2,100-year-old Alexander the Great mosaic analyzed for restoration

Re:2,100-year-old Alexander the Great mosaic analyzed for re... by tristramb on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @08:51AM (#42792800)

From article: "Here, in the Battle of Issus, Alexander's army of 75,000 Greeks faced Darius' vastly superior force of approximately 600,000 Persian troops."

From Wikipedia: "Modern historians find Arrian's count of 600,000 men highly unlikely. They argue that the logistics of fielding more than 100,000 soldiers in battle was extremely difficult at the time."

Basically, the ancient agricultural landscape would be unable to feed an army of more than 100,000.

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Re:2,100-year-old Alexander the Great mosaic analyzed for re... by michaelcampbell on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:17AM (#42794352)

Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast mentions this in almost every episode. Numerical values in historical documents are always to be greeted with LARGE amounts of suspicion if not outright disbelief.

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Re:2,100-year-old Alexander the Great mosaic analyzed for re... by jaapz on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @09:13AM (#42793048)

The next paragraph, or actually next sentence adresses this immediately:

> These ancient written sourced troop numbers are likely greatly exaggerated as more modern accounting of the battle puts the numbers much lower, but it is how the story was told for the better part of 2,300 years.

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Re:2,100-year-old Alexander the Great mosaic analyzed for re... by Maken on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @09:12AM (#42793029)

Macedonian war propaganda, still going strong 2K years later.

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Re:2,100-year-old Alexander the Great mosaic analyzed for re... by duxup on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @10:26AM (#42793786)

Yeah 600k seems pretty outsized for battles of that time, even compared just "reported" numbers.

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