Military History: The Birthplace of War

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Joshua gets credit, too, for a strikingly modern gathering of and reliance on intelligence. When he sent his spies into Canaan (’Go view the land, even Jericho.’ Joshua 2:1), he was asking for a report on the capabilities and intentions of the people his army was facing. A source no less authoritative than the CIA evaluated this information gathering and rated it a major success, reporting, ‘Joshua’s operation, conducted in private by professionals, led to an achievement of national destiny.’

The ancient upper Euphrates city of Mari practiced sending out reconnaissance patrols to take prisoners and bring them back for interrogation. According to one of the letters in the archives of Mari:

Hammurabi spoke to me as follows: a heavily armed force had gone to raid the enemy column, but there was no suitable base to be found, so that force returned empty-handed and the column of the enemy is proceeding in good order without panic. Now let a light armed force go to raid the enemy column and capture informers [literally 'men of tongue'].

From these prisoners came fresh information that interrogators forwarded to army superiors, including information about troop strength, movements, and objectives. Care was taken to differentiate between hearsay and direct information.There was, in general, an appreciation of the value of good intelligence in the ancient Near East. The earliest known maps are among the clay tablets of Sumer (circa 2500 b.c.), and they deal with geography that is still of intense topographic focus today — the area between Babylon (in present-day central Iraq) and the Persian Gulf. (Perhaps those maps were the result of reports from men of tongue.)

The invention of iron changed everything, and led to an incredibly dynamic period of military development. Within a few centuries of its appearance among the Hittites (circa 1300 b.c.), iron technology had spread throughout Egypt and Mesopotamia. The strength and durability of iron, although important, were only part of the reason for its enormous impact. It was the economy of the metal that truly made it the backbone of ancient armies. Unlike bronze, it did not require the alloying of copper with rare tin to harden it. It was more readily found, more easily extracted, and more reliably forged (rather than cast) — all of which put manufacturing mass quantities of iron weapons within the means of even the poorest states.

The ability to equip larger armies led to larger armies. A Bronze Age army circa 2300 b.c. might briefly field perhaps fifty-four hundred men. By comparison, the Egyptian army of 1300 b.c. numbered one hundred thousand. The Assyrian army six centuries later was twice that size. The exponential increase in size demanded entirely new concepts of raising and training troops, of strategy and tactics, of logistics — in short, of everything.

These armies were not only bigger but were far more diversified, with specialty units of infantry, cavalry, charioteers, artillery, and engineers. Each branch had its own particular requirements and logistics, and so the logistical services themselves had to evolve radically. We have already seen that the Egyptians brought mobile chariot repair battalions with them on campaign. The Assyrians created the musarkisus, a logistical branch to specifically provide for the needs of their cavalry. Persia’s Great King Darius I imposed history’s first coinage on his realm in the sixth century b.c., allowing his logistical branch to anticipate the needs of his campaigns with far greater precision (and, as a byproduct, gave rise to the earliest military contractors).

Echoing down from the Fertile Crescent’s Iron Age come two other seemingly modern concepts — ecological and biological warfare. When Sargon II of Assyria attacked neighboring Urartu (714 b.c.), he ordered his armies not only to attack their opponents in the field but also to destroy granaries, fill irrigation ditches, and cut down fruit trees. It is clear that this was a new development in the early warfare of the region. The Old Testament, in Deuteronomy, prohibits warring on trees: ‘When thou shalt besiege a city…, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof…; for thou mayest eat of them, but thou shalt not cut them down; for is the tree of the field man, that it should be besieged of thee?’

But trees were used for siege engines. Armies on the move carried with them only the most necessary manufactured iron components of larger equipment. For the structures and framework of their catapults and crossbows, towers, and ladders, they depended on raw materials — trees — from the theater of operations. This new artillery did not depend only on stones or oversized arrows as ammunition. In an early foreshadowing of biological warfare, ancient accounts tell of them being used to fling dead horses, pieces of bodies, even poisonous snakes into a besieged city.

The earliest written references to artillery put it on the walls of Jerusalem in the reign of King Uzziah (783-742 b.c.): ‘And he made in Jerusalem engines, invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal’ (2 Chronicles, 26:15). This is probably an anachronism. The Assyrians, certainly the preeminent military force of the time, show in their reliefs no knowledge whatsoever of this kind of artillery.

Methods of attacking across bodies of water — troops using pontoon bridges, or maneuvering through marshlands in reed boats or on inflated goat skins — were introduced by the Assyrians, who seemed to have innate genius for war.

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Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Foreign Affairs, Military Technology

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