This is just something that I've always wondered. I've often read that names actually have meanings and aren't just a noise that we've come to associate with individuals - Alexander apparently comes from Greek to mean "defender of men," Matthew is apparently Hebrew for "gift of god."

The thing is that, obviously, when I call my brother Matthew/Matt and he calls me Alexander/Alex we don't recognise the meaning our names have - to us, they're just the "sounds" we call eachother by. But back in antiquity, did people actually call one another the "titles" that these names mean? Did people say "hail king Alexander" or was it essentially like they were saying "hail king Defender of Men!" and so on?

Weird question, but something I've been thinking about recently and would appreciate having it cleared up. thanks!

Recently read How Great Generals Win by Bevin Alexander, so, I was looking for similar books or something like John Keegan a History of Warfare. Even books that just discuss famous/key battles throughout history and what kind of strategies were used to win would be much appreciated.

I've always been interested in the tumultuous philosophical/political movements in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In particular I'm thinking of the time period pre World War 2. Were any aspects of the anarchist movement successful? How prominent was the movement? How much of a threat was the anarchist movement to the US (government, industry, etc.)? How did anarchism align with other movements of the time (labor, Marxism, suffrage, civil rights, etc.)? What were watershed moments in the movement (labor unrest, international conflict)?

Hello all. Thanks for looking at this. If you know of any resources that I could look at for this please feel free to recommend!

Obviously, the two revolutions were extremely different in a lot of ways. Why was it about the American Revolution that led to relative stability when compared to the French Revolution?

It seems fairly universal that man figured out how to smelt bronze, then iron, then steel, etc. but how did they figure out smelting in the first place? It seems like it'd have a fairly large learning curve, especially before the tools themselves could be forged.

Wasnt it a three day trip?

Why if large parts of Africa were owned by the British or French did they eventually spilt up wouldn't they be stronger united why not the united French African or something like that and why did the democratic republic of the Congo stay together was it that Belgium had better colonial skills and for South America most of South America was unified except for Brazil by the Spanish and they all had similar cultures and why did Brazil just stay as one country maybe there would be the independent rio republic

Why is the majority muslims in Egypt while Christianity came to egypt a long time before Islam?

When we think of formations in "early" war, we tend to think of the Romans; large groups of soldiers moving together in big square groups or as an advancing line a few soldiers deep. I was wondering if the Aztecs did something similar to this or if they departed from this idea. I've heard that they tended to use looser groups, but I've also heard of depictions showing them moving together quickly and closely to overwhelm an enemy. Is one of these more true than the other or does the truth lie somewhere inbetween.

Minor follow-up: Do we know of any notable specific military leaders from Aztec History?

I understand that this may be one of those things we may not have a ton of info on.

If someone asks us to picture a samurai today, we can clearly imagine the archetypal samurai that we have seen depicted so many times, but was knowledge about the samurai a common thing in the Soviet Union before WWII? Where would the average Soviet soldier on the Pacific front have gotten the idea to call his new nemesis for 'samurai'? Did Soviet propaganda paint the Japanese as samurai or was this nickname spread by the more educated among the Soviet soldiers?