Introduction

For many historians, military history begins with the classical Greeks. Warfare in World History, for example, starts with the battle of Thermopylae {480 BCE}.¹ The very useful Reader's Guide to Military History has one entry on ancient Egypt and another on the ancient Near East, but eight on the classical Greeks and another eleven on the Romans.² The Art of War in World History devotes eleven of its 1069 pages to warfare before the Greeks.³ Likewise, the World History of Warfare devotes only twenty-nine pages to the pre-Greek and Persian Near East.⁴ This common misconception of military history beginning at Greece is off by a mere 2500 years. In purely chronological terms, half of all recorded military history occurred before the battle of Marathon {490 BCE}.

On the other hand, there is certainly some justification for the Hellenocentric approach to early military history, largely because the surviving source material for Greek military history alone probably exceeds the entire corpus of surviving militarily significant sources from the ancient Near East from 3000–500 BCE. Furthermore, the sources for ancient Near Eastern military history are written in a number of obscure and difficult languages which are seldom studied by military historians. All these languages still present numerous philological difficulties and uncertainties. Compounding these problems, we find that many of the sources are laconic, tendentious, fragmentary, and contextually obscure. Furthermore, many modern scholarly studies on ancient Near Eastern military matters are published in specialist journals of limited accessibility, often burdened by nearly impenetrable technical jargon and abbreviations and a bewildering array of unpronounceable transcriptions of ancient words. Despite these problems, however, there is a vast vista of ancient Near Eastern military history which remains essentially terra incognita to many military historians. The goal of this study is to synthesize our current knowledge of early ancient Near Eastern military history in a form that is accessible to the broader range of military historians who do not specialize in ancient Near Eastern studies.

Those general surveys of military history which deal with the ancient Near East to some degree frequently do so by giving a brief passing nod to Thutmose III {1504–1452 BCE} at Megiddo, Ramesses II {1304–1237 BCE} and the Hittites at Kadesh, the Assyrian Empire {930–612 BCE}, and perhaps the Bible, before turning to the Greeks.⁵ Important as these events and periods are, they are but a small portion of the vast array of ancient Near Eastern military history, and the repeated emphasis on these same events necessarily distorts the overall understanding of warfare in the ancient Near East. Indeed, this present study concludes at the end of the Middle Bronze Age {c. 1600 BCE}, before the battles of Megiddo {1482 BCE} or Kadesh {1274 BCE} took place. Even within this limited timeframe I found myself hard-pressed to selectively synthesize the available source materials into the 544 pages of this book.

Geographically this study encompasses the modern countries of Turkey (Anatolia), Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq (Mesopotamia), western Iran, and the modern states of the Arabian Peninsula. However, due to the nature of the surviving sources, most of the emphasis will be on Mesopotamia and Egypt. Chronologically, this study ranges from the origins of warfare to the end of the Middle Bronze Age around 1600 BCE; again because of the nature of the surviving sources, the focus will be on the period from roughly 3000 to 1600 BCE. The selection of the year 1600 for ending this study is based on three considerations. First, major social and political transformations occurred around this time, as reflected in material culture; scholars use these transformations as the criteria for the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Ages. Second, this period of transformation is marked politically by the fall of Babylon to the Hittites {1595 BCE} and the beginning of the rise of New Kingdom Egypt in Thebes {1569 BCE}. Finally, the sixteenth century BCE witnessed the final emergence of fully developed chariot warfare, creating the “chariot age”, which would dominate Near Eastern military history for the next half millennium or more (which I hope to examine in a future study). I will present both a narrative of military history and an examination of military systems and ideologies of different kingdoms and cultures in the ancient Near East during this period

Chronological issues

Chronological notation conventions

Unless other wise noted, all dates are BCE (Before the Current Era = BC) or, in other words, before the traditional year of the birth of Christ. I have adopted the convention of placing dates within pointed brackets { }, with parentheses ( ) used to identify sources, and square brackets [ ] marking editorial insertions into quotations of sources, to help contextualize and clarify the intent of the source. A number followed by a “C” refers to a century: hence {25C} means the twenty-fifth century BCE. A number preceded by a “Y” refers to a regnal year: thus {Y 15} refers to the fifteenth year of the reign of the king under discussion. Regnal years are generally also translated into the equivalent years of our current calendar when known.

Sources for chronology⁶

While scholars of modern military history can sometimes temporally define military events down to the hour and even minute, historians of the ancient Near East often debate about which century a ruler lived in. The systems of scholarly periodization of the ancient Near East present the non-specialist with a bewildering variety of names and periods which I have attempted to simplify and systematize. There are a number of different methods by which scholars attempt to discover chronological information for the ancient Near East. Each of these methods has its advantages and limitations; the most secure dates are based on a complementary combination of as many chronological methods as available.⁷

The overall goal of these methods is an attempt to establish absolute chronology, in which ancient events are correlated to precise years in our modern calendar. For much of the ancient period, in most of the regions of the ancient Near East, dates for an absolute chronology are unfortunately not available with certainty; historians must therefore rely on other forms of periodization based on estimates derived from a combination of other dating techniques. These include:

· Synchronism, which searches for the correlation of chronologically significant events in one text with another, or with astronomically datable events.

· Dendrochronology, the study of the patterns of tree rings for certain species of trees which vary according to differing climatic conditions for each year, allowing the year a tree was chopped down to be determined.

· Radiometric dating, which provides approximate dates derived from measuring the decay of radiological elements (such as Carbon 14) found in all organic matter.

· Relative or stratigraphic dating, based on analysing the relative position of an artifact in relation to other artifacts found at a given site (EA 5:82–8).

· Typological dating, comparing form, pattern, color, material, and construction techniques of the remains of material culture (EA 450–3). This type of dating is generally associated with pottery typologies, but weapon typologies are also very important for military history.

By painstakingly fitting together thousands of minute technical chronological data from these and other forms of dating, archaeologists have been able to identify the broad chronological patterns of ancient Near Eastern history, and establish an absolute chronology for much of the history of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Unfortunately, a number of ambiguities and uncertainties in the data permit several different overall ways of interpreting the chronological information, and hence different chronologies.

For the most part this study will not deal with technical questions of chronology. Instead, I will accept the “Middle Chronology”, as used in the standard reference works such as The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (EAE), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (EA), and Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (CANE).⁸ Specific chronological charts for regional periodization will be provided for each chapter. I should emphasize, however, that there is ultimate uncertainty in much of the chronological information from the early ancient Near East. Generally speaking, the older the date the more uncertain the chronology.While all dates given here are more or less problematic, I will use the abbreviation “c.” (for the Latin circa, or “approximately”) when giving chronological information that is especially dubious. Even though the dates given are often mere guesses, I have chosen to use dubious dates rather than no dates at all, in order to help the reader keep at least a relative sense of chronological periodization and development through time. We must remember, however, that these dates are sometimes little more than chronological pegs on which mentally to hang our information, rather than temporal absolutes.

Periodization

There are a number of additional different ways scholars categorize ancient chronological information besides trying to give a date in our modern calendar. The first is the appearance of writing, which alone allows us to give precise dates and specific names to people, places and events. Periods before writing are prehistoric, while societies with surviving written source materials are historic. The transition point between prehistoric and historic is different for each region of the world. Some regions of the world–Australia for example–remained prehistoric until the eighteenth century CE. In Egypt, on the other hand, the first evidence of writing is about 3000 BCE; thus, before 3000 is prehistoric, while after 3000 is historic. However, it is generally the case that the first evidence of writing is often so sparse and laconic that it provides the historian with very minimal information–sometimes nothing more than the name of a king. We thus often speak of a protohistoric period, where the number of written texts is so limited that it provides us with only fragmentary historical knowledge.

A second method of periodization is based on archaeological study of the primary material used for tool making: stone, copper, bronze, or iron. Broadly speaking, archaeologists speak of three great “ages” in the ancient Near East: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age (EA 4:267–73). The Stone Age itself is divided into subperiods: Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Epipaleolithic (Late Old Stone Age)⁹ and Neolithic (New Stone Age). In addition, there is a transitional period from the use of stone to the use of metal, in which the first signs of working copper appear; this period is known as the Chacolithic (“Copper-Stone” Age), which generally corresponds with late Neolithic in most regions of the ancient Near East.

This system of periodization by tool manufacturing has its own particular set of problems. First, based on the tools alone, no absolute chronology can be determined; assigning specific years in the modern calendar to each “age” results from synchronisms (discoveries of chronological matches or overlaps) with historical texts, radiometric dating, and archaeological stratigraphy. Second, each of these archaeological ages begins at a different absolute date in different regions of the Near East. Thus, the Bronze Age in Egypt begins later than the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. Some isolated regions of the world, such as parts of New Guinea or the Amazon, for example, were still in some ways in the “Stone Age” until the early twentieth century. Third, the dividing line for these periods generally represents centuries of transition. Stone or bronze tools often remained in widespread simultaneous use for centuries after their “ages”, according to the archaeologists’ periodization, technically ended. From the military history perspective, this system is somewhat unsatisfactory. In Egypt, for example, flint arrow heads were still in widespread use during the Middle Kingdom, even though Egypt was technically in the Middle Bronze Age by that time. It must be remembered that the transition between tool ages is based on when the technology first appears, not on when it is universally adopted. For the ancient Near East, the following is a very rough periodization by tools (based on EA 4:269–70), with the caveat that each region has its own specific chronology with different periods of transitions. Egypt, in particular, generally entered these phases several centuries later than the rest of the Near East. Table A shows a chronology of the Ancient Near East, based on the materials used for tool making.

Archaeologists also classify chronological periods based on a matrix of material culture discovered at, and named after, specific archaeological sites where a particular combination of material culture was first discovered. Thus we find in Egypt a discussion of the Faiyum culture, the Moerian period, as well as the Maadi, Badarian, Naqada or Gerzean; all of these, however, are simply specific regional subphases of the Neolithic period in Egypt. These periods of material culture are often subdivided into phases, which are generally given Roman numerals. In order to minimize confusion and complexity, throughout this study I will mainly use the dynastic and tool-based methods of periodization since these are the most relevant to military history. I will generally convert pottery-based subphases of material culture into their dynastic or tool-typology equivalents. At the beginning of each chapter I will provide a chart which attempts to correlate all these different forms of periodization for the region under consideration.

Historical geography and ethnography

The historical geography and ethnography of the ancient Near East is also a complicated subject. One problem is that the modern location for most place names mentioned in ancient texts is not known for certain. Even capitals of major empires, like Akkad of the Akkadians and Washukanni of Mitanni, have not been identified with certainty. The same place might be called different names in different languages; place-names can also change with time. The kingdom of Mitanni, for example, was anciently called Mitanni, Maitta, Hurri, Khanigalbat, Khabigalbat, Naharina and Nahrima (DANE 200). Furthermore, different scholars often translate a single ancient term differently; likewise the English, German, French, or Italian usages are sometimes quite distinct. All of this is further complicated by the fact that many ancient sites are called by their modern Arabic names, even after the ancient name has been discovered. Thus, the ancient Ebla is also frequently called by its modern Arabic name Tell Mardikh. For the non-specialist, this can create immense confusion. As a general rule I will select one standardized modern spelling for ancient place names, and consistently use it throughout this study. Alternate place-names will generally be given in parentheses or in notes; all alternate spellings in quotations and translations will be standardized. Thus, for example, I will consistently use the modern standard English spelling for the city of Aleppo, rather than Yamkhad (ancient Near Eastern name), Beroea (Hellenistic name) or Halab (Arabic name).

Different ancient peoples at different times also defined themselves and others differently, and such ethnonyms (names of peoples) could change through time. Many different ethnic groups inhabited the same region simultaneously, with some groups disappearing and others appearing in different periods. Migration was common in the ancient Near East, causing frequent changes in ethnography. Furthermore, what groups called themselves was often different from what foreigners called them. For clarity for the non-specialist, I have decided to use a simplified, standardized, and consistent–though necessarily somewhat arbitrary– system for describing ancient ethnography. Broadly speaking, I will use the following terms for peoples living in the following modern regions:

Map 1 The Near East

Using this method is unsatisfactory in many ways. It is rather like calling ancient Gauls or Franks by the modern term French; or, more drastically, like referring to the Iroquois as New Yorkers. While recognizing the problems with this approach, my goal is to make ancient ethnography and geography more accessible to modern readers. When introducing new ethnonyms I will always try to place them in their proper geographical and chronological setting and give variant spellings. Thus, when, introducing the Hittites and Luwians, I will say they are “Anatolian” peoples, even though the land the Hittites and Luwians inhabited was not called Anatolia until nearly a thousand years after the age of the Hittite Empire.

Sources

Before roughly 1820 CE, all of our knowledge of the ancient Near East was found in the Bible and in classical Greek and Latin sources. During the nineteenth century the decipherment of ancient Egyptian {1822–1843 CE} and the cuneiform writing systems {1802–1852 CE}, along with the rapid development of the discipline of professional archaeology, transformed our knowledge of the ancient Near East. Indeed, the rediscovery of the lost history of the ancient Near East through archaeology and the philological decipherment of dead languages is one of the great intellectual sagas of mankind.¹⁰ Nearly all of the sources for ancient Near East history used in this book have been discovered through archaeology in the past two centuries. From these two centuries of archaeological effort we have four types of source materials available for the study of warfare in the ancient Near East:

1. texts, in a wide range of genres including royal inscriptions, year names, autobiographies, hymns, letters, administrative texts, myths, epics, and other literature;

2. martial artwork: artistic representations of arms and combat, generally patronized by kings for royal propaganda and aggrandizement, or as religious veneration and thanksgiving to the gods;

3. fortifications;

4. weapons and other military-related artifacts.

Each of these categories of evidence is complementary, offering different perspectives on ancient warfare, but each also has special methodological problems relating to their interpretation. Some of the technical issues relating to specific artifacts, art, or texts will be introduced throughout this study. Here some general methodological considerations will be discussed.

Textual sources

The textual sources of ancient Near Eastern military history before 1600 are largely in three primary languages: Sumerian, Akkadian (including Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian dialects), and Egyptian. Hittite texts become crucial for Anatolia and Syria in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. A large archive of administrative and economic texts also exists in Eblaite, which are of indirect interest to the military historian.¹¹ There are a number of other ancient Near Eastern languages which are poorly attested or poorly understood, or for which we only have a body of names mentioned in texts written in other languages. These include Elamite, Hurrian, Amorite, Byblos Syllabic, and Old Canaanite; these languages have few significant texts for military history.¹² The linguistic Babel of the ancient Near East is further compounded by the fact that many crucial secondary studies are in German, French, and Italian.

Another problem in dealing with ancient Near Eastern sources is that there are a number of different ways to transliterate ancient words and names and to translate technical military terms. Some of the translations I have cited use different transliteration systems. I have opted to follow the spelling and transliteration systems found in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (EAE), the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (EA) and the Dictionary of the Ancient Near East (DANE). In order to make understanding easier for the non-specialist, I have standardized alternative spellings in sources which use different spelling and transliteration systems. Thus, I use the spelling “Montuhotep” for the famous Middle Kingdom Egyptian rulers. If sources I quote use the alternative spellings Mentuhotep or Mentuhotpe, I have simply changed their spelling to conform to the EAE system without comment.

Likewise, certain technical military terms can be translated in different ways by different translators. I have chosen to standardize many of these as well. For example, the Egyptian term imy-r can be translated in different ways according to context. In texts relating to work crews it is perhaps best rendered as “overseer”. In a military context the translation of “commander” is probably more appropriate. The problem is that different English words are sometimes used by different translators to translate this single Egyptian word. Thus, many of the translations I am quoting have been slightly modified by me for consistency of translation of technical military terminology. I generally give a transliteration of the original term I am translating when the concept is first introduced. I also make extensive use of square brackets [ ] to indicate my insertion of explanatory terms into a translation to provide background for the non-specialist reader. For example, when a text states “I am the lord of the land” (L 249), I might modify it to read “I [the god Shamash] am the lord of the land [of Mari]” to clarify the context.

I have made a consistent effort to give as many sources in translation as possible. Throughout this study I have given preference to citing English translations in accessible editions, though this has not always been possible. I have generally not given full bibliographic references to the standard editions for these sources in the original languages. Instead, I have included references to translations or commentaries which include full bibliography on original language editions and studies. Those who wish to consult the original languages can find that information in the secondary literature and commentary on the translations I have cited. Such primary studies are thus at most one bibliographic step away in my notes and references. I have also adopted a fairly extensive system of abbreviations to keep the size of the notes and parenthetical references to a minimum. These abbreviations can be found on pages xv-xxiv.

Art and weapons

Martial art and surviving weapons are a crucial source for the military history of the ancient Near East. Throughout my study I have made extensive use of such sources. Unfortunately, due to publication costs, it has been impossible to include illustrations of all the items I discuss in the text. Whenever I make reference to a particular work of martial art or weapon I attempt to give references to recent and accessible publications which have reproduced that art, preferably in color. I will frequently give multiple references to reproductions of the same piece of art to help those attempting to track them down. I also try to get a full verbal description for those who cannot get access to the images, though such descriptions are invariably inadequate.

The interpretation of martial art has its own set of methodological problems which I will discuss on occasion throughout the text. Three major problems are idealization, contextualization and anachronism. Idealization is where the martial scene is presented in an idealized or ritualized context–how things should have been, rather than how they really were. This is a nearly ubiquitous problem with ancient Near Eastern martial art, since nearly all of it was patronized by kings or nobles in order to glorify their martial achievements. The second problem, contextualization, is more subtle. It is attempting to determine what precisely the art is intended to depict. For example, the famous “Standard of Ur” includes scenes of Sumerian war-carts trampling defeated prostrate enemies (AFC 98–9; FA 84; AW 1:132–3). The question is: does the art mean to depict war-carts in the midst of battle as they knock down enemies in combat, or does it show an after-battle triumph where the war-carts are paraded among the corpses of the dead who have already been killed by infantry? Such questions plague the interpretation of a great deal of ancient martial art. Finally, there is the question of anachronism; this is especially a problem in the context of ritual or mythological martial art. Here the essential problem is: do the weapons of the kings and gods represent the actual weapons used in battle at the time the art was made, or are they idealized mythical weapons which are no longer actually used in combat? Here the example of

Christian religious art depicting the archangel Michael with a sword is analogous. Such art in medieval churches may depict actual contemporary weapons, while a depiction of Michael in a twentieth-century church–still with his sword rather than a machine gun–is clearly anachronistic. Likewise the British Royal Horse and Foot Guard continue to parade with archaic weapons and uniforms that are no longer used in actual combat. Four thousand years from now an archaeologist might be puzzled by what seems to be the continued use of sword-armed cavalry in the age of machine-guns, tanks and airplanes.

What is war?¹³

For anyone who has been in one, it seems silly to ask the question “what is war?”. Only those who have experienced it can really know, and for them there can be little doubt as to what it really is. I have been fortunate to never have experienced war at first hand. I missed the Vietnam War by only a few months, with a draft number of 53. In one sense this should disqualify me from even discussing the topic. By what arrogance do I–who have never killed anyone or had anyone try to kill me–talk about warfare? But in reality, that is not my purpose here. My function is to collect, synthesize and present what the peoples of the ancient Near East had to say about warfare. My function is that of interlocutor, to serve as an intermediary for voices of ancient warriors–now dead for thousands of years– and let them tell their stories. I am, of course, not so naïve as to believe that I can tell their stories without necessarily distorting their past through the prism of my own ideas, beliefs, ignorance, and limitations. But, as much as possible, my goal is to present and elucidate the ancient texts, art, and artifacts related to war.

For the purpose of this study, I am not overly concerned with formulating a precise definition of warfare; I am actually rather dubious that such a thing could be done, or if it could that it would be very useful. Different definitions of warfare are often related to the fact that anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and other scholars, although all dealing with the same phenomenon, each approach the issue by asking different types of questions and attempting to answer those questions with different types of evidence and methodologies. Our concern, then, should not be defining “what is war?”, but rather, “what type of model or definition for warfare is most helpful in understanding the issues and questions related to the strengths and limitations of a given discipline, methodology or body of evidence?” A universally useful definition of war is not only unattainable, but undesirable. Rather, such definitions should be viewed as more or less useful models for answering a specific range of questions with certain types of methodology. The overall issue of warfare should be explored with as many different perspectives and methodologies as possible. My goal here, however, is not to formulate an idealized model describing what “tribal warfare”, “chiefdom warfare”, or “state warfare” was supposedly like (FA 48–73). Rather, I will pay close attention to the evidence we have describing what was actually done by specific individuals at specific times and places. My particular approach here is thus historical, though I will gratefully incorporate the insights provided by anthropology, archaeology, and other disciplines as frequently as possible.

It is odd that, in attempting to define warfare, so little attention is often paid to the indigenous concepts of warfare of the peoples being studied. Rather than trying to decide what we think warfare is, we should begin by asking ourselves what do they–the objects of our study–think warfare is. This is the important anthropological distinction between insider and outsider perspectives and forms of discourse. It is more interesting to the historian to discover what the ancient peoples thought they were doing when they fought wars, than how modern scholars choose to describe or model what we think ancient peoples were doing. From the perspective of ancient Near Eastern peoples, war was conceived of as something altogether different from the activity often described as war by anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. Feeding and equipping armies certainly occurred in the ancient Near East. Ancient soldiers marched and fought, and killed and died, just like modern soldiers. But for ancient Near Easterners that was not what was really important about war. For the ancients, war was the means by which the gods restored cosmic order through organized violence undertaken in their name by their divinely ordained kings. Or, to put it in Clauswitzian terms, “war is the continuation of divine policy by other means”. Whatever other modern models we might wish to apply to our study of ancient Near Eastern warfare to help illuminate certain questions, this definition must never be far from our mind. Throughout this study I will try to pay careful attention to the ideologies of warfare as conceived by ancient Near Easterners.

To the modern mind this definition of war is almost incomprehensible, particularly since in the wake of 9/11–the destruction by terrorists of New York's World Trade Center in September 2001–we tend to view warfare in the name of God as something abhorrent. In reality, however, throughout most of history and in most regions and cultures, there has been an intimate connection between religion and warfare, so much so that one could argue that ancient Near Eastern warfare was, in many ways, a form of religious worship and mass sacrifice.

To the modern advocating the superiority of the veneration of a god of love and peace, the ancient would simply reply: “Why would I possibly want to worship a god who cannot bring victory in battle?” To the outsider, four thousand years removed from this world-view, there is something unsatisfying and even disturbing in this perception of war. But only when we understand this key concept–that ancient Near Eastern war isn't really about maces and javelins and fortresses, but is a theomachy, a “war of the gods”–can we begin to understand ancient Near Eastern warfare. From their perspective it is not that humans cynically invoke the gods to justify fighting their human wars. It is that the gods use the humans to fight their divine wars. The cosmic war between good and evil, order and chaos, is ongoing; the gods simply recruit mortals to fight in that war. To understand the ancient Near Eastern view of war is to read of the acts of the gods in Homer's Iliad not as literary metaphor but as an absolutely authentic description of the actual presence of real, cosmicly powerful beings using humans as their pawns.

But, to return to the world-view of the twenty-first century: rather than attempting a narrow definition of warfare and ignoring all war-like human behavior that does not fit this definition, I will, instead, adopt a loose and broad definition of war and war-like activities. In its most universal form, warfare is simply organized violence between rival human groups. Under this broad definition, “gang wars” over drug territory in a ghetto would be a form of warfare. Thus, in some sections of this book I will take this perspective, considering fighting between small forager tribal groups as just as “authentic” a form of warfare as World War Two. But most of the attention of this book will be focused on state-sanctioned organized violence, directed at either destroying rival political entities, or forcing them into submission. Much of ancient Near Eastern warfare also had an important economic component, either to enrich the gods, king and warriors directly, through the acquisition of slaves, plunder, or tribute, or indirectly, by controlling access to important rare resources such as tin, lapis lazuli, or cedarwood for building timber. All of these factors–religion, politics, and economics–had an overlapping and integrated impact on war-making in the ancient Near East; although we view them as causally separate, they would generally not be clearly distinguished in the minds of ancient kings and warriors.