The oldest known siege trench ringed a Philistine city nearly 3,000 years ago
Siege comes from the Latin for sitting, and much of siege warfare was exactly that: surrounding a city and waiting. The earliest surviving proof of an attacker digging a ring around his target lies at Tell es-Safi in Israel, where a 2.5-kilometre trench encircled the Philistine city of Gath in the late ninth century BC.
Walls came first. The Sumerian city of Uruk was famous for fortifications stretching 9.5 kilometres and standing up to 12 metres tall. At Ao, a Shang dynasty site in China, fifteenth-century BC walls measured 20 metres thick at the base. Not everyone bothered: Indus Valley cities and Minoan Crete invested relatively little in defences, probably relying on frontiers and coastlines, while Mycenaean Greeks piled up the massive stonework later called Cyclopean.
Attackers had several ways in. Egyptian tomb reliefs from the twenty-fourth century BC show soldiers wheeling ladders up to Canaanite walls, the oldest siege equipment on record, and Assyrian kings later rolled up tower-shaped battering rams with archers perched on top. Sennacherib's siege of Lachish in 701 BC is unusual in surviving three ways at once, in the ground, in written Assyrian and biblical accounts, and in carved reliefs from his palace at Nineveh. Tunnelling under a wall and collapsing it, a method called mining, invited defenders to dig counter-tunnels to cave the attackers' works in first.
Force was often the last resort. The commonest approach was to wait, or to persuade someone inside to open a gate; a bribe to an unhappy gatekeeper could deliver a city intact. Medieval commanders often offered generous terms early, letting a garrison march out with its weapons, since a long siege drained money, time and lives. A defender who gave in too readily, though, risked execution for treason by his own side. Hunger and disease cut both ways, as encamped besiegers could suffer as badly as the people they were starving. Sometimes a city simply was not worth the effort: in the fourteenth century BC a Hittite army bypassed Carchemish, finished its main campaign, then came back and took the city in eight days.
Sieges dominated European warfare through the Renaissance, and Leonardo da Vinci won part of his fame designing fortifications. Ever stronger cannon in Napoleon's era eroded the value of walls, and twentieth-century mobile warfare left single strongholds far less decisive.
Source: Siege
