Еще несколько цитат. "Все совпадения случайны".
Robin Archer. Chariotry to cavalry: Developments in the early first millennium // New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare. 2010
Greenhalgh claims this as evidence that Mycenaean charioteers fought with long spears or lances in the same manner as medieval cavalry. Even the interpretation of the text here is tenuous (“when a man from his own car” may simply refer to a man that has just stepped down from his chariot), and Littauer and Crouwel have demonstrated in some detail that it would have been simply impossible for a charioteer to fight with a spear whilst in motion.
...
The same can be said for the Hittites and the fact that knowledge of Hittite chariotry is based on Egyptian representations of the battle of Kadesh makes this interpretation even more suspect. Although pictorial representations of battles can be very useful historical sources, they must be regarded as sceptically as any other kind of primary source material and cannot simply be taken at face value. The Egyptian kings that commissioned these depictions had no interest in displaying objective history or providing accurate information for future scholars on their monuments. Their inscriptions and reliefs were pure propaganda pieces, intended to demonstrate the king’s splendour and the invincibility of Egypt. The enemy forces were almost always depicted as bearing significantly inferior arms and armour, assuming they were shown with equipment of any description (it was not uncommon for enemy forces to be shown naked). The intention was not to demonstrate the king’s skills as a warrior by showing how he overcame a formidable opponent, but to demonstrate Egypt’s position as the sole beacon of order in the world by depicting foreign forces as a disordered, ineffectual rabble that could never hope to successfully challenge Egyptian order and might, and whom the king could slaughter without difficulty whenever they appeared, regardless of their numbers (which had to be prodigious to even be worthy of his attention). It is, therefore, no surprise that the Hittite chariots were depicted without bows - if they had bows, they would have actually appeared as a disciplined and effective force, which was not the intention of the exercise.
Christopher Tuplin. All the King's Horse: In Search of Achaemenid Persian Cavalry // New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare. 2010
But evasions of this sort are not so readily available where headgear and cuirasses are concerned. We cannot, for example, reduce the problem by supposing that cuirasses were regularly worn under the tunic as by Masistius, because the solid cuirass with neck-guard presented by the iconographic evidence - and also attested there for infantrymen - is entirely missing from classical texts, and cannot even persuasively be discovered in the Gadal-Iama inventory.
Guy Halsall. Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West. 450-900. 2003
Thus none of the instances discussed above really demonstrates that the English always fought on foot; the laconic nature of almost all battle accounts means that the absence of many statements about cavalry (though, as we shall see, there are some) is hardly significant. In some of the cases just discussed the sources may be read in a different way and every battle had special circumstances which favoured dismounted combat. Given the scarcity of evidence, one might mischievously suggest that the Anglo-Saxons’ defeat in every battle where they are specified to have fought on foot argues that they were better fighting mounted!
...
Only the handing down from generation to generation of the received idea, indeed the construct, that Anglo-Saxon warriors never fought on horseback, has led to this substantial body of evidence being perversely explained away as evidence of ‘mounted infantry’, whereas the same sorts of data on the Continent are read simply as evidence of mounted combat. The weight of the evidence is overwhelming. This should not be taken as an argument that Anglo-Saxon warriors always fought on horseback; for one thing, there are plenty of manuscript illuminations showing Anglo-Saxons fighting on foot.
Mark Edward Lewis. China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. 2009
Empress Wu had begun to dominate the court by the mid-650s, and from the time of her husband’s death in 683 until her deposition in 705 she reigned as the empress dowager and empress of her own dynasty. Despite the length and importance of this period, we have little reliable or useful documentation about her activities, apart from a few inscriptions and a handful of Buddhist texts. This deficiency stems from the fact that Wu Zhao was a woman. All the records of the period were composed and edited by men who were not only her political enemies but who regarded her entire career as a perversion of nature. Even modern historians, fully aware of the unreliability of the documentary record, still cannot escape this polemical web of enmity. The venerable Cambridge History of China, after pointing out the bias of the record, accepts unchallenged Wu’s supposed murder of her own child in a plot to supplant a rival, her mutilation of the people she supposedly executed (already a cliché about female rulers in her own day), her sexual liaisons with leading supporters (another hoary cliché), her superstitious nature and manipulation by necromantic frauds (a tendency conventionally attributed to all women), and many other such slanders.
While it cannot be demonstrated that some of these events did not happen (how could one prove a negative?), historians have no evidence that should lead them to trust any of these accounts in the slightest. Unfortunately, this means that six decades of events at the Tang court are virtually a blank slate. The one thing the records do demonstrate is the extraordinary level of animosity aimed at Empress Wu. That she held the reins of power as long as she did speaks highly of her intelligence and resolve, and suggests that whatever savage acts she may have committed were likely necessary to survive in a world of enemies who would stop at nothing.
Заметка " Цитата о реконструкции битв" из жж уважаемого А.В. Томсинова.
Greenhalgh claims this as evidence that Mycenaean charioteers fought with long spears or lances in the same manner as medieval cavalry. Even the interpretation of the text here is tenuous (“when a man from his own car” may simply refer to a man that has just stepped down from his chariot), and Littauer and Crouwel have demonstrated in some detail that it would have been simply impossible for a charioteer to fight with a spear whilst in motion.
...
The same can be said for the Hittites and the fact that knowledge of Hittite chariotry is based on Egyptian representations of the battle of Kadesh makes this interpretation even more suspect. Although pictorial representations of battles can be very useful historical sources, they must be regarded as sceptically as any other kind of primary source material and cannot simply be taken at face value. The Egyptian kings that commissioned these depictions had no interest in displaying objective history or providing accurate information for future scholars on their monuments. Their inscriptions and reliefs were pure propaganda pieces, intended to demonstrate the king’s splendour and the invincibility of Egypt. The enemy forces were almost always depicted as bearing significantly inferior arms and armour, assuming they were shown with equipment of any description (it was not uncommon for enemy forces to be shown naked). The intention was not to demonstrate the king’s skills as a warrior by showing how he overcame a formidable opponent, but to demonstrate Egypt’s position as the sole beacon of order in the world by depicting foreign forces as a disordered, ineffectual rabble that could never hope to successfully challenge Egyptian order and might, and whom the king could slaughter without difficulty whenever they appeared, regardless of their numbers (which had to be prodigious to even be worthy of his attention). It is, therefore, no surprise that the Hittite chariots were depicted without bows - if they had bows, they would have actually appeared as a disciplined and effective force, which was not the intention of the exercise.
Christopher Tuplin. All the King's Horse: In Search of Achaemenid Persian Cavalry // New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare. 2010
But evasions of this sort are not so readily available where headgear and cuirasses are concerned. We cannot, for example, reduce the problem by supposing that cuirasses were regularly worn under the tunic as by Masistius, because the solid cuirass with neck-guard presented by the iconographic evidence - and also attested there for infantrymen - is entirely missing from classical texts, and cannot even persuasively be discovered in the Gadal-Iama inventory.
Guy Halsall. Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West. 450-900. 2003
Thus none of the instances discussed above really demonstrates that the English always fought on foot; the laconic nature of almost all battle accounts means that the absence of many statements about cavalry (though, as we shall see, there are some) is hardly significant. In some of the cases just discussed the sources may be read in a different way and every battle had special circumstances which favoured dismounted combat. Given the scarcity of evidence, one might mischievously suggest that the Anglo-Saxons’ defeat in every battle where they are specified to have fought on foot argues that they were better fighting mounted!
...
Only the handing down from generation to generation of the received idea, indeed the construct, that Anglo-Saxon warriors never fought on horseback, has led to this substantial body of evidence being perversely explained away as evidence of ‘mounted infantry’, whereas the same sorts of data on the Continent are read simply as evidence of mounted combat. The weight of the evidence is overwhelming. This should not be taken as an argument that Anglo-Saxon warriors always fought on horseback; for one thing, there are plenty of manuscript illuminations showing Anglo-Saxons fighting on foot.
Mark Edward Lewis. China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. 2009
Empress Wu had begun to dominate the court by the mid-650s, and from the time of her husband’s death in 683 until her deposition in 705 she reigned as the empress dowager and empress of her own dynasty. Despite the length and importance of this period, we have little reliable or useful documentation about her activities, apart from a few inscriptions and a handful of Buddhist texts. This deficiency stems from the fact that Wu Zhao was a woman. All the records of the period were composed and edited by men who were not only her political enemies but who regarded her entire career as a perversion of nature. Even modern historians, fully aware of the unreliability of the documentary record, still cannot escape this polemical web of enmity. The venerable Cambridge History of China, after pointing out the bias of the record, accepts unchallenged Wu’s supposed murder of her own child in a plot to supplant a rival, her mutilation of the people she supposedly executed (already a cliché about female rulers in her own day), her sexual liaisons with leading supporters (another hoary cliché), her superstitious nature and manipulation by necromantic frauds (a tendency conventionally attributed to all women), and many other such slanders.
While it cannot be demonstrated that some of these events did not happen (how could one prove a negative?), historians have no evidence that should lead them to trust any of these accounts in the slightest. Unfortunately, this means that six decades of events at the Tang court are virtually a blank slate. The one thing the records do demonstrate is the extraordinary level of animosity aimed at Empress Wu. That she held the reins of power as long as she did speaks highly of her intelligence and resolve, and suggests that whatever savage acts she may have committed were likely necessary to survive in a world of enemies who would stop at nothing.
Заметка " Цитата о реконструкции битв" из жж уважаемого А.В. Томсинова.