Irregular Wars Wargaming

The first of the captains to be painted for Project Seleukid. With the amount of purple he's wearing, the commander is obviously a royal kinsman - for our immediate focus on the battle of Magnesia (190 BC), he is to represent Seleukos, son of Antiochos III the Great, joint commander of the left wing with his cousin Antipater. Seleukos was the second son of Antiochos the Great and his Pontic-born queen, Laodike. His elder brother, Antiochos, died in 193, and Seleukos was raised to the throne as co-regent in 192. During the Roman War, he carried out the Seleukid invasion of Pergamon and then held joint command of the left wing at Magnesia. The following year he was left in command of the Seleukid resistance to Roman conquest in Asia Minor. Following the Treaty of Apameia, Seleukos was left to rule the western portion of the Seleukid Empire while his father turned once more to the east. On Antiochos the Great's death in 187, Seleukos succeeded peacefully as Seleukos IV Philopator ...

Andrew and I started another wee Burrows & Badgers campaign this week. I ran my rogues again - the Dirty Paws - but with a new line-up: badger, polecat, bat, rat, and two stoats. Andrew ran a new retinue of royalists led by the beaver, Lord Knawsley, supported by a badger and five mice. We played the treasure hunt scenario from the core rules - my secondary objective was to push through and get off Andrew's side of the table, his aim was to crush my warband and take at least four of them out of action. Sadly I was too shattered to take enough photos for a full narative, but first blood went to Hugo Hairtrigger, the crossbow-weilding rat rogue who got an early shot in on one of the royalist mice. The two seconds met for a brief melee - Sgian the polecat rogue was actually gearing up to search for treasure, but that royal badger had other ideas. After one round of taking a beating, Sgian legged it and ran to get off the royalists table edge. It was the mouse-nun Ivy who discover...

For a number of circumstantial reasons, my next unit for the Seleukid project happens to be some Hellenised Arab light infantry. I never considered the inclusion of Arab light infantry in a Seleukid army to be objectionable, but it was recently drawn to my attention (via the comments left on this blog) that some folk find it problematic . From the two known orders of battle, we know that 10,000 Arabs under their own commander were present at Raphia in 217 BC. There is no indication how they were equipped and the usual assumption is that they were tribal light infantry as they were deployed opposite (and bested by) Ptolemiac phalangites. At Magnesia in 190 BC, Arab camelry (the subject of a future post) are described in some detail. Arab infantry are not explicitly mentioned, but I have proposed that some of the unaccounted for 10,000+ troops may have included Arab infantry. Antiochos III's army at Magnesia was hastily assembled, brought together from contingents across the empire ...

Anyone who has spoken to me about my different archaeological interests for any length of time knows that I am rather partial to Kilikians (I've published a number of articles on the Tarkondimotid dynasty for a start). So when it was time to dip my toe in the water and get my end of ProjectSeleukid going, it was not a difficult decision to start with Kilikian light infantry. These Taurus highlanders (admittedly only half of Kilikia was mountains - but the rest of it was fringed with mountains) appear in all three detailed breakdowns of the Seleukid army, at Raphia, Magnesia and Daphne, and parts of Kilikia remained within the Seleukid orbit from the 290s right down to the early 1st century BC. Helpfully we have a couple of references to ancient Kilikian light infantry equipment. Unhelpfully, the most detailed account comes from Book 7 of Herodotus, two and a half centuries before Magnesia. Still, it provides a guide. The [Pisidians] had little shields of raw ox-hide. Each man carri...

Jim's Byzernians took on my beastling army of the Red King this week in a hard-fought, 1000 point game of Fantastic Battles . The battlefield was constricted somewhat with terrain, including two large woods and a settlement that benefited neither of us so, as the defender, the Red King deployed his army of highland mice, squirrels, bunnies and other assorted beastlings in depth across the centre and right.  The Byzernians launched an ambush across the abandoned left flank with a large unit of axe-wielding gallowglasses. The beastling army responded by redeploying their reserves to cover the wood, and advancing down into the valley on the opposite flank. The gallowglass unit was pinned and surrounded in the woods, and ultimately abandoned by the rogue leading them, causing the unit to rout.  In the centre and right, the beastlings were finding the going a bit tougher - everywhere the Byzernians out-matched them in melee and only the bog trolls were doing ok, hurling great bould...

While my work on Project Seleukid has, for the most part, been pretty theoretical to date, Andrew has been forging away at his usual pace and has already brought two units together, both Victrix kits. The first of these is one of the three phalanxes that we will need for our Magnesia order of battle. The following text has been lazily lifted from something I wrote back in 2014 when I was building my 6mm phalanx units. However, the points raised still stand, so worth repeating. The centre of any Hellenistic monarch's battle line was generally composed of 'Macedonians'. That is to say, those fighting in the Macedonian fashion, equipped with small round pelte (shields) and wielding long pikes in both hands, fighting in a massed phalanx between 16 and 32 ranks deep. For the Seleukids, you probably shouldn't let the pseudo-ethnic Macedonian title lead you astray. There is every reason to believe that a high proportion of men serving in the ranks of a third century Seleukid ...