[HN Gopher] Ancient soldiers used sound to frighten and confuse ... ___________________________________________________________________ Ancient soldiers used sound to frighten and confuse their enemies (2022) Author : tintinnabula Score : 18 points Date : 2023-04-03 04:42 UTC (18 hours ago) (HTM) web link (theconversation.com) (TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com) | cronix wrote: | Kind of like the Stuka Siren/Scream[1] sound combined with the | doppler effect the German planes used in WW2 to make that wailing | sound that increased in frequency as they dive bombed. That sound | carried quite a distance and instilled fear in anyone who heard | it, which affected more people than those that were bombed. The | Tie Fighters in Star Wars used a similar sound. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhJ8HY24Pb8 | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | Another example is Gideon from the Bible where they smashed a | bunch of jars and blew trumpets in the middle of the night which | caused the enemy to think they were being attacked by a large | army and caused them to fight each other. | viraptor wrote: | Another one to add to that collection: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars Polish heavy cavalry | with wings making loud buzzing noise during charge. | bitsinthesky wrote: | Do you have an example handy of the sound they'd make, maybe a | youtube video? Sounds interesting. | twic wrote: | There's a bit in Xenophon's Anabasis (1.8.18) where the armies of | two contenders for the throne of the Persian Empire, Cyrus and | Artaxerxes, meet in battle. Cyrus's army has a contingent of | Greek mercenaries, including Xenophon, who gives the Greek view | of the battle in some detail. The armies draw up into lines and | slowly advance towards each other, until suddenly the Greeks | charge: | | kai ama ephthegxanto pantes oion to Enualio elelizousi | | and at the same time they all uttered the cry as for the Warlike | One [ie Ares, god of war] | | kai pantes de etheon | | and all flew forward | | legousi de tines os kai tais aspisi pros ta dorata edoupesan | | they say that some loudly beat their shields with their spears | | phobon poiountes tois ippois | | sowing fear among the horses | | (the Greek is Xenophon's [1], the English my crummy translation) | | So, screaming and drumming to scare the enemy and his horses! | | The reason i remember this bit about thirty years later is that | the word for a war-cry here is "elelizousi", "elelizousi". My | teacher suggested that this was onomatopoeic, because the cry | itself was "ELELELELELELE...", which would be pretty easy to make | as you were running towards an enemy, and would be pretty | upsetting to hear, coming from thousands of armoured Greeks. As | sort of evidence for that, the same word also means "to whirl | round" [2], and you can imagine that whirling an object round on | a string (as with a sling) would also make the same sort of | sound. Wiktionary reckons it's from some proto-Indo-European | root, but what do they know, they've probably never charged | anyone in their lives, the nerds. | | [1] | https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... | | [2] | https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%29leli%2Fzous... | UI_at_80x24 wrote: | My personal favorite item related to this is various peoples that | used slings would carve lead/stone ammo to make a high-pitch | whistle as the bullets flew through the air. | analog31 wrote: | No mention of the bagpipes. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-03 23:01 UTC)