One of the recurring questions on this sub is about how warriors could tell friend from foe on the battlefield before the era of modern uniforms. These questions get great replies from AH's resident military historians, who usually point out the inaccuracy of the chaotic scrums depicted in movies and point out that in most cases, premodern armies fought in dense formations, so that "friends" were the ones beside and behind you and "foes" were the ones facing you. But it's always struck me that this answer makes more sense for large-scale infantry combat than for smaller-scale and/or cavalry combat.

Lo and behold, I was reading the Bāburnāma (the autobiography of Bābur, the first Moghul Emperor), when I came an anecdote about a raid gone wrong. Accounting for what happened, Bābur writes (in Annette Beveridge's translation, with some of my comments in [ ]):

"The explanation of the affair seemed to be that some of Ayūb Begchīk's Mughūls [allies of Babur] had slipped away from Aūsh to raid near Andijān and, hearing the noise of our troop, came somewhat stealthily towards us; then there seems to have been confusion about the pass-word. The pass-words settled on for use during this movement of ours were Tāshkīnt and Sairām [important cities held by the Mughūls.] If Tāshkīnt were said, Sairām would be answered; if Sairām, Tāshkīnt. In this muddled affair, Khwāja Muhammad 'Ali seems to have been somewhat in advance of our party and to have got bewildered,--he was a Sārt person,--when the Mughūls came up saying, 'Tāshkīnt, Tāshkīnt,' for he gave them 'Tāshkīnt, Tāshkīnt,' as the counter-sign. Through this they took him for an enemy, raised their war-cry, beat their saddle-drums and poured arrows on us. It was through this we gave way, and through this false alarm were scattered!"

Bābur adds a further note on these pass-words: "Pass-words are of two kinds;--in each tribe there is one for use in the tribe, such as Darwāna [trap-door] or Tūqqāi [relationship?] or Lūlū [pearl]; and there is one for the use of the whole army. For a battle, two words are settled on as pass-words so that of two men meeting in the fight, one may give the one, the other give back the second, in order to distinguish friends from foes, own men from strangers."

So there you have it, from the Tiger's mouth: at least in Transoxiana, at least around 1500, password systems were used to distinguish allies and enemies on the battlefield!

I’ve asked this before & it was fun, so asking again - what upcoming books are you excited about?

I am persistently baffled by the lack of name recognition for Enheduanna.

I understand the pragmatic part of it - less Mesopotamian scholars exist than Classicists - less people read Cuneiform than Latin - but seriously - the first author in recorded history and she ends up basically as a footnote?

Also… major speculation alert

…I’ve been reading up on her from a philosophical perspective and if you understand her to be talking about the gods as personifications of ultimate ‘things’ that correlate to the human experience - when she talks about ‘Inanna’ - who has variously been described as the god of ‘love/sex/war’ - but on my reading can also be described as the god of ‘Eros’ in the Greek sense (I.e. a desiring agent desiring something for its own sake’) - or else the god of ‘Will’ - you can read her hymns to Inanna as basically a treatise setting out the supremacy of a ‘willful god’…

Which got me thinking. Abraham was from ‘Ur’ - I did some reading and although there’s a bit of back and forth on precisely which ‘Ur’ and precisely when Abraham lived - if you follow Ockhams Razor to probably the same Ur Enheduanna was the defacto governor of (one of the most important cities in the region) - and if you accept some recent scholarship that puts his lifetime within 300 years of Enheduanna…

…THEN SURELY this is at least worth a bit of investigation. Hell - even just a thought experiment.

At the very least - kids should grow up all over the world learning the name of the first author in recorded history. IMHO etc. etc.

Where can I read about the lives of defectors from the West to Soviet Union (after the defection)?

I have family from Hidalgo so I wanted to ask, after the collapse of the the toltecas, where did the people end up? Like I know the contemporary indigenous peoples in Hidalgo are Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua for the largest populations today but given how groups and people migrate (and also might have if the collapse involves famine or Bastidas disaster), I figure it’s not a given that the Toltec just became the modern groups. But my Toltec history is way more weak than my Mexica history so I’m not familiar if toltec is just an overarching name for an empire with various groups within it like other empires and governments.

Thank you :)

I'm going to repeat what I said last week just in the hope of getting a reply from one of our distinguished historians. I've read books and articles about how so many concepts we take for granted as eternal and universal are in fact relatively recent and contingent: "race", "nation", "religion", "state" (this one causing a lot of controversy in a recent answer here!), "sexual orientation" etc. I am curious if anyone has ever argued this about "class" (in a Marxist sense), or if that concept is different somehow.

I was thinking about Frank Olson and the claim that the CIA did him in because they feared he would blab about biological weapons in Korea. Seeing as how the US bioweapon program was nowhere near feasible for such a claim, what reason could the CIA have for wanting to kill him?

what was the economy like before world war 2?