In the world of news, spin and self-promotion, there is no more useful tool than numbers – numbers in abundance, all types of numbers, large and small, in every shape and form. Anything will do to prop up a line, enforce an argument or serve self-interest in an environment where truth and lies are interchangeable and, nowadays, usually indistinguishable. The numbers twist and turn, take on countless shades and are fabricated with reckless abandon, passed around as facts.
There is nothing new about this at all. Big surprise. In my experience as a historian, there is never anything new. We can start with Shakespeare before going much further back:
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hand clutch’d as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say
‘Thou liest’ unto thee with a voice as free
As I do pray the gods.Coriolanus III.3
Pepi I was the third king of Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty and reigned c. 2300 BC. He made war on the Bedouin and, so he claimed, recruited an army of “many ten thousands” – a suitably vague total that made his force seem as big as the reader felt like imagining. And that, of course, was the whole point.
When the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Thutmose I (c. 1504–1492 BC) fought a war in Nubia during his second regnal year, he recorded in a triumphant inscription how so many enemy archers had been killed that the valleys were “flooded with their innards”. Even the birds had allegedly been overwhelmed and could not make off with all the grisly remains.
The text is so relatively early in the tradition of recording historical events that it is hardly surprising the description is unsophisticated and non-statistical. Enumerating the fatalities wasn’t a priority. The point was to be colourfully and bombastically descriptive. Metaphor was the order of the day but back then all you needed was the metaphor. Any Egyptian fatalities (and there must have been some) were ignored.
Later in the reign, the warmongering Thutmose headed north into Syria. Another inscription records inflicting a massacre. This time, he adopted a cryptic phrase that implies he had killed all the captives because “no census” was taken of the living prisoners. He either meant there weren’t any to be counted because they’d all been killed, or there were so many living prisoners (destined for enslavement) it wasn’t worth bothering to count them.
Later, Ramesses III (c. 1186–1156 BC) illustrated another technique for bragging about enemy casualties. The walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu on the West Bank at Thebes (Luxor) are still decorated with reliefs showing piles of severed hands and genitals of the fallen enemy. These are accompanied by an inscription recording the actual numbers of hands and foreskins (3,000 of each), but this was far less important than the visual impression of the piles.
Officials pile up the severed hands of captives at Ramesses III’s mortuary temple, Western Thebes. Numbers abound, easily identified by the inverted ‘U’ symbol which represents ‘10’
By Graeco-Roman times, historians were far more likely to cite figures – always rounded and usually extravagantly large. Obviously, no-one had gone around counting bodies. Even if they had, the time separating the events from when historical accounts were written was usually so great that they were hopelessly unverifiable. Worse still, all we have are medieval copies of copies of copies of the originals, allowing for numerous errors in transmission.
But, just as for the Egyptians, that wasn’t the point. Figures were bandied about for propaganda purposes and to provide graphic metaphors. By resorting to vague approximations like ‘thousands’ or Thutmose I’s metaphors, the scale then becomes as varied as people’s individual imaginations. Few people realise that Homer never described the Cyclops. He merely alluded to the Cyclops’ characteristics and left the reader or listener to imagine the monster. That is exactly how numbers are used.
The Roman historian Tacitus stated confidently for the benefit of his audience that while 80,000 Britons fell in the battle ending the Boudican Revolt in Britain in AD 60, only 400 Romans had been killed. The outcome was certainly in the Romans’ favour, but the figures are clearly both rounded and implausible. He was writing half a century after the event anyway.
Such claims had a long tradition. The Roman imperator Sulla said his army had killed 20,000 soldiers under Marius the Younger’s command at Signia in 83 BC with the loss of only 23 of his men – or so Plutarch reported in the early second century AD after reading Sulla’s autobiography.
When the Roman historian Livy researched the size of the Roman army assembled in late 217 BC during the Second Punic War against Carthage, he found his various unnamed sources disagreed about the numbers and types of additional recruits. “I should hardly venture to declare (these) with any certainty”, said Livy, before explaining how the figures differed, drastically affecting the possible number of legions and men involved. He made no attempt to decide which was more likely, recognising that since he was writing two centuries after the event, he had no means of forming a judgement.
This did not trouble the Romans, for whom the actual numbers of casualties were neither here nor there. All they cared about was whether they had won or not, and something to help them understand the degree of their triumph (or disaster).
There are so many instances of imagined, invented, manipulated and falsified figures from other times that I only have room here to mention a few.
In A Journal of the Plague Year, which covered the events of 1665 in the reign of Charles II, Daniel Defoe researched the death figures but concluded:
Besides, I must still be allowed to say that if the bills of mortality said five thousand, I always believed it was near twice as many in reality, there being no room to believe that the account they gave was right, or that indeed they were among such confusions as I saw them in, in any condition to keep an exact account.
Defoe was thus convinced that the official figures were woefully low. Conversely, during Covid it soon became clear that those dying with Covid had been mixed up with those dying from it. Even then, the matter of comorbidities and other chronic underlying conditions was neatly glossed over in the rush to depict the virus as being as universally lethal as possible.
In another context entirely, when the Nazis started up, membership numbers were allocated starting with 500 to make the party look bigger than it was. Ingenious, but also characteristic of their unmatched cynicism.
In the modern era, you might have thought that we could have moved on. We live in such an enumerated era that we seek – even crave – numerical precision about everything, especially in war and disasters.
But we have not moved on at all. When the numbers pop up, as they invariably do, and regardless of who the source is, they are usually treated as factual by those who want to believe them and refuted by those who do not. Neither side has any means, usually, of prevailing over the other.
During Covid, Imperial College’s No. 9 Report (Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand) famously opined:
In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in G[reat] B[ritain] and 2.2 million in the US (p. 7).
That figure was intended to grab headlines – and it did. It then escaped the original report and took on a life of its own, thanks in no small part to the tedious habit of journalists to pounce on apocalyptic possibilities. In this instance, it was not even a retrospective exaggerated estimate but a nebulous prediction. It was turned into a spurious ‘fact’, even though it had not yet happened.
When the 510,000 deaths proceeded not to happen, the figure was still treated as if it had been an inevitable certainty, only offset by the Government’s measures. Like an Escher drawing of an endless staircase, the claim goes round in circles getting nowhere.
Buying figures at face value undermines the reporting of news at every level. On May 20th 2024, the Telegraph’s coverage of events in Gaza was typical:
Some 14,000 babies in Gaza will die in the next 48 hours if aid does not reach them, the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs has said.
Tom Fletcher told BBC Radio 4 that “we need to flood the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid” in order to save lives.
“I want to save as many as of these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours,” he said.
Asked how he reached the 14,000 figure, Mr Fletcher said: “We have strong teams on the ground – and of course many of them have been killed.”
As the story grew, the figure of 14,000 was treated as factual – even though, like Imperial College’s ‘510,000’, it was a prediction, and in this case apparently plucked out of the ether, not even the conceits and selective modelling mathematics of a scientific report.
Tom Fletcher morphed into ‘The UN’ for the Labour MP Nadia Whittome who, according to the Telegraph:
In a post on X, she said: “The UN warns that in the next 48 hours, 14,000 babies in Gaza could die due to Israel’s blockade.”
Gradually, as the penny dropped, the story was reined in. By May 21st on Radio 4’s Today programme the figures had been converted to “thousands”. Claire Menara of Doctors Without Borders was interviewed and distanced herself from the specific numerical claim:
“We’re not able to confirm the numbers, not from my standpoint, here but we are seeing every day on the streets and in our clinics the condition of people is deteriorating. So, the number of children that are coming in with third-degree burns is horrific. We haven’t had any medical supplies allowed in since March 2nd so our medical supplies are critically low.”
On May 23rd the story was clarified – if you can call it that – in the Guardian (as it was elsewhere):
UN officials had to retract Fletcher’s claim of deaths within 48 hours by saying he was referring to a UN technical report on food insecurity classification that said 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition could occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026. The report’s timeframe is one year and not two days, as mentioned by Fletcher.
It is obvious that a catastrophe is unfolding in Gaza, regardless of who you believe or blame, but it is fascinating to me that we still bandy figures around as if they were literally true and treat them as such. In the case of the Gaza babies story, their tragedy was pushed to the back as the saga turned into arguing over whether the numbers of imminent deaths were true or not.
The basis of substantiation is almost invariably the status of the person who comes up with the figures in the first place. This closely resembles the claimed validity of some of the figures churned out during Covid and to do with climate alarmism. Both reflect an almost wilful desire to use any opportunity to maximise the apocalyptic tone of reporting or modelling, but also to pursue an agenda.
If you want further evidence for how no-one has moved on, you need only consider the words of Thucydides when he wrote his account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century BC:
My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eyewitnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.
He also bemoaned the effects of tradition, noting that merely because something was enshrined in tradition it was then accorded the status of a fact. Nonetheless, that didn’t stop him citing numerous figures for the size of armies and never explaining where he had found them.
That is precisely how Imperial College’s claimed prospect of “510,000” deaths turned into a tradition and a fact simultaneously. It proved an enduring trope during the Covid period. Although it was a number, it was really being treated as a dramatic metaphor, designed both to provoke terror and to legitimise strenuous and unprecedented controls on movement and behaviour. Now it seems the Covid Inquiry has been told that Boris Johnson, in reality, wanted tighter Covid rules to deal with those who resisted the rules to self-isolate.
What then should we believe? If we believe one figure, we might as well believe them all. If we disbelieve one, then why should we believe another? Can we trust anything we are told? How do we assess the plausibility of the source of any of these figures? What is peddled as the truth one day is discredited the next by an alternate reality, which itself is then usually toppled by another claim.
In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan remembered a childhood experiment to write out all the numbers up to 1,000:
The magnitude of large numbers has never ceased to amaze me.
In the end, large numbers are mostly meaningless to the human mind, whatever we like to pretend, beyond the metaphorical. We react to them emotionally, not rationally, as the young Carl Sagan did. Virtually nobody is ever in any position to assess their plausibility – or lack of. We rarely know how they were totted up in the first place, yet we are bombarded with them night and day.
Does all this matter? Yes. In the ancient world, few people could read the inscriptions or texts that bragged about war successes. In our complex, fractured and traumatised world, we are confronted by figures from every direction. Increasingly, no-one knows what to believe, or even whether they should believe anyone or anything at all.
One of the paradoxes of huge numbers is that they obscure the individual. The more there are, the less they mean anything to us, as Jane Austen so memorably pointed out after news of the Battle of Albuera (May 16th 1811) arrived. The casualty numbers remain only the subject of various estimates to this day, but oscillate around 12,000–15,000:
How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!
Jane Austen, letter to her sister Cassandra, May 31st 1811
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His most recent book is The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome. A History of the Ptolemies (2024). His next book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (August 2025).
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.