The Origins Of War

From The Stone Age To Alexander The Great, Revised Edition

Arther Ferrill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When did war begin? Standard military accounts tend to start with the Graeco-Persian wars, laying undue emphasis on the preeminence of Greek heavy infantry. But, as this strikingly original and entertaining book shows, the origins of war can be traced back not to the Iron Age, or even to the Bronze Age, but to the emergence of settled life itself nearly 10, 000 years ago. The military revolution that occurred then?the invention of major new weapons, the massive fortifications, the creation of strategy and tactics?ultimately gave rise to the great war machines of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Persia that dominated the Near East until the time of Alexander the Great.It is Arther Ferrill's thesis that in the period before Alexander there were two independent lines of military development?a Near Eastern one culminating in the expert integration of cavalry, skirmishers, and light infantry and a Greek one based on heavy infantry. When Philip and Alexander blended the two traditions in their crack Macedonian army, the result was a style of warfare that continued, despite technological changes, down to Napoleon.This newly revised edition presents detailed and copiously illustrated accounts of all the major battles on land and sea up to the fourth century b.c., analyzes weapons from the sling to the catapult, and discusses ancient strategy and tactics, making this a book for armchair historians everywhere.

Chapter One

Prehistoric Warfare

What is War?

‘I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine…. War is hell.’ WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, 19 June 1879

And so it is – vividly so for those of my friends who suffered, some of them horribly, in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam. ‘I can still hear the horses screaming,’ says a veteran of the campaign against Hitler. The Germans had used horses from the beginning of World War II, but, as the war ground to an end, and fuel was scarce, they began to rely even more heavily on the animals for transporting artillery. The sounds of the dying horses reverberated over the battlefields.

Reflections of intensely personal human feelings, of pain and tragedy, darken the pages of modern warfare. Cavalié Mercer, a captain of artillery, remembered some years after the battle of Waterloo how the loud, shrill agony of a gunner whose arm had just been shattered struck him ‘to the very soul’.¹ A sentence from John Keegan’s masterpiece of military history, The Face of Battle (1976), describing the ‘disaster’ of Waterloo, summarizes the ‘hellishness’ of war with an eloquence vivid in its portrayal of reality: ‘Within a space of about two square miles of open, waterless, treeless and almost uninhabited countryside, which had been covered at early morning by standing crops, lay by nightfall the bodies of forty thousand human beings and ten thousand horses, many of them alive and suffering dreadfully.’²

We shall often have occasion in the pages of this book to examine ancient warfare in the light of Waterloo. Napoleon and the Iron Duke fought the last battle between major powers in the history of warfare in which Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) would not have been out of place. To be sure, the introduction of the stirrup in the Early Middle Ages and of gunpowder in the Late Middle Ages made some substantial differences, but not as many as most twentieth-century readers might assume. At Waterloo Napoleon did have artillery, but Alexander’s catapults were nearly their equal in range and destructiveness. Napoleon’s army numbered some 72,000 men whereas Alexander had about 75,000 fighting troops by the time he crossed the Khyber Pass into India. The battle of Waterloo was actually fought on a smaller scale, geographically and tactically, than the battle of the Hydaspes in the Punjab in July of 326 BC.

After Waterloo, by the time of the Crimean War and the American Civil War, technological change took warfare far beyond the conception of ancient generals. The railroads and highly developed firearms increased mobility and firepower beyond the wildest imagination of the Persian conqueror, Cyrus the Great, or Alexander, but in 1815 Napoleon and Wellington could move their armies no farther or faster than Alexander. Napoleon is famous for his view that an army travels on its stomach, but Alexander understood that as well. Although the tin can goes back to the Napoleonic Wars, it was in fact little used, and Alexander’s logistical system functioned nearly as smoothly and with as much sophistication as Napoleon’s.³ As for the musket of the early nineteenth century, Alexander’s archers and slingers could not compete in penetrating power but they could get off more shots (it took about twenty seconds to reload the musket), and they had a greater effective range. As John Keegan says of Napoleonic marksmanship, ‘even at fifty yards a large proportion of musketeers clean missed their target – it reinforces suspicions that many musketeers did not aim at all, or at least did not aim at a particular human target.’⁴

The medieval battles of Crécy and Agincourt were minor engagements by Alexander’s standards. With his balanced striking, force of heavy infantry, light infantry, cavalry and skirmishers he would have made short work of the victorious English armies of the vaunted longbow. And the gunpowder employed at Agincourt would not have deterred him. Between Alexander and Napoleon, a period of more than 2,000 years, there is an amazing continuity of military technology, ruptured at the end only by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Those who have experienced war have sometimes been amused, sometimes annoyed, by scholars who insist on defining it. ‘War is Hell’ is good enough for one who has been under fire. Unfortunately the historian and the archaeologist, looking for the origins of a complicated pattern of social behaviour (in this case warfare), must have an acceptable definition, at least a working definition, particularly, as in this case, when the search extends into the darkness of prehistory. For one thing is certain – the origins of war are prehistoric. By the beginning of recorded times, at the earliest appearance of civilization, war was an established pattern of behaviour in Mesopotamia and in Egypt.

In military science it is widely accepted that definitions are notoriously difficult or stupidly arbitrary.⁵ For example, there is a superb article under ‘Warfare’ in the latest edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica which illustrates the problem of distinguishing between such basic military terms as ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’, a fact long known to professional military historians. Maréchel Bosquet’s famous comment about the Charge of the Light Brigade – C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre (‘It’s magnificent, but it’s not war’) – illustrates the point nicely. Obviously any definition of war will be subject to modification, exception, and dispute.

At the risk of grotesque simplification let me suggest that ‘organized warfare’ can best be defined with one word. The word is formation. Not all military writers would use exactly the same term, but they generally agree on the basic idea. When warriors are put into the field in formation, when they work as a team under a commander or leader rather than as a band of leaderless heroes, they have crossed the line (it has been called ‘the military horizon’) from ‘primitive’ to ‘true’ or ‘organized’ warfare.⁶ Primitive warfare consists of ambushes, feuds, skirmishes, whereas organized warfare involves genuine battle of the kind detailed in Edward Creasey’s classic Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851). The basic formations used down to the time of Napoleon have been the column, the line, the square and the circle. The latter two are basically defensive formations. Deployment into the column for marching and into the line for attack is, regardless of weapons or military technology, the sing qua non of warfare.

The point is colourfully made in the description of a relatively minor event during the battle of Waterloo. The Scots Greys, attacking French infantry, were carried away by success and pursued too far and carelessly. One of their staff officers wrote:

Our men were out of hand. Every officer within hearing exerted themselves to the utmost to reform the men; but the helplessness of the Enemy offered too great a temptation to the Dragoons, and our efforts were abortive … If we could have formed a hundred men we could have made a respectable retreat, and saved many; but we could effect no formation, and were as helpless against their attack as their Infantry had been against ours. Everyone saw what must happen … It was in this part of the transaction that almost the whole loss of the Brigade took place.⁷

John Keegan also emphasizes the importance of formation (which implies discipline) by stressing its opposite:

Inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out, and the strongest fear with which every commander lives – stronger than his fear of defeat or even of mutiny – is that of his army reverting to a crowd through some error of his making … Many armies, beginning as crowds, remain crowdlike throughout their existence … Tactically quite unarticulated, they were vulnerable to the attack of any drilled, determined, homogeneous force … The replacement of crowd armies by nuclear professional armies was one of the most important, if complex, processes in European history.⁸

Now that we have at least a rough idea of what we are looking for, of what warfare is, we can sever the historian’s lifeline to written sources and take the plunge into the darkness and the mysteries of prehistory in the search for the origins of war.

Prehistoric Warfare in Modern Scholarship

The beginnings of organized warfare, the deployment of the column and the line, the invention of strategy and tactics, the use of massive defensive fortifications, and the development of a military weapons technology with its long-, intermediate- and short-range weapons can all be traced back into prehistoric times. Warfare, except for its various modern refinements, cannot be credited to civilized man, although we shall see that the ancient civilizations of the Near East and Greece added powerful new ingredients to the war machine they inherited from Neolithic times.

Strangely, modern archaeologists and anthropologists have generally ignored the development of warfare in prehistory.⁹ As one observer has said about modern studies of primitive war, ‘Anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists have largely confined their writing to deprecating war rather than attempting to understand this behavior pattern which has played such a tremendous role in human affairs.’¹⁰ Modern scholars have written at considerable length about the social, economic, political and religious structure of prehistoric societies, but their consideration of prehistoric war has focused on its ceremonial significance and on its role in shaping political institutions, or they have often seen it in demographic terms as the by-product of early population pressures.¹¹

Prehistoric warfare, however, was as independently important in early society as the discovery of agriculture, the development of protourban settlements and the emergence of organized religious systems. Indeed, we shall see that the Neolithic Revolution is in many ways characterized by an explosive revolution in man’s war-making capacity, that the appearance of proto-urban settlements in some areas was influenced at least as strongly by warfare as it was by the discovery of agriculture. In fact, though the cultivation of plants occurred in many places for numerous reasons, in a few places it may actually have been war rather than agriculture that led to the earliest Neolithic settlements.

Some of the first features of war can be traced back beyond these settlements of the Neolithic Age to Early and Middle Palaeolithic times. The use of the spear, fire, stones and clubs against animals is well attested. Such weapons must sometimes have been used against man as well, though in fact there is little evidence from all but Late Palaeolithic sites of anything that can be called organized warfare. Feuds and quarrels undoubtedly led occasionally to violence and killing. A few hominid and early human skeletons reflect violent death, but whether as a result of war or warlike action cannot be determined. Still, a review of the evidence will show that or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Preface
• 1 Prehistoric Warfare
• 2 Ancient Near Eastern Warfare: the Copper-Bronze Age
• 3 Assyria and Persia: the Age of Iron
• 4 Classical Greek Warfare
• 5 The Military Revolution
• 6 Alexander the Great and the Origins of Modern War
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index