A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  The first settlers formed small, self-sufficient communities. Because of the tendency for the rivers to change their beds, irrigators were obliged to cooperate, linking one system with another as the waters moved and thus progressively enlarging the size of their settlements. The organisation of linkages and the regulation of disputes fell to those with traditional priestly functions and, because the timing and volume of the flood’s annual arrival was ascribed to the favour or disfavour of the gods (who may have been new gods), mythic intercession with the divine by the priests progressively invested them with political power. Such priest-kings naturally used their power to have temples raised, both as dwellings for themselves and as centres of the cults they served, and their power to direct labour for temple-building further translated into the power to elaborate irrigation systems and other public works. The temples, meanwhile, became centres of administration, since large bodies of farmers giving their labour to public works needed feeding from a central source, and at such a source the collection of agricultural surplus and its distribution to the labourers had to be methodically recorded. Different forms of produce, as well as different quantities, had to be noted by distinguishable marks, and from such notations on impressible clay derived the symbols which provided the first form of writing.

  Hence the argument that by about 3000 BC the Sumerian irrigation societies had built the first cities, that such cities may properly be called city states, and that such states were theocracies. The power of the priest-kings derived from their ‘ownership’ of the unprecedented wealth that irrigation farming yielded - 200 grains harvested in the ear for each one sown — and then from the use to which they put their share of the surplus. It paid for the temple staffs, for the slaves which indebtedness may have brought, and for the funding of trade which the temples presumably dominated: the Mesopotamian plain being deficient in stone, metal and almost every sort of wood, all those materials had to be brought from a distance to satisfy the Sumerians’ need for essentials and also their desire, soon generated in a society where some were liberated from daily labour, for luxuries as well. The archaeology of Sumer yields evidence of luxuries brought from far away: gold from the Indus valley, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, silver from south-eastern Turkey, eventually copper from the coasts of the Arabian Sea.85 The one thing it does not reveal, at least from the earliest stages of the Sumerian cities’ rise to statehood, is any evidence of warmaking. None of the thirteen cities known to have existed at the beginning of the third millennium, including Ur, Uruk and Kish, then had walls. Sumeria at that stage seems to have had a civilisation spared domestic strife by the awesome authority of its priest-kings, inter-city war perhaps by the absence of any clash of interests, and external aggression by the harshness of the landscape that surrounded the fruitful valley and by the lack of any means of mobility — neither the camel nor the horse had yet been domesticated — available to potential interlopers from the western desert or the eastern steppe.86

  In the same millennium that Sumer was achieving statehood, similar irrigation societies were growing up, or were about to do so, in the valleys of the Nile and the Indus; Chinese and Indo-Chinese civilisation, later so dependent on irrigation technique, had not yet moved to that economic level. The key to the rise of theocracy in the Indus valley, it has been suggested, lay in the invention there of baked brick, which permitted the construction of flood-control works on a scale large enough for half a million square miles of land to be brought under cultivation around the now vanished cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro toward the end of the third millennium.87 But excavation has only begun to lay bare the secrets of the ancient Indus. In Egypt, by contrast, where systematic archaeology started, over a century of digging has allowed us to reconstruct the anatomy of its civilisation with some certainty and from an early date.

  Site 117 has alerted us to Egypt’s violent prehistory. The evidence lacks to prove one way or another how the Egyptians’ way of life developed between 10,000 BC and the unification of their settlements along the Nile under a single king about 3200 BC — whether peacefully or not. Scholars agree, however, that it was the particular environment of the river valley rather than political events within it that did most to make Egypt the civilisation it became. Egypt lives by the silt-bearing flood that descends from Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands immediately after the spring monsoon; the fact that it varies in volume and date of arrival was crucial in bringing the Egyptians to venerate their kings as gods. Until about the fourth millennium, the desert that borders the Nile along its 600 miles between the delta and the Second Cataract approached the river less closely than it does today and the valley people dwelt higher up on the banks, combining cultivation with herding. Then there was an unexplained desiccation, driving the population down into the flood plain, on which in future it came entirely to depend for a living. Scholars suppose a period of warfare between the chiefs of population centres along the valley, as they struggled for control of the migrants from the extending desert’s fringe; then, about 3100 BC, the local big men lost their authority to a single ruler, conventionally called Menes, who united Lower and Upper Egypt — the delta and the southern Nile — and founded the kingdom that was to survive, under the rule of the pharaohs, for nearly 3000 years.88

  Military Egypt had a style as distinctive to itself, and almost as long-lasting, as its own civilisation; quite different from that of Sumer or the regimes that succeeded to dominance in Mesopotamia, it was long marked by technological backwardness and a studied indifference to external threat. Both features had their root in Egypt’s unique location. Even to this day, the country is virtually unapproachable by an invader except through narrow corridors to the north and south. To the east the arid highlands that divide the Nile valley from the Red Sea form a natural barrier a hundred miles wide, while to the west the sands of the Sahara remain a no man’s land for any army. The first pharaohs began to deal with the threat from the south by a campaign of conquest into Nubia, and by the Twelfth Dynasty (1991–1785 BC) they had secured the frontier between the First and Second Cataracts with an extensive complex of forts; the threat from the north originally did not exist, since few people dwelt on the eastern Mediterranean coast and those who did lacked means of mobility.89 When the threat became manifest during the second millennium, the pharaohs attempted to deal with it, eventually successfully, by withdrawing the capital from Memphis to Thebes, by raising a standing army and by exploiting the difficulties of the terrain in the delta as a natural barrier.90

  Until the founding of the regular army under the New Kingdom (1540–1070 BC), Egyptian warfare remained strangely old-fashioned. Its weapons were ‘clubs and flint spears even in the Middle Kingdom’, during the internal wars over succession to kingship. In that period (1991–1785 BC) bronze weapons were widely in use elsewhere, and the Egyptians had themselves been making first copper and then bronze weapons for several hundred years.91 The reason for the Egyptians’ tendency to cling to a superseded technology is hard to find; that they undoubtedly did so is proved by the many depictions of their warfare left to us in their sculpture and wall-painting. Their soldiers do not wear armour of any sort, but march to battle bare-chested and bare-headed, with only short shields for protection; it is only quite late in the New Kingdom that we find any representation of even the pharaoh wearing armour.92 Now, it is a simple fact of biology that the naked human flinches from a blow with an edged weapon (Shaka’s extraordinary and probably unique achievement, millennia later, was to make his Zulus behave otherwise); we may therefore presume that Egyptian combat, until the appearance of invaders of a different culture at the end of the Middle Kingdom, was stylised and perhaps even ritualised. Scarcity of metal may be an alternative explanation, of course, but it is more likely to be ancillary to the reason why the warriors of a highly sophisticated civilisation chose to equip themselves scarcely better than their Old Stone Age ancestors. The probability is that in a rigidly stratified society, whose kings had progressed from
the status of priests to that of gods and where almost every aspect of public and indeed private life was regulated by ceremony, battle too partook of the ceremonial.

  It is extremely significant, for example, that representations of the proto-pharaoh Narmer, dating from about 3000 BC, and of the New Kingdom pharaoh Rameses II, who ruled nearly 2000 years later, show both with an upheld mace about to dispatch a cringing captive; the posture of the captives is closely similar, the stance of the pharaohs identical.93 Even when allowance is made for the very long-lasting conventions of Egyptian art, the similarities may not easily be dismissed. What both may represent is an actual, not merely symbolic, killing of a captive at the end of battle. The practice of human sacrifice disappeared early in Egyptian civilisation, but it may well be that it persisted on the battlefield, that warriors fought unprotected because they rarely came to hand strokes (a characteristic, as we have seen, of ‘primitive’ warfare), but that it was the fate of those disabled or captured to be ceremonially slaughtered by a great warrior — perhaps the pharaoh himself — once victory had been conceded.94 The possibility of a parallel with the Aztecs’ ‘flower battle’ is there to see, and is supported by the Egyptians’ persistence in a choice of weapons — mace, short spear, simple bow — which eventually, after nearly 1500 years of continuous pharaonic rule, achieved an almost antiquarian oddity.

  Battle was certainly not ceremonial when fought against foreigners; the mummified body of Seqenenre the Brave, a pharaoh who defended the kingdom against invaders just before the founding of the New Kingdom in 1540 BC, reveals a terrible head wound, presumably suffered in defeat.95 But the preceding 1400 years, a span of time which takes modern Britons back to a century when their islands were ruled from Rome and today’s Americans to an age when the territory of the United States was not ruled at all, the Egyptians maintained a stable and almost unvarying way of life, based on the three seasons of inundation, growing and drought, regulated by the rule of a king who took a major place among their 2000 gods, and dedicated, in the time and with the labour that could be spared from irrigation and cultivation, to raising and furnishing the palace, temple and tomb architecture, still unsurpassed in monumentality, that the necessities of passage to the afterlife, as they conceived it, required. Within that ordered world, deeply beautiful in its artistic achievement for all the harshnesses that the act of creation laid on those at the bottom of the artistic process, the hewers of stone and drawers of sledges, warfare must have been relegated to a lowly and unimportant role. ‘Ultimately kingship was the outcome of force,’ suggests one analyst but it may have been a form of force quite unClausewitzian in character, a stylised clash of arms brought on by the manifest incapacity of a regnant king to perform his functions and thus no more than a spectacular physical event by which authority was transferred to one better qualified to exercise it.96 The people of Egypt, over the space of 1400 years, fourteen centuries of what must have seemed a fixed normality to the generations which lived and died within their span, may very well have been spared the reality of war, as other people later experienced it elsewhere, altogether.97

  The people of Sumer were not so fortunate. The river plain of the Tigris and Euphrates, unlike that of the Nile, is not protected by geography from invasion — the Sumerians themselves were probably migrants in the first place — nor does it lend itself to central control. In Egypt a ruler who can plug the top and bottom of the valley has the whole river for his kingdom. In Mesopotamia, not only do the rivers wander seasonally across the face of the land; it is flanked to its east and north by highlands that act not as barriers but as points of dominance to those settled there, who find in the tributary valleys of the great rivers easy lines of approach to the rich flood plain at their feet. The political effects of this geography are easy to depict: Sumerian cities early began to dispute among themselves over boundaries, water and grazing rights, all subject to the vagaries of flood; the Sumerian kings also early found their authority challenged by the arrival of immigrants from the hills who set up cities of their own. Between 3100 BC and 2300 BC, as a result, warfare increasingly dominated Sumerian life, leading to the supplanting of priest-kings by war leaders, military specialisation, the accelerated development of a weapons metallurgy and, probably, the intensification of combat to the point where we can begin to speak of it as ‘battle’.

  These are, of course, suppositions, to be pieced together from fragments of evidence — the appearance of walls at city sites, the discovery of metal weapons and helmets, the frequency of the inscription for ‘battle’ on clay tablets, records of the sale of slaves, who were perhaps captives, the gradual replacement of the prefix en (priest) by lugal (big man) in the titles of rulers, and so on.98 Particularly important is the evidence for the infiltration of Semitic peoples from the north, the Akkadians, who first founded cities of their own on the plain and eventually, after some centuries of conflict between their cities and those of the Sumerians, supplied the world’s first emperor, Sargon of Agade.

  It has been suggested that Sumer also supplies the first evidence of long-distance campaigning, in the saga of Gilgamesh, king of the city of Uruk about 2700 BC. He appears to have gone on a military expedition to bring cedar wood from the mountains — ‘I will cut down the cedar. An everlasting name I will establish for myself! Orders … to the armourers will I give’ — and to have killed the ruler where the cedar trees grew.99 It is difficult to see, however, how he might have transported a quantity of cedar wood any distance, so that the saga provides little support for the practice of either war or trade over long distances at that time. Nevertheless Uruk appears to have acquired walls in the time of Gilgamesh, and walls more than five miles round, which speaks for his powers to direct labour, while within the next 200 years hard evidence of serious warmaking begins to accumulate.100 We have the so-called Vulture stele, which shows Eanatum II, king of Lagash, defeating the people of Elam, early inhabitants of what was to become the mighty Persian kingdom; his soldiers wear metal helmets and are arrayed in column on a six-man front.101 The Standard of Ur, from the same period, shows soldiers similarly equipped — they wear cloaks and fringed kilts which appear to be strengthened with pieces of metal, claimed by some scholars to be prototypical armour, though very ineffective it must have been — and are led by others driving four-horse, four-wheel carts. Excavations at the ‘death pits’ of Ur have produced relics of metal helmets which appear to have been worn over leather caps.102

  The helmets are copper, the first non-precious metal that man learnt to work, because it can be found in large and relatively pure ingots in a natural state. It is not of much military use, being easily penetrated if used as bodily protection in sheet form and quickly losing its edge if beaten into a weapon.103 Some natural copper, however, occurs in an ore that contains tin and, as man learnt during the fourth millennium that metals could be melted, the technique of combining common copper with scarce tin to produce hard bronze evolved; it was widely in practice by the end of the third millennium, and in Mesopotamia smiths were busy inventing most of the metal-working methods on which we still depend today, including smelting from ore, casting, alloying and soldering.104 One of the earliest products of alloying and casting was the socket axe, a bronze head into which a wooden handle could be securely riveted, thus producing a durable edged weapon of formidable penetrative power when wielded by a muscular and determined warrior. The ‘chalcolithic’ period, in which copper (Greek khalkos) and stone (Greek lithos) co-existed, was rapidly superseded by the coming of the age of bronze, as man bent to the almost universal rule that a superior technology obliterates an inferior one as fast as the necessary techniques and materials can be acquired. One of the necessary materials in this case — tin — was scarce and localised; it occurs in Mesopotamia only as an impure ore called cassiterite, a river-washed mineral, but adequate supplies of the pure ore seem to have arrived quickly from the shores of the Caspian Sea and perhaps even from central Europe. By the time Sargon of Agade (or A
kkad, a city so-called from his Semitic ancestors and yet to be discovered by archaeologists) had made himself ruler of Mesopotamia, about 2340 BC, bronze had become the weapon of conquerors; Sargon was a man of bronze.

  The Sumerian King List, our principal source of knowledge about Sumerian history, has been interpreted to show that he ruled from 2340 to 2284 BC; alternatively he is said to have ruled for fifty-six years. What seems certain is that he fought a series of wars against neighbouring cities and then against neighbouring peoples — thirty-four wars are mentioned — and that he eventually succeeded in establishing the boundaries of his empire roughly where those of modern Iraq lie today. In the eleventh year of his reign he campaigned as far as Syria, the Lebanon and southern Turkey and may have reached the Mediterranean. One inscription suggests that he had an army of 5400 soldiers and his army was undoubtedly kept busy putting down revolts among the Sumerians who rebelled against rule by a Semitic incomer; Sargon called himself ‘He Who Keeps Travelling the Four Lands’, that is the universe, and he certainly appears to have lived toujours en vedette.

  Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sin (2260–23 BC), called himself ‘King of the Four Quarters’, a truly imperial title, and he is known to have campaigned into the Zagros range, the mountains that separate Mesopotamia from northern Persia. By the time of his reign, and despite his need to defend the frontiers of his empire, the empire had then become an established fact, and was indeed the most important fact in the developing life of the Middle East. Its wealth was a magnet to jealous predators living beyond the magic circle, among whom, nevertheless, some elements of its civilisation took root, as a result partly of war, partly of trade. The outcome was that ‘by about 2000 BC … Mesopotamia had come to be ringed around by a series of satellite civilisations, or proto-civilisations’ which, as they acquired the military means, supplied the waves of conquerors — Gutians, Hurrians, Kassites — who conquered part or all of the great plain during the next thousand years. Such peoples were making their own transition to a different economic life even before they came down from the high ground, refining their mastery of pastoralism, which began to supply the animals — asses, oxen and horses — through which they acquired military mobility, and developing techniques of agriculture on rain-watered land that provided them with a surplus on which to support the beginnings of civilised life.105