New Release: The armies of Sumer and Ur

As I’ve telegraphed over the last couple of weeks, our latest range goes all the way back to the beginnings of history.   Some 6000 years ago, the area known as Mesopotamia became home to a remarkable civilisation that we generally call ‘Sumerian’.   It was a civilisation of city states and saw notable innovations ranging from intensive agriculture, irrigation, an organised religion, architecture, literature and written records.

However, these advances also brought with them an inevitable series of rivalries between the various cities, and as they jockeyed for position, the innovations also included organised warfare, wheeled combat vehicles, regular formations, siege warfare and a general tool kit of ways to inflict bodily harm on the representatives of rival cities and ethnic groups.

Although our knowledge of Sumerian warfare is necessarily limited by the sheer number of years separating us and the lack of sufficiently detailed records;  a successful king would boast on the numbers of enemy slain, the amount of loot taken and occasionally the imaginatively nasty way of slaying prisoners, there is very little of the nice details that we wargamers thrive on.  However there are two excellent pictorial references upon which we can base our concepts of appearance and fighting methods.  These are the Stele of Vultures

And the Standard of Ur.  

I would strongly recommend having a look at these pictures from the past.  They offer a fascinating insight into what can,  at the same time, be both a familiar and completely mystifying people.

Our new Sumerian range has included all of the options that we feel cover the major interpretations of the Sumerian way of war, and we have also put together an army pack for the popular Hail Caesar rules.   You can find all of the details here.

We will have all of the codes available at Colours this coming weekend.