The “armies” sent out from Ur were surely employed in siege warfare. An
important indicator about warfare during the Third Dynasty of Ur was noted by
Burke: the names used to identify the regnal years of the five kings of the dynasty
never refer to a pitched battle. Dozens of the year-names refer to military actions,
but the actions are invariably sieges.^39 Although battles against “barbarians” may
have been fought in the open country during the Third Dynasty of Ur, we must
concede that none of these encounters was celebrated sufficiently—or was deemed
important enough—to enter into the collective memory of the king’s subjects.
Near Eastern warfare during the reign of Hammurabi
(1792–1750 BC)
A period for which we are relatively well informed on the subject of warfare is
the reign of Hammurabi (1792–1750 BCon the middle Mesopotamian chron-
ology), thanks especially to cuneiform texts from the palace at Mari. In the thirty-
fourth year of his reign Hammurabi destroyed the palace (along with the walls of
Mari), thereby burying more than 20,000 clay tablets. Almost half of these tablets
have now been published, and from volumes 26 and 27 of the Archives Royales
de MariWolfgang Heimpel has provided a new translation of close to 1000 letters
sent to Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, most of the letters having been dictated to scribes
by Zimri-Lim’s commanders in the field.^40
The letters that Zimri-Lim received say little about combat of any kind. The
commanders are concerned about divining the will of the gods, about receiv -
ing food, boots and other provisions from the palace, about the constantly shifting
alliances of cities and their allegiance to the Great Kings, and about the comings
and goings of enemy troops. The commanders do not, however, seem concerned
about either attacking enemy troops or being attacked by them, and the modern
reader must wonder what exactly the “troops” were. The letters report no combat
other than incidental skirmishing, usually resulting in a very few casualties. We
must imagine thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of men in rival troops
annually on the move in Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia, but we do not know
that these rival troops confronted each other on battlefields or even intended to
do so.
Assyriologists working with the Mari tablets have not found descriptions of, or
references to, pitched battles. In the 1960s Albert Glock and Jack Sasson, poring
over the early volumes of the Archives Royales de Mariin order to find what they
had to say about warfare, came across raids, ambushes and sieges but nothing about
battles in the country.^41 Sasson’s short “Tactics” section dealt only with ambushes.^42
Introducing his chapter titled, “The Battle,” Glock explained what “battle” meant
in Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia:
We hear nothing of battle lines drawn in an open field. The opposing army
gathered itself for defense inside the fortifications of a city. The attack was,
therefore, against a formidable barrier, the city walls and related defenses, as
well as an army of defenders.^43Warfare in Western Eurasia 67