makes the south Caucasian rapiers earlier than those from the Aegean and Byblos.
With their very rudimentary (single rivet) hilting, the south Caucasian rapiers
are more likely to represent the beginning of a tradition than to be a regression
from the multi-riveted rapiers found in the Aegean.^193 In short, it appears that in
the lands south of the Caucasus, very early in the second millennium BCand perhaps
already late in the third, men worthy of being buried each in his own kurgan were
accustomed to carrying a rapier. That these men had used the sword in combat is
not demonstrable, but enough specimens have been found for us to see that in
southern Caucasia the rapier was not a ritual object or an extravagant curiosity
reserved for royalty but a standard badge of distinction for men in the upper tier
of a ranked society. Above I have suggested that some of these men may have begun
employment as charioteers by the rulers of Crete late in the MM II period, which
is to say shortly before 1700 BC, and that it was from south Caucasians that Cretan
royalty adopted the rapier (and then improved upon it) as a symbol of power.
Although the history of the Type A rapier began in southern Caucasia, it was
not there that the further development of the sword took place.^194 That happened
instead on the Greek mainland and in the Carpathian basin, places where swords
had previously been altogether absent. Chapters 5 and 6 will trace the rapid
evolution of the sword from the Type A rapier to the much more serviceable Type
B sword in Mycenaean Greece, and to the formidable Boiu rapier and the short
Apa sword of the Carpathian basin.
Summary
In the first half of the eighteenth century BC, if that is when Hammurabi ruled
Babylon, wars were frequent in Mesopotamia. A war here was usually for
conquest: a Great King had ambitions to add yet another city to his network of
vassals. The war would begin and end with the aggressor’s siege of the target city,
an operation requiring thousands of laborers as well as a much smaller number
of archers, slingers and hand-to-hand warriors. When kings went to war in the
Iron Age they normally first met in battle, and the loser would retire to his city
to await a siege by the victor, but early in the second millennium BCthat was not
the case. When Hammurabi or one of his contemporaries went to war his
ÉRIN.MEŠ(not yet an army in the usual sense of an armed force) proceeded
directly to the alien city in order to lay siege to it.
While the siege was a common occurrence, pitched battles between two armies
had apparently not yet begun. The only battles in open country attested in our
sources for Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant are an ambush of an ÉRIN.MEŠ
or a mêlée when a king’s force of spearmen and archers (usually recruited from
nomadic tribes) went out on campaign to attack other nomads who were causing
trouble. In an ambush or a skirmish most of the fighting was probably at long
range.
Weapons in the eighteenth century BCwere not as efficient as they were soon
to become. In the Near East the long-range weapons were the sling-stone and the
bow (usually a self bow) and arrow. For hand-to-hand fighting, which occurred
96 Warfare in Western Eurasia