by John Brant

Created on: April 15, 2010

The Sumerians first settled ancient Mesopotamia between 4,000 and 3,500 BC, making their civilization a few centuries older than Egypt.  Unlike Egypt, Sumer and the later civilizations of Mesopotamia never formed a single nation as did their Egyptian contemporaries.  Conflicts between the city-states of Mesopotamia became an annual event, as did invasions from outside the region.  To survive in their volatile area of the world, the Mesopotamians become the first to develop armies and to organize military responses to an endless torrent of threats.

Throughout the history of the ancient world, potential conquerors viewed Mesopotamia as one of the richest prizes in the known world.  Mesopotamia’s rich and irrigated land made it one of the most productive agricultural areas of the world.  But the key to great riches for the Mesopotamian or the people who could conquer them lay in its location as a nexus of trade routes that linked India (and later China) to Egypt and later Europe. 

The vast riches of the Mesopotamian civilizations created to separate military processes.  The first was a constant battle to assert supremacy over a city-state’s neighbors (or to retain their independence) and the second was to repulse the frequent attacks from nomadic invaders who wanted to take some of the valley’s fertile land or important points on the trade routes for their own benefit. 

Over the course of ancient history, the militaries and the nature of war evolved constantly in Mesopotamia.  In Sumeria, city-states fought each other over water rights and farming land, with small-scale wars occurring almost annually.  With the coming of the Semitic people called the Akkad, the first true empire in the region emerged, and thereafter, the region frequently faced conquest by other Mesopotamians or outsiders.

In the earliest wars, the weapons and tactics remained fairly primitive, with the use of Stone Age weapons such as clubs, or simple missile weapons like slings.  The “armies” of the Sumerian cities actually were local militia, with little organization. 

The evolution of armies shows that the later Sumerians and the later Mesopotamians, technology became increasing complex and heavy resources were devoted to warfare and defense.  Between 3,000 BC and the emergence of the Assyrian Empire around 1,000 BC, Mesopotamian armies developed concepts of military transportation (on land and water),

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