "gae-". Instead as Tacitus noticed in "germania" the name was given from strangers and basically meant one' own inhabitants, a bit like the Boii. In truth, powerful tribes like the Chauci, Marcomanni, Chatti, all paled in comparison of the Suebi confederacy which loosely encompassed half of then German-speaking northern germany, opposed to southern-celtic speaking Germany. Outside club-bearers, the folklore bear or wolf skin warriors, night daemons like the Harii, the bulk of these armies was made of spearmen, using a moderalty long and handy "framea" tipped with narrow and very sharp spearpoint dictated by the lack of iron. Despite their lack of protection these ancient germanic warriors -as described-, already impressive and hardy, fought with their whole body against much better equipped and trained killing machines such as Roman soldiers...

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