Did Great Walls Really Work? (Rome, Persia, and China) DOCUMENTARY

In this history documentary we explore the common tropes of Great Walls. Most often they are portrayed as the edges of civilization, beyond which no one ventures. The defenses boast a single set of massive, long walls whose primary purpose is to serve as a bulwark against invasion and their greatest threat is the inevitable clashing of armies upon them. However upon closer inspection of the historical record we find that these ideas are more myth than fact. We explore each idea in turn by using the frontiers of Rome, Persia, and China as references for how huge empires actually defended their borders.

Bibliography and Suggested Reading:
"Hadrian's Wall" by Adrian Goldsworthy
"Pax Romana" by Adrian Goldsworthy
"The Sassanids" by Kaveh Farrokh
"The Great Wall of China (221 BC–AD 1644)" by Osprey Publishing
"The Archaeology of the Great Wall of the Qin and Han Dynasties" by Xu Pingfang

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:38 Ad Spot
04:37 Edges of Civilization
09:49 Beyond the Wall
13:24 Defensive Designs
16:57 Borders in Action
21:06 Battle for the Walls
25:00 Outro

[snippsnapp]

The Maginot Line also worked as intended. The French never expected Germans not to try an circumvent it. It effectively turned 350 kilometres of the front line impassable and defendable with a lower amount of troops than you would need without the fortifications. France got conquered for other mistakes, not because of the ineffectiveness of their fortifications.

[warspiteschannel]

You missed another function of walls - customs and excise. The builders can charge taxes on goods passing through the walls and ensure that good quality weapons are not being sold to hostiles.

[vampirecount]

Interestingly, the old Disney animated film Mulan (of all things) accurately portrayed the use of the Great Wall of China. Where it was used as a warning system and not as a fortification.

[BlaBla-pfmf]

Some great walls were part of an in-depth defence. The wall of Anastasius and the Long Wall of Gallipoli were meant to defend the suburbs of Constantinople and the Straits from smaller, faster raids that bypassed roman fortifications in the Balkans but the ultimate defence against an enemy army was the Theodosian Wall.

[ScoobyDoo-zpsq]

The Chinese historically had issues with raids from highly mobile nomads. They would ride in and out at will and it was extremely costing to maintain a large standing army to patrol such large areas. Having a wall in place would not only act as a barrier but would give warning to the local garrison and population a threat was incoming. The only times the wall was penetrated was when China was in the middle of a civil war (Mongols) and not unified or the local general was bribed to open the gates (Manchu)

[monegal]

That's why military forts like Vindolanda where built a bit far from the wall, so the soldiers could react from the backlined to an attack on a wide section of the wall

[Intranetusa]

Interesting video. To add, the ancient Chinese Han Dynasty (200s BC - 200s AD) built walls and forts that were used offensively as launching pads to stage an expeditionary invasion into enemy territory, and were also used defensively to warn and temporarily hold off against enemy attacks until defensive armies could react. It was along these series of fortifications and walls that beacon towers would be used. The Han Dynasty was able to use walls to go on the offensive because they had spent many years building up a large and powerful "mobile" army composed of cavalry and mounted infantry that were able to chase down and "pin" the nomadic tribes - thus forcing the nomads to commit to battle. It was this strategy that allowed them to decisively defeat the powerful Xiongnu Empire - chasing the northern Xiongnu away towards the west and vassalizing the southern Xiongnu into culturally "Chinese" people. Later dynasties would try to repeat these methods with varying degrees of success.

[saturnv]

In Game of Thrones defense, the Wall is so tall it basically acts like a geographic feature.

[TSInfiMa-rz]

In the books, the wildlings picked the section with a hill place against the Wall. They then sent expert climbers to scale the wall before dropping ladders down for the rest.

[andrewsuryali]

Massive attacks against the strongest point of a great border wall did happen in Chinese history during the Warring States Era. The Hangu Pass defending Qin was twice attacked by a coalition of almost all the other states, in 247 and 241 BCE. The Hangu Pass was the strongest point in Qin's Guanzhong (Central Plains) defense wall and its walls were twice the height and depth of the rest of the walls along the border. The coalition had to attack this point simply because it was too hard to organize a more "nuanced" strategy between what were ostensibly still enemy states in the long run. In 241 BCE Grand General Pang Nuan of the Zhao took the initiative of basically leaving his bickering allies behind at the Pass and went through a weak point at another location along the wall to flank the Qin capital of Xianyang. He was forced to turn back at the city's gates because his allies' cohesion broke down once they realized he'd done this. The five allied kingdoms (Zhao, Yan, Chu, Wei, and Han) almost fell into infighting right there in front of the wall until Pang Nuan (or his subordinate Li Mu) managed to shift blame to the sixth state of the coalition (Qi) who had failed to show up at the Pass. The entire giant army then turned around, crossed all the way to the opposite side of China, and smacked Qi around for the next few years.

[swordsnspearguy]

suddenly i have the urge to write something where some of these tropes are justified while still being accurate to how frontier defenses were used great video as always found it both informative and inspiring

[Ranyick]

In the game Chivalry 2 there’s a map called Baldwin which features a massive wall which defends the Southern border of the kingdom of Agatha and actually consists of a main wall (referred to as the “bullwork”) and a smaller wall in front of it. There’s also a small town between them.
I love how it actually features multiple layers of defenses instead of just a single great wall

[seanpoore]

I think The Wall from ASOIAF is a oretty good example For Fantasy, at least in the books. Theres only one big assault on it every thousand years or so, there IS lots of interaction between the southern and northern halves of the wall (sonetimes trade but Mostly raiding) its big enough to actually Be an effective deterrent, and its main use/function is magical not purely military fortification

[LordWyatt]

A very biased lawyer once tried to convince my class that walls don’t work but my response was that they did until the enemy found a way around them. The Mongols rode around the Great Wall, the Crusaders in 1204 had to take the Theodosian walls by sea or they would have failed, the Muslims (among many other people) drilled under walls to destroy them. Walls stopped working when the firepower caught up to them and even then they were useful against anyone with not enough of it. WW2 was the death knoll for walls in my opinion.

[ironiccookies]

In Game of Thrones, the white walkers simply went to the end of the wall by the coast where it was less guarded and with an undead dragon blasted the wall down. The Night's Watch would often conduct operations into the north against Wildlings. And the Wildlings wouldn't care about attacking the wall if it weren't for the white walker threat. All they wanted was to retreat south of the wall. The only problem is that there is absolutely no multi-layered defense. Once someone got past the walls, it was open undefended land down to Winterfell. You can argue The Gift is there, but it's really just a piece of land owned by the Night's Watch with small towns and villages, and not defended at all.

[RocketHarry]

Honestly Martin should have taken the more historical approach with the North Kingdom and the Night Watch having outposts mixed amongst the southern Wilderling tribes with the Southern Free-folk having cultural and unoffical political ties with the Northmen showing that the wall is merely the formal marking of the border not the end of the zone of influence. This would have gone a great extent of having a little more immersion and more room for world building.

[MustafaH-he]

I thought this was obvious since, even with machine guns, it took millions of men to maintain fortifications on a similar scale during world wars. How could a handful of men stop armies? And even during the world wars, without radio, telephone and rail, it would have been impossible to stop the lines from collapsing.

[zigisamblak]

I mean if they didn't work they wouldn't have spent millions of man hours creating them. The walls of Constantinople were invincible until they brought in a massive cannon, that's when wall defenses became mostly obsolete. The modern day wall is a trench and it's still effective and widely used.

[matthewbrooks]

I love this channel. These one-off videos about specific subjects are my favorite.

[guyfawkes]

You never have to question the usefulness of wheels or walls.