The Imperial

Utter nonsense. The Mauryans and the Seleucids never waged war accept for a conflict b/w Seleucid Nikator vs Chandragupta, in which the Mauryans won.

Also, the Mauryan controlled a huge empire, controlled one-third of the world's population, had a standing army of 7,00,000 fighting men and had the biggest economy of their time. None of these were accomplished by the Ptolemies or the Seleucids.

sculptingman

I can't agree that the Han was an Empire.
After Chin, who unified China, standardized written languages... it is hard to consider any succeeding dynasty an "empire" anymore that we generally consider Egypt an "empire".

China became one nation and a unified cultural people.
And there were no further conquests.


Rome is certainly the greatest empire of ancient times in terms of ruling over subject peoples.

If that is not the criteria, then one has to look to Egypt as the longest continuous ethnic/political entity of ancient times.

Frank81

You're wrong sculptingma, Han China conquered vast territories in Central Asia which Qin couldn't, also they expanded in the south to what today is Vietnam and other regions. Both, Central Asia and Southern China were full of different ethnic peoples than Han Chinese, even today.

Guaporense

It's not nonsense. The Seleucid Empire expanded into India around 200 BC, though we don't know the details we know that they recovered the provinces lost we know they did recover these lands.

Which implies that they managed to wrestle them from the Mauryans.

Biggest economy? One third of the world's population? 700,000 men under arms? I am sorry, but just saying stuff doesn't make it true. We lack evidence for any one of your assertions.

We don't know the population of the Mauryan Empire. Estimates put's the population of India around 250 BCE at 30 million. I would guess that's a good estimate for the population of the Mauryan Empire at it's peak, nearly the same peak population of the Seleucid Empire, 25 million.

On the other hand we know that the Ptolemies had 200,000 men under arms, the world's largest and greatest city, Alexandria, a rapidly urbanizing culture in Egypt which was becoming highly integrated with the rest of the ancient world. The Ptolemies and the Seleucids also had the cutting edge in science and technology.

Ptolemaic Egypt also reached about the same rate of urbanization as India did in in the last decade, but they reached it over 2,000 years ago (25%)! The Mauryan empire certainly didn't achieve this rate of urbanization, considering that their capital had a population around 200,000, their total urban population would have been around 5%, or 1.5 million. As result, while the Mauryan empire had a much larger total population than Ptolemaic egypt the total urban population of Egypt was about the same as India's in the late hellenistic period.

For instance, the largest ship ever build before the 19th century was Ptolemaic (for which we have actual citation of size). The Hellenistic states also achieved the optimal catapult designs and deployed impressive technological contraceptions:



The Ptolemies and the Seleucids were very powerful ancient empires and should not be underestimated by any means. They were defeated and conquered yes, but by Rome, the greatest and most powerful empire in the history of the world (in relative terms).

Guaporense

I would also include Carthage as one of the most powerful ancient empires. After all, it was Carthage that almost defeated Rome. And the Empire of Carthage also was vast: covering a territory from Portugal to modern Lybia, it was over 2,000 km in extension.

Carthage was able to field a fleet of 350 quinqueremes in a battle of the First Punic War, with a total crew of 150,000 men. In total the battle involved up to 300,000 men and was the largest naval battle in human history in terms of number of personnel engaged. In total the first punic war involved the destruction of 1,200 quinquereme, and each quinquereme had a crew of 400, hence it was actually the largest naval war in history until modern times.

Roman quinquereme:


Considering the duration of the wars and the size of the armies engaged in the battles, Carthage mobilized a total of perhaps 1 million personnel for each of the two punic wars. Well documented wars of this scale are unheard of until the Napoleonic wars, when France mobilized a total of 3 million men for their bid for world domination.

mingming

The Battle of Lake Poyang holds that honor with the Han fielding a whooping 650,000 men going against Zhu Yuanzhang's 200,000 men.

Hell, even Cracked.com acknowledges it as the biggest sea battle in history.

The 6 Most Gigantic Everything in the History of War | Cracked.com

Check out number 2.

Guaporense

I knew that somebody would come up with those mythological tales. Cracked.com is not the most authoritative source, to say the least.

That was a lake battle and the reliability of these numbers is highly questionable. Remember Herodotus and the 300 spartans versus 3 million Persians? Also, wikipedia described 650,000 men in 100 ships, that's 6,500 men per ship. Clearly, that's nonsense, pre-20th century ships didn't have crews over 1,000.

The Battle of Cape Ecnomus has better quality sources, since Polybius described the battle in detail and the number of ships involved is also consistent with the number of ships fielded during the war and which other battles. If you want I can provide you the direct citation from Polybius of the numbers of the First Punic War.

Guaporense

Also, I would suggest for people to check out this document, written by an Stanford professor, instead of the simple internet nerds like, about just this subject:

http://ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf

Read the part on "war-making capacity". Some quotes:

He also made graphs:




Which shows that Rome's military power was only surpassed in the 15-16th centuries. European military power then increased at an explosive pace during the early modern period thanks to the great development of firearms. So, according to this research, the most powerful pre-modern state was Rome from Augustus to Trajan, as I suspected.

mingming

Five things:

1. What makes European sources of "better quality" compared to Chinese sources? Because Europeans (and Americans) say their sources are better? You might as well step up your rhetoric and just say Europeans are better than the Chinese.

2. While it's true there are no clear estimates on just how many soldiers were involved in that battle, every single account puts it at a huge number. The majority of those accounts put the Han navy at 650,000. Keep in mind that these numbers come from academics who studied traditional sources. They are not made up "mythologies" that Euro-centric people tend to believe.

3. A lake is still water. A naval battle is defined to be a battle fought using boats, ships, or other waterborne vessels. As long as it's fought on water, it's a naval battle. And Lake Poyang is the largest freshwater lake in China.

4. Cracked.com is not the best place but they still quote sources and back up their claims. Wikipedia is a even worse place to go. I can go on Wikipedia right now and change that "100 ships" to "1,000 ships". But if you're going to quote Wikipedia, at least quote it correctly. Wikipedia clear states over 100 ships. That could be any number from 101 to infinity.

5. It's not remotely impossible for the Chinese to field that number of troops. The Sui Dynasty sent 518,000 south to crush the Chen Dynasty. During the Sui's final years, so many people turned to banditry that rebels were reported to be in the millions. Starvation and oppression are the two main factors that drive people to do such things. When you have a huge peasant population that suffers under oppressive rule with little to no food, you will end up with huge numbers of rebels. That was what was happening during the Yuan's final years.

HackneyedScribe

Ian Morris is hardly the most qualified in Eastern History, but focuses on Western History. That's probably why he missed out on a lot of sources in that paper when concerning Chinese history, which is pretty lacking. Much of it has to do with personal gut feeling about the situation rather than hard data. For example, he missed some government records over the Han dynasty when he was trying to calculate calories per capita, and laments about the lack of output for the average farmer when in fact the Han government actually recorded it, 2.4 - 3 hu per mu (this is very important as the officials are talking specifically about the average farmer, so this is the median output, not the mean) with almost 14 mu per capita(not so important as it's the mean average, not the median. The rich always owns a disproportionate amount of land in all sedentary societies), using Eastern Han scales of measurement. Of course, I doubt they would use the entire available land for food production and none for cash crops, as the net food surplus would be tremendous. Only cartoon characters could consume ~2 liters of millet per capita per day, while even with these sources we are forgetting the importance of land distribution. The median is much more important than the mean, and finding the mean already results in guesstimates. Anyways, Ian himself admits that much of his data was just speculation and should be adjusted accordingly. Many times he just tossed a random number around, such as the “war-making capacity” index. There are no equations or variables to come up with that number, he just chose it. There are also plenty of historians who would argue the exact opposite of what he says in certain cases, as much of historical estimates is just guesswork. Some guesswork, however, is better than others, but still guesswork nonetheless. Having graphs with data points that are really just gut feeling guesses really doesn't make it any more accurate.

As for the battle of Lake Poyang, I have no doubt that the number of 650,000 is more akin to Chen Youliang's entire army rather than the amount of soldiers he has in this particular battle (It was recorded that he had 150 "tower ships", not 100 ships as according to wiki. That's equivalent to saying the United states has around a dozen aircraft carriers. By no means is it representative of the entire navy). Yet on the other hand I find it unreasonable to discount it based on Herodotus, who has no relevance to the Ming shih. After all, sending 3 million people to a foreign land out of a population of 20 million is hardly the same as sending .85 million people to the next door out of a recorded population of 60 million (but most likely ~80 million). One historian's inaccuracy should not be used to discredit another historian, unless if the latter based his work on the former. In this case they do not. I say Chen's army was exaggerated as an army of over half a million people simply isn't cost effective. With an army that large, it's probably much more preferable to split it into two or three armies. I would argue that by the Han dynasty navies of 200 thousand men were a very real possibility (Red Cliffs). Anything before that is murky. We know that the Warring States had a sizable navy, but we have no numbers. Most ships of the Warring States are "wing" ships, separated into three sizes. The largest size has a length/width that is surprisingly similar to the Greek bireme. By the Han Dynasty navies became centered around giant tower ships flanked by "wing" ships. This type of naval organization was probably the core concept in Chinese history until the Ming dynasty, in which cannon platforms and blue water navies probably made the tower ship obsolete.