The broad set of transformations in human settlement, economic subsistence, and social and political organization that often go under the title “The Agricultural Revolution” inevitably had a major impact on warfare as an aspect of human history. Indeed, as this chapter argued, warfare only arose in conjunction with the changes associated with (though not always caused by) agriculture, including sedentarism and territoriality, as well as hierarchy and socioeconomic specialization. Even then, the development of warfare was slow and halting. The wars of chiefdoms seem rarely to have exceeded a certain organizational level, which is not to say that they were not destructive—their very destructiveness may have inhibited the further development of political hierarchy in warring chiefdoms. The development of warfare in state-level societies, or civilizations, lagged behind political and cultural innovations (especially from our modern perspective of military technology as cutting edge and global in its potential impact) for millennia.
It was only with the Assyrians and Qin that all the major elements of warfare as it would be practiced by most major state-level societies came together in a single military system: At the tactical level, with heavy, disciplined infantry, true cavalry, and (siege) artillery; at the organizational level, with standing military units and logistical support systems run by a central administration; and at the strategic and political level, with the use of this military system in the service of a centralizing, transformative imperialism, directed by a culture of the inseparability of war and state. The following four chapters will trace the working out of the implications and variations of this sort of military society in Persia, Greece, Rome, China, and elsewhere, on land and sea. The rest of the book simply extends that story.
Dawson, Doyne. The First Armies. London: Cassell, 2001. A well-organized and up-to-date survey of early military history—indebted to Drews (below) in its explanatory scheme, and generally persuasive, though with a narrow focus on military causation.
Drews, Robert. The End ofthe Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 b.c. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. An important and controversial reconsideration of the end of the Bronze Age, placing the explanatory emphasis on military change, especially the effectiveness of heavily armed, disciplined infantry.
Ferguson, Brian. “The Birth of War.” Natural History (cover story), July/August, 2003, 28-35. An accessible version of Ferguson’s conclusions; they are available in scholarly form in his “Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, and the Origins and Intensifications of War,” in E. Arkush and M. Allen, eds., Violent Transformations: The Archaeology of Warfare and LongTerm Social Change (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005); see also his “Violence and War in Prehistory,” in Debra L. Martin and David W. Frayer, Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past (Langhorne: Gordon and Breach, 1997). Ferguson supports the theory of a cultural invention of war with a detailed and global survey of the archaeological evidence; his is currently the essential body of work in this field.
Ferrill, Arthur. The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985. A useful historical survey of the evidence as it stood in the mid-1980s. Ferrill was an early proponent of the cultural invention position on early warfare.
Keeley, Lawrence. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. The most cited text in support of the theory that warfare has been a constant part of human activity since the earliest days of the species. While valuable, the book is overly polemical, and all of Keeley’s hard evidence in fact dates from very late in the archaeological record, when no one disputes the existence of warfare.
Otterbein, Keith. How War Began. College Station: Texas A&M, 2004. A useful account in which Otterbein agrees with Ferguson on the late origins of war while disagreeing about the exact mechanisms, putting more emphasis on the transition from big-game hunting to warfare.
Partridge, Robert. Fighting Pharaohs: Weapons and Warfare in Ancient Egypt. Manchester: Peartree, 2002. A clear introduction to the military role of pharaohs and the organization of Egyptian armies in the chariot age.
Saggs, H. W. F. The Might That Was Assyria. London: Sidgewick and Jackson, 1984. A general history that includes some details of military organization and operations.