N Encyclopedia: A Bequest Unearthed, Phoenicia and the Phoenicians, Punic, Canaanites. The Siege of Tyre. Tyre was a fortified city occupying a small island off the coast of today’s Lebanon.
The geography made it inexpugnable and, as Wallace Bruce Fleming describes in his The History of Tyre, an enticing prize for many superpowers over history. Some scholars believe the capture of Tyre during the Alexander Campaign was strategically unnecessary. Tyre had offered surrender, but had refused Alexander the right to sacrifice in the temple of Melqart during the great festival in February, because only a native king could perform the necessary religious ceremonies. According to Lucius Flavius Arrianus, in his Anabasis Alexandrinus, Thence he advanced towards Tyre; ambassadors from which city, despatched by the commonwealth, met him on the march, announcing that the Tyrians had decided to do whatever he might command. No Persian king had ever made such an outrageous demand, yet Alexander had felt insulted and had insisted.
In January 332 B.C., Alexander’s siege began with a blockaded Tyre. Google.
SpecTech: Signing on a Crew for a Fantasy Ship. In my last Spec Tech I wrote about choosing a ship for a fantasy novel.
This time, we will sign on a crew to sail the ship. While we chose a carrack as a useful model of a fantasy ship, the crew we choose would work for almost any sailing ship. The skills required and the division of labor stayed remarkably stable for close to five hundred years or so, despite changes to the size and scale of the ships themselves. So, lets look at the crew of a typical merchant ship during the age of sail. Starting from the top, you need a captain. The captain is supported by his mates, usually at least two. The Second Mate is the junior mate, often not held in high regard by either the Captain nor the crew. Between the mates and sailors is a group of specialists, often referred to as “idlers” because they do not have to stand watches, though as they tend to work at least twelve hours a day, they are hardly idle. How many sailors sailed on any given ship?
Watches can be divided in various ways. Chinese Siege Warfare - Early Cannons. A direct descendant of mechanical catapults of previous generations, the cannon slowly replaced and eventually ousted the great siege engines of old from Chinese arsenals.
The word Pao for catapult was written with the "stone" radical on the left of the word. This same word was adopted for the name of these new gunpowder weapons but with the "stone" radical replaced by the "fire" radical. This meant that the same word Pao was used to mean catapult as well as cannon, differentiated only by the type of radical used. A further differentiation arose during the transitional stages of the Song to Ming dynasties by the addition of the word Huo or "fire" next to the word Pao to form Huo Pao or "Fire Cannon". This word is not to be confused with those of old incendiary throwing catapults of the Tang and Song dynasties. In A.D. 1221, the Jurchens had used a pumpkin-shaped iron bombard, which was more a short ranged flame-thrower than a real cannon.
Illustration of the 16th century A.D. New Testament Greek Dictionary for kleptes.