Context: Modern historians debate and argue over historical events. Meanwhile the sage Vyasa dictating the Mahabharata to Lord Ganesha, showing that ancient historians simply recorded massive, made-up casualty counts - something shared across the globe.
Part of it is that many pre-modern armies also had extremely limited ability to estimate the numbers of their enemies, as they often lacked professional scouting units who specialize in such matters - even some early modern ‘rationalized’ attempts at scouting with collations of multiple scouts’ record-keeping and long-distance observation tools like binoculars, like the Pinkertons in the US Civil War, could come up with double or triple the actual numbers of the enemy.
On the other hand, Procopius, a Late Roman/Byzantine writer, accuses Emperor Justinian of killing a trillion people (‘a myriad myriad of myriads’ - ‘10,000 * 10,000 * 10,000’), and 50 million in Libya alone. So uh, there’s definitely a taste for big numbers with some pre-modern writers.
accuses Emperor Justinian of killing a trillion people (‘a myriad myriad of myriads’
Guy kinda sounds like a dick
I mean, Procopius also wrote that Justinian walked around with his head detached from his body in that same text, so it may not be the most accurate of sources.
(even speaking as someone who fucking hates Justinian)
How would YOU know, you weren’t there to see for yourself. Dude was probably a Dullahan.
Justinian walked around with his head detached from his body
Massive dick
Also the Buddha had lived for trillion times the theoretical age of our universe (big bang to heat death) before reaching enlightenment
Mahabharata
I maybe a bit biased but it is the greatest epic there is.
Anyway, when Sage Vyasa requested Lord Ganesha’s help, Ganesha agreed—but with a crucial condition: Vyasa must dictate the story continuously, without pause. In exchange, Vyasa proposed that Ganesha should write only after fully understanding each verse.
I’ve read a shortened version - I found it lacking in comparison to a modern fantasy novel. I didn’t really care about the characters, their motivations were strange, the build up to the war felt forced, it’s unclear why seemingly every leader in the world cares enough about the brothers’ conflict to send their forces and have them all die, and it wasn’t clear how exactly the heroes were killing so many enemies so quickly (thousands in a matter of minutes I believe?).
But then, making any sense might be irrelevent for the function of myth.
