Militarism and the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe - Robert Drews

than of battles in the open. Some 80,000 Neo-Sumerian tablets have been
recovered and well over half of these have been published. Although many of the
tablets refer to warfare, they provide us with little usable information about it.
For the little that we have we are indebted to Bertrand Lafont, who sifted through
a great many tablets in search of it.^35 We know that the typical campaign included
the siege of one or more cities, but we know almost nothing about the force
assembled for the campaign. Lafont recognized that a campaign was a major
undertaking, requiring extensive planning and logistical support:

It is naturally frustrating, therefore, to find that the massive documentation

for this period contains virtually no evidence about either these armies or the

kingdom’s military organization in general. Even with such a quantity of texts,

we cannot fathom how soldiers were recruited, supplied, maintained,

equipped, armed, organized, disciplined and launched into battle.^36

A tablet from Girsu, for example, told Lafont that in the third year of Ibbi-
Sin provisions were sent for the feeding of an “army” (in Sumerian, an erin 2 ,
which Lafont translates as “troop”). The provisions were a staggering 159,600
liters of barley and 47,400 liters of flour. The “army” that Ibbi-Sin had dispatched
was obviously huge, the provisions being enough to feed tens of thousands of men
for a long time, but nothing more is known about the “army” or its accomplish -
ments.^37
How an “army” numbering tens of thousands could have been raised is clear
enough. The tablets show that the kings of Ur, as representatives of the gods of
Ur, could call upon all of their adult male subjects to serve in the “army.” The
large troop that went out on a campaign, consequently, was hardly an army at all,
and included a large number of men who did not want to be there. Lafont describes
how thorough was conscription during the Third Dynasty of Ur, and how it affected
all able-bodied men:

Throughout the year every man (guruš) was thus obliged to devote a fixed

time in service as a “member of the troop” (erin 2 , Akk. sabum). He could

then, depending on situation and need, be assigned either to work on civil

projects such as construction, drainage, agriculture, etc., or to military

service.^38

The “troop” (erin 2 ) was itself divided into two categories: one category included
all those men in the “troop” who were currently on active duty, and the other
category included all who were currently inactive. Apparently a man’s category
was assigned month-by-month, and a complex bureaucracy was required to
manage all of this. Adding to the complexity was the fact that some men resisted
coming forward and had to be “seized by arms.” How many days of the year the
typical gurušspent in corvée service is uncertain, but on the basis of the Girsu
and Umma archives Lafont concludes that the men in the erin 2 “would have devoted
at least half of their time to state service.”

66 Warfare in Western Eurasia