War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  Chariots also worked best in bulk, with hundreds of vehicles swarming around open flanks and filling the sky with arrows. The more chariots the enemy has, the more you need yourself, and chariot forces grew exponentially. Around 1625 B.C., the Hittites attacked Aleppo with just a hundred chariots, but at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 B.C. they mustered thirty-five hundred, along with ten times as many infantry. (Their Egyptian enemies fielded similar numbers.)

  Raising, training, and feeding such hosts called for a quantum leap in the scale and skill of bureaucracies and commissariats, and controlling so many vehicles on crowded, dusty battlefields demanded even more from officers. The great military challenge in the third-millennium Fertile Crescent had been how to discipline infantry to fight face-to-face; in the second millennium it was how to get chariots going in the right direction at the right time. The answers: more hierarchy, more officers, more spending.

  Stationary bandits in the chariot age hardened their hearts, taxed their subjects more heavily, and raised bigger armies to keep up with their neighbors. Those who failed, seeing their chariots smashed on the battlefield and their infantry hunted down and slaughtered, could only put hope in the strength of their walls. The scale and sophistication of walls and towers therefore leaped ahead too, which, the Red Queen Effect being what it is, only encouraged the building of better rams and digging of deeper tunnels. (Homer’s Iliad, written down in Greece around 750 B.C., may preserve distorted memories of a ten-year siege at Troy around 1200 B.C.)

  Leviathans had to become bigger and scarier in the age of chariots, their administration tighter, and their armies and civil services more professional. And yet, in the now-familiar paradox, the consequence might have been less violence. As one state swallowed up another, the number of states available to fight each other steadily shrank, and when wars did break out, there were surprisingly few big battles. So far as we can tell, the kings of the thirteenth-century-B.C. Fertile Crescent felt much the same way about their armies as rulers would do in eighteenth-century-A.D. Europe: these proud professionals cost so much, and battles destroyed them so quickly, that no one in his right mind would send them into a head-on clash unless he had to. The biggest chariot battles that we know much about—at Megiddo in 1368 B.C. and Kadesh in 1274—both involved at least one and perhaps both sides being taken by surprise.

  As usual, we have no official statistics on rates of violent death, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the golden age of chariots in the lucky latitudes—1600–1200 B.C. in and around the Fertile Crescent, 1000–600 B.C. in China, and 400–100 B.C. in India—saw the overall risk of violent death declining. Over such a huge area, the patterns are of course spotty, but warrior burials often became less common, elite art tended to emphasize the arts of peace, and fortifications grew rare outside the militarized frontiers.

  All the while, trade kept expanding, driving up wealth. Again the patterns are spotty, but those regions most active in commerce—for example, Ugarit on the Syrian coast or the cities of Minoan Crete—are filled with large, comfortable houses that speak of prosperous middling people. Spectacular finds from Mediterranean shipwrecks give us a glimpse of farflung trade in metals, wine, and other little luxuries, while documents from royal palaces and traders’ offices talk of timber, food, and textiles moving within and between the great kingdoms. War was being more productive than ever.

  Until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. The chariot age had begun with changes on the periphery and ended the same way. This time, though, the relevant periphery was in Europe, not central Asia. Farming had spread from the Fertile Crescent across much of Europe by 4500 B.C., and over the next three millennia population there rose, steadily closing the cage. For three thousand years Europeans had fought in classic raid-and-run mode with bows and daggers, but around 1450 B.C. smiths in what is now northern Italy and Austria came up with a new answer to local warriors’ needs. A thousand years earlier, when fighters in the Fertile Crescent had begun shifting from raiding to pitched battles, bronze alloys had still been quite crude, and the best weapons craftsmen could produce were heavy thrusting spears. The relatively soft bronze then available was good enough for daggers or awkward, sickle-shaped short swords that could only be used for hacking, but true swords10—long enough and hard enough for cut and thrust, reliable enough to stake a life on—were beyond any smith’s capacity.

  By 1450, however, bronze workers were making metal tough enough to cast long, straight-sided swords with the blade and hilt made from a single piece of metal. The handle would never come off, no matter how hard a warrior slashed at his enemy’s armor. He could stab too: most swords have two shallow grooves running down the length of the blade, which archaeologists gruesomely (but probably accurately) call blood channels.

  Within a couple of centuries after 1450 B.C., the new swords spread across northern and western Europe. Archaeologists usually find them in hoards or graves along with bundles of tiny spearheads (which must come from javelins, made for throwing rather than thrusting) and sometimes breastplates and shields too. This package was hardly necessary for murdering sleeping villagers in dawn raids; it surely speaks of fierce pitched battles. Small groups of armored men would hurl javelins from fifty paces or less to wound their enemies or pierce their shields to make them useless; then, when the men closed to arm’s length, the gleaming bronze swords would do their deadly work.

  European fighters had murderous new weapons, but the sophisticated soldiers of the Fertile Crescent seem to have been in no hurry to learn from the uncivilized North. When thousands of charioteers could blot out the sun with their arrows, they must have asked, what need was there for riffraff carrying javelins or cut-and-thrust swords?

  They got their answer around 1200 B.C., when swordsmen started moving into the eastern Mediterranean. Some came as lone desperadoes or in little bandit gangs; others signed up as mercenaries in the pharaohs’ armies; and others still joined mass migrations, with entire tribes taking to ships and wagons. Climate change might have played a part, with drier weather making life harder in the Balkans, Italy, and Libya. Whatever the causes, though, the consequences were spectacular.

  It must have been hard, at first, for professional armies to take this rabble seriously, and up to a point the arrogant charioteers were clearly right. When Egypt’s pharaoh Merneptah caught a migrating host moving in from the Libyan Desert in 1208 B.C., he destroyed them completely, killing 9,274 warriors (tallied by counting the penises sliced off corpses). The Egyptians also captured 9,111 swords but only twelve chariots, a strong hint that the invaders were using new tactics. To be on the safe side, Egypt then raised its own corps of swordsmen (probably hired from among the invaders) and won an even more dramatic victory in 1176 B.C. So why worry?

  Because, it turned out, the invaders learned not to play by the rules. So far as we can tell, they avoided pitched battles, and a string of asymmetrical wars dragged on for decades. Diffuse, shapeless threats emerged suddenly and disappeared just as quickly. One day, chariot horses would be run ragged trying to bring raiders to battle; the next, they would find themselves suddenly surrounded. Cheap javelins brought down expensive horses; barbarian swordsmen came in for the kill.

  A single mistake could bring on disaster, as when raiders burned the trading city of Ugarit while its army was away helping the Hittite Empire against another set of raiders. Between about 1220 and 1180 B.C., beginning in Greece and working their way down to Israel, the migrants got the better of one king after another, wearing down their armies and sacking their palaces. Egypt’s battlefield victories saved it from this fate but could not stop a slower infiltration of migrants, who, by 1100 B.C., had effectively taken over the Nile Delta.

  Bureaucracies collapsed and literacy declined all across the Fertile Crescent. No one paid their taxes anymore, and with no money coming in, governments could not pay armies. Raids went unchecked. Poverty crept up, disasters fed off each other, and population plummeted. A new dark age had come.


  Getting to Chang’an (and Pataliputra)

  And then things got worse. Without Leviathan’s protection, long-range trade dried up; without trade, few smiths could find tin to make bronze. Unable to arm the few men they could muster, the Leviathans’ woes increased. Central organization broke down still further.

  By 1050 B.C., however, ingenious metalworkers on Cyprus were already finding a solution to the bronze shortage, although at first it only added to the problems Leviathans faced. Cypriot craftsmen had known for centuries how to work iron, an unattractive but abundant ore. They had rarely bothered, though, because good bronze was superior to this ugly, brittle metal in almost every way. Only when trade routes broke down and the tin ran out did they go back to iron and learn how to work carbon into it. Soon they were forging serviceable weapons and tools—not as good as the best bronze, but much cheaper. Iron was so cheap, in fact, that almost anyone could afford it. Iron swords were the ancient equivalent of AK-47s, giving every angry young man the same killing power as the representatives of law and order.

  The slide into anarchy accelerated between 1050 and 1000 B.C., when new monuments and written records almost disappeared from the Fertile Crescent, but then it bottomed out. With so few rich kingdoms left to plunder, there was less incentive for raiders to strike from the deserts or across the seas, and as the security environment settled down, chieftains began rebuilding the shattered states. By 950, Solomon had created a new kingdom in Israel. This split in two around 930, but by then Assyria was building an empire in what is now northern Iraq. In 918, for the first time in nearly three centuries, an Egyptian pharaoh led a major military campaign beyond his country’s borders, burning and plundering almost as far as Lebanon. Once again chariot wheels were throwing great plumes of dust into the sky above battlefields on the plains of Syria.

  The early first millennium B.C. was not simply a rerun of the mid-second, however. Chariots never regained their battlefield dominance, for two reasons. The first was that the horse breeders out on the steppes had not been idle. For a thousand years, herders on the steppes had been goading teams of horses to drag heavy wagons from one watering hole to the next. As I mentioned a few pages ago, mobility was all-important for the scattered peoples on the grasslands; being able to move quickly between pastures as the grass sprouted and then withered could be a matter of life and death. The result, of course, was that big, strong horses were always in demand, and by about 900 B.C. breeders near the western end of the steppes (in modern Ukraine) were producing horses so big and strong that people could climb on their backs and ride them all day long. Confronted with this new opportunity, would-be equestrians came up with reins and bits that could control horses. Stirrups were still far in the future, but by clutching their mounts with their knees and sitting in elaborate horned wooden saddles, riders learned to fire arrows at a full gallop and even thrust with spears without shoving themselves out of their seats.

  A new revolution in military affairs was beginning. As we will see in Chapter 3, another thousand years would pass before its real significance was felt in the agricultural empires, but on the steppes its importance was immediately obvious. Rideable horses cut the travel time between fertile pastures from weeks to days. So long as every man, woman, and child in a community could ride and shoot a bow, there was now nothing to stop them from trotting across the plains as fast as their flocks could go, fighting when they needed to. Ancient Greek stories about Amazons, female warriors from central Asia, probably reflect the women who fought in these great treks; archaeologists have found that in some periods fully one-fifth of the steppe graves that contained weapons belonged to women.

  The rulers of southwest Asia’s new Leviathans quickly saw that cavalry were cheaper, faster, and more reliable than chariots. The Assyrians began recruiting nomads to fight for them and importing horses to ride by 850 B.C. By 400 B.C., expanding states in China were doing much the same thing, and by 100 B.C. even Indian kings—shielded from the steppes by the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush—were moving the same way.

  The other reason that chariots largely disappeared in the first millennium B.C. was, at first, even more important: the real advantage of iron weapons revealed itself. Iron spearheads, swords, and chain mail were so cheap that vast numbers could be bought. Cavalry cost less than chariots, but iron-armed infantrymen cost much less than bronze-armed ones. Assyria took the lead, raising (according to royal accounts) fifty thousand infantry in the 870s B.C. and more than a hundred thousand in 845. First-millennium-B.C. Assyrian kings regularly put more cavalry on the battlefield than second-millennium pharaohs had put chariots on theirs, but they raised such vast armies of infantry that first-millennium horsemen could hardly ever dominate the battlefield in the way that chariots had in the second millennium. The only thing that could stop these dense columns of foot soldiers was equally dense columns of the same kinds of troops.

  The man who really cracked the secret of this new arms race was a usurper who seized the Assyrian throne in 744 B.C. under the name Tiglath-Pileser III. Beset by rivals, he had no choice but to be unorthodox, and he quickly saw that his one chance to survive was to build up a stronger central government than his predecessors had. Former kings, lacking the strength to create effective bureaucracies, raise taxes, and bend unruly noblemen to their will, had tried to sidestep the problem by cutting deals with their warlike aristocrats. If the local lords would raise troops from their estates, the most common version went, the kings would bring them together, lead them to victory, and then give them generous shares of the plunder. This was a cheap way to raise lots of soldiers, but Tiglath-Pileser could not rely on the fractious Assyrian lords to support him. Yet there was a way around this: he would cut the nobility out of the picture by striking a deal directly with the peasants. The meager surviving sources do not explain exactly what he did, but Tiglath-Pileser somehow gave peasants direct ownership of the land instead of holding it as clients of great lords. In return, the peasants paid the king taxes and served in his armies. With tax revenue rolling in, Tiglath-Pileser hired managers and paid salaries to his underlings—which allowed him not only to impose stricter discipline on them but also to hold on to the loot from his wars, rather than sharing it with his overmighty lords.

  All this worked wonders for Leviathan. A lot of people got impaled (an Assyrian specialty) in the wars of the eighth and seventh centuries, but the booming cities hosting Assyria’s high-spending governments were as famous for pleasure gardens and libraries as for barbarity. Like Egyptian noblemen before them and Renaissance courtiers after them, the cream of Assyrian society found more profit in impressing the king with their cultivation than in fighting duels in the streets of Nineveh.

  As always in ancient history, no statistics survive on homicide rates or elite feuding, but the circumstantial evidence again seems strong. Tiglath-Pileser found a new way to tame the aristocracy, which, as Elias showed in his Civilizing Process, was just the path that early-modern Europe would take toward peace more than two thousand years later. Tiglath-Pileser and his successors also pushed Assyria’s borders outward, swallowing up smaller states and preventing them from fighting each other. The Assyrian Empire expanded enormously, forcing its neighbors either to submit or to adopt similar policies of centralization.

  Once the process began, there was no turning back. The rise of Assyria spawned dozens of new small states around its edges as peripheral peoples organized governments to fight back, raising taxes and training armies. When a coalition of these enemies overthrew the Assyrians in 612 B.C., a sixty-year tussle over the empire’s carcass ended in the rise of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the biggest the world had yet seen (although it has to be said that much of the area the Achaemenids ruled had almost no one in it, and its population was barely half what the Roman and Han Empires would one day have).

  Persia’s growth set off another phase of state formation around its periphery, and in the 330s B.C. it met the same fate as Assyria. It took just four years for
Alexander the Great, ruler of what struck the Persians as a backward kingdom on their northwest frontier, to overthrow the great empire. By then, though, still newer fringe societies were appearing, and in the third century B.C. Rome and Carthage fought the largest, fiercest wars in ancient history. By the time Carthage surrendered in 202 B.C., Rome had built the greatest war machine in the world and across the next century swallowed up the entire Mediterranean Basin. For the next thousand years, the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean were always to be dominated by a few huge empires, holding sway over—and imposing peace on—tens of millions of people (Figure 2.8).

  Figure 2.8. Size matters: Eurasian empires compared, 3000 B.C.–A.D. 117

  This was the age, according to Hanson and Keegan, when the Western way of war was born. But when we look across the rest of Eurasia’s lucky latitudes in the first millennium B.C., we see remarkably similar patterns. Thanks to their later start on farming and caging after the end of the Ice Age, China and India began down this path several centuries after the Mediterranean world, but each independently discovered the same secret of success as Assyria, Greece, and Rome, raising mass armies paid for by powerful governments and winning wars in huge, face-to-face battles settled by shock tactics. Each region added its own twists to the tale, but from the Atlantic to the Pacific the story remains recognizably the same.

  Once again, this is clearest in China. After being adopted later than in the Fertile Crescent, chariots continued to dominate battlefields until the sixth century B.C. (the biggest Chinese chariot battle on record, at Chengpu, was in 632 B.C.), but by 500 B.C. kings were starting to figure out the same strategy that had worked so well for Tiglath-Pileser. They cut aristocrats out of war, granted peasants rights to their land, and then taxed and conscripted them as payback.