School of War - Ep 102: Paul Edgar on the Warfare of the Ancient Near East

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Paul Edgar, Executive Director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas-Austin, a veteran of the U.S. Army, and a scholar of ancient Near Eastern warfare, joins the show to talk about war and peace in the old days—the very old days. ▪️ Times      •    02:58 Introduction      •    10:07 Olmsted     •    16:00 The Bronze Age     •   22:07 Verifying history     •    27:12 Idrimi     •    35:03 How did they fight?     •    39:46 Tactics of the time     •   42:34 Continuities in geopolitics Here is a link to the article discussed today Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

My guest today has a remarkable background. He's an Army Ranger and Battalion Commander in the Army's Old Guard, turned polyglot and scholar of ancient Near Eastern Warfare, who has participated in America's post-9-11 wars in the Middle East, only now to study the somewhat arcane question of how wars used to work there in the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. Except, and hear me out here, it's really not so arcane, for all of the advances in technology,

for all the developments in culture. There were no Muslims or Christians back then, for example. For all of the pretty substantial changes the world has seen over the last 3,000 years, the patterns of conflict in the ancient Near East look a great deal like the patterns of conflict today, in terms of how and where states project influence, where they come into contact, and where they do battle. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941.

A date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram.

And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thank you for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Paul Edgar, who is the executive director of the Clement Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. He's got a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Texas. And he is a scholar of the warfare of the ancient Near East, which is a first for us here on School of War.

He is also, I have to say, Paul, I want to ask you some questions about your life and your background, because before all of this, you served several decades in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer. And I started the show a couple of years ago. I would always ask guests about their backgrounds and lives. And because I have so many authors on the show, typically the responses would be, well, I grew up. I got a PhD, and I've been writing about this subject for 30 years. And they were not the most colorful portions of the interviews. In your case, however, you know, numerous deployments in wartime, indeed two wars, just service, combat service, You commanded a battalion of the old guard, which for those who don't know, is the Army, the Third Infantry Regiment, which is the regiment that perform ceremonial duties and security duties in Washington, D.C. And in that capacity, you supervise the soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. So let me start here. You know, tell us about yourself, but in the course of that, explain, how is it that not only an Army officer, but an infantry officer just gets up one day and decides to become a scholar and not just a scholar, but a scholar of

the late Bronze Age. Take it away. I'll do my best. And I'll just, I'll start in college. You know, I actually have to laugh. So some of your listeners may be familiar with a guy named Pete Blaber. And I won't go into Pete Blabor's history. But he was, he was very much the paradigm of Ranger and Delta operators, officers, a couple

of decades ago. And I saw a recent podcast that he was a guest on. And I think you can say this about so many of us, not all of us, but many of us in our late teens and 20s, but I'll quote Pete Blaber. I was not a model of scholastic excellence. As a high school student, and so I kind of bumbled into college, fortunately, right? I went to St. Mary's University here in Texas and San Antonio. They were, I think they were gracious to grant me entrance. for a number of reasons I joined ROTC after my first year.

And my intent was not to stay in the Army, it was to do other things. But after my first kind of simulated combat patrol, I thought, boy, this is pretty cool. Maybe I'll do this. And then I learned about the Ranger Regiment. And I said, that's really what I want to do. And fortunately, I was able to do that.

I finished college, was commissioned through RTC, went to Korea for a year, and then went to Second Ranger Battalion. And even at that point, I was thinking, I was just, all I wanted to do was be a Ranger platoon leader. That would satisfy, that would be the great satisfaction of my life. And then I would separate and, I don't know, do something else. But I worked for Stanley McChrystal was the battalion commander at the time. Tony Thomas who commanded Delta and Socom was the XO. Pete Blaber later joined the battalion.

A lot of other names that you would recognize were in that unit. And it was such a phenomenal time that I decided to stay for a career. And most of my time was spent as a conventional paratrooper in airborne units. That was my only rotation through the Ranger Regiment. So I went to 173rd or what becomes the 173rd while I was there in Italy, an airborne brigade that we stood up from scratch in Alaska as part of sort of the growth of the Army to, in order to manage the demand for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that's sort of the point that sort of brings me to academia is a couple things.

one is I severed my ACL and so I was not able to go back into the special operations world. So I had to look for something else. And that ended up being what's called the Olmstead Fellowship or Olmsted Scholarship, which is a pretty neat opportunity for kind of not quite midgrade officers in each of the services. They sent me to Israel to learn modern Israeli Hebrew and to get a master's degree. and my master's work was essentially in Jewish literature from the Iron Age, so maybe 700, 600 BC, BC, E, through the Crusades.

And I studied some other things, but that was the gist of it. While I was there, we invaded Iraq. And even, you know, well before Secretary Rumsfeld allowed us to use the word counterinsurgency most of us were talking very seriously counterinsurgency. We were reading Galula and many other things. So this is as early as 2004. But both that time at Tel Aviv University, and what I found was really,

and I thought all of academia was like this at the time, I found since then that it's not. But there were a lot of academics that were producing work, and this is both historians and political scientists and linguists and others, anthropologists who happened to be downrange with us and willing to work with us, they were contributing to my understanding of what was going on and how we could best address it. And there's a bigger argument there whether or not that worked or not.

I won't get into that. But I think it's more than fair to say that academics produced work and were willing to engage with us in a way that I found. really profoundly helpful during those, you know, really difficult years, particularly between 2004 and when I retired in 2014 with, you know, with a number of rotations and then kind of culminating with what I would consider, you know, it's not the same war, but there's a similar conflict there, working on the Israeli-Palestinian issue with United States Security Coordinator at my last year in the Army. So all of that prompted me to consider seriously a second career in academia because I wanted to be, I wanted to think about these things more deeply and then and then be helpful to, you know,

whether it's to soldiers or policymakers or the people in between hoping that, one, we could, if we go to war, that we make the best possible decisions about going, simply about that point, deciding to go to war and then two when we are at war to do that in a way that is you know we're talking about terrible things here but within that context doing things as well as possible to minimize human suffering sort of political disorder etc so so that's that's kind of the background I hope that that summarize it no it's every now and then I have a guest on it doesn't happen that often but you and maybe a scan to Raymond. There's a couple others who I think, I mean, you're living my best life. How did, how did you? This is sort of this

romantic progress from the infantry to the Iron Age. I have to say, and here's a question for you. It strikes me as as very commendably broad-minded on the part of the Army or the Department of Defense, whoever is actually administering Olmstead, to let you study the Iron Age, which I, I mean, I'm all for it. And to me, it's sort of self-evident where the value would be. And clearly you're the kind of guy who agrees. But, you know, my impression of the administration of things like, I don't actually know anything about Olmsted, but my impression of the administration of things like this is there is a prejudice for more contemporary stuff. Modern, you know, if you're going to learn about the Middle Eastern studies, you study, you know, international relations theory, you know, or kind of stuff where there's probably some value depending on how you do it. And this notion that what you actually did would be, you know, at best, an academic curiosity without much relevance. How is it that you were able to persuade them?

Or did you kind of stumble into it? Well, you didn't need to. That was the nice thing. You know, the Olmsted program in General George Olmsted, who put his personal, you know, kind of fortune towards this back in the 60s. And it's worth, it's a digression so that I won't go into. But it's worth learning about General George Olmstead's personal background and what led him to think that this was something that officers needed to do, not.

to be an area specialist, but to be better operators. The whole program is oriented, not towards making regional specialists that then get put, you know, put somewhere as a desk officer, but to give you deep linguistic and cultural experience in one area, so that if you have to do it again, you're deployed to war, whatever, eat in another area, unrelated language, etc., that you recognize the environment, even if you don't recognize the details of the culture and the language immediately. That's the idea. And so the, so really was broadminded from, from the very beginning. And those who continue to run the foundation have maintained that, that aspect of it and have been really supportive. So I didn't even need to convince them. A lot of people do, I would say a lot of

Olmstead scholars do, things that are more modern. And I think there's, you know, that's natural, nothing necessarily wrong with that, depending on, you know, what it is that they're interested in. But I just felt like if I, if I'm in Israel with, you know, population of roughly seven, you know, 700 or seven million, the Jewish state that I should sort of, that I should immerse myself very deeply in the things that, that created this people, right? And so you go, you go back further, certainly. Historically speaking, we can really, you know, we can really zero in on when this group of people,

the Israelites, become a much narrower people to Jews. And that's the, you know, that's the Iron Age. So, Paul, I had a similar instinct to you. I was actually in college for, you know, 9-11 invasion of Iraq invasion of Afghanistan. I briefly considered joining the service at the time and ended up deciding not to because we won. We invaded Iraq and what March of 03 and April Saddam statue came down and was all over and I thought, well, I missed that. But I had already- A lot of us were worried we missed it.

Yeah, right? Why did we have something to learn? Exactly. Had nothing to worry about it, it turns out. Oh, and then again, when I was actually in my battalion, our Iraq deployment, this is 2009, was canceled. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I was, I missed. Now I really missed it.

I went to all this trouble and I really missed it. And again, yet again, it turns out. And then finally, when we got back from Afghanistan, I have a fond memory of sitting with my fellow lieutenants from my company on the beach, staring out at the ocean in North Carolina. And one of my good friends who's actually been a guest on the show, OC Best, saying, and forgive my language. This is generally a family show.

So mute me now if you have kids listening. Well, that fucking sucked. Why do you want to do that so bad? As a memory has seared into me. Anyway, to the point, I had an opportunity to go to graduate school, and I chose to do medieval Arabic thought and pitch some people on letting me do medieval Arabic thought. they were sold on very, a very similar conception is yours that, and also that I thought, you know, that not that modern Middle Eastern studies and everything that you learn there

isn't important. Of course, it's at the end of the day, it isn't, it's what you're going to do. If you're going to work on these issues, you're going to work on stuff that is, for which recent history is extremely relevant. But I also thought that that stuff would inherently be easier to just pick up and that it was the longer learning that required and or the more foundational learning that required an academic environment. There was nowhere I was going to read Islamic philosophy and early Islamic history other than academia. And I sort of stand by, you know, its practical impacts were limited in the sense that

I was able to bluff my way out of a dispute with some pro-Taliban mullahs once by claiming that my interpretation of the Quran was superior to theirs, which was partly a bluff, but I was working, I was operating on the principle that they were bluffing too, that they had no idea. They had memorized the Arabic, but they really didn't know what it meant. But, you know, it was more the framing, like confidence in my understanding of the context and the system. Yeah. That justifies it. Okay.

So. Yeah, I'm with you. I do think that, again, not to go, not to digress on certain things, but simply to summarize that I'm actually working on this with a few colleagues, but a humanist understanding. of war, politics, foreign affairs is enormously helpful. It's not just about sort of policy and data, right? Yeah. So let's talk about your work for a bit, and then we'll come back around to your career because I actually think that's a natural place to go,

is to what does this all mean for us here in the 21st century? So, and I think it would be the best procedure here would be to start very broad and very big picture because I will confess even for myself as somebody who I'm I'm actually for formally qualified Paul to do only two things I'm formally trained as it as an infantry officer company great infantry officer and I am formally trained as a handler of medieval Arabic texts with a concentration and philosophy those are my two qualifications so even somebody with that nerdy dimension your scholarship proceeds what I know about the Middle East by some 2,000 years at least what is the late bronze age

what did the Middle East look like? Just give us a bit of a picture of the world at that time that you focus on. So maybe it's also worse even before that to try to summarize how we even learned about these things. Because historically, our understanding of politics and war begins more or less with Herodotus. You can go a little bit early. If people are comfortable using the Hebrew Bible, you can, can kind of pick and choose a couple of things before that, but broadly and fundamentally, our understanding of war in politics begins with Herodotus. And that's because a lot of this

material that I've been fortunate to use was still undiscovered or had been lost and was still undiscovered until it's kind of a, this is a coincidence that I haven't seen it yet, but the Joaquin Phoenix film of Napoleon just came out. So, so. I saw it. We just did an episode with Al. Okay, cool. We're going to bring students.

I hope I'm not making a mistake, but we're going to bring a bunch of students on Wednesday night, an IMAX showing of it. Hopefully there's enough. I have a take. My take is if you just see it as long-delayed British propaganda, it works great. And it's actually quite entertaining.

If you go and expecting something else, should be disappointed. Well, I hope there's at least one or two, war and state craft lessons there that I can tease out. But so, so Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, right? And, you know, just for just so we had work with round numbers in 1800 or about 1800, his expedition to to Egypt where he gets where the British, the British take out his fleet.

And so he can't return the way he had anticipated. and so he kind of marches up up the more or less the coast of the Levant. It doesn't make it to Jerusalem, but sends messages. We usually consider that, and he brought a number of academics with him, to kind of tease out some of these things. And I think that it prompted a real interest in the ancient Near East in ways that had not occurred before. You know, the political conditions were right.

The Ottoman Empire was weak. And so it was easier to go in and do archaeological digs than maybe it would have been 100 years before, 200 years before. But anyways, the interesting capacity to do this, to do archaeological exploration was, it just sort of caught fire for more than 100 years. A lot of this was privately funded. Some of it was publicly funded or it was kind of jointly funded, but a lot of it was private. And it was British and German and French and Italian, but everybody was getting on board. It's sort of like colonialism. Everybody thought that they should be involved with the archaeology as well as, you know, they should have some colonies somewhere. So it was kind of a piece of that world. But we discovered or we discovered so much. It began with Egyptian hieroglyphs or what we normally refer to as Middle Egyptian in an understanding and deciphering that language and that writing system. But then we found all these cuneiform tablets of Sumerian and Acadian.

Nobody knew what these things were. And it took decades for scholars to, one, to find it. And then we continue to find those things, right? to find those things, decipher the language, and then catalog all of the different tablets that, the cuneiform tablets that we found in different languages. And then once you kind of catalog all those things, then you're at a position where you can kind of sort out the history. And a lot of the, and kind of which documents are history, which documents are receipts,

which documents are kind of arcane laws and olens. So anyways, we're still kind of at the forefront of piecing this part of history together because I would argue that only for a few decades or maybe 50, you know, maybe 50, 60 years have we been in a position to begin synthesizing the historical material from, not just from the late Bronze Age, but much earlier, to piece that together and develop at least what in academia we might call a synthetic history. That doesn't mean it's artificial. It's just that it means that you're, you know, you're stitching together a variety of sources to put together a something that's a bigger picture. And so I'll start, you know, kind of starting

with that only recently did we know any of this stuff existed and it took a while to sort out and we're now in a position that we can develop the history and understand that history and in a way that we didn't. And so, of course, like I said before, we started with Herodotus and now we can go back further. So can I just interject? Yeah, yeah, of course. At the risk of taking us really off track.

Yeah. Maybe this whole episode will just be the prelude and then we'll record another episode. But this is fascinating to me. So how do our earliest, you cite Herodotis, the foundational texts for us, the text that the text that began our understanding of the history of the Mediterranean, the Near East, et cetera. So Herodotus, but also, you know, you have Thucydides' archaeology, right? There's that sort of his essay on prehistory. You've got the Bible.

You've got the Hebrew Bible. You know, how do they hold up, I guess? I mean, that's a huge question. Right, right, right. But like, how does, how do the accounts of prehistory in these different documents hold up in light of the kind of collated evidence that you are working on? So one of the big, I will say that one of the big motivations early on was to, of these archaeological expeditions, was to verify the historicity of the Hebrew Bible, right? And as these things went on, people started studying Acadian, Sumerian, Hittite, etc., in their own right, and for their own sakes.

But that was, that was a big part of what drove this interest initially. So, so I'll say, I'll say this, that what we call the Iron Age, roughly 1,100 or 1,000 BC or BCE through, gosh, I'm not even sure when we, you know, when we end the Iron Age, because it's, to me, that's like, that's, that's so recent. Right. But we usually call it, instead of saying the end of the Iron Age, I think usually we call it sort of late, late antiquity, the Greek and Roman era. So between about 12 or 1,100 BCE and the 8th century around 750 or 800 BCE, there's just a real lack of materials in the Levant that help us put these things together. So unless, and the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible we have are just a, you know, if we go to Kumar on, we're talking 200-ish, right, C.E. So there's about a 600-year gap between, between, or longer, between our copies of the Hebrew

Bible and the things that they record. Right. Right. So this is one, for biblical scholars, this is one of the questions is how it's a question that remains. I would say less people are interested in it now than they were, I don't know, many decades ago or certainly in the 1800s, but it's still of interest. And the field kind of flips, you know, kind of flip-flops back and forth. Right now, and I think it's fair, I think this is a fair assessment, is that right now, I think there's a reasonable amount of confidence that David and Solomon were, you know, we're real kings. We're real kings of something like a united monarchy.

That may be the extent sometimes of the kingdom that is, that's described in the Hebrew Bible, isn't the precise boundaries, because sometimes it's pretty vast all the way to Mesopotamia. So, and I'm not sure, you know, some people would say that that's just propaganda, but I'm just not sure we always conceive of things in the same. same term. So I'm not ready to jump on the propaganda bandwagon at this point. But anyways, all that to say is that as we go, we find little bits of material and textual evidence that seem to indicate, yes, David was a real king, Solomon was a real king. And then after that, certainly when you get into the 9th century and the 8th century, we start to have, and once you get

to Hezekiah in the late, late 8th century and Sinocereb, the Assyrian. Then now you can start to stitch together history very, very confidently, right? There's lots of details that are missing, but you're very confident about, about sort of the or the progression of kings, who invaded who, who paid tribute to who, who was kind of subordinated to who, what were some of the political struggles. Those things, I think we can be very confident in that the Hebrew Bible captures it pretty well. When you talk about the patriarchs, you know, that stuff is, it's lost. And I don't think it'll be found.

I may be wrong. I may be wrong. But I think those things will never be corroborated just because the kind of history that it captures and the era of history and the people that it captures didn't produce the kind of material. that would corroborate their existence and that sort of thing. So how's that? How's that? How's that?

I mean, we could talk for it. It was more on this. And I think that would be ultimately a disservice to the show, which is after all called School of War, not School of Aaron and Paul's, you know, ongoing curiosity. Musings, yeah. So I am going to drive us towards war, but this is fascinating. So, look, I'm inclined to take us to the Bronze Age because you wrote this great article, which folks can just look up online,

a most ancient statecraft, the dreamy statue inscription, which as an act of marketing, the title perhaps does not do justice. It's actually fascinating as a sort of overview of, if you like, the international system of the late Bronze Age near East. Tell us about this world.

How did this world work? Right. So let me signpost for the reader as a listener. We talked about kind of the finding and decipherment of the materials that lead to our understanding of this history. We talked a little bit about the era after the one that I studied the most.

So we talked about the Iron Age, which is the era of the production of most, if not all, of the Hebrew Bible. And now we're going back further. And this would be the time, you know, sort of this, this would be the time of the Exodus and the Patriarchs, if we're using the Hebrew Bible as something to relate it to. And this is normally called, and for, we're, we're We're kind of stuck with the convention. It's not always the best convention or the most helpful, but we talk about it in terms of the late Bronze Age, and that's roughly 1,600 BCE through you could go 1,200 or 1,100 BCE.

And this is a very distinct political era, and this is one of the reasons why I studied it. When I learned that this was very much a distinct, beginning, kind of beginning, a rise, a golden age, and then a collapse of a international political system. And that this was an era, this was a really unique political era in and of itself. That's what one of the things that drew me to study it. And it's convenient too, right? Because as a story, it has kind of this beginning, middle and end, right? So, but that's roughly the time frame we're looking at.

graphically, what we're looking at is Mesopotamia, right? So, so Iraq, modern day Iraq. We're not yet, Persia does not yet enter the equation. That's later, that's right, that's with the acumenid period or, you know, Herodotus covers some of that. But Persia is not yet a player in the ancient Near East. So we go from Mesopotamia, kind of southwest to Egypt, up the coast of the Levant, into Syria, and then Anatolia or modern-day Turkey. You know, what we would consider today, Kurdistan was also involved, and I'll address that with one particular kingdom in a second.

But that's sort of the geographic boundaries of this international system. Now, they related to other parts of the world, right? We've got lots of evidence that there was, there was certainly connection with the rest of the Mediterranean. We've got, we've got evidence that there was, that there was trade even as far as India, those sorts of things. But they were not what we might consider sort of major players in this international world. So we talked to the time frame, geographic boundaries,

what we would consider to the same. states, the major states in this in this world, the era begins more or less with what we would, we could call three great powers. And we don't need to talk too much about what a great power is just for the for the purposes of a podcast. So consider them, you know, there's substantial powers that that have a capacity to project military and significant military and political influence. across the region, the geographical region that I described. So those three states are Hati or the Hittites in Anatolia, Egypt, and Metani. And Matani is the kingdom that roughly would be in the area that we might consider Kurdistan today.

So those are the great powers. And then you have lots of city states or kind of what might be little more than city states in some cases, in between. At the beginning of the era, these major powers, they tend to be, their influence tends to be isolated to their kind of geographic homeland and the areas that border. But then as they gain power and ambition and capacity and as their own domestic situation allows, they're able to extend that power, right, and extend that influence. And Metani collapses. So, Matani, after a couple hundred years, really almost evaporates, which is a, I won't

go into the story. And so what you end up with for a big chunk of the late Bronze Age is just two great powers, Hati and Egypt. And they expand, Hati expands south, and Egypt expands north. and they run into each other in what today is southern Syria. They have a three-day battle, which is mostly a stalemate. So this is the early 13th century. They battle to a stalemate.

And Egypt has, if our historical records are accurate, Egypt has a little bit of an upper hand, but nothing that is politically, significant. And then we can't trace this day by day or month by month or year by year, but about 10 years later, we have a treaty between the two. So sometime between that major battle and this treaty, they, you know, the leaders of those two powers had to grapple with what was it that they were going to do. And let me, let me kind of add to the story a little bit. bit by describing in what is today really al-white Syria. That's sort of that that portion of

Syria that is that is predominantly al-A-white. That was a state or a country, a small, a small country called or a small state called Ugarit, from which you may be familiar with the language Ugaritic. But that was the most important port city and sort of transatlantic. point of of of commerce between the Mediterranean and in ancient near east of Levant Syria and Mesopotamia so it was hugely lucrative and both Egypt and Hattie wanted you know wanted to have wanted to exercise substantial influence over that part of that part of the region and it's not too far from there that they have their three day three day battle but in any case just to demonstrate there was

real interest here, right? There's real economic interest. Somehow, though, between that three-day battle and the treaty, they figured, you know, they sort of assessed their options and they had to make choices about whether they doubled down militarily or whether they try to work this out in a way, in a diplomatic way so that, you know, ideally this is kind of a win-win for both Hanti and Egypt. And I think that's what you get, really, is you get a couple hundred years of this real stable international system because the two great powers are capable of getting along with one another. And so I guess I'll go ahead and pause there. Yeah, well, look, I mean, there's so many directions we could go from here. I suppose let me take us from politics sort of down to

operations and tactics to the extent that you can speak to these things in any level of detail. How did they fight? How did it work? This is, so this is, this is a little bit difficult because Many of our, you know, we've got, we have textual evidence, right, stories of how these armies fought. And we also have, for lack of better, from, we have artistic evidence. And then we also have some archaeological evidence of battlefields. But the textual evidence and sort of the iconography or the arts that depicts these battles place the king over, sort of really at the center of the story.

And it's their sort of hugeness, their boldness, and their great, not just their, you know, not just their leadership, not just their like ability to command. In fact, there's very little about command. It's about them personally trampling the opposing force, right, on their majestic horse. and it's usually larger than life. That went for me.

Is that not how it went for you, Paul? No, I was relying largely on the people around me and hopefully, wow, I was helpful. So in terms of how the battle occurred, I'm not sure we can really say other than, other than from other evidence. And frankly, just that we know that hand-to-hand combat with, with, you know, at much, swords and spears and arrows that it was that it was bloody and personal and just chaos. So so there may have been more more organization to it, but it's hard to decipher in the in the materials and the texts that we have. I will say that you know, one of the one of the things that we have is a really interesting hit type text on how to train horses. So this is this is kind of an

era where horses are being widely domesticated. And there's some argument on where that actually begins. But there's a Hittite, there's a very long Hittite text. And essentially it looks like, it's like a training calendar, right? If anybody who's spent any time in the military and has set up a training calendar for a week or a month or a quarter would look at this text and say, this is exactly what it is. It's a training calendar for how you train your horses for combat. So it's pretty interesting.

So there was a level of organization that we don't know about, and because the text just don't record it in that way. Chariots were a thing. Were they not? Yeah, but again, here, we're in this weird position because it'll describe, it'll describe in terrain that was completely unsuitable for fast movement, right it will it will describe the king in his chariot and again the the art that we have that depicts these battles the king will be the giant king will be in a giant chariot and trampling all

his foes right and then the smaller chariots and helpers are kind of behind him so so yeah chariots were there but i i i'm not sure i you know people have written about this and i'm just not convinced anybody's gotten it right yet. I think that it was probably helpful in repositioning a little bit, you know, repositioning some archers, that sort of thing. But it wasn't anything like a tank battle, which is how movies like to capture it. That's not, I just, I don't think that that was possible based on their technology and the terrain they were fighting on. Can I ask, I realize these are sort of dumb questions for somebody's been making. There's never a dumb question.

Well, that's a very polite thing you'd say. There is a sufficient diversity of technology documented for the period. You know, you mentioned bows and arrows, spears, swords, horses. You know, there's enough different kinds of stuff that you can move around and kill people with that you would almost expect, as you're going to go try to figure this out, that there would be some kind of combined arms dimensioned. Right. that it can't just be mass A under this king, encounters mass B under that king, and then they

just have a melee. You would, I mean, I guess theoretically you could, but it would seem strange that it would not have occurred to somebody there to like try to separate this out a bit. So, I mean, it sounds like, how do you, how would we even try to piece together more from Let me actually, let me instead, I'll address that, but let me instead address that there are indicators that people were thinking through these things. I just don't think that we can sew it all together, right? Yeah, maybe it's my, you know, my, maybe I just haven't discovered the materials yet,

or if it's maybe it's in front of me and I just haven't seen it yet. But and, and so there's a, there's an Egyptian, and this is actually before the, this is Egyptian text before the late Bronze Age, where, where one of the protagonists talks about his plans, right? that his plans are so great that he's going to defeat his opponent. And to me, that's one of these early indicators that there was, there really was a strategy of a sort, that there really was thoughtfulness to how I was going to go about this and, and, and, and, outthink my, my enemy with the, you know, the tools of war that I do have. So, so I do think that, that people were doing exactly what you described, but I'm not, but I don't think we have discovered the texts

or we have, or maybe we haven't properly interpreted or understood the texts that reveal these things. The, you know, the, the texts on training a horse is another example. So, so we know that people are really putting some thought into these things, but, but how it, how they stitched it together in terms of a combined arms effort, which I'm sure they did, and we might consider it a rudimentary way, but it's absolutely still, you know, still some sort of way. I'm not sure we can put that together yet. So, I mean, I can continue to talk to you about this stuff for hours. Maybe you would come back and we can keep doing that sometime. But let me, as promise,

let me try to sort of bring it back around to the present day. And you can talk, whether it's operations or strategy or politics, take it in any direction you want. But, you know, of course, we are talking about a part of the world that is, I mean, it's at war right now in multiple ways and in multiple places. Some of these wars, you think of the Syrian civil war in particular, it's absolutely savage. Right. What happened in Israel two months ago, you know, just utter utter savagery on October the 7th. So there is a kind of character to warfare in this part of the world in recent years that does not seem to give much evidence for the notion that things are getting more humane and more quote unquote modern as. as the years go on. There seems to be a flaw in that idea. So what, what continuities do you see,

what parallels to all of your study of truly ancient history, more ancient than what most people mean by ancient history? What have you learned about this part of the world and perhaps about warfare and politics more generally that matters today? So a few things. one is, and I mentioned before, that al-A-White, you know, that al-A-Wite Syria almost matches. The borders of al-A-I-Syria and Ugari are almost identical. And so to me, that's an indicator that geography influences us, you know, that even geography at a low-level influences us and our movements and the things that we're interested in and our capacity to grow and project societies and states, etc. that those things influence us in ways that we don't even realize. So I do think that, and maybe that's just one way of saying,

geopolitics is still a real thing. It's certainly not the only thing, and geopolitics is not sort of fate or determinative in an absolute sense, but it's hugely influential in ways that we may not even perceive. Just, again, that the limits of a society, in the late Bronze Age mirror the limits of a society in this age is at least, you know, at least raises some suspicion that is worth investigating. Number two is that political order, I guess political order on an international level.

And in fact, there's evidence at the domestic level as well, but from these texts. but that international order is created and sustained by willing partners, and that it's not something that we can ever take for granted. And this kind of goes to the, you know, what I'm thinking of right now is the collapse of the late Bronze Age. And there are a number of things that lead to it. Like most major events in international history, there's more than one fact. factor involved. But one of the prominent ones for the collapse of this international system was this migration or invasion of what we normally refer to as the sea peoples and the

Philistines, the Peleset in Egyptian texts, are part of that, part of that wave of people from the Mediterranean that just starts showing up and laying waste to anything on the coast. we don't know if there was some kind of some method to it there may have been but it's again it's a mystery to us at this point it's lost to us at this point but that's those societies were not ready for it and they could have been you know there's no reason why there's no reason why the hittites and the egyptians in the late bronze age if they if they worked together that they could not have prevented their own collapse so i guess those are the two things that really occurred, or those are the few things that, a few of the things that

occur to me that are true today, right? That political order is maintained by those who are collectively committed to maintaining it. That it doesn't have to be in a, that political order, international political order does not need to be an oppressive thing. It can be, there are certainly going to be limits and constraints and that sort of thing, but it can still be mutually beneficial, not just to the great powers, but to everybody in between. And you see that with the text, these smaller powers were frequently, there were moments when they were warring with Egypt, usually to no avail. But when they were at war with Egypt or Hattie, and there were times when Egypt and Hattie would kind of put them under their thumb. But they were also, just like we see today, people ask the United States to get involved.

People ask Great Britain to get involved. they ask Australia to get involved to help them out with whatever international problem they're facing. And so that was the dynamic then, too, is we have so many letters, so many diplomat, these are cables or these are diplomatic letters, the equivalent to neiform and on tablets, but it's the same thing. They're writing in a different lingual franca, but they're asking for help. They're asking for military assistance. They're asking for favor relative to their hostile neighbors. So, so anyway, that international order doesn't simply need to benefit the great powers, but it can be mutually beneficial to everyone involved.

Paul Edgar, the Clements Center, the University of Texas at Austin. This has been a truly fascinating conversation. I hope you'll come back sometime and continue it. Thank you so much for making the time. Thanks, Eric. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.