by John Keegan
The ethos of societies centred on the hunting-party may, indeed, quite ambivalently vary between the cooperative and the contentious. Frederick Selous (1851–1917), the archetype of the Great White Hunter, found his party swelled almost uncontrollably when he was shooting game in what is now Zimbabwe in the 1880s, as native people hungry for meat tailed on to the retinue of someone who was known to be a dead shot. Ethnographers note, by contrast, that a hunter whose luck leaves him may quickly lose his authority in a hunting-band and even become the victim of those who had come to depend on him for food. Equally, neighbours may learn to share hunting, according to migration patterns or in acceptance of the succession of lean with fat years; or they may do no such thing, but rather guard their hunting-grounds as if they were private property and kill those who cross the boundaries. Hugo Obermaier, an early interpreter of cave art, believed one scene showed Stone Age man defending his territory.73 Egyptologists interpret the contents of the notorious Site 117 at Jebel Sahaba in Upper Egypt in a similar way: in the graves there fifty-nine skeletons have been excavated, many of which, notes F. Wendorf, show signs of wounding. The skeletons are in
direct association [with] 110 artifacts, almost all in positions which indicate that they had penetrated the body either as points or barbs on projectiles or spears. They were not grave offerings. Many of the artifacts were found along the vertebral column, but other favored target areas were the chest cavity, lower abdomen, arms and the skull. Several pieces were found inside the skull, and two of these were still embedded in the sphenoid bones [at the base of the skull] in positions which indicate that the pieces entered from under the lower jaw.74
Since the skeletons were those of males and females in almost equal number, and the absence of callusing around the bone injuries indicated that wounding had been fatal, one conclusion drawn was that the dead were victims of a fight between hunters over territory, perhaps brought on by a sudden desiccation — return of arid conditions — in the Nubian region during the climatic instability at the end of the Ice Age.
‘We may have in this site’, thinks Ferrill, ‘the first extensive skeletal evidence for warfare in prehistoric times.’75 Equally, however, we may not. The bodies may have been interred over a period of time, as another interpreter suggests. They may, again, belong to people of an altogether different culture from those who killed them, since the upper reaches of the Nile valley were a melting-pot in the New Stone Age, and so bear not at all upon the bellicosity of Stone Age hunters. An uncanvassed fourth possibility is that the graves do indeed reveal evidence of a fight between hunters, but one that falls into the category of ‘raiding’ or ‘routing’ as practised by the Yanomamö and Maring. The fact that the victims were both male and female is consistent with this interpretation, and so is what Ferrill calls the ‘overkill’, the infliction of multiple wounds, as on the body of a young woman inside whose skeleton twenty-one arrow or spear points were found. The Maring, in particular, set out on a ‘rout’ with the intention of slaying all they can trap in the target village, without distinction of age or sex; and if the wounding evidence suggests a massacre, that, alas, is consistent with human behaviour from many places over many centuries. One of the most gruesome discoveries made at the disinterment of the mass grave on Gotland, containing 2000 bodies from the battle of Visby of 1361, was that many of the dead had been extensively mutilated — typically by repeated sword-cuts down their shins — and such cuts could only have been inflicted after they were disabled. But as I have argued before, moreover, neither ‘raiding’ nor ‘routing’ is a true act of warfare. Each subsists ‘below the military horizon’ and is better thought of as multiple murder than as an episode in a campaign. If the dead of Site 117 and those who attacked them were both from hunting-cultures, as the original excavators supposed, and if the dead were all killed at one time, then the ghastly outcome of their encounter reinforces the view that the hunting men of the New Stone Age were no more than primitive warriors, members of groups without a distinguishable military class and without a ‘modern’ concept of warfare. Fight they no doubt did, ambush, raid and perhaps ‘rout’ as well; but organise themselves for conquest and occupation they almost certainly did not.
Yet those people of prehistoric Nubia, inhabitants of a region which then as now straddles the meeting-place of fertile and infertile land, may be a key to our understanding of how ‘primitive’ eventually became ‘true’ or ‘modern’ or ‘civilised’ war. For another interpretation of the evidence at Site 117 is that it memorialises not a fight between hunting-peoples over game-bearing territory, but a conflict of entirely different economies. The upper Nile valley is one of the areas in which the benevolent change of climate that followed the end of the last ice age best favoured the adoption of a new and more settled way of life for Stone Age man. There are indications from the stone implements found that the inhabitants had begun to harvest wild grasses and to grind the extracted grains into meal; there are subtler indications that they had begun if not yet actually to domesticate, then to tend the animals on which they depended for a living.76 They were trembling on the brink of pastoralism and agriculture, the two activities which transform man’s relationship with his habitat. Hunters and gatherers may have ‘territory’; pastoralists have grazing and watering-places; agriculturalists have land. Once man invests expectations of a regular return on his seasonal efforts in a particular place — lambing, herding, planting, reaping — he rapidly develops the sense of rights and ownership. Toward those who trespass on the places where he invests his time and effort he must equally rapidly develop the hostility of the user and occupier for the usurper and interloper. Fixed expectations make for fixed responses. Pastoralism, and agriculture even more so, make for war. That, at any rate, is one meaning that has been placed on the relics of Site 117 where, it is suggested, a sudden fluctuation of climate, characteristic of the earth’s warming at the time, cast a group of hunters or gatherers, driven back towards the Nile, into conflict with proto-pastoralists or farmers over the same piece of territory. From which group came the bodies of those who are buried there, we must be left to guess.
Superior skill at arms should have rested with the hunters. ‘We may speculate’, thinks J.M. Roberts, ‘that the dim roots of the notion of aristocracy are to be sought in the successes (which must have been frequent) of hunter-gatherers, representatives of an older social order, in exploiting the vulnerability of the settlers, tied to their areas of cultivation.’77 Certainly it is a universal phenomenon that rights of hunting are always arrogated by those who have authority over the tillers of the soil, that aristocrats who monopolise such rights also enact brutal penalties against those who violate them, and that the overthrow of aristocratic hunting-rights has often been a chief demand of revolutionaries. Hunter-gatherers had many centuries of decline ahead of them, however, before their putative descendants could lord it — as Grand Falconers or Chief Foresters or Masters of the Horse — over the cottagers and ploughboys of the feudal establishment. In the meantime, the trend of events in the ecologically favoured zones of human habitation lay with those who would work to alter the surface of the land rather than with those who were content to skim its offerings. Agriculture was the way of the future.
In the 7000 years between the retreat of the ice and the appearance of writing at Sumer, man — though still working with stone tools — painstakingly, erratically and with many false starts taught himself the techniques of land clearance, tilling and reaping in half a dozen regions which were to become the centres of great civilisations, in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus and the Yellow River. Of course, he did not make a leap directly from his ice-age way of life to intensive cropping. Historians generally agree that he began by bringing gregarious animals under a measure of control — there is evidence of shepherding in northern Iraq as early as 9000 BC — and there was clearly a cumulative progression from systematic collection of wild grains to planting and eventually to the select
ion of better-cropping strains. Historians do not agree, however, as to where and how man first established agricultural settlements — understandably, since the evidence is so patchy. An early assessment was that he chose the uplands of the Near Eastern river valleys, healthier and drier than the ground below, where slash-and-burn clearance could make successive fertile openings in the tree cover.78 This theory is supported by evidence of the contemporaneous appearance of a new sort of stone tool, fashioned from heavy basalt or granite, and ground by abrasion — the magnificent ‘polished’ axes and adzes of the New Stone Age. Some historians advanced the idea of a Neolithic Revolution, in which the demands of agriculture called forth novel tool-working skills or, alternatively, new tools made advances into the forest possible. Certainly it is the case that chipped tools of flint do little damage to large trees, while a heavy polished axe can fell a tree of almost any size. The neat technological determinism of this theory, however, did not last long, even though it suggested that an even neater pattern of agricultural advance occurred with our New Stone Age ancestors: from the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent down into the alluvial plains of the great rivers themselves, and from slash-and-burn to the seasonal cultivation of flood-fertilised lowlands.
Undoubtedly such a movement occurred, but from a very early period, perhaps as early as 9000 BC, man hit upon an altogether different pattern of agricultural life. At Jericho, 600 feet below sea level in the arid valley of the Jordan, archaeologists have found the remains of what by 7000 BC was an eight-acre town, housing 2000 or 3000 people, who made their living by cultivating the fertile zone in the surrounding oasis; their strains of wheat and barley were imported from elsewhere, as was the obsidian for some of their tools. Only a little later, at Çatal Hüyük, in modern Turkey, a much larger town grew up, eventually covering thirty acres and accommodating between 5000 and 7000 people, living a life of considerable sophistication. Digging has disclosed the presence of a wide variety of imported goods, presumably traded, an equally wide variety of locally produced craft goods, suggesting a division of labour, and most arresting of all, traces of an irrigation system, indicating that the inhabitants were already practising a form of farming previously thought characteristic only of the much larger and later settlements in the great river valleys.
Of key significance to military historians is the structure of these two towns. Çatal Hüyük is built with the outer walls of its outermost houses presenting a continuous blank face, so that even were an intruder to have broken a hole through it, or through a roof, he ‘would find himself not inside the town but inside a single room’.79 Jericho, even more impressively, is surrounded by a continuous wall ten feet thick at the base, thirteen feet high and some 700 yards in circumference. At the foot of the wall lies a rock-cut moat thirty feet wide and ten feet deep, while inside the wall at one point stands a tower that overtops it by fifteen feet, providing a look-out place and, though it does not project beyond to form a flank as later bastions would, a dominant fighting-platform. Moreover, Jericho is built of stone, not the mud of Çatal Hüyük, indicating that an intense and coordinated programme of work, consuming tens of thousands of man-hours, had been undertaken. While Catal Hüyük’s conformation might have been chosen simply to keep out the occasional robber or raider, Jericho’s is quite different in purpose: incorporating as it does two elements that were to characterise military architecture until the coming of gunpowder, the curtain wall and the keep, as well as the even longer-lived moat, it constitutes a true fortified stronghold, proof against anything but prolonged attack with siege engines.80
The discovery of Jericho in 1952–8 compelled a complete reappraisal of prevailing scholarly assumptions about when intensive agriculture, urban life, long-distance trade, hierarchical society and warfare first began. Hitherto it had been thought that none of these developments emerged until the foundation of the irrigation economies in Mesopotamia, and those believed to have derived from them in Egypt and India, sometime before 3000 BC. After the excavation of Jericho it was clear that warfare at least — for what could be the point of walls, towers and moats without a purposeful, well-organised and strongly armed enemy? — had begun to trouble man long before the first great empires arose.81
And yet between Jericho and Sumer we have but the scantiest evidence of how military developments progressed. That was perhaps because, in a still largely empty world, homo sapiens was devoting his energies to colonisation rather than conflict. In Europe there were already farming villages as early as 8000 BC and agriculture was advancing westward at the rate of about a mile a year in the more fertile zones, reaching Britain about 4000 BC. There were urban settlements on Crete and the Aegean coast of Greece in 6000 BC and a developed pottery industry in Bulgaria about 5500 BC, while by 4500 BC the cultivators of Brittany were beginning to raise the megalithic tombs that still commemorate their ancestors. By the same date five of the six distinguishable ethnic groups that inhabit India were established throughout the subcontinent, pursuing a New Stone Age way of life in scattered settlements. There was a thriving New Stone Age culture in the fertile highlands of north and north-west China in 4000 BC, based on the wind-driven (loess) soils of the Yellow River. Only Africa, Australia and the Americas then remained solely in the hands of hunter-gatherers, nowhere numerous, though the Amerindians who had crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia about 10,000 BC, bringing with them advanced hunting techniques from the Old World, had nevertheless succeeded in extinguishing the continent’s spectacular big game, including the giant bison and three species of mammoth, in about a thousand years.
Almost everywhere population densities remained very low. Though the number of people in the world rose from about 5–10 million in 10,000 BC to perhaps 100 million in 3000 BC, they were almost nowhere densely concentrated. Hunter-gatherers typically needed between one and four square miles of territory to support each individual. Farmers could support themselves and their families on much smaller spreads: at the Egyptian city of El-Amarna, for example, founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten about 1540 BC, it has been estimated that people were living at a density of about 500 per square mile of productive soil.82 That, however, was on the hand-watered gardens of the rich Nile valley and, in any case, at a date that lay in the future. Between 6000 and 3000 BC the scattered agricultural settlements in eastern Europe did not exceed a size of fifty or sixty households each; in the Rhineland of the fifth millennium BC, farmers were subsisting by slash-and-burn in the great forests, periodically abandoning and then reoccupying settlements which never housed more than 300–400 people.83
In such stringent and yet paradoxically such ample circumstances, the urge to fight cannot have been strong. Land was effectively free, to anyone willing to shift a few miles and burn some forest — as poor peasants were still doing in nineteenth-century Finland. Yields, on the other hand, must have been so low as to produce little worth robbing, except immediately after the harvest, and then difficulties of transporting the loot — lack of pack or draught animals, lack of roads, lack perhaps even of containers — would have robbed the exercise of its point.84 Robbery, particularly robbery with violence, justifies the risks involved only if the reward comes in a compact form of high intrinsic value. Ship cargoes meet those criteria; but there were no cargo ships to pirate in the fourth millennium BC. Large agricultural surpluses do so as well, particularly if they are stored at points easy of access and for escape, and all the more so if held in a transportable form — in bales, pots, sacks or baskets or as flocks on the hoof. Then, of course, the land which is the source of such bounty itself becomes a target, even if the interlopers lack the skills to manage it, as was so often to prove the case. In the millennia when man was teaching himself to farm and colonising the empty lands of the Near East and Europe, there was only one region that produced large surpluses exposed to predation across approach routes that favoured easy movement. That was the lower alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, known to ancient historians as Sumer. It is fr
om the Sumerians that we derive the first hard evidence of the nature of warfare at the dawn of written history and can begin to perceive the outlines of ‘civilised’ war.
WAR AND CIVILISATION
The Sumerians, like the Aztecs, achieved civilisation within the constraints of a technology of stone. It is, however, not their tools — and in any case they early became metallurgists — but their powers of organisation that laid the basis for their warmaking, as both defenders and aggressors. Historians believe that settlers first began to establish themselves on the alluvial plain of Iraq once they dared to leave the rainfall line at the foot of the surrounding hills — in what are now Syria, Turkey and Iran — and begin to experiment with grain-growing and herding on unwooded land. Mesopotamia — the land between the rivers — offered rich advantages to settlers. It was fertile, and its fertility was renewed by the annual flood of snowmelt from the rivers’ mountainous source. It was level — it falls only 112 feet in 210 miles — and it needed no clearing, since no trees grew there. There was no frost during the growing season, and, if the sun shone too hot for comfort in summer, there was unlimited water to swell cultivated plants. The limitlessness of the water supply, however, was what forced the early settlers to coordinate their efforts to bring the soil under cultivation, in a pattern of activity entirely different from that of the independent slashers-and-burners who had already begun to penetrate the great European forests. The floods formed swamps in some places but elsewhere left the rainless alluvium parched. To drain the marsh and water the dry land required ditches to be dug, and not only dug but dug to a plan, and not only planned but kept in constant repair, as each year the flood brought silt to clog the channels. Thus was born the first ‘irrigation society’.
An elaborate political science of irrigation (called by some ‘hydraulic’) societies has been constructed by ancient historians, almost all of it from archaeological discovery. The Sumerians left an enormous buried treasure of dwellings, temples and city walls — built roughly in that order — and of manufactured and trade goods, together with many carved objects and a vast archive of inscribed clay tablets, the latter all relating to the receipt, storage and disbursal of produce and all found within temple limits. From this record, it has been proposed that Sumerian civilisation developed along the following trajectory.