Middle-Bronze-Age City-State Army Deployments

As Wargamers, we live in a privileged and pampered age, where we can go to almost any major wargames convention and pick up an Osprey book that outlines the way our favorite ancient army looked and fought (1). And the more popular periods go into a lot of detail over several Osprey books. Not to mention that there are some quite accessible academic texts from the various university press offerings. But then what happens when we are dealing with more obscure armies? (And that would include most armies that didn’t have a written record that we can currently decipher and read). How do we reflect period battle plans or design historically accurate formations? There are no real written records of such battles, and they probably didn’t set up and fight like any of the later wargame armies that we usually compete or play with. So, how do we guestimate what they really did on the battlefield?

We also live in a golden Wargamer-friendly age when it comes to various rule sets. Seems like most major “systems” have rules adaptations that tweak a standard core set of rules so that they better reflect current thinking about warfare in a specific period (2). But what happens when we choose to get into some really odd-ball period? Or what happens if we want to take “our” favorite rules, but then we want to bend them to favor doing things that don’t reflect the author’s original ideas or tastes?

Now, this particular article is a result of my interest in the 1800 BC Sumerian Larsa City-state (that falls between Sargon the great, and the later Hamurrabi-Babylonian empires), but the general methodology for examining a period holds true for any odd-ball army of a period that was lacking writing (possibly like early Bronze Age nomads), or even later armies (possibly like Aztecs), where we don’t have an accurate military record, and we have to try and piece together a “reasonable” approximation of how they fought.