728 Military: The Middle East of Horus Recent excavations in the western Nile delta have identified a parallel chain of forts that were presumably constructed to protect the Egypt’s northwestern frontier, which began at Zawyet Umm el-Rakham, about 200 miles west of Alexandria, where Ramses II built his substantial citadel These forts were surrounded by massive enclosure walls and sometimes ditches Fortified gateways, watchtowers, loopholed ramparts on the inside, and covered glacis on the outside made them almost impregnable Granaries and cisterns were attached to the forts Probably 50 to 300 soldiers were stationed in one fort at a time, depending on its size, which implies that small military units were able to hold their positions THE MIDDLE EAST BY CARYN E NEUMANN Throughout the ancient Near East, war made and unmade political and cultural worlds The social orders of the time were formed and maintained by brute force and compulsion Long royal reigns produced and were reproduced by military stability Short reigns reflected weakness in war As a result, the military played a crucial role in the lives of the ancients The first literate civilizations and the first organized armies appear almost simultaneously in the river valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates The Sumerians invaded southern Mesopotamia in about 3100 b.c.e and subjugated the inhabitants, the Subarians As the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem recounting the deeds of the mythical hero-king Gilgamesh, indicates, rulers were chosen by the army from a hereditary and divinely approved list The ruler represented a god, and his job was to ensure that the god was satisfied Rulers fielded armies of 5,000 to 10,000 men who fought in a phalanx, shoulder to shoulder The Sumerians used copper weapons, spear, and ax Phalanx tried to break phalanx by shoving, jabbing with the spear, and hacking with the ax At first, the Sumerians dominated Mesopotamia because their opponents had ill-disciplined, stone-armed forces In time, however, the Akkadians, Gutians, and Elamites adopted copper weapons and organized tactics About 1950 b.c.e a coalition of Subarians, Gutians, and Elamites ravaged Sumer and led the last ruler off as a prisoner At the beginning of the second millennium Indo-Europeans tribes invaded the Near East These tribes had developed the chariot and combined it with the composite bow to produce a highly mobile platform from which they could deliver accurate, rapid fire The Hittites, the first of these invaders, used the mountains by the Halys River to protect themselves from their enemies before they fanned out to conquer the rest of Anatolia They viewed war as the only honorable calling for a man The Aryans formed the military into a separate class, led by the nobility They organized their army by tribe, clan, and family in units of 180 men Chariots led the charge and guarded the rear The chariots did not rush into battle but organized to give each other protection, with the least experienced charioteer encouraged to learn from the more seasoned soldiers The Assyrians dominated Mesopotamia in the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries They possessed the largest army in the Near East with perhaps 200,000 Assyrians and another 800,000 men drafted from conquered territory The Assyrians hired mercenaries, replaced the annual call up of militia with a standing army, and organized their kingdom to ensure a sufficient agricultural base to support the chariot and cavalry units on a permanent basis They were the first to organize regular cavalry units and to use transportation as a tactic The Persian army was organized, like the Assyrian army, into regiments of 1,000 men further divided into hundreds and 10s The 10 would form in fi le, the leader armed with a lance while the other men had bows or swords The shields were placed in front as wall behind which all could fire their arrows The balance of evidence suggests that in premodern warfare the mobilization of manpower mattered more than any other factor in the long run To get enough men to win combat that was often hand-to-hand fighting, nations recruited Detail of a Persian soldier from the stairway of the palace of Darius, king of Persia, at Persopolis (modern-day Iran) (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)