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Vulture12 t1_ix648vr wrote

Reply to comment by WorthPlease in what was the population of ancient Mesopotamia? by Omastnar

I'm not invested enough to buy the source books to evaluate, but you're more than welcome to.

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imperialus81 t1_ix6anno wrote

The thing is that even primary sources from the period are likely unreliable. Between propaganda, translation issues, and transcription issues it is impossible to say with certainty how many men were actively under arms...

So, lets look at it from the other end. What is reasonable? Realistically it comes down to food. So the primary source of calories for all of those societies would have been bread. A 1lb loaf of whole wheat bread has about 1100 calories in it. An adult male needs between 2000 and 3000 calories/day. We'll assume a goal of around 2500 calories/day as necessary to keep your soldiers capable of actually fighting. Most of that will come from bread and it wouldn't be surprising if each soldier would have eaten about pounds of bread per day which would net them 2200 calories.

Also, I'm fully aware that Ramesses did not have access to modern food scientists, but the reality of it is, that he would have been aware of the fact that a starving army will not perform well, and as armies throughout history have discovered fucking around with food very quickly leads to finding out that bad things happen to said army.

Now, man cannot live on bread alone. Especially if you want them fit to fight. An oz of red meat has about 75 calories. we're short about 300 calories so that works out to about 4oz of red meat. You could probably cut this back a bit if you supplemented with other things, particularly veg but you also need to remember that unlike bread, meat spoils very quickly. This means salting or other pre refrigeration methods of food preservation or keeping your meat on the hoof for as long as possible which will in turn create a massive logistics train.

Also keeping in mind you need to provide your soldiers with something potable to drink and this likely meant watered down wine or beer. Again assuming reasonably strenuous physical activity in a hot climate like the fertile crescent you are looking at about 1.5 liters of water per day.

Now is when we break out the calculator. If you are fielding 1000 men this means that in order to keep them from starving you will need to provide 2000 loaves of bread plus about 150 lbs of meat and 1500 liters of drinkable water per day.

Now, if you are fielding 300,000 men... well you are looking at 600,000 loaves of bread, 75,000 lbs of meat, plus 450,000 liters of drinkable something.

That's a lot of food for a modern army to manage with shelf stable MRE's (only country in the world I would bank on being able to pull it off is the USA) nevermind the 'logistics' system of a pre-20th century army.

*Edit* fixed the numbers for meat requirements.

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Northstar1989 t1_ix6lrbg wrote

>Now, man cannot live on bread alone. Especially if you want them fit to fight. An oz of red meat has about 75 calories.

You're completely wrong.

Armies on the march DIDN'T eat any substantial amount of meat in ancient times.

Most armies existed on an almost entirely grain-based diet as late as the Roman Empire. Legionaries famously ate a sort of porridge for most meals on campaign, and were punished by being fed lower quality or less desirable grains (such as barley rather than wheat) if they did something wrong.

Meat is a modern luxury. It's not something armies could afford to travel with large quantities of.

Your other assumptions are ridiculously far off too. The total army of a nation would almost never be deployed all in one place (it simply wasn't logistically feasible, as you deduced). So, maybe half the Army would be defending dozens of cities in the homelamd as holding forces, and the other half would be spread into 3 or 4 large fighting forces and one to two dozen smaller skirmishing forces along the border with a foe.

The larger armies would only gather together right before a battle. The Romans even had a maxim for this: "March divided, fight concentrated."

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imperialus81 t1_ix6nmo0 wrote

I picked on red meat as a straight forward protein source that every ancient society would have at least had access to. It's also why I counted 2200 of their 2500 calories as coming from bread.

Were there other options? Sure. Beans and other legumes would fit the bill and would have likely played a significant role but beans also would have needed more water, which would have further complicated things. Plus, not every society would have had access to the same sorts of legumes so in the spirit of keeping it simple I put the number at 4oz of meat since going into more detail than that is just going to get too situational. As a note Tacitus does speak briefly as to the meat requirements of a Roman legion numbering it at around 150 swine/day for a full legion of 6000 troops plus their supporting folks. Now he was speaking about a legion in garrison, not on the march and we have no idea if it was some super special 'Legate Picard Day' or something but the point remains, that's a hell of a lot of food.

I also left out fat requirements since the Romans solved this through olive oil but I have no frigging clue how the Assyrians or Egyptians would have done the same outside of imports.

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Northstar1989 t1_ixbr6xm wrote

Tacitus was a late Imperial historian writing in a period of relative peace, and known to be subject to exaggeration and outright flattery at times to ingratiate himself with the powerful.

That being said, he was most definitely talking about garrison troops. Legions did occasionally travel with substantial swine herds to eat, but nowhere near the scale of 1 hog per day per 40 men. A figure of around 1 hog per day per 250 men might be more accurate for an army on a prolonged campaign.

Note that few legions in Tacitus' day actually went on such long campaigns. The legions were generally fairly sedentary at the time, only marching relatively short distances to deal with border incursions.

The Dacian Wars towards the end of Tacitus' life were one major exception to this rule: and although the legions were exceptionally well supplied during them as Dacia was quite close to major Greek and Illaryian holdings of Rome (and connected to them by navigable rivers), you'll likely find that meat consumption for the actively canpaigning legions even then fell substantially below this figure of 1 per 60 if you look into any reliable statistics available for the wars.

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Szwedo t1_ix6v1hw wrote

Weren't humans smaller back then too so they needed less calories, let alone meat protein being far less consumed in general up until the 20th c?

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imperialus81 t1_ix6xevy wrote

Right, which is why I went for 2500 calories. For reference, a modern MRE averages at 1250 calories per meal, or 3750 calories per day.

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Thuis001 t1_ix7dft9 wrote

Soldiers would also need to eat far more calories to stay in fighting shape as they expend more energy than your average person.

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Szwedo t1_ix7dsa0 wrote

Armies back in this time were barely professional

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Thuis001 t1_ix7n4li wrote

That has no bearing on how many calories an individual needs though. Just on how capable an army would be at ensuring the soldier has access to those.

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imperialus81 t1_ix816ic wrote

You'd be surprised.

We do for example have records of what 'in theory' Napoleon was giving his troops in the early 19th century and it isn't far off the numbers I listed. This is the 'ideal' situation, not when they were marching home from Moscow:

24 oz of bread, 8 oz of meat, 2oz legumes.

My own numbers were more bread focused with less meat, but on that note you saw how pissy some folks got when I suggested half that quantity of meat upthread.

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