Casse

Are you talking about the faction description or the faction history page?

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Originally Posted by Elmetiacos

The only example I can find is the famous "Dying Gaul" who has been given an obviously Greek sword anyway... all the warriors on the Gundestrup Cauldron have spears... can you supply any examples of swordbearing Celts in ancient art?

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I only have some examples concerning the Galatians, but they are numerous. We first have the mention in Livy 38.21.5 of Galatians only using swords. Then we have over a dozen terracotta figurines of Galatian soldiers only armed with swords. Finally, we have several representations on funerary stelae of Galatian soldiers again armed with a sword as their only weapon.

The Faction History is mostly fantasy. It says the Casse established themselves as a power swiftly after they arrived in the 3rd or 4th Century BC (presumably it has to be the 4th, or they'd be getting off their boats as EB starts) but we know nothing of them apart from what they did in Caesar's war against Cassivellaunus. We don't know if they were Gaulish conquerors or if they'd been around for hundreds of years. "transcribed oral histories, copied in later periods by Christian monks, point to stories of a failed attempt at unifying the whole island under their rule" is fiction; apart from (historically useless) mediaeval romance like Geoffery of Monmouth's History, there are no Irish-style transcribed oral traditions of British history, especially none that mention the Cassi. There's no evidence of a plague striking Britain in this period at all, but the page goes on to say that it was regarded as a bad omen and who died from it. "Catuvallarix" could not mean "King of the Islanders" - there are three Celtic roots in that name *katu- "battle" *walla- "powerful" and *rixs "king". Control of the tin trade implies control of Cornwall and South West England, but only South Eastern tribes have been mentioned.

That's just the first paragraph.

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Originally Posted by Elmetiacos

But Celtic armies do seem to have used spears only in hand to hand combat. Wealthier troops often had swords, but one interesting fact is the way they developed. In the Hallstatt Period, late Bronze and early Iron Age, swords are longer and have points - this is the leaf bladed variety people visualise when they think of a "Celtic longsword". This type is abandoned in the La Tene Period, and swords become generally shorter and with blunt ends. We also find more finely decorated scabbards. Doesn't this suggest that the sword is more of a status symbol and less of a primary battlefield weapon? In the EB time frame, I think Celtic nobles would have used spears and javelins, only resorting to swords if the spear was lost or broken, or to cut the heads off the dead.

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Are there any theories as to why the Celts felt the need to downgrade their sword design? It seems counterintuitive unless they completely stopped using them, even as a back-up weapon (and that would beg the question: why did they stop using them in the first place).

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Originally Posted by lobf

I'm not talking about minor edits, though. I mean, as far as I understand it, the whole page is nonsense or speculation.

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:sigh:

The page was written by Ranika. Elmetiacos disputes Ranika's expertise and input to the mod. However, you cannot say Ranika is wrong without giving him a chance to defend himself. Unfortunately, he is not active anymore and there is no one else on the team with extensive knowledge of ancient Britain, so we cannot have a proper discussion about it. Presumably, the team is also unwilling to discuss it since it sparked a couple of flame wars previously.

I am by no means an expert in the field of ancient celtic grammar, so I will not go into an argument with those giants already at work here.

However, one has to remember that history, no matter how scientific you act in your approach to it, is a science where many facts are forever obscured in the mist of time. Not even those cultures, where the tradition of recording history was indeed strong, can ever manage to produce material that we can percieve as containing "the truth". Merely someone's subjective perspective of it. Then, when there are no written sources, and all we can find is oral tradition, writings from different times, or different parts of the world than the area discussed (like Herodotos description of India), and some archaeological finds, then, all we can do is to try to put all af theese "clues" into a context, and make our own picture from there, although, of course, omitting obvious faults.
Sometimes, like in the case of Casse, there are no 100% reliable sources, and that, what we can find, is often contradictory or incomplete.
Unless you have a time machine, you can never know for sure what the past really looked like; all you can do, is to collect the fragmets that are there, and make the best out of it. As I percieve it, this is what the EB team has done with the Casse faction.

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Originally Posted by lobf

I'm not talking about minor edits, though. I mean, as far as I understand it, the whole page is nonsense or speculation.

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The dead horse - she is unable to go faster, no matter how much she is beaten. :yes:

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Originally Posted by Ludens

Are there any theories as to why the Celts felt the need to downgrade their sword design? It seems counterintuitive unless they completely stopped using them, even as a back-up weapon (and that would beg the question: why did they stop using them in the first place).

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I'd be interested to find out more on this, too.

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The page was written by Ranika. Elmetiacos disputes Ranika's expertise and input to the mod. However, you cannot say Ranika is wrong without giving him a chance to defend himself. Unfortunately, he is not active anymore and there is no one else on the team with extensive knowledge of ancient Britain, so we cannot have a proper discussion about it. Presumably, the team is also unwilling to discuss it since it sparked a couple of flame wars previously.

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I can only say this: If Ranika had quoted any sources, or even given some hints as to where his information came from, it wouldn't need him to be here to defend his assertions. Almost everything I've said on the forums you can go and cross-check and on one occasion Blitzkrieg and Tiberias Nero did some checking and were able to correct my Gaulish. Ranika didn't do anything like this except on one occasion where he quoted two archaeological sites where he claimed warhammers had been found - one turned out to be Viking and the other to contain nothing but slag. Instead he went into this almost Dan Brown world of secret unpublished Gaelic manuscripts - and surprise, surprise, three years on they're all still unpublished. Once again a mighty "hmm".

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Originally Posted by Mithridates VI Eupator

Sometimes, like in the case of Casse, there are no 100% reliable sources, and that, what we can find, is often contradictory or incomplete.

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In their case, in fact, we have no sources whatsoever. They are a name in list written by Caesar and that's it.

on the sword changes:

1) thanks for recognizing the sources MP and I posted.

2) the old longswords were from the bronze age and, due to the nature of the bronze age economy, proliferated with only minor variations across a huge stretch of the ancient world. those swords, and most of the other forms of arms and armor of that period--including leaf-bladed shortswords, which were actually the more common blade, went extinct everywhere by the middle of the first millenium BC. they look nicer--beautiful in fact--but bronze is apparently not as good for long blades and killing people as an iron blade. Apparently the bronze longsword was so weak (its length was often pushed to its limit in many samples, and many samples are themselves broken, often at the tang, rather than being ritually destroyed as in later Celtic practice) that it had to have been used primarily for thrusting, rather than for cutting. Thus, even the soft iron longswords attributed to the Celts (overstatement anyone?) would be preferable and more attainable than these high quality bronze stabbing longswords.

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Originally Posted by Elmetiacos

I can only say this:

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The problem is that "you can only say this" constantly - one might say "bordering on trollishly" - despite us repeatedly stating that we are looking into the issue internally. Again, I am amazed at the depth of passion you bring to the table for something of which you are no part and have no stake. It certainly doesn't appear as though you wish to "improve" anything here, which leaves me wondering exactly what your motives are for saying the same thing repeatedly in many places.

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Originally Posted by blitzkrieg80

Actually I have found some evidence in some Germanic loanwords from Celtic - 'wire' which can prove that the monopthongised ei to ē being different between various forms of Celtic, nonetheless important in their date during EB timeline, unlike Elmetiacos' assumption that all Celtic was fully transformed:

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Which is what I've said all along! If you go back to the Materia Celtica thread, I've posited Proto-Celtic /ei/ becoming /ai/ and then /oi/ in Brythonic, giving Welsh /wy/ whereas /ei/ was reduced to /ê/ in Gaulish, which is why I had Gaisonêdes for Gaulish and Gaisonaites for British spearmen.

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Elmetiacos, it is true that a nominative plural makes most sense, but you also do not know why an -e is there. as you say, a locative or whatever is silly... so there is more going on than a simple gloss. and Casse are not Gauls either.

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Unfortunately the Casse history page says they are Gauls - they have only just arrived in Britain according to that. As far as I can tell, "Casse" looks very much like the result of a misprint in an edition of Daithi Ó hÓgain's book The Celts: a History being copied.

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Originally Posted by blacksnail

The problem is that "you can only say this" constantly - one might say "bordering on trollishly" - despite us repeatedly stating that we are looking into the issue internally. Again, I am amazed at the depth of passion you bring to the table for something of which you are no part and have no stake. It certainly doesn't appear as though you wish to "improve" anything here, which leaves me wondering exactly what your motives are for saying the same thing repeatedly in many places.

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I wasn't replying to the team in this case; yet another person came along with the "But you can't criticise Ranika!" thing. Alright, I won't mention him again.

Thank you. Sorry for snapping at you.

If it helps, there are three general gradations to work with regarding team responses:

• "I don't think this is correct and have brought it up with the team for perusal," such as much of your Materia Celtica thread. That's something the team can at the very least look at to see if it could be used to improve the mod. Nothing guaranteed, but this kind of thing is most likely to help us out and actually get us to produce things in the mod.
• "I don't think this is correct and have brought it up with the team, but am bringing it up again," such as this thread. Not very useful, as we already know. This generally gets grumpy responses because it distracts the historians from doing their actual work to repeat the same stuff they said before.
• "I am going to directly attack a team member or former team member." This is just not tolerated. "I don't agree with what Ranika wrote" is fine, "Ranika was a big fat fraud" is not. This is most likely to get you annoyed responses, or on a fast-track to bandom if we think you're trolling. Generally included in this category is also "poor deluded EB team, they know not what bitter fruits they reap."

That's about it. If you're in that first category, you're golden and we are actually inclined to listen to what you have to say as something more than noise. The further down you get, less so.

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Originally Posted by blacksnail

The dead horse - she is unable to go faster, no matter how much she is beaten. :yes:

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Heh, I'm not trying to make your life difficult. I'm just getting contradictory responses and trying to clarify the answer. I trust your judgment in this matter, blacksnail.

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Originally Posted by blacksnail

"a fast-track to bandom"

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Just to note, in case non-members think this is common: there isn't such a thing really. The team has put up with virtually everything outside of direct threats without banning people. I think only two or three people have been banned from posting in the EB fora here in all the years it has been open. I honestly think we may have lost as many team members who got fed up with our "liberality" in this regard than we have banned actual posters, or at least the number is close. Just trying to make sure it wasn't misconstrued.

I don't think Elmetiacos is trollying.
He's just defending his point of view, and I believed that here open (but polite) discussion was well-admitted.
I think that the team members are fallible mortal men as we are. :sweatdrop:

As Teleklos said, I should have stated "deliberate trolling" - ie, spoof accounts or whatnot. As he says, this is a very rare thing. I've been here since early 2006 and I remember it happening once.

Having been asked for something positive, I'll open a new thread on suggestions for Cassian history.