Shelters

Greek armies don’t seem to have brought much in the way of tents with them; it was easier to cut down the local greenery, move a couple of rocks, and build temporary shelters from spare textiles or mats. The owners of event locations rarely approve of felled saplings and most people today are not as resistant to the Boeotian sun as people in the long sixth century BCE! Very few pictures or descriptions of tents and temporary shelters are known, especially before Alexander the Great. Beware translators who render the vague word for “shelter” (σκήνη) or “place to lie down” (κλισίη) as “tents”! Most translators are not trying to communicate material culture, and some translations were written before much had been published on the practicalities of life in antiquity.

Anderson, Theory and Practice, pp. 61, 62
Karunanithy, The Macedonian War Machine, pp. 195-196 {the tents of Alexander’s infantry}
John Lee, A Greek Army on the March, pp. 121-123 {the tents of the Ten Thousand}
Spawforth, Anthony (2007) “The Court of Alexander the Great Between Europe and Asia.” In Anthony Spawforth (ed.), The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge) pp. 82-120

In contrast, the Neo-Assyrians proudly displayed their tents with a central pole and a framework of branches reaching towards the walls, and Greek writers lovingly described the tents of Persian kings and generals (supposedly, the 50 × 70 meter Odeion in Athens was copied from the tent of Xerxes, Pausanias 1.20.4). Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great has tents made for each company of 100 men, which implies something quite elabourate.

Aside from the Bedouins, today’s pastoral nomads in the Near East practice a way of life learned from Turks and Mongols in the last thousand years (and communities have often moved back and forth between nomadism, village-based herding, and farming as the political economy demanded). The first solid evidence for pastoral nomads in Iran is Herodotus (Potts, Nomadism in Iran) and we do not know what kinds of tents and shelters these Iron Age nomads used. Nomads in recent times use a variety of forms, and the Assyrians show Arab tents as the same kind their own soldiers live in. Some boats also had a tent, presumably shelter for the crew on deck. Tents in cuneiform texts are made of leather, woollen cloth, or goat-hair, with ropes and wooden components (poles and rafters?) but most of these texts come from urban contexts.

…
Akkadian zaratu (plural zarātu): RlA L p. 541, CAD Z p. 66
Akkadian kuštāru, (h)uroatu, zaratu, maškanu
Neo-Assyrian reliefs
RlA s.v. Zelt
Andrews, Peter Alford (1997) Nomad Tent Types in the Middle-East. 2 volumes of a planned four-volume series (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Riechert)
…

… Scythian …
David Stronach, “On the Antiquity of the Yurt: Evidence from Arjan and Elsewhere.” The Silkroad Foundation Newsletter Vol. 21 No. 1 pp. 9-18 https://edspace.american.edu/silkroadjournal/wp-content/uploads/sites/984/2017/09/On-the-Antiquity-of-the-Yurt.pdf

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