The dynamics of the origins of war outlined in the previous section had implications for the further development of warfare and military organization. While the shortage of evidence for specific wars and military systems (such as they may have been) in the period between the invention of warfare and the second millennium bce prevents detailed surveys of cases, some general trends can be discerned. These trends fit into the major categories of thematic analysis that this book is organized around, so they are worth surveying as the foundations of military practice and history. While most of our scattered evidence comes from Egypt and the Near East, where records of the earliest civilizations are most plentiful, what we know of early China, India, Mesoamerica, and other areas fits the same patterns.
The first trend involves the external and internal consequences of the invention of warfare for social organization. Understanding the reciprocal impact of war and social organization on each other requires a quick typology of social complexity. Roughly, sociopolitical organizations can be divided into simple societies and complex societies. Simple societies lack hierarchical organization—all members of the group have roughly the same status, and differences tend to arise from individual characteristics and to not be heritable. This description clearly applies to hunter-gatherer bands, small groups usually consisting of a single extended family group. Although tribes, combinations of several bands, do sometimes have recognized leaders, especially when the tribe is large, they too count as simple societies. But, if a tribal leader and the families who support him attain hereditary chief status and develop permanent or semipermanent mechanisms of governance, the society crosses the ill-defined border into complexity and becomes a chiefdom. At the highest level of complexity, with permanent bureaucracies, formal offices, and, usually, urban political organization and some form of permanent record keeping (writing, in most cases), is the state. (It is important to note that the hierarchy of organization sketched here moves from less to more complex, but this does not imply a move from “worse” to “better” or from “barbaric” to “civilized.”)
The evidence for the invention of war traces back far enough that it predates any society that would fit the usual definition of a state-level polity. Whether the earliest war-making groups were large tribes or proto-chiefdoms is impossible to know. What is more certain is that making war stimulated advances in social complexity. Organizing groups of men (and women?) for war was not easy and entailed the deployment of mechanisms that could coerce labor, resources, and even military service out of a community or, even better, that could convince community members to contribute such things more or less voluntarily. Warfare was therefore one significant factor contributing to the development of both organizational and ideological bonds tying human communities more tightly together. Specific technologies that facilitated such structural and cultural advances—above all, writing—are (not surprisingly) closely though not exclusively associated with the spread of warfare. Of course, this process of political consolidation associated with war was by no means inevitable or unproblematic. War could just as easily destroy a community, and not just the losing side. Even a successful war could create political tensions within a society, overextend its resources, or make it too large to govern effectively, any and all of which could trigger the collapse of political unity and social cohesion.
The influence of war on social organization can be seen in the external relations as well as the internal dynamics of ancient polities, especially state-level societies. Ancient states had a tendency to expansionism, since new land and peoples were the main way governments could add to their resource base. The peoples on their margins thus were often forced to respond not just in terms of creating their own war-making capabilities but in terms of adapting to the ideologies of their powerful neighbors. The result was more organized chiefdoms and states politically. Culturally, the process is known as ethnogenesis, or the creation among border groups of a separate cultural, ethnic, identity, which, in turn, complicated expansion and the assimilation of such groups for the dominant state. The importance of the connection between war and sociopolitical organization is reflected in the fact that many of the earliest historical figures about whom we know any details are royal military leaders such as Sargon of Akkad (in ancient Babylonia) and Menes of Egypt.
The indirect connection between war and mechanisms of social and cultural control have just been noted. More directly, warfare from very early on has been associated with the development and spread of different forms of technology. However, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of asserting technological determinism, a view of the past that simplistically ascribes all significant change in military history (and, at times, in history as a whole) to changes in technology. The impact of specific technologies varies widely depending on the economic, political, and cultural contexts into which they are introduced, a theme to which we will return repeatedly in this book. Still, certain technologies undeniably had a significant impact on the waging of war, even if that impact was varied.
In early warfare, the key developments were in metallurgy, fortification, and animal domestication. The invention or discovery of metals—first bronze and later iron—that could hold an edge (and, conversely, could be shaped into body armor) raised the effectiveness of armies from metallurgically advanced societies, while fortification of fixed sites was one of the sure signs of the spread of warfare to an area. The key domesticate, of course, was the horse: Use of the horse first to draw war chariots and later to carry warriors, as well as the more general use of horses and other beasts of burden to transport supplies, brought major transformations to warfare that will be discussed later in the chapter (pages 10-11).
The main form of technology in war is, of course, weaponry. Ancient warfare saw the same basic division of weapons that persists in some form even today between weapons of hand-to-hand combat, such as clubs, daggers, and spears, and missile weapons, such as javelins, slings, and bows. The weapons of early warfare undoubtedly evolved out of the tools of big- game hunting but rapidly acquired specialized forms designed specifically for mass use in killing other armed and armored humans. The sword has never been a hunting weapon, for example. (The bow, on the other hand, easily crosses over from hunting to war.) Weaponry is closely associated with tactics, but we know so little about ancient battles that no firm conclusions can be drawn about how armies actually fought until well into the second millennium bce, as we will detail further.
The sociopolitical implications of waging war inevitably carried over into cultural expressions. We noted above the role of royal propaganda in bonding communities together for war efforts. Accounts of royal military triumphs, accurate or not, burnished the reputation of the leader, showed him performing a central function of kingship in protecting the community, and thus helped legitimize monarchical rule. Based at least loosely on actual contemporary events, such accounts are among our first historical sources for military history.
But at least as significant were the variations on warrior culture that arose among military aristocracies and elites wherever they appeared. The warrior ethos—often constructed around bravery, loyalty, and other values common to effective military groups—had the chance, because it represented the views and interests of a significant social group rather than those of formal royal power, to pervade a society’s cultural outlook more thoroughly than royal propaganda often could. War tales—the literary expressions of a warrior ethos, often in poetic form (and in many places extant as oral epic poetry long before being written down)—stand at the source of many traditions of literature. Homer’s Iliad is probably best known to Western readers, but the genre includes many of the stories that became the basis of the Hindu religious tradition, and the earliest literary epic we have in written form, the Epic of Gilgamesh, tells the story of a mighty warrior-king. A common element of all warrior cultures is that they are highly gendered. From the earliest cases for which we have evidence, war, martial feats, and the exercise of armed force (and, by extension, the legitimate exercise of authority) have all been constructed as intimately if not exclusively associated with masculinity. We do not know much for certain about gender roles and identities in the long age of human development before the rise of organized warfare, but it is likely that the gendering of power and the masculinizing of public life that characterizes, to one degree or another, almost all societies before modern times have their roots in the cultural consequences of the use of violent force in hierarchical societies. Women throughout history have participated in warfare as leaders, fighters, and close supporters of armies, though not in large numbers, but the image of warfare as a masculine preserve has remained unaffected by such counterexamples. When Artemesia, queen of Halicarnassus, distinguished herself as a war leader on the Persian side at the naval battle of Salamis (see Chapter 5), her overlord Xerxes, looking down on the otherwise disastrous battle from a high hill, is said to have exclaimed, “My men have become women and my women, men.” The implications for women’s rights of this gendering of armed force have, for most of history, been fairly grim.