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Carthage has to have the goofiest downfall of a culture in all history. The Carthaginians labelled their ship parts for efficient construction. Rome captured on

Carthage has to have the goofiest downfall of a culture in all history. The Carthaginians labelled their ship parts for efficient construction. Rome captured one of their ships and found all the labels. Rome then made the better style ship made by Carthage and conquered them mainly due to the ships. It's like death by Ikea.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> It's like death by Ikea. You win the Internet.
himinlomax 3y ago
Carthage and Rome also fought what was by some measures (by number of ships or sailors) the biggest naval battle of all times, even taking WW2 into account.
- nolok 3y ago
  Fun fact is that they have this record "only" because the east asians seas just kept screwing with everyone doing massive fleets. The mongols, koreans, japans ...
chadash 3y ago
The Romans actually had a difficult time beating the Carthaginian navy. They tried to copy their ships, but without the ship-building experience, they didn't have much success. To level the playing field, they invented the corvus (AKA the "crow") [1] which was a boarding bridge designed to pierce the enemy ship and allow combatants to board. This played to Rome's strength as a land power with much better hand-to-hand combat troops. The Corvus had much success in battle, but it is thought to have significantly weighed down ships and offset their center of mass. So at one point, the Roman Navy was stuck in a storm and is thought to have lost over 350 naval ships (and 300 cargo ships) and 100k men at once. It is thought that the corvus might have been responsible for making the ships more likely to capsize during this storm, as the Romans stopped using them after this disaster [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(255_BC)#Storm_off_Camarina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(...
- nolok 3y ago
  Sadly for Carthage, in that era Rome's main strenght was its ability to take aburd losses and then just recruit back a giant army right after. There is quite a number of times where they lost a % of their army / populace similar to what that has crumbled many empires through history, but Rome just got back up like it's nothing. I can't imagine how their ennemies must have felt in those instances.
  - borissk 3y ago
    Ask a Ukrainian. Russians like to call Moscow the third Rome and their leaders don't care about losses.
    - nolok 3y ago
      Russia maybe have the numbers, but the troops and equipment they're fielding today in Ukraine is not equal to what they were fielding two years ago.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        True. But if they do win (for the record, I hope they don't), it won't be because they had superior technology. Or superior generals. It won't be because their cause was righteous. They will have won because they kept piling on with more infantry beyond what anyone would have thought possible. Denialism's a fucking superpower.
        nolok 3y ago
        Oh I agree, but I'm also of the very macabre and morally evil view that, for the west/nato, the current situation is the best one we could hope for (short of the dream of "ukraine beats russia"). We don't lose lives, we spend money but not enough that we actually feel it, Russia need to concentrate so much on it their ability to act elsewhere is disminished (sure they launch all their triggers/ Houthi, Venezuela, Sub-saharian africa, but it's not 2016 anymore), ... It's frankly horrible, but every time an ukrainian solider dies to kill two russian soldiers, western countries safety position improves. I'm not saying I agree with that, or think it's good, to be clear. But I think that the west never considered Ukraine in their sphere and the horrors that have happened since 2013 have invariably been in favor of "us" and not russia, and russia is so focused on playing the game the way it was played last century it feels like they missed it.
vkou 3y ago
Anecdotes like that, while interesting[1], are rarely the principal cause of an entire nation-state's downfall. The principal cause for why Rome was so successful at beating up its neighbours was well-executed logistics and a capable bureaucracy. ---- [1] Interesting, but non-nonsensical. How would labeling the parts of an already-completed ship meaningfully impact reverse-engineering efforts? It's a ancient ship, not an composite airplane, or a microchip, you can rip it apart, piece-by-piece, without the benefit of labeling.
- sophacles 3y ago
  When I was young, one of my mentors said "half of engineering is knowing the vocabulary". The older I get, the more I'm convinced he's right. The names of parts helps give some amount of context and purpose to why a thing was done, what it's role is, etc. This gives a much quicker comprehension to the thing you're trying to understand - consider someone handing you a codebase you've never seen, and a vague description of what it does. Is it easier to understand with well named functions, variables and types? What if the all function names were replaced with f1, f2, ... fn, and variable names were replaced with v1, v2, ... vn, and so on? What if it wasn't a complete codebase, but only part of it, and had gone through a bit of a scramble (the Carthaginian ship in question had been wrecked as I understand it)? What if you were a brand new programmer (Rome was new to the whole ship thing then...)? You're absolutely right that it's not strictly necessary to have the labels for reverse engineering, but the labels certainly help... for context it was 8 years from the start of the war until the battle in question, and the fleet was built in just 4 years. At that rate, I find the label thing a plausible contributing factor.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> It's like death by Ikea. You win the Internet.

himinlomax 3y ago

Carthage and Rome also fought what was by some measures (by number of ships or sailors) the biggest naval battle of all times, even taking WW2 into account.

nolok 3y ago
Fun fact is that they have this record "only" because the east asians seas just kept screwing with everyone doing massive fleets. The mongols, koreans, japans ...

chadash 3y ago

The Romans actually had a difficult time beating the Carthaginian navy. They tried to copy their ships, but without the ship-building experience, they didn't have much success. To level the playing field, they invented the corvus (AKA the "crow") [1] which was a boarding bridge designed to pierce the enemy ship and allow combatants to board. This played to Rome's strength as a land power with much better hand-to-hand combat troops. The Corvus had much success in battle, but it is thought to have significantly weighed down ships and offset their center of mass. So at one point, the Roman Navy was stuck in a storm and is thought to have lost over 350 naval ships (and 300 cargo ships) and 100k men at once. It is thought that the corvus might have been responsible for making the ships more likely to capsize during this storm, as the Romans stopped using them after this disaster [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(255_BC)#Storm_off_Camarina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(...

nolok 3y ago
Sadly for Carthage, in that era Rome's main strenght was its ability to take aburd losses and then just recruit back a giant army right after. There is quite a number of times where they lost a % of their army / populace similar to what that has crumbled many empires through history, but Rome just got back up like it's nothing. I can't imagine how their ennemies must have felt in those instances.
- borissk 3y ago
  Ask a Ukrainian. Russians like to call Moscow the third Rome and their leaders don't care about losses.
  - nolok 3y ago
    Russia maybe have the numbers, but the troops and equipment they're fielding today in Ukraine is not equal to what they were fielding two years ago.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      True. But if they do win (for the record, I hope they don't), it won't be because they had superior technology. Or superior generals. It won't be because their cause was righteous. They will have won because they kept piling on with more infantry beyond what anyone would have thought possible. Denialism's a fucking superpower.
      - nolok 3y ago
        Oh I agree, but I'm also of the very macabre and morally evil view that, for the west/nato, the current situation is the best one we could hope for (short of the dream of "ukraine beats russia"). We don't lose lives, we spend money but not enough that we actually feel it, Russia need to concentrate so much on it their ability to act elsewhere is disminished (sure they launch all their triggers/ Houthi, Venezuela, Sub-saharian africa, but it's not 2016 anymore), ... It's frankly horrible, but every time an ukrainian solider dies to kill two russian soldiers, western countries safety position improves. I'm not saying I agree with that, or think it's good, to be clear. But I think that the west never considered Ukraine in their sphere and the horrors that have happened since 2013 have invariably been in favor of "us" and not russia, and russia is so focused on playing the game the way it was played last century it feels like they missed it.

vkou 3y ago

Anecdotes like that, while interesting[1], are rarely the principal cause of an entire nation-state's downfall. The principal cause for why Rome was so successful at beating up its neighbours was well-executed logistics and a capable bureaucracy. ---- [1] Interesting, but non-nonsensical. How would labeling the parts of an already-completed ship meaningfully impact reverse-engineering efforts? It's a ancient ship, not an composite airplane, or a microchip, you can rip it apart, piece-by-piece, without the benefit of labeling.

sophacles 3y ago
When I was young, one of my mentors said "half of engineering is knowing the vocabulary". The older I get, the more I'm convinced he's right. The names of parts helps give some amount of context and purpose to why a thing was done, what it's role is, etc. This gives a much quicker comprehension to the thing you're trying to understand - consider someone handing you a codebase you've never seen, and a vague description of what it does. Is it easier to understand with well named functions, variables and types? What if the all function names were replaced with f1, f2, ... fn, and variable names were replaced with v1, v2, ... vn, and so on? What if it wasn't a complete codebase, but only part of it, and had gone through a bit of a scramble (the Carthaginian ship in question had been wrecked as I understand it)? What if you were a brand new programmer (Rome was new to the whole ship thing then...)? You're absolutely right that it's not strictly necessary to have the labels for reverse engineering, but the labels certainly help... for context it was 8 years from the start of the war until the battle in question, and the fleet was built in just 4 years. At that rate, I find the label thing a plausible contributing factor.