A follower or item for BAC

A Šagina’s Posse
Brought to you straight from Ur III for your laborious pleasure, Lord Jumper, is your trusty Šagina (military governor). This man (or maybe woman, if you’re some time-traveling Scythian or pre-dynastic Sumerian) is a well-educated, literate and properly indoctrinated member of either your family, or an ethnic minority you can trust to not be welcome wherever you station him. He’s an able civil administrator, military commander, courier and if necessary merchant. More than that, he comes with all the men under his command. Five thousand aga-uš (professional soldiers) and five thousand eren (reservist soldier-laborers).

The aga-uš are trained in contemporary military tactics, equipped with contemporary weaponry and armor, and have served in a minimum of four year-long campaigns. They will eagerly serve you and your šagina, whether as soldiers on campaign against an enemy people or city, as raiders to pillage the countryside, guardsmen to protect your property, settlements or caravans, or as muscle for less…legally sanctioned activities. They can also serve as household servants and aids in a pinch, though they might grumble a bit. Among these five thousand aga-uš there are about twenty five officers, each of whom are literate and can serve as more general administrative officials if need be, though they are not as able or ideologically compliant as the šagina.

The eren on the other hand are a bit more complicated. These are men settled in agrarian military colonies near a provincial fortress. For your purposes, they spend half the year tending to their farmland with their families, sharecroppers, and slaves, and half the year living in their barracks, from which you can call them forth to either work as manual laborers or soldiers. They offer half their annual harvest to you as tax or rent, dependent on the specifics of your own station. As laborers the eren are particularly adept at the creation and maintenance of rural infrastructure such as irrigation canals, damns, levees, bridges and roads. They’re a bit less used to constructing urban buildings beyond simple houses, workshops, and fortifications, but given some instruction and guidance they’ll perform just as ably. As soldiers, the eren are of lesser quality than the age-uš but are still equipped to a fair standard and well-enough trained to be reliable in battle.

Naturally, if you prefer to not be an anachronistic mess, you can have an equivalent group from your respective culture, kill-joy. Regardless, these people count as followers and any losses will be replenished every ten years, though you may also recruit locals to replace said losses if you prefer not to wait.