the Stela of the Vultures. When he looked at the representations on these artifacts
Yadin, like other scholars at the time, saw well-ordered phalanxes of spear-
bearing infantrymen clashing with each other, while four-wheeled “chariots”
sped across the Sumerian battlefield. Models of two-wheeled carts, although the
wheels were solid and the draft equids were controlled by nose-rings, convinced
Yadin that Mesopotamian chariot units were widely used in battle, and that
“[w]ith all its shortcomings, the Mesopotamian chariot was assuredly a formidable
and decisive instrument of warfare in this region. And it was used continuously
in its basic original form throughout the whole of the third millennium.”^6 Placing
both phalanxes and chariots in the Early Dynastic period, Yadin saw “normal”
warfare beginning almost as early as civilization itself:
During the second half of the fourth millennium, and more markedly during
the third, the foundations were laid for the principles of warfare and the basic
types of weapons and fortifications which prevailed during the succeeding
3,000 years—indeed, right up to the discovery of gunpowder in the 15th
century A.D.^7This picture of highly developed warfare (with the onagers and “chariots”
front and center) in the Near East during the third millennium BCstill appears
regularly in histories of ancient warfare.^8 A stark alternative, however, is available.
To the traditional view a trenchant paragraph in Doyne Dawson’s The First
Armiesoffers a bold challenge that is incapable of proof but likely to be much
closer to the truth:
[T]he wars of complex agrarian societies seem always to turn on the clash of
masses of foot soldiers in more or less disciplined formations. It is hence
commonly and not unreasonably assumed that state-level warfare of the
Clausewitzian type must have arisen simultaneously with the rise of the state
in about 3000 BC, and that infantry warfare arose at the same time. But it will
be argued herein that in fact there was a startling time gap, two thousand years
long, between the rise of the state and the rise of state-level warfare. Three
stages can be discerned in that long transition. Clausewitzian warfare became
technically possible with the development of city states in Mesopotamia by
3000 BC, but the evidence suggests that did not happen. Instead, the first states
poured their resources into fortification, a purely defensive strategy which
prohibited offensive warfare; insofar as offensive warfare existed, it was
probably little different from that of the Stone Age, and no more effective as
an instrument for achieving political objectives. In the second stage, after 1700
BC, offensive wars between well-organized states became common, but this
was a type of warfare unlike any before or since, relying upon elite groups
of horsed chariotry, with such infantry as there was in a passive and subsidiary
role. Finally, after 1000 BC, the first true infantry formations appeared, as did
the first true cavalry, and the art of war as we know it was born.^9Warfare in Western Eurasia 59