Northstar1989 t1_ix6kym6 wrote on November 21, 2022 at 3:15 AM

Reply to comment by RevolutionaryChip864 in what was the population of ancient Mesopotamia? by Omastnar

No it's not.

As earlier comments have pointed out, mercenaries were EXTREMELY common in this time period.

These numbers likely included many, many mercenaries who were on some kind of retainer to serve if needed- but served other city states at times as well.

Treyred23 t1_ix6nylr wrote on November 21, 2022 at 3:41 AM

There is no way to feed and water 300,000 men and their animals at this time.

Its a ludicrous number.

vzierdfiant t1_ix6wi5c wrote on November 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM

You realize that the logistics and technology to feed and coordinate that many people didn't exist until modern times, right? 300K men means 2.1 Million gallons of water and 4.2 million pounds of food per week. You realize this is an insane amount of material to produce, store, and ship solely with man and horsepower, right?

Just doing napkin math: A Typical horse can walk 50 miles a day and carry 300 lbs. Assuming the military campaign is only 25 miles away from the city that has 10's of millions of pounds of food stored for war, you would need 5714 horses working 24/7 just to move the food and water to the soldiers. For every 25 miles farther, you need 5714 more horses. Also, these horses need food+water, gear and weapons need to be moved. So if you wanted to wage a war 100 miles away from your city, you needed more transport horses than all of the legions of the roman empire at peak power (22k or so cavalry).

Just crazy to think about, and then add that you need to feed these horses, and that you need to feed the cavalry horses as well. Don't know how much a horse eats, but i imagine its a lot.

ThoDanII t1_ix7hncj wrote on November 21, 2022 at 9:40 AM

Ships, boats, waggons

Replace land transport whenever possible with watertransport, and use waggons instead of pack animals

vzierdfiant t1_ix8ofuw wrote on November 21, 2022 at 4:32 PM

Did mesopotamian cultures have the technology to create large watertight containers?

ThoDanII t1_ix8pram wrote on November 21, 2022 at 4:41 PM

yes

they did pottery and wineskins

vzierdfiant t1_ix8qy0x wrote on November 21, 2022 at 4:50 PM

Ah yes, pottery. So durable and capable of being used to transport large volumes of water over rocky terrain and primitive roads without breaking, very plausible. And at any large volume (over 500L) wineskins would leak a ton.

ThoDanII t1_ix8vdje wrote on November 21, 2022 at 5:19 PM

Prussian soldiers used glas canteens, and i think the waterskins would max out by 20 or 50 litres in my estimation

and yes afaik they used pottery to transport water, wine and olive oil over large distances