Chapter Two
The Rise of the Chiefs
Anthropologists commonly use the term “chiefdom” for a primitive culture that has developed a formal social hierarchy in which the war leader holds a unique and permanent rank above all his tribesmen, often with theocratic and redistributive functions as well.1 Such chiefdoms are familiar in ethnographic literature because they are common in the hinterlands of civilized societies. Among the known examples, the eighteenth-century kingdom of Hawaii may represent the highest point of development. Most of the known examples, like Hawaii, owed much to contact with civilized peoples, who tend to think that such well-organized tribes are more typical of the primitive world than they really are, because the societies in contact with civilized people tend to be like that.2 In the Neolithic, chiefdoms of this type were probably less common than in historical times, but there is no reason to doubt that they existed here and there.3 They provided a transitional stage in social development between the tribe and the state.
At the level of the chiefdom, the causes of war become more complicated and the motives for war become separable. We can now distinguish among ideological, economic, and political motives.
1. The articulated motives for war are still revenge and prestige. The difference is that wars are now fought to avenge wrongs against the chief and for the honor and glory of the chief Primitive militarism is being replaced by kingly or theocratic militarism, an ideology that continues without much change until the time of Louis XIV.
2. The economic causes of war become more compelling. Genuine conquests and occupations are now possible, so wars can be fought more openly and directly to gain territory. The values of honor and glory may become a pretext, masking a chief’s grab for land and wealth.
3. Finally, war becomes an organizational source of power. It is now possible to fight wars simply for political reasons, and the martial values may become a pretext for a chief’s grab at power for its own sake.
It has been pointed out in the preceding chapter how warfare, at some early stage in human evolution, escaped from the control of nature and became an instrument of culture. By the time the stage of the chiefdom is reached, warfare has begun to escape from the control of culture and is becoming a political instrument used in the search for wealth and power by a ruler who is no longer responsive to the collective interests of his people. The forces of escalation break loose. Armies, recruited by command as well as consensus, may number in the hundreds or even the thousands, are able to fight formal battles in line, and may be capable of systematic tactics and strategies. A specialized warrior class is likely to emerge, and wherever it does, its extravagant demands for honor and glory multiply the pressures for military escalation. The trophies of honor and glory become more lucrative and now include prisoners of war for slavery, sacrifice, and cannibalism, all of which become additional incentives for warfare. The rituals of war become grand and expensive, and the Red Spirits are promoted to war gods.
The more advanced chiefdoms appear to practice what is today called warfare in every sense, except for the lack of an ideology that permits self-conscious strategic thinking. The history of political warfare should therefore begin with these chiefdoms, except that they have no history. In spite of their efficiency, chiefdoms do not seem to last. Only a bare handful of chiefdoms have ever made the full transition to bureaucratic state. The process of military escalation and political centralization is reversible, and normally, it is reversed. The disadvantages of losing freedom to the chief are as obvious as the advantages of military superiority, so the chiefdom rarely survives the death of the chief, which is likely to be premature. Countless societies may have come to the edge of statehood and drawn back from that brink. Chiefdoms do not last because of their efficiency.
If this necessarily hypothetical reconstruction of Neolithic history is correct, then we may conclude that as late as five thousand years ago the essential nature and functions of primitive warfare had not changed, so far as the vast majority of the human race were concerned. The inherent tendency of militarism to escalate was still contained. The occasional attempts to turn warfare into something more dynamic, purposeful, and expansionary had all self-destructed.
The Rise of the State4
Although the possibilities of warfare as a source of political power may have been realized in some Neolithic chiefdoms, they could not have been exploited further without the development of political hierarchies exercising routine coercive power. That this breakthrough happened so rarely and in such specialized environments suggests that primitive society had built-in checks on the escalation of war. If it had not, the Stone Age could not have lasted so long, nor would the state have taken so long to rise. When it finally rose, it brought a new kind of warfare, the invariable symptom and perhaps the major cause of early state formation.
This breakthrough occurred independently in only half a dozen places on the earth, all of them regions that were more or less circumscribed geographically and socially. The clearest examples of circumscription are the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates Valleys, both alluvial river systems suitable for irrigated agriculture and surrounded by arid country. In these environmental traps, Neolithic peoples were forced to submit to new forms of social control because they could no longer escape by fission and migration. This process was first consummated in Sumer (now Iraq) between 3400 and 3100 B.C. and was soon after replicated in Egypt. Later, independent breakthroughs took place in the Indus Valley, the valley of the Yellow River in China, in Middle America, and in Peru. (The extent to which all these cases fit the circumscription model is disputed, but these controversies need not concern us here, as our main interest is the Middle East.)
Theories about the origin of the state tend to fall into three categories. There are those who see the early state as an integrating mechanism that responded to the need for efficient management of complicated irrigation systems and brought perceived benefits to the entire society. Karl Wittfogel’s “hydraulic” theory about the rise of civilization is a well-known example.5 These theories resemble the “social contract” theories of John Locke and other early modern philosophers. Other theorists see the early state as a coercive mechanism arising out of internal social conflict; this is a Marxist view, though it has influenced many who are not strictly Marxist.6 And the third group of theorists emphasizes the importance of external war and conquest in promoting internal consolidation. The role of warfare in the rise of civilization has been pointed out by the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Ferguson, by Herbert Spencer and other nineteenth-century social Darwinists, and by many twentieth-century anthropologists.7
But we do not have to chose among Locke, Marx, and Spencer. The theories are not mutually exclusive, and it seems unlikely that any one theory could fit all cases. Warfare plays the largest role in the third class of theories, but practically all theorists, even the integration theorists of the first group, admit that warfare must have been a powerful integrating factor in the rise of the state, provided a supportive climate for it, and was the mechanism by which the state system spread.
Whether or not warfare was essential to the rise of the state, the rise of the state certainly marked a decisive break in the history of warfare—the most important turning point until the gunpowder revolution in early modern Europe, which brought with it a still more potent form of political and military centralization. The cultural balance of power, in which most human societies had been trapped for thousands of years, was replaced by the political balance of power, which has endured to the present day. The cultural trap had loopholes: People could escape from it by “forgetting” about their grievances when “remembering” them would have been inconvenient, by ritualization, by arbitrating their disputes, by moving away. But there was no escape from the political trap, except in circumstances of unusual geographical isolation like those of Old Kingdom Egypt. The political type of warfare, heretofore an occasional and not particularly successful experiment in human history, now broke free of all constraints. War ceased to be an ancient ritual of earth and became a struggle for power and wealth between ruling groups claiming descent from the gods. They began the progressive elimination of primitive societies and primitive ways of war, a process that today is practically completed.
The sheer scale and pervasiveness of warfare in early states justifies these conclusions about its central importance. All early states had standing armies, all were expansionist, and all engaged in chronic interstate warfare that resulted in fewer and fewer states. In Egypt, with its extremely circumscribed geography, the process resulted almost at once in the unification of the Nile Valley under a single ruler, whose theocratic functions thereafter overshadowed his military functions. In Iraq, much less circumscribed and divided among many powerful city-states, the process of unification took longer and was never permanently successful, and the militaristic character of the state became much more pronounced. Not until the twenty-fourth century B.C. did Sargon of Akkad unite all the cities of the plain into the first hegemonic empire.
This pattern of interstate warfare continued through the Bronze Age. There was a notable increase in scale during the high Bronze Age (circa 1600-1200 B.C.), when civilization spread outside the two original river valleys and there emerged a system of international relations covering the entire Middle East. Another leap forward came in the early Iron Age, when the first true territorial empires arose. The Bronze Age empires, following the model of Sargon, had been loose hegemonial structures in which a conqueror ruled his client states only by threatening them with his army and usually did not rule for long. But the vast neo-Assyrian empire (ninth to seventh centuries B.C.) and the far vaster empire of the Persians (sixth to fourth centuries B.C.) maintained relatively centralized imperial administrations supported by armies that could attempt to provide for the defense of all the king’s territories. In the Achaemenid Persian state, warfare reached an apogee that would never be exceeded in antiquity, as far as organizational and logistical capabilities went. The total armed forces of the Assyrians exceeded one hundred thousand men; those of the Persians may have exceeded three hundred thousand. Field armies of twenty thousand men and campaigns extending over hundreds of miles were common features of early Iron Age warfare.
The Art of War in the Ancient Middle East8
The earliest depictions of “civilized” warfare, the Standard of Ur and the Stele of the Vultures, both artifacts from Sumer circa 2500 B.C., show spearmen protected by shields standing several ranks deep. They do not look very different from their Neolithic predecessors, except for technical improvements made possible by the invention of bronze: the first real helmets, the first real swords and axes, more reliable spears and shields. In addition to this heavy infantry, there was a light infantry armed with missile weapons. Other than that, there is little that can be said with confidence about the art of war in the early Bronze Age.
We are somewhat better informed about warfare in the high Bronze Age (circa 1600-1200 B.C.). By then the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow had come into common use, producing a period unique in military history, when civilized armies in the Middle East and the Aegean Basin relied upon a main striking force—some think an exclusive striking force—of chariot archers.9 The reliefs depicting the Battle of Kadesh in Syria circa 1300 B.C.—the first battle whose course can be reconstructed in some detail— show masses of spearmen drawn up in deep formations, but they seem to be restricted to a purely passive role, such as guarding the camps; the offensive role is left to squadrons of charioteers firing long-range bows.
The age of chariotry came to a sudden end with the sack of the Bronze Age citadels around the eastern Mediterranean circa 1200 B.C. The early Iron Age brought a revival of infantry (or perhaps the first reliable infantry), soon to be joined by the first cavalry, for the Assyrians had mastered the art of riding into battle on horseback. The Assyrian army included the equivalents of all the services known to Napoleon: heavy infantry, light infantry, heavy cavalry (lancers), light cavalry (archers), and in addition, retained chariots, whose function may loosely be compared to that of Napoleon’s field artillery.
But the Assyrian reliefs do not suggest that they relied much upon their heavy infantry in an offensive role. They seem to have used charges of cavalry and chariotry to break up the enemy formations, after which their infantry moved in to mop up. Even in the infantry, the archers seem more useful than the spearmen. Later on, the Persians relied still more on archers, both mounted and on foot, and hardly seem to have had a heavy infantry tradition at all.
The conclusion that no ancient Middle Eastern army possessed a heavy infantry capable of effective shock tactics is confirmed by the fact that in later times such tactics were peculiar to the Greeks and were incorporated into eastern armies only to the extent that they were able to hire Greek mercenaries. Some historians think “phalanx” battle was much older than the Greek polis culture because they see descriptions of it in the Homeric poems and artistic representations of it in the Middle East as far back as the Bronze Age, which I have already mentioned. These do look like Greek phalanxes, but after all, there is nothing else that any fairly close formation of fairly heavy infantry could look like, and we know of nothing else that acted like a Greek phalanx. Putting men in a close formation would not make them capable of the tactics and ethos of Greek hoplites, described in the next chapter.
Warfare in Ancient Religions
This heading may arouse expectations that I can in no way satisfy. The connections between warfare and religion in antiquity are so pervasive and so little explored that they defy generalization, but the subject is of great importance to a study such as this, so the attempt must be made.10
What attitudes about warfare are suggested by the common features of primitive religion? The signals are mixed. The constant participation of the spirit world conveys a sense of “bellicism”—of warfare as part of the natural world. At the same time, warfare seems to be regarded, even by the most warlike, as a sort of interruption of normal life. Warriors must be dressed and painted so as to change their personalities. Special ceremonies signal their departure from normal life, and others, their return to it. Above all, warfare requires justification: The constant efforts to secure the favor of the spirit world imply that fighting and killing to avenge wrongs are required by the order of the world. We have seen how the elaborate ritualization of primitive warfare both promotes war and limits it. It is possible to discern in primitive religion the germs of all later philosophical and theological interpretations of warfare, including both jus ad bellum (the right to make war) and jus in hello (rights in war).
Specific myths about the origins of war are difficult to find because the practice is so taken for granted. Most mythology seems to assume that conflict is simply part of the cosmos and has been so always, among spirits as well as men. Even if there was a primitive dreamtime inhabited by ancestors or gods, these beings fought with one another. Often the cosmos itself must be born in battle, as in the Babylonian creation myth, where the gods fight Tiamat the cosmic dragon and make the world out of her dismembered body.
Sometimes we find myths about a primitive golden age in which there was no war or other strife. This provides an explanation for the origins of war, and the need for such an explanation reflects a sense that warfare is an evil. The curious story of Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis may in part be a myth about the origin of war. But this primitive pacifism is always very pessimistic. Golden ages are usually lacking not only in warfare but in sickness, old age, and every other evil, and they always ended long ago, leaving warfare to be accepted as one of the inescapable misfortunes of the world we live in. The Xingu River Indians of Brazil—one of the “relatively peaceful” cultures—say that in the beginning, the Sun Spirit created three kinds of people, the peaceful Xinguano, the warlike Wild Indians, and the warlike White Men, and then gave each its own world to inhabit, so that the Xinguano were not bothered by the two nasty breeds. Unfortunately, the boundaries separating these worlds have now been permeated.11 This myth is unusual in that the golden age continues into recent times. But the myth also contains a realistic acknowledgment that the sphere of peace has always been fragile and is now collapsing.
In organized chiefdoms, the rituals of war take on a theocratic function: The chief is a deputy of the gods, sometimes divine himself, and all warfare has to be explained as an act of the gods, fought for their honor and glory and the honor and glory of their chiefly champion. All warfare must still be justified as an act of righteous vengeance. As shamans once brought down the spirits with magic to help the people avenge their wrongs, so priests petition the gods with sacrifice to avenge the wrongs of the chief.
In the early civilizations religion does not change much in the ideology of war. The rituals of war become more costly and ferocious, and the gods and their myths are more clearly defined by organized temple priesthoods. But all aspects of warfare are still interpreted in the terms of theocratic kingly militarism. The inscriptions of the Assyrian kings attribute all their victories and massacres to the power of Assur, a being far more reliable than the primitive spirits in that he had little use for chivalric conventions and none at all for purification rites.
Here are some excerpts from the ninth-century B.C. annals of King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria:
When Assur, the lord, who called me by name and has made great my kingdom, intrusted his merciless weapon unto my lordly hand, (I) Assur-nâsir-pal … who has battled with all the enemies of Assur north and south and has laid tribute and tax upon them, conqueror of the foes of Assur … when Assur … in his wrath had commanded me to conquer, to subdue, and to rule; trusting in Assur my lord, I marched by different roads over steep mountains with the hosts of my army, and there was none who opposed me….
To the city of Sûru of Bît Halupê I drew near, and the terror of the splendor of Assur, my lord, overwhelmed them….
At the word of Assur, Ishtar, and Adad, the gods, my helpers, I mustered my chariots and armies … With the masses of my troops and by my furious battle onset I stormed, I captured the city; 600 of their warriors I put to the sword; 3,000 captives I burned with fire; I did not leave a single one among them alive to serve as a hostage. Hulai, their governor, I captured alive. Their corpses I formed into pillars; their young men and maidens I burned in the fire. Hulai, their governor, I flayed, his skin I spread upon the wall of the city of Damdamusa; the city I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire.12
The ancient Middle East saw the full development of warfare as an instrument of state policy; but as the annals of Ashurnasirpal suggest, the intellectual history of war had hardly begun. The elites of these societies thought about war in ritual and mythic terms similar to those of primitive cultures. In official language, war was always described as an act of the gods. In practice, it must have been perceived as a human act performed for political functions , but none of these societies possessed a political culture capable of expressing such ideas. There must have been a kind of conscious strategy, for there had to be long-range planning behind such extensive campaigns, but the nature of it is a matter of inference. Inference cannot justify the assumption that any of these states had a “grand strategy,” or long-term plan for relations with the outside world, or that they ever did any planning beyond immediate war objectives.
In one corner of the Assyrian empire, a peculiar variant of theocratic militarism had developed. Some scholars doubt that the Hebrew people, in the days when they really conducted warfare, had any military practices that differed much from their neighbors.13 But it is certain that the priestly editors who compiled the Torah in its present form, probably in the seventh century B.C., wanted to believe that their forefathers had practiced a very special form of warfare. The wars of Assur were just wars, but the war of Yahweh was a genuine holy war. The wars of the ancient Hebrews had been expressly commanded by Yahweh as part of his cosmic plan, to clear heathen nations out of the way of Israel, though he allowed some to remain in order to test the Israelites. Yahweh fought in these wars as an active participant and prosecuted them with genocidal fury. “The Lord is a man of war,” Moses sang after the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea (Exodus 15.3 RSV). Here is the war code of Deuteronomy:
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods, and so to sin against the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 20.10-18 RSV)
The Deuteronomic tradition was the most extreme version of crusading warfare in all antiquity and was to have a profound influence on the Christian world. We will return to it in the final chapter.
In summary, primitive and ancient societies all thought of war as an act of human and divine justice, as the avenging of wrongs. And as a constitutional act, it was the ultimate expression of group loyalty. They did not think of war as a strategic act to carry out purposes of state. That was the unique contribution of the Greeks, to whom we now turn.
Notes
1. E. R. Service, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, 2d ed. (New York, 1971).
2. R. B. Ferguson and N. L. Whitehead, eds., War in the Tribal Tone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, N. Mex., 1992).
3. In fact, there might have been experiments along this line even in Paleolithic times. This hypothesis provided the plot for Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age by the Swedish paleontologist Björn Kurtén (English translation, New York, 1980).
4. Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, ed. Ronald Cohen and E. R. Service (Philadelphia, 1978); The Early State, ed. H.J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik (The Hague, 1978); Jonathan Haas, The Evolution of the Prehistoric State (New York, 1982). The circumscription theory I follow here was developed largely by Robert Carneiro in “A Theory of the Origins of the State,” Science 169 (1970), 733-738, and “Political Expansion as an Expression of the Principle of Competitive Exclusion,” in Cohen and Service, The Early State, 205-223.
5. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, 1957).
6. E. g., Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1964).
7. The correlation between political centralization and military effectiveness has been emphasized by Wright, H. H. Turney-High, Robert Carneiro, and Keith Otter-bein, The Evolution of War: A Cross-Cultural Study (N.p., 1970), among others.
8. On this neglected subject, see the bibliography in Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton, 1993). Yigael Yadin’s The Art of Warfare in Biblical lands in the light of Archaeological Discovery (London, 1963) is valuable both for text and plates, which include photographs of the Standard of Ur and the Stele of the Vultures. Arther Ferrill’s The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (London, 1985) includes a useful survey of ancient Middle Eastern warfare.
9. See the fascinating, if admittedly conjectural, reconstruction of Bronze Age chariot warfare in Drews’s End of the Bronze Age.
10. I know of no very useful general treatment, but see the material on primitive religion collected by H. H. Turney-High (Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts, 2d ed. [Columbia, S. C., 1971]) and the articles on the golden age, Creation, and related subjects in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mercia Eliade (New York, 1987-).
11. Thomas Gregor, “Uneasy Peace: Intertribal Relations in Brazil’s Upper Xingu,” in Jonathan Haas, ed., The Anthropology of War (Cambridge, 1990), 105-124.
12. Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, ed. D. D. Luckenbill, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1926), 139-146.
13. See the discussion by Robert Carroll, “War in the Hebrew Bible,” in War and Society in the Greek World, ed. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London, 1993), 25-44.