Shaka Zulu vs. Julius Caesar - A Historian Reacts - Epic Rap Battles of History

welcome back everybody well it's been a while but we're gonna dive back into epic rap battles of history uh today we're gonna take a look at chaka zulu vs julius caesar uh in the coming days this week just to give you a heads up about what else is coming i'm finalizing uh my script uh with my research on reconstruction so you can expect a forgotten history episode on reconstruction later this week also a wednesday day after tomorrow we're going to begin a multi-part reaction series to the history of the ottoman empire in turkey it's an area of history i know very little about so i'm excited to learn and i look forward to i know we have fans who live in that part of the world i'm looking forward to hearing your perspective because i'm sure you know a lot more about that history than i do so i'm excited to hear that as well also i'm putting up a vote over on patreon for all of our patrons regardless of level uh and to what our next reaction should be after the turkey series so let me know your thoughts on that by voting right now and let's dive in to shaka zulu vs julius caesar [Music] [Music] wrap [Music] so a couple of things there and i'll admit right up front i don't know nearly as much about shaka zulu as i know about uh julius caesar so i'm going to probably get more references related to julius caesar than i do about shaka but i can remember as a kid watching a tv series on shaco zulu that was really really good and i remember even as a kid just thinking it was really well done i know shaka lives in the early part of the 1800s uh he's in a lot of ways kind of considered the the father of uh what would come later the power of the zulu tribe uh all the way up to uh kind of when they hit their height of their power in the anglo-zulu war and so uh that great victory that the zulu have over the british at the battle of uh island luana is thanks in large part to something that this guy did 60 70 years earlier in innovating and kind of um updating the tactics they came up with this famous kind of what they call the bullhorn tactic it was a particular way of drawing the enemy in and then encircling him and hit him on both flanks and it was used as it at island luana uh to defeat the british there obviously they had 10 times the number so that didn't hurt either but um it talks about cleopatra in africa julius caesar very famously has this relationship with cleopatra she's cleopatra the seventh technically uh and like many who came before her she was married to her brother in fact you want to look at a weird weird-looking family tree look at cleopatra's ancestors because basically she has like four ancestors all the way back through her family tree it's like the same inbreeding over and over it's multiple generations of siblings marrying each other and cousins marrying each other it's amazing to me that cleopatra came out normal at all through all that inbreeding but she has a child that she says belongs to caesar they called him cesarean and he was most likely killed around the age of 17 on orders of um caesar augustus octavian when he came to power you talk a lot of [ __ ] for a man wearing a diaper i heard you had poison spit where was it in this cipher cause all i hear is so boot full of citizens so he's obviously talking about italy because it looks like a boot the whole thing now he talks about no discipline from shakazulu but honestly that's what shaka brought to the zulu that they didn't have before was organization and discipline and kind of modernizing as much as possible as much as you can modernize you know people who are very much living kind of in the stone age as far as their uh their weapons go and things like that but he really did kind of modernize their tactics you should take your cow skin shield and hide under it you're [ __ ] with the most triumphant third of the triumvirate birth to the empire and last of the republicans and hunting you accompany my legions of my country so a bunch of things there he refers to the you know uh the best third of the triumvirate uh caesar was part of this triumvirate with uh pompey magnus uh and with crassus who uh both were really considered to be much more important crassus was like the richest guy in rome pompey was rome's greatest general caesar was kind of the afterthought of the three but he's the one everybody remembers the most now but it certainly wasn't that way at the time and he talks about being the last of the republicans because caesar becomes a dictator at the end of his life that's why he gets murdered by the by the senate uh and after him follows yet another civil war another triumvirate and in the end they end up with an empire in the form of the first emperor who is uh caesar augustus where's my kidnappers if i'm just a [ __ ] talker jump on you like boom so don't go rattling your sticks at me if i wanted to shake spears i'd waggle my biography i don't know if it's a biography julius caesar by william shakespeare but he did have kind of an autobiography a lot of what we know about caesar's life and especially about his campaigns in places like gaul comes from his own writing which you need to take with a grain of salt because obviously he's writing in such a way to build himself up and kind of create the legend of caesar so he probably fudged a lot of things but you know to the victor the victor gets to tell the story tell me how does it get oh yes you can stop many times by your friends so what you're gonna do with your own sword where the lines of your legion get caught by the horns of the zulu so there he refers to the horns of the zulu and and again they had this kind of bullhorn formation that i talked about earlier and that was really what the zulu were known for it and it's believed that shaka was the one who implemented that and everyone knows you're just a chicken so a reference to caesar salad there uh the zulu were known for their speed and uh one of the reasons why uh when word comes at rorke's drift and again this is 60 years after shaka's time at rorke's drift the reason that they didn't just run is because they knew they couldn't outrun the zulu the zulu were known for how quickly they could move uh across the plains they would cross incredible distances in a short period of time and then still arrive ready to fight i do find it interesting that he gives caesar a hard time about having been murdered by his friends because shaka was assassinated by his own brothers uh so you know really not much better of an ending cause i'm going to laugh with the bones of your goat hurting out my front lines you can grow my wheat for me after you're beaten uh so i mean the zulu live much further south they were in south africa but a lot of the grain supply for the roman empire came from egypt they relied very heavily on that in fact that was one of the reasons why in the aftermath of caesar when they had this another triumvirate with um i can't forget who was but it's it's octavian who becomes caesar augustus it's mark antony uh there was a third guy his name's escaping me at the moment but he was almost kind of again like an afterthought um but uh marc anthony starts withholding the grain supply from the romans um and that's kind of the trigger that causes the war between anthony and octavian there were a lot of other factors but that was one of the things that brings that situation to a head uh is the the withholding of grain supply hoping you know for more money yeah honestly i don't feel like either one of them did particularly better than the other and i'm sure i have no doubt i missed some references please let me know the things that i didn't mention i'm sure there are quite a few like little things that i just don't know the deep enough history especially for shaka to be able to um to catch all of those things but just on the surface i feel like caesar won but maybe it's just because i don't get you know it's close i can't really pick a winner and i know it's kind of a cop-out answer but let me know your thoughts use the comment section below let me know what else we i missed let's have a conversation about shaka talk about why he was as remembered as as prominently as he is of course we all know caesar's story but let's talk a little more more about shaka maybe we'll even do some more uh videos on him and on the zulu at some point it's a period in history that i'm kind of interested in i just watched zulu and zulu dawn in the last couple weeks great movies for their time that tell an interesting and forgotten part of history so hit that like button i put the link in the description to the original video so you make sure to go over and check them out and give them a like as well thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 89,775

Keywords: epic rap battles, erb reaction, epic rap battles of history reaction, shaka zulu erb, epic rap battles of history, shaka zulu vs julius caesar, caesar vs shaka zulu rap battle, shaka zulu vs julius caesar rap battle

Id: mVahhPIP87Q

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021