摘要：The situation is paradoxical. During the last century
of the 3rd millennium BC, several accounts testify
that rulers of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III) conducted,
from the heart of Sumer, several wars of conquest
beyond the frontiers of their kingdom, probably
infl uenced by the imperial model initiated roughly two
centuries earlier by the kings of Akkad. And yet very
few documents, with little detail in them, are available
on the armies that led these military conquests. Moreover,
we know little about how these kings organized,
from a military point of view, the defenses either at the
center or at the outskirts of their kingdom. Although
the military organization of this period is extremely important
to the history of ancient Mesopotamia, the total
evidence that we have to date is so sketchy and incomplete
that it allows only minimal insight.1
