The Environment in which the Assyrian Army Emerged

These are the oldest stories online at OldestStories.net. It bothers me more than I can express that we, as an historical community, don't have a clear idea of what ancient large-scale melee warfare actually looked like on the ground. There's no shortage of theories and proposals and reconstructions out there, and I've drawn upon a lot of them in my previous episodes about the militaries of various periods, but for every theory, there's another opposing vision out there, and I'm not yet aware of any unified consensus vision of how spear and shield combat, which was statistically the most common form of organized warfare for all of humanity until the gunpowder era actually worked. How far apart are the combatants? How much do they rely on their wider formation? How long will someone fight at the front of a line, and if there are resting periods, how do they transition either out of the front line, or how does the whole line pause? We know a lot about the big picture and key dramatic moments, but we know almost nothing about the actual mechanics of an organized group combat. And this after spear and shield warfare, you know, supported by archers, skirmishers, and sometimes cavalry, was the dominant paradigm for most of human history until about 300 years ago. How can something so common have been so thoroughly forgotten? Re-enactors and archaeologists and military historians all make their best efforts to propose answers, but ultimately the fragility of our knowledge about the past is distressingly apparent in this particular category of study. Everything about the past is more uncertain than we often give it credit for, but I'm always bothered that military history after so much study is still so often uncertain. If you are also bothered by the fragility of our knowledge of the past, you can support me in this tiny work of preservation by joining my Patreon or donating directly at oldestories.net. I may not always have all the answers, but like you I'm searching for them, and hopefully we can all put the pieces together in a way that makes a decent amount of sense. Because today, and honestly it's going to stretch into next episode, I'm covering something that I've wanted to get to for a very, very long time. Now we've gotten to Sargon II of Assyria, we can finally see a fully mature, most powerful version of the ancient Mesopotamian army system. This is also the most famous version of the army. If you see popular representations of ancient battles from this general time and place, which to be fair you rarely do, you'll usually see the Sargonid army, or at least an attempt at representing it. You can hear three things make this army unique, the siege equipment, the combined arms with cavalry and the shielded heavy archers. And indeed, all three of those are present and quite interesting. But at the same time, none of these are quite as unique as you'll sometimes hear. The army is fundamentally a professionalized evolution of the very standard, spear and shield line that is the most common form of organized warfare and human history. And I think the best way to understand where it is and is not unique and the ways in which it's one of the most fascinating military systems of the ancient world is to see where all the components come from. And then, more next time, we're going to look at where they all come together. In modern times, most of our experience with war comes from war games and war stories, at least with this sort of pre-gunpowder war. And it's tempting to divide up the army as spearmen, archers, cavalry, chariotry, siege equipment, and logistics. But in fact, when we read the written sources from Assyria, we typically find that the Assyrians themselves thought of their army as being made up of professional soldiers, or King's men, levy infantry, foreign specialists, the cavalry and chariotry elite, and the logistical train. We see in art, spearmen, shield bearers, and archers among the Assyrian infantry. And we also see a class of axemen among some auxiliaries and foreign armies, but very little is made of these distinctions among the written sources themselves. This suggests that in fact, there may have been far more flexibility among these warrior classes than we might typically assume. In an equipment list, we will sometimes see men broken up by equipment types, but will also sometimes see equal numbers of spears, shields, and bows being issued, as if every man would, in some cases, be allotted every weapon and make the decision which to use when the battle was joined. And we see men with multiple weapon types frequently in art, indeed this goes back long before Assyrian times. Anyway, to begin understanding the Sargonan army, we need to go a bit back in history. Back to before the dawn of civilization, back to the most primitive of men running around killing each other, little different from monkeys bullying other groups of monkeys. Because those interesting feature of Near Eastern warfare, at least to me, is the fact that basically every paradigm of pregunpowder warfare is confronted on a regular basis by the Assyrian military in some form or another. The oldest of these forms is usually called by military historians, the heroic or tribal or primordial warfare type, which is often given the somewhat unhelpful designation as type one warfare. Now tribal warfare is pretty much exactly what you imagine when you think about the Native Americans of North America, or if you've ever watched that Dead Birds movie about the tribes of New Guinea. It's what you hear about when Abraham goes on caravan raids in the Bible, or even fundamentally how many small conflicts in Africa still play out today, despite the arrival of modern weaponry. It is, in its pure form, centered around a relatively small group of amateurs, numbering in the tens, at most, who represent essentially all the fighting-age men of a given community. They go out and raid, relying as much as possible on the elements of surprise. When that's unavailable, battles tend to be extremely low-casualty and low-impact. The few examples that we have for genuinely Stone Age people appear to be missile skirmishes, mixed with intimidation displays, carried out at the extreme edge of the effective ranges of the weapons with extremely high mobility. The act of warfare can be rampant in intertribal relations because the fact is that it's actually a nontrivial task to kill someone in these Stone Age battles. An adult man who knows you're coming and has allies nearby, even if you have a similar number of allies as well, you could get a lucky blow into the head. But generally speaking, battles with rocks and sticks and arms and fists take a significant amount of work to actually reliably kill someone, versus just driving them away or wounding them enough that you can take their stuff and run off. But then at some point a few thousand years before the dawn of recorded history, copper working gets invented. We are so far up the tech tree that it's hard for us today to really comprehend, but a weapon of, well I say copper but really bronze or other copper alloys is substantially more lethal than a stone weapon. Now to be a little bit technical here, the difference between pure copper and stone is real but it's much more marginal and the gap between bronze and early iron is very minimal the real advantage with iron is economic. But the gap between bronze weapons and stone weapons in terms of lethality and effective range and power is tremendous. A copper bronze really javelin or arrow has a significantly improved effectively full distance. A bronze tip spear is significantly more durable than a stone tip to one and far likelier to penetrate without shattering. For hand weapons, stone restricts you to basically axes and daggers and those break quite often while copper and especially bronze allows far better versions of both as well as unlocking the far more versatile sword. One armor of course isn't really a thing while copper and bronze armor pieces often integrated with textile armors or like wood or wicker shields quickly become non-optional in this highly-fality environment. Copper alloy over stone was an eye-win button of the likes that human history has only seen a few of greater magnitude than horses I would say, debatably it's on par with gunpowder in how much of an eye-win button it is over the previous technology level. Bronze armies were so dominant over stone armies in every region of the old world that true hardened copper working was, whenever it was introduced, it totally displaced stone working peoples. Now that doesn't mean it totally displaced stone tools entirely because the thing about copper and especially bronze is that there isn't really a lot of it in most places, especially compared to just stone which is everywhere, but what it did in the region around Mesopotamia is create a warrior elite in nearly every society affected. Those societies that didn't have at least someone around on their side with these superior weapons would find themselves either dominated or totally destroyed by the new, highly-fality way of doing things. And this is the paradigm that would still be dominant among tribal and nomadic peoples throughout Mesopotamia, even into the newest Syrian and neo-Babalonean periods. But we need to think about why it was so powerful, and this gets us to the question from the beginning. No one truly knows the dynamics of an ancient melee battle, and so everything is left to reconstruction. Now, I myself have gone back and forth on this, a fair bit, even on this show between different models because they do all have something to recommend them in different contexts, but I think the highly psychological push and pull model best explains the developments into the Assyrian period. Now in this model, you imagine that every single soldier on the battlefield has a drive pulling them into battle and a drive pulling them away from the battle. That pull is safety. Pull is, if you can imagine it, something of a dangerous place. It's like jumping off a high place. The mind inside your body resists you jumping, even if your spirit is urging you onwards. You don't want to be where those arrows are falling. You don't want to be in range of that spear tip. You don't want to be isolated when the cavalry and chariots are swinging around the flanks. It's not cowardice. This is a pull away from danger that even brave men feel. This is the fear that brave men overcome that makes them brave and not just ignorant. It's both rational in that I can describe it to you and you go, "Oh yeah, you should avoid those dangers for sure," but it's also evolutionary. Having insufficient respect for the dangers of the battlefield is likely to weed you out of the gene pool decently quickly. Now, of course, if there was only pull, no one would go to battle at all. We would all hide inside our caves like sheep. But there are also the push factors that push you towards the enemy. These pushes are many and varied and we'll talk about four broad categories, though you could perhaps discuss the same thing in multiple different frameworks. There's the obvious push factor of ideology, broadly the idea that your nation, people and gods are worth fighting for or conversely that the enemy is particularly perfidious and worthy of slaughter. Now, there's also the push factor of social pressures, which is everything from wanting to show solidarity with the man standing next to you to the disciplinary pressures of your officers who will beat you with sticks if you don't do what you're told. And somewhere in between these two are family pressures that need to be a man to your wife and kids to protect your homestead and hopefully to bring plunder and glory back to raise your status. The most internal is the drive within each man to seek after glory and bloodlust that desire that every man has since boyhood to take a stick and swing it at stuff. Obviously, these four pushes are not exhaustive and they vary radically between context and even between different men. But that psychological combination of pushes is what gets you close to the enemy, close enough to kill him or take whatever other desired action is needed. The pull, meanwhile, keeps you from getting too close, too much pull ends up with the man or army being defeated as the enemy can run you down. Too much push leads to suicidal charges, which, you know, to be fair or sometimes highly effective, but more often they're just suicidal. And so each man and each force ends up in a balance, where they're seeking the minimum safe distance, where they can still be effective with their weapons, and quite a lot of battle dynamics can be read through this lens. I'm not going to talk about how it interacts with modern gunpowder warfare, mechanized warfare, drone warfare. I'm going to leave that as an exercise to the listener. We're going to stick to ancient battles today. For an example, direct tribe on tribe type one warfare is very rarely recorded in the Near Eastern record of the Bronze or Iron Ages. I can't say that it didn't happen, but our sources generally imply that type one warfare greatly preferred raiding and ambushes to direct open field battles, because the lethality of direct skirmishing at fairly long ranges made it hard for two parties with low population counts to close on each other effectively without access to armor. And those with access to better weaponry were generally on their way to becoming sedentary with relatively few exceptions. Attacking the unprepared or defenseless was far higher in safety and more profitable in terms of glory and plunder. This is why in the Bronze Age we typically see amurites and related peoples depicted with the axe as their main weapon rather than the spear. As we've seen before, the axe is far better than the spear at quickly incapacitating an unarmored and unprepared opponent. It's only in order to break armor or when range is needed that the spear start to come out, which is far more dangerous and hence a less desirable place to be. I say so much about type one warfare here because unlike many other ancient civilizations, type one warfare was prevalent throughout the entire period. And this is because the terrain of Mesopotamia was always very close to regions that were almost impossible to settle and farm. Marginal regions where tribal nomadic societies could thrive, but where the settled folk could never quite settle. And in fact, if you look at Iraq in the modern era, really until the Saddam years there were still basically unchanged nomadic tribal societies living in the swamps and living in the marginal areas, only they've only recently been settled with the higher technology and the militarized conditions of Iraq in the last number of years. So we should, in all seriousness, expect that anyone bordering steplands or mountains was never in all of ancient history, totally free from the threat of mobile raiders, accepting only possibly the interior of the greatest empires at their very peak. But in those places where agriculture could thrive, giving birth to cities and empires, the old type one combat quickly becomes obsolete. Tribal societies have population limits that cities and empires simply don't in the same way. Meaning that when a city is able to bring the full force of its sheer numbers to bear against basically any one type one tribal society, the tribal society is just completely overwhelmed if they can be caught. On the other hand, a city is far less mobile than a nomadic band if you can believe such a thing. And so, these sorts of societies quickly come to adopt type two warfare, which is a style-based heavily around walls and lines, undergirded by the ability of settled societies to produce relatively large amounts of men and materials relative to tribal societies. As long as you know that an enemy is coming, you can line up all the men in your city in a defensive line, or if you know that the enemy will someday come, you can line up all bricks in your city in a defensive wall. A wall of spearmen with shields is obviously quite different from a stone wall around a city, but there is a poetic parallelism here. An idea that your issues are being solved with quantities and materials. It brings us to the real start of Mesopotamian civilization, here 20 minutes into an episode about the Neo-Issyrian period. This is going to be a multi-part episode. As far as we can tell, warfare in the pre-literate Sumerian and probably Ubiode periods revolved around lines of spearmen, usually with shields, lining up against other lines of spearmen. If a formation like this is able to directly confront any group, significantly less populous or significantly less organized, a block of spearmen wins most of the time. The strategy of a spearline, not just in Sumer, but pretty much anywhere in history, converges on the same few simple ideas. Think about our push and pull vision of battle, you're in a line and you have some motivation for approaching the enemy in the first place. You know, desire for glory and plunder, need to protect your home, sanction of the gods, or just the coercive nature of core of a conscription. Ah, whatever it is, it gets you marching forward even when you see another enemy spearline in the distance. In these periods, we're talking lines of perhaps a few hundred men in many cases, but the concept carry in cleanly into 10,000 man spearlines in future ages. Now you are in this vision, about one arm's length away from the man next to you, and indeed that's probably exactly how the first formations were created and regularized, making a spacing of some 70 to 100 centimeters from man to man. Not between men, but like from your center line to his center line is about 70 to 100 centimeters. You feel like you're not so close that you're being crushed, but you're close enough that you're definitely being supported by your comrades, and the regularized block makes it feel like you have a place, both in terms of you're an important part of this battle, but also you don't really have a clean and easy place to flee unless you're right on the edges or the back line, where you're probably less threatened. So the closer you get to the enemy formation, the more it feels like their block is one massive beast crawling slowly towards you. You see their wicked, gleaming spear tips, and imagine how easily it would press into and through your flesh. This is fear, sensible, even if animal fear, and so you have things keeping you safe. You have a shield of some size in early Dynastic Sumer, those shields are pretty big, they're oval or rectangular, and covering most of the body. You can hide behind that, and you're using a spear, so you don't have to, and you really shouldn't let the enemy get too close. As your line comes close to their line, you make a few test thrusts to renew your sense of your range, and you start poking at the enemy in front of you to discourage him from getting closer. He, of course, is doing the same and discouraging you from getting closer as well, and you pause at the edge of your spear range. Now in Sumer, you don't actually have much armor. You want armor, and at other times in places, spearmen would armor themselves up as much as possible, but you can afford maybe a relatively thick, conicous skirt running down to your ankles that will help tangle up a low spear strike, and make a firm penetration of the leg a bit less likely. And you might have a bronze helmet, or even just a leather cap, since the head has one of the highest psychological needs to be protected just after the chest in a battle. It is frankly too hot for cloth armor on the arms, even if it probably would help a lot, and so in the Sumerian context, they rely very much on that big, wicker shield. And now one thing we forget in modern times is just how light most of those shields were. And sometimes in places they are very light and very thin wooden strips, sometimes extremely thin and laid over each other crosswise to make something decently strong, but perhaps more often, and certainly in the Mesopotamian context, and this will run all the way from the earliest soldiers to the Assyrian and even later Persian spear lines. The shields are wicker on thin wooden frames, maybe with treated cloth or a leather covering. Here used to warfare with bullets and bombs where you need basically a slab of metal between yourself and the enemy's weapon to have even a chance of survival, but the energy of a spear or arrow is orders of magnitude lower than anything used in modern warfare. A wicker shield is often enough to catch arrows and entangle spears. Yes, it'll get all messed up over the course of the battle, and you'll probably need another one afterwards, but wicker shields are quite cheap, especially compared to all the other weapons and armor that a soldier is carrying. The important part of the shield is that it keeps the tips of arrows and spears away from you. For a slashing weapon like an axe or a sword, you're even safer. If you have just the light shield and the enemy has the time to hack away at it, then they can hack its pieces in just a few blows, leaving you effectively defenseless, but you have that spear. It's extremely costly for someone to put themselves in spear range. A swordsman needs to surge, hit hard and fast while he has momentum that either win or pull back in time before he gets poked full of holes. The spear keeps him at range, and a light, large shield is enough to make it take a bit of time before he can push through. Compare this to something like the Roman legionary. He has a sword, no spear, and because of that, he has to have both a much stronger heavier shield and vastly heavier amounts of armor. He has to get within the deadly range of a spear and be reasonably confident that he will survive. Now, Rome isn't all that relevant here. In fact, it's a couple thousand years away, if we're still in the early phase of Mesopotamian history, and the general idea here is that we should think about how safe you feel in front of an enemy as a function of your armor and your shield, and nobody in the ancient Near East had armor, anything like the much leader, Roman armor, I mean, until the Romans actually got there. A Sumerian spear line, therefore, probably wasn't very mobile once the battle has been joined. I do like to give maximal credit to the ancients, but for all that I do think there was a good deal of trickery and general strategy going on in the pre-literate and early literate period, I generally don't see much evidence that spear lines did much more than walk towards each other, possibly make an initial charge, and then poke until someone gave up, and then they chased the losers and slaughter anyone they could catch. Surely there was variation over the centuries, but we are both simplifying here for time, and because we don't really have the details needed to go too much further. So then the Akadian Empire came, with Sargon of a CAD leading a new model army. How exactly it developed as anyone's guess, but at some point the Akadian Empire figures out how to leverage its industrial power to up armor its spearmen. The shields get smaller and probably tougher, but to compensate, the men get shirts of either scale or lamellar armor, bronze helmet, and a short sword as a backup weapon. This lets him run faster and move easier while his head and core are protected. His legs are less protected, but remember that if somebody is aiming a spear from their arms, sort of held from their shoulders to your legs, then because it's angled, their spear is now effectively shorter than your spear, giving you more distance that you can safely thrust into them. The things like this really do indicate to us that both sides of the battle spend most of their time hanging out right at the very edge of spear tip range. Now after the Akadian Empire falls, and even through the middle bronze age, this uparmored infantry concept remains among the elites, but we see a clear shift back to the larger shields, lower armor, and lower mobility Sumerian patterns among the cities of Sumer and Akad, even into the old Babylonian period. In the era of city on city warfare of the Isenlarse period, mobility seems isn't all that important, but also it seems that a portion of that almost miraculous Akadian industrial capacity has simply been lost, basically permanently, and no one has any clear idea why. Throughout this period though, it's not like spear lines with the only game in town. The cities don't just forget about the tools of tribal societies once they go agricultural. Assault and ambush tactics are still employed and for the same purposes to punish enemies and to take slaves and plunder, but more importantly, the skirmishing lines remain to various degrees integral to the overall line of battle. The battle opens with archers, slingers, or javelin throwers, hurling projectiles at the other army until the other army gets too close. Now what exactly happens to these skirmishers afterwards varies a lot. They don't go to the back and fire over the main line that was invented by the total war games and only actually happened in very specific tactical or geographic circumstances. Sometimes the skirmishers go to the flanks, sometimes they get sort of checker-boarded into the larger formation. Sometimes they just retire from the battle at that point, but at this point in history skirmishers in civilized lines are a discouragement to the enemy and a way of controlling the flow of battle more than they are a real source of casualties. They weigh down your shield with arrows, they're going to catch a handful of people off guard, the occasional pressure from arrows makes you feel that much less safe. They have more uses in other battle types, but at this point in history the primary battle is the open field battle and the side that can't answer fully there is the one that ends up losing. It's at the end of the middle Bronze Age around 1600 that the next paradigm shift occurs. The first introduction of proper horses to draw chariots absolutely up ends the military system of the entire Near East. While chariots have been a thing for a while, they were drawn previously by weaker equids and weren't actually faster than a fast healthy man. Chariots drawn by a proper horse team over short battlefield-relevant distances are vastly faster than pretty much anybody. Think of the impact on a block of infantrymen. With a decent number of chariots rolling anywhere they want on the battlefield, there's no longer anywhere safe and missiles can come in from your unarmored or unaware side without you having any real way of responding or withdrawing. It's not like skirmishers that can usually only attack from straight on because skirmishers are just as fast as people and so if they're trying to get around you some of your guys can sort of screen them a lot easier. It's really the strength of an ambush happening on the open field. The enemy is able to come from anywhere at any time and it makes the whole battlefield feel potentially unsafe in a way that gradually wants to pull the soldier out of battle. That might seem sort of a bit modest and detached and clinical but the fact is the chariot would dominate Middle Eastern warfare for the next four centuries and this isn't because they were tanks charging in and shattering lines. Almost no chariot charging occurred. The main debate here is whether it happened at all or if it was just quite rare. It was a platform so fantastically expensive that even the greatest powers struggled to maintain them in significant numbers and yet these fast missile platforms could so effectively pick apart loose lightly armoured infantry formations and they could harass tight inflexible formations that the question of whether your side or their side won the chariot duel at the start of the battle and thus had free reign to harass the infantry often decided the whole thing. It was all things considered a fairly odd period of history. But then came the Bronze Age collapse ending the age of the chariot from two sides. From the cost side, the great powers are now too poor or just destroyed to field them in quite as large of numbers but more decisively came the massed mobile missile infantry of the collapse era armies that decisively broke their power. The exact nature of the military revolution here is highly debated. People argue about whether or not part of the sea people's strategy involved large amounts of light infantry running really fast on the battlefield and literally catching the chariots by hurting them, kind of like hunting animals. If this was part of the strategy, we don't see it surviving into the Iron Age near East. But what we do see emerging, all the way from the Aramean tribes of the west to the Elimites of the East, is a switch to vastly more archer heavy armies. To the point that the Elimites, for example, appear to be 100% archer for their army, at least by some depictions during the Neo-Assyrian period. While we can't say for sure, my own feeling is that the vastly higher volumes of vastly more mobile infantry archer armies are the tactical innovation that broke the universal power of the chariot during the collapse era. A chariot for all its speed is not agile, and while a loose formation can be pulled apart, a sufficiently well-trained and agile foot formation can learn ways to just dodge a chariot. If they can move and shoot in sufficient volume, then the high and somewhat exposed profile of the chariot leaves it vulnerable to foot archers. We see chariots react, first by getting heavier and more armored. This is the primary reaction of the Assyrian chariot, but at the same time this makes it more expensive and has hence less numerous and also slower. The chariot remains a prestige vehicle, but the primary challenge of open combat is now this new sort of high-volume missile fire. Around the same time, the introduction of iron means that larger armies can be equipped and the rising populations mean that larger armies can be fielded in general. Cammlery and Cammlery, meanwhile, arrive to the battlefield far more gradually than most battlefield innovations. As the civilized powers generally show a great deal of uncertainty about how to best employ them, and possibly also there's just a bottle neck in how fast they can breathe them into being properly effective. Meanwhile the uncivilized powers, usually the mountain highlanders with their superior horsemanship are unable to penetrate the lowlands, purely on the strength of cavalry, the way that the later step warriors would manage to do. Those step warriors, we will see the Comerians showing up in some number of episodes. I'm not quite sure when, I'm not sure how long it'll take us to get to them, but that is type 3 warfare, which is how the Assyrian Empire ends up fighting type 1, type 2, and type 3 opponents with type 4 being gunpowder. Anyway, the massed white archer formations ward off a lot of these new cavalry tools except where they can be used in raids, ambushes, or as part of combined arms approaches. And this finally gets us to the rise of the Assyrian Empire through the early Iron Age, which I had actually sort of thought that the Assyrian Empire would be the point of this episode, but I did get a bit distracted with other things. Still, the kings of Assyria, and especially Sargon, are far more intimately aware of the strategic context into which he's building his army than are, I think, even many of the people who dip their toes into Saganid era military history. No army develops in a vacuum, and the unstoppable Assyrian army was unstoppable precisely because of how well they were able to hard counter the very specific threat environment they were employed in. And so that's enough for me today. If you haven't had enough for me, I do have quite a large backlog of episodes at this point, but you can also check out my Patreon where I do have a few bonus episodes posted from last year, and maybe making more depending on how far ahead of the posting schedule I can manage to get in this year. It is my New Year's resolution, so we'll see how that works out to produce more Patreon content. Anyway, join us next time as we actually look at the actual army of Sargon the Second from their unique adaptation of the Archer centric army to their absolute mastery of the battle space to their intensely drilled combined arms tactics. Thank you for listening. The history of warfare and Mesopotamia is full of blood and heroes and more exciting stuff long before the cities, men were fighting wars, but these were small and tribal for stealing sheep and horses. The cities came in with them, populations rose, production meant big armies and blocks of spearmen formed. The big men rode on chariots, or really just donkey carts, they rode above the battlefield so the men could sniff their farts. When Sargon of a god came, he standardized control, now large professional armies could swallow nations whole, then in the days of Babylon the horsemen they came down, like aliens invading their chariots took the crown, then all through the late Bronze Age great empires arose, built by mighty chariot men and soldiers and countless rose, then came the big collapse day, the seafoak new a trick, just run real fast with archers and chariots get real sick. When afterwards came iron, which gave the world more war, more plentiful and copper it made the armories full and over in a serio, an ashered anded rain, he put it all together and conquered the world again. The archer with a shield wall supported by cavalry became the strongest army the world had ever seen, with many moving piece of spies, rams and foreign corps, a serian logistics would take the world by storm. But Babylon got lazy after a serious fall, instead of playing offense they chose to build a wall, so Persia came and conquered with a new more mobile force and Missopotamia was conquered and vanished from the earth.