41. The Queen's Urban Management Brigade of Egypt (I)

The history of mankind is almost the history of war.

The so-called war is a collective armed struggle between different countries and interest groups. In the history of mankind, most of the wars between different countries were caused by territorial disputes. Wars within the same country are dominated by disputes over the throne and the change of dynasty. In the West after the Middle Ages, religion also became an important reason for war. In the 20th century, a new casus bellique ideologist was added.

In short, since the dawn of humanity, wars have not stopped. War and civilization have always complemented each other, and war not only plays a catalytic and promoting role in the development and progress of human civilization, but also threatens the survival of human civilization itself.

War is also an important part of human culture, and literary works describing various wars have been one of the mainstream of literature in various countries since ancient times. After entering the computer age, war has become an important material for computer games: summarizing war, tasting war, appreciating war, and criticizing war will always be one of the most talked about common topics among all shijie netizens.

Despite the brutality of war, people can only communicate through war, and without war, we would still be living in ignorance today. The collapse of the Hittite Empire allowed iron to spread throughout Shijie, and the Battle of Talas spread papermaking to the West. The wars between primitive tribes in ancient times promoted the integration of nations and the formation of states; The thousand-year-old confrontation between the agrarian peoples and the nomadic peoples is one of the main themes in the history of human civilization and the direct cause of the great migration of ethnic groups. Tragic wars are always accompanied by social revolutions. Bringing a new pattern.

-- War is like childbirth, a labor pain in the long history of mankind, and the arrival of healthy babies. Then slowly move towards maturity.

It is precisely because of the countless violent wars that peace and development will become the consensus of mankind, and people today can stay away from the flames of war, write quietly, and live well.

However. As far back as the 1st century B.C., ancient humans still preferred to communicate with wars and swords.

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With the bad news of another invasion of the Roman army, the haze of a new round of war. It quickly loomed over the devastated city of Alexandria.

Everyone knows that when Queen Bixia brazenly rejects Pompey's blackmail demands, a bloody battle is inevitable.

However, compared to the more than 20,000 Roman troops who invaded brazenly. The forces that Queen Cleopatra was able to muster. It's very thin.

-- Several Hellenistic Diadochi states born on the ruins of Alexander's empire, whether it was Seleucid Syria, Ptolemaic Egypt, or Pergamon and Bactria, all had the same problem: the ethnic hierarchy within the kingdom was so great that the natives were called as inferior pariahs, and the upper ones were Greek Macedonian immigrants. And the army can only pull strong men from among the superior people.

-- The one who wields the strongest force naturally holds the supreme power. Back in ancient times. The human beings of the whole shijie understand this truth.

But the problem is that in the era before the Roman Empire unified the Mediterranean, the various civilizations of the West, such as Carthage, Greece, Macedonia, etc., had a very strict definition of nation, such as the descendants of Greek immigrants, who were not born in Hellenistic city-states, would not be considered fully Greek. And the mixed descendants of Greeks and native Egyptians are not usually recognized as Greeks either. To make matters worse, the ancient Greeks had a relatively low fertility rate - compared to the barbarians - and after settling down, most Greeks would be much less enthusiastic about warfare.

Thus, after the first period of great power, the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt was faced with a shortage of troops: although the Greek and Macedonian immigrants who migrated to Egypt numbered hundreds of thousands, the population base was still far from sufficient for a regional hegemon who controlled a vast territory of millions of square kilometers around the eastern Mediterranean, and had to rely on foreign mercenaries to fill the gap.

Moreover, as time went on and society prospered, the spirit of martial arts was still maintained, and the number of Greeks willing to fight as soldiers became fewer and fewer, and by the time of Ptolemy IV, even the addition of mercenaries was not enough.

In order to maintain their vast territory from Thrace to Cyrenaica, the Ptolemaic dynasty had to begin conscripting the indigenous Egyptians to fight in the army, and as a result, once these Egyptians had military liliang, they began to seek political power. After the legal claim for citizenship was denied, these indigenous Egyptian armies turned into rebels, repeatedly launching armed uprisings in Upper Egypt, which led to endless unrest and internal strife, and brutally crippled the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, the former overlord of the Eastern Mediterranean, in chronic blood loss.

What's worse is that the Greeks in the classical period were naturally fond of playing with city-state autonomy and extremely disgusted with monarchy, and on the one hand, they enjoyed the treatment of the ruling class of the country in Egypt, and on the other hand, they tirelessly wanted to make self-government and independence and democratic movements - as the upper echelons of the ruling class, the rebellion of the oppressed Egyptian natives was even more common, coupled with the palace struggles that have been in the tradition since ancient Egypt...... All in all, by the time of Cleopatra VII, Egypt's military mobilization capacity had fallen to a very tragic level, roughly similar to that of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the period, whether it was Greek and Macedonian immigrants, or the indigenous Egyptians, all of them were extremely unreliable, and the main force of the war could only rely on foreign mercenaries, and even the dispatch of the Roman Republic, which was very similar to Korea in the future.

As a wealthy country with a population of several million, the late Ptolemaic dynasty could only maintain an army of about 20,000 men. Even the only 20,000 troops were wiped out by Cleopatra in the previous phase of the civil war. To make matters worse, the Ptolemaic dynasty today has no reserve replenishment mechanism at all - just as the British did not dare to establish a military service system in Hong Kong - and the original Greek citizen soldier system has long since collapsed. As a result, the current Queen of Cleopatra had to start all over again, recruiting a whole new army among the refugees in Alexandria.

However, these undisciplined and untrained men had only been training for less than a month. Even if they are forcibly pulled into the battlefield, they are just a large number of miscellaneous soldiers who can only be used as a burden, and their combat effectiveness is outrageously weak, and the possibility of causing chaos to their own people is quite large.

As a result, when the Roman republican army was now preparing to face Pompey the Younger, Queen Cleopatra, even though she had exhausted all the military resources under her control, had only gathered 3,000 recruits from Alexandria, 1,000 troops sent by the local nobles to support the King, and 2,000 mercenaries she had brought from Syria, which were only one-third of the number of the Romans, and even less than one-tenth of their combat effectiveness.

Obviously, it is absolutely unreliable to expect this rabble to create any miracles on the battlefield. Fortunately, Wang Qiu and the others had already noticed this, and collected a large number of ordnance in modern Shijie in a targeted manner to improve the combat effectiveness of this motley army in a short period of time...... (To be continued.) For mobile phone users, please go to read. )