See, to get the right flavor for inter-city warfare in the Sumerian period, we really have to go back and look at what we know from the limited Sumerian written war records. There’s lots of writing on kings and their devotions to the gods and refurbishing of temples, and lots of lists of things that the various priests were interested in (probably mostly an inventory so they could tax them!), but no real historical write-ups that we could call an accurate AAR (After Action Report) --- those didn’t start until Egyptians wrote up the battle of Meddigo on their temple walls, much later on (1457 BC). So we need to start our ideas by essentially going back to the granddaddy of all war engines (after the bow), and that’s the plain old city wall. The Sumerian history of war (and it’s also true for many Bronze Age societies like Troy), was really a history of various sieges.

Some of the oldest walls ever found are not that far away, due West from Sumeria and located at Jericho, dating back to around 7500 BC. They enclosed an oasis that was home to about 2000 inhabitants (8). Year-round homesteading, near a good well or an oasis, encouraged farming in one spot (which in turn required defensive walls). Walls were the mechanism that let conscript soldier-farmers beat off the predations of various roving bands of raiders. At Jericho, the surviving walls were only about 12 feet high and 6 foot thick, with at least one taller round tower, and a ditch out front of them. Although Jericho is the only known surviving example of that age and in that region, there must have been other towns that had lesser walls, that have just not survived (or been found) intact. Still the walls at Jericho were nowhere near as large and impressive as the walls in Larsa’s prime, around 1850 BC (some 60 feet tall, with lots of taller towers). Still, the intent of city walls and defenses is to “displace” the raiders, and encourage them to try elsewhere.

However, in the rich Mesopotamian delta the only building material was mud or baked clay, and this meant the tapered walls could only reach about 60 feet tall. Walled cities started a bit later in Mesopotamia than elsewhere, around 5000 BC, but by 3000 BC walled communities in the Uruk culture were fairly common. Sargon was a very successful king about this time, because he was the first king who amassed the technical know-how and the slave or conscript manpower to conduct successful sieges (building siege towers and mud ramps, and assembling thousands of men for the shear digging). So we can see that the record of early Bronze Age warfare is mostly a record of sieges against walled cities.

After Sargon, defensive wall design improved and flourished They were often laid out in a zig-zag plan or pattern, so that anyone attacking one face of the wall would be shot at from the next sector, at a right angle. There would be higher towers, every 100 feet or so along the walls, and ditches out front, which could be flooded in some cases from nearby rivers or canals. The walls would be anywhere from 20 feet thick to 100 feet thick through the base, depending on the town, and they used horizontal reed-mats within the structure to reinforce the basic mud-and-fired-brick material’s strength, and to discourage attackers from trying to dig through the brick, mud and rubble.