Ancient Logistics

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I'm interested too

Cattle sheep and pigs matched together with soldiers as a source of food.

>>2432155
When traveling through relatively friendly territory, word would be sent out in advance of a march for supply depots and markets to be made ready for an army. Otherwise, the army would split into several smaller units that could more easily support itself through foraging.

Some combination of

>soldiers looting/hunting food in situ
>professional quartermasters buying food on site
>caravans/ships

If you were a Mongol, you could bring a herd of cattle with you on campaign so you could sustain yourself anywhere there's steppe basically indefinitely.

>>2432155
Well OP pic is one answer

>>2432436
Never knew the Mongols have already existed in the Ancient era.

>>2432458
Well pedant'd, friend.

But yeah, I have to imagine the Mongols weren't the first steppe people to do that, and it's not like High Middle Ages logistics was any better than ancient logistics.

Is called roads. Was the key to roman expansion good roads meant fast travel. They had pretty reliable road building methods. Allowed armies and supplies to be moved at speed to hot spots and reduce need of large standing armies

>>2432478
Roads are on land, but what about sailing? Would you just hope for the best and hope you arrive somewhere near your destination?

File: roman_gaul_road_map.jpg (898KB, 1071x1012px) Image search: [Google]

898KB, 1071x1012px

>>2432493
The Roman Empire was mostly reliant on overseas trade since land travel was 30 times more expensive than land travel (actual figure I remember reading) in those days due to a lack of technological sophistication regarding wagons and carts compared to ships. They did not just hope to end up at their destination, these civilisations were not completely primitive and had experienced helmsmen, navigators and crews that could get from Alexandria to London within weeks.

>>2432155
The Romans had waystations every few Roman miles on the road network in which official state couriers could restock, resupply, sleep if needed and change horses, covering dozens of miles a day. Around these waystations small Roman market towns would grow until you had a network of small market towns all over the empire, reliant on the trade going through it, the soldiers spending their coin on supplies and leave etc. Roman army depots existed all over the place, and particularly at crossroads in the road network or on natural ports. All of the main legionary fortresses in Britain for example, are based in locations where the troops could easily be resupplied from overseas via coast or river. Roads were built as needed to move armies around and typically were built on the advance instead of afterwards. There were also smaller Roman roads maintained by private landowners or say, the local town decurions would force everyone to pay a tax for upkeep, and of course there were smaller dirt roads all over the place, many of which still exist to this day.

In the early 2nd century AD one could travel unmolested and unarmed between Scotland and Sudan in little over a month. We know of many of the roads due either to physical remains, or due to Roman road itineraries (essentially lists of routes between towns).

e.g. at the top of this image you can see the land of the the Treveri (i.e. where Augusta Treverorum was on the Rhine frontier).

>>2432155
This is a nice resource, basically a Google-Maps-esque route calculator for the Roman world:

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

File: orbis.png (628KB, 1366x641px) Image search: [Google]

628KB, 1366x641px

>>2434510