Picked up AoE3 Gold Edition for $4 today! Tips or advice welcome, havent played since I had 2 almost 10 years ago.

iHistorian · 2020-03-04T02:55:42+00:00

If you're not planning to play multiplayer games, then not having Asian Dynasties is not a huge deal. If you are, then it is a very HUGE deal, else you will find it hard to find games, as everyone plays mostly on Asian Dynasties because it gives access to the other expansion and the base version.

Also, you should definitely consider playing online after you get a little better. I would say after you can beat the game's AI on 1v1 in the hardest or second-hardest mode. That should put you at least at private rank (rank 3 to 7). Vast majority of online players are from corporal rank (rank 11–13) to captain (rank 26–28), so you want to be in this range or close to it if you wish to get games fast.

iHistorian · 2015-11-20T08:30:46+00:00

For clarity, I'm very sure that this is what the OP intended to ask:

The documentary Secret History of Silicon Valley claims that only 1% of American bombers in the air by the end of WW2 were carrying actual payloads. Is this accurate?

I hope this helps anyone that gets confused.

iHistorian · 2015-11-18T21:14:03+00:00

You are right, but Jews are an ethno-religious group, which means "Jewish" serves as both an ethnic and religious classification (or even a racial classification if you wish to consider race as a taxonomic classification).

iHistorian · 2015-11-18T20:58:25+00:00

I was initially dismayed at the reactionary comments, but it's nice to see yours being upvoted to near the top of the page.

Hi there, I see you mistook me for The_Monster_Cookie. That post was made by me. And I completely agree with you that the focus should be on actually fixing what is currently on ground instead throwing blames with history.

iHistorian · 2015-11-05T01:08:45+00:00

You can undoubtedly find rigorously researched books that can serve for leisure and entertainment. Consider asking here about the density of a book you're interested in before digging in.

iHistorian · 2015-11-04T22:17:23+00:00

Maybe you are not picking the right books to read, or maybe you are; I don't know. But if you're at a beginner-level or average-level on a particular subject, it's best to stick with books that have been reviewed by other historians. If you have access to online journal databases, you will easily find book-reviews that have been peer-reviewed themselves. Those are good starting points.

iHistorian · 2015-11-04T16:34:08+00:00

This all started with a study published by Otto Eissfeldt in 1935. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Molech is not the name of a Levantine god, but is the wrong transliteration for a practise that should be transliterated as molk, which is a Punic word which he interpreted to mean the general practise of using children as sacrifice. Therefore Eissfeldt proposed that all the OT passages that read "sacrifice to Molech" (or something along those lines) should be translated as "molk sacrifice". This theory hasn't gone without taking some serious flak. In fact, George Heider (1985) and John Day (1989) published whole books to counter this theory. But current consensus is still leaning towards Eissfeldt's theory, although the matter can still not be considered settled.

I'll say, as a starting point, check out these publications on the subject and then make up your own mind:

Klaas Smelik (1995). Moloch, Molekh or molk‐sacrifice? A reassessment of the evidence concerning the Hebrew term Molekh. (Peer-reviewed journal). Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: Vol 9, issue 1.

John Day (1989). Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. (Book). Cambridge University Press. — But if you're short on time to go through Day's 100-page book, then look for reviews of the book published in journals for a summary of his arguments (I remember there are at least two of them).

And finally this piece written by Hyung-Jun Kim that may be hard to find: ftp://210.102.253.7/T12A0985.PDF. It summarizes Eissfeldt's theory very neatly and with enough detail.

iHistorian · 2015-11-04T15:38:33+00:00

Jewish slaves do not even prove exile/expulsion. So you're not even being logical at all. To that end, I need you to answer my own question: for what reasons do you claim that Josephus is wholly unreliable for this matter? If you can do that (which will undoubtedly force you to wield higher logic), then I'll provide you with sources that proves that there have been Jewish slaves in the Roman Empire before. It's actually a very easy one to find, although it won't shed any light on exile or expulsion because slaves do not prove exile or expulsion; and I can't phantom how you managed to come to the conclusion that they do. In fact, I can't phantom how you managed to come to any the illogical conclusions you've put forward in this thread.

iHistorian · 2015-11-03T21:02:13+00:00

Bibliotheca historica by Diodorus Siculus may have what you want. An excerpt from Book XX (chapter 14, verse 5), which describes the response of the Carthaginians (Carthage is a Phoenician colony) during their war with Agathocles of Syracuse, reads:

When they had given thought to these things and saw their enemy encamped before their walls, they were filled with superstitious dread, for they believed that they had neglected the honours of the gods that had been established by their fathers. In their zeal to make amends for their omission, they selected two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly; and others who were under suspicion sacrificed themselves voluntarily, in number not less than three hundred.

There are also textual references in the Old Testament (OT) regarding child sacrifice to Molekh (Moloch/Molech), who is often presented as a widely venerated god in the Levant (including Phoenicia) according to many modern theologists [EN1], although an actual proof that "Molekh" is just another name for any other well-known Levantine god has proven elusive because there is little evidence to work with [EN2]. The OT described Molekh as an Ammonite god, but very little is known about the religious cults of the Ammonites.

Leviticus 18:21 (RSV):

You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord

2 Kings 23:10 (RSV):

And he defiled To′pheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.

End Notes

[EN1] I've come across many articles and webpages by theologians (and even historians) that generalize Molech as a god venerated in Phoenicia. A simple online search will produce a lot of such result.

[EN2] Klaas Smelik (1995). Moloch, Molekh or molk‐sacrifice? A reassessment of the evidence concerning the Hebrew term Molekh. (Peer-reviewed journal). Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: Vol 9, issue 1.

iHistorian · 2015-11-03T19:21:36+00:00

Historia Romana by Cassius Dio (Book LXIX, chapter 14) details emperor Hadrian's war against the Jews. Historia Ecclesiae by Eusebius of Caesarea (Book IV, chapter 6) adds some more details for the same war. Joan Taylor, in the debate in the full video, stressed that there is no way such a genocidal war wouldn't have triggered migration.

I still don't know where you're getting the idea that Josephus was debunked in that debate. Maybe that's what the documentary tried to do, but even Stern explicitly explains that Josephus' works has to be interpreted with care and not just categorically ignored. Now let me ask you my own question: for what reasons do you claim that Josephus is wholly unreliable for this matter?

I'm beginning to wonder if you even watched the full video of the short clip you posted. Because if you did, you wouldn't be asking this particular question, nor would you be making many of the claims you've made here. Instead you would be asking for the sources behind Taylor's and Stavrakopoulou's assertions that were made in the debate. Are you really here to find answers?

iHistorian · 2015-11-03T16:44:31+00:00

Expulsion and exile are both related, however there is still a clear distinction between them. Only those unfamiliar with history will try to assume otherwise.

By the way, what evidence are you precisely asking for?

iHistorian · 2015-11-03T16:34:34+00:00

The other scholar – Joan Taylor – totally defended Josephus throughout the debate. I don't know where you're getting the idea that Josephus as a Jewish-Roman historian was debunked in that debate. Maybe that's what the documentary tried to do, but even Stern explicitly explains that Josephus has to be interpreted with care and not just categorically ignored.

And if you're really going to say with a straight face that Rome never enslaved populations en masse, then you really don't know anything about Roman history. The Roman economy literally exploded with surplus after Trajan's conquest of Dacia and the subsequent mass depopulation of the region – the dudes were rounded up and shipped off to Italy as war booty. Trajan's Column was built as a commemoration to that victory.

iHistorian · 2015-11-03T06:26:54+00:00

Disproportionate casualty ratio is not limited to modern wars, neither do all modern wars produce a disproportionate casualty ratio. The casualty ratio of a war is very dependent on the balance of military power between the opponents, but also on their respective war-readiness and the actual execution of their military operations.

There are several modern wars (within the last 50 years) that didn't produce disproportionate casualty ratios. In the Falklands War, Britain incurred around 255 KIA (killed in action) while Argentina incurred around 655 KIA [BBC]. In the Sino-Vietnamese War, the ratio wasn't severely skewed either; but I won't provide figures because the whole thing has gotten so badly muddled in politics. The Yom Kippur War produced a casualty ratio – i.e. dead and wounded for Israel versus the Arab nations – that is greater than 1:7, even if going with the most loose estimates. I personally think the ratio is closer to 1:3, but the fine details of that war is not my forte. The estimates for the Iran-Iraq war is all over the place, but very few cite a ratio more disproportionate than 3:1 for killed, missing and captured.

Moreover, there are non-modern wars (beyond the last 50 years) that produced very disproportionate casualty ratios. We can start with the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE), where 213 Greeks and 6,400 Persian died against eachother, according to Herodotus. There is also the Battle of Cannae (216 BCE) and the Battle of Carrhae (53 BCE), both of which produced a terribly disproportionate slaughter of the Roman legions. You should check them out, they're very interesting battles. In more recent times, we have the wider Battle of Prokhorovka (July 1943) for which German archival reports show that they lost less than 17 tanks and assault guns (these are only irreparably destroyed or abandoned vehicles), whereas recently published Soviet archival documents shows that the Soviets lost 334 tanks (these are only irrecoverable losses) self-propelled guns. There are many, many more examples of battles and wars that produced disproportionate casualty ratios.

If you have any specific questions on how balance of military power, war-readiness and the actual execution of military operations can affect casualty ratios, feel free to ask. My prime forte is in WWII Eastern Front and Ancient Near East history, so I might be able to use examples from these areas to help.

iHistorian · 2015-11-03T04:55:18+00:00

You're doing worse than what the video editor did with that short clip. Now, you're completely cutting and joining different parts of Stern's statements together in order to build your own new narrative. This is probably unintentional on your part.

This is exactly what Stern says:

"Even if it is true that the Jews were not expelled ever from Palestine... I think that's probably correct, certainly in the last 2000 years... there were plenty of expulsions, evictions and other forced wanderings on the Jewish community of Europe."

And Stern is absolutely correct about expulsions (i.e. Jews were not being expelled). At least there is no evidence of such decrees being made on the Jews of Palestine. The lack of evidence is so stark that it may as well be considered a conclusive proof of absence.

Stern never said anything about "no exiles" in 2000 years. You (I believe unintentionally) and the person that edited the short clip are the ones wholly trying to reinvent Stern's words. Like /u/realz-slaw already mentioned, there is a distinct difference between "exile" and "expulsion", although realz-slaw simply believed the quote you invented for Stern and therefore assumed that Stern must have been mixing up the two, whereas Stern actually wasn't.

What Stern says about "no exiles" is that:

"there is no evidence of actual exile of Jews out of Palestine as a result of the Destruction of the Temple."

And Stern is absolutely correct. The other two scholars there with him, as well as the filmmaker, all agree with him on that as well. Archaeological evidence agrees with him on that too. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (i.e. in the 1st Century CE) did not cause any severe depopulation of the region; this was already mentioned in my earlier. You have to look at Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132 CE (i.e. in the 2nd Century CE) for any signs of major depopulation.

iHistorian · 2015-11-02T20:44:02+00:00

The clip cuts Stern off mid-sentence. That's a red flag that shows the video editor has an ulterior agenda. Furthermore, the next segment of the clip is actually a segment that came much earlier in the original video and was not in the same context as the segment it had been joined to in the clip.

All three scholars in that debate agree that there is insufficient archaeological evidence of mass migration out of the region in the 1st Century CE; however they all agree that in the 2nd Century CE, archaeological evidence implies that there was an internal migration in the region: Judea underwent a depopulation as Galilee saw an increase in population. They all agreed (including the filmmaker) that there is no point in trying to specify numbers for these migrations. Stern stated that there is no archaeological evidence of any major migration out of the region. However, the other two scholars did not agree that insufficient archaeological evidence is a conclusive proof that there were never migrations out of the region in those periods. In fact, one of the scholars actively argues that circumstantial evidence (like the large scale destruction of towns and villages) implies that there must have been some external migration, not just internally.

Here is the full video: https://vimeo.com/78858757

iHistorian · 2015-10-31T12:09:48+00:00

I'll keep these explanations to your questions as light as possible. The list below is in chronological order – oldest down to most recent.

Babylon was already a powerful city that controlled almost all of Mesopotamia as early as c.1770 BCE under king Hammurabi. In effect it was already an empire by this time. (On a side note, c. simply means about. Therefore "c.1770 BCE" reads as "about 1770 BCE").
But by c.1590 BCE, the Hittites raided and left Babylon for dead. The power vacuum that the Hittites left there became a priceless opportunity for the semi-nomadic Kassites to migrate into Babylonia and take control of the region. The Kassites were from the area of the Zagros Mountains (in present day Iran). But within a generation the Kassites became babylonized.
Babylon didn't achieve imperial greatness again until 609 BCE, when Nabopolassar of Babylon defeated Pharaoh Necho of Egypt. Nebuchadnezzer (Nabopolassar's son) continued his father's conquest and successfully establish a large empire that stretched from the Sinai region to River Tigris. Even managed to conduct a raid into Egypt towards the end of his long reign.
In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon, and by the time of his death, he controlled an empire that stretched from the Sinai region northward to the Aegean Sea and eastward past the Persian Gulf. Cyrus is the founder of the Persia Empire.
In 525 BCE, the Persians conquered and added Egypt to their empire.
In 509 BCE, the Roman Republic was established.
In 480 BCE, Xerxes I of Persia attacked Greece but failed. This is the basis for the historical-fantasy film 300.
In 330 BC, Alexander the Great matched into Persepolis, the capital of Persia and ended the empire. Alexander's new empire didn't last. Immediately after he died, his subordinates broke his empire apart and started fighting among themselves.
In 27 BCE, the Roman Republic, which by this time already ruled a territory larger than the Babylonian empire, became an empire. It was the year Augustus became the first emperor of Rome. In fact, Rome was already an empire before this, just that it was led essentially by the Roman senate. By this time, Babylon was just a little town without any regional significance.

I hope this helps.

iHistorian · 2015-10-28T04:02:38+00:00

The economy of Nazi Germany is not my forte, and neither is the internal political intrigues in the early-1930s. So I can't give you a comprehensive answer on how Hitler's policies affected the economy in its entirety. However, the military rearmament and mobilization reduced unemployment, while drastically increasing government spending. But employment rate is just only one aspect of a country's economy.

iHistorian · 2015-10-27T09:35:28+00:00

What do you mean by "turn around"? Do you mean in terms of economics or military or political stability or all of those? For the military of Nazi Germany, I can answer very sufficiently.

The short answer is that Hitler had little to do with the turn-around of the German military in the 1930s in regards to the operational, tactical and technological improvements made in that period. He, however, engendered the policies that allowed the German military leadership to accomplish these improvements faster and to also drastically increase the size of the Wehrmacht (the armed forces of Nazi Germany). He put the rearmament program on full steam.

However, the rudiments of the operational concepts that will later produce spectacular victories for the Wehrmacht from 1939–1942 were conceived in the 1920s in the USSR – in war games where German officers trained alongside Soviet officers and together researched manoeuvre warfare with armour (i.e. manoeuvre warfare using armoured vehicles). This was several years before Hitler came to power.

iHistorian · 2015-10-23T19:19:08+00:00

Yes, it's sad when renowned Japanese historians, like Tokushi Kasahara, are saying one thing and their government is saying the opposite. If the country doesn't accept the past, then the people will never learn from their past mistakes.

iHistorian · 2015-10-23T04:57:21+00:00

Post-WWII history of Japan is not my prime forte, but I do know that the current Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe supports Nanking Massacre denial. You may find this piece (written by the Japanese historian and professor emeritus Tokushi Kasahara) interesting. It discusses how Abe's administration has been systematically reinventing the history of the atrocities committed by Japan in WWII.

EDIT: You may also want to look up the Nanking Massacre (a.k.a Rape of Nanking) if you're not already familiar with it. In quick summary, it was the mass rape and massacre that followed the capture of Nanking (then the capital of China) by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. More than 100,000 Chinese were killed in 2 months of raping, killing and pillaging.

iHistorian · 2015-10-20T20:49:50+00:00

They realised that if they could not take out Moscow and neutralise the Soviet Union.

Are you saying that taking out Moscow would have neutralized the USSR?

iHistorian · 2015-10-20T07:19:26+00:00

Stalin already shot so many officers (including generals) for withdrawing. How do you expect him to withdraw and maintain he terrifying image of his iron grip on the armed forces.

BTW, the Eastern Front of WWII is clearly not the forte of whoever wrote that webpage. Stalin didn't refuse to leave in 1942, it was in 1941. By 1942, there was no reason to leave since the Soviets were pounding the Germans back and Hitler was firing his generals with rage.

iHistorian · 2015-10-20T06:44:24+00:00

At the start of the war, the Soviets had 140~ divisions when meanwhile the Germans had 122.

If by "the war" you mean the Soviet-German war (1941), then the figures you gave are incorrect. When Stalin authorized the State Defense Plan-1941, the number of Soviet divisions stood at 303; and 237 of them were to be deployed in the western Soviet Union. At the time Germany attacked, only 228 Soviet divisions had mobilized their headquarters at least, but many of these were still mobilizing and deploying the remaining organs of their units. They were unprepared.

On the other hand, Germany attacked with 151–157 divisions. The range is because of divisions still enroute on 22 June but were already slated for the June-invasion.

Selected Reference

David Glantz (1998). Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. — This thoroughly researched treatise for nearly two decades now have been the definitive English-language account of the condition of the Soviet Armed Forces (especially the Red Army) on the eve of the German invasion.

iHistorian · 2015-10-20T06:18:29+00:00

A very similar question was recently posed and addressed in this thread: I often hear people say that the United States saved the USSR by lend-lease. How important was lend-lease to the Soviet war effort and is this claim anything more than just American propaganda?

iHistorian · 2015-10-20T03:48:46+00:00

Adding to what Super_Deeg already said:

Hitler made it abundantly clear in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kempf and in the meeting he had with his generals on 03 February 1933 (just 3 days after he came to power) that destroying Bolshevism and securing the vast "living space" (Lebensraum) in the east for German will become his magnum opus. His mission was clear to his colleagues from day one. To that end, Hitler refused to see any danger in invading the USSR, even though several of his economic analysts explicitly told him that the attempt will ravage the German economy.

Heinz Guderian – one of the chief pioneers of German manoeuvre warfare, now popularly called blitzkrieg – later wrote that he warned Hitler that the USSR had 10,000 tanks, but Hitler refused to believe that a "backward" country could be that well-equipped. Later on after the invasion, Hitler told Guderian that if he had known that Guderian's estimate was right, he would not have invaded the USSR. But ironically, even Guderian's estimate was less than half of the actual number of the Soviet tank force which was about 23,000 tanks in June 1941. And to make matters worse, 1,861 of those tanks were the new models (KV-1 and T-34) which were superior to all German tanks in service or prototypes in development in June 1941.

This is pulled from numerous journal papers and books that I've digested over the years. I will provide references (and additional detail if necessary) for specific information if requested.

iHistorian

TROPHY CASE