(^2) Chapter One
in other words, mattered more than artisans. Public policy had to take
into account relations with potential metal suppliers who lived beyond
the range of direct administrative control. Safeguarding trade routes
from rivals and marauders was also important and sometimes difficult.
On the other hand, availability of skilled metal workers could usually
be taken for granted once the appropriate artisan tradition had be
come established in the community.
Wars were normally fought with existing stocks of arms and armor,
modified only by gains or losses through capture in the course of
operations. What an army needed along the way was food and forage.
Hence the availability of food constituted the principal limit upon
military action and the size of armies. Occasionally and by exception,
an outbreak of epidemic disease intervened to alter military balances
abruptly—miraculously, indeed, as the biblical account of the Assyrian
failure before Jerusalem in 701 B.C. attests.^1
Guarding against disease and other evidences of divine displeasure
was the province of priests with their knowledge of religious rituals
and prayers. Doing something to increase local supplies of food and
forage for the support of an itinerant army was the province of rulers
and administrators. It was always easiest to rely on direct exercise of
force, i.e., to plunder local food producers by seizing their stocks of
grain or animals in order to consume them on the spot or at very short
remove. Such an army had to overwhelm opposition quickly and then
move on, for it rapidly exhausted local supplies, leaving devastation in
its rear. Peasants deprived of their stocks were likely to starve and
were sure to have the greatest difficulty in finding seed for their fields
in the following year. Several years, even decades, had to pass before
the ravages of such a campaign could be remedied.
The career of Sargon of Akkad, who plundered all the lands of
Mesopotamia around his capital city of Kish about 2250 B.C., illus
trates the potentialities and limits of this sort of organized robbery. As
one of his inscriptions declares:
Sargon, king of Kish, thirty-four campaigns won, the walls he
destroyed as far as the shore of the sea. ... To Sargon, the king,
the hand of Enlil [chief of the gods] a rival did not permit. Fifty-
four thousand men daily in his presence eat food.^2
- 2 Kings 19:20–36.
- G. A. Barton, ed. and trans., Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad (New Haven,
1929), pp. 109–11.