by H A CULLEY
Once he had secured the new city, Uktannu sent in his soldiers to clear the people out before he set fire to it. Inevitably there were instances of rape, murder and theft, but most of the people managed to escape to safety before the flames engulfed their homes.
He watched with satisfaction at the stream of refugees heading to other nearby Assyrian cities. He knew that those heading for Arrapha and Nuzi would soon spread the word to Ishme-Dagan outside Hiritum. He settled back to wait for the Assyrian king to appear. Uktannu had no doubt that the king would assume the old city was under siege and rush north the relieve it. He had already picked the battle ground where he would meet them.
When Ishme-Dagan heard of the sacking of the new town of Assur he did exactly what Uktannu expected. Leaving Sulu-Sin and his Eshnunnans to keep up the siege of Hiritum, he led his army on a forced march up the Tigris. He had committed the cardinal sin for any military commander: he had split his forces in two.
The Assyrians hadn’t lost as many as the Eshnunnans during the night attack but his army was still reduced to eleven thousand men, slightly less than Uktannu had; and the mixed Babylonian/Sumerian force had faster horse-drawn chariots and camel archers. Apart from his spearmen and archers, Ishme-Dagan only had fifty serviceable chariots, thanks to the loss of many of his onagers.
Uktannu had chosen his ground well. His foot soldiers stood at the top of a long incline with their left flank anchored on the Tigris. He had placed his chariots on his right flank with the camel archers behind them. The foot archers and the slingers stood in front of the spearmen.
The Assyrians placed their chariots in front with the archers and spearmen behind, in that order. Ishme-Dagan waited for the Babylonians to make the first move but Uktannu showed no inclination to do so. Eventually the Assyrian king got fed up with waiting and sent in his chariots. Uktannu thought that it was a stupid move to make as the king had far fewer of them than he did. He was about to order his own chariots forward when a breathless horseman brought him the disastrous news that a second Assyrian army was rapidly advancing towards him from the north. The horseman was from a patrol that had been left to watch the garrison of Assur but this force had appeared from the direction of Nineveh, Assyria’s second city. Uktannu was in a quandary. The enemy chariots would hit his defensive line in minutes but, if he engaged in battle here, he would be crushed between the two armies.
~#~
Haban kicked Dahaka harder than he meant to so as to get his attention. The boy had been expecting the order to follow the chariots into the attack against the enemy in front of them. Instead of that, Haban had been ordered to take his five hundred camel archers and delay the army from Nineveh until Uktannu could defeat Ishme-Dagan and then turn round and face the new threat.
The horseman who had brought the news had no idea of the enemy strength but he thought that there must be thousands of them, judging from the dust cloud. The only other thing he could tell Haban as that they appeared to be mainly infantry with no more than a few chariots. Haban sent him off to try and gauge the enemy’s numbers. He would have to manage on his own as the enemy would be beyond Assur by now.
The battlefield was about seven miles from Assur and so it wasn’t long before Haban saw the enemy column for himself. Just as he did the horseman returned to say that he thought that there were probably about five thousand spearmen and a few hundred archers. There were only five chariots. Haban thanked him. The men from Nineveh were probably militia and they would never have seen camel archers before. They were in for a surprise. The chariots weren’t a fighting force and would probably contain the senior officers. They would be his initial targets, followed by the archers.
He looked around him, seeking something. Dahaka sensed his hesitation and glanced behind him, asking what he was looking for.
‘Dead ground in which we can hide. I want to catch them still in column, not deployed and ready for battle.’
The boy nodded and then pointed off to his left. He had spotted a depression that Haban hadn’t seen. He tapped the boy on his shoulder to thank him and led his five hundred into the shallow bowl. He tapped the boy on his shoulder again three times – the signal that he wanted the camel to kneel down so that he could dismount. He then gestured for all the others to get their camels to kneel so as to make sure that they couldn’t be seen from the chariots, which had higher lines of sight. He slithered up to the edge of the depression and waited for the enemy to come into view.
~#~
Uktannu sent his own chariots forward at the same time as the camel archers turned about and rode off to the north. As the Babylonian chariots neared the charging Assyrians they split into two columns and rode across the front of the enemy, raining arrows down on them as fast as they could. Their target, as ever, were the onagers. As they completed their run and turned to ride back to their own lines, the foot archers and the slingers took over. Within fifteen minutes the fifty charging chariots had been reduced to a disorganised shambles.
Privately Uktannu thought that Ishme-Dagan was an idiot to have sent his smaller number of chariots against him. He was, of course, opening proceedings in the traditional manner, whether that made sense or not. With the destruction of his chariot force, the King of Assyria seemed to be debating what to do next. Uktannu fretted at the lull, worrying that, if Haban wasn’t able to delay the second Assyrian army, he might be running out of time. He therefore decided to take the initiative.
Although his success so far in the campaign had increased his self-confidence somewhat, he was still wary about taking the offensive. He was far happier being reactive rather than proactive. However, he reasoned, the night attack had proved that he could do it, although that had taken careful planning; something he didn’t have time for now.
After some consideration he sent the chariots forward again. This time they ran across the front of the enemy line sending both spears and arrows into their ranks. They did take some casualties through return fire from the Assyrian archers, but it was much more difficult to hit a moving target than it was a static mass of men.
At first the Assyrians just stood there and took the punishment but they were getting more and more irate at their inability to hit back. Eventually the right wing had had enough and they raced forward, eager to get at their tormentors.
Ishme-Dagan was wracked by uncertainty; not knowing how to deal with the chariots now that he had lost his own. So he did nothing. When his right wing charged he was furious at their lack of discipline at first, but that feeling was replaced by one of relief that the decision had been taken out of his hands. He signalled a general advance.
Uktannu’s chariots kept up their harassment of the Assyrian host until the latter came within range of the Babylonian foot archers. Then they sped away to the rear to act as a reserve. The archers faded away through the ranks of spearmen as the enemy right wing closed on the Babylonian and Sumerian front rank. The lines of the former were ragged and stood no chance against the disciplined ranks that faced them. They beat against the shield wall with no more effect that wavelets lapping gently against a shore.
As the rest of the Assyrians reached the lines of Uktannu’s men, his archers started to fire arrows at high trajectory to strike the rear ranks of the enemy. There had been no time to equip them with new armour and they had only received basic training. The two sides stabbed and pushed at each other, neither side dominating the other. Men fell and others stepped forward to replace them. The Babylonians were better armoured and more experienced, but the Sumerians were the weak link.
Uktannu watched the progress of the battle from the hump of a camel in the rear. He had taken half a dozen boys from the slingers to act as runners but so far they hadn’t had much to do. Then he saw about a thousand spearmen at the rear of the enemy making for the open ground beyond his left flank. Their obvious intention was to roll up his ranks of spearmen from that side. He thought about sending in the chariots to protect his flank but he wanted to keep them for the pursuit. S
o he sent a boy to the senior captain of the slingers.
The slingers had been resting in the rear since they had withdrawn, as their missiles could only be used effectively in a flat trajectory. A minute later, they were sprinting for the left flank. Most got away three stones before the enemy closed with them, bringing down about a third of the attackers. Such severe losses at the hands of boys had really riled them and they ran at them determined to spit them on their spears. Then a few hundred spearman detached by Uktannu from the rear ranks arrived and charged through the fearful boys to engage the Assyrians. The boys couldn’t believe their luck. One minute they faced death and then the enemy were on the defensive. An adrenalin rush cursed through them and, crying out wildly in relief, they dashed in between their own men and used their daggers to good effect on the enemy to cut hamstrings and attack genitals with frantic stabs from below.
The Assyrians’ morale had already been affected by the numbers lost to the boys’ slings. The twin assault by spearmen and the boys’ daggers destroyed them. It was true that several of the boys were also dead or injured, but that hardly made up for the loss of over five hundred out of the original thousand of the enemy. They started to retreat in disarray. The boys pulled out their slings again and several more were hit as they fled.
By this time the ill-disciplined attack on the other flank had been broken and the Assyrians pulled back. Seeing the remnants of those sent to outflank the Babylonians also in full flight, the centre broke and joined the general rout. It was then that Uktannu sent his chariots in pursuit whilst he turned the rest of the army around to meet those advancing on him from the north.
~#~
Dahaka kicked his camel to its feet again and all the other camel boys did likewise. Haban took three hundred with him and trotted over the lip of the depression. He had waited until half of the enemy column had passed him. The dust kicked up by the column was so thick that the marching Assyrians weren’t aware of the impending attack until arrows started to strike them down. Haban took his men south along one half of the column whilst the other two hundred tackled the rear half.
At first the archers were firing blind into the thick dust but each arrow was fairly sure of a hit amongst the close packed men. On the other hand, the Assyrian bowmen couldn’t see most of their targets and those that they could see were fast moving.
A few arrows did find their mark but the attrition rate against the Assyrians was much, much higher. Then an unlucky arrow, probably fired blindly, came winging out of the column and hit Dahaka in the chest. The boy tumbled out of the saddle and hit the ground. The camels had been trained to kneel immediately if they felt the loss of the boy controlling them. Haban threw himself out of the saddle almost before the camel had lowered its posterior to the ground, but it was no good. Dahaka was clearly dead. Haban wept as the battle carried on around him. Dahaka and he had grown close: he was the nearest thing Haban had to family but he realised that he needed to get back into the saddle of another camel and control the battle.
Reluctantly he stood up and looked around him. His archers seemed to be managing pretty well without him. The dust had settled now that the column was stationery, although the camels riding around the column still threw up a little. Some of the Assyrian bowmen were beginning to learn to aim off for the moving camels and several now lay dead. He needed to change his tactics but first he required a new camel boy. Just then another camel was hit. As it hit the ground Haban saw that the archer was obviously dead. His body looked like a pin-cushion. The man had obviously ridden too close to the enemy. ‘Bloody fool,’ Haban thought to himself as he grabbed the disorientated boy and sat him in the seat so recently occupied by Dahaka before climbing up behind him.
Within seconds the camel was back on its feet and the boy had pulled himself together. Haban told the boy to lead the camel archers to the south until they were out of range of the Assyrian bowmen and sent another camel to give the same message to his other division.
Once all the camel archers were gathered together Haban did a quick head count whilst the enemy column stood still, uncertain what to do next. Of the five hundred he had started out with he had lost ninety eight camels and ten more were without archers. Judging by the shambles they had left the column in, it had suffered perhaps five or six times that number of casualties. The other problem was that most archers only had a few arrows left in their quivers. Haban ordered a quick re-distribution so that each archer had nine arrows.
The Assyrians had decided to deploy into extended line to receive the next attack by the camel archers. Their own bowmen took up position in front of the thousands of spearmen. This was an error as it revealed the fact that they only had a few hundred of them left. Haban passed the word for what the Babylonians called a dividing stream attack concentrating on the archers. He realised as he rode towards the enemy again that he didn’t even know the name of his new camel boy.
Kicking the boy’s left arm with his foot, he led his two hundred across the enemy’s front shooting down bowman after bowmen as they tried, and mostly failed, to hit the fast moving Babylonians. When they circled back Haban had lost another seven camels but, more seriously, he only had two arrows left.
As they gathered to check casualties and share what few arrows were left again, they saw the Assyrians start their retreat. The latter had very few bowmen left now and, as they couldn’t know that the Babylonians were nearly out of arrows, they had decided that they had had enough. Haban watched them go. His task had been to delay them and so he should have felt elated by their defeat. Instead he felt sick at the loss of so many of his men. He touched his foot to the side of the boy whose name he still didn’t know and led his men back south hoping against hope that Uktannu had won his fight.
~#~
The Babylonian chariots hounded the fleeing Assyrians all the way back to Hiritum. They stopped short of the besiegers’ camp as the Eshnunnans came running to take up a defensive position behind which the exhausted Assyrians took refuge. A few foolish archers sent arrows towards the chariots, but they all fell short. Five minutes later the latter were gone.
Narem-Suen and Mutu-Namaha had been informed as soon as the Assyrians started to stream into view. They watched the chariots pursue the last of them and then turn and disappear again.
‘What do you make of that?’ the king asked, hardly daring to believe that it meant what it appeared to do.
‘I can think of no explanation other than the Assyrians have been defeated,’ the other man replied with a grin. ‘I would estimate that no more than five thousand have made it back here so someone, and I wish I knew who, has reduced the Assyrian army by more than half.’
‘I wish that were true. They still have another thirty thousand or so who they can call on, if my information is correct.’
‘That may be so, but most of those are tied up guarding their northern border against Hittite raids or in keeping order in their part of the Zagros Mountains in the east. They may be able to call on a few more thousand from Nineveh and the other cities around Assur but they are militia; no, I think that Ishme-Dagan, if he is still alive, would be well advised to give up this adventure and crawl back to Assur to lick his wounds.’
‘If he can get there. Whoever our saviours are must be between him and his homeland. However, with the Eshnunnans, they are still a formidable fighting force.’
‘Except for the fact that most of the Assyrians have thrown away their weapons in their eagerness to run,’ Mutu-Namaha laughed.
As the sun was setting, the two went back to the palace to celebrate.
When the king woke up the next morning he was annoyed to hear shouting coming from somewhere inside the palace. Then sounds of cheering wafted in though the archway leading to the balcony outside his bed chamber. He had slept with his wife and the two had made love before going to sleep. It had been very satisfying and his intention had been to repeat their love making once he and Huchithrâ woke up. After the loss of their daughter she had taken a
long time to recover and then the siege had started and he hadn’t been in the mood. He therefore got up feeling both frustrated and angry. Just as he strode towards the door, it burst open and a grinning Mutu-Namaha stood there.
‘They’ve gone!’ he almost shouted in jubilation.
‘What, all of them?’ Narem-Suen asked, hardly daring to believe it.
Buckling on a kilt and sandals, he joined the army commander in his chariot to ride to the walls. The besiegers’ camp was indeed deserted. The ground was littered with the detritus left behind after their night time retreat, including those too badly wounded to walk. Scavengers were already pouring over the camp to see if there was anything worth taking and others were busy slitting the throats of the wounded. Buzzards hovered over the scene, waiting impatiently to feast on the dead.
Somehow the scene destroyed Narem-Suen’s elation and his mood changed from euphoria to depression as he watched the venality of some of his subjects.
‘Get those people back inside the gates and get parties organised to remove the rubbish and bury the dead properly. Any wounded are to be treated appropriately, not slain out of hand,’ he barked. Mutu-Namaha turned to the captain of the city watch and nodded. The man hurried away.
Two hours later the vanguard of a large army appeared marching along the road from the north. Panic spread through Hiritum like wildfire and a cry went up that the Assyrians were back. However, as the army approached the main gates Narem-Suen could see that the lead chariot was flying the blue banner of Babylon. He and Mutu-Namaha descended the steps from the wall and stepped into a waiting chariot to ride out to meet the Babylonian commander. He wondered who had lead such a brilliant campaign, perhaps Arishaka or even Hammurabi himself?