A Global History of Pre-Modern Warfare

Before the Rise of the West, 10,000 BCE–1500 CE

Kaushik Roy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the military histories of the regions beyond Western Europe in the pre-modern era.

Existing works on global military history mainly focus on the western part of Eurasia after 1500 CE. As regards the ancient period, such works concentrate exclusively on Greece and Rome. So, 'global' military history is actually the triumphal story of the West from Classical Greece onwards. This volume focuses not only on the eastern part of Eurasia but also on South America, Africa and Australasia and seeks to explain the history and varied trajectories of warfare in non-Western regions in the pre-modern era. Further, it evaluates whether warfare in non-Western regions should be considered primitive or inferior when compared with Western warfare. The book notes that Western Europe became militarily significant only in the early modern era and argues that the military divergence that occurred during the early modern era is not unique – it had also occurred in the Bronze Age, the Classical era and in the medieval period. This was due to the dynamism and innovativeness of non-Western militaries and the interconnectedness that existed in parts of the Eurasian landmass. Further, those polities which were able to construct a balanced military force by synthesising diverse elements were not only able to survive but also became capable of projecting power across continents.

This book will be of much interest to students of military history, strategic studies and world history.

1
THE ORIGINS OF WARFARE

DOI: 10.4324/9780429284069-2

I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

(The Holy Bible, Revelation 6:7–8)

Introduction

In this chapter, how, why and when organised violence emerged on this planet is discussed. We begin with the premise that warfare (organised violence) is the product of both biology and culture. Doyne Dawson argues in an erudite way that the cultural model of the social scientists needs to take into account the fact that human groups evolved by natural selection. In the early twentieth century, Mendelian genetics challenged the assumption that acquired traits can be inherited. This in turn generated the trend of cultural determinism in the humanities discipline. Objective scientific knowledge was challenged, and culture is regarded as the product of social learning. In the 1970s, the British biologist William Hamilton showed that natural selection promotes the survival and reproduction not only of individuals but also of their close relatives who share much of the same genetic heritage. And so culture is partly the product of natural selection. The same decade also witnessed development in other fields that proved that chimpanzees organised small game hunting and engaged in a sort of raiding warfare. Both humans and chimpanzees have descended from a common ancestor that inhabited East Africa in the Late Miocene epoch, about 8 million years ago. A territorial instinct was present in the common ancestor of the chimpanzees and humans. So probably the genetic seeds of warfare were present in our common ancestor. Dawson writes that certain cultural features such as a communal ritual, a powerful myth, charismatic leadership etc., result in group formation. And the success of such groups in the long run predisposes people to more cooperative behaviour towards their own ethnicity and deeper hostility to outsiders (Dawson 1999: 79–100). In recent times, practitioners of deep history have given due importance to the role of genetics in shaping human behaviour (Harari 2014). Hence, culture and biology together, like a DNA double helix, shape human behaviour.

This chapter attempts to see whether warfare emerged in different parts of the globe for similar reasons. Probably, we Homo sapiens (in this book by Homo sapiens we mean Homo sapiens sapiens but for the sake of brevity the former term is adhered to) inherited homicidal tendencies, like the apes and chimpanzees, from our common ancestor. But we could fight more efficiently and effectively than the apes and chimps because of the development of segmented groups and language, which enabled the Homo sapiens to effectively cooperate, especially during hunting. Hunting skills and tools were used with decisive effect for intraspecies combat. The shift in the politico-economic fabric, that is, the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, not only resulted in greater density of population but also exacerbated clashes for resources. This in turn requires a re-evaluation of the origins and nature of prehistoric warfare.

Most archaeologists, in reaction to the carnage wrought by the Second World War, have painted a picture of ‘peaceful’ societies before the rise of the state. Prehistoric fortifications are categorised by them as ritualistic markers. These archaeologists, in their attempt to portray a warless prehistoric past, argue that weapons and armour found in the graves were mere status symbols (Keeley 1997: 19; Thorpe 2003: 145–65). Quincy Wright in his A Study of War writes: ‘Primitive peoples only rarely conduct formal hostilities with the object of achieving a tangible economic or political result. Their hostilities are seldom conducted by a highly professional military class using distinctive instruments and techniques’ (quoted in Wright 1942: 58). Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley is of the opinion that prehistoric burials, when excavated, show evidence of a high homicide rate. The skeletons show that death had occurred due to insertion of projectile points. Keeley’s Hobbesian approach appears to be much more fruitful than Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ perspective. Keeley rightly challenges Wright and Harry Turney-High’s assertion that prehistoric warfare was primitive, non-serious and a low-key business with extremely low casualty rate (Keeley 1997: 5–16). Keeley says: ‘Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means’ (quoted from Keeley 1997: 175). One can say that prehistoric warfare involved the participation of all the adult males of the tribes and forager bands, and in a way it was total. On the other hand, the wars were fought mainly with hunting tools. The population of the different segmented groups engaged in conflicts was small. Further, due to logistical deficiencies, such conflicts did not last long. Hence, prehistoric conflicts were indeed limited. So the characteristics of both total and limited wars were present in prehistoric conflicts. Our story properly begins with the Stone Age.

Old Stone Age

The Stone Age is divided into Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Epipaleolithic (Late Old Stone Age)/Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) and Neolithic (New Stone Age). The Paleolithic Age (Pleistocene for the geologists) started between 250,000 and 500,000 years ago, when the Homo erectus became food gatherers (Childe 1946: 22). Homo erectus appeared in Java and Africa between 1.7 million and 1.6 million years ago, and Homo sapiens emerged some 100,000 years ago. Around 60,000 BCE, Homo sapiens started dispersing from Africa.

The environment of South-East Asia was different from the environment of East Africa and Europe. In the latter two areas, large grasslands provided ideal habitat for big game animals that lived in herds. Humans developed bones and specialised stone tools to hunt these animals and process their meat, hide, sinews and bones. However, there were no herds of big game in South-East Asia. For acquiring food and raw materials in this region, the humans mostly used a bamboo toolkit rather than stone (Dawson 2001: 39; Miksic and Goh 2017: 77–9; Scott 2017: 4). Robert O’Connell asserts that the use of primitive tools for hunting initiated a cultural break for the Homo sapiens and paved the way for the emergence of warfare (O’Connell 1989: 19–21).

Mesolithic period

The Middle Paleolithic Age started about 300,000 years ago when Homo erectus started using fire, and the Upper Paleolithic Period started 40,000 years ago. During the latter period, in Europe and Africa, the emergence of arrowheads and spear points reflected sophisticated hunting techniques (Miksic and Goh 2017: 80). The Middle Stone Age started in North Europe, around 11,500 bp (before present). The Epipaleolithic/Mesolithic Period in the Near East can be stretched from 18,000 to 8500 BCE. It must be noted that all these chronological frameworks are highly speculative.

About 35,000 years ago, the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe and the Levant, leaving Homo sapiens as the dominant species. The Neanderthals lived in small groups and engaged in foraging and hunting. They knew how to make fire, tools and weapons from stone and bone. They also practised funeral rites, scattered flowers on their graves and placed special objects with the dead. However, they did not make permanent dwellings and did not know pottery. The Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred with each other, and some traces of their genes remain with us even today. It is estimated that between 1 to 4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA (Harari 2014: 17; Wileman 2014: 4, 52).

The Neanderthals were bulkier and more muscular compared to Homo sapiens (read: humans). They, like humans, were able to hunt and kill animals larger than themselves. The Neanderthals were in Europe and in the Levant long before Homo sapiens entered these two geographical zones. Still, the Neanderthals became extinct, while the humans survived. The Neanderthals did not use the bows and arrows that humans started using 71,000 years ago. The use of projectile weapons gave humans an upper hand in hunting vis-à-vis the Neanderthals. Later, bows and arrows proved to be an excellent weapon of war for the humans. Some 40,000 years ago, Europe was covered with dense vegetation, and the Neanderthals used close contact hunting techniques – that is, they crept close to the game and then stabbed them with spear. In contrast, in the wide and open grasslands of Africa, the humans used projectile technology to bring down fast-moving small animals. About 39,000 years ago, due to climatic changes, the dense vegetation of Europe was reduced by about 75 per cent. Then the Neanderthals’ close contact hunting became ineffective. But humans had an edge with their bows and arrows. Further, the Neanderthals were less adaptive than the humans. They mainly depended on big animals for protein and, unlike humans, did not consume aquatic animals. Some 45,000 years ago, humans used bone needles to prepare clothing from hides and skins of the hunted animals. Then, about 27,000 years ago, humans were able to manufacture snares and nets to catch small animals. These innovative techniques were absent among the Neanderthals. Further, humans equipped with projectile technology worked in packs with dogs and thus were able to dominate the Eurasian ecosystem, as the domesticated dogs aided the humans in hunting. Anthropologist Pat Shipman asserts that the symbiotic relationship between humans and dogs, among many other factors, enabled the former to overcome the Neanderthals. And most of the modern dogs’ descent can be traced back to the European/Asian Arctic wolf. The dogs located the prey and held the animal in place till the human hunters arrived at the scene. The dogs also warned the humans about the arrival of other competing predators. So the humans could hunt effectively with less expenditure of energy and thus spend most of their time and energy reproducing offspring (Shipman 2017).

Did warfare exist before the advent of Homo sapiens? Don Brothwell suggests that the Neanderthals fought against each other. Such conflicts were linked to hunting rights over game, etc. (Brothwell 1999: 31). Similarly, Julian Maxwell Heath also suggests that in Belgium, some 45,000 years ago, there were no humans, but there is evidence of Neanderthals fighting against each other in this region (Heath 2017: 26). In contrast, archaeologist Slavomil Vencl asserts that while there is no evidence of warfare in the Old Stone Age era, armed violence (intergroup conflict) started in the Mesolithic period (Vencl 1999: 58–9). Similarly, the Marxist archaeologist Paul M. Dolukhanov claims that there is no evidence of intergroup conflicts in Paleolithic Eastern Europe. Low population density combined with the abundance and diversity of available resources enabled the humans to avoid warfare. However, warfare emerged during the Mesolithic era in Eastern Europe (Dolukhanov 1999: 77–9).

Warfare among the Neanderthals is an ongoing debate. However, the Mesolithic era probably witnessed some sort of crude warfare among Homo sapiens. Besides material, non-material factors might also have played a role in the origin of armed conflicts. Humans might have fought for prestige, for the choicest game or for women even before the Mesolithic period. Further, scarcity of resources is a relative concept. In Mesolithic Southern Scandinavia, conflict occurred not because of competition for economic resources but due to a sense of a strong degree of internal territoriality among the different human groups. Slights on personal honour resulted in feuds, which in turn escalated into intercommunity conflicts. The people fought with clubs, bows and arrows (Thorpe 2003: 157–60).

Large herd animals like the mammoth, musk ox and woolly rhinoceros evolved in Eurasia during the second half of the Upper Pleistocene period, which is about 35,000 to 30,000 years ago. The transition from Pleistocene to the Holocene or from the later glacial to the post-glacial epoch occurred roughly 10,500 years ago. This time period witnessed the extinction of several large Pleistocene mammals, including mammoths, and the emergence of animals such as elks, deer, wild pigs and beavers, etc. In the Upper Paleolithic era, in Eastern Europe, hunting provided 30 per cent of the total food intake of the humans. The rest was provided by food gathering and fishing. The hunters of Eastern Europe restricted the size of their population through primitive birth control and infanticide. Nevertheless, population increased with time in certain regions due to the spread of farming, which supplemented and increased the volume of food production. According to one calculation, during the Paleolithic era, the density of population in the Near East was about 3 persons per 100 sq km. It rose to 12.5 persons per 100 sq km in the same region during the Mesolithic era. The population density of the agricultural Neolithic communities of the Near East came to be about 25 persons per sq mi. (Dolukhanov 1979: 19, 23–5). Population explosion might have functioned as a trigger for the emergence of warfare.

The Zagros Mountains were comparatively densely populated in Upper Paleolithic times. A wild ancestor of cultivable barley was native to this region. The Upper Paleolithic people mainly depended on hunting migratory herd animals like wild goats and wild ox. The tools of the inhabitants comprised long, thin stone blades. The earliest villages appeared in the lower belt of the Zagros Mountains around 10,000 years ago. Each village covered about 3.2 acres of land, and the houses were built of clay (Dolukhanov 1979: 39–41).

Around 10,800 BCE, a millennium-long cold period occurred due to glacial melt in North America. The cold water poured through the St. Lawrence River into the Western Atlantic. The cold spell somewhat checked the trend towards sedentary agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. Then, around 9600 BCE, warmer and wetter conditions prevailed. The average temperature increased by 7 degrees Celsius within a decade. Trees, mammals and birds spread throughout Eurasia, and human population rose again (Scott 2017: 43). In Britain and Denmark, the Mesolithic people started making boats. The Mesolithic hunters roamed from Denmark through Doggerland into Britain. Around 6500 BCE, due to melting of ice, the sea levels rose and Britain was cut off from North-Western Europe. Doggerland was flooded and disappeared (Wileman 2014: 5–6). Britain was then separated from continental Europe.

The Homo sapiens, during their march from West Asia in the eastern direction, entered north-west India roughly around 50,000 years ago. Then they spread to Central India and finally moved into Sri Lanka about 29,000 years ago. At that time, there was a land bridge between South India and Sri Lanka. Later it vanished with the rising sea level. Homo sapiens must have fought and exterminated related species like Homo erectus and Homo habilis in South Asia (Habib 2016: 25–37).

About 30,000 years ago, flak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of maps
• Glossary
• Introduction: evolution of warfare before the rise of the West
• 1 The origins of warfare
• 2 Military convergence and the Bronze Age civilisations of Eurasia
• 3 Military divergence in Eurasia: Classical Greece against Persia
• 4 The era of hybrid military machines: Macedonia, the Hellenistic monarchies, India and China
• 5 Military divergence again: Rome, Carthage, Parthia, India and the Far East
• 6 Military convergence in medieval Eurasia
• 7 Convergence or divergence? Naval warfare in medieval Eurasia
• 8 Evolution of warfare beyond Eurasia
• Conclusion
• Index