Alexander Empire in America

In a book Alexander lives to 50 i think and conquers India,China,Carthage,Arabia,Sythia and Italy his Empire becomes very orintal with the offical Religon Buhddisim,Hannable discovers Atlantis(THe New World)

 

Here's my idea They istablish colonies in Florida,Cuba,Bahmahs,most of The Mississipi they establish New Alexanderia they have wars with Native tribes.

The Battle of The West Nile (Mississippi river)

Greek Forces                                                          Native forces

Troops  500,000          ;           ;           ;           ;  Troops  90,000
Caverlry 200,000          ;           ;           ;           ;  Cavelry 40,000

Mahots(War elephants) 300         &nb sp;         &nb sp;   

The NAtives win by supior arrows

Originally posted by meninwhite In a book Alexander lives to 50 i think and conquers India,China,Carthage,Arabia,Sythia and Italy his Empire becomes very orintal with the offical Religon Buhddisim,Hannable discovers Atlantis(THe New World)   Here's my idea They istablish colonies in Florida,Cuba,Bahmahs,most of The Mississipi they establish New Alexanderia they have wars with Native tribes. The Battle of The West Nile (Mississippi river) Greek Forces                                                          Native forces Troops  500,000          ; ;           ; ;           ; ;           ; ;  Troops  90,000 Caverlry 200,000          ; ;           ; ;           ; ;           ; ;  Cavelry 40,000 Mahots(War elephants) 300         &am p;nb sp;         &am p;nb sp;    The NAtives win by supior arrows

This is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard! First of all, Alexander could not have conquered such a huge empire and maintained it. He could barely control what he had conquered, let alone an empire 5 times the size. Second, the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most advanced sailors of the time, only had galleys, which would have sunk within a week of attempting to cross the Atlantic. To cross over 700000 troops with horses and elephants: that's bigger than D-Day, which was a short hop across a channel. Finally, where would the natives get the horses? Besides, the native cultures of the modern Eastern US only became an agricultural society capable of mustering such a huge army several hundred years later. I know it's historical amusement, but put a little bit more thought into your posts, please! 

Originally posted by meninwhite In a book Alexander lives to 50 i think and conquers India,China,Carthage,Arabia,Sythia and Italy his Empire becomes very orintal with the offical Religon Buhddisim,Hannable discovers Atlantis(THe New World)   Here's my idea They istablish colonies in Florida,Cuba,Bahmahs,most of The Mississipi they establish New Alexanderia they have wars with Native tribes. The Battle of The West Nile (Mississippi river) Greek Forces                   & ;nbs p;          &a mp;n bsp;                     & ;nbs p;      Native forces Troops  500,000      &am p;nb sp;   ;            ;      &am p;nb sp;    ;            ;  Troops  90,000 Caverlry 200,000       & amp; nbsp;  ;       & ;nbs p;   ;       & amp; nbsp;   ;      & ;nbs p;    ;  Cavelry 40,000 Mahots(War elephants) 300       &am p;nb sp; &nb sp;      &am p;nb sp;  &nb sp;    The NAtives win by supior arrows

Which whacko wrote this? I swear, the things that get published these days.

Natives having superior arrows? They were still using the same stone and flint weapons that they were using when they entered the Americas. How would there have been native cavalry? There were no horses in America until the arrival of the Spaniards. There was no way they could have won a pitched battle with the Greeks. The natives never even fought in pitched battles.

Seeing as how 400,000 is an extremely liberal estimate of the entire native population of North America, divided into thousands of seperate tribes, I think you would be quite hard-pressed to find 130,000 able-bodied warriors to fight.

Good luck being able to transport an army of 700,000 and 300 elephants over an ocean with the technology available in the world at the time.


Edited by Belisarius

If there was such a pitched battle, Alexander would kick butt. The stone and flint arrows wouldn't do much against his elpephants and his own archers. What the heck does "superior arrows" mean?

What do you mean by superior arrows? The Native Americans of the time were not even as advanced as the Hittites and Assyrians in warfare.

Edited by Rome

Well, I saw a documentary on it, a few years back, on the Discovery channel. I don't remember the name of the largest settlement. However, the settlement of Cahokia is estimated to have had a population of 15-30 thousand inhabitants around 1200AD. This you can look up on the net. Considering that that is approximately the population of Paris at the time, we can assume that the Mississipi valley had a fairly large population as well. 400,000 total for the areas covered by Canada and US doesn't really seem like such an "extremely liberal estimate", when you may have had 30,000 only in Cahokia.

400,000 is an extremely insane number for an ancient people like the Native Americans. If an estimate of one million is used in 1600, how in the 300s BCE can the Native Americans have as much?

There's several factors to take into account:

1. The native population of North America has been underestimated in the past, to make more credible the claim of the white colonizers. This is similar to the claims of Apertheid South Africa that the Cape region was uninhabited when the European settlers arrived.

2. The European settlers arrived in the 1600's on the Eastern coast of the US, but European diseases arrived earlier (in the early 1500's) and seem to have decimated a large portion of the population, especially in the agrarian regions of the Midwest. Thsu, the 1600 population may a lot lower than the 1500 population. I remember in Jared Diamond's book, Guns Germs and Steel, that some historians have claimed a 90% population decrease for the area for that century.

3. The agricultural revolution in these areas had started by 300BC, although the bulk of the population expansion occured later.

I think that between the population explosion after 300BC and the decimation which occured after the introduction of European diseases in the 1500s, the two population levels of 300BC and 1600AD may well be comparable. When taking into account that most estimates of the population in 1600 were probably lower than reality, one may see why I believe that 400,000 is a low figure for the population at the time.

Such a population spread over Canada and the continetal US would imply a density of 0.02 inhabitants per square kilometer. In other words, a region such as New York State would have a population of only 3000 people. Rhode Island would only have a population of 60 people: barely the size of a hunter-gatherer tribe. By contrast, the Nejd, a region of comparable size to New York with a very unfriendly environment had a population of around 50,000 people in the 1800s. This is a desertic region in Arabia whose population consisted entirely of nomadic bedouins who still lived according to the traditional style at the time. A region such as New York State could be considered a lot more friendly to life than the Nejd. To use another example, the Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean support a native population of around 30,000 hunter gatherers, over 8000 square kilometers, aside from the more urban immigrant population. According to Wikipedia, by 1492, Haiti alone had a population of 250,000 Arawaks and they were not an agrarian society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American

Again, according to Wikipedia, "The Native Americans [...], it is estimated that at least ten million lived in the territory now occupied by the US before European contact, and the subsequent introduction of foreign diseases such as small pox that decimated the native populations."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States


I think that if we were to revise this estimate by a factor of 10 and arrive at a population of 4 million, spread over 20 million square kilometers, we might be closer to the truth. Still, this population would not be enough to field the enormous armies that the original post talked about.

Edited by Decebal

The original immigrants that came to the Americas indeed probably numbered in the hundreds. But 2000 years after evidence of human inhabitation was first discovered in North America, evidence was found of human inhabitation pretty much everywhere in the Americas, all the way to Tierra del Fuego. And then the population could grow for 7000 years, until the timeframe in question. Even if we assume a very low rate of growth of 0.5% (which would assume high mortality), that would mean that the original population would increase by a factor of 1.45e15 over 7000 years. At 0.2%, the population would increase by a factor of 1.185 million. These are very low growth rates, but they would still allow for a very large population by 300BC, in theory numbering in the billions. Of course, that did not happen. What probably did happen, is that the population increased a lot during the first couple of thousand of years, filling most inhabitable areas. It then more or less stablized, with the best areas having the largest population density. This confining and the subsequent rise in density you talk about that surrounding civilizations would force upon hunter gatherers would simply happen to a certain extent naturally, as a result of this population growth.

As far as your argument of varying terrain, do you realize how large the inhabitable and bountiful areas of the US and Canada are? If we take the East Coast, from Florida to Nova Scotia, the Midwest (with the Mississippi valley), the Great Lakes and St.Lawrence valley, the Pacific coast up to British Columbia, you'll find that it adds up to about 5 million square kilometers, out of a total of 20 million. At the time of European contact, the Inuit nation (Eskimos) numbered about 10,000 people spread over one of the harshest  environments on Earth and about 1 million square kilometers.  Are you going to tell me that other native people living on the bountiful 7 million square kilometres could not manage a population density greater than 7 times that of the Inuit? Assuming that the entire population of 400,000 was concentrated in those 5 million square kilometers, this would still only mean a population density of 0.08 people per square km.

How do you explain the growth from 400,000 to the Wikipedia estimate of 10 million at the time of the European contact, especially since the agrarian revoultion was only confined to one area?

Actually I did say that the population stabilized overall. I didn't go into this further, but natural calamities would certainly have had a role in this overall stabilization. Sustained growth of 0.2-0.5 would have resulted in populations of billions or even trillions, which is where natural calamities come in, to lower that population to realistic levels. All I meant was that there was ample time by 300BC for the Americas to become densely populated and for the native people to fully occupy and exploit all available habitats. Jared Diamond goes into some detail about the populating of the Americas in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel"

You talk about a pop density of 0.08 people/square km between Mississipi and east of the Pacific coast. However, these are precisely the regions in the US which are not as bountiful as say California or the East Coast. The density would be a good deal greater there...

I know that Wikipedia is not the most trustworthy source, and I'll look up some other sources when I get the time. In the meantime, I still think that the native population of North America has historically been underestimated for political reasons, until recently. Coming back to the original post though, even though the population base may have been there, there was no political unification to speak of which would allow for such large armies.