>the phalanx, a formation known to perform badly on uneven

They often didn't fight on home turf?

>Fight battles on flat ground

>dont shoot arrows in the rain

>>1844958

At least for the hoplite and phalanx thing, it's because the origin of post-Mycenean Greek warfare was HEAVILY ritualized. Not to say that people weren't killed (hell, a lot of people were killed) but they weren't fighting in the sort of total war mindset you saw by say, the Peloponeasean war, where the phalanx system was starting to fall apart, be replaced by more flexible combined arms approaches.

File: 1289855460267.jpg (749KB, 1280x2005px) Image search: [Google]

749KB, 1280x2005px

>>1844958
We fought frogs. We did it well. We figured out the bow cut them down better than swords ever could so we mastered their use. Any questions?

File: 1382636655690 (1).jpg (33KB, 350x350px) Image search: [Google]

33KB, 350x350px

>>1844970
>but they weren't fighting in the sort of total war mindset
I'd retained this impression from past readings, that many pre/early-classical encounters outside major wars were just farmers having a RELATIVELY harmless row or practicing tradition (otherwise the harvest, general agriculture would be fucked and the local economy would be fucked as well).

Was that the case in other places/cultures (Italy, Celts, fertile crescent settlements, etc.)?

>>1845008

I haven't done really in depth study of all those places, but you do see it in a lot of tribal societies, like the mesoamericans and the australian aborigines and in a lot of Sub-Saharan african tribes.

I can't say for certain, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised.

>>1844970
dont you mean afterwards when thebes fought its way to the dominant power and the armies of epaminondes set the tactical template for the macedonian armies that would conquer the persian empire in years to come. i even feel like some of the heights of the peloponessian wars were at sea.

>>1844970
infact i would say that it wasnt until contact with rome that the phalanx became undeniably outdone

>>1845107
The traditional Greek phalanx was more or less gone by the time of Alexander passed.
So well before Roman contact.

>>1845098

No, I mean well before that. If anything, Epiminondes was a step backwards in the tactical range, forgoing things like massive naval power, fortification circumvellation races, cavalry and missile support. Leuctra would see some innovations to the classical hoplite push, but was still centered around a hoplite push in a way that Greece had been moving away from for a little while.

A lot of Thebes's dominance was paradoxically because it was able to reject the advances in the Peloponesean war; because as great as they were tactically and operationally, they also bankrupted everyone involved. Hoplites were, from the perspective of a city-state's government, cheap. Fleets and fortifications stretching for dozens of miles weren't; and the fact that the Boeotians kept to their old ways might have gotten their asses kicked at battles like Oenophyta, it also meant they weren't bankrupted and bleeding men heavily in the way that the more total wars demanded.

>>1845107

The thing is, while you have some superficial similarities between Macedonian phalanxes and a traditional hoplite phalanx, they're quite honestly enormously different military formations, with the former being orders of magnitude more dangerous and professional than the latter. Yeah, the Macedonian phalanx managed to keep some use up until Roman times, but the older Greek phalanx of the 7th century B.C.? Long in the trash heap.

>>1845244
>The thing is, while you have some superficial similarities between Macedonian phalanxes and a traditional hoplite phalanx, they're quite honestly enormously different military formations, with the former being orders of magnitude more dangerous and professional than the latter. Yeah, the Macedonian phalanx managed to keep some use up until Roman times, but the older Greek phalanx of the 7th century B.C.? Long in the trash heap.

Complete historic illiterate here, what was the difference? Aren't they both just big squares of dudes with pointy things and shields?

>>1845255
Traditional hoplite phalanx only has like first two rows at most doing any fighting, rest just stand around. The regular size spears also mean it isn't as impenetrable from the front.

Meanwhile the Macedonian phalanx has like five rows pointing their spears forward being much longer and frontal penetration becomes quite impossible. Rear row spears stop some of the incoming missiles as it's a bloody forest. Due to all the spears bearing forward it's less maneuverable but it only needs to move forward, flanks are for support and other phalanxes to worry.

Basically macedonian phalanx improved all the strong points of traditional and was intended for combined arms. Which was sadly forgotten or ignored as hellenic successor states devolved into similar ritual infighting as Greek city states had done with traditional phalanx. And then Rome mopped them up.

File: 9e8cbd532264528afca15d6f82009d54.jpg (7KB, 300x196px) Image search: [Google]

7KB, 300x196px

>>1844958
Well, if you think about it:
>the phalanx was a formation used against tribes of people who know nothing about formation and attacks them without any sort of coordination

>the longbow was a weapon designed to take down humans and horses from afar.

They were designed to take down fellow human civilization, not adapt to the environment.
You can also say this to other sorts of weapons, tactics, and buildings. Sometimes even medicine like:
>the first tanks are literal death traps that quickly loses its function once it falls unto the trench line that it was supposed to penetrate through
>production continued because of their ability to soak small arm's fire and their effects on the morale of their own troops and the enemy

>Guns were originally nothing more than fancy fireworks that are highly inaccurate, can only fire at close range, and can barely penetrate leather armor, let alone plate
>corssbow reign supreme for 500 years.
>gun production never ceased because their noise making ability caused great mental damage on the enemy

>farming itself used to be a highly inefficient way of life because plants takes too long to grow. Being nomadic hunters are much more efficient
>existence of barbaric tribes that they wish to avoid gave birth to better farming methods and cattle herding which led to the birth of civilization.

>>1844974
for the love of god, can I finally get source on this comic?

>>1845377
google image says "battle of crecy comic"

>>1845377
http://m.imgur.com/gallery/XqJod

>>1845355
So was the Macedonian phalanx more or less an antiquity-flavoured pike square with shields?

>>1845377
Called either Battle of Cracey or just Cracey(Crecy?) Based on the historical battle of the same name between the English (defending) and French w/ (Italian?) Mercs. If you like some coarse humor that comic is fucking grand. I loved it.
I found it for myself by google-searching for matching images manually, and checking the site each hopeful image was hosted on until I got a hit.
This was years ago so well... fucked if I know where to find it now, but I still could.

>>1845587
No, the pike square was a derivative of the Macedonian phalanx

>>1845636
That's kind of what I meant really.

>>1845587
Macedonian phalanx was the original pike formation, all other pike formations since then are derived from it.

Frankly its mostly because of successor incompetence that it didnt become the dominant military formation of the classical world

Romans, Etruscans, Phoenicians,Illyrians, Italics, Lydians, and even Celts also used the hoplite phalanx at about the same time Greeks used it .

I think it was the linothorax armour that gave greater versatility, and idea that you would group people who knew each other fight together, for morale purposes. For example the Athenians would split the hoplite units according to the "tribes" they were, meaning the areas in which they lived in Attica. The Spartans who were a militarized nation, according to citizenship,age and experience.

All this "it was ritualised combat" is crap, there are very few differences between the Persian, Peloponnesian wars and the engagements before that.

The main differences are that before these two wars the Greeks fought primarily for land disputes, and as such the main idea was that the phalanx was a battle of endurance, with the first one retreating losing his hold on the land. The greeks however did not fight differently in the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, nor was the Hellenistic way of fighting that different. The only thing that changed was the tactics of engagement, and added military units like archers, more cavalry, elephants and light units like the Thureophoroi. The phalanx just like Napoleonic warfare, is a good example of historical technological maximal potential, where technology had nothing more to offer, and armies had to adapt tactics to it, and not their way of engagement due to innovation.

If you want to know why a civilization won against another, look at the level of their technological knowledge and aptitude for new tactics based on that technology. If you understand that you will see why the phalanx is the most "Greek" way of fighting.

>>1844974
cringin at that comic 2bh. The "Englishmen" who fought the hundred years war were all French anyway

>>1845750
>The "Englishmen" who fought the hundred years war were all French anyway

Most of the actual fighting was done by peasants, particularly longbowmen (which, at Crecy, comprised 5/6 of the English army), these men were born to ordinary, lower-class people, a lot of them coming from Wales, most definitely not being French.

Even the nobility, by the late 14th century, had become distinctly English. For example, Edward III, the king that began the hundred years war, and who fought at Crecy, enacted laws enforcing the use of English as a standard in courts of law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleading_in_English_Act_1362), with his successors not long after making English the official language of government.

The idea of the English upper classes all being French and speaking French was only accurate for 3 - 4 centuries after the Norman conquest, and the hundred years war marked the effective end of that.

>>1844974

>get your ass handed in agincourt
>try to run like pussies back home
>run into the French army
>French nobility went full retard and stormed you with their heavy cavalry
>they struggle in the mud
>you have the chance to shoot them like fish in a barrel

Truly a marvel of English strategic genius

Tell me why was your army defeated by a peseant girl again ?