Anything Salvageable?

[Dangun]

I have been reading the Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma, and you get things like this...

"The host that followed Anawrhtaminasaw, it is said, were thirty and eight white elephants, eight hundred thousand black elephants, eight million horses, one hundred and eighty million fighting me, eight hundred thousand boats..."

Do you think there anything historical, salvageable in there?
Numbers are at least 4 orders of magnitude silly. Is the ratio worth anything?

Perhaps one for the literalists?

[Andreas Johansson]

So you reckon there were at most 3.8 white millielephants there? :p

If the proportions stand in any relationship to reality, the army was very infantry-heavy: elephants to horses to fighting men is 1:10:225, which I guess makes sense in the SE Asian environment.

If the DBMM army list is to be believed, before the mid-11C, Burmese armies had few elephants, but thereafter fileded very large numbers.  If Anawrhtaminasaw is the same as King Anawrahta mentioned in the in the lists notes, he was supposedly responsible for the shift, which doesn't fit too well with the very low ratio reported here.

[Patrick Waterson]

Thinking about the figures, 38 white elephants would suggest 38 notables (kings, princes, very-high-ranking nobles and the like) but thereafter I do wonder if trimming the 'thousand' off each of the entries would provide a tolerably accurate picture.

I suspect a usage/translation problem here (assuming it is not just a south-east Asian habit of overstatement), in that the 'thousand' might have doubled for something like 'mighty' or 'excellent' as opposed to a quantified value.

This would give us:
38 white elephants (and presumably highly important riders)
800 mighty black elephants (an impressive figure, presumably consistent with a substantial increase over pre-mid 11C totals)
8,000 mighty horses (or horsemen)
180,000 mighty fighting men
800 excellent boats

Would this fit within likely possibilities for the culture?

[Swampster]

Perhaps even '10000' might be your 'mighty'.
If it is like modern Burmese, the words for thousand and ten thousand are quite similar in pronunciation and in how the words are written. One hundred thousand and one million sound fairly similar them as well, though in writing they are a bit different (though quite similar to each other).

OTOH, this SOAS article https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233578760_A_reassessment_of_hyperbolic_military_statistics_in_some_early_modern_Burmese_texts basically says the numbers are exaggerations and can only be used to give some kind of relative size, but even then not in an absolute way.
One useful snippet is that the whole western Burmese kingdom probably had a population of under 170000.

[Dangun]

So you reckon there were at most 3.8 white millielephants there? :p

Yep. Pretty much!

Although to be fair. From memory the DBM rules, toward the back, say a single unit of Elephant represents an average of 50 animals, and infantry about 1000 people...

So from a unit ratio perspective you'd get 4:10:45 elephant:horse:infantry.
Rounding a little... 1:2.5:10 doesn't look too silly.
(Even more approximately, a DBA army would look therefore 1:2:9)

Maybe if anything, its horse heavier than I expected.

(assuming it is not just a south-east Asian habit of overstatement),

This is tricky. I am not sure how to make the case that any one state's sources are exaggerated to a greater or lesser degree?

In some Chinese writing the word for 10,000 can just as easily mean "a lot." For example, throwing your arms in the air and yelling "Tenno heika banzai" does not mean the Emperor should live precisely 10,000 years and then drop dead.

[Andreas Johansson]

From memory the DBM rules, toward the back, say a single unit of Elephant represents an average of 50 animals, and infantry about 1000 people...

So from a unit ratio perspective you'd get 4:10:45 elephant:horse:infantry.
Rounding a little... 1:2.5:10 doesn't look too silly.
(Even more approximately, a DBA army would look therefore 1:2:9)

Maybe if anything, its horse heavier than I expected.

I don't know about DBM, but acc'd DBA 3.0, it's "up to" 25 elephans per element, or about  250-300 horsemen or 5-600 infantry, so, going with 25, 250, 500 for simplicity's sake, the element proportions would become 1:1:11.25, which is close enough to the 1:1:10 proportions of the pre-Anawrahta list. From Anawratha on it's 3:1:8 or 2:2:8 depending on whether you take the general on a a nellie or on a horse.

(FWIW, in DBMM it's ~16 elephants, 128-200 horsemen, or 200-256 foot per element, which'd give you proportionally more infantry in element terms.)

[Patrick Waterson]

(assuming it is not just a south-east Asian habit of overstatement),

This is tricky. I am not sure how to make the case that any one state's sources are exaggerated to a greater or lesser degree?

Look for patterns. If armed forces exceed known population (as opposed to estimated population), then exaggeration is present  If armed forces conform to c.10-20% of likely population at the time, the figures (for the armed forces) are probably accurate.

As Andreas points out, the ratios are rational and more or less in conformity with what one might expect, so I think we might be able to assume that 'thousand' does not necessarily mean 'thousand' (see Peter's post on Burmese quantification).  Assuming that 'thousand' is used to represent some degree of real or imagined excellence as opposed to three additional decimal places, we are left with large but not incredible forces; I would not go as far as Peter's 'ten thousand' as the 'virtue epithet' despite the attractions of its use as standard for the enthused-for Imperial Japanese lifespan*, simply because the resultant forces would be too small: 80 (black) elephants, 800 cavalry, 18,000 infantry and 80 boats.  This diminished total would, in my estimation, be a city-level army and scarcely worthy of mention as the following of a notable king; not a force worth crowing about in the chronicles.

*Which is itself quite modest by Ancient Egyptian standards, which optimistically proclaimed the reigning pharaoh as 'living forever and ever'.

So unless there are good reasons to the contrary (is the population estimate of c.170,000 for western Burma at the time realistic or pessimistic?) I would go with 800 elephants, 8,000 cavalry, 180,000 infantry and 800 boats.  Assuming that each of the 38 white elephants carried an important commander (as opposed to just being the king's show-off herd) this would give us about one notable officer (general or whatever) per 5,000 men, which to me seems not unreasonable.

In any event, the ratios seem good; the question would appear to be just how much 'virtue' or 'mightiness' is contained within the figures; 1,000 and 10,000 seem the most likely choices.  10,000 has the advantage of being fairly broadly utilised elsewhere; 1,000 leaves us with a more impressive and chronicle-worthy army.

[Duncan Head]

How late does the Glass Palace Chronicle go? I know it's compiled in the early C19th, but not how late a period it covers. Do we have any outside estimates, Western or Chinese or whatever, to compare with the figures given for later kings' armies?   

[Swampster]

So unless there are good reasons to the contrary (is the population estimate of c.170,000 for western Burma at the time realistic or pessimistic?)

I don't know why he reckons on 170000 but he says that the population of Western Burma in the mid-19th century was only 260000. This, though, is a smaller area than the Pagan Empire. The wiki article puts the population of the Empire at its zenith at between 1 million and 2.5 million, so likely smaller than that of Angevin England. FWIW, a major battle like Bouvines had fewer than 18000 total combatants on both sides combined, representing a major effort by France and the HRE.

180000 might be a reasonable estimate for the total raiseable portion of the population, but this is the host actually with the king - it would be rare to summon the entirety of the fighting strength of a kingdom and hard to provision them.

How late does the Glass Palace Chronicle go? I know it's compiled in the early C19th, but not how late a period it covers. Do we have any outside estimates, Western or Chinese or whatever, to compare with the figures given for later kings' armies?   

Charney's paper reckons the Portuguese figures are also distorted. They often seem to ultimately derive from indigenous figures anyway, but then can be further altered if it enhances the Portuguese reputation. He gives an example of a Portuguese source mentioning 3000 cannon and compares this to a Burmese source having the same 3000 cannon Charney is suspicious since no one else mentions these guns and also that some booty includes 300 women, 3000 cannon, 3000 Thai famililies and 30000 Mon families - rather oddly similar despite the various orders of magnitude.

[Patrick Waterson]

Thw Wisdom of Wikipedia contributes the following:

Various sources and estimates put Pagan's military strength anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 men. One inscription by Sithu II, who expanded the empire to its greatest extent, describes him as the lord of 17,645 soldiers while another notes 30,000 soldiers and cavalry under his command.[72] A Chinese account mentions a Burmese army of 40,000 to 60,000 (including 800 elephants and 10,000 horses) at the battle of Ngasaunggyan in 1277.

The article also notes:

The army was organised into a small standing army of a few thousand, which defended the capital and the palace, and a much larger conscript-based wartime army. Conscription was based on the kyundaw system (called the ahmudan system by later dynasties), which required local chiefs to supply their predetermined quota of men from their jurisdiction on the basis of population in times of war. This basic system of military organisation was largely unchanged down to the precolonial period although later dynasties, especially the Toungoo Dynasty, did introduce standardisation and other modifications.

The precise figure of 17,645 soldiers I would suggest may correspond to the standing army.  If the Chinese count of opponents at Ngasaunggyan is reasonably accurate, it would support the existence of 800 elephants and 8,000 cavalry derived from dividing the Glass Palace Chronicle figures by 1,000.  Of course not everyone thinks the Chinese count was accurate, but if it is deemed credible then it would by implication also support the other Chronicle figures (divided by 1,000) to give an overall mobilisation total of 200,000 (or rather 8,000 plus 180,000 plus boat and elephant crews).

Whether this entire strength would be fielded all together is questionable, although the king would presumably sumon the entire muster in one place at least once during his reign if only to ensure his subordinates were not lying to him.  What would make sense to me would be if the standing army plus the mounted and riverine forces were joined with regional infantry levies (say 20-40,000 of them) to give and army strength of 40-60,000 for a particular campaign.

[Dangun]

How late does the Glass Palace Chronicle go? I know it's compiled in the early C19th, but not how late a period it covers. Do we have any outside estimates, Western or Chinese or whatever, to compare with the figures given for later kings' armies?

It goes to the present - at the time 19th c.
But it has only been translated to 14th c.