By John Patrick Hewson
The battle of Megiddo is the earliest battle of which there is some historical record, although the record is fragmented and sketchy.
And, although no complete record of the tactics exists, we do have some information at our disposal. James Henry Breasted, in his
“Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents” published in Chicago in 1906, gives a translation of an inscription from the Amen
temple at Karnak which gives some details of the battle. A slightly different translation is given by J. B. Pritchard in
“Ancient Near Eastern Texts” published in 1969. In addition, a tentative map of the battlefield is given in “Carta’s Atlas of the
Bible” by Yohanan Aharoni, published in Jerusalem in 1964.
By John Patrick Hewson
For close to 500 years the Byzantine Empire conducted relations, sometimes as allies,
sometimes at war, with the Bulgars. The Bulgars were originally a Turkic people
who, like other Central Asian peoples, had a reputation as military horsemen, and
they had developed a strong political organization based on the Khan as leader.
The Khans came from the aristocratic class of Boyars, and were augmented by senior
military commanders called Tarkhans. In the second century, the Bulgars migrated
to an area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and sometime between 351 and
377, a group of them crossed the Caucasus to settle in Armenia.
By Gordon Davis
Between 343 BC and 290 BC the Romans and Samnites engaged in a series of fierce wars throughout central Italy. The two peoples, along with the Celts of the Po Valley to the north, were ascendant powers at this time, eclipsing older power blocks such as Hellas Megale and the Etruscan city-states. The fighting of 327 – 321 BC between Rome and Samnium was the opening phase of the second war between these two states and it was far more intense in both the breadth of territory covered and the number of battles fought than the first war of 343 – 341 BC. The present article attempts to provide a detailed military history of the fighting of this seven-year period.
By Gordon Davis
Livy indicates that the consuls eventually decided to try to break out through either of the two forks, instead of moving deeper into the hill-country of central Samnium to the east. The legions issued from the camp, formed up and advanced their standards against the Samnite fortifications. In undoubtedly some hard and desperate fighting, they were nowhere successful. Each assault, however determined and ferocious, was bloodily repulsed. Fighting through a fortified defile is an incredibly difficult endeavour, as the Persians had found out at Thermopylae in 480 BC.