Duke Leto

OK, now I'm sure you're not even reading these things.

The treasury under discussion in the above quote was Tiberius' treasury in Rome for the entire Roman Empire, not whatever was in the Temple Vaults. (Measured in talents of silver and gold bars, if I recall correctly, NOT coinage.)

The point of the example was to question Tacitus' assertion that Tiberius left Caligula 5 billion sestertii in the Imperial treasury and that Caligula spent it in around 18 months, and by implication that his 600,000 people in Jerusalem is also highly suspect.

I just flat out do not get your hostility. Mods as my witness relative to my temper I've borne your insults patiently without bothering to respond in kind. From the beginning I've not been attacking you, I've been attacking a number in a book you like. I've said as much a couple of times.

I've actually admitted it when my numbers turned out to be incorrect, you NEVER have, even when caught out outrageously on the size of Titus' army.

And the insults to my intelligence and qualifications? I was a star honors program history student in college before I ditched it and went into database design. (Frankly even the database design puts on a pretty good level with respect to logistical questions. Since then I've read dozens, probably not hundreds, of books on military campaigns, population estimates, agricultural and industrial history and several of the classical historians in translation in their entirety. I can probably paraphrase large portions of Herodotus from memory. When I say a 400,000 person festival in 1st Century Jerusalem is pretty god damned unlikely, I'm not totally outside of my area of competency to say so.

What the hell have you got? You've read Sanders and what else? It seems your interest is primarily in Jewish ritual history, and that doesn't have squat to do with logistical analysis. Where's your 400 level thesis?

The level of personal umbrage you're taking that someone would dare criticize a number in Sanders' book, (I haven't called into question anything else about it), is totally out of proportion.

Since I can't help myself, here's another example: Thucydides' Athens.

The area within the walls was roughly 4.5 square miles, much bigger than Herodian Jerusalem. Archaeologists estimate its population at the end of the siege at 120,000-180,000. The area enclosed around the Piraeus was maybe 2-2.5 square miles looking at the wiki image but it does not appear to have been fully utilized. There was also the Long Walls but nobody lived there. Let's say 6 square miles of Athens with a population of 250,000. That's 65 people per square mile, too much by my standards. So the Peloponnesian War starts and the Spartans besiege the city, driving the rural population of Attica, a much more fertile area than Judea and not that different in size, into the walls. Note I said at the end of the siege? The siege lasted 25 years and the rural population didn't regain access to their farms, but since we know what I'm about to tell you about happened, we can assume the city population was a bit more crowded at the start of the war, so let's say an additional 150,000 got in there. That's 104 per acre, 2012 Manhattan crowdedness. (Tacitus siege of Jerusalem requires 1300 per acre.)

Water was apparently never a problem. The Piraeus allowed the city to constantly import food and there was a never a chance of capturing it until the Athenian fleet was finally destroyed at Aegospotami. Sanitation though, got sticky pretty fast. Nothing went wrong the 1st year, the 2nd year the plague hit. We're not sure we can trust Thucydides' number that a third of the city died, but it was so bad that Spartans temporarily lifted the siege for fear of catching the thing.

So, for the siege of Jerusalem we're looking at something twice as many people cooped up in 1/8th the space of Athens? (A large number of Spartan POWs captured near Pylos caused the Spartans to sue for a temporary peace to ensure their safety. The large number was, ironically, 300, so maybe we ought to take the Athenian population figures with some skepticism too.)

Ancient historians write inflated numbers, even the very reliable ones. Religious authorities seek to magnify the glory and importance of faith. These aren't controversial concepts.

outhouse

sure it is

you admitted to being ignorant about the water, and the sewer, and have tried ever other avenue only embarrassing yourself.

sorry the facts stand

outhouse

[facepalm]


the population of a city ----- has nothing to do with the population of a NATIONAL holiday that was a requirement for all to attend for a week. Who focused on one city to accumulate in.

We know this wasnt the everyday city population, but that of a week long pilgrimage.

outhouse

I have a number of thoughts in sanders I dont agree with. he is not the best of the best in any way shape or form in my book.


I just happen to agree with his findings on this based on my own research.

Iskander

Do you really want to discuss anything with those people????

outhouse

You have a point, :deadhorse:

Duke Leto

Ooops. Well don't I look silly. It was Suetonius who said 2.7 billion in a year. Suetonius is rightly considered a bit less reliable than Tacitus. Even at slightly more than half the number I originally quoted, Suetonius' number is still absurd owing to the area the coins would take up and the fact that would have been the equivalent of 2.7 million unemployed workers he was putting to work out of a population of 60 million.

So it looks like I have to scratch around for another Tacitan number. I thought he gave a number of boats wrecked and soldiers killed in the storm after Weser River, but that isn't the case.

Let's see...

He reports that a Phoenix was seen in Tiberius' reign in Egypt, says it appears every 500 or 1461 years, and gives a list of Pharaohs that had Phoenix appearances which aren't separated by 500 years and one of whom was a composite by Herodotus drawn from extremely confused Egyptian records of Thutmose III and Ramasses II. We don't assume Phoenixes or Pharaoh Sesostris existed on Tacitus' say so, now do we? In fairness Tacitus prefaces the anecdote with the word "dubious" but he also prefaces the 600,000 Jerusalem number with "I have heard it said".

In the Agricola, Tacitus claims his father-in-law killed 10,000 of 30,000 proto-Scots in a single engagement at a loss of something like 360 of his own men. That's pretty much guaranteed to be an exaggeration. Casualty numbers don't work like that, especially since the Scots retreated back into the woods where cavalry wouldn't be able to run them down. Also, the number here is five times larger than the army William Wallace brought with him to Falkirk. Edward I only boasted half the number of men at Falkirk. While neither was the full manpower pool of Scotland or England, the Army James IV was defeated with at Flodden field in the last battle before British unification was stated at 30,000, although 20,000 may be a more reliable number. The Caledonian chieftain Calgacus, of "they have made a desert and called it a peace" fame, can only have been ruler of a fraction of Scotland but is being given credit for fielding an army equal to that of all of Renaissance Scotland. Not possible.

Modern Scotland is about 2/3rds the population of Modern Israel, and something like 1/10th the population of the U.K. The population of Scotland at the time of James IV's death is given by Wiki as about a million. IF things were proportionate, we'd expect the population of the area comprising modern Israel at that time to be 1,500,000. If I recall the figures it was more like 300,000-400,000, which is about what you'd expect given that the climates are both marginal and that Scotland is more than 3 times the size of Israel. I suspect Agricola's Caledonia had FAR less than a million men to compare to the 200,000-300,000 men I've been crediting Josephus' Palestine with though, because advanced agriculture would not have arrived yet.

Similarly Tacitus says that 70-80,000 people were slaughtered by Boudicca in the towns of Colchester, St. Albans and London, although he also says London was evacuated beforehand. What? OK, modern London could have 80,000 slaughtered in the city limits without anyone taking much notice, but Shakespeare's London had 200,000 people tops. (Also VASTLY bigger than Herodian Jerusalem.) The populations of modern Colchester and St. Albans are 180,000 and 80,000. The 30,000 or so soldiers killed at Towton in 1461 wrecked the Lancastrian manpower pool sufficiently that it shut the war down for 8 years until the Yorkists started fighting each other. That argues for it being a pretty non trivial chunk of the military population. 5 or 6 million in England and Wales would make it 0.5% total. As noted above, the population of England in Boudicca's time would have been significantly lower. We're talking two million. Most of that population will have been on farms. Obviously Boudicca will have been attacking the major population centers, but we're talking about her slaughtering 3-4% of the population of the island here! Even 7-8,000 would be straining the limits of credulity, since archaeologists calculate that Roman London could have had no more than 35,000 inhabitants at its height. (It was barely 25 years old when Boudicca burned it.)

Tacitus gives Boudicca's army as having 100,000 combatants. Bullshit. That would be a tenth of all the men in England and she didn't have access to all of England to get her men from. 100,000 is half the number of British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk and probably bigger than any single army that's ever concentrated on British soil since the Norman Conquests (for the purposes of fighting a battle on British soil). Her force need only have been big enough destroy one legion and convince the commander of another to delay engagement. 15-20,000 would have done the job. Five German tribes in closed country were able to take apart Varus' 3 legions, two pretty big British tribes taking down one seems credible.

In conclusion? You can't trust ancient historians' numbers, even if they are Tacitus.

Duke Leto

OK, this one is my fault for inadequate clarity. I was counting on readers to make a logical connection without my explaining it.

The entirety of the rural area surrounding Athens except for a few forts and the town of Plataea was evacuated into the city on a more or less permanent basis at the outset of the war so that after the plague and the military disasters the population of Athens in 404 BCE would pretty much have been what the population of Attica plus Athens was in 431 BCE. That number, from the above calculations, would have been 300,000-400,000. Ancient Attica is about half the size of Modern Israel and is much more fertile. It also contained Athens, which was the capital of a mini-Empire over the Aegean islands, drawing revenue from every city. (Meaning it could afford to grow, although obviously nothing like Rome...)

Duke Leto

My willingness to admit mistakes is not a sign of ignorance.

You've made one glaring one so far that I've highlighted twice and you still will not admit to it. You had a size for Titus' Army of 120,000 men, which I called out as a ridiculous exaggeration. You said you got the number from Carrier's email, which is interesting because there wasn't any such number in there. Carrier quoted 150,000 for the full strength of the 28 legions of the Roman Empire with auxiliaries coming to 275,000ish total. Titus had 4 of them and one of them had been pretty badly beat up at the beginning of the war.

It follows that Titus had 35-40,000 men at Jerusalem. That's basically in line with everything we know about the Roman Army. You were wrong on that. Why can't you own up to it?

The main problem, even allowing for the cistern based water supply having sufficient throughput, is one of total regional Jewish population. You've never refuted my point that no one can come from further North than Galilee in large enough numbers to mean anything, so you're stuck with the area of Modern Israel and some of Jordan to draw your pilgrims from. Within that area maybe half to a third are Jewish. So realistically you need a total population of the area in the department of 1 million to 1.5 million. Modern Israel is 7 million people and it imports 5% of its food even though it has almost the most advanced agricultural technology on Earth! You've been shown that we get as much as 10 times the grain yield per acre and we have the technology to bring far more acres under cultivation than out ancestors from 1000 years ago. You've been shown that the population of many areas has gone up 25 or 50 times since 1 CE. Why should Israel alone have had such a slow growth trajectory?

What's your background to refute my study of agronomics?

Sigh.

:deadhorse: is right.

outhouse

If you have this much lack of comprehension, reading simple things. No wonder you cannot follow known history


Carrier's quote is below.




because I think you need glasses, to help you read ALL the words.


you keep making gross errors




incorrect [facepalm]

all there had to be was 1.6 million jews and have only 25% show up to a NATIONAL event.


or even 800,000 jews and have half of them show up.



either way the evidence is overwhelming the temple was packed full which could hold 400,000 people.



you do know non jews were there as well? [facepalm]



I dont need to refute BS

you have provided no evidence for how far anyone could, or would travel, other then opinion.

so far your opinion has been one of ignorance on the subject


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Temple

A Jew from distant parts of the Roman Empire would arrive by boat at the port of Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv), where he or she would join a caravan for the three day trek to the Holy City (a trip which only takes about an hour by automobile today), and would then find lodgings in one of the many hotels or hostelries


http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holi...estivals.shtml


Historical texts and archeological evidence indicate that in late antiquity, during the Hellenistic and Roman eras, the pilgrimage festivals were a profoundly significant social and religious institution, bringing Jews from all over the ancient world of the Mediterranean to Jerusalem.


http://books.google.com/books?id=YVI...page&q&f=false

the above link has a wealth of information on how the passover effected the economy


if im not mistaken there was more area that could be farm land back then, and less people. you loose.

Can you speak Chinese? because youve had to have dug a hole so deep you can hear them by now. Keep reaching maybe you'll get a handful of rice