Tired of running Egyptians against the same-old, same-old? Well there are a lot of other choices when it comes to the Bronze Age for wargames. This is the first on a series of quick primers on the OTHER armies that can be put together. Remember this is a PRIMER, so we aren't trying to win a PhD with these! But hopefully they will give you a bit of a "thumbnail" as to some attractive options for YOU to pursue.

First up? Some of the least appreciated of early Biblical or Bronze Age wargames armies are those of ancient Sumer and Akkad, two city- states that produced some of the most sophisticated armies of their time. At most conventions there are lots of Egyptian armies, maybe a handful of Assyrian and Babalonian armies, and even the odd Hittite army, but then the numbers of other Bronze Age variations seem to dwindle rapidly. As an aside, some wargames lists refer to these as Ur or Urarian armies, where Ur was one of a dozen states in the Southern delta of the Tigris and Euphrates, that joined in loose alliances against one another, and against raiders from the surrounding area. Sumerian civilization goes back at least to 4000 BC. Sumerians were a light skinned Indo-Europeans that predated the Greek city states by some 2000 years.

The area was also called Mesopotamia, or the "land between the two rivers," a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates basin. In the Bible, this 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. Akkad is located about 200 miles North, and that was the capital from which Sargon the Great launched his campaign of military conquest uniting all of Mesopotamia. Sargon extended his empire to the South (the Persian Gulf) out to the West (to the Mediterranean Sea) and Northeastward (to the Taurus Mountains of Turkey). He sat on the crossroads of trade routes that brought in enormous taxation and wealth. We now think of Sargon the Great as the first example of a military dictatorship.

But what's the appeal for the Bronze Age wargamer? Well, the Sumerians were the technologically elite of their time, and their military innovations put them far ahead of places like Egypt (for the same time period), which didn't need the advanced design of armament, and where Egypt's enemies were also relatively unsophisticated at the time. We know this because the Sumerian civilization was among the oldest urban civilizations on the planet, and we have the first examples of writing which emerged to produce ancient cuneiform. While this was initially more of a form of administrative language written as wedged strokes on clay tablets, it also became the record of the war efforts --- the first After Action Reports. Towards this end, we've found detailed records carved in stone, of some of the oldest military battles ever recorded (2525 BC, so pre-dating Kadesh, which is well known to most wargamers).