what was the population of ancient Mesopotamia?

Submitted by Omastnar t3_z0hspy in history

I tried to find out the population of Mesopotamia during the time of the late Babylonian Empire, but i couldn't find anything. All it gave me where the populations of individual cities, do we know? Or is it just simply something nobody can figure out.

I tried searching through Wikipedia but was unable to find anything, I've found numbers between 25,000 people, to 200,000 people in the city itself, and 150,000 people for all of the Babylonian Empire which i think is goofy. So far the only source I've found that I think semi-realistically estimates the population of Ancient Babylonia isn't in the right period, its in the time of Hammurabi, and it also isn't a direct source, its a PDF for a public school.
https://www.peoriapublicschools.org/cms/lib/IL01001530/Centricity/Domain/5669/Hammurabi%20Documents.pdf

The reason I'm looking so hard for this was because I got into an argument about the army size of Babylon near its destruction, I thought it was between 50-100,000, but the guy I was arguing with said populations were so small back then their army couldn't have ever reached larger than 2,000.

Anybody know where I can figure this out?

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MeatballDom t1_ix5zmpw wrote

I'm not intimately familiar with the population studies of these people, but can speak a bit on populations in antiquity.

The overwhelming majority of it is just educated guesses/estimates. Very rarely do we get anything that states actual populations, and even those that did have censuses should be taken with a grain of salt.

So what do we look at? We look at the cities themselves mainly. We know that cities need to be able to house people, feed people, provide water, etc. So if we're only getting evidence of enough houses for 20,000 people, water (piped in or otherwise) for 30,000 people, etc. then we can start to doubt some of the higher limits.

However, we also can't just assume things were perfect either. We can't assume every room was a bedroom for one person. We can't assume that the amount of water would have been given to one person and used up (no excess) or that the amount of water was enough to give the right amount to all the people there (inadequate).

And so on and so forth. That is all to say that the reason we get such wide swings in population estimates is because different people are looking at different criteria and analysising them differently too. Some people may be very conservative, and go for the lowest, some may be a bit more open and go for the highest possible number.

So who's right? We usually will never know. Same thing happens with army sizes, with a lot of guesses -- though in antiquity this tends to go towards over-exaggerating rather than under, though there's probably a few instances of that happening too. Additionally, it's a common mistake to think that all members of an army lived in said place. Mercenaries were far more common than most people think, and this is fairly universal across antiquity.

/This is by no means describing the whole problem/study, there's a lot more factors to take into account, more areas of evidence we can look at (burials are fun), but just a very quick introduction.

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WorthPlease t1_ix65g4t wrote

Most historical sources from that time are highly Apocryphal.

  1. The modern numeric system we use today did not exist
  2. The people who eventually created "historic" version of these " documents" were born hundreds of years after they supposedly existed, and never actually lived in the places where these events occurred. And even those sources "reporting" on contemporary events are often highly exaggerated. It's very unlikely the Roman Republic could field 100,000 soldiers in a single battle, let alone do it again multiple times in a century. Those same "historians" we source on figures of this era can't even be relied upon to provide accurate numbers on things that happened when they were alive. And in fact they likely inflated or just made them up.
  3. Those people likely relied on multiple levels of translations from languages that no longer existed or they did not understand. Provided to them by people who also did not understand those languages.
  4. It was very beneficial to spread stories of great historical civilizations at the time as fact. It was not easy to disprove any claims and you could make a lot of money writing and orating stories about great historical empires and events.

Given historical comparisons, the logistics and technologies of the time, I think having 10,000 people living together in a "city" would be quite a feat. Add in communication (almost everybody is what you would consider illiterate), logistics, difficulty of travel, would mean that 10% of a population being able to muster for war would be...optimistic.

It's likely "great battles" of the time took place between hundreds of soldiers on each side. Thousands could have been possible but very rare.

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War_Hymn t1_ix8hw26 wrote

I believe contemporary Middle or New Kingdom Egypt had a population of 2-3 million at the time?

As a rule of thumb, urban population in those days usually represent about 5-10% of a local regions total population, so you can calculate a rough estimate of the total pop by multiplying combined population of city centers by a factor of 10 to 20.

More accurate estimates will require at minimal assessing the food production capacity of the area in question, ideally paired with records from the locale (which the city-states of Mesopotamia made plenty of in the form of cuneiform clay tablets recording taxes and temple contributions). I'll see if I can dig up something..

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Vulture12 t1_ix5xy83 wrote

Some digging on Wikipedia shows that the Neo-Assyrians (immediately preceding the Neo-Babylonians) could field an army of 300k men and earlier than that in Egypt Rameses II had an army of 100k men (both pages cite books for their numbers). It doesn't sound like your estimate is unreasonable at all and 2000 is definitely too low.

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WorthPlease t1_ix643dz wrote

Those numbers are almost certainly nonsense. Given logistics of the time it's incredibly unreasonable that they could communicate to get that many people in a single place, and then somehow feed them and provide water.

Relying on those sources for numbers just does not matter because the modern form on "numbers" we use doesn't even exist yet.

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42Sheep t1_ix8oqcq wrote

> the modern form on "numbers" we use doesn't even exist yet.

This is interesting. You've stated this at least twice. What does it mean? I understand the symbols would be different and the base-10 system might not be used. I'd think people would be very familiar with counting things. I thought writing was thought to have started with tallying counts of things.

I know some numbers can be a statement rather than a count (specifically thinking the Book of Revelation but I suspect it's elsewhere as well). Given that, wouldn't "10" people be 10 it whatever system is being used as long as "10" doesn't actually mean "all"? Thanks.

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ThoDanII t1_ix6ez4p wrote

the army must not necessarily deployed in one theatre less in one place

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imperialus81 t1_ix6ls1t wrote

Good point, but even then if you apply the same logic as I did in my other post regarding food requirements to say the Battle of Kadesh where (once again according to Wikipedia) there were supposedly 20,000 troops on the Egyptian side... Now this was an army operating out of Egyptian territory in modern day Syria so they wouldn't have access to reliable supplies from a friendly (or at least co-operative) population.

20,000 troops equals 40,000lbs of bread, 3000lbs of meat, and 30,000L of drink per day. Plus fodder for the chariot horses and pack animals, plus probably an equal number of non-combatants who were also attached to the army.

Some of that could likely be made up via foraging and looting, but I find it highly unlikely that there would even be enough calories available in the vicinity of an army like that to actually keep them fed.

This speaks to a big problem with Wikipedia as a source. If you actually look at the citations for both the size of the Assyrian army quoted above as well as the size of the Egyptian force at Kadesh you'll see that in both instances they cite a book by Osprey publishing. Osprey is a great publisher in a lot of ways, but they aren't academic. Their primary market is wargamers and modelers. In fact, both books cited were written by a fellow by the name of Mark Healy. Not to disparage Mr. Healy but he has a masters degree in Political Theology. Not History or Near Eastern studies or Archeology or anything related to the field. He's a hobbyist, not an expert.

As a matter of fact, the 20,000 number looks like it is actually citing a website article from ancienthistorylists.com with an article titled "Top 14 decisive ancient battles"

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vzierdfiant t1_ix6wuae wrote

Great points. Also, I think 30,000L is way too low. They are soldiers in Syria. Easily 4 liters per person per day. Moving 80,000L of water per day in animal hide skins using horses and people is a crazy logistical feat over any distance more than a couple miles. They didn't have water containers on wheels, right?

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imperialus81 t1_ix6yby1 wrote

Realistically it's all pretty low. Would they need more water? For sure. But 1.5L would likely keep them alive, especially if they were campaigning during the cooler, non growing seasons which is the only way you'd ever get your numbers to even approach 100 or 300 thousand as you would be relying on your farmers as the bulk of those troops.

The bar I set is not 'well fed'. 2500 calories is what I would consider to be survival level given the physical expectations of an army on the march and in battle. For reference, a modern American 24 hour pack of MRE's contains between 3500 and 4000 calories. Likewise, water I estimated at a low end, since it is quite likely that an army on the move would almost certainly follow a river, where they could access flowing water that could be used for cooking and even be somewhat 'purified' for drinking through the addition of alcohol or vinegar.

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vzierdfiant t1_ix78rok wrote

100% would need more. Soldiers are marching, building camps, hauling gear, etc. Hard work, and tiring, would need at least 4 L per day and 3000+ calories imo, unless you want your army to be emaciated and exhausted in a couple of weeks.

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Vulture12 t1_ix648vr wrote

I'm not invested enough to buy the source books to evaluate, but you're more than welcome to.

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imperialus81 t1_ix6anno wrote

The thing is that even primary sources from the period are likely unreliable. Between propaganda, translation issues, and transcription issues it is impossible to say with certainty how many men were actively under arms...

So, lets look at it from the other end. What is reasonable? Realistically it comes down to food. So the primary source of calories for all of those societies would have been bread. A 1lb loaf of whole wheat bread has about 1100 calories in it. An adult male needs between 2000 and 3000 calories/day. We'll assume a goal of around 2500 calories/day as necessary to keep your soldiers capable of actually fighting. Most of that will come from bread and it wouldn't be surprising if each soldier would have eaten about pounds of bread per day which would net them 2200 calories.

Also, I'm fully aware that Ramesses did not have access to modern food scientists, but the reality of it is, that he would have been aware of the fact that a starving army will not perform well, and as armies throughout history have discovered fucking around with food very quickly leads to finding out that bad things happen to said army.

Now, man cannot live on bread alone. Especially if you want them fit to fight. An oz of red meat has about 75 calories. we're short about 300 calories so that works out to about 4oz of red meat. You could probably cut this back a bit if you supplemented with other things, particularly veg but you also need to remember that unlike bread, meat spoils very quickly. This means salting or other pre refrigeration methods of food preservation or keeping your meat on the hoof for as long as possible which will in turn create a massive logistics train.

Also keeping in mind you need to provide your soldiers with something potable to drink and this likely meant watered down wine or beer. Again assuming reasonably strenuous physical activity in a hot climate like the fertile crescent you are looking at about 1.5 liters of water per day.

Now is when we break out the calculator. If you are fielding 1000 men this means that in order to keep them from starving you will need to provide 2000 loaves of bread plus about 150 lbs of meat and 1500 liters of drinkable water per day.

Now, if you are fielding 300,000 men... well you are looking at 600,000 loaves of bread, 75,000 lbs of meat, plus 450,000 liters of drinkable something.

That's a lot of food for a modern army to manage with shelf stable MRE's (only country in the world I would bank on being able to pull it off is the USA) nevermind the 'logistics' system of a pre-20th century army.

*Edit* fixed the numbers for meat requirements.

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Northstar1989 t1_ix6lrbg wrote

>Now, man cannot live on bread alone. Especially if you want them fit to fight. An oz of red meat has about 75 calories.

You're completely wrong.

Armies on the march DIDN'T eat any substantial amount of meat in ancient times.

Most armies existed on an almost entirely grain-based diet as late as the Roman Empire. Legionaries famously ate a sort of porridge for most meals on campaign, and were punished by being fed lower quality or less desirable grains (such as barley rather than wheat) if they did something wrong.

Meat is a modern luxury. It's not something armies could afford to travel with large quantities of.

Your other assumptions are ridiculously far off too. The total army of a nation would almost never be deployed all in one place (it simply wasn't logistically feasible, as you deduced). So, maybe half the Army would be defending dozens of cities in the homelamd as holding forces, and the other half would be spread into 3 or 4 large fighting forces and one to two dozen smaller skirmishing forces along the border with a foe.

The larger armies would only gather together right before a battle. The Romans even had a maxim for this: "March divided, fight concentrated."

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imperialus81 t1_ix6nmo0 wrote

I picked on red meat as a straight forward protein source that every ancient society would have at least had access to. It's also why I counted 2200 of their 2500 calories as coming from bread.

Were there other options? Sure. Beans and other legumes would fit the bill and would have likely played a significant role but beans also would have needed more water, which would have further complicated things. Plus, not every society would have had access to the same sorts of legumes so in the spirit of keeping it simple I put the number at 4oz of meat since going into more detail than that is just going to get too situational. As a note Tacitus does speak briefly as to the meat requirements of a Roman legion numbering it at around 150 swine/day for a full legion of 6000 troops plus their supporting folks. Now he was speaking about a legion in garrison, not on the march and we have no idea if it was some super special 'Legate Picard Day' or something but the point remains, that's a hell of a lot of food.

I also left out fat requirements since the Romans solved this through olive oil but I have no frigging clue how the Assyrians or Egyptians would have done the same outside of imports.

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Northstar1989 t1_ixbr6xm wrote

Tacitus was a late Imperial historian writing in a period of relative peace, and known to be subject to exaggeration and outright flattery at times to ingratiate himself with the powerful.

That being said, he was most definitely talking about garrison troops. Legions did occasionally travel with substantial swine herds to eat, but nowhere near the scale of 1 hog per day per 40 men. A figure of around 1 hog per day per 250 men might be more accurate for an army on a prolonged campaign.

Note that few legions in Tacitus' day actually went on such long campaigns. The legions were generally fairly sedentary at the time, only marching relatively short distances to deal with border incursions.

The Dacian Wars towards the end of Tacitus' life were one major exception to this rule: and although the legions were exceptionally well supplied during them as Dacia was quite close to major Greek and Illaryian holdings of Rome (and connected to them by navigable rivers), you'll likely find that meat consumption for the actively canpaigning legions even then fell substantially below this figure of 1 per 60 if you look into any reliable statistics available for the wars.

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Szwedo t1_ix6v1hw wrote

Weren't humans smaller back then too so they needed less calories, let alone meat protein being far less consumed in general up until the 20th c?

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imperialus81 t1_ix6xevy wrote

Right, which is why I went for 2500 calories. For reference, a modern MRE averages at 1250 calories per meal, or 3750 calories per day.

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Thuis001 t1_ix7dft9 wrote

Soldiers would also need to eat far more calories to stay in fighting shape as they expend more energy than your average person.

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Szwedo t1_ix7dsa0 wrote

Armies back in this time were barely professional

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Thuis001 t1_ix7n4li wrote

That has no bearing on how many calories an individual needs though. Just on how capable an army would be at ensuring the soldier has access to those.

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imperialus81 t1_ix816ic wrote

You'd be surprised.

We do for example have records of what 'in theory' Napoleon was giving his troops in the early 19th century and it isn't far off the numbers I listed. This is the 'ideal' situation, not when they were marching home from Moscow:

24 oz of bread, 8 oz of meat, 2oz legumes.

My own numbers were more bread focused with less meat, but on that note you saw how pissy some folks got when I suggested half that quantity of meat upthread.

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RevolutionaryChip864 t1_ix67yil wrote

300 000 men army is absolutely impossible.

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Northstar1989 t1_ix6kym6 wrote

No it's not.

As earlier comments have pointed out, mercenaries were EXTREMELY common in this time period.

These numbers likely included many, many mercenaries who were on some kind of retainer to serve if needed- but served other city states at times as well.

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Treyred23 t1_ix6nylr wrote

There is no way to feed and water 300,000 men and their animals at this time.

Its a ludicrous number.

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vzierdfiant t1_ix6wi5c wrote

You realize that the logistics and technology to feed and coordinate that many people didn't exist until modern times, right? 300K men means 2.1 Million gallons of water and 4.2 million pounds of food per week. You realize this is an insane amount of material to produce, store, and ship solely with man and horsepower, right?

Just doing napkin math: A Typical horse can walk 50 miles a day and carry 300 lbs. Assuming the military campaign is only 25 miles away from the city that has 10's of millions of pounds of food stored for war, you would need 5714 horses working 24/7 just to move the food and water to the soldiers. For every 25 miles farther, you need 5714 more horses. Also, these horses need food+water, gear and weapons need to be moved. So if you wanted to wage a war 100 miles away from your city, you needed more transport horses than all of the legions of the roman empire at peak power (22k or so cavalry).

Just crazy to think about, and then add that you need to feed these horses, and that you need to feed the cavalry horses as well. Don't know how much a horse eats, but i imagine its a lot.

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ThoDanII t1_ix7hncj wrote

Ships, boats, waggons

Replace land transport whenever possible with watertransport, and use waggons instead of pack animals

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vzierdfiant t1_ix8ofuw wrote

Did mesopotamian cultures have the technology to create large watertight containers?

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ThoDanII t1_ix8pram wrote

yes

they did pottery and wineskins

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vzierdfiant t1_ix8qy0x wrote

Ah yes, pottery. So durable and capable of being used to transport large volumes of water over rocky terrain and primitive roads without breaking, very plausible. And at any large volume (over 500L) wineskins would leak a ton.

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ThoDanII t1_ix8vdje wrote

Prussian soldiers used glas canteens, and i think the waterskins would max out by 20 or 50 litres in my estimation

and yes afaik they used pottery to transport water, wine and olive oil over large distances

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Lothronion t1_ix67bnv wrote

These seem like a good indicator. In 19th century Western Europe the population percentage that would be engaged in the military was about 2%, with the exception being the militarized Kingdom of Prussia with a percentage of 3,5% (if I remember correctly).

Given how these societies are far older, so less manpower would be needed elsewhere, a reasonable percentage could be 5%. Therefore, Rameses II's 100 thousand could easily translate into 2 million people, which seems a reasonable figure for the time (since the population fell in the Bronze Age Collapse, and how in Ptolemaic Egypt the figure was 3 million people).

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ThoDanII t1_ix6evs3 wrote

>Given how these societies are far older, so less manpower would be needed elsewhere, a reasonable percentage could be 5%.

quite contrary, more manpower would be needed for less efficient methods

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the_skine t1_ix6geix wrote

Also, they didn't have large professional armies.

Up until the early 1900s, over 95% of all people worked in agriculture. Many of those men would help plant in the spring, go to war in the summer, harvest in the fall, and tend to their homes and farms in the winter.

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Laura-ly t1_ix97b9h wrote

I have often wondered this very thing when reading some of the population numbers in the Bible. For instance, the enslaved Hebrew Exodus population was supposedly 600,000 men plus their families. This takes the number upwards of over a million and a half people to almost 2 million people. It's been estimated that Egypt's population was around 5 million people (I can't remember where I read this, sorry) so this means that the population of the slaves was around 1/3 of the population.

There is zero evidence of the Exodus, it's a national foundation myth written centuries later but the number of people the Bible alledges were killed in battles or living in cities seems to be highly embellished. Population studies are hard to come by when trying to compare these old stories to realistic population numbers.

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HyperbolicSoup t1_ixabb2y wrote

Nineveh May have had north of 1MM people before it’s sacking around… 600BC I want to say

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