Specifically, a lot of our wargames historical information comes from the Stele of Vultures, that celebrates the victory of Eannatum of Lagash who defeated the king of Umma in 2525. They call it the Stele of Vultures because it shows vultures and lions tearing at the corpses of the defeated dead lying on the desert plain. This stele is the oldest known engraving of war in the Sumerian period. It shows the king of Lagash leading a densely packed infantry phalanx of helmeted warriors, armed with spears, wearing protective body armor, and trampling their enemies. The king has a socketed axe, and rides in a chariot drawn by four onagers (wild asses, the forerunners to chariot horses.) In the lower panel, the king holds a sickle-sword. The wargaming army implications of this stele are significant.

First, the stele suggests that the Sumerian troops fought in dense phalanx-like blocks of men, possibly organized six files deep, with an eight-man front (although there may be some artistic license here). They predate Alexander the Great by some 2 millennia. But whatever the specific size, any attempt to fight in a phalanx-like close-formation requires significant training and discipline, so that stele suggests that the men depicted were some kind of "professional" soldiers. The typical neolithic mob-army of men brought together haphazardly, to counter some temporary crisis (as found in Old Dynasty Egypt) had been clearly been superseded in Sumer by the professional standing army, the first concrete example that we have.

Moreover, as early as 2600 BC, the kings of the city-states (like Shuruppak) provided for the maintenance of 600-700 hundred soldiers on a full-time basis. The equipping and maintenance of soldiers in a uniform manner was considered a royal expense, and not a case of each warrior providing his own equipment.