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The armies of Sumer could have thousands of soldiers; some city states could field armies five thousand or six thousand men strong. [1] In ancient Sumerian militaries, the king was the supreme commander of the army. However, smaller units were commanded by lower ranking officers. [6] Generals were valued in the ancient Akkadian military.
The Mesopotamian Civilization had an adept grasp of tactics. In fact, they are the first confirmed users of the shield wall tactic later made famous as the classical Greek phalanx and the Roman "testudo formation". It is unknown who first developed this tactic, but it is thought to have been developed somewhere between 2500 B.C.E and 2000 B.C.E
A close order formation is a military tactical formation in which soldiers are close together and regularly arranged for the tactical concentration of force. It was used by heavy infantry in ancient warfare , as the basis for shield wall and phalanx tactics, to multiply their effective weight of arms by their weight of numbers.
Although little is recorded about their military tactics, the Stele of the Vultures depicts Sumerian soldiers in a shield wall formation during the third millennium BC. By the seventh century BC, shield walls in ancient Greece are well-documented.
Sumerian phalanx-like formation c. 2400 BC, from detail of the victory stele of King Eannatum of Lagash over Umma, called the Stele of the Vultures. The phalanx (pl.: phalanxes or phalanges) [1] was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar polearms tightly packed together.
The infantry phalanx was a Sumerian tactical formation as far back as the third millennium BC. [1] It was a tightly knit group of hoplites, generally upper and middle-class men, typically eight to twelve ranks deep, armored in helmet, breastplate, and greaves, armed with two-to-three metre (6~9 foot) pikes and overlapping round shields. [2]
The almost constant wars among the Sumerian city-states for 2000 years helped to develop the military technology and techniques of Sumer to a high level. [116] The first war recorded in any detail was between Lagash and Umma in c. 2450 BC on a stele called the Stele of the Vultures .
The army could number tens of thousands of soldiers, so the smaller battalions consisting of 250 men, led by an officer, may have been the key of command. The tactics involved a massive strike by archery followed by infantry and/or chariotry attacking the broken enemy lines.