Sieges in the age of Hammurabi
Siege warfare in the Age of Hammurabi must be clearly differentiated from sieges in later periods of ancient history.59 In classical antiquity the siege of a city—such as the Spartans’ siege of Athens in 404 bc, or the Visigoths’ siege of Rome in 410 CE—was often the culmination of a war, and the prerequisite for those conducting the siege was the decisive defeat of their enemy in battle if not the complete destruction of the enemy’s military capacity. In Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia, in contrast, when a king besieged a city it was not because he had already defeated the enemy. When Hammurabi and his contemporaries went to war, they fought no preliminary battle of any significance but proceeded directly to the siege itself. An ambush and тёШ might have occurred when the king of one city sent an “army” to besiege another city: the king of the city about to be besieged might have posted some of his fighting men in an ambush along the way, to harass the would-be besiegers and to delay or discourage their arrival.
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 bc is 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 fortifications 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 position 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 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 NeoSumerian 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 ERIN.MES is conventionally translated as “troops” or “army,” inthe Age of Hammurabi most men in an ERIN.MES were apparently not armed. Cuneiform scholars are more or less agreed that in Late Bronze Age and Neo-Assyrian texts ERIN.MES can 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 corvee. As this huge troop—occasionally numbering in the tens of thousands71—moved toward the target city, it was accompanied by an armed escort. The men of the ERIN.MES could 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 asymmetrical warfare—between a kingdom and stateless “barbarians”—we have no evidence that in the third and early second millennium bc the 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 accepted by those who believe that from their beginning the cities and states of the Near East engaged each other in battlefield warfare.
