Could the Persian Empire logistically support an army several million strong?

[Prufrock]

Just for some practical considerations regarding the unloading process, I asked my brother who skippers a deep sea fishing vessel out of Australia about the feasibility of unloading a 50 ton vessel in a day. He reckons a crew of 58, working shifts of one hour on and half an hour off for maximum efficiency, using nets and a pulley system capable of lifting 500kgs at a time, and with foremen who knew what they were doing, could unload 50 ton of cargo from ship to dock in 12 hours. Done chain gang style, with no nets or pulleys used, he reckons you'd need double the number of men.

As for unloading via smaller ships ferrying goods to a beach, it would depend how far off shore the vessel was moored, but he reckoned you'd struggle to unload 50 tons in a day. In his opinion, for a modern vessel you'd need something like twelve dinghies / tenders per ship working in constant relays, good weather and sea conditions, and 150 men for the job. You could use fewer ferrying vessels for a ship which mooring closer to the beach, but you'd still need the same number of trips.

So in practice unloading 3000 tons a day via 60 50 ton ships would not be as easy as it might appear!

To provide 1.7 million (or rather 3.4 million if noncombatants are provided for) men with a daily choenix (roughly 2 lbs) of food each, which Herodotus considers the minimum requirement, requires moving about 6.8 million pounds or about 3,000 tons per day.  This translates to unloading about sixty 50-ton ships on a daily basis, a figure well within the capacity of the coastal cities of the Persian Empire to provide and the average Greek beach to handle.  At the other end of the pipeline, loading sixty 50-tonners daily should not tax the capability of a decent port.

So, as long as there are no storms and no hostile fleets interfering with the system, there should be no problem keeping Xerxes' army supplied.

[Prufrock]

You will believe what you want to believe of course, and nothing anyone here says will change your mind, but you are not convincing anyone either, so it's at a bit of an impasse.

You have to treat it like WWI Aaron.  Man the fire step and keep the MGs supplied with ammunition and water.  Eventually they falter and you can stand down but you know that sometime soon they'll charge across that same shell-blasted terrain and it will all begin again 

A good joke's a good joke, but I do of course fully support Patrick and Justin's right to their own approach to the sources. There are points of disagreement (often large ones!) but debate is healthy, provided it's done in a respectful way, as it has been here. 

[Dangun]

A good joke's a good joke, but I do of course fully support Patrick and Justin's right to their own approach to the sources. There are points of disagreement (often large ones!) but debate is healthy, provided it's done in a respectful way, as it has been here.

There does seem to be significant differences of opinion regarding, when to apply doubt, or how much doubt should be applied to literary sources.

I am guessing that no one is really a literalist, and that everyone sits on a continuum.
And I would hazard a guess that in some cases we would reach consensus.

For example, in the Chronicles of Chiang Mai, one of the first kings is described as having an army of 117 million men. I am guessing we could reach consensus on that.
It is almost as likely that we'll reach consensus on whether a cross really did appear above the battle of Milvian Bridge with 'conquer by this' written on it, as per the Life of Constantine.

For me, events without precedent or antecedent (like squeezing 3 million Persians through a small gap) don't pass the sniff test, even before we get to detailed criticisms like that of Maurice.

Perhaps at least, being aware of where we each sit on the incredulity continuum can tell us the risks we take balancing efficiency and criticism?

PS: Personally I think it of as a ratio of certainty over evidence, and it may lead me to worry unnecessarily about things like the quality of evidence for Roman auxiliary equipment...

[Justin Swanton]

Just for some practical considerations regarding the unloading process, I asked my brother who skippers a deep sea fishing vessel out of Australia about the feasibility of unloading a 50 ton vessel in a day. He reckons a crew of 58, working shifts of one hour on and half an hour off for maximum efficiency, using nets and a pulley system capable of lifting 500kgs at a time, and with foremen who knew what they were doing, could unload 50 ton of cargo from ship to dock in 12 hours. Done chain gang style, with no nets or pulleys used, he reckons you'd need double the number of men.

Here's one comparison. We use a lot of 80gsm white bond paper at my print shop. It is ordered by reams, each ream measuring 61x86cm and weighing 40kg. I often order 20 reams. When the truck arrives I help unload it with one, possibly two men from the truck. It takes about 10 - 15 minutes to unload 800kg. So at that rate with breaks totalling 2 hours we would unload 50 tons in 12 hours - just the three of us.

The secret is to unload the cargo a bit at a time, in quantities individual men can manage.

[Jim Webster]

Just for some practical considerations regarding the unloading process, I asked my brother who skippers a deep sea fishing vessel out of Australia about the feasibility of unloading a 50 ton vessel in a day. He reckons a crew of 58, working shifts of one hour on and half an hour off for maximum efficiency, using nets and a pulley system capable of lifting 500kgs at a time, and with foremen who knew what they were doing, could unload 50 ton of cargo from ship to dock in 12 hours. Done chain gang style, with no nets or pulleys used, he reckons you'd need double the number of men.

Here's one comparison. We use a lot of 80gsm white bond paper at my print shop. It is ordered by reams, each ream measuring 61x86cm and weighing 40kg. I often order 20 reams. When the truck arrives I help unload it with one, possibly two men from the truck. It takes about 10 - 15 minutes to unload 800kg. So at that rate with breaks totalling 2 hours we would unload 50 tons in 12 hours - just the three of us.

The secret is to unload the cargo a bit at a time, in quantities individual men can manage.

well that's certainly an argument for loading lose grain

Looking at one of Patrick's amphora, apparently the standard on held 5·77 imperial gallons
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Quadrantal.html

So it holds just over 20kg
As for the weight of the amphora itself these vary but I saw an interesting comment
https://www.anticopedie.fr/dossiers/dossiers-gb/amphora.html
Their shape may seem strange at the first look, since they cannot stand upright, but it's however very convenient to stack them up in a boat and to be carried by man. A clever point is that the weight of some amphoras, when empty, is equal to that of their content (it should thus not exceed 23-24 kg!) thus, when a boat has to be loaded, one will know that one full amphora will be balanced by two empty ones...

So our grain filled amphora, should such a thing need to ever be transported, weights in at about 50kg.
I've unloaded by ten tons of 50kg bags of ammonium nitrate far too many times, but I'm not sure I'd want to do it on a moving surface

[Patrick Waterson]

I would point out that a number of recent finds have supported some of Herodotus' unlikelier stories, e.g. about Scythian 'drug tents'.  It would be particularly unwise to condemn his account without firm evidence behind one.

I would argue that accepting  the possibility that a historical or other  source is  not fully reliable is compatible with Western enlightenment thinking;  I also am not aware of where I have been particularity unwise enough to condemn his account.

There is a world of difference between 'not fully reliable' and 'dismissable on sight'.  The essence of the question and crux of the matter is whether the source is basically correct.  Western 'enlightenment thinking' (which I take to be the 21st century rather than the 18th century approach) seems to assume guilty until proven to agree with a particular outlook or theory, the standard of proof often being a moving goalpost.  I prefer and consider it more logical to assume innocent until at least some indication of guilt becomes manifest (e.g. as Nicholas points out, an army of 117 million for a king of Chiang Mai presupposes various factors which do not seem to have been present at the time, most notably a population of around 1,170,000,000 in Chiang Mai's territories).

Had my interlocutor been unwise enough to condemn Herodotus' account out of hand I would not have used the conditional 'it would be'.  Instead I salute his discretion.

[Justin Swanton]

Just to recap on general approach: I've been proven wrong too many times in the past to think it won't happen again in the future (my wife regularly proves me wrong in the present). If Herodotus is talking rubbish then fine, I'll drop him like a hot brick. But I was about to say what Patrick said: innocent until proven guilty, not vice versa. Reading Herodotus, Arrian, Livy and the like, I pick up the fact that they were trying to be historians and get their facts right. Obviously they had bias like any human, but I don't get the impression they had it anywhere near the level of a Goebbels. It's especially interesting when they give precise numbers and concomitant details: Herodotus citing 1 700 000 million rather than just 5 000 000 or 10 000 000, and describing how Xerxes determined the size of his army by measuring 10 000 man contingents. It's rather too elaborate to be just a vague exaggeration. If wrong, it has to be a systematic fabrication.

[Mark G]

What was the Greek word for fact, and it's entomology?

[Jim Webster]

what irritates me about the whole debate is that it would be much more useful if we could find out where Herodotus got his figures from, what sort of figures the Persian Empire kept etc
We have the details of how some contingents were put together and paid, and it might be that Herodotus had seen some sort of Empire wide summary document
But the idea that Xerxes took damned near six million people to Greece in summer is getting in the way of actually looking at proper history

[Patrick Waterson]

Just for some practical considerations regarding the unloading process, I asked my brother who skippers a deep sea fishing vessel out of Australia about the feasibility of unloading a 50 ton vessel in a day. He reckons a crew of 58, working shifts of one hour on and half an hour off for maximum efficiency, using nets and a pulley system capable of lifting 500kgs at a time, and with foremen who knew what they were doing, could unload 50 ton of cargo from ship to dock in 12 hours. Done chain gang style, with no nets or pulleys used, he reckons you'd need double the number of men.

As for unloading via smaller ships ferrying goods to a beach, it would depend how far off shore the vessel was moored, but he reckoned you'd struggle to unload 50 tons in a day. In his opinion, for a modern vessel you'd need something like twelve dinghies / tenders per ship working in constant relays, good weather and sea conditions, and 150 men for the job. You could use fewer ferrying vessels for a ship which mooring closer to the beach, but you'd still need the same number of trips.

Interesting to know, Aaron, although as Jim's useful and practical information on amphorae suggests, unloading amphorae is a bit different to unloading fish.  Not sure if that is a full enough response, but as Jim and Justin indicate, the trawlerman's estimate might be a bit on the time- and labour-intensive side.

Now on the matter of Thermopylae and its associated choke points ...

Herodotus VIII.24-25 gives us a clue how the Persians could have shifted their army past Thermopylae:

While they were there, Xerxes sent a herald to the fleet. Before sending him, Xerxes had made the following preparations: of all his own soldiers who had fallen at Thermopylae (that is, as many as twenty thousand) he left about a thousand, and the rest he buried in trenches, which he covered with leaves and heaped earth so that the men of the fleet might not see them. [2] When the herald had crossed over to Histiaea, he assembled all the men of the fleet and said: "Men of our allies, King Xerxes permits any one of you who should so desire to leave his place and come to see how he fights against those foolish men who thought they could overcome the king's power."

After this proclamation, there was nothing so hard to get as a boat, so many were they who wanted to see this. They crossed over and went about viewing the dead. All of them supposed that the fallen Greeks were all Lacedaemonians and Thespians, though helots were also there for them to see. [2] For all that, however, those who crossed over were not deceived by what Xerxes had done with his own dead, for the thing was truly ridiculous; of the Persians a thousand lay dead before their eyes, but the Greeks lay all together assembled in one place, to the number of four thousand. [3] All that day they spent in observation, and on the next the shipmen returned to their fleet at Histiaea while Xerxes' army set forth on its march.

What Xerxes actually did, however, was to march through Phocis.  The Thessalians who acted as his guides (Herodotus VIII.31) took him through a route 'no more than thirty furlongs wide', which must have seemed more congenial for the movement of a large army than the one-carriage-wide route via Thermopylae.  From Phocis he went on into Boeotia and thence to Attica (Herodotus VIII.32-34 and 50-51), with a contingent splitting off to attack Delphi (VIII.35-38).

What was the Greek word for fact, and it's entomology?

Please explain the relevance of the study of insects to this discussion.

what irritates me about the whole debate is that it would be much more useful if we could find out where Herodotus got his figures from, what sort of figures the Persian Empire kept etc

For that we need to find archives.  And we probably need to find them in Iran.

But the idea that Xerxes took damned near six million people to Greece in summer is getting in the way of actually looking at proper history

The $64,000 dollar question: why?

[Erpingham]

Except that the critical approach seems to smack of falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus, which is essentially a fallacy:

Genuinely struggling to see this.  If this were the case, we could reject Herodotus' whole story by pointing to his obviously fabulous tales.  Whereas a coherent set of problems has been raised, not against Herodotus' whole narrative, but a particular aspect of it, his numbers.

[Erpingham]

Just checking on the importance of the Scamander on the progress for Northern Greece.  The Scamander/Karamenderes is in Asia Minor.  Am I missing something?

It's Maurice who points out it's the last decent water source before the bridge, the next decent one is the River Hebrus in Thrace.

Thanks.  But we are making no allowance for transport of water, so are we assuming that the army only stops at major rivers to drink, and if so, would that work?  I was more thinking of drinking maybe once, at the end of the march, each day.

[Duncan Head]

it would be much more useful if we could find out where Herodotus got his figures from, what sort of figures the Persian Empire kept etc

For that we need to find archives.  And we probably need to find them in Iran.

From the archives we do have (see http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/persepolis-admin-archive for example), unfortunately, it would be hard to prove that the Achaemenids even had an army... 

[Flaminpig0]

I have owned a Persian wargames army for years but sadly and a little embarrassingly know very little about their culture and society.  Are they semi-feudal ?  I assume they are not a totalitarian ' hydraulic' civilisation like the Sumerians or Egyptians.

[Prufrock]

Convince me Aaron! Just one little irrefutable fact....

I don't believe it would be possible to reliably deliver the posited daily requirement of 3000+ tons of shipped grain supplies.

See here, regarding traffic through Ostia in Imperial times, which was of course a special case:

http://www.ostia-antica.org/med/med.htm#52

"Generally speaking the unloading of a ship of 150 tons will have taken two to four days. A cargo of 250 tons required six to eight days. Certain cargoes required special loading and unloading facilities. Sacks of grain and lighter amphorae could be carried by dockhands. Heavier amphorae were carried by two men, using poles slipped through the handles. Mobile cranes were used for lifting heavy objects such as marble sarcophagi and wild animals in cages. For the unloading of an obelisk, weighing many tons, exceptionally strong cranes must have been built."

If you are transporting via amphora as posited (say 39l capacity each @ 30kgs a pop (not including tare)), you need to be loading 100,000 and transporting, delivering and unloading another 100,000 of them daily.

And you are still having to get another 1700 tons from land sources as well.

It would be a massive operation. I don't think you are taking that properly into account.