By this period, the Mesopotamian aristocracy had begun to supplement its income with warfare, so in the very next episode Gilgamesh announces that he is about to lead a military expedition of fifty men to the Cedar Forest, guarded by the fearsome dragon Humbaba, to bring this precious wood back to Sumer. It was probably by such acquisition raids that the Mesopotamian cities came to dominate the northern highlands, which were rich in the luxury goods favored by the aristocracy.38 Merchants had long been dispatched to Afghanistan, the Indus Valley, and Turkey to bring back timber, rare and base metals, and precious and semiprecious stones.39 But for an aristocrat like Gilgamesh, the only noble way to acquire these scarce resources was by force. In all future agrarian states, aristocrats would be distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.40 The cultural historian Thorstein Veblen has explained that in such societies, “labor comes to be associated … with weakness and subjection.” Work, even trade, was not only “disreputable … but morally impossible to the noble freeborn man.” Because an aristocrat owed his privilege to the forcible expropriation of the peasants’ surplus, “the obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy.”41
For Gilgamesh, therefore, the organized theft of warfare is not only noble but moral, undertaken not just for his personal enrichment but for the benefit of humanity. “Now we must travel to the Cedar Forest, where the fierce monster Humbaba lives,” he announces self-importantly: “We must kill him and drive out evil from the world.”42 For the warrior, the enemy is always monstrous, the antithesis of everything good. But significantly, the poet refuses to give this military expedition any religious or ethical sanction. The gods are solidly against it. Enlil has specifically appointed Humbaba to guard the forest against any such predatory attack; Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess Ninsun, is horrified by the plan and at first blames Shamash, the sun god and Gilgamesh’s patron, for planting this appalling idea in her son’s mind. When questioned, however, Shamash seems to know nothing about it.
Even Enkidu initially opposes the war. Humbaba, he argues, is not evil; he is doing an ecologically sound task for Enlil and being frightening is part of his job description. But Gilgamesh is blinded by the aristocratic code of honor.43 “Why, dear friend, do you speak like a coward?” he taunts Enkidu: “If I die in the forest on this great adventure, won’t you be ashamed when people say, ‘Gilgamesh met a hero’s death battling the monster Humbaba. And where was Enkidu? He was safe at home!’ ”44 It is not the gods nor even simply greed but pride, an obsession with martial glory and the desire for a posthumous reputation for courage and daring, that drives Gilgamesh to battle. “We are mortal men,” he reminds Enkidu:
Only the gods live forever. Our days
are few in number, and whatever we achieve
is a puff of wind. Why be afraid then,
since sooner or later death must come?…
But whether you come along or not,
I will cut down the tree, I will kill Humbaba,
I will make a lasting name for myself,
I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.45
Gilgamesh’s mother blames his “restless heart” for this harebrained project.46 A leisured class has a lot of time on its hands; collecting rents and supervising the irrigation system is tame work for a species bred to be intrepid hunters. The poem indicates that already young men were chafing against the triviality of civilian life that, as Chris Hedges explained, would lead so many of them to seek meaning on the battlefield.47
The outcome was tragic. There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour. Humbaba turns out to be a very reasonable monster, who pleads for his life and offers Gilgamesh and Enkidu all the wood they want, but still they hack him brutally to pieces. Afterward a gentle rain falls from heaven, as though nature itself grieves for this pointless death.48 The gods show their displeasure with the expedition by striking Enkidu down with a fatal illness, and Gilgamesh is forced to come to terms with his own mortality. Unable to assimilate the consequences of warfare, he turns his back on civilization, roaming unshaven through the wilderness and even descending into the underworld to find an antidote to death. Finally, weary but resigned, he is forced to accept the limitations of his humanity and return to Uruk. On reaching the suburbs, he draws his companion’s attention to the great wall surrounding the city: “Observe the land it encloses, the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and market-places, the houses, the public squares.”49 He personally will die, but he will achieve an immortality of sorts by cultivating the civilized arts and pleasures that are enabling humans to explore new dimensions of existence.
Gilgamesh’s famous wall was now essential for the survival of Uruk, though, because after centuries of peaceful cooperation, the Sumerian city-states had begun to fight one another. What caused this tragic development?
Not everybody in the Middle East aspired to civilization: nomadic herdsmen preferred to roam freely in the mountains with their livestock. They had once been part of the agricultural community, living at the edge of the farmland so that their sheep and cattle did not damage the crops. But gradually they moved farther and farther away until they finally abandoned the constraints of settled life and took to the open road.50 The pastoralists of the Middle East had probably become an entirely separate community as early as 6000 BCE, though they continued to trade their hides and milk products with the cities in return for grain.51 They soon discovered that the easiest way to replace lost animals was to steal the cattle of nearby villages and rival tribes. Fighting, therefore, became essential to the pastoralist economy. Once they domesticated the horse and acquired wheeled vehicles, these herdsmen spread all over the Inner Asian Plateau, and by the early third millennium, some had reached China.52 By this time they were formidable warriors, equipped with bronze weaponry, war chariots, and the deadly composite bow, which could shoot with devastating accuracy at long range.53
The pastoralists who settled in the Caucasian steppes of southern Russia in about 4500 BCE shared a common culture. They called themselves Arya (“noble; honorable”), but we know them as Indo-Europeans because their language became the basis of several Asiatic and European tongues.54 In about 2500 BCE some of the Aryans left the steppes and conquered large areas of Asia and Europe, becoming the ancestors of the Hittites, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Scandinavians, and Anglo-Saxons we shall meet later in our story. Meanwhile, those tribes who had remained in the Caucasus drifted apart. They continued to live side by side—not always amicably—speaking different dialects of the proto-Indo-European tongue until about 1500 BCE, when they too migrated from the steppes, the Avestan speakers settling in what is now Iran and the Sanskrit speakers colonizing the Indian subcontinent.
Aryans saw the warrior’s life as infinitely superior to the tedium and steady industry of agrarian existence. The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 55–120 CE) would later note that the German tribes he encountered far preferred “to challenge the enemy and earn the honour of wounds” to the drudgery of ploughing and the tedium of waiting for the crops to appear: “Nay, they actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”55 Like urban aristocrats, they too despised labor, saw it as a mark of inferiority, and incompatible with the “noble” life.56 Moreover, they knew that the cosmic order (rita) was possible only because chaos was kept in check by the great gods (devas)a —Mithra, Varuna, and Mazda—who compelled the seasons to rotate regularly, kept the heavenly bodies in their proper places, and made the earth habitable. Human beings too could live together in an orderly, productive way only if they were forced to sacrifice their own interests to those of the group.
Violence and coercion therefore lay at the heart of social existence, and in most ancient cultures this truth was expressed in the ritualized bloodshed of animal sacrifice. Like the prehistoric hunters, Aryans had absorbed the tra
gic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other beings. They expressed this conviction in the mythical story of a king who altruistically allows himself to be slain by his brother, a priest, and thus brings the ordered world into being.57 A myth is never simply the story of an historical event; rather, it expresses a timeless truth underlying a people’s daily existence. A myth is always about now. The Aryans reenacted the tale of the sacrificed king every day by ritually slaying an animal to remind themselves of the sacrifice demanded of every single warrior, who daily put his life at risk for his people.
It has been argued that Aryan society was originally peaceful and did not resort to aggressive raiding until the end of the second millennium.58 But other scholars note that weapons and warriors figure in the very earliest texts.59 The mythical stories of the Aryan war gods—Indra in India, Verethragna in Persia, Hercules in Greece, and Thor in Scandinavia—follow a similar pattern, so this martial ideal must have developed in the steppes before the tribes went their different ways. It was based on the hero Trito, who conducts the very first cattle raid against the three-headed Serpent, one of the indigenous inhabitants of a land recently conquered by the Aryans. Serpent had the temerity to steal the Aryans’ cattle. Not only does Trito kill him and recover the livestock, but this raid becomes a cosmic battle that, like the death of the sacrificed king, restores the cosmic order.60
Aryan religion, therefore, gave supreme sanction to what was essentially organized violence and theft. Every time they set out on a raid, warriors drank a ritual draft of the intoxicating liquor pressed from soma, a sacred plant that filled them with frenzied rapture, just as Trito did before pursuing Serpent; they thus felt at one with their hero. The Trito myth implied that all cattle, the measure of wealth in pastoral society, belonged to the Aryans and that other peoples had no right to these resources. The Trito story has been called “the imperialist’s myth par excellence” because it provided sacred justification for the Indo-European military campaigns in Europe and Asia.61 The figure of Serpent presented those native peoples who dared to resist the Aryan onslaught as inhuman, misshapen monsters. But cattle and wealth were not the only prizes worth fighting for: like Gilgamesh, Aryans would always also seek honor, glory, prestige, and posthumous fame in battle.62 People rarely go to war for one reason only; rather, they are driven by interlocking motivations—material, social, and ideological. In Homer’s Iliad, when the Trojan warrior Sarpedon urges his friend Glaukos to make a highly dangerous assault on the Greek camp, he quite unselfconsciously lists all the material perks of a heroic reputation—special seating, the best cuts of meat, booty, and “a great piece of land”—as an integral part of a warrior’s nobility.63 It is significant that the English words value and valor both have a common Indo-European root, as do virtue and virility.
But while Aryan religion glorified warfare, it also acknowledged that this violence was problematic. Any military campaign involves activities that would be abhorrent and unethical in civilian life.64 In Aryan mythology, therefore, the war god is often called a “sinner” because a soldier is forced to act in a way that calls his integrity into question. The warrior always carries a taint.65 Even Achilles, one of the greatest Aryan warriors, does not escape this stain. Here is Homer’s description of the aristeia (“triumphal rampage”) in which Achilles frenziedly slaughters one Trojan soldier after another:
As inhuman fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles
Of drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber
And the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilleus
Swept everywhere with his spear, like something more than a mortal.66
Achilles has become an inhuman force of purely destructive power. Homer compares him to a thresher crushing barley on the threshing floor, but instead of producing nourishing food, he is “trampling alike dead men and shields” as if the two were indistinguishable, his “invincible hands … spattered with bloody filth.”67 Warriors would never attain the first rank in Indo-European society.68 They always had to struggle “to be the best” (Greek: aristos); yet they were still relegated below the priests to the second class. Herdsmen could not survive without raiding; their violence was essential to the pastoralist economy, but the hero’s aggression often repelled the very people who revered him.69
The Iliad is certainly not an antiwar poem, but at the same time as it celebrates the feats of its heroes, it reminds us of the tragedy of war. As in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the sorrow of mortality sometimes breaks through the excitement and idealism. The third person to be killed in the poem is the Trojan Simoeisios, a beautiful young man who, Homer says, should have known the tenderness of family life but is beaten down by the Greek warrior Ajax:
He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar
Which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows
Smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top:
One whom a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining
Iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine-wrought chariot,
And the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river.70
In the Odyssey, Homer goes even further, undermining the entire aristocratic ideal. When Odysseus visits the underworld, he is horrified by the swarming crowds of gibbering dead, whose humanity has so obscenely degenerated. Coming upon the disconsolate shade of Achilles, he tries to console him: Was he not honored like a god before he died, and does he not now rule the dead? But Achilles will have none of it. “Don’t gloss over death to me in order to console me,” he replies. “I would rather be above the ground still and labouring for some poor peasant man than be the lord over the lifeless dead.”71
We have no firm evidence, but it was probably pastoralists living in the mountainous regions surrounding the Fertile Crescent who introduced warfare to Sumer.72 The herdsmen would have found the cities’ wealth irresistible, and they had perfected the art of the surprise attack, their speed and mobility terrifying the city dwellers, who had not yet mastered the art of horsemanship. After a few such lightning raids, the Sumerians would have taken steps to protect their people and storehouses. But these assaults probably gave them the idea of using similar techniques to seize loot and arable land from a neighboring Sumerian city.73 By the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Sumerian plain was mobilized for warfare: archaeologists have discovered a marked increase in walled fortifications and bronze weaponry in this stratum. This had not been unavoidable; there was no such escalation of armed conflict in Egypt, which had also developed a sophisticated civilization but was a far more peaceful agrarian state.74 The Nile flooded the fields with almost unfailing regularity, and Egypt was not exposed to the tumultuous climate of Mesopotamia; nor was it encircled by mountains full of predatory herdsmen.75 The Egyptian kingdoms probably had an ad hoc militia to repel an occasional nomadic attack from the desert, but the weapons unearthed by archaeologists are crude and rudimentary. Most ancient Egyptian art celebrates the joy and elegance of civilian life, and there is little glorification of warfare in early Egyptian literature.76
We can only piece together the progress of Sumerian militarization from fragmentary archaeological evidence. Between 2340 and 2284 BCE, the Sumerian king lists record thirty-four intercity wars.77 The first kings of Sumer had been priestly specialists in astronomy and ritual; now increasingly they were warriors like Gilgamesh. They discovered that warfare was an invaluable source of revenue that brought them booty and prisoners who could be put to work in the fields. Instead of waiting for the next breakthrough in productivity, war yielded quicker and more ample returns. The Stele of Vultures (c. 2500 BCE), now in the Louvre, depicts Eannatum, king of Lagash, leading a tightly knit and heavily armed phalanx of troops into battle against the city of Umma; this was clearly a society equipped and trained for warfare. The stele records that even though they begged for mercy, three thousand Ummaite soldiers were killed that day.78 Once the plain had become militarized
, each king had to be prepared to defend and if possible extend his territory, the source of his wealth. Most of these Sumerian conflicts were tit-for-tat campaigns for booty and territory. None seem to have been decisive, and there are signs that some people saw the whole business as futile. “You go and carry off the enemy’s land,” reads one inscription; “the enemy comes and carries off your land.” Yet disputes were still settled by force rather than by diplomacy and no state could afford to be militarily unprepared. “The state weak in armaments,” commented another inscription, “the enemy will not be driven from its gates.”79
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