The Great Armies of Antiquity (review)

Richard A. Gabriel has been a prolific investigator of the armies of antiquity. Normally his books have not broken new ground but offered a wealth of enticing details on how those armies fought. This is not the case with his latest book, which is presented in scholarly dress, although at its best it is little more than a coffee table work.

Nineteen of its twenty-one chapters deal with different armies at an average length of about thirteen to fifteen pages per host. He begins with the world of the first armies, Sumer and Akkad, and then continues with the armies of the Pharaohs, the Hittites and iron weapons, the Mitanni and the war chariot, the armies of the Bible, the iron armies of Assyria, the Shang and Zhou armies of China, Persia and the art of logistics, Greece, Carthage, the Vedic and Imperial periods of India, Rome, the barbarian armies of the Iberians, Gauls, Germans, and Goths, Byzantium, the Vikings, the Arabs, Japan, the Mongols, and the Ottomans. The chronological period covered is from around 3500 BC to 1453 AD.

The most interesting chapters are the initial one dealing with "warfare in the ancient world from 2500 BC to 1453" and the concluding chapter which discusses the evolution of "modern war from 1453 to 2002." Yet even those chapters do not present new ideas but rather a summary of matters the author has mainly discussed elsewhere.

One can argue with many of Gabriel's choices, such as, for instance, bringing the definition of ancient armies to the whole medieval period or stereotyping the Assyrians as an iron army. More relevant, however, is another criticism. In all fairness, the reader cannot ask the writer of a book covering such broad topics to offer a detailed examination of the scholarship on the various armies, nor would it be fair to expect completely novel ideas. What, however, is a must is a review of the most important relevant works on the topic. Here Gabriel fails, relying at times, for instance, on booklets like those of the Osprey series, written mainly, with some exceptions, for the general public of armchair generals and wargamers. But let us take two armies as an example: the Egyptians and the Arabs. On Egypt he mentions his own work, Gurney on the Hittites, and the book in the Osprey series on Qadesh, forgetting several other publications dealing more specifically with the accomplishments and failures of the armies of the Pharaohs. On the Arab armies, no mention is made of the essential investigations of two great scholars: the work of Frank McGraw Donner and the old but very reliable discussions of Leone Caetani. Those representative examples could be repeated over and over again for each chapter.