Art Friday : A Peek into the Ancient World with Johnny Shumate

Friday, October 31st, 2008, 12:00 amRoys

While games are a great way to simulate interest in the various (violent) periods of human history, they aren’t exactly the best way to learn history since most games (with the exception of the more hardcore wargames) are after all entertainment products which have to carefully balance between playability and historical accuracy (yes, even Rome : Total War - that’s why there’s the Rome Total Realism mod).

Since not everyone enjoys reading history books, I believe that illustrations do a better job at dispensing nuggets of interesting historical facts with a significantly smaller investment of time. And if it encourages you to pick up a related book to learn more, all the better

I therefore present today, one of my favourite historical illustrators, Johnny Shumate, whose impressive portfolio of warriors throughout the ages is a veritable treasure trove for history buffs who always wanted to visualize the warriors (especially those from ancient Greece and Rome) mentioned in books.

For example, you’ve probably read that each Phalangite of the Macedonian armies under Alexander The Great used to carry a 6 metres spear known as the sarissa. You can’t really envision how long and unwieldy a sarissa is until you see it been pictured in use.

The classic phalanx formation of the Greek hoplites (and in this case the Macedonian Phalangites as idenitified by their distinctive helmets).

Romans in combat with the Gauls. As pictured, the unarmoured Gauls were unable to resist a Roman charge for long despite their well-known valour.

One of the famous Scythian horse archers. Gobryas, one of the eminent Persians who had accompanied King Darius in his futile attempt to subjugate the nomadic Scythians, was quoted in Herodotus’s Book IV of The Histories as having interpreted the Scythians’ gift of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows to King Darius as follows:

Unless ye become birds and fly up into the heaven, O Persians, or become mice and sink down under the earth, or become frogs and leap into the lakes, ye shall not return back home, but shall be smitten by these arrows.

The Battle of Kadesh during the 13th century BC - one of the earliest recorded battles of the world - the earliest being the 15 century BC Battle of Megiddo.

Some famous personalities of the ancient period.

King Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great.

King Pyrrhus of Epirus who won two victories over the Romans at the expense of enormous and irreplaceable casualties, thus giving birth to the term Pyrrhic Victory.

Ephialtes of Athens. Neither the anti-Spartan Athenian politician, nor the Ephialtes who betrayed the Spartans at Thermopylae but an exiled Athenian officer in the service of Memnon of Rhodes, the commmander of the Greek mercenaries under the King Darius III of Persia. Ephialtes is pictured here sallying out from Halicarnassus in 334 BC to attack the Macedonian besiegers and their siege engines.

As mentioned earlier, Johnny Shumate doesn’t just only illustrate ancient warriors. Below are a trio of Waffen SS troops defending Berlin against the Red Army in 1945 and a Rhodesian infantry soldier with a FN FAL.