Enemies on foot who were pursued by such a vehicle would have needed only—
if they had not already stopped it by spearing one of the onagers—to turn aside in
order to evade it.
On the Ur Standard the wagons drawn by four equids abreast are shown rolling
over dead or injured enemies, all of whom are naked, and Dawson is probably
correct in suggesting that the vehicles were built precisely for that purpose: to
trample and crush enemy casualties.^26 The vehicles should probably be called
triumph- or trampling-wagons rather than battle-wagons. After the wall had been
cleared of defenders the wagons may have been brought up to crush those slingers
and archers who had fallen to the ground from atop the wall. The first attested
use of equids in battle between Near Eastern kings, as we shall see in Chapter 4,
occurred ca. 1750 BCin Anatolia. An inscription of Anitta of Kanesh indicates
that he employed (or possibly met) forty teams of chariot horses in his siege of
Šalatiwara. That was a harbinger of a storm that would soon sweep over all of
the Near East.
Warfare in the Akkadian period, as in Early Dynastic Sumer, evidently centered
on the besieging of cities. Although more than 8000 cuneiform tablets in Old
Akkadian have been found, they tell us less about Akkadian warfare than one would
suppose.^27 Most of the tablets dealing with military matters are administrative texts
that tell us something about conscription, recruitment, and remuneration, but not
about the way that battles were fought.^28 Other tablets, dating especially from the
Old Babylonian period, are copies of inscriptions that had been set up by Sargon
and his four successors on the throne of Akkad: Rimush, Manishtushu, Naram-
Sin, and Shar-kali-sharri. These inscription-copies tell us more, but—like all royal
inscriptions—they cannot be taken at face value.
How many people in Mesopotamia and neighboring lands were killed by
Sargon’s armies is not known, but the boasts of his successors as kings of Akkad
are detailed. Although we have no idea how far the boasts are from the truth, they
at least tell us how these kings wished to be seen by their subjects and their gods.
Rimush, Sargon’s son, claimed to have killed Akkad’s enemies by the tens of
thousands: an inscription reported that in a single encounter Rimush’s troops killed
16,212 “young men” from (or in) the Elamite region of Barahšum,^29 and the figures
for a single campaign add up to more than 70,000 enemy casualties.^30 Such carnage
is difficult to believe, and difficult to square with what little is known about
Akkadian armies. An inscription of Sargon declared that “every day 5400 men
ate their bread in front of him,” and that claim has been taken to indicate the size
of Sargon’s standing army.^31 A distinguished Assyriologist has recently concluded
that Sargon’s army of 5400 men was “a military force that no other ruler of the
time could match or withstand.”^32 If that is correct, it is difficult to imagine that
Sargon’s son could have faced an army of 16,212 men, and killed all of them. In
the copies of Rimush’s inscriptions are we dealing with outright lies, with scribal
inflation, or with a slaughter of the general population?
It has been widely supposed that the Akkadian kings’ many victories (in one
inscription Sargon claimed thirty-four of them) were won on the battlefield. Akka -
dian kings certainly had warriors armed with bows, axes, maces and spears and it
64 Warfare in Western Eurasia