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This is examined in some detail by the Youtube creator "Lindybeige". He talks about: the name of the weapon; how the weapon may have worked; the veracity of th

• logicallee 10y ago
  I'm sorry, I glanced through the write-up and I just don't buy it. Who's going to forge a flail? This just screams "No true scotsman" to me. Give an example of a flail and, well, it's not a TRUE flail because... The paintings of flails aren't TRUE flails because... The example of a physical flail isn't a TRUE flail because... The last time I saw someone actually minutely go through all the evidence and point by point address why it must be dismissed, it was in a flat-Earth video. Seriously. "Where's there's smoke, there's fire" exists because if you can show flails all over the historical record then there were probably flails. Look at this quote from the article: >“But wait,” you may ask, “what about those flails at the Met that you just mentioned?” This is where the story gets interesting. My working hypothesis is that all the flails at the Met, and those in similar collections occasionally found elsewhere in the world, are, as Warner asserted so bluntly, fakes. Well, actually this makes it really easy to be a flat-Earth apologist. "What about the NASA missions, people going to orbit and seeing the Earth? Faked, forgeries. Done in a studio. People have been painting for millennia, it's just that now it's digital. What about the fact that you can talk to someone in China or Australia and ask them about where the sun is? They're lying or simply mistaken. How can they be mistaken about whether it's day or night? Concussion, dementia, practical joke, etc. Point is it's fake. Okay what about the fact that ships disappear hull-first as they recede into the distance? Optical illusion or a trick of the eye. Not real. Okay, what about satellites, GPS? Fake, a forgery. It's easy to come up with a fake system, you could do it on your own computer, you could model a fake "planet" that is a sphere a hundred times the size of earth and make a fake "GPS" system that reports fake values. But why would anyone do that? I don't know, why would anybody fake a flail." -- EDIT: I don't know why you guys are downvoting me. When authors write provocative pieces purporting that something never existed at all, they're almost always wrong. Example: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/joe-goulds-teeth http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/joe-goulds-teet... [Here's Mitchell later on: "In 1964 Mitchell published the second of two profiles of Gould for The New Yorker, later collected in the 1965 book Joe Gould's Secret. Mitchell asserted that the Oral History never existed. Upon the publication of Mitchell's "Joe Gould’s Secret," in September, 1964, people began to write to him and send him notebook copies of the Oral History. "I wish I had had this information when I wrote the second Profile," Mitchell told people who wrote to him, "and if I ever write another article about Joe Gould, which I may do, I’d like very much to have a talk with you.""] Please see my reply below for where our author uses the same very extreme viewpoint.
  • kstenerud 10y ago
    That's not a "no true scotsman" fallacy. His argument is that the flail was never actually used as a regular weapon by the military, not that it never existed. It obviously exists, since there are flails. But as a military weapon, flails are next to useless, were never recorded in military texts or inventories, and all of the examples we see in museums are either ornate and ceremonial/artistic, or flimsy. At best it was a failed experimental weapon.
    • logicallee 10y ago
      If his argument isn't that "it never existed" then he shouldn't title his post "The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t Exist" or write "A military flail is a medieval weapon consisting of a short handle attached to a chain, at the end of which is a metal ball. [...] Only problem is: they never existed." or write "the flail was almost certainly an invention of the imaginations of later people." or write "My working hypothesis is that all the flails [...] are [...] fakes." or write "At first that would seem to settle the debate: flails certainly existed, otherwise what could these artists be doing putting them in their art?" (The answer is "depictions of the exotic or fantastical" and the author says: "The artist certainly had quite an imagination.") Why would the author write: "The more interesting possibility is that they were figments of an active artistic imagination, and that the examples we have are artistic or ornamental." and "the original inventors were not weaponsmiths but illustrators" i.e. that not one authentic copy exists. That it was invented in art. This is an absolutely ridiculous suggestion, but it is the title and hypothesis of the writeup. The author is suggesting, explicitly in the quotes I mention above, that not one authentic copy had been originally constructed. (Not that it existed but in low numbers, this is an idea he tried very hard to dismiss.)
  • sgnelson 10y ago
    Just to note, you would be surprised how many "ancient" items are forgeries, either from real items or made up items. Unfortunately I have no link to evidence; but people have regularly (especially in the 18th/19th century) created forgeries of so-called "ancient items".