War: What is it Good For? (Absolutely Nothing?)
|
|
The Jet Li Movie “Hero,” set in the China of the Warring States Period (403-221BC), is loosely based on the story of Jing Ke’s assassination attempt on the King of the Qin dynasty. Wary of assassins, the king allows no one closer than 100 paces from his throne. A stranger called Nameless arrives at the capital claiming to have killed three assassins the King most fears. He tells the king how he killed the first assassin, Long Sky, then used the love that the other two, Broken Sword and Flying Snow, had for each other to destroy them as well. When Nameless has finished his story, the king tells one of his own, in which he perceptively suggests that there were four conspirators, and that Nameless was in league with the other three to achieve his goal of killing the king.
The king goes on to share his vision of a united China with Nameless, a China that would finally be at peace for the first time in history, a peace that could be achieved only through war. Ultimately, Nameless accepts the king’s vision, and is executed by the king’s army, an example to would-be assassins, and a sacrifice for the betterment of China. For this he is given a hero’s funeral. The King of Qin, upon who the story is based, Shi Huangdi, went on to become the first emperor of unified China, giving the name Qin, or Ch’in (“China”) to the new state.
Were there such visionary leaders in the ancient world? Not Shi Huangdi, who was castigated by later historians as a cruel dictator and megalomaniac. But the movie does nonetheless raise questions about the purpose of war and the growth of states, such as, is such growth possible without war? Can there be such a thing as a “war to end all wars?”
Introduction
[Images: Skull from 2500 BC Denmark with embedded spear point (national museum, Copenhagen) in Philip De Souza: The Ancient World at War, P. 15; Neolithic cave painting of archers from Algeria: Da Souza P. 14 (pierre colombe/corbis;) Marine Battle of Ramses III against the Sea People, da souza p. 44 (After Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte 1835.).
War is father of all, king of all. Some it makes gods, some it makes men, some slaves some free. Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BC)
Like later history, that of the earliest civilizations is drenched in blood. If we were to look at history unvarnished, it should come with a warning: killing, rape, genocide and slavery have been central to the human experience for much of the past 5000 years and possibly much, much longer. Why? In what follows we will explore what motivates humans to violence and war, and what wars have been fought over—both profound causes and what historians often refer to as “proximate” causes, and in so doing try to get an idea of what role war plays in human society.
War touched the lives of perhaps millions of people in the ancient world. Although of little solace for those who lived through it, from the destruction of war often emerged new relationships, new political entities, technological, scientific, social and political innovations. Driven by the needs of defense and aggression, these innovations appeared much in the same way that today’s military drives innovations—GPS and the Internet being two prime examples—and in the same way that we now have global political and financial institutions formed largely in the wake of two catastrophic world wars in the twentieth century. But in all likelihood, these are unintended consequences, not motivations for war. But apart from such spin-offs, does war drive a process of growth from smaller to larger political entities or polities, just like the vision of Shi Huangdi, in the end leading to peace? And is this process visible in the ancient world? Is it true that, as Charles Tilly suggests in discussing Europe, that war made the state, and the state made war? And was this state-making a conscious project of leaders, or yet another unintended consequence of their greed for war spoils and territory?
China’s first “unification” came under the Qin, but unification is a relative term, and should never be considered total, permanent or complete. Mesopotamia, at 3500 BC was a collection of small city-states, well defended by walls such as at Uruk. But one thousand years later, the Land Between the Rivers was largely consolidated under the Akkadian Empire, ruled over by a very martial royal family from the city of Akkad. Successions of kings, powerful city-states and empires came and went in the subsequent millennia, among them the Kassites, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and while there were periods of peace and stability, some of them quite long, this period in history is rich with martial detail, as ruler deposed ruler in gory succession struggles and expansionist campaigns. Ancient Egypt shared with China a large and long-lasting state, but one that was borne from war, as many chiefdoms and kingdoms were brought to heel and incorporated into the larger Egyptian polity. Once unified, Egyptian warfare was mostly focused on its neighbors. In all of these areas a move from small political units, to larger, more unified ones, is evident, even if this process was halting.
We will discuss the Greeks who show up for the first time here, looking at three distinct phases of Greek history, all of which feature warring city states, and expansionist political entities, culminating with the success of Philip of Macedonia and his son, who would become Alexander the Great, who carried out an expansionist campaign that only lasted a few years but brought Greek, or Hellenistic culture to North Africa, and large swathes of south west Asia.
We will also take a look at India after Harappa, and see what role war and peace played in the Mauryan Empire (321-185 BC) on the Eastern side of the continent, and ask whether warfare had similar functions in state-building, or whether India bucked the trend and promoted peace. In the New World, Mesoamerica’s earliest complex society, the Olmecs, practiced ritualized warfare, frequently battling neighbors for supplies of sacrificial victims. And we look at the earliest complex societies of South America, on the Peruvian coast and find familiar signs of hierarchical societies using organized violence to get a head, (quite literally).
Just as feminist scholars have attempted, largely in vain, to find fully matriarchal societies, others have searched for pacifist societies, hoping to prove perhaps that war is not a natural part of human society. The few societies that have been put forward as “peaceful” are only such in specific historical periods, and under certain conditions. There are some tribes which, pushed from their ancestral lands and largely depleted of population, are in no fit state for military operations. Other peoples, like the Swedes, are peaceful now, but only a couple of centuries ago were heavily militarized, and before providing the world with safe cars, they gave us the dreaded Vikings.
Before we consider the specifics however, we will look at the origins of war; did it begin with civilization, or in the prehistoric human past? Looking at data from archaeology and ethnology we consider the argument that violence was endemic in the earliest human societies. With developments within the fields of primatology, evolutionary biology, psychology and genetics, we are now able to put flesh on the bones of archaeological evidence and make more confident assertions about prehistory, to suggest that violence might have had an adaptive benefit to the very earliest humans, allowing them to prosper in the brutal struggle for survival.
While one wants to answer the question what is war good for? with a loud “Nothing!” we should think on Heraclitus’ assertion, for it is possible that war was the forge which shaped much of human society, and even when it was not directly responsible for creating ever-larger, more complex societies, many were built in response to the threat of war. Perhaps indicative of this is Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Written in the sixth century BC, it is the product of a long history of war in China, and distills generations of experience in warfare, illustrating how prevalent and important war was to the state. As that text makes clear, warfare became deeply institutionalized during the river valley civilizations, and continued in those that followed, not only in China, but everywhere else in the world. “The art of war is of vital importance to the state,” says Sun Tzu. “It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.” These words could have been written yesterday.
I. What is the Origin of War?
Did war have a beginning? If it did, and we can trace its “invention” back to a historical point, does that mean it is an aberration, and can be eradicated, like a disease? But if we can find no “start” date for war, does that mean that our species was “born” warlike? And if war is innate, does that mean we are destined to always fight?
What is War?
In order to begin thinking this one through we should define our terms. Like many words, “War” is enormously elastic, with widely differing connotations. Lets look at some of the basics. Today we tend to think of war as a highly organized military enterprise waged between two nation-states. The World Wars of the twentieth century were fought between well-defined nation-states. In ancient times Mesopotamian city-states, for example, which were well-defined political entities, fought each other for “supremacy,” meaning booty, land, and power. Chinese kingdoms, or dynasties, fought for millennia, using war to expand their influence.
Carl Von Clausewitz, a nineteenth century German military theorist, famously referred to war as “the continuation of policy by other means,” suggesting that war was motivated by politics, initiated by failed negotiations and limited to state participants. And this theory has found considerable support, even today. The military historian John Keegan offers a useful description of this “political-rationalist” definition of war in his book The History of Warfare. This definition characterizes war as a state-level activity in which there are pitched battles, skirmishes, sieges, easily-identifiable sides, clear goals and even rules. But such a definition is inadequate when dealing with “primitive” or pre-state warfare. Was there war before states, in prehistory, and if so, what did it look like?
Were Pre-historic Humans Peaceful?
The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that pre-historic humans were at the mercy of their instincts. Living in a world of finite resources, he said, violent conflict was inevitable for them: “And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.”
Hobbes’ larger idea, explored in his famous work “Leviathon” (1651), was that our nature is such that we need order imposed from above. Imagine perhaps the leader of a band of cavemen, slapping around two junior members who are fighting. The junior cave men are unable to control themselves, so must be helped to do so by a higher power. Members of a society, in other words, must accept a “social contract” to allow the state absolute power in return for security. This security would be guaranteed by the state’s monopoly on physical force. Hobbes, writing during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, was doubtless heavily influenced by the experiences of his historical period, but his critique remains one of the most significant tracts of political philosophy ever written. Hold the image of Hobbes’ rowdy cavemen for a moment while we give you another possibility.
In the eighteenth century the French Philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau challenged Hobbes’ view of our nature with his concept of the “Noble Savage” (Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind, 1755). Humans, he believed had lived harmoniously with nature and each other for most of their history. Here you can picture beautiful people, scantily clad in a dreamy desert island setting. Peace and Love abound. Food is plentiful and free. But with the advent of agriculture, Rousseau said, and the resultant population growth and rise in inequality, tensions appeared in this utopian vision; war arrived as part of the package of civilization. Attempting to prove this thesis, Rousseau paid attention to the reports of primitive people that Europeans were encountering in their voyages of exploration in the eighteenth century. He liked what he saw in Tahiti. French expeditions reported discovering peaceful natives, half-naked, living in an egalitarian utopia. Aha! Rousseau ran with these reports, but paid little attention to the parts where they described the less savory habits of Tahitian life, such as the practice in which a warrior would “pound his vanquished foe’s corpse flat with his heavy war club, cut a slit through his victim and don him as a trophy poncho.”
What is the Evidence for “Primitive War?”
Archaeologists today are often accused of overlooking evidence of pre-historic violence. But increasing evidence is showing up. In the caves at Peche Merle and Cougnac in southern France, among more common paintings of animals, ice age humans also depicted what many archaeologists consider to be murder. In one painting a man is shown standing with seven spears penetrating him. At Cosquer Cave on the Mediterranean coast there is an engraving, which has come to be known as the “Killed Man” from 18,500 years ago. It shows a body lying prone with its legs and arms in the air and a deeply engraved line running through its back and up through the skull, possibly a spear or harpoon. Whether this portrayed a real event or not, we don’t know. But if killing was in the human imagination, is it conceivable that it was not happening in reality?
There is considerable evidence—beyond paintings—that it was. In England researchers have found settlements from around 4000 BC with extensive perimeter walls. Did the walls symbolize the inhabitants’ concepts of inclusivity/exclusivity, as some scholars have claimed? Or are they more simply defensive measures against hostile “others?” Human bones inside the encampment, and piles of arrowheads around the gates, suggest the latter. In one case a man’s skeleton was found with an arrowhead lodged in his back. In his arms was an infant who had been crushed to death as he fell.
Several sites in Western and Central Europe reveal similar activity. But the evidence is by no means limited to Europe. At Wadi Kabbaniya near the Egyptian-Sudanese border, Fred Wendorf, then of Southern Methodist University, discovered the body of a young man buried around 20,000 years ago, with three wounds; a broken left arm (possibly from warding off a blow), a partly-healed wound from a spear tip in the same upper arm, and two spear points in his pelvis. Wendorf thinks that skirmishes over watering holes in that area were frequent, and this individual had experienced several. “The last one,” he thinks, “got him.”
Further archaeological evidence points not just to killing on an individual level—more suggestive of murder rather than war—but killing in groups as well. Cemetery 117, as it’s known to archaeologists, is in Gebel Sahaba, in Egyptian Nubia. Here Wendorf discovered 59 human bodies, of men, women and children. Forty percent of the adults he found had stone projectiles in them. One woman had 29 stone arrow tips in her, and one man had 19 separate wounds, possibly suggesting a ritual killing. Others had multiple arrowheads in chest and back, some were shot through the lower jaw or skull, as if at short range, while they were on their backs. The children were mostly executed at short range by arrow shots to the head or neck. This happened 12-14 thousand years ago, about the same time that the Natufians were building the first villages in the Fertile Crescent.
Rock paintings in Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia, show groups of men battling with spears, with boomerangs flying overhead (the ancient equivalent of the pilot-less drone?). And in the Americas archaeologists found 850 year-old remains of human muscle protein on pot shards, and human remains in a piece of fossilized human excrement. As Lawrence Keeley puts it: “The Prehistoric New World was also a place where the dogs of war were seldom on a leash.”
Killing, then, and possibly war of some form, was likely familiar to pre-historic humans, and we can say with some confidence that as far as the evidence goes back, there was probably human-on-human violence.
What is the Evolutionary Background of War?
Beyond archaeology, evolutionary biology and psychology allow us to peer into our species’ past, and ethnology lets us draw conclusions about how humans lived in pre-history. Many evolutionary psychologists now think that humans have always practiced violence against each other. As Steven Pinker of Harvard University puts it: “Any genetic group that has made it into the present probably had pugnacious ancestors in the not-too-distant past.” If the people of dreamy Tahiti routinely wore each other’s corpses as ponchos, what hope did the rest of us have?
But why should violence be a precondition to survival? Put simply, human survival over these many millennia was always in question; we were up against severe changes in climate, predation from wild beasts, plagues and famines. It is no wonder that none of the other “ape men” that had evolved alongside us made it in the long run. But we did, illustrating why evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has referred to humans “survival machines.” Part of this survival meant becoming more dangerous than the giant beasts which liked to eat us, and this process may have inadvertently created a new monster, Man, against whom we had to protect ourselves. The way that natural selection works, it is no surprise therefore that a capacity for violence became a trait which gave tough guys the edge in the game of survival. As philosopher David Livingston Smith puts it: “These groups flourished while the pacifists withered on the evolutionary vine.”
Hobbes believed that all conflict boiled down to three causes: Gain (Competition), Diffidence (here read “distrust”) and Glory (i.e. reputation). Competition—at least between men—in our early history was often over women. Men have, in evolutionary terms, always competed for women: “This explains,” says Steven Pinker “why men are the violent gender, and also why they always have something to fight over, even when their survival needs have been met.” Clearly competition also exists over material possessions, beginning, in the human species, with food resources. Secondly, what Hobbes called “disdain,” is really the distrust of others. Possession itself is cause for both defense and aggression; if you know that your neighbor covets your possessions your best defense may just be offense. And your neighbor might be thinking the same thing. The need to strike pre-emptively to protect your assets has come to be known as the “Hobbesian Trap,” and it finds expression in struggles between ancient Greek City states of the fifth century BC, or urban centers in Mesopotamia of 3000 BC as much as in the nuclear age. Soviet nuclear arms proliferation drove U.S. nuclear proliferation and vice-versa for a quarter century, in a spiraling arms race, which likely had its origins in a part of the human brain, which for millions of years has wondered, “should I destroy him before he destroys me?” Finally, Hobbes talked about “Glory,” which is a common theme in war throughout the ages. Translating this into “reputation” or “honor” makes its appeal more obvious. Hobbes said that men fight over “a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue.” But such a notion is more than just a vague concern for reputation, it carries more evolutionary baggage than would fit in an overhead compartment. In a hostile world, individuals had to express their willingness to inflict violence on anyone who would encroach upon their territory, or benefit at their expense. Having people know that you were not be trifled with, therefore, made it less likely that you would be. As Steven Pinker puts in typically high-brow style: “In the words of the Jim Croce song: ‘you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Jim.’”
But what did early war look like? The standing armies that we are familiar with did not appear on the historical horizon until the river valley civilizations were well established. Nomadic tribes and settled hunter-gatherers today still practice several distinct forms of violent warfare, which likely resemble early warfare closely. One form is more “ritualistic” as it looks somewhat like a pitched battle, but few people get hurt. The Dani highlanders of New Guinea have been doing this for centuries if not millennia [photo of Dani battle in Keeley, P. 70—also in Gat P?]. Here, male members of two different communities will meet in an open area. Often much of the battle involves hurling verbal insults at each other, sometimes even ending in hilarity. Exchange of arrows and spears will likely also take place but at their maximum effective range, and casualties are low, sometimes nil (the stakes have been raised in recent decades, however, with the introduction of guns to the traditional arsenal of spears and arrows). Graphic source: http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1604/video/Dead_Birds.html
The other main form of warfare is much more damaging, involving swift and deadly raids on enemy communities. With the element of surprise, and with overwhelming numbers, there is little risk for the attackers. One technique favored by widely different groups including the Bering Straits Eskimos and the Mae Enga of New Guinea involves surrounding huts at dawn and thrusting spears through the thin walls, pouring arrows into the doorway and shooting people as they run out. Raids give way to larger enemy actions, what Lawrence Keeley refers to as “massacres,” the aim of which is total annihilation of the enemy, men, women and children. The subarctic tribe of Kutchin Eskimos habitually attempted to destroy the Mackenzie Eskimos, killing all members of an encampment but one, the “survivor,” who would be left to tell the tale. Something akin to this could have taken place at Cemetery 117 in Gebel Sahaba.
So far, so bad, it seems. But in looking honestly at our likely evolutionary background of violence we cannot but notice that we have come a long way. While there is no evidence that chimps, wolves, or any other animals show remorse for having killed, history attests that killing is, for us, no light matter. In fact men have had to be persuaded, and in many cases forced to kill in battle. There are strong taboos against killing, in almost all cultures, and this is largely understood to be because violence, while something we inherited from our ancestors as a useful tool, is nevertheless a tool of last resort, for the simple reason that it is dangerous. Going up against one of your own species supposes an equal match, and it does not take much to be injured, possibly fatally, or killed outright. These taboos very likely also exist because it can’t be good for the species as a whole to have them murdering each other. Killing should only be undertaken when absolutely necessary, and when the chances of success are high. If the chimps figured this out, so did Sun Tzu: “If fighting is sure to result in victory then you must fight…if fighting will not result in victory, then you must not fight, even if it is a ruler’s bidding.”
Many historians have noted the reluctance of warriors to kill. Niall Ferguson, for instance, has written that the First World War would have been inconceivable without alcohol because the soldiers could never have committed such atrocities sober. Getting high or drunk is an ancient wartime practice, from the Vietnam War to Ancient India, as the brain needs to be chemically altered to overcome natural inhibitions. There are other ways of overcoming these, and all have been practiced throughout history. One is propaganda, which broadcasts the “justice” of the cause for which you are fighting, and might well portray your enemy as evil, bent on your destruction, or, as was famously the case with the Jews in Nazi Germany, inhuman. Kooks, Japs, Rag Heads, Camel Jockeys, the list of epithets for perceived enemies is endless and gives away a very human reluctance to kill other….humans, so you give them names that de-humanize them.
II. How Did War Change with “Civilization?”
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or company entire than to destroy them. (Sun Tzu, The Art of War III. 1.)
So the evidence suggests that primitive people practiced forms of warfare, in ancient times and today. It also suggests that this kind of behavior went far back into prehistory, and played a part in our evolution. But what happened when we became “civilized?” Based on the historical record it seems reasonable to assume that most city states around the ancient world paid little heed to this particular piece of advice from Sun Tzu (above); conquering one’s enemies was often done old-school, besieging them in their citadels, massacring their men, raping their women and then either enslaving them and their children or butchering them. War, with the advent of civilization, whether Chinese or Olmec, became a major preoccupation, taking up vast reserves of “blood and treasure” to the extent that many states built their economies around the constant need for defense, and the demands of keeping soldiers in the field. It also made war deadlier. “In earliest pre-history,” says David Livingston-Smith, “the sparseness of human population put a natural brake on the scope of our ancestors destructiveness. But when agriculture made large concentrations of people possible, and urban centers began to turn nomadic tribesmen into sedentary tillers of the soil, the deadliness of war increased proportionately.” To illustrate this Livingston Smith cites the Greek historian Herodotus, who recorded that the Greeks killed 200,000 Persians on a single summer day in 479 BC at the battle of Plataea. Twenty years later, in China, the Qin dynasty slaughtered quarter of a million combined forces of Han and Wei.
In addition to scale, motivations for war also changed somewhat with the rise of cities and states; instead of struggles over hunting ranges, conflict ensued over productive agricultural land; slaves were taken as booty, because there was work to be done, and apart from some domesticated animals, humans were the only energy source available. Cities also accumulated products and goods, either stored food or valuable items such as precious stones such as gold, silver or jade, and other manufactured goods.
But many scholars now think that although warfare seemed to get a boost from civilization, mortality actually dropped, perhaps supporting Hobbes’ idea that the state, or Leviathon, would prevent us from killing each other. This is probably because whereas state warfare could often be massively destructive, it was balanced by long periods of internal peace, with violence only projected outside the polity. This was notably the case with ancient Egypt, as we will discuss below, where after the country had been unified under one ruler it was relatively peaceful within its boundaries if not without.
War in the Near East
Civilization was born in the near east around the 4th millennium BC. In Mesopotamia the world’s first work crews were assembled to meet the challenges of irrigation and public works, as we discussed in the last chapter. But organization of men and record keeping are two essential ingredients of any effective military, as Sun Tzu would attest. It is therefore no surprise that the shape of the earliest “armies” was related to that of work crews in this region, as historian Nigel Tallis puts it: “In the ancient world, even more so than today, the nature and structure of army, society, economy and state were directly related and interdependent.”
And the armies were put to use. Near Eastern ancient history is a particularly dizzying succession of kings and dynasties. We should look at this warmongering in perspective, though; although we have many records of wars, for example, from Mesopotamia, these cover several thousand years. As the historian Benjamin Foster puts it: “King Hammurabi of Babylon was remoter in time from King Assurbanipul of Assyria, than William the Conqueror from Eisenhower.” Mesopotamian ancient history was, in other words, long. It is conceivable that there were fairly long periods of peace, scattered amongst outbursts of war.
Were Cities Defensive Structures?
With the rise of cities we begin to see the first “organized” or civilized warfare, in which political leaders were often military leaders as well, and could conjure up large numbers of armed men, some professional soldiers, and some lowly conscripts. City states, whether in Mesopotamia, Greece, or the New World, always appeared in clusters (over one thousand in ancient Greece, 30-odd in Mesopotamia and several dozen in the Valley of Mexico), and they always appeared in the absence of a larger, territorial state, in fact perhaps because of the absence of such. This clustering suggests a need for defense, probably against each other.
To some extent city-state warfare can be seen as an extension of a pre-historic “habit” of warfare, an extension of our natural fear of strangers. As Robin Wright puts it: “If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight.” Both of these activities were entered into with gusto. Natural resources provided one motivation for both warfare and trade. Sumerians needed timber and metal ore, neither of which was available locally, and conflict over trade routes was common. Cities also clashed over the waterways and access to productive land. Conflict was likely also common between sedentary city-dwellers and nomadic or semi nomadic peoples in the region. This is a common feature of societies at this period, globally: Sedentary settlements, towns and cities, stockpiled goods of all sorts, and nomadic peoples, who specialized in herding livestock, were often good on horseback and were adept at the lightening raid to help themselves to the benefits of civilized societies.
As we learned in chapter three, unlike our society, most inhabitants of early cities were food producers. If this seems counter-intuitive, it is. Until you begin to perceive the security picture. Archaic references to the Mesopotamian city of Uruk refer to it as “Uruk-the sheep-enclosure,” suggesting that the city might have begun as a place of safety where shepherds and goatherds could protect their charges from marauding bands, on the look out for livestock. Protection was written into the DNA, you might say, of ancient towns and cities. “Centralized ceremonial/cultic/civic centers, marketplaces and artisan workshops,” says historian Azar Gat, “would mean little in the development of city-states were it not for the imperatives of defense.” The reason that people endured the overcrowding, disease, and inconvenience of a city was the threat posed from other cities, sometimes only kilometers away. Putting it bluntly, Gat makes the point that: “City states were the product of war.”
But did this kind of gathering together really protect from war? Prehistoric warfare was not as advanced as that which brought down Ur and later Sumerian cities. Tribes have historically “raided” each other in pursuit of booty. Raiding was effective when your target group was small; you could swoop in unannounced, grab and run. If you had numerical advantage there was less likelihood of physical harm being done to you. But when settlements became larger villages, this threw a wrench in the plan. You needed larger raiding parties to achieve a numerical advantage, and grab-and-run was no longer an option; instead you would be fighting house to house, each dwelling being a potential stronghold. A small settlement could be eliminated overnight by a handful of raiders. Not so a town. As populations grew, so did armies; eventually walls went up, and the ante was raised considerably in the scale and scope of warfare.
What Was the Nature of War Among the Earliest Greek City States?
City states, although originating in Mesopotamia are often most associated with ancient Greece. Civilization in Greece starts with Crete in about 3000BC. Minoan culture, as it is known, was centered around Knossos, where bronze age remains have been found including a large number of double-edged daggers in communal tombs. The importance of the double edge on these weapons is that they are considered much more likely to be weapons rather than tools; the extra edge makes it hazardous for more innocent uses such as whittling wood or preparing food. Complex palace structures at Knossos suggest a hierarchical kingdom which peaked at about 1600 BC.
But by 1450 BC Knossos was in the hands of Greeks from Mycenae, a mainland city state, whether by force or by default is not completely clear, and it is the Mycenaeans who expanded the Greek world, through trade and conquest. Their military adventures in Asia Minor probably provided the background for Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad, which tells the story of the Greek coalition of city-states besieging the city of Troy. In this poem, the Mycenaeans are cast as the leaders of the anti-Troy coalition. The rich archaeological record from the Mycenaean period suggests a society of full-time military specialists. Graves reveal armories of weapons, and skeletons with multiple wounds, many healed, suggesting men who had long fighting careers. One forensic scientist reconstructing the faces of these warriors for a documentary, referred to them as a “group of thugs,” which fits nicely into our theory that evolution favored the tough guys.
Fresco from the palace at Pylos (de souza P. 98)
But clearly there is more to their civilization than this. They recorded much of the economic and administrative details of their lives in what archaeologists call the Linear B text, an early form of Greek, and left behind many elaborately decorated vases, engravings and seals (although much of the subject matter was warfare!). At Mycenae and nearby Tirnys, archaeological remains speak of the prevalence of war. Not just the presences of massive defensive walls, the setting of gates at an angle to the main walls thereby exposing their enemies to fire from the walls. Rear gates provided escape routes, and the town layouts incorporated springs for access to water in times of siege. But warfare in this period might not have yet been that of John Keegan’s definition. For the Mycenaeans it was probably relatively small-scale, involving raids, and if we are to believe Homer, individual combat between elite, aristocratic warriors, and victory involved booty including livestock and women.
C16th BC engraving from Mycenae showing chariot driver riding down a warrior on foot. The foot soldier is carrying a possibly double-edged sword. National Museum, Athens.
In book 18 of the Iliad, Homer described the shield of perhaps the Greeks’ most prized warrior, Achilles. Designed by the God-slash-metal smith, Hephaestus, it depicted scenes of two cities, one at war, and one at peace. Homer’s description of the shield shows two painfully contrasting realities, one what the warriors had left behind—wives, children, parents, and harmony, such as they will likely never see again—and the other a city at war. As the historian Lawrence Trittle says, “Achilles’ shield reveals that the early Greeks knew war all too well and saw peace as an elusive good.”
Detail of A Reconstruction of Achilles Shield (http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/AchillesShield.html)
Notwithstanding their credentials as tough dudes, the demise of the Mycenaeans was surprisingly rapid, between about 1250 and 1050 BC. Explanations for this include everything from drought to civil war. But one points the finger at the Land and Sea People, a collection of disparate peoples from around the Mediterranean, possibly even including dislocated Minoans and Myceneans, among others. They raided along the Mediterranean coast, overthrew the Hittite empire of Anatolia (which reached its height around 1400 BC), and were eventually defeated by Ramses III of Egypt in 1174 BC.
Ramses III defeating the Sea People in 1174 BC. Source: After Champollion, Monuments de L’Egypt….1835
[Timeline of Greek History de Souza P. 101)]
Scholars divide “ancient” Greek history into three main phases, the Minoan/Mycenaean (3000-1100 BC), Archaic (700-480 BC), and Classical (480-338). After the collapse of Mycenae, Greece entered a “dark age” reverting to some extent to “pre-civilized” state, of small, scattered villages, and little in the way of written, or archaeological records. By the eighth century BC we see the emergeance of small towns and the first writing for several hundred years. Settlements grew in this era until the form of the Greek city state (or Polis, Greek for city) which was to dominate the classic era emerged. Multiple city states vied for control throughout the archaic period, culminating in Sparta’s emergence as a regional power by the 7th century BC, and spent much of its time defending itself from the Kingdom of Lydia, and its successors, the Persian empire based in Iran. Struggles against the Persians continued for many years, until the Greeks, led by the city state of Athens, decicively defeated the Persian armies of Xerxes at the battle of Plataea (479 BC).
But by about 400 BC, any unity that had been generated by external threats had dissipated, and the cities were at it
again. Eventually there were two primary rivals in Greece, Athens and Sparta. Conflict between them erupted in the Peloponnesian Wars (461-446 BC and 431- 404 BC). Sparta eventually gained Persian support (it is not uncommon for enemies to become allies, if the interests align!) But after defeating Athens, Sparta was beset by new hostile alliances, and wars continued, which by about 350 BC left Greece largely rudderless. The resulting power vacuum allowed the northern Macedonians to decicively defeat combined Greek forces at the battle of Chaerona in 338 BC, making Philip of Macedonia the de-facto leader of the Greeks. [Graphic: Spartan Hoplite Phalanx as portrayed in film “300.” Source: http://scottthong.wordpress.com/2007/05/21/the-macedonian-phalanx/
To what end, all this fighting among Greeks? Here we should simply read Hobbes, he seems to provide very adequate explanations. Greeks themselves talked about “wanting more” (pleonexia). Of what? Primarily wealth, but honor to boot. Here the Greeks foreshadowed Hobbes, for they understood that accumulation of resources and reputation were innate human compulsions. Cities competed for wealth, and won honor and respect with acts of military might. Rivalries which might have been appeased with raids or a few days of plundering enemy territory developed into a desire for total annihiliation of the enemy. Luckily, perhaps, most of the cities of the classical era lacked the resouces for long drawn-out campaigns, and they had to make do with amatuer militias and a few seasoned aristocratic warriors who could afford effective weapons. It was this lack of financial deep pockets that allowed the Macedonians to become the dominant power in the region, and it was the Macedonians, under Alexander the Great who spread Greek culture, or Hellenism, far from the shores of Greece, which we will read about below.
- II. What Role Did War Play in Building Territorial States?
When there is dust rising in a high column, it is the sign of chariots advancing; when the dust is low, but spread over a wide area, it betokens the approach of infantry. When it branches out in different directions, it shows that parties have been sent to collect firewood. A few clouds of dust moving to and fro signify that the army is encamping. (Sun Tzu, The Art of War IX, 23.)
You know that warfare has become a big deal when you can read an enemy’s actions by the behavior of dust clouds on the horizon. While city states increased the deadliness of warfare, the rise of large territorial states such as appeared with the Assyrians and Akkadians in Mesopotamia, or ancient Egypt, and most notably because of its sheer size, China, increased the scale of war yet further, and made it ever-more organized, bureaucratic and central to the state.
The logic of conquering in Mesopotamia led in some periods to greater political unity, and larger polities. Lugalzagesi of Uruk established a territorial state in southern Mesopotamia around 2450 BC. To this point Mesopotamia was inhabited by two major ethnic groups, separated by their language, Sumerian in the south, and Akkadians who were mostly in the north, in today’s Syria and southern Turkey. Both groups shared a culture, which archaeologists refer to as “Sumerian.” But it was not until Sargon the Great, from the city of Akkad, north of Uruk, (also known as Sargon of Akkad) conquered the lands of Lugalzagesi and “united” the north and south, that this region actually became a single polity under one ruler, around 2330 BC. This is widely considered the world’s first “empire.”
"Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions" from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud, Iraq, c. 850 BCE.
Hunting was often practice for war.
Sargon’s conquests were momentous both for the region and beyond, as he campaigned far beyond Mesopotamia, including waterborne excursions to what is now Oman and possibly southern Iran, looking to profit economically. If war in Mesopotamia created the need for cities, it subsequently created the idea of empire, and this was emulated and spontaneously re-created the world over as the new visions of kingship and the state developed. (Timeline here for Mesopotamian history: see de Souza: P. 47).
Left: Court of Hammurabi: source: http://www.blatner.com/adam/consctransf/historyofmedicine/1-overview/brief.html Right: Codice of Hammurabi. Louvre, Paris. Graphic note: Interesting to combine “imaginative reconstructions with primary visual sources? Primary sources are very “dead” not as visually descriptive or appealing.
As we advance through the centuries in Mesopotamia, crunching enemy heads as we go, the tales of military victories pile up (yet the defeated are silent as ever). Fast forwarding through the Akkadians, and bouncing off the stepping stones of the Babylonians, whose legendary king, Hammurabi, created what some consider the first legal system (Hammurabi’s code), we stop in next at around 700 BC. At this point King Sennacherib of the Neo-Assyrian empire, inscribed his valiant deeds on what is known to archaeologists as Sennacherib’s Prism, a clay prism inscribed with the text of his annals, mostly concerning war and in many parts quite graphic. Describing his “taming” of the Elamites (a people of Southern Mesopotamia) he says: “I cut their throats like sheep…my prancing steeds…plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariots were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors.”
Aerial view of Lachish showing siege ramp front right, and remains of palace on top.
http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/lachish_slides/lachish_text.htm
Sennacherib’s warmongering illustrates how early military empires worked. The Assyrians based themselves in the Tigris valley. Wide open plains with no natural defense necessitated a large army. In 700 BC, When King Hezekiah of Judah, based in Jerusalem, decided he did not need to pay tribute to Sennacherib, the latter mustered an enormous army. The frieze which he later constructed to encircle an entire room in his palace, tells the story of the subsequent siege of Lachish, a city south of Jerusalem. The pictures unfold as if in real time, reading left to right. Its like a graphic novel, images of the Assyrian army marching north; the preparations for the siege; the siege itself, and the carrying off of tons of booty. Most poignant, perhaps, because it evokes scenes familiar to anyone who watches televised news today, are scenes of more than 200,000 people the Assyrians forcibly removed from the city to relocate elsewhere in the empire. This was a common Assyrian practice when towns or cities were troublesome, and has remained a time-honored habit of leaders throughout history, including most notably Joseph Stalin.
Survivors of Lachish marching into exile pass their spread eagled leaders being flayed alive. Relief from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh. British Museum.
Sennacherib’s modus operandi illustrates all three of Hobbes’s rationales for war: gain, competition, and reputation are all key to the military operation, its strategy and consequence. That there was profit is evident in the portrayal of the spoils hauled away from Lachish; in the competitive world of Mesopotamia all rulers knew that they had to look over their shoulder; reputations preceded rulers, and there can be no doubt that Hezekiah’s fate was noted by other rulers who were considering stiffing the Assyrians. It would have been useful to have interviewed Sennacherib and ask what his motivation was in all this. Did he have a vision of unity? Or was warfare just a way to become rich? Perhaps unforeseen by the Assyrian rulers who were intent on such benefits of war, Assyria came to control most of what is today considered the Middle East, creating one geo-political region out of it for the first time in history. Whether this was a strategic goal or a side effect of a Hobbesian culture of war is not clear, but the end result, an expanded state, is clear, and is repeated in many regions over and over in human history.
Did War Unify Egypt?
The Narmer Palette is carved from a single piece of schist—slate-like rock—dated to around 3200 BC. Discovered in Upper Egypt in 1897, it was a votive offering, or gift, from the Egyptian king to his “father” the god Amun-RA. The palette tells a tale in pictures and hieroglyphs of military conquest, by King Narmer (also associated with Menes, the unifier of Egypt). On one side of the palette the king stands, legs apart, with his right arm raised, grasping a mace, to smash the skull of a kneeling captive who he holds with his left hand by the hair. The kneeling man’s name is inscribed above his head possibly indicating that he was important, another king, perhaps, or that he symbolized a people. King Narmer is barefoot, signifying that he is on sacred ground, performing a ritual execution. Opposite the king’s face we see the falcon
The Business of State Building? Narmer Palette: Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Horus of Nehken, representing royalty, standing on six sheaves of papyrus (personified with a human head). The message is clear (at least to Egyptologists): The papyrus represents Lower Egypt, therefore the vignette tells the story of the conquest of Lower Egypt by Upper Egypt. On the reverse side of the palette is another vignette: The king, walking barefoot and holding his mace, approaches ten decapitated bodies, their heads placed between their legs. Again, here we see the king (depicted as larger than everyone else) vanquishing his foes.
In the palette, Narmer is shown sporting both the white crown of Upper Egypt and the red crown on Lower Egypt, making it clear that the dominant theme of the piece is unification. So here is the clear evidence of the war-as-unifier idea. But is it not possible, though, that polities also came together to form larger entities through peaceful means? Clearly we cannot rule this out, although there is no evidence in the case of Egypt. Trade has often been put forward as an alternative way that mutual interests can converge; economic interaction, over time can create commonalities, which may eventually lead to unification under a single leadership.
We can think of different polities coming together out of the pressure of war as a push scenario where unwilling participants are forced to “join or die.” Sociologist Robert Carneiro wrote about this push model in the 1970s: “Given the universal disinclination of human groups to relinquish their sovereignty, the surmounting of village autonomy could not have occurred peacefully or voluntarily. It could—and did—occur only by force of arms.” Nobody, in other words, would willingly let the neighboring band take over. But the anthropologist Elman Service offered a rebuttal to Carneiro, in which he proposed just that: “It is, in fact, clear from the record in some cases, and probable in many others, that small neighboring societies, or parts of them, often join an adjacent chiefdom quite voluntarily because of the benefits of participation in the total network.”
There seems to be less evidence for Elman’s theories in the historical record, given the grisly history of war. But if communities did not necessarily join out of force, is it possible that they joined to face a threat of violence from a third entity? This seems more likely, and it is this process that has likely fostered unity, alongside the less subtle method of our hero Narmer and his mace. The notable move from small, less complex societies to larger more complex ones, which we see the world over, is therefore achieved under both the reality and the threat of war.
While largely mythological, because the real unification of Egypt was a process which took generations, the Narmer Palette celebrates not just royalty, religion and the forces of order and justice prevailing over chaos, but the unification of the country, which would remain essentially in one geographic piece until the present. The Old Kingdom alone lasted a millenium (3100-2100 BC), and was surprisingly peaceable. Egyptologists believe that the forty administrative districts of ancient Egypt (or nomes) preserved the outlines of the chiefdoms which were conquered to create the state, and the depictions of warfare on the Narmer Palette, and another early source, the Towns Palette, show this process of “state consolidation.”
What were the consequences of such consolidation? In Egypt, as in other places where similar military campaigns consolidated power, cultural, social and technological developments followed, which invariably bound the state together, as military historian Azar Gat points out: “Once unified, internal peace was maintained, diverse religious traditions were no doubt standardized and incorporated. A state language was imposed. Royal administration, taxation, economy, justice, and military systems were set up and monumental state construction etc., evolved rapidly.”
What was the Relationship Between War and Culture in Ancient China?
China is the longest-lived and largest state entity in history. Its history, more than any other perhaps, seems to defy Elman Service’s claims that communities threw in their lots together willingly. Competition for supremacy, just as in city-state Greece, or ancient Mesopotamia, was fierce (even if there were no “flying” martial art heroes as in the movies).
War in China, in the Clausewitzian sense, most probably began under the Shang dynasty (1750-1045 BC), in that organized royal armies now began to face off against each other. Although in rough terms you could say that these wars were expansionist, seeking to conquer neighboring states, control territory and gain booty of various types, in China there was a complicating feature which continued through the Shang and the Zhou dynasties: This was the taking of captives for ritual sacrifice. This provided a major motivation for warfare. As historian Robin Yates puts it: “Sacrifice and war were essential, almost daily activities of the aristocratic elite and there is no indication of any concept of or efforts to establish peace.” Sacrifices, of humans and animals, were intended to venerate ancestors, and in doing so the aristocracy maintained the social and cosmic order. War, in this context, was a religious service, or duty, and included rituals of divination, oaths and prayers before combat, followed by the presentation of booty and captives at the ancestral temples.
One of 8000 terra cotta soldiers found in tomb of China’s first emperor. Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/art50038
Historians still argue over the causes of historical actions. One of the main debates is whether events and processes take place for economic, or “material” reasons, or for ideological reasons—religious beliefs, for example. Often the truth lies in between. China’s warfare is a case in point. Sacrificial victims were a part of the religious ideology of the time, it is true; therefore you might argue that war was fought for ideological reasons. However you must remember that a well-oiled religious establishment enabled rulers to maintain their legitimacy, and in early China the establishment was oiled with the blood of captives. Spoils and territory were products of war and enabled the victors to expand their operations and enrich themselves. “Waged against rebellious vassals, other states that were emerging on the Shang’s periphery and under its impact, and tribal neighbors, warfare was a constant state occupation,” says Azar Gat. [Graphic Shang bronze ritual wine vessel. British Museum].
The place of rituals in Chinese warfare illustrates how warfare is almost always conducted in the face of human reluctance. During the Spring and Autumn Period (771-403 BC) weapons belonging to the generals were stored in the ancestral temple, taken out only when the head of state had decided on war with other leaders of the lineage, and in the presence of the ancestral “tablets” upon which were written the ancestors’ names. The leader then purified himself before handing out weapons. The process of the war itself and its end were also marked by specific rituals, making evident that war was a “special” event, fraught with hazards ,which necessitated extra observance of religious duties.
Such ritualism continued through the Zhou dynasty, inherited from the Shang which it supplanted. Continuation of the rituals was one way that the state made clear that the gods approved of the new dynasty. The Zhou, and subsequent Chinese dynasties, believed that someone who died of unnatural causes could become a dangerous ghost. The killing therefore had to be sanctioned by ritual. Dead ancestors enjoyed an afterlife, and had the power to affect the living, for this reason they had to be appeased with constant offerings of food and drink prepared in elaborate ritual vessels made from bronze.
Conquest was also key to the Zhou’s motivation for war, and this led to later unification of the country: “War was without question the single most important driver of state formation during China’s Eastern Zhou Dynasty,” says Francis Fukuyama. Conquest was responsible for the transition from a decentralized feudal state to a centralized imperial one, and in the process almost every major state institution was intimately connected to this military process. It has been estimated that during 294 years, during the so-called “Spring and Autumn period” there were only 38 years of peace. Some 1211 separate wars were fought during this period. If the subsequent couple of centuries saw fewer wars it was only because there were fewer adversaries to fight them; during the aptly named “Warring States Period,” sixteen states fought each other until there were seven. While the frequency of wars declined, their duration and intensity increased. One Chinese historian reported that 245,000 soldiers died in a battle in 293 BC and 450,000 in 260.
In the early dynasties the focus of fighting was the chariot, a wheeled cart pulled by two horses. This was somewhat equivalent to the European “knight” of the Middle Ages, in that the charioteers were usually aristocratic, as the equipment was expensive and the training lengthy. Towards the end of the San Dai, the emphasis on war moved from chariots to infantry, as the numbers of aristocrats shrank. Large numbers of peasants, who were cheap to equip and quick to train, were conscripted by the state. But such militarism was still expensive. War was not possible without money, as every civilization discovered: “If the campaign is protracted,” says Sun Tzu, “the resources of the state will not be equal to it.” If mass mobilization required money, money meant taxation. To meet this challenge the state of Lu began to tax agricultural land between 594 and 590 BC. Under similar pressures, in 548 BC, the state of Chu conducted a cadastral survey of its lands, villages, households, and agricultural resources, including items such as fishponds and forests, with the goal of reorganizing its tax base and drafting soldiers. Bureaucracy, therefore, was one consequence of such militarization.
Terracotta army guarding the first emperor’s tomb.
The Qin state in particular tightened its hold over its populace via bureaucratic reforms carried out by Lord Shang, (d. 338 BC). The state was divided into 31 counties, each with an appointed administrator who reported to the capital in writing. A new elite was created within a hierarchy of ranks. This replaced the old aristocracy, and remained dependent on the ruler. New standardized laws applied to everyone equally, and group responsibility was decreed not just within families, but among groups of families, so that entire communities were punished for individual misdeeds. This encouraged informing on one’s neighbors and undermined individual and family ties, guaranteeing loyalty to the state instead.
China’s history of warfare is in many ways no different from any other civilization, with age-old reasons driving the conflict: pursuit of an advantage over a rival, Hobbes’ “Gain,” and “reputation,” as well as more articulated “moral” causes invoked to appease the gods. Ultimately the Qin, after a ten-year campaign, created the Chinese empire (221 BC). Subsequently it dismantled all fortifications and confiscated all weapons, casting them into a series of enormous bronze statues, of which none survive today. The Qin’s peace was forged through war, and at the time considered to be a renewal of the peace that had reigned at the beginning of cosmic time. China’s wars moved outside its borders, as they tend to do, but forever after the Chinese saw themselves as Robin Yates puts it, “as a single people living under a single cosmic ruler who linked the three realms, Heaven, Earth, and Man, into a harmonious whole.”
Did Warfare Also Accompany Complex Societies in the New World?
In South America the story was quite familiar. Warfare is evident in coastal Peru, where a series of complex societies evolved from about 2000 to 500 BC. Disembodied, male heads have been retrieved from the site of Asia on Peru’s central coast. These heads signal the beginning of what was to be a long tradition in this area of taking and curating enemy heads as trophies. At a granite temple of Cerro Sechin, dated to around 1500 BC, you can see gruesome carvings of mutilated and dismembered limbs, the record of ritual sacrifices in which elites displayed their power over others and their link to divinity.
[Mesoamerican timeline: De Sousa P. 275. ] In Mesoamerica, the Olmecs (C. 1150-400 BC) used organized force to attain their ends in their heartland and beyond. Early spears and spear throwers quickly give way in Olmec archaeology, to more specialized weapons of war such as maces clubs and stone-tipped spears built for cutting and thrusting more like a sword, and for use in close quarters. Historians of the Olmec think that they trained specialized troops in elite warfare, and these are represented in stone carvings; kings are shown with bound captives showing that projected force was used to build and sustain kingdoms. The Olmec regional centers, however, were not nearly as densely populated as old world centers of this period, and therefore we do not see large state armies at this point. Instead Olmec warriors played a central part in their trading operations, which were conducted elsewhere in Mesoamerica such as Oaxaca, Guatemala and central Mexico, and as such were instrumental in creating a common cultural area.
After 400 BC Olmec uniformity was on the decline, and a period of competing cities ensued. Perhaps the largest of these, Monte Alban in southern Mexico, was home to a people now known as the Zapotecs. It began to fortify its perimeter around 200 BC, and was one of the few city sites found thus war with fortifications, allowing it to dominate other cities without being vulnerable itself. Not unlike Mesopotamia, it seems that there was inevitable conflict between cities, and monuments of conquest in Monte Alban portray the vanquished naked and enslaved, bowing to the king. As the polity matures and spreads its influence, however, these monuments begin to portray victims as clothed, sometimes regally, suggesting that there was a new policy of integration of captives into the regional capital. Monte Alban was becoming the region’s first—albeit modest—empire.
How Were the Consequences of Alexander the Great’s Conquests?
While Egypt was prospering as a large coherent state, and had developed the courtesy to attack only non-Egyptians, the Greeks were duking it out with each other, city by city, as were the Sumerians. But even amongst these distinct entities there was an ongoing process of consolidation, realized through conflict over access to trade routes, defensive leagues and fear of “far enemies” i.e. the Persians, who were usually—but not always—more terrible than the odious neighbors.
The battle of Chaerona, which established Philip of Macedonia as overlord of Greece, was notable in two main ways: first it demonstrated a new military strategy that would become the norm in the Greek world and beyond: the Macedonians combined the infantry formation known as the Phalanx, a tight knit body of infantry, with lighter armed troops and cavalry. The cavlary was commanded by the second notable item: Alexander, son of Philip, to be known later as Alexander the Great. Alexander’s greatness, however, was achieved very much on the shoulders of his father, who was respsonsible for creating an effective fighting force in Macedonia to unite Greece behind him, and project force outwards, towards the ancient Greek enemy Persia, seeking the “freedom of the Greeks” living under Persian rule.
Artist’s rendering of a Syntagma, unit of the Phalanx. http://faq.macedonia.org/history/philip.html
Just as with Sennacherib, it would have been helpful to interview Alexander and discover whether he had in mind a vision for an overarching empire, or a notion of peace through unification. Or did he just feel compelled to wage incessant war and become master of everything, in other words, a God? (Egyptian priests at the Oasis of Siwa in the Lybian Desert named him son of Amon-Zeus). In 334 BC Alexander crossed into Persian territory, following his father’s assasination, and the next year he scored a massive victory over the Persian King Darius III at Issus. Having secured the rest of the Mediterranean coastline from the Persians, he continued inland, confident, no doubt, in his powers, after his enormous successes. By 329 BC Alexander had killed or defeated all Persian claimants to the throne and had taken over the empire. Finding it hard to know when enough was enough, he continued headlong into Afghanistan, founding cities as he went, often named by some variation of Alexandria, and entered India in 326. Here his energy—ar at least, that of his soldiers—ran out. He retreated eventually to Persia where he spent the last year or so of his life grappling with the problem of ruling this empire he had created in such haste.
While his “empire” never really materialized as a coherent, stable unit, Alexander’s story is perhaps the clearest example in history of war spreading ideas, culture and ways of life, in this case Hellenism. Alexander’s conquests and founding of multiple cities attracted colonists from mainland Greece, and they contributed to spreading the Greek language as well as religion, philosophy and the sciences. Alexander was a proponent of incorporating conquered peoples into his empire and even into his army and administration, and in this way he created a hybrid culture which formed the basis of the Hellenistic period, and put its stamp on large swathes of North Africa, and south west Asia. The city of Alexandria in Egypt was perhaps the flasgship city in this respect, attracting scholars from around he Hellenistic world.
Alexander’s legacy was multifaceted. Quite apart from his military innovations and successes, he transformed Greece from fragemented warring cities into a regional culture ultimately affecting the world and reaching more people than could any number of military campaigns. His physical empire, however, fragmented after his death, and city-state Greece continued several more centuries before succumbing to the military superiority of Rome.
IV. Were There Any Peaceful States?
Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemies troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdoms without lengthy campaigns in the field. (Sun Tzu,The Art of War, III, 6)
The short answer to this question is no. Not really. Bu to clarify, we need a definition of peaceful. This would necessitate agreeing on a length of time in which a society must not fight before being considered peaceful. Matthew Melko and Richard Wiegel, for example, define peace as the absence of physical conflict in a certain region for at least 100 years. They include in this definition the “Ptolemaic Peace” of Egypt (332-216 BC); the Roman Peace, or Pax Romana (203-90 BC). But just because during these periods there were no wars in Egypt or Italy, respectively, it does not follow that these were “peaceful societies.”
Other scholars have searched, largely in vain, for peaceful societies, and many have looked long and hard at hunter-gatherer societies, such as the !Kung, or Kalahari “Bushmen.” But Yale anthropologist Carol Ember found that 64% of hunter gatherers engage in war every 2 years. She rated only ten percent as peaceful. While Stephen LeBlanc of Harvard writes that hunter-gatherers, given to regular warfare, rarely take prisoners, preferring annihilation, unless they can use women, which they integrate.
Ancient India has produced a couple of contenders for the title of “peaceful society” but as we have seen, one of them, Harappa, is dubious. The other one, also questionable, involves King Asoka (ca. 269-232 BC), of India’s Mauryan dynasty. Eight years into his reign he waged a massive campaign in the Kalinga territory of the south. By the end of his reign, India was united under one banner, more or less. His annals, inscribed on a rock (known as the thirteenth Rock Edict) tell of how, in this campaign, 150,000 men were deported from the country (presumably as slaves); 100,000 were slain there, and “many times as many those who died.”
We might expect this edict to be a Sumerian-style bragging opportunity, in which the Great King tells the world that he is not to be messed with. But Asoka was different. He was repulsed by all this bloodshed, and consumed with remorse for the suffering he caused to so many. “For it is considered very painful,” he says, “and deplorable by Devanampriya (A.K.A. Asoka) that, while one is conquering an unconquered country, slaughter, death, and deportation of people are taking place there…”
Why even bother to conquer people if you can’t do it without the burden of killing them, you might ask. But short of having the foresight not to conquer people, he does the next best thing: he feels bad about it and decrees that people should not do that sort of thing again. Is this the beginning of a sensibility of peace, perhaps the first in history? The edict goes on to suggest that future generations should resist the urge to bloodshed, and that in the event that they feel compelled to conquer some territory or other, they consider taking mercy, and regard the moral conquest as the only “true” way.
This edict is one of the most well known texts in Indian history. Historian Richard Salomon has read thousands of Indian inscriptions in his multi-decade career, carefully looking for signs that someone listened to Asoka and followed his lead. His conclusion? “It is unique…I have yet to find a single comparable reference to the evils of war and the virtues of peace and gentle persuasion.”
This is surprising, Salomon point out, because Asoka invented the practice of inscribing royal proclamations on pillars around the country, like ancient bulletin boards. But while others followed his lead, they only imitated the physical practice, not the ideas. Whatever his motivations might have been—the calming influence of Buddhism, (which he embraced as part of his remorse), which got its start about this time, or some crafty, hypocritical strategy, after Asoka’s death in 232 BC, India “rapidly declined into disorder, fraternal strife, and war, in other words, into the pattern of violent dynastic rivalry and eventual decline that was typical of Ancient India.”
That Asoka should prove to be an aberration in practice is not completely obvious. This period, the first truly “Historic” period in India by virtue of its written records, was also synonymous with the rise of Buddhism, which professed a creed of peace, harmony and equality and the end of human suffering. But this might be analogous to the rise in China of Confucianism, based on the writing of Confucius (551-479 BC), one of the earliest of Chinese philosophers, whose conservative philosophy aimed at keeping society in balance by ensuring that each member of society perform their designated role, has remained a central pillar of Chinese society until the present. Very much a product of its time, it is likely that Buddhism was also a uniquely Indian response to the vicissitudes of ancient life, one of which was constant warfare, and plenty of suffering.
Conclusion
When an army feeds its horses with grain and kills its cattle for food, and when the men do not hang their cooking pots over the camp fires, showing that they will not return to their tents, you may know that they are determined to fight to the death.
(The Art of War, IX, 34.)
It is always difficult to imagine why people would fight to the death. Often to the modern mind it seems ridiculous that people would choose war over peace. But human have been making such choices from the very beginning of history. We have learned in this chapter that there are no truly “peaceful” societies; war is endemic, in some form, among every civilization on earth, and as far as all the evidence shows, it always has been. And contrary to much modern thinking on the subject, war is not a pathology, but it is a natural part of the human experience, emanating from the conflicts between self-interested, rational beings or societies.
Where hard evidence runs out in the historical record, in the Neolithic and Paleolithic, we rely on ethnology to look at what modern tribal peoples do, and the evidence from this avenue is similarly suggestive of war. From biologists and geneticist we have learned that in all likelihood a propensity for violence was a beneficial adaptation, which answers the question of our chapter, what is war good for by suggesting that war allowed humans to survive and flourish, albeit at the expense of others. The only reason we have not driven ourselves to extinction—which might seem like a real possibility, especially with nuclear weapons—is that unlike our violent primate cousins, we have deep-seated inhibitions against violence, which act as a break to war. The ability to be violent has always been an option for humans, as Steven Pinker puts it: “If the brain is equipped with strategies for violence, they are contingent strategies, connected to complicated circuitry which computes when and where they should be deployed.”
If selective violence was beneficial for individuals and small bands, the same logic applies to larger groups. Therefore we see warfare blossom and grow with the dawn of civilization. Yet surprisingly, perhaps, the evidence suggests that although warfare expanded in scale with the growth of societies, mortality dropped because of the increased security that the sate offered its citizens. Even if from time to time there would be massive blood-lettings, the final tally appears to have been less than the constant attrition experienced by small non-state societies for whom raids and skirmishes were extremely frequent.
It is also clear that war played a central role in driving the growth of societies from small bands to larger settlements, to cities and eventually the full-blown civilizations such as we saw in Egypt, Sumer, China and India and Mesoamerica. Its interesting to wonder whether, in the absence of violence and warfare, human societies would have taken the same path. Much of the technological and socio-political developments we see in the ancient world, from metal working to shipbuilding, from political standardization to fiscal administration is directly related to the demands of warfare.
Finally we should look at the role of men in war, as it seems that they are exclusively to blame. History can count incidents of women combatants on the fingers of one hand, and still have one left over to scratch an itch. Historians estimate that they make up less than one percent of combatants in history. Exceptions to the rule include figures such as the English queen Boudicea who fought the Romans, Jean D’Arc of Medieval France, or Sarah Rosetta Wakeman in the US Civil War. But generally, women in most societies commit an insignificant proportion of violent actions, the vast majority being provided by young males. But does this mean women are inherently peace-loving? Not necessarily. Some studies have concluded that women get out their aggression by encouraging their men to acts of barbarity on their behalf. Incitements are often sexual, the baring of breasts by womenfolk before their soldiers is not uncommon in many societies. As you may have guessed, sex provides part of the puzzle in women’s relationship to violence. If aggression is a trait favored by natural selection, it was passed along by women who preferred aggressive males as mates: warriors, in other words, were (and still are) sexy.
Most people would rather see war as an aberration, an irrational, inexplicable “mistake” that has no basis in human nature. The truth seems to lie elsewhere. Saying this, however, by no means excuses it or legitimizes it. We should remember Sun Tzu’s words, and see war as a strategic option, an option of last resort, and hope that all the other human traits, our ability to cooperate, our ability to empathize with others, our respect for human rights, all conspire to counter the more destructive urges of our ancient past.
