Archaeological evidence for warfare after 8000 bce, including mass burials, weapons caches, and razed villages, covers a broad swathe of Eurasia, from modern Belgium to north China, and similar evidence appears, though significantly later, in the Americas. Interestingly, most of it is associated with evidence suggesting levels of political organization that rise to no more than chiefdoms. The areas where urban, state-level societies first arose, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley, and, a little later, north China, seem not to have been the areas of most intense warfare. Thus, though warfare enhanced the power of leadership in chiefdoms, intense warfare in prestate societies seems not to have been a sufficient stimulus to even higher levels of political organization. Indeed, the destructiveness of warfare may have hindered the accumulation of resources and the concentration of population necessary for the rise of the first states. (Once states existed widely, the ascent from chiefdom to state was easier because models to copy and resources to exploit existed already.)
The result was that the appearance of warfare in history predates the appearance of true state-level societies by about 5000 years, and, for almost another 1000 years after the rise of urban states, warfare was not the focus of states’ political organization or activity. Early city-states in Mesopotamia engaged in warfare regularly but at low levels of intensity (at least as far as we can tell), and the self-image of rulers was far more often connected to their religious roles than to their leadership in war. Egypt, unified into a kingdom early on after what looks like a brief and low-intensity period of armed competition, and isolated by the deserts surrounding the Nile valley, lived through nearly a millennium of civilization virtually without war or armies. The archaeological record of the Harappan civilization of the Indus valley in Pakistan is ambiguous enough to prevent firm conclusions about the role warfare played there, but it does not seem to have been prominent. The early states of the Yellow River valley in north China may have fought more often, but the warfare appears to have been limited in scope and intensity. Indeed, the energies of early city- states outside of Egypt were mainly devoted to the struggle to harness nature’s fickle rivers through irrigation. It was probably the internal organizational imperative connected with irrigation that combined with war leadership to push chiefdoms in Mesopotamia to state level between 3500 and 3000 bce. Mesopotamian developments almost certainly influenced the rise of states in Egypt and the Indus valley. Chinese states emerged, probably independently, by about 1000 years later. Still, even if early states were not focused on war making, war constituted an important part of their history, and urban political organization had important consequences for the patterns of warfare.
The Standard of Ur
The Standard of Ur is a wooden box inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli. The “War” panel, shown here, depicts an army that includes spearmen, swordsmen, and heavy four-wheeled chariots drawn by asses or onagers. The “Peace” side shows what may be a postvictory feast.
Cities and War
The emergence of state-level societies was marked above all by the appearance of cities (except perhaps in Egypt, where various urban centers were rapidly subordinated to a precociously centralized kingdom). As massive centers of gravity in political, administrative, economic, and social terms, it was inevitable that cities would also become the focus of the warfare conducted by city-states. The centrality of cities to early warfare is reflected in the archaeological evidence: Even the earliest Mesopotamian cities are surrounded by major walls clearly designed for defense against hostile armies. Massive walls had surrounded even earlier settlements, the best-known example being the famous walls at Jericho, dating to around 7000 bce. But those walls were not as obviously designed for defense against human enemies, and the most recent interpretations see them arising initially as mechanisms of flood control. At cities such as Uruk, on the other hand, the presence of towers placed at intervals along the walls and jutting out from them so as to provide angles for flanking archery fire leaves no doubt as to the purpose of the structures.
The fortifications that extended in many cases around a perimeter of several miles, often to a height of more than 30 feet with bases up to 60 feet wide (the walls of Mesopotamian cities were basically earthen, faced in baked brick, and so had to taper upward from a broad foundation; the walls around the early cities of the Yellow River valley were similarly constructed of rammed earth), suggest the use of conscript peasant labor. This same pool undoubtedly provided most of the soldiers for urban armies. Given the limited populations and resources early cities could have harnessed to war efforts, it is probable that such armies were essentially part-time militias with little training and only a small core of elite warriors connected to the monarch. In addition, the pictorial evidence for early foot soldiers, as in the Standard of Ur, shows very light or nonexistent armor and few weapons other than simple bows and spears. Warfare in such a physical and social context was thus dominated by sieges, not just because defeating an enemy meant breaking into his city, but because armies were not yet instruments capable of fighting decisive battles. Battles undoubtedly occurred but were also undoubtedly minimally led affairs. Furthermore, the lack of cavalry meant that such armies had little capacity to exploit a victory in pursuit, and so defeated armies could usually retreat within their city walls where they had to be besieged. Sieges were difficult, however, for if a surprise assault did not break a city’s defenses immediately (and the height of city walls made scaling difficult whether by surprise or during a siege), an earthen ramp had to be built up to the top of the wall to make an attack possible. Failing that, cities had to be starved into submission, and the besieging army was as or more likely to run out of food first.
Small and unprofessional armies, massive walls, and limited logistical capabilities meant that the defense had a significant advantage, and successful attacks depended on putting together coalitions of several states, coalitions that proved hard to sustain. Thus, for almost a millennium after the appearance of the first cities between 3500 and 3000 bce, Mesopotamia remained divided into numerous independent states waging indecisive, low-intensity warfare under royal war leaders such as Gilgamesh (see the Sources box “Gilgamesh and Images of Kingship”). The early history of China looks similar, and the same must have been true of the Indus valley if those cities even engaged in warfare. Egypt was a united kingdom, but one lacking in warfare during this period.
Akkad and the Origins of Empire Around 2400 bce, some rulers seem to have begun to find ways to transcend the limitations of city-state warfare. The process appeared decisively with Sargon, the king of Akkad, who sometime between 2400 and 2250 (the dates are uncertain, though normally accepted as 2371-2316 bce) created an empire that may have stretched from the Mediterranean to the southern Iranian plateau, encompassing most of Mesopotamia. Although the empire barely outlasted its creator, and we know almost nothing about how Sargon constructed or ruled it, Sargon’s success pointed the way toward later developments.
The basis of Sargon’s success seems to have been his ability to maintain a small standing army: Inscriptions from his reign claim that “5400 soldiers ate daily in his palace.” A permanent force would have given him a significant advantage in siege warfare: Not only could he have maintained sieges over greater durations, but several innovations in siege techniques appear, probably as a result of accumulated expertise made possible by a permanent force. Mining, or digging through or under the walls at chosen spots, is referred to in the sources, and pictorial evidence shows siege machines that look essentially like large battering picks, sometimes covered to protect them from missiles lobbed from the walls. To counter defensive missile fire, Sargon’s engineers deployed mobile siege engines that acted as platforms for firing back from a height at least equal to the defenders’. They also worked out ramp building with precision and could therefore rapidly force a city to negotiate a surrender to avoid an inevitable sack. At the same time, personal infantry weapons saw gradual improvement. More powerful composite bows supplemented simple bows, increasing the range and penetrating power of arrows significantly, and bronze swords began to appear in greater numbers as slashing weapons.
Crisis and Recovery The Akkadian Empire was probably never more than a loosely ruled confederation, and it collapsed completely around 2200 bce. But its demise coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the beginning of the collapse of civilization in the Indus valley, and probably with a period of crisis that preceded the emergence of the first historical dynasty, the Shang, in China. This pan- Eurasian crisis of early Bronze Age societies suggests some deeper causes than simply political weakness. Many historians point to environmental factors, including climate change combined with local ecological degradation resulting from intensive farming, and the limits of early states’ material and cultural capacities for organizing their societies, as crucial in explaining this crisis.
Yet in all cases save India, where the Harappan culture disappeared and state-level societies did not emerge again until after 600 bce in the Ganges valley (see Chapter 2), recovery followed the period of crisis. The Egyptian Middle Kingdom and the Babylonian Empire of Hammurabi rebuilt and extended the states of their predecessors, using military techniques essentially unchanged from earlier times. It was only after the collapse of Babylon and the Middle Kingdom around 1700 bce and a period of disorder and invasions from beyond the margins of civilization that middle Bronze Age states achieved more intense political organization. New kingdoms emerged beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century bce. New forms of sociopolitical organization intimately tied to new military technologies, combined in the person of the chariot warrior elite, led the way.
Being a war leader was one element of the image of kingship projected in both literary and pictorial sources. Here we present a carving of Hammurabi receiving authority from the sun god Shamash and the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh, each depicting aspects of a war leader in the world’s first civilization.
HammurabiSurpassing all kings, powerful and tall beyond all others, violent, splendid, a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader, hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers— fortress they called him, protector of the people, raging flood that destroys all defenses— two-thirds divine and one-third human, son of King Lugalbanda, who became a god, and of the goddess Ninsun, he opened the mountain passes, dug wells on the slopes, crossed vast oceans, sailed to the rising sun, journeyed to the edge of the world, ...
renewing the statues and sacraments
for the welfare of the people and the sacred land.
Who is like Gilgamesh? What other king
has inspired such awe? Who else can say,
“I alone rule, supreme among mankind”?
The goddess Aruru, mother of creation,
had designed his body, had made him the strongest
of men—huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.
The city is his possession, he struts through it, arrogant, his head raised high, trampling its citizens like a wild bull.
He is king, he does whatever he wants, takes the son from his father and crushes him, takes the girl from her mother and uses her, the warrior’s daughter, the young man’s bride, he uses her, no one dares oppose him.
source: Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh: A New English Version (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 71-72.