Panzerkampfwagen and Others

French in Madagascar

 

 

 

 

Queen Ranavalona, III

Birth: Nov. 22, 1861

Death: May 23, 1917

Madagascan Monarch. A native of Amparibe, Madagascar, she ruled Madagasgar from 1883 until 1897. She was the last reigning monarch of her country. She was forced into exile by the French following the First Franco-Malagasy War, and she died in Algeria in 1917.

During the initial rush in the 1600s for Far East markets, France established a temporary settlement at Fort Dauphin on Madagascar, off Africa’s eastern coast. It failed to maintain itself, and for a time France settled for posts on the smaller islands of He de France (Mauritius) and Bourbon. By the 1800s, France had secured treaty rights for protection of French nationals on Madagascar, but the dominant Hova government leaned more toward British than French interests. In 1883, French warships bombarded the towns of Majunga and Tamatave and landed troops, forcing the acceptance of a French protectorate. The locals resisted the French presence, sometimes under the direction of British officers. The resistance provoked another bombardment of Tamatave in 1894, followed by an invasion the following year. French General Jacques Duchesne landed 15,000 men on the island and began a methodical invasion against violent resistance. By 1896 the island was declared a French colony. A military government deposed the queen and continued to fight the revolts, finally suppressing the locals by 1905.

In December 1904, the Russian Baltic Fleet docked at Antsiranana (Diego Suarez) for coal and provisions before sailing on to its doomed encounter with the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Tsushima. Before leaving port the Russian sailors were required to put ashore the animals they had acquired, including monkeys, boa constrictors and one crocodile.

During World War II, Malagasy troops fought in France, Morocco, and Syria. Immediately preceding the fall of France, Germany initiated planning to forcibly deport all of Europe’s Jews to Madagascar in what was known as the Madagascar Plan. Action on the plan was never begun. After France fell to Germany, the Vichy government administered Madagascar. During the Battle of Madagascar, British troops occupied the strategic island in 1942 to preclude its seizure by the Japanese, after which the Free French took over.

In 1947, with French prestige at low ebb, a nationalist uprising was suppressed after several months of bitter fighting with 8,000 persons killed. The French subsequently established reformed institutions in 1956 under the Loi Cadre (Overseas Reform Act), and Madagascar moved peacefully toward independence. The Malagasy Republic was proclaimed on October 14, 1958, as an autonomous state within the French Community. A period of provisional government ended with the adoption of a constitution in 1959 and full independence on June 26, 1960.

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Macedonian Companion (Heteroi)Cavalryman circa 330BC

 

All the Macedonian heavy cavalry - 1,800 men in all - was in the senior regiment of the army, its riders recruited from among the sons of the noblest Macedonian families. The regiment consisted of eight squadrons (ile), of 200 men each; only the royal one had 400, and these were the crème de la crème. A squadron was divided into four smaller units: tetrarchia, each with 49 men. Squadrons were commanded by an ilearch, and were probably accompanied by a trumpeter.

 

The figure of 49 was decided very simply: the tetrarch was at the head of the unit, with three men in the first line behind him, five in the second, seven in the third and so on up to the last, which had 13 men. This triangular formation was introduced into the Macedonian army by Philip II. It had the advantage of making possible sudden turns to the left or right, at some 45 degrees, which gave the unit more manouverability than the line formation used by the Persian cavalry. There was no need for the whole unit to turn; each man just turned half-left or half-right, and the left or right side of the triangle became the new front line of the unit, with seven Companions (heteroi), in the first line and six in the second. The men in the first line were spaced, so those in the second line were not hindered in the charge. This gave the tetrarchia a striking front line of 13 men, and 52 for the whole ile. The four tetrarchias in an ile were arranged like the teeth of a saw, one beside the other, so did not present each other with obstacles to straight or diagonal movement. Several iles made up a cavalry brigade (hipparchy) commanded by a hipparch. The execution of their complex manoeuvres in battle conditions required strong discipline and a high level of training.

 

Each squadron of the Companions was recruited from its county and bore its name, and probably had its distinctive colours too. Equipment and weaponry did not differ much from the Greek, but the helmet was distinctly Macedonian. Later, during campaigns lasting several years, lost equipment was made good in various ways, and the appearance of the men became Hellenic. Alexander himself had his helmet damaged by an axe blow from a Persian rider at the Battle of Granicus, and replaced it with a Boeotian helmet.

In ancient times, lions and leopards lived in Macedonia and are mentioned by Roman sources several centuries later. Macedonians and Thracians covered their horses with the skins of these beasts, as we can still see in stone reliefs, which have been preserved.

Ancient Technology Preserved

by Dick Teresi

 

The narrative of humankind’s seed civilizations is already an old story: replete with technological and social advances, imperialism, conquest; then the wars, the social and technological disintegration, and the sack. Each succeeding empire, while destroying much of the previous society, retained and advanced some of its technologies. The Greeks and Romans took some. The North Africans carried away some to Egypt and its great city, Alexandria. But much of the science and technology packages put together by the peoples of the ancient Middle East remained, tended to and enhanced, first by the Persians, and later the Muslims.

 

In the arid ecology of the Middle East, water was a constant preoccupation. Given an annual rainfall in Iran that averages six to eight inches, for example, it is unsurprising that the supreme large-scale technology of the ancient Middle East was hydrology. Although the pyramids of Egypt were among the biggest construction projects ever undertaken (c. 2000 B.C.), as much labor and ingenuity went into constructing Mesopotamian embankments and canals, built at about the same time for flood control and irrigation.9 Water management remained the most important technology from the ancient civilizations through the brilliant centuries of medieval Islam. Providing people with water, Muhammad is said to have observed, is the act of greatest value.10 (See Frank Herbert’s planet Dune and its Fremen culture.)

 

One of the first irrigation systems in recorded history was in Jericho, where water tanks have been dated to around 6000 B.c.11 One of the first canals on record, the Al-Gharrif waterway from the Tigris, was cut by the governor of the Sumerian city of Lagash before 2500 B.c. (The work of the Sumerians wasn’t all positive. Alfred Crosby points out that they ruined much of the farmland of the Middle East by irrigating their fields with water from their rivers. The water evaporated, leaving salt behind, the “same process,” says Crosby, “going on in our southwest, where, as in Sumeria, there are fields white with salt.” Still, says Crosby, the difference between the Sumerians and the Stone Age people who preceded them is greater than the contrast between the Sumerians and ourselves.)12 The Egyptians had a department of irrigation as early as 2800 B.C. The dam Sadd-al-Kafra, twenty miles south of Cairo, was built in 2500 B.C. The remains survive. In 690 B.C. the Assyrian king Sennacherib constructed a masonry dam on the Atrush River and a thirty-six-mile long canal to Ninevah.13 Around 100 B.C. the Nabateans of south Jordan and the Negev Desert of Israel built seventeen thousand dams.

 

The Persians inherited this mastery of dam, canal, and underground waterworks. In one instance, the Persians captured an entire Roman army and put them to work building a dam.14 In a huge engineering feat between A.D. 530 and 580, the Persians constructed two dams that diverted water from the Tigris River into the Nahrwan Canal. After their conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century A.D., the Muslims adapted the inherited techniques, and enormously extended the application of mechanical and hydraulic technology. Near the city of Basra, founded in the seventh century A.D., Muslims built up a vast network of dams and dam-fed canals. A dam built over the Kor River in Iran between Shiraz and Persepolis in A.D. 960 irrigated three hundred villages with more than ten water-raising wheels and ten water mills. It still exists.15 South of Qum in Iran, thirteenth century Muslims built the first known example of a true arch dam. Unlike most dams, it did not depend on gravity for its resistance. Instead it was constructed as an arch laid on its side, its convexity pointing upstream, the sides anchored into the rocky banks of a gorge, where the forces of water pressure against it transferred to abutments.

 

During the Islamic expansion, Muslims built many dams on the Iberian peninsula, including a dam at Cordova that was fourteen hundred feet long and a series of eight dams on the Turia River in Valencia, with associated canals. These canals had a total capacity that was slightly less than that of the river, suggesting that the engineers were able to gauge a river and then design dams and canals to match it.16

 

Water mills were a variation on the theme to exploit water for power. Their origin is unclear, but some were present in the pre-Islamic Middle East. By the Islamic medieval period, three types of water mills were in use: undershot, vertical and horizontal overshot. They were used for flour production, papermaking, cloth making, and the crushing of sugarcane and metallic ores.

 

There was a remarkable diversity of machines for milling in Iran and Iraq. In Baghdad, with a population approaching one million inhabitants, conventional milling wheels could not keep up with demand, so Baghdadis carried out corn milling using a series of floating water mills on the Tigris that operated continuously on twenty-four-hour shifts, using undershot wheels that drove the millstones through wooden gears. By A.D. 1000 smaller horizontal, turbine-like wheels with the millstone mounted on the same shaft, directly above, were used throughout Eurasia, from western Europe to China. Near Basra, ten mills operated by the ebb and flow of tides about a century before the first mention of tidal mills in Europe.17

 

Windmills were also invented in the Middle East, where water for power was scarce. Records from eastern Iran date windmills in that area from around A.D. 950. Some of those are still operating today. According to legend, the inventor of the windmill lived in Iran during the time it was conquered by the Muslims in the mid-seventh century. The second caliph, Omat, levied heavy taxes on windmills, and, according to the story, the inventor was so irate that he murdered Omat. Nonetheless, windmills spread throughout the Islamic world, then to India and perhaps China. The technology reached England in the mid—twelfth century. 18

 

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the burning of the library at Alexandria (the Birdcage of the Muses) in A.D. 640 and the European Dark Ages, the Islamic Middle East preserved engineering technologies as well as pure science. Such fields included building construction, mirrors, weights (gravity physics), surveying, hydraulics, military technology, navigation, and the designing of ingenious machines. Often technology and engineering were given as much merit as pure science. The word handasa in Arabic, for example, means architecture and engineering as well as geometry. The distinction was not rigidly made between scientists and technicians. Many men were both.19

 

The obvious Islamic paragons of this type were the three Banu Musa brothers of ninth-century Baghdad. They were astronomers and mathematicians as well as engineers. Around 850 they wrote a compendium, Kitab al-Hiyal (The Book of Ingenious Devices, or On Mechanical Devices).20

 

The Banu Musa brothers designed increasingly complex waterwheels and other sophisticated water-drawing systems. Although they were influenced by the clever Alexandrine inventors of Hellenistic Egypt, whose work was translated into Arabic during their lifetimes, the Banu Musa made many advances. They designed a device for providing hot and cold water, dredging machines for harvesting jewels from sea and river bottoms,21 and an oil lamp that raised its own wick and fed itself more oil. The brothers built elaborate fountains. They are credited with the earliest use of a crank as part of a machine (the crank wasn’t employed in Europe until the fifteenth century) and the first use of suction pipes.22

 

Fun was an important element. The Arabic word hiyal can denote almost any mechanical object, from a small toy to a siege engine. The leisure class took its toys seriously, and Islamic courtly circles funded engineers. Consequently, many of the most advanced Arab designs were both toy-like and useful. The Banu Musa brothers designed eighty-three “trick vessels.” There are pitchers from which pouring cannot be resumed after it has been interrupted; vessels that replenish themselves if a small amount of water is removed; vessels into which a mixture of liquids can be poured together, yet discharged separately. The components usually included variations on conical valves, siphons, airholes, balances, pulleys, gears, miniature waterwheels, floats, and cranks.23

 

Automata, or self-operating mechanisms, were very popular. A prominent designer of automata was Badi al-Zaman al-Jazari, a twelfth and thirteenth-century engineer who may have been in the employ of the southeastern Turkish Artuqid dynasty. Al-Jazari devised most of his large-scale automata to collect and transport water, and was known for his gear systems, one of which showed up two centuries later in Europe in Giovanni de’ Dondi’s mechanical clock. One of al-Jazari’s automata toys was a mechanical boat with drinking men, designed to amuse guests at a drinking party. When activated, the hiyal came alive in a counterpoint of sailors rowing and musicians playing.24

 

The caliphs of Baghdad exploited this richness of invention and engineering to build private playgrounds. Perhaps memories of Babylon inspired Islam’s monumental gardens, models of paradise on earth. A report from the early tenth century describes a pond-filled garden. In the middle of one pond stood a tree with a silver and gold mechanical whistling bird. Another of the garden’s ponds was filled with mercury, upon which floated gold boats. Around the ponds were automata of singing birds, roaring lions, and other moving animals.25 A thousand years ago the Arabs were experimenting with animatronics.

 

Many of the basic building blocks of European technology originated in the ancient Middle Eastern river-valley civilizations. Medieval Islam’s central location in Eurasia allowed it to acquire inventions from India and China as well as make crucial advances on technology inherited from ancient Greece and Hellenistic Egypt. In time, the technological knowledge of the Middle East was transferred to Europe via Spain, and to Asia and Africa. Muslim engineers contributed enormously to the technology of medieval Europe, and Europeans may have feared the dominance of Middle Eastern technology and learning. Dante reveals European animosity toward Islamic culture in the Commedia. In Canto VIII of The Inferno, the Florentine poet places the mosques in the city of Dis, and in Canto XXVIII he puts Muhammad in the eighth circle.

9. Arnold Pacey, “Technology,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology,

and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht/

Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997),p. 937.

10. Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam:An Illustrated Introduction (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 165.

11. Pacey, in Encyclopaedia, p. 937.

12. Alfred Crosby, professor of history at the University of Texas, in a letter to the

author, December 29,2000.

13. James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, p. 384.

14. Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand Year History, Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 8.

15. Donald R. Hill, “Technology in the Islamic World,” in Encyclopaedia, p. 948.

16. Ibid.,p.949.

17. Pacey, Technology in World Civilization, pp. 10—11.

18. James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, p. 393.

19. Ahmad Y. Al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill, Islamic Technology:An Illustrated History

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 264.

20. Pacey, Technology in World Civilization, p. 34.

21. James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, p. 139.

22. al-Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 45.

23. Ibid.,pp.59,90,61.

24. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, p. 188.

25. James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, p. 140.