to bring the ramp up to the top of the city wall. On the size of the labor force
required for the project Paul Kern cites a mathematical exercise inscribed on an
Old Babylonian tablet. The ancient writer calculated “that if one man could haul
two cubic meters of earth per day, it would take five days for 9,500 men, working
twelve hours a day, to build a ramp to the top of a wall twenty-two meters high.”^67
The writer did not bother to estimate how many of these men would be injured
or killed by enemy missiles. How to supply food and water for so vast an “army”
must have been a science in itself. Bertrand Lafont called attention to the Neo-
Sumerian texts detailing enormous amounts of provisions that the quartermasters
deemed necessary: over 200,000 liters of barley and flour.^68
When the ramp neared the top of a wall, the defenders might prudently decide
to capitulate, and to hand their city and its king over to the besiegers.^69 In such a
case the siege ended, and the defenders and the city’s residents might be treated
with restraint. If the besieged did not surrender, a battle was fought at the top of
the ramp and the wall. Here may finally have occurred an attack by a phalanx
of massed spearmen, each protected by a shield, such as in the scene that Eana -
tum of Lagash ordered his sculptors to portray on the Stela of the Vultures. Several
hundred attacking spearmen must have outnumbered the defenders (the width of
the wall at the top was rarely more than 4 m, much shallower than the siege ramp).
The culminating battle was probably brief, an hour of combat terminating days,
weeks, and occasionally even months of laborious siege operations. In some cases
the besiegers—if they did not respect the city’s gods—followed their victory in
battle by slaughtering most of the population, raping and enslaving the young
women, and razing the city.
For most of the thousands of men whom a king needed in order to subdue another
city the term “laborers” is more appropriate than “soldiers.” Although the Sumero -
gram ÉRIN.MEŠis conventionally translated as “troops” or “army,” inthe Age of
Hammurabi most men in an ÉRIN.MEŠwere apparently not armed. Cunei form
scholars are more or less agreed that in Late Bronze Age and Neo-Assyrian texts
ÉRIN.MEŠcan usually (although not always) be translated as “troops” or “army,”
but for our period a more appropriate translation would be “labor force.”^70
The fighting men—many of whom were archers, slingers and spearmen recruited
from nomadic tribes—were a small part of the total number. The labor force was
normally conscripted in a corvée. As this huge troop—occasionally numbering in
the tens of thousands^71 —moved toward the target city, it was accompanied by an
armed escort. The men of the ÉRIN.MEŠcould find themselves caught in a
skirmish if the enemy had planted an ambush along the way, but the entire troop
was neither intended nor equipped for battle.
In summary, although battles in open country must have taken place in asym -
metrical warfare—between a kingdom and stateless “barbarians”—we have no
evidence that in the third and early second millennium BCthe military forces
of Near Eastern kingdoms, including Egypt, faced each other on battlefields.
Absence of evidence, as archaeologists repeatedly caution us, is not evidence of
absence, and we cannot prove that such battles did not happen. Given the sheer
volume of textual evidence, however, we must ask that the burden of proof be
74 Warfare in Western Eurasia