The area of present-day Iraq is the site of ancient Sumer and Akkad, two city-states that produced the most sophisticated armies of the Bronze Age. The Greeks called the area Mesopotamia, literally the "land between the two rivers," a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates basin. In the Bible, the 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. If the river is followed northward from Sumer for about 200 miles, the site of ancient Akkad can be found. From here, in 2300 B.C., Sargon the Great launched a campaign of military conquest that united all of Mesopotamia. Within a decade Sargon had extended his conquests from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea and northeastward to the Taurus Mountains of Turkey (Map 1). Sargon the Great provided the world with its first example of a military dictatorship.
Sumerian civilization was among the oldest urban civilizations on the planet. In Sumer the first attempts at writing emerged to produce ancient cuneiform, a form of administrative language written as wedged strokes on clay tablets. And in ancient Sumer the first detailed records, written or carved in stone, of military battles appeared. No society of the Bronze Age was more advanced in the design and application of military weaponry and technique than was ancient Sumer, a legacy it sustained for two thousand years before bequeathing it to the rest of the Middle East.
The cities of Sumer, first evident in 4000 B.C., provide the world's first examples of genuine urban centers of considerable size. In these early cities, especially in Eridu and Urak, people first manifested the high degree of cooperative effort necessary to make urban life possible. Both cities reflected the evidence of this cooperation in the dikes, walls, irrigation canals, and temples which date from the fourth millennium. An efficient agricultural system made it possible to free large numbers of people from the land, and the cities of ancient Sumer produced social structures comprised largely of freemen who met in concert to govern themselves. The early Sumerian cities were characterized by a high degree of social and economic diversity, which gave rise to artisans, merchants, priests, bureaucrats and, for the first time in history, professional soldiers. The ancient Sumerians were a polyglot of ethnic peoples, much like in the United States.
The period of interest for the student of military history is that from 3000 to 2316 B.C., the date that Sargon the Great united all of Sumer into a single state. This period was marked by almost constant wars among the major city-states and against foreign enemies. Among the more common foreign enemies of the southern city-states were the Elamites, the peoples of northern Iran. The conflict between Sumerians and Elamites probably extended back to Neolithic times, but the first recorded instance of war between them appeared in 2700 B.C., when Mebaragesi, the first king on the Sumerian King List, undertook a war against the Elamites, and "carried away as spoil the weapons of Elam." This first "Iran-Iraq war" was fought in the same area around Basra and the salt marshes that have witnessed the modern conflict of the last decade between the same two states.
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