W ARFARE IN THE A W NCIENT ORLD Brian Todd Carey Joshua B. Allfree Tactical Map Illustrator John Cairns Regional Map Illustrator First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Pen & Sword Military Digital Edition by Pen & Sword Digital 2011 Copyright © Brian Todd Carey, Joshua B. Allfree and John Cairns, 2005, 2011 ISBN 978 1 84884 630 2 The right of Brian Todd Carey, Joshua B. Allfree and John Cairns to be identified as Authors of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military, Wharncliffe Local History, Pen & Sword Select, Pen and Sword Military Classics and Leo Cooper. For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles, please contact Pen & Sword Books Limited 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Preface and Acknowledgments Researching, writing and illustrating this book was a seven-year odyssey. The idea of writing a two-volume survey of warfare in western civilization – Warfare in the Ancient World and Warfare in the Medieval World – came to me while doing a book-search for two undergraduate courses at the American Military University. Unable to find a suitable text, I decided to write my own. I soon recognized that my narrative required a visual component, and computer- generated maps were not my forte. Luckily for me, I was exposed to some wonderful maps generated by two of my best and brightest students. US Army Master Sergeant Joshua Allfree joined me as tactical illustrator early on and his abilities as both cartographer and military historian were invaluable. Later on we were joined by John Cairns, a physics major and professional cartographer, who was taking my one-hundred level western civilization course at Front Range Community College-Larimer Campus. His computer-generated maps of the Persian Empire, Hellenic Greece, and Imperial Rome knocked my socks off and he graciously agreed to assist Josh and me in this undertaking. Both of these gentlemen believed in my vision and this project years before a publisher was found. For that I will be forever grateful. We could not have completed the project without the collaboration and support from a few notable people. We would first and foremost like to thank Pen and Sword Books, especially our managing editor Rupert Harding and our copy-editor Merle Read. Without their generous support and guidance this endeavour would simply have been impossible. Colorado State University history professors Jordan, Long and Knight each saw and commented on an early draft and their comments were greatly appreciated, as were the comments of Ken Danielson. Peter Glatz assisted with proofing the regional maps in a production environment, while Paul Wessel at the University of Hawaii and Walter H.F. Smith at NOAA provided the GMT mapping system. We would also like to thank Jona Lendering from http://www.livius.org for his assistance with plates. Finally, no labour of love is ever possible without the unwavering support from our family and friends. We robbed them of hours and hours of our time, and now they can see what it was all about. Brian Todd Carey Loveland, Colorado K M EY TO APS Introduction Military equipment and tactical organization in pre-modern western civilization underwent fundamental changes between the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium and the revival of Europe in the seventeenth BCE century of the Common Era. During this four and a half millennium span, the art of warfare reached a sophisticated level, with commanders fully realizing the tactical capabilities of shock and missile combat in large battlefield situations, situations where perhaps 150,000 men took the field at the same time along a narrow front. On a battlefield where the force-to-space ratio was so high, the ability to orchestrate tens of thousands of infantry and cavalry became necessary for ultimate victory. Modern principles of war, such as the primacy of the offensive, mass and economy of force, were understood by ancient, classical, medieval and early modern generals, and applied on battlefields throughout the period under study. Warfare in the Ancient World is the first volume of a two-volume study. It surveys the evolution of warfare on the battlefields of the Near East and Europe between the beginning of the Bronze Age to the fall of the Western Roman Empire (c.3000 –c.500 ), while the second volume, Warfare in the BCE CE Medieval World, covers the development of warfare from the rise of Byzantium in the early medieval period until the Thirty Years War (c.500–1648 ). CE Through an exploration of fifty-four select battlefield engagements (twenty-one battles in volume one and thirty-three in volume two), it is this author’s intention to survey the changing tactical relationships between the four weapon systems – heavy and light infantry and heavy and light cavalry – focusing on how shock and missile combat evolved on the battlefields of the Near East and Europe. Overview of Warfare in the Ancient World Warfare in western civilization began with the invention of civilization in southern Mesopotamia and Egypt in the late fourth millennium , a date BCE roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age (c.3100–c.1000 ). As the world’s first city-dwellers, the Sumerians, organized into city-states BCE in lower Mesopotamia, they applied the new technology of bronze to warfare, creating bronze maces, sickle-swords, socket spears and axes, and the defensive technologies of copper and bronze helmets, armoured cloaks, and bronze armour. Surviving artefacts suggest that as early as 2500 the Sumerians BCE waged war in close order, with heavy infantry massed in rank and file and protected by standardized equipment. The Sumerians are also credited with inventing war chariots. Initially a large cumbersome vehicle drawn by teams of onagers, the war chariot would evolve into a light, manoeuvrable machine pulled by teams of horses. By 1500 , the BCE composite bow-wielding archer was placed in the improved chariot by the New Kingdom Egyptians, creating the dominant tactical system of the ancient world and initiating an age of tactical symmetry. During the late Bronze Age, Mesopotamian kings and Egyptian pharaohs sought battle on level terrain where they could employ their own expensive, prestigious and lethal machines against opposing chariots, or batter enemy infantry formations and hunt down fleeing footmen. Warrior pharaohs such as Thutmose III at Megiddo in 1458 and Ramesses II at Qadesh in 1285 used the chariot to great effect expanding Egyptian hegemony into the Levant (italicized battles are illustrated in multiphase tactical maps throughout this work and volume two). But the invasion of a new wave of barbarians threw the eastern Mediterranean into a chaotic period known as the ‘Catastrophe’ lasting from roughly 1200 to 900 . In the Aegean and Near East, Bronze Age civilizations BCE declined or were completely destroyed by barbarian invaders using new military technologies (longer cut-and-slash swords and chariot-hunting javelins) and more sophisticated tactics. The ‘Age of the Chariot’ was over, replaced by an era where iron weapons, not bronze, ruled the battlefields of western civilization. The beginning of the classical period (c.1000 –c.500 ) also witnessed BCE CE the widespread domestication of horses by civilizations and the subsequent rise of cavalry. Though history cannot pinpoint the precise beginning of this unique and enduring relationship between human and horse, it is believed that nomads first domesticated ponies for riding on the Eurasian steppes some time in the late second millennium. The Eurasian steppes are an elongated belt of grassland some 3,000 miles long and 500 miles wide, bordered to the north by the Siberian taiga or subarctic forest, and to the south by a wide band of desert, reaching the Great Wall of China in the east and the salt marshes of Iran in the west.1 Steppe warriors eventually married the skills of riding and archery, creating the signature martial art form of the region, light cavalry. Western civilization would contend with numerous waves of these horse archers, including Scythians, Parthians, Huns, Magyars, Turks and Mongols, by first employing steppe warriors as mercenaries, then developing their own cavalry corps, emphasizing heavy cavalry over light. The proliferation of iron war-technologies in the first centuries of the first millennium resulted in changes in the tactical organizations of two important BCE early Iron Age civilizations: Persia and Greece. Both of these civilizations organized for war in a different manner. Achaemenid Persia was a willing student of the Assyrian experience and adopted and adapted many martial technologies and tactical organizations from Nineveh, and in turn leaned toward a limited combined-arms tactical system emphasizing light infantry and heavy and light cavalry. The Greek experience was quite different. Because of their geographic isolation, the Greeks in the archaic period (c.750–c.500 ) BCE developed a tactical system emphasizing heavy infantry and tactical symmetry. Both civilizations developed cultural prejudices concerning how to wage war, specifically which weapon systems to emphasize and what technologies to adopt. The Persian Wars (499–c.469 ) brought these two civilizations into BCE direct conflict. When the Greeks and Persians met on the field at Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea, both armies could not have been aware of the lasting impact this encounter would have on the development of classical warfare. During the next one and a half centuries, a profound exchange of martial ideas and technologies took place between the Greeks and Persians. The Greeks would learn from the