Swords, spears, elephants
Kinds of evidence and kinds of weapons
Why is a poem like the one I looked at last week so important for historians?
As a reminder, it was this short poem, written in Tamil during the earliest period of epic poetry writing in the southern parts of peninsular South Asia, roughly the areas of modern Tamil Nadu and Kerala states in India:
As the hostile onslaught bent on destruction beats at the front ranks
of the army of his king, he alone, sword raised in his right hand,
blocks the enemy from surging on and so he is like a shore
to a great ocean, that man whose lineage, like him, has shown
preeminent generosity, the ruler of a village which other than always
feeding those who come to it singing
does not even create enough income to merit being taxed by a king.
(The song of Maturaik Kanakkāyanār.1)
The importance of this and the other poems like it is, to a large extent, down to what evidence survives for different times and places. How much do we have to paint a picture of any given past world?
The first and second centuries are great for thinking further about this, because we know really rather a lot about some societies from this time and a lot less about other.
In particular, if I ask you or you ask me (or anybody else with an interest in history) ‘what was going on in the first and second centuries?’ the answer you are most likely to get, at least in Europe and places where the teaching of history has been developed from European models, is ‘the Roman Empire’. The answer you would be most likely to get in East Asia would be ‘the Qin-Han Empire’.
Large, wealthy, bureaucratic empires tend to leave lots of evidence behind. They were very big so evidence for them will be spread over large areas, making it less vulnerable to loss by localised changes. They also tended to generate lots of stuff, from paperwork to empire-wide fashion to mass-produced food and equipment. Big empires are also often very good at creating things that last a long time, such as roads, harbours, fortresses and large buildings designed to be used over generations, from public arenas to temples and warehouses.
Being the first really big, rich and highly bureaucratic empire to exist in a particular place is a massive ‘points booster’ for lasting visibility and durability, too. Yours are likely to be the first roads, harbours, temples, etc. on their sites. Later people may well just repair them rather than remaking them, so your designs will be the ones that last. The traces of their activity will be fitted into the gaps around yours or built on top of it, and then maybe scraped away and chucked by later archaeologists who are looking for ‘the good stuff’,2 because...
It is also very likely that these early big, wealthy, bureaucratic empires in a region will acquire some sort of legendary or prototype status. They are the historical equivalent of the saying that you only get to make a first impression once. The Qin-Han and Roman Empires, for example, both hold a unique status as the perceived origins of key aspects of regional ‘civilisation’.
In Europe, Roman culture is everywhere, in the alphabet used in the majority of European languages, in styles of public building, and the names given to kinds of public office and government bureaus. Playing the game ‘how does this thing link back to the Romans’ in any European context is almost trivially easy when you start.3
We are trained from childhood, in school, by media and the heritage industry and by our own popular stories and legends, in ways that find an equivalent in East Asia with the Qin-Han, to think of the Romans are one of the ‘great’ moments in human history. This also tends to make people more interested, so that the Roman past gets a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention.
None of this is necessarily bad: this isn’t a moral issue. We are all entitled to be interested in whatever we like.
But when it comes to trying to see other past worlds, it is a challenge. Trying to look at the world outside the Roman and Qin-Han Empires in the first and second centuries is a bit like staring directly into a stadium floodlight then trying to see what is going on in dark corner at the back of the stands.
Recognising that some of this is about where and when gets conserved and studied is one step. However, it doesn’t fix the real discrepancies of evidence.
Let’s look at one specific example: how did people fight in the first and second centuries CE?
If we wanted to answer that question about the Roman Empire, the list of sources available is so ludicrously long that breaking it down into big categories is about the only way to summarise it.
Material evidence: we have literally tens of thousands of pieces of individual archaeological evidence, including weapons and armour (spears, swords, knives, shields, caltrops (cunning little clumps of nails or spikes designed so that however they land on the ground, one spike is always pointing upwards, waiting to lame horses and skewer advancing soldiers’ feet), cuirasses (chest protectors), pauldrons (shoulder protectors), grieves (shin protectors), helmets...). We even have leather and wood finds, showing how these things were strapped on, decorated and supplemented with padded vests and such like.
Standing fabric and site archaeology: we’ve also got whole sites, including frontier walls, fortresses, military roads, way stations and barracks (which also show us things like how soldiers were trained and kept healthy with baths houses and doctors’ offices).
Visual sources: wall paintings, mosaics and coin images all give us pictures of soldiers. Some are romanticised, some show legendary battles, some are crudely drawn and some are very schematic. But there are thousands upon thousands of them. Put them all together and we can build up a pretty Technicolor and detailed idea of how Roman soldiers, and sometimes, the people they fought, were dressed, how they arranged themselves, how they used specific kinds of weapons and armour in combination and how different kinds of soldier worked together.
Texts: the Roman Empire (like the Qin-Han Empire in East Asia) was not just literate. It was hyper-literate. We have inscriptions in stone about battles fought, veterans housed, ranks delineated and generals celebrated. We have manuals by about how to organise armies, supply then, train them and deploy them for battle. We have poems, fictional stories, historical accounts and letters about military campaigns, individual battles and the building of military infrastructure. We even have graffiti and tombstones from individual soldiers, telling us the games they played during downtime and showing how deployment all over the Roman Empire created cross-cultural marriages, friendships and business opportunities.
At the end of all of this, there is still a massive amount we don’t know but this is relative. Let’s compare this to the very specific question of ‘how did people fight?’ in the southern parts of the peninsula of South Asia in the first and second centuries.
Material evidence: Nope. Not really. People were probably mostly cremated not buried, so no grave goods, and if people were buried in megalithic tombs, these were emptied probably centuries ago. Fewer sites in total have been excavated, and over s smaller original area, and anyway, different military arrangements probably mean that there are no massive military sites waiting to be found with all of their individual bits of everyday military life.
Standing fabric and site archaeology: Also a bit of a bust. There are a few sites with excavated layers datable to the first and second centuries but most of these seem to have been rural domestic sites, so I guess we know that most farmers didn’t keep weapons in their houses, at least when they abandoned those houses for whatever reason..? It isn’t exactly surprising information! Probably the best places for finding things like forts and barracks (if they existed) would be in cities, but these are thought to be buried directly under modern, heavily populated cities, and in any case that ‘if they existed’ bit is really important. We don’t actually know what military infrastructure was like.
Visual sources: A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a hero stone dedicated to a heroic farmer and his heroic dog, Kovivan. It dates from about five hundred years after the period we’re now trying to look at, but hey… it’s something. We can see a man holding a bow and a knife. He wears a loincloth and appears to be bare chested. He has long hair and some sort of hair ornament and probably a torque or neck ring. Is this how Karundevakatti actually went into battle or is it a romantic portrayal of how a heroic warrior ought to look? He has a bow but where does he keep his arrows? He holds what seems to be a short knife, but is this a realistic indication of how long Karundevakatti’s knife/sword was, or just how much space the stone carver left themselves?
The more images you have, the easier it can be to answer questions like these. Hero stones cluster in the 8th to 13th centuries, not the first and second, but they are often illustrated, so we can perhaps use them to build up a composite picture of possible weaponry and clothing.
On them, we see spears, long swords, bows and arrows. There are depictions of men on horseback, showing some details of saddles, bridles and stirrups. We can see that bare chested and with a loincloth is common as is the wearing of decorative hair pieces and, often necklaces or ankle bands. Some hold shields.
Texts: The societies of southern peninsular South Asia in the first and second centuries CE were literate but they were not hyper-literate. We do not have inscriptions from this early period and this far south in the subcontinent. There are no written histories, legends or manuals about warfare, but there are the poems. There will be a newsletter coming up about how these poems and the people who wrote them fitted into society, but for now, the reason they are so important is because they are virtually our only textual source for these early centuries CE. The poems are our very best insight into how people lived, worked, played, thought and fought.
Around half of the poems to survive are related to warfare and they range from graphic descriptions of the aftermath of battles to the festive sight of armies marching out to war, from the grief of widows and mothers to individual deeds of glory. The purpose of these poems was to praise and flatter and perhaps to encourage others to bravery but they were meant to present realistic, moving and believable accounts. They were shaped by the attitudes and the material world that surrounded the poets and they were, in many cases, probably based on real events and perhaps even presented to people who had been there. We may wonder if everybody was quite as heroic as the poems suggest, but we do not need to be too sceptical of the details of their world.
In the poems, we see a wide range of weapons which mostly matches those on the hero stones. There is also reference to bare chests and little mention of armour. Elephants were clearly critical to warfare and to how kings presented themselves as powerful and effective. Horses and chariots were also important, even if they may have needed to be imported from overseas or further north, as horses were in much later centuries.
A white parasol, also visible in some hero stones, was a symbol of kingship. It could be used to signal when a king was departing for or returning from battle or when he had been victorious.
The elephants with their dark trunks and their handsome tusks
raised on high and tipped with iron are the clouds.
The swords of warriors who swore oaths as they flourished them
for the attack form the lightning. The royal drums that received
a sacrifice of blood are with their glowing drumsticks
the thunder that makes those snakes, the enemy kings, tremble
and feel deep anguish. The fast horses are the driving wind
on the wide field where arrows shower down like rain released
by the mighty strings of the strong, swift bows. On the drenched
battlefield, chariots are the plows…
(extract from Paranar sings Cēramān Katalōttiya Vēlkelu Kuttuvan.4)
Here we see fragments of material culture lost: of drums and drumsticks made of fragile organic matter and iron tips for elephants’ trunks: would we even know what it was if somebody found one? And anyway, iron often corrodes quickly. We see the human, the behavioural and the ritual.
We also see another poet using nature as the analogy for war. In last week’s poem, it was the cresting and fall of a great wave. Here, a storm gives way to the ploughing of the drenched fields. We see the frames of reference in which people could make sense of their own lives, but also perhaps glimpse a world view in which wars by kings were presented as equivalent to the seasons and the labour of farmers.
Many questions remain. How large was an ‘average’ battle? Tens, hundreds, thousands? How was control distributed between an overking and the other leaders - minor kings, village heads, etc. who might be with him? Did they all bring their own followers and command them or did they all answer directly to the king? How were armies supplied with equipment and food? Did soldiers bring their own gear and food, for example, or was some of it provided for them? And were soldiers professionals or were they mostly men who did other jobs and only fought when called upon?
Some of these are questions I’ll come back to in the next couple of weeks, some we just don’t know, but without the Tamil epic poems, we would know a great deal less and squeezing the information out of them is a chance to reflect, too, on how differences in the survival of evidence and the depth of interest in specific earlier societies affects the pictures we can paint in the present.5
Hart, George L., and Hank Heifetz, eds., The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil, the Purananuru (Columbia University Press, 1999). Song no. 33 (p. 188).
This does not usually happen these days. Medieval and even more recent archaeology is now studied in its own right and archaeological processes have improved over the last century or so, but until very recently (as in, within the last 30 years in some places), it was pretty normal for excavations to be looking for ancient stuff and just to dispose of anything later. Even now, when medieval or more recent layers are properly documented, they still need to be removed to see what is below them. Archaeology will tend to lead to the ultimate preservation of the oldest layers on a site. If tourism is a factor, or countries have particular periods they are interested in, this may also affect where archaeologists stop digging at a site and preserve what is there for display, rather than carrying on digging. Again, being the first and biggest on a site makes it more likely that something will be kept.
Feel free to send suggestions or test cases!
Puranānūru song 369 (pp. 201-211).
I will be on holiday from 21st August to 2nd September. I’ve stacked a couple of what I hope are really fun newsletters continuing to dig into these early Tamil poems, but I won’t be able to respond to any comments or questions until I get back.