Where did this claim about the Egpytian Theban army come from?
score:4
According to Homer, Egyptian Thebes had 100 gates, each capable of issuing 200 hors*m*n with associated chariots and horses (Iliad, book 9, as translated by Alexander Pope, ca. 1720):
Not all proud Thebes’ unrivall’d walls contain,
The world’s great empress on the Egyptian plain
(That spreads her conquests o’er a thousand states,
And pours her heroes through a hundred gates,
Two hundred hors*m*n and two hundred cars
From each wide portal issuing to the wars)
According to the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela's De chorographia (book I, chap 9, in a 1585 English translation)
...Thebes, which hath (as is reported in Homer) a hundred Gates, or (as other saye) a hundred Pallaces, the houses of so many Princes, eche of which Pallaces (as the state of affayres required) was wont to send foorth ten thousande armed men.
More recently this exaggeration has been repeated in fiction, where a character says
"It is," said the Doctor of Sorbonne, "because the stock of faith has greatly decreased."
A great deal was said about Thebes and its hundred gates, and of the million of soldiers that issued out of those gates with the twenty thousand chariots of war.
"Shut the book there," said Mr. Andrew. "Since I have taken to reading, I beg to suspect that the same genius that wrote Garagantua, used of yore to write all the histories."
and in nonfiction by the same author
But, who can possibly believe, that through each of the hundred gates of Thebes, there went out two hundred chariots of war, and one hundred thousand combatants ? That would amount to twenty thousand chariots, and one million of soldiers; and, if we reckon one soldier to every five inhabitants, the amount of the population of this single city, would be five millions; in a country which is not so large as Spain or France
(I cannot explain the funny math involved with 100 times 100,000 equaling one million.)
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