[richardtavor]

What an interesting find. I have helped to interpret fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Israel) (90% of them are civil documents (marriage, divorce, birth, death, census, etc, some personal, some Biblical, etc.) Many Archaelogists have pieced together the daily lives of the sect that lived at the scriptorium at Qumran (no, they were not monks!) One of my conclusions was that life moved a whole lot slower then--wars took years of preparation and everyone knew when they were coming. I hope this student finishes the project--it helps to understand history if one has a fundamental understanding of how ordinary people lived.

[Benjo]

One of my conclusions was that life moved a whole lot slower then--wars took years of preparation and everyone knew when they were coming.

That's interesting. I would have guessed just the opposite, that in those days all you had to do to go to war was put down your scythe and hoe and pick your spear and sword and you were in business. In contrast, when we were preparing for the first Gulf War, the military spent the better part of a year prepositioning all the tanks and other weapons and supplies.

Now that I think about it I remember cases where it took years for to prepare for wars in antiquity too. I remember readinging once that an ancient king in Iraq once spent something like five or ten years digging a canal connecting the Tigris and Euphrates. Then when he was done, his army sailed down the canal and attacked the cities on the other river. The Vikings, I remember too, when they attacked coastal cities in Britain and Europe would show up out of the fog one morning with as many as 800 ships.

[mass55th]

"...wars took years of preparation and everyone knew when they were coming"

Yeah, but did they have an exit strategy?

:-)