Friday, December 22, 2023

Israel Eph’al on the use of "Strategems" (stratagems) in Antiquity

  

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)

 

 

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