Because a city’s primary protection was not its army but its wall, immense effort
was devoted to making the wall impregnable. In the Levant the early second
millennium BCis styled the Middle Bronze Age, and the MB IIB and IIC periods
were the zenith of urban fortifications. Cities of 20,000 or 30,000 inhabitants were
not uncommon there, with walls 2 or 3 miles in circumference. These were sun-
dried mudbrick walls, in many cases resting on a stone socle. For protection against
erosion the walls were faced with a mud, gypsum or lime plaster. In most of the
Near East a city wall was typically at least 10 m high, and some walls reached
20 m.^60 In the Levant the ruler of a Middle Bronze city ordinarily supplemented
the fortification wall with a sloping rampart of earth. Once the rampart was in
place, it was faced with a plaster or pebble glacis in order to protect it from
erosion.^61 While digging up the earth required for the rampart, laborers were at
the same time digging a fosse, or a ditch, which also figured into the city’s defense.
Most of the fosses were evidently dry ditches, although a few may have been able
to hold water and so to serve as a moat.^62
Erecting these fortifications was laborious. In his study of Levantine fortifica -
tions in the MB period, Burke calculated the person-days that would have been
required to construct them. Using a formula, Burke concluded that at Shiloh—
the smallest of the cities considered—9,650 person-days were required for
amassing the earth rampart and another 18,835 person-days for the wall. For Hazor,
the largest of the cities in the southern Levant, Burke’s figures are 320,560
and 165,560 respectively (the earth rampart at Hazor was enormous).^63 Although
impressive, these figures are considerably lower than those offered by earlier
scholars, because Burke assumes—on the basis of several Akkadian texts—that
a worker could bring 3 cubic meters of earth to the rampart each day. Israel
Finkelstein, on a more pessimistic estimate of worker productivity, had calculated
that 1,800,000 person-days were required to construct the earthen rampart at Hazor,
and 1,000,000 at Tell Dan.^64 The fortification of Hammurabi’s own city, Babylon,
must have required thousands of men working for years.
Siege warfare, then, was the aggressor’s attempt to go over, under, or through
a city wall. The sector of the wall under attack would have been manned by
hundreds of defenders: archers and slingers attempting from their high posi -
tion to drive the aggressors back from the wall. For the siege to succeed a great
deal of labor was again required. Often the besiegers began by building a
temporary tower near the wall, so that from atop the siege tower their own archers
and slingers could shoot arrows and hurl sling-stones down upon the defenders
atop the city wall. Although the composite bow had evidently been known for
1000 years it was very expensive, and the bow used by ordinary archers in the
Old Babylonian period was the “self” bow.^65 The effective range of a self bow—
in terms of accuracy and penetrating power—was rarely more than 70 m, although
its overall flight range may have been as great as 200 m.^66
A tower was merely a first step in the siege of a city, meant to provide some
protection for crews of sappers, who would try to tunnel under a wall, or for the
several dozen men operating a battering ram. Most often the tower helped to protect
the huge labor force needed to construct a siege ramp. The aggressor’s goal was
Warfare in Western Eurasia 73