"Romans in China: The Lost Legions of Carrhae" Topic
10 Posts
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Tango01 | 17 Nov 2017 3:17 p.m. PST |
"The Romans in the first century BCE were perhaps the most growing empires around. Though the civil wars of Caesar and Pompey, and Octavian and Marc Antony dominated the scene a lot more happened around them. In 53 BCE a Roman army under Marcus Licinius Crassus, vanquisher of Spartacus and richest man in Rome, attempted to extend Roman power into Parthia, modern day Iran. He got as far as modern day Harran in southeast Turkey before he was met by a Parthian army under Surena. Crassus was a little too cocky and pushed forward, thinking victory would be easy against these inferior barbarians. He was sadly mistaken as the Parthians were an efficient semi-professional army with the most elite horse archers the world had ever seen at the time. In a slaughter known as the battle of Carrhae the Romans lost nearly their entire army and Crassus was killed. The remaining 10,000 or so Roman legionaries were captured…" Main page link Amicalement Armand |
Sobieski | 17 Nov 2017 4:51 p.m. PST |
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goragrad | 17 Nov 2017 6:09 p.m. PST |
There is an error right off the bat in that quoted paragraph. There were approximately 20K casualties and 10K were captured, but 10K of the legionaries escaped and in fact defeated a couple of later Parthian invasions of Roman territory. THe picture of the testudo at the link is also of 1st Century AD legionary re-enactors – at the time of Carrhae the armor would have been mail and the shields were still the larger oval. Aside from that, it was an interesting piece, but I would like to see some better DNA evidence and some particularly Roman artifacts. There was a lot of traffic on the Silk Road through the centuries and a surprising number of Caucasoid Siberians – including many with red hair, blue eyes, and increased statures. Still makes for a good story that could actually have happened. |
KniazSuvorov | 18 Nov 2017 5:27 a.m. PST |
Good god, that article has a discouraging number of typos; I can't be bothered to read a "published" article that clearly hasn't seen any kind of human proofreading. Anyway, I agree with goragrad; it's a good story, but there's no compelling evidence it actually happened. Central Asia is full of Caucasians (that's where the Caucasus are, after all). There's a lot more chance that those taken to Li Jian were not Romans than that they were. The "Romans" in the story are even said to have been unusually tall compared to the Han -- which actual contemporary Romans would not have been. (Roman sources refer to innumerable foreign peoples as "tall" because they themselves were so short.) Likewise, the "fishscale" of shields recorded by the Han could have been the Roman testudo -- or it could just as easily have been something else. The compound bows used by horse archers from the steppe could famously punch through a wooden shield and still retain enough force to embed itself in flesh. It's likely that any shield-toting infantry stationed on the steppe would have developed a system of overlapping shields. |
Cacique Caribe | 18 Nov 2017 7:17 a.m. PST |
Didn't some of those Romans go on to fight some monster horde on the Great Wall of China? Oh, wait. I might be thinking of something else. Ok. I've got it. The Romans meet Chackie Chan. Ha! That sounded like an Abbot and Costello movie title. :) Dan
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Tango01 | 18 Nov 2017 11:12 a.m. PST |
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Dagwood | 19 Nov 2017 2:59 a.m. PST |
Tall red-haired men with blue eyes sounds more like the Gallic cavalry than the Roman legionaries. |
MichaelCollinsHimself | 19 Nov 2017 3:09 a.m. PST |
Mercenaries of the Ancient World by Serge Yalichev pages 247-249 has an account of this…. First proposed by Professor Dubs of Oxford University in 1955, in "A Roman City in Ancient China". |
grahambeyrout | 25 Nov 2017 12:19 p.m. PST |
The idea of Roman prisoners ending up in China was the storyline of "Winter Quarters" by Alfred Duggan published in 1956 |
BigRedBat | 25 Nov 2017 2:52 p.m. PST |
Ah they never got quite as far as China in "Winter Quarters"- just to the Sea of Grass. Great book though! |
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