The City Besieged: Siege and Its Manifestations in the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Maeir, Aren
• Position: Book review

The City Besieged: Siege and Its Manifestations in the Ancient Near East. By ISRAEL EPH'AL. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 36. Leiden: BRILL, 2009. Pp. xvii + 211. $118.

This volume, which is a review of the epigraphic--and to a lesser extent the archaeological--evidence for siege in the pre-Hellenistic ancient Near East, is extremely important for all students and scholars interested in the ancient Near East (and antiquity in general), and in particular, for those concerned with aspects of military history, technology, and tactics. Essentially, this is an English translation of the Hebrew edition that appeared in 1996. The author's meticulous research is now available for readers who do not have a working knowledge of Hebrew.

Following an introduction in which he defines siege and states the purpose of the book, the author covers the following ground: (1) a review of the relevant evidence, including the literary and non-literary documentary sources, ancient artistic depictions, and archaeological finds; (2) a discussion of various military aspects of siege, including blockade, negotiation, famine, and thirst, as well as various aspects of the final breaking into the invested town (chapter 3); (3) a consideration of the legal and economic aspects of siege; (4) a discussion of the social aspects of siege warfare.

By and large, the author provides the most in-depth and multi-faceted discussion of siege in the ancient Near East to date. The author's intimate familiarity with the relevant epigraphic material, in particular the Hebrew and Akkadian corpus, as well as his impressive command of the relevant historical sources and military thinking, combine to make this book ever so worthy. Its main weakness is that it is simply a translation of the Hebrew edition, with very little updating, either relating to relevant studies published after 1996 or to newly discovered archaeological material. This is apparent at various levels.

Eph'al does not take account of two recent books (one scholarly, one semi-popular--Kern 1999; Campbell 2006) that discuss siege in the ancient world and include extensive examinations of the phenomenon in the pre-Hellenistic Near East. Although he briefly refers to the final report on the excavations at Lachish (Ussishkin 2004), his discussions in fact rely only on the preliminary reports and do not consider the detailed analyses of the relevant finds in this final report (e.g., Gottlieb 2004; Sass and...