Tollenses Battle: Bronze Age Fantasy Fodder

[Nolgroth]

Just finished reading this article. Very interesting.

 

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/1384.full

[L. Marcus]

That certainly tickles the imagination.

[Nolgroth]

I can just see the possibilities between a pre-Historic early Bronze Age game or a reference point for an Urban Fantasy game. Why were they fighting? What were the stakes? The honest answer is probably territory, slaves, trade routes or something similar. The fantasy is that they were the last stand in a battle to stop some sort of Evil Thing^TM  from happening or to put down some ancient and powerful being. So many permutations to toy with for a campaign. Being as there are no written records of the battle, it completely leaves the interpretation to the perspective reader (or GM in this case).

[Christopher R Taylor]

I confess that a Bronze Age game is really fascinating to me because its so old and fantastical back then.  Egypt and Assyria and Akkadia, Sumeria, the old, old world lost in time where somehow magic seems more plausible.

[Nolgroth]

Not to mention Hattusha. I watched a documentary called the Dark Lords of Hattusha. Some more fodder for that sort of campaign.

[L. Marcus]

The Indus valley seems to have been a rather nice place to live during the Bronze Age. Shame that sometin' 'appened to it ...

[Christopher R Taylor]

I even love the names from those time periods, long lost civilizations like the Hittites and the Etruscans. The longest-settled location that anyone knows of on earth is in Bulgaria, just built on the ruins of past cities over and over from far, far back into the distant past.

[IndianaJoe3]

One idea that I haven't used yet is a city so old that it pre-dates recorded history. Imagine what might be lying beneath its foundations.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Uruk Expansion.

[Christopher R Taylor]

THe idea of a modern city with a subway, sewers, old shut down unused subway, then ruins of previous cities beneath it in layers, that fascinates me.  Imagine what could be down there?

[Roter Baron]

Wow! Germany - where they kick ass for at least the last 5200 years.

 

The area of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is nowadays one of Germany least populated. I thikn they'd have a hard time to get as many people together for a brawl of that size today.

[Christopher R Taylor]

It is surprising to me that so many were gathered in that one area.  I have to guess that it was a huge coalition of kings and warlords on either side meeting up for some catastrophic final clash that lasted for days if not weeks given the info in the article.

[womble]

I'm putting together the bones of a "What if Troy had won the war, by ambushing the raiders in the Horse" bronze age/heroic swords and sorcery game (with additional "stuff"). Interesting to note that flint was still used for arrowheads at least in this battle. I'll have to find some more info on this Tollense thing to see if there are any more conclusions drawn about the state of "military science" in that Age. It's intriguing to think of a potentially Mediterranean expeditionary force pressing north into Germany. What were they seeking? What might have provoked their rulers to send them there?

[Christopher R Taylor]

It seems like a mix of flint and bronze was in use, suggesting either one side was richer/more advanced or the transition was going on between the two.  Flint actually  probably makes a better arrowhead than bronze but its darn hard to mass produce.

[L. Marcus]

I'm under the impressiin that bronze was rare and reserved for the elite. The common folk were still using the techniques of their neolithic ancestors.

[Markdoc]

 

It seems like a mix of flint and bronze was in use, suggesting either one side was richer/more advanced or the transition was going on between the two.  Flint actually  probably makes a better arrowhead than bronze but its darn hard to mass produce.

 

Flint is OK if you are shooting at unarmoured targets, but shoot it at a bronze breastplate or even very hard wood, and it goes 'poof'. You can make it sharp (sharper than bronze, in fact), but it's very brittle. And it's light - far lighter than bronze - which reduces penetrating ability against harder armors (and also limits its use in heavier bows). Last of all, it's brittleness means that flint weapons were often one-use only: whereas metal arrowheads can be (and we know, were) scavenged and reused.

 

So mass production isn't the problem - there are mass production sites for flints all across Northern Europe where the stuff was literally dug out by the ton, shaped and then carried off for trading  (though of course, large scale casting in bronze is still easier, if a lot more resource-intensive). Danish flints, for example were traded in large numbers hundreds of kilometers from their origin. The problem is simply that flint isn't great for war arrows where your target might have decent armour. 

 

So in a bronze-age culture with plenty of resources, the flint* war arrow went out of style very quickly. They are found on ancient battlefields in the mediterranean, but by the time of Troy, war arrows were bronze headed (Homer specifically notes this, for what it's worth). People did not stop using flint - you can find Greek scythes with flint teeth and flint scrapers dating back to 200 BC or so (though by that point only poor rustics used them), but flint arrows had stopped being used on battlefields in Greece a thousand years before that.

 

Egypt is a bit of an exception. In Egypt flint arrowheads continued to be used for a few centuries alongside bronze ones, and historians have been arguing about why for decades. Everywhere else, not so much.

 

cheers, Mark

 

*not just flint: pre-bronze age, obsidian and bone were also used, and in Greece and Italy, obsidian arrowheads outlasted flint ones by a few centuries.

[Roter Baron]

My guess with Egypt and the longer use of flint would be that due to the warmer climate Egyptian warriors (and their enemies) used bronze armor less often. Thus, flint arrowheads were still effective and you could save or spare bronze for other things.

[Markdoc]

My guess with Egypt and the longer use of flint would be that due to the warmer climate Egyptian warriors (and their enemies) used bronze armor less often. Thus, flint arrowheads were still effective and you could save or spare bronze for other things.

 

it could be. But Egyptian royal troops were actually pretty well armoured by the New Kingdom era (actually ahead of their contemporaries in equally hot places in neighbouring countries). It might be because Egyptian society was highly conservative in a lot of things, or because they used a lot of Nubian mercenaries, who came from regions without ready access to the ores needed to copper or bronze arrowheads (the Egyptians used a lot of copper weapons, also for a longer period than their neighbours). Or it might simply be that flint was cheaper and Egypt had a big, expensive army to maintain, so they were looking for minor savings ... we don't really know. 

 

cheers, Mark

[Christopher R Taylor]

Flint is OK if you are shooting at unarmoured targets, but shoot it at a bronze breastplate or even very hard wood, and it goes 'poof'. You can make it sharp (sharper than bronze, in fact), but it's very brittle. And it's light - far lighter than bronze - which reduces penetrating ability against harder armors (and also limits its use in heavier bows). Last of all, it's brittleness means that flint weapons were often one-use only: whereas metal arrowheads can be (and we know, were) scavenged and reused.

True enough, but then not a lot of people actually wore much armor back then.  Armor was very expensive and required materials few people had a lot of around to spare, even leather.  Nothing in that article suggested they found armor (only bits of weapons) which means either the reporter wasn't interested in that aspect, the warriors were wearing armor that didn't last (bone, leather, wood, cloth), or they didn't have any.  Most historical research I've read says that they didn't wear a lot of armor in the pre-bronze and bronze age, unless important people or very wealthy.

 

On the other hand, some cultures did (Egypt, as MarkDoc notes, Spartans, etc) and they wore a lot.

[Markdoc]

True enough, but then not a lot of people actually wore much armor back then.  Armor was very expensive and required materials few people had a lot of around to spare, even leather.  Nothing in that article suggested they found armor (only bits of weapons) which means either the reporter wasn't interested in that aspect, the warriors were wearing armor that didn't last (bone, leather, wood, cloth), or they didn't have any.  Most historical research I've read says that they didn't wear a lot of armor in the pre-bronze and bronze age, unless important people or very wealthy.

 

That's all true ... which is why the warriors at Tollenses were shooting flint arrows at each other, while their contemporaries in Assyria or Mycenae* were wearing heavy armour, building seige weapons and shooting bronze-tipped arrows at each other. By that stage - around 1200 BC - there were already armies with large numbers of armoured troops in the mediterranean era. They weren't - as far as we can tell - the bulk of the army, but neither were they rare, or all nobility, apparently numbering in the hundreds if not thousands in the Assyrian armies that were destroying the Hittite empire around the time this battle happened.

 

Edit: this should not be taken to mean that none of the warriors at Tollenses werewearing metal armour - bronze armours are found in burials of the Urnfield culture, which stretched across central Europe at this time. It's just that this far north, armour was probably much rarer than in the mediterranean cultures. Such valuable armour is unlikely to have been left on the battlefield.

 

cheers, Mark

 

*This is a reconstruction of the so-called Dendra armour, known to us from one complete set, several parts for other sets and some illustrations - all dating from 1-2 centuries before the battle at Tollenses. You can read some notes and se ethe photos done by some reconstructors here. I'd take much of what they write with a grain of salt, since a lot of it is speculation, but the armours depicted are all based on real remains.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Its also possible that the armored folk were so much more likely to survive that they didn't lie dead in a heap with the others

[L. Marcus]

But one would expect at least one in the heaps of head -- unless, as with Visby, all the really good armors were only on one side.

[Markdoc]

But one would expect at least one in the heaps of head -- unless, as with Visby, all the really good armors were only on one side.

 

Funny, I was thinking about the mass of unarmoured dead at Visby, when I was writing my earlier post, but because I was in hurry didn't note it

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

Well, many in the Visby mass graves on the Korsbetingen had armor, but they were far from the state of the art of the time (Viking-era chainmain and lamellar), and most wore no armor on the lower legs -- many skeletons had damages to the shins and feet, showing that the Danish men-at-arms and mercenaries went for the legs to incapacitate the opponent before the kill.

[Markdoc]

I was thinking more of the fact that most of the levy were buried without armour, though the fact that fragments of iron rings were found with the skeletons suggested that some of them were wearing armor when killed. So the fact that it isn't in the mass graves doesn't mean that it wasn't used.

 

cheers, Mark