The precise origins of warfare must remain a problem that cannot be solved definitively, given the paucity of evidence available to answer the questions we have. It seems likely, however, as we argued in Chapter 1, that warfare as we conceive of it today—the mass use, by one group of humans against another, of violence organized along social lines, with that organization often rising to the level of a chiefdom or state in political terms—arose late in human history. The evidence for warfare relates exclusively to the modern human species, and within the 200,000-year existence of that species, exclusively to the past 12,000 or so years, in association with the conditions that also led to the invention of agriculture and the rise and spread of complex forms of political organization. Even then, it took many more millennia before warfare had evolved to a level of maturity comparable to what we are familiar with in most history in the past 2000 years. It was in Assyria and then in Qin China that the full tool kit of warfare—a tool kit with social, political, technological, and cultural components— first appeared. From that point on, we can trace the set of themes that will carry forward throughout the rest of this book.
One of these is the intimate connection between warfare and state power in world history. Cooperation was always necessary to the functioning of human social groups, but coercive force became more necessary as the size of polities grew and as different states came into more constant and competitive contact with each other. Warfare thus became a major component of both external relations and the keeping of internal order. The growth of empires during the period covered by this part of the book shows the increasing effectiveness of military force, in conjunction with more sophisticated administrative mechanisms of rule and more persuasive ideologies of social control, in allowing states to govern larger and more diverse territories. Yet the relationship between warfare and state power proved complicated as early as it arose. Successful conquests could strengthen a state by providing it with increased resources, especially in the form of agricultural land and the labor that worked it, as well as control over important trade routes and elimination of dangerous enemies. But it could equally prove disastrous: For every big winner, there was at least one big loser. And the costs even of victorious warfare were high for states built on fragile agricultural economies characterized by low productivity. Overexpansion, unsustainable tax rates, and rebellion could threaten imperial powers, especially pioneering conquerors such as the Assyrians or the Qin.
Successful warfare also complicated the relationship between the state and its elites, particularly when, as was commonly the case, the elite class was composed of warriors. While conquests could provide new lands with which monarchs could reward warrior elites for their service and loyalty, such rewards eventually had to end, raising the prospect of internal strife, and could in the meantime enrich provincial leaders enough so as to threaten central control. At times, as in the history of Rome, elites took themselves out of military roles to enjoy the fruits of political dominance, while their military values became institutionalized in a professional army. At other times, similar results were achieved by central effort: The Qin systematically suppressed the Chinese warrior aristocracy using both material and ideological methods. Yet the dominance of warfare in state policy, the necessity for the establishment of a competent military leadership class, and the almost inevitable congruence in preindustrial societies between social status and political power meant that the problem of warrior elites was bound to recur regularly. It was states such as the Han and Roman empires, states that achieved relatively stable (or, more important, adaptive) institutional solutions to this problem that showed the greatest staying power in a complex world of warring states.
The relationship of war to the state also arose at the lower end of the social structure, above all in terms of the bases of unit cohesion and military effectiveness in infantry. Two roads to effective infantry emerged as early as the end of the Bronze Age. The first was social and communal: Infantry units’ cohesion reflected the social ties of the community from which the military unit came—indeed, the social community and the military force were, in terms of the adult male members of the community, often essentially identical. The second was state-centered: A state with enough financial and administrative resources could afford to raise and train effective infantry, essentially creating through drill, education, and experience units that became communities. The communal model probably came first and provided the model for what effective infantry forces should look like (at least in the Near East and the Mediterranean worlds; the Chinese case is less clear). However, the state-centered model proved more stable—communal infantry was subject to decline with every transformation of the society itself, transformation often brought about by military success—and capable of providing far-larger forces. Thus, where sufficiently strong states existed (an important and restrictive condition), their infantry was a force to contend with. But the separation of army and society implied by this model could also prove problematic. At times, the creation of naval power, though still limited, added to the social roles and state functions associated with military force.
The pinnacle of state-dominated military organization was achieved first, as noted above, in Assyria and Qin China. Though the details varied, the major components of a centralized fiscal-administrative state supporting a permanent professional army— with society and the economy organized and tapped in service to the militarized state, and with culture and ideology used to legitimize and glorify the entire structure— appeared in both. And they were reproduced in their major imperial successors, whether Persian, Han, Alexandrian, Mauryan, or Roman. But the very success of these giants of the Age of Empires complicated the job of their successors in reproducing such organization. They spread the tools of militarized state rule, raising new potential enemies both within and beyond their borders, and connected the Eurasian world in ways that further complicated states’ struggle to survive. Connections and new enemies met most clearly and threateningly among the horse nomads of the Central Asian steppes. Their armies would dominate the age of migrations and invasions dealt with in the next part of this book, often reducing the centralized (sedentary) military state to a historical but unrealizable ideal looked back on by more decentralized and warrior-dominated kingdoms.
The early history of warfare also saw the establishment of the major technological components of warfare. Fundamentally, these consisted of the abilities (social and political as much as technological) to build walls, to harness stored energy (whether through muscle, torsion, tension, counterweight, or, later, explosion) to hurl missiles at men and walls, to shape hard metals into weapons and armor, to domesticate horses, and to build seagoing ships. None of these abilities was necessarily military in nature; that they were put to military use says as much about the cultural contexts into which they were introduced as it does about the impact of technology on war.
These technological components would remain essentially stable at least into the seventeenth century, when improved ships and firearms began to alter some of the balance of these components in some places. And more fundamentally, the limitations of nature and technology faced by ancient armies lasted until the Industrial Revolution and in some cases beyond—armies still marched on foot or rode on horseback beyond their own railheads well into the twentieth century.
That none of the technological abilities fundamental to military activity were necessarily or purely military in themselves and that they remained stable illustrates what will be a consistent theme of this book: Technology in war is largely a dependent variable. That is, technologies’ effects vary according to the social and cultural contexts into which they are introduced. Further, once the essential suite of technologies—walls, missiles, metal weapons and armor, domesticated horses, and seaworthy ships—had been incorporated into warfare, no particular invention or technology would alter the fundamental patterns of warfare until the steam engine, which was itself not, of course, a necessarily military technology.
Organized warfare from earliest times had major implications for culture, and different cultures affected warfare in different ways. From the beginning, war as a major activity of kings and elites generated myths: in epics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world, and the Homeric epics with their glorification of a warrior elite; and in court histories designed to glorify and legitimize the kings and elites. Military affairs are thus closely associated with the very process of writing history right from their origins. This connection accounts both for the existence of much of the source material we have for military history and for some of the problems with that material in terms of biases and reliability. Major sorts of military literature, epic and historical, reflect and helped to construct the different cultural emphases and interests of warrior elites and dynastic states.
The impact of culture on military organization and patterns of warfare can be seen most clearly in comparisons of the major fiscal-military states of the Age of Empires. Structurally, they all appear similar. But their reasons for going to war; the methods they thought of as acceptable, glorious, treacherous, and so on; the value they placed on warfare in terms of its ability to generate personal glory and domestic political capital; and the ethical perspectives conquerors brought to ruling those they conquered— all were products of cultural outlooks that could vary considerably despite the structural similarity of these states and the military challenges they faced, both internally and externally. Cultural variation and the mutual impact of war and culture will show up consistently as one of the themes of this book.
Culture also marks one of the general areas of transition from the classical age into the age of migrations and invasions considered in the next part of this book. Consideration of these changes highlights the general characteristics of war and culture in ancient times. First, many of the great traditions emerged in the Age of Empires out of separate (though not entirely isolated) cultural spheres. In other words, though structural similarities emerged based on fundamental economic and technological limits on the organization of hierarchical human societies, cultural divergence dominated. But the broader horizons of communication and trade that empires made possible, at least in part, contributed to an age when cultural borrowing, interaction, and conflict would become more prominent. Second, many of the cultural and ideological constructions that emerged in this period were, not surprisingly given the context in which they arose, focused on the needs and values of states and elites. The rise and spread of salvation religions would often introduce ideas friendlier to common people but would, in turn, further complicate the ideology and culture of warfare. These developments are taken up in Part 2.