The king, with a socket axe, rides a chariot drawn by four onagers (wild asses.) In a lower panel, Eannatum holds a sickle-sword.
The Stele of Vultures portrays the king of Lagash leading an infantry phalanx of armored, helmeted warriors, armed with spears, trampling their enemies. The stele represents the first important pictorial of war in the Sumerian period.
It is called the Stele of Vultures for its portrayal of birds of prey and lions tearing at the corpses of the defeated dead as they lay on the desert plain. The importance of this war to the military historian lies in a commemorative stele that Eannatum erected to celebrate his victory. In this war Eannatum of Lagash defeated the king of Umma. The almost constant occurrence of war among the city-states of Sumer for two thousand years spurred the development of military technology and technique far beyond that found elsewhere at the time. The first war for which there is any detailed evidence occurred between the states of Lagash and Umma in 2525 B.C. The conflict between Sumerians and Elamites probably extended back to Neolithic times, but the first recorded instance of war between them appeared in 2700 B.C., when Mebaragesi, the first king on the Sumerian King List, undertook a war against the Elamites, and “carried away as spoil the weapons of Elam.” This first “Iran-Iraq war” was fought in the same area around Basra and the salt marshes that have witnessed the modern conflict of the last decade between the same two states. Among the more common foreign enemies of the southern city-states were the Elamites, the peoples of northern Iran. This period was marked by almost constant wars among the major city-states and against foreign enemies. The period of interest for the student of military history is that from 3000 to 2316 B.C., the date that Sargon the Great united all of Sumer into a single state. The ancient Sumerians were a polyglot of ethnic peoples, much like in the United States.
The early Sumerian cities were characterized by a high degree of social and economic diversity, which gave rise to artisans, merchants, priests, bureaucrats and, for the first time in history, professional soldiers.
Both cities reflected the evidence of this cooperation in the dikes, walls, irrigation canals, and temples which date from the fourth millennium.Īn efficient agricultural system made it possible to free large numbers of people from the land, and the cities of ancient Sumer produced social structures comprised largely of freemen who met in concert to govern themselves. In these early cities, especially in Eridu and Urak, people first manifested the high degree of cooperative effort necessary to make urban life possible. The cities of Sumer, first evident in 4000 B.C., provide the world’s first examples of genuine urban centers of considerable size. No society of the Bronze Age was more advanced in the design and application of military weaponry and technique than was ancient Sumer, a legacy it sustained for two thousand years before bequeathing it to the rest of the Middle East. And in ancient Sumer thefirst detailed records, written or carved in stone, of military battles appeared. In Sumer the first attempts at writing emerged to produce ancient cuneiform, a form of administrative language written as wedged strokes on clay tablets. Sumerian civilization was among the oldest urban civilizations on the planet. Within a decade Sargon had extended his conquests from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea and northeastward to the Taurus Mountains of Turkey. Sargon the Great provided the world with its first example of a military dictatorship. If the river is followed northward from Sumer for about 200 miles, the site of ancient Akkad can be found.įrom here, in 2300 B.C., Sargon the Great launched a campaign of military conquest that united all of Mesopotamia. In the Bible, the area is called Shumer , the original Sumerian word for the southern part of Iraq, the site of Sumer with its capital at the city of Ur. The Greeks called the area Mesopotamia, literally the “land between the two rivers,” a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates basin. The area of present-day Iraq is the site of ancient Sumer and Akkad, two city-states that produced the most sophisticated armies of the Bronze Age.