My visits to Heuneburg and Haithabu/Hedeby reminded me that I don’t know enough about one of the great puzzles in world history: why cities spread so slowly, with frequent retreats and abandonments. There were towns in the Balkans before the Indo-Europeans came, but it was almost the year 1,000 before there was a single town on the Baltic, and that was burned and abandoned. Why did it take 5,000 years for cities to spread from Mesopotamia to Denmark, when other innovations spread in a few centuries? And why did many societies which once had prosperous cities give them up?
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Philip Sabin, Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World (London: Continuum Books, 2009) Bookfinder link
Big battles are always a popular topic, but even the best-documented ancient battles are difficult to understand. The few ancient accounts which survive never answer every question which modern readers ask, and often disagree with each other or say things which are difficult to believe. Several plausible interpretations are always possible, and deciding between them is a matter of judgement not proof. One way to resolve these debates is to apply a new methodology. Sabin’s book argues that wargaming is just such a methodology and that it has been unfairly neglected as a tool for understanding ancient battles. To support this, Sabin designs a wargame then presents scenarios for 35 land battles in the ancient Mediterranean world from Marathon (490 BCE) to Pharsalus (48 BCE) with comments on the major uncertainties and how his wargame can help clarify them. Wargamers have studied these battles many times in the past, but few have Dr. Sabin’s training, or explain their reasoning in such detail.
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