Aksoy, OC; (2017) Warfare and Military Doctrines in North and Southeast Arabia (14th -6th Centuries BC). Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This thesis seeks to define what were believed and thought to be the best ways to conduct military affairs in the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age in north and southeast Arabia. This thesis takes its departure from the hypothesis that we cannot define the phenomenon of war in the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age with certainty since there is limited first hand evidence that mirrors actual combat conditions in north and southeast Arabia. Instead, what we can render out from the existing corpus of data are the individuals, communities and polities’ imaginations, perceptions, designations, and perhaps recollections about wars and other military activities, namely, their military doctrine. Pursuing this perspective, I have conducted surveys and artefact studies in Oman, UAE and Saudi Arabia in the past four years. The scenes of conflict in rock art, in Assyrian art, rock inscriptions, the Assyrian annals, military architecture and copper alloy armament received scrutiny in this research. Through analysis and review of this large corpus of data, I aimed to reconstruct the military geographies and cognitive stages of warfare in these regions: (1) fundamental doctrine (ideologies, power structures, motivations for combat), (2) environmental doctrine (tactics and technology), and (3) organisational doctrine (operational art). As result of this work two schemes of military doctrine are proposed for north and southeast Arabia. These schemes suggest that multidimensional and non-linear ways of waging military affairs were prevalent in these regions as opposed to the unilateral manifestations of conflict, ideology, power and technology in states and empires. Each force and perhaps each individual have their own objectives and designations about the concept of war, and they reflected these views by the means of rock art and inscriptions, defence architecture, and weaponry design and use.

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