by John Keegan
Certain military equipments, attributes and techniques were common to those who lived both within the empire and on its fringes. They had abandoned stone weapons for bronze and had begun to acquire metallic armour; they made increasing use of the bow and, if a rock sculpture depicting Naram-Sin has been accurately interpreted, may have developed the powerful composite bow by the middle of the second millennium BC; they were familiar with the architecture of fortification and had also learnt some of the methods — breaching and scaling — of siegecraft; they had accepted the need, within Mesopotamia at least, for the ruler to maintain out of his revenue bodies of armed men ready to go to war; the same revenue may have supplied the funds for the manufacture of standardised weapons; they must, given the distances over which they campaigned, have learned the rudiments of logistics, at least to the extent of being able to supply themselves with food for man and beast for some days’ campaigning within enemy territory; above all, they had learned to improve the physique of domesticated horses — domestication had begun on the steppe during the fourth millennium — by care and selective breeding.106 Such horses, when used to pull a greatly improved war cart, which had shed two of its four original wheels to become the chariot, were truly to revolutionise warmaking, above all by putting the rich and stable but sedentary valley civilisations at risk from the predators who hovered in the horse-breeding lands beyond. After the end of the second millennium BC, such predatory charioteers disrupted the course of civilisation in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and wherever else it had put down roots.
Interlude 2
Fortification
Charioteers were the first great aggressors in human history. Aggression, by an opposite if not always equal reaction, stimulates defence, and so, before we consider how the charioteers and the horse-riding peoples who succeeded them altered the world in which civilised arts of peace had begun to flourish, we ought to examine the means by which the settled inhabitants of the rich lands sought to preserve what they had won from nature against theft and devastation.
The evidence from Jericho indicates that the very first agriculturalists were able to find the means to protect their dwellings against enemies, though who such enemies might have been remains obscure. Were they raiders who wished to plunder stored produce, perhaps on a regular, parasitic basis, or would-be agriculturalists who wanted Jericho’s fields and perpetual water-source for themselves, or mere vandals who threatened to plunder and destroy? The first seems the likeliest; people from the wilderness rarely want, let alone know how, to turn farmer and, while history is full of pointless vandalism, it more usually shows that raiders had the sense to see that parasitism profited better than rape and pillage. If that were the case at Jericho, we should probably see its walls and tower not simply as a refuge — the first of the three forms that fortification may take — but also as the second, a stronghold.
A stronghold is a place not merely of safety from attack but also of active defence, a centre where the defenders are secure from surprise or superior numbers, and also a base from which they may sally forth to hold predators at bay and to impose military control over the area in which their interests lie. There is a symbiosis between a stronghold and its surroundings. A refuge is a place of short-term safety, of value only against an enemy who lacks the means to linger in the vicinity or who operates a crude strategy of raiding against soft targets: the medieval villes perchées of south-eastern France, built on the summits of the precipitous coastal hills of Provence as sanctuaries against the visits of Muslim sea raiders, are perfect examples of the type.1 A stronghold, by contrast, must command an area productive enough to support a garrison in normal times but itself be sufficiently large and secure to house, supply and protect the garrison when under close attack. The builders of strongholds, therefore, have always had to make a nice judgement between the false economy of building too small and the extravagance of conceiving defences too expensive to be completed or, if completed, too extensive to be defended with the manpower available. The Crusader kingdoms, particularly in their years of decline, perpetually teetered on the brink of over-fortifying the shrinking garrisons that they could deploy.
Strongholds differ from refuges also in the features they must incorporate. It suffices if a refuge is strong enough to deter an attacker from the trouble of mounting an assault; ‘primitive warriors’, like the Maring inside their palisaded villages or the Maoris inside their hilltop pa, were safe from ‘routing’ or ‘raiding’ because their enemies lacked siege engines and had no means to support themselves for any length of time away from their own homes.2 Strongholds, typically the constructions of more advanced and therefore richer societies, must be able to withstand siege from attackers who bring their own rations or command a line of communications along which they can be supplied and who also deploy machinery. The circumference of a stronghold should therefore enclose a water-supply — especially if it is to be a protection for flocks — as well as storehouses and living-space.3 Above all, it must provide means for the garrison to wage an active defence — fighting-platforms that command a field of fire over prepared killing-grounds and strong gates through which counter-attacks can be mounted at moments of opportunity.
Until the coming of gunpowder, all attacks on strongholds had to be mounted at close range. That was true by definition of the simplest sort of attack — escalade — by which the besiegers sought to scramble over the walls with scaling-ladders, but also true of what siege engineers later called ‘deliberate siege’ — mining, battery with rams or projectile-throwers and counter-fortification with siege towers. Projectile-throwing, let it be said at once, rarely repaid the effort: a stout wall can easily absorb the energy directed against it by engines that depend on counter-weights or torsion springs to launch their missiles. Of their nature, moreover, such engines throw their projectiles at an inefficient angle of attack; the superiority of the gunpowder missile over all its predecessors was that, since it travelled in a flat trajectory, it could be directed at the one point where a high wall is vulnerable to collapse, at its foundations.
The designers of strongholds always sought, therefore, to deny an attacker easy access to a wall’s foundations and to provide the defenders with superior fire positions. One of the fascinations of Jericho is that its builders, in the dawn of fortification practice, appear to have perceived all the dangers by which it might be threatened and to have furnished it with protection against each. Thus the dry moat deprived the attackers of a platform from which to approach the walls’ foundations, while it also formed a prepared killing-ground (in an environment with impermeable soil, less evaporation and more water, it might have been made a wet moat). The walls, over three times the height of a man, required any attacker to bring scaling-ladders, a very insecure footing from which to launch an assault; it is likely that the walls were also furnished with fighting-platforms. Finally the tower, which overtopped the walls, gave the defenders a further advantage of height.
To these three defensive features — walls, moat, tower — fortification engineers were to add little in the 8000 years between the building of Jericho and the introduction of gunpowder. The principles were established; all subsequent improvements were no more than refinements of what Jericho’s builders conceived. Outer walls were to be set around inner ones — ‘multivallation’; obstacles were to be set at the lip of the moat (as they may indeed have been at Jericho, the evidence perhaps having perished); inner strongholds — ‘keeps’ or ‘citadels’ — were to be added and towers set on the outer rather than inner faces of the walls, to allow flanking fire; at very important sites, detached outworks — themselves strongholds in miniature — were to be built as a protection for gates or to deny points of advantage to an attacker. In general, however, it may be said that later fortification engineers made no greater improvement over Jericho than subsequent printers have over Gutenberg’s Bible.
Strongholds are a product of small or divided sovereignties; they proliferate when centra
l authority has not been established or is struggling to secure itself or has broken down. Thus the Greek fortifications on the coasts of modern Turkey and Sicily were built to protect individual commercial settlements in the early years of colonisation; the castellation of England by the Normans — 900 castles may have been built between 1066 and 1154, varying in size between those that needed as few as a thousand and as many as 24,000 man-days for their construction — was undertaken as a deliberate means of enforcing Norman rule on the Anglo-Saxons;4 the Roman forts of the ‘Saxon Shore’, such as Reculver and Pevensey, were built to deny the estuaries of south-east England to Teutonic sea raiders emboldened by the decline of Roman power during the fourth century AD.5 More properly, however, we should regard the forts of the Saxon shore not as individual strongholds but as elements in the third form that fortifications may take: strategic defences. Strategic defences may be continuous, as Hadrian’s Wall was when kept in repair, or more commonly may comprise individual strongpoints so positioned as to be mutually supporting and to deny avenues of attack to an enemy across a wide front. Of their nature, strategic defences are the most expensive form of fortification to construct, to maintain and to garrison, and their existence is always a mark of the wealth and advanced political development of the people who build them.
The fortified cities of Sumer, once Sargon brought them under central control, may be seen as forming a strategic system, though they did so by the process of accretion, not design. The first deliberately conceived strategic system would appear to be that of the Nubian forts built by the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty from 1991 BC onward. They eventually stretched for 250 miles along the Nile, between the First and Fourth Cataracts, constructed so as to command both the river and the desert and at distances from each other which allowed intercommunication, perhaps by smoke signals. Again, the archaeological evidence reveals a concept of fortification to which subsequent builders of strategic defences found little to add. The early forts, located in a region around the First Cataract where the valley is wide enough to support an agricultural population, were designed to protect it as well as dominate the river. The later forts, which followed the line of the Egyptian advance into barbarous Nubia and the much narrower upper Nile, were more strictly military in function. Surviving written records reveal that the upstream forts were conceived as a truly military frontier. Senusret III erected a statue of himself and raised an inscription: ‘I have made my boundary, having sailed further south than my fathers. I have increased what was bequeathed to me. As for any son of mine who shall maintain this boundary … he is a son of mine who was born to My Majesty … But as for whoever shall abandon it, and who shall not fight for it, he is no son of mine.’ The inscription was found at the fort of Semna and dates from 1820 BC. The statue has been lost but in the same fort has been found a cult statue of Senusret III which dates from 1479–26, clear evidence that his admonition to hold what he had won had been taken to heart.6
Egyptian frontier policy in Nubia was a model for later imperialists everywhere. At Semna three forts are situated so as to control the river from both banks, and there are tunnels so that water can be drawn from it; a mud-brick wall protected the road to the south on the landward side for several miles. All the forts contain large granaries, two sufficient to supply several hundred men for a year; they were probably restocked from the rear supply centre at Askut, an island fortress apparently purpose-built as a grain store. Another inscription reveals what the garrison’s duties were: ‘to prevent any Nubian from passing … when faring northward, whether on foot or by boat, as well as any cattle of the Nubians. An exception is a Nubian who shall come to barter at Iken, or one with an official message.’ Forward of the forts, the Egyptians maintained a desert patrol recruited from Nubian desert men, named Medjay. (Among the ‘Semna Despatches’ found on papyrus at Thebes is a typical desert patrol report: ‘The patrol which set out to patrol the desert edge … has returned and reported to me as follows: “We have found a track of 32 men and 3 donkeys.” ’) British officers with experience on India’s North-West Frontier would recognise Egyptian practice instantly. Like the Egyptians, the British maintained an administered zone where large garrisons protected the settled population, a forward zone where the garrisons held purely military forts, and forward of that again a ‘tribal’ zone where only the roads were defended and the surrounding areas were policed by tribal militias — Khyber Rifles, Tochi Scouts — recruited from the peoples against whom the whole elaborate defensive structure had been erected in the first place.
It is not surprising that the plans of both Jericho and the Second Cataract forts perpetuated and reproduced themselves over time and distance; it is not even very surprising that they emerged so early. Given that man turns his mind to integrating the various but limited elements of architecture and town-planning into a system of self-protection, it almost inevitably follows that something like Jericho or the Semna complex will emerge; similarly, though this has psychological rather than material roots, the practice of turning poachers into gamekeepers — Medjay, Khyber Rifles — follows almost immediately from the recognition that primary control of a frontier between civilisation and barbary is best exercised by bribing those who live on the wrong side of it.
It would be wrong to surmise, however, that the principles that underlay the construction of Jericho and Semna were rapidly or widely disseminated. The people of Jericho were rich in their time, the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty richer still. Elsewhere mankind remained poor and thinly settled until well into the second millennium BC and it is only in the first millennium that defended settlements came to be built over a wide area. Archaeologists have noted the appearance of a fortified Greek settlement at Old Smyrna, within a defensive wall furnished with cut-stone bastions, in the ninth century BC, and of walled settlements at such widely distant spots as Saragossa, Spain, and Biskupin, Poland, in the sixth century.7 Hilltop enclosures — the ‘Iron Age forts’ so familiar in Britain, where 2000 have been identified — may have been dug in south-eastern Europe as early as the third millennium, but it was only in the first that they became widespread.8 Historians continue to disagree about their function — proto-towns or places of temporary refuge? — and about the political conditions that prompted their building. The probability is that, like the Maori pa, they were the products of a society that had become tribalised and in which neighbouring groups sought to secure their movable goods against raiding; but we cannot be sure. All we know is that fortification spread from south-east into north-west Europe during the first millennium, matched by the establishment of defended ports along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea as Greeks and Phoenicians voyaged to establish trading colonies beyond their homelands. Fortification undoubtedly followed trade; indeed Stuart Piggott, the leading expert on urban prehistory, suggests the existence of a major two-way trade route leading from the fortified Mediterranean coastal ports to the inland hill-forts of France and Germany, along which passed wine, silk, ivory (and even apes and peacocks — a Barbary ape reached a king of Ulster in prehistoric times) on the northward leg, and amber, furs, hides, salt meat and slaves in return.9
By the end of the first millennium fortifications pimpled the face of the temperate zone. In China, where the first towns had been unwalled and where, in the treeless loess plains even the basic materials are lacking, towns walled with beaten earth (pisé) nevertheless appeared during the Shang dynasty (c. 1500–1000 BC), which exercised the earliest centralised authority; interestingly, the Shang ideograph for a city, yi, incorporates the symbols for an enclosure and a man kneeling in submission, suggesting that, as was often the case elsewhere, the fort in China was an institution of social control as well as of defence.10 In historic Greece, following the Dark Ages brought on by the collapse of Minoan civilisation, the emergent city states walled themselves as a matter of course; so too did those in contemporary Italy, including, of course, Rome. By the time Alexander the Great set off on his march of con
quest through Persia to India in the fourth century BC, strategists expected to find their path blocked by strongholds whenever they campaigned in settled terrain.
Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), Prussian general and military thinker. His book On War has largely determined how the Western world has thought about warfare since his death.
Toppled idols on Easter Island, whose Polynesian inhabitants destroyed their own civilisation by warfare before the coming of the European voyagers.
A Mameluke warrior of the Fourteenth Century AD practising the exercises of the furusiyya, the most refined form of the steppe horseman’s skill-at-arms.
An image d’Epinal of the Mamelukes of Egypt in combat with Napoleon’s troops at the battle of the Pyramids, 1798. Furusiyya individualism was defeated by drilled musketry.