Ancient Warfare Magazine

Ancient Warfare is a unique publication focused exclusively on soldiers, battles, and tactics, all before 600 AD. Starting with ancient Egypt and Persia and continuing to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Ancient Warfare examines the military history of cultures throughout Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa. Ancient Greece and Rome receive the most frequent coverage, due both to the wealth of contemporary sources and the modern fascination with these two great civilizations. Subject-matter ranges from the familiar to the more obscure: while Alexander the Great, the Persian Wars and Caesar’s Gallic campaigns all receive regular coverage, Ancient Warfare also looks at some of the less common parts of ancient military history, from chariots as battle taxis to PTSD in antiquity.

Ancient Warfare Magazine

EDITORIAL — The history before history • NEWS ITEMS BY LINDSAY POWELL

Earliest Egyptian military activity in the Sinai

Cartagena's mixed-materials walls

Longest, oldest iron spear discovered in India

First anatomical evidence of elephants in Spain

The affluent lifestyle near a Roman fortress

Parasites infected soldiers

HAVE YOU READ? • Hannibal Crosses the Alps

Camps in Germany prove third-century-AD Roman advances

THEIR NAME ALONE TERRIFIES • The rise of the Abdals in the region of Turan in Central Asia, a people also known the Hephthalites, marks a pivotal, yet frequently underestimated, chapter in the history of Central Asia and the Near East. Emerging from a nomadic heritage, these formidable warriors carved out a vast empire that left an indelible mark on the geopolitical landscape of the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

From clan to empire

A tapestry of names

FURTHER READING

IMPERIUM • In ancient Rome, the word imperium might mean several things, from military authority to the empire itself. The precise meaning of this term changed throughout Roman history.

AN UNDERWATER SOURCE • The First Punic War, fought between Rome and Carthage, is a landmark conflict in the rise of Rome. With art and archaeology, we can determine how a Roman legionary may have been armed and armoured in this clash of empires.

STATE OF PLAY • Traditionally, warfare in Archaic Greece has been viewed as the time when the heavily armed hoplite and hoplite warfare first emerged and then dominated land warfare. More recent scholarship, however, has challenged this traditional view, arguing that Classical hoplite warfare only emerged much later, in the fifth century BC. The theme articles in this issue reexamine this fascinating and crucial period of Greek warfare.

The potter's wheel and the artist's eye

TWO COINSIN THE HAND • What is a hoplite? In the Ancient Greek the word is ὁ ὁπλίτης (ho hoplites) or ‘equipped man’, which comes from τὸ ὅπλον (to hoplon) meaning equipment or tool. The aim of this article is to help further the understanding of what it means to be a hoplite, but not through the social lens, but rather the economic lens, and how the Greek economy of the Early Iron Age and Archaic period helped form the iconic phalanx and the men clad in bronze that stood in the formation.

Solon's reforms

A MAN OF BRONZE • Nearly two millennia before the armour-clad Medieval knight of the fourteenth century, a comparable system of near-complete plate protection was already employed by hoplites in Archaic Greece. Understanding this early manifestation of full plate armour requires a close examination of the Archaic hoplite himself. Far removed from the popular image of later Classical warfare, the hoplite of the sixth and early fifth centuries BC occupied a transitional moment in Greek military development.

WRITING THEIR NAMES IN BLOOD • Herodotus tells of how, in ca. 546 BC, when...