value in conquering Old Europe: “A well-equipped warrior on the ground is formid -
able enough, but on horseback he undoubtedly became a terrifying opponent.”^16
The corollary of Gimbutas’ thesis, although seldom stated, is that through the rest
of the Neolithic and through all of the Bronze Age men in temperate Europe fought
from horseback.
These are profound misconceptions, I am quite certain, and much more about
early warfare remains to be explored. The goal of this chapter is to separate what
is assumed from what is known about warfare in western Eurasia before the
introduction of chariots. At the outset it must be admitted that for most of western
Eurasia few conclusions can be drawn, and even those few are tentative. Because
for prehistoric Europe and the Eurasian steppe the subject of warfare is almost
totally obscure, we must take a long and close look at the Near East. There our
documentation is full enough—especially for Mesopotamia—to make at least a
few pertinent observations. Recent surveys by Doyne Dawson and William
Hamblin have helped to bring together much that is known about warfare in the
ancient Near East. Aaron Burke’s study of early siege warfare is illuminating, and
also valuable are a variety of other specialized studies, including the essays edited
by Philippe Abrahami and Laura Battini in Les armées du Proche-Orient ancien.^17
Those of us who are not Sumerologists or Assyriologists are fortunate that
thousands of early cuneiform texts have now been translated into one of the modern
languages: the ongoing translations in the Archives Royales de Mari, and the
translations by Jerrold Cooper, Ignace Gelb, Burkhart Kienast, and Wolfgang
Heimpel.
Warfare in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC
Although warfare was common, and almost constant, in the ancient Near East
during the third and early second millennium BC, the kind of warfare with which
Near Easterners were familiar was not what a modern reader would expect. This
has seldom been recognized by military historians—Dawson’s book is an
exception—and it is still widely assumed that all through the third and early second
millennia a Near Eastern king took a sizeable army out on campaign and sent it
into battle against another king’s army. That assumption is without support. What
evidence we have suggests that warfare normally meant the siege of a city, and
not a battle in the open country.
Ideas about warfare in Sumer and Akkad still come mostly from the Stela of
the Vultures, erected by Eanatum of Lagash after his victory (ca. 2450 BC) over
the city of Umma, and from the Ur Standard. Although the relief for which the
Stela of the Vultures is named shows vultures feasting on the heads and hands of
the Ummites, another relief on the stela shows Eanatum’s helmeted men advancing
in a close-order formation with spears and shields, and treading over the naked
bodies of slain Ummites. Most often, the latter relief has been understood—despite
the fact that the Ummite casualties are naked—as evidence that in Sumerian warfare
one phalanx battled another in open country. The inscription on the stela suggests
that the battle was not entirely—and probably not at all—the clash of close-order
Warfare in Western Eurasia 61