Customer Reviews

The First Armies

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a well done book, with an readable, focused text, clear, colorful maps, and excellent illustrations, mostly color photographs. The author divides the period from prehistory to about 500BC into four periods: prehistory itself; the age of city-states, characterised by siege warfare; the age of ruling aristocracies, characterised by chariot warfare; and the age of nationalistic empires, characterised by infantry warfare and mass (for the time) armies. The author gives easy to follow explanations for these changing modes of warfare. Most of the focus is on Mesoptoamia, with Egypt also covered fairly well. There is brief discussion of India, but China is mentioned only in passing. Organization is chronological, not thematic. The author has his own theories (e.g. chariots were used in combat as arrow platforms, not merely to carry elite warriors to the battlefield) but he gives adequate time to alternate theories. There is a biographical appendix and a list for further reading. I found the book well worth the money.

With so little known about early warfare, it is hard to prove anything conclusively. But for Dr Dawson to dismiss the sparse artistic and literary evidence for Sumerian warfare in favour of his own theories, backed by no evidence at all, is a bold move. The Stele of the Vultures shows close-packed spearmen behind large shields walking over bodies but "it is not obvious from these representations what they were supposed to do on a battlefield" and "the disciplined formation of heavy infantry was invented by the Archaic Greeks". For the war chariots depicted crushing enemies on the Standard of Ur, it is "impossible to imagine this cotraption being used in battle". His theory that later in the Bronze Age, "there were no reliable infantry formations capable of taking an offensive role in battle" and that infantry basically guarded the camp while chariots did the real fighting, is based on "our not inconsiderable information about the actual battles of this period" - namely, the two Egyptian accounts of Megiddo and Kadesh written by two megalomaniac pharoahs who won single-handed, according to them! The course of both battles is still hotly debated by experts, and to make sweeping dogmatic statements covering all Bronze Age armies from such uncertain evidence is a huge leap of faith. I gave this book one star for the beautiful maps and illustrations. For readers wanting a more informative history, not radical theory presented as fact, I would recommend 'Armies of the Ancient Near East' by Stillman and Tallis.