Meshwesh minor errors and typos

[JonathanJ]

The start and end dates for Warring States Chinese do not match the "restrictions" dates.

[Andreas Johansson]

Speaking of the Warring States, there seems to be a major gap in coverage of the 3rd century - there's a list for Qin and one for Zhao or Chu, but seemingly none for the other states (principally Han, Wei, Yan, and Qi, but some minor states also survived well beyond 307 BC).

ETA: When I look at it again, it seems that both issues are caused by a simple typo: the end date for the main Warring States list should be 207 or so rather than 307 BC, and so it covers the "other" states right until the end of the period, or rather until their individual conquests by Qin.

Speaking of which, the last of the "other" states, Qi, was finally conquered in 221, so maybe the list should end then; unless the idea is that it also covers the various attempts to restore defunct states during the Qin-Han transition, in which case it should end in about 202 with China reunified by Han.

[David Kuijt]

Speaking of the Warring States, there seems to be a major gap in coverage of the 3rd century - there's a list for Qin and one for Zhao or Chu, but seemingly none for the other states (principally Han, Wei, Yan, and Qi, but some minor states also survived well beyond 307 BC).

ETA: When I look at it again, it seems that both issues are caused by a simple typo: the end date for the main Warring States list should be 207 or so rather than 307 BC, and so it covers the "other" states right until the end of the period, or rather until their individual conquests by Qin.

Speaking of which, the last of the "other" states, Qi, was finally conquered in 221, so maybe the list should end then; unless the idea is that it also covers the various attempts to restore defunct states during the Qin-Han transition, in which case it should end in about 202 with China reunified by Han.

Looking at it now, it's two separate minor errors.

The first is that during a list-merge phase the "Early Warring States Zhao and Chu" got combined with the "Early Warring States Other" and the end date of the first (which is the start date of the Later Warring States Zhao and Chu) was erroneously chosen as the end date for the combination. Should be easy enough to fix once I find and check the original dates and reinsert them in the data files.

The second is that the database seems to have a bit of trouble showing more than one age band. In this case the Later Warring States Zhao and Chu run from 306 BC to 221 BC, then pause for 12 years, then run again from 209 BC to 202 BC with the Han reunification. That data is in the data files correctly, so there seems to be some issue with how it is imported or how it is shown after import.

[Andreas Johansson]

The "Early Abassid" list should be "Early Abbasid".

[David Kuijt]

The "Early Abassid" list should be "Early Abbasid".

Database already shows Abbasid -- I must have fixed that last month some time, after the last upload but far enough ago that I do not recall doing so. It should show up the next time an upload happens (maybe before Friday, depending upon other factors).

[JonathanJ]

The Maccabean Jewish Trained Army lists general as being Knights, raiders or light infantry. There are no light infantry.

[David Kuijt]

The Maccabean Jewish Trained Army lists general as being Knights, raiders or light infantry. There are no light infantry.

That will be resolved once allies appear -- the Maccabees have an internal ally from 152 BC to 104 BC (the whole period of the Trained Army) that is a wad of Light Foot or Rabble and a few Guerrilla bowmen (Bow Levy). Until the allies are visible, that doesn't make much sense.

[Andreas Johansson]

Rus and Early Russian list one another as enemies - is that as should be? Presumably all principalities change over simultaneously?

[David Kuijt]

Rus and Early Russian list one another as enemies - is that as should be? Presumably all principalities change over simultaneously?

I dunno -- the whole issue of how army list transitions (the change from one list to another list within a single culture not having been conquered by external forces) happen is fraught with assumptions, generalizations, and hand-waving. In some very few cases we have fairly good data -- Constantine and the Middle/Late Imperial Roman transition, for example. Most of the time everyone is just making s**t up.

In this case we're talking about half a dozen distinct polities hundreds and even thousands of miles apart switching from "we're all foot, we move around on rivers, and our mounted suck" to "we've got lots of trained horsey guys and some Polk foot that aren't bad either". Not a transition that happened in 35 seconds, of course. So the underlying question is this:

Which is better:

• Assume that every principality switched over magically at a given instant from one model to the other
• Don't assume the above, which means allow the Rus to fight the Early Russian, even though we don't have any historical record of inter-principality conflict at a moment when one principality had more horses and fought that way and another was still fighting in the more conservative foot-dominated mode.

Both choices are poor (can be criticized by reasonable people as being speculative and unhistorical), but we have to choose one or the other. It's a binary choice -- either there is an enemy link between Rus and Early Russian, or there is not.

In this case we chose to pretend that the transition wasn't perfectly smooth; that nobody said "wait, it's 1054 -- horses were just invented, yay!" and everyone immediately mounted up. But no, we don't have any particular evidence that some principalities made the transition faster than others.

You might ask if we've made the same choice with other cultures (i.e., are we consistent?). Probably not always so. In this case the fact that the army list represented a handful of different (sometimes warring) principalities spread over a huge chunk of geography lent weight to the supposition that they couldn't all have made the transition simultaneously, and that horse-rearing and horse-warfare-training couldn't have spread instantaneously over that whole massive region, so we decided to come down in favor of allowing Rus v. Early Russian as an enemy link (a reasonable historical matchup). We might not have made that choice in every case, with every other culture making that transition. We're happy to listen to contrasting opinions on these matters as well, if anyone thinks the right choice is different from what we went with on a given matchup (and has cogent arguments to back their opinion, of course).

[Andreas Johansson]

I guess the unspoken assumption between my question was that in actuality the change was gradual and therefore the end result should never face the original. This implies of course that there should be transitional lists: but in the absence of such actually being documented they can be simplified way at little cost.

Of course, I do not actually know anything about how the change took place.