Strategems
Every
series of possibilities detailed in the Assyrian queries of prevailing over a
city, whether by negotiations or by force, concludes with the question “[Will
the city be caught] by any stratagem?—that is, an unexpected manner which would
not occur to anyone and therefore could not be specified explicitly in query.
Many conquest traditions refer to various strategems, some of which may have
been practical and others that seem completely imaginary.
The
archetypal imaginative stratagem was the infiltration of Greek warriors into
Troy in the wooden horse, after they had failed to overcome the city over a
long period of time (Odyssey 8.487-520). The same motif appears in the
Egyptian story of the capture of Jaffa, in the period of Thutmosis III by
sneaking soldiers into it, hidden inside baskets.
Sophisticated
strategems are also attributed to historical figures: Pausanias relates that
Soin (early 6th century BC) placed hellebore roots in the water
supply of the city of Cirrha, the port city of Delphi, and infected its inhabitants
and defenders with severe diarrhea, forcing them to abandon their posts on the
walls of the besieged city. (Description of Greece, 10.37.7) Herodotus
tells of the capture of the city of Barca by Amasis (the general of Darius I)
after nine months of exhausting siege by making a treaty with its inhabitants
that was to remain valid “so long as this land shall stand,” when in fact the
treaty was made above a pit that had been dug by the Persians and concealed by
planks covered with earth.
One of the strategems
used in the traditions of siege entailed tricking the defenders to go outside
of the city by staging a retreat or withdrawal of the attackers. The defenders,
thinking that their enemies were withdrawing due to weakness, move out of the
city and chase the retreating forces. At this stage, a second group of
attackers, the “ambush,” that remained hidden until that point, enters and
attacks the city. The Bible mentions two cases quite similar in formulation, in
which this tactic was used: the conquest of the town of Ai by Joshua (Josh.
8:2-22, 24) and the conquest of the town of Gibeah during the war of the
Israelite tribe against Benjamin (Jud. 20:29-42, 48). Parallels are also found
in ancient military literature. (Frontinus, Strategems, 3.10.1-9) Suspicion
of such a stratagem is implied in the reaction of the Israelite king upon
hearing that the Aramean camp, that had laid siege to Samaria, was empty of
soldiers, “And the king rose in the night and said to the servants, ‘I will
tell you what the Arameans have prepared against us. They know that we are
hungry: therefore they have gone out of the camp to hide themselves in the
open, thinking, “When they come out of the city we shall take them alive and
get into the city’” (2 Kgs. 7:12). (Israel Eph’al, The City Besieged: Siege
and Its Manifestations in the Ancient Near East [Culture and History of the
Ancient Near East 36; Leiden: Brill, 2009], 102-3)
