Warfare in the Third Millenium BC
At the beginning of the third millennium BC,
the success of intensive, irrigated agriculture on the plains of Egypt and the
Near East changed the culture of organized war-making, which had previously
consisted of small skirmishes between rival groups of nomadic tribesmen.
Hydraulic projects, improved agronomic
techniques, and planned economies at Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Assur, Nimrud, and
Egypt created the necessary capital to support armies, logistics, and
fortifications.
Far more important, sophisticated agriculture
instilled an overriding territorial impulse: growing but stationary populations
sought ever more effective ways to defend and to acquire productive farmland.
Furthermore, the Near East provided the ideal arena for large, mobile armies:
warm weather during a long growing season, coupled with extensive plains,
broken by accessible rivers.
Rugged mountains, swamps, snow, ice, and
sudden rain - the banes of large-scale and decisive military operations - were
all but absent.
The agricultural surpluses of the Sumerians,
Hittites, and Egyptians freed a sizeable minority of those peoples from the
daily burden of producing food; they could instead fabricate metals for weapons
and raise horses to draw war chariots.
Yet complex warfare was not merely the
consequence of new bronze metals, edged weapons, or increases in the numbers of
ponies, dramatic as these new developments were. Just as important was a novel
social and economic complexity centring around the 'palace', an institution
that created underlords with specialized military, political, and religious
responsibilities - precisely those disciplines prerequisite for war on any
large scale.
The Hittites, Egyptians, and Assyrians for the
first time possessed the capability to muster enormous armies. They were able
and willing to extinguish thousands of combatants in a single battle,
obliterating entire cultures through the directives and sanction of powerful
religious and political palace officials. Thus the early Assyrian ruler
Tiglath-Pileser (c. 1100 BC) in near epic terms bragged of his destruction of
Hunusa:
Their fighting men I cast down in the midst of
the hills, like a gust of wind. I cut off their heads like lambs; their blood I
caused to flow in the valleys and on the high places of the mountains...That
city I captured; their gods I carried away; I brought out their goods and their
possessions, and I burned the city with fire.
The three great walls of their city which were strongly built of burnt brick, and the whole of the city I laid waste, I destroyed, I turned into heaps and ruins and I sowed crops thereon.