The First Army Battles
We don’t know when the first battle between real armies took place, but it was probably around 5,500 years ago in the land of Sumer, in today’s Iraq. The armies of that time would have carried the same weapons that hunters and warriors had been using on animals and each other for millennia – spears, knives, axes, perhaps bows and arrows – but they would be ten or twenty times more numerous than any hunter-gatherer band, and they would actually stand and fight, obeying a single commander, at least for a few minutes. Hunter-gatherers could never have done such a thing; only farmers had the numbers, the commitment, and the right social structure.
It is possible, however, that there was one very early exception. In the 1950s archaeologists discovered that Jericho had become the first walled town in the world over 10,000 years ago, between 8500 and 8000bc. The town walls were at least twelve feet high and six feet thick, with a rock-cut moat ten feet deep at their base, and they encircled an area of ten acres. Up to 3,000 people lived behind the walls, and there was a 25-foot-high tower in the middle that probably served as a final refuge or keep for the most important residents. The walls are rather elaborate for mere flood defences and suggest that this may have been a militarised society, defending something that other people wanted badly enough to attack it. This great asset was the Jericho aquifer, which spilled its water out over a series of natural terraces around the city.
Jericho’s walls appeared at the end of a 2,000-year period when local ‘Natufian’ hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent, while continuing to hunt wild game, were devoting more and more of their time to harvesting wild plants. Their semi-permanent settlements included grain-storage pits, but around 8500bc a shift to drier climatic conditions dramatically shrank the number of settlements. The consequent food shortages may have driven the Natufians to shift from merely reaping wild grains to deliberately sowing them; and they may also have led to one or more attempts by hungry tribes to seize control of the Jericho aquifer, for whoever controlled the aquifer would still have water and therefore food. All of which could explain those ten-thousand-year-old walls, but the crisis passed and there is no evidence of other city walls in the Fertile Crescent for another three thousand years. Real battles were a long time in the making.
The next town we know of, almost a thousand years later and 600 miles north of Jericho, is Çatal Hüyük, a community of 5–7,000 people that thrived near what is now Konya in southern Turkey between 7100bc and 5700bc. The houses were built in a honeycomb-like structure, with no streets or alleys between and entrances high on the walls or in the roofs. There were no defences that could have withstood a serious army even for a day.
There were storage bins for wheat and barley, so some kind of agriculture was underway, but the inhabitants also depended on hunting game and gathering wild plants, fruits and nuts in the river valley. They had certainly domesticated goats, and there are hints that they were also working on cattle. The absence of larger dwellings or ceremonial buildings suggest that they were still an egalitarian society, and grave goods indicate that women had similar status to men. All in all, they look very like the descendants of some hunter-gatherer bands who decided to get together and move indoors.
This was the era, between 6000bc and 4000bc, when all the ‘founder crops’ and goats, sheep, pigs and cattle were being domesticated, but few people were following the example of Çatal Hüyük and creating ‘proto-urban settlements’. The exception was Sumer, the wetlands along the lower Euphrates River in what was later known to the Greeks as Mesopotamia and is now called Iraq. Mesopotamia is a flat, almost featureless plain created by the Tigris and Euphrates, the two rivers that drain most of the upland part of the Fertile Crescent. The soil was amazingly fertile: it was pure silt laid down by past flooding. You could easily get two crops a year off this land, but the people who settle in Sumer were not yet full-time farmers.
The last stretch of the lower Euphrates was a hunter-gatherer’s paradise: the Garden of Eden, if you like. At that time it was immensely rich and varied in its food sources, allowing what were dense populations by hunter-gatherer standards to live together while still pursuing a traditional lifestyle, catching fish and molluscs, hunting migratory birds and deer, gathering wild plants, and doing a little low-impact agriculture on the side – just spread your seed where you know the river will flood, and wait for it to grow in the rich silt that’s left behind when it recedes.
The earliest settlers of Sumer all spoke essentially the same language, but they created at least a dozen settlements that had grown into little city-states by the early fourth millennium bc. Wars, however, were not frequent or severe, for the Sumerians very early hit upon the device of using religion as a non-military source of authority to settle disputes. They didn’t have kings or permanent secular leaders, but they did have temple priests whose role, apart from pleasing the gods, was to settle disputes peacefully not only among the local residents but also between neighbouring settlements. Their occasional wars were fought in the classic hunter-gatherer style, and their city walls (if they had them: there is no evidence of their existence) would have been to discourage raids. Really massive ramparts did not start going up until much later.
The temple priests bought Sumer five, maybe ten centuries of relative peace – but the growing populations ultimately made inter-city conflicts inevitable. The population was rising fast because women in these new settlements no longer had to restrict their child-bearing to one surviving baby every four years (nomadic mothers can’t carry around two small children). When the climate hit another dry phase around 3500bc and wild food sources dwindled, people had to turn to farming – but good farmland was becoming scarce because the rivers were not flooding as high or as long. The cities – only two or three days’ walk apart – started to fight over it, and by 3200bc walls were going up around the world’s biggest city, Uruk (pop. 25,000–50,000). Soon other major Sumerian cities like Kish, Nippur, Lagash, Eridu and Ur also had walls.
This new urban lifestyle offered lots of opportunities for clever or lucky people to accumulate property of various sorts, including land, and a gap began to open between the rich and the rest. Some people were now much more equal than others, and the rest simply had to lump it.
For one group, though, there was an alternative.
A New Way of Life
It was almost certainly settled communities that first domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle, but these tamed animals created the possibility of a new and different way of life: pastoralism. People could regain their independence by herding tamed animals and using their meat, hide, wool, milk and blood to support an entirely independent lifestyle. Some would have been greatly tempted by this option, because the values and traditions of free men and women were being eroded fast in the agricultural societies.
Most people had to accept the new rules, but the people who looked after the animals had a choice. They lived on the fringes of the farming community anyway, to keep the animals from eating or trampling the crops, and they regularly disappeared off into the uplands in spring to find fresh pasture. At some point, it must have occurred to the herders that they didn’t have to come back.
Pastoralism is a harsh way of life, without a roof over your head or much in the way of material possessions, but it would have attracted those who didn’t like what was happening in the settled communities. During the fourth and third millennia bc, pastoral societies were coming into existence throughout the Middle East. The ‘nomads’, as they were called, would always be greatly outnumbered by the farmers, and they would always depend on the settled societies for their higher technologies, including their metal weapons. But it was a viable alternative to the cramped farming lifestyle, and from the start the nomads had a deep contempt for the settled folk.
It’s likely that these pastoralists soon started raiding each others’ herds, but a more attractive option would have been to steal the farmers’ animals – and while they were at it, all the other valuable things that farmers had and they didn’t. It was tempting, and it was easy.
The nomads didn’t have horses yet, but even on foot they were far more mobile than farmers. Since their animals moved with them, they could concentrate all their fighting strength against a chosen target at short notice. Farmers couldn’t do that, so it was the nomads who generally had numbers on their side at the chosen place on the right day. Their modus operandi would have been a surprise raid followed by a rapid retreat into the highlands with the spoils – and since they couldn’t retreat very fast on foot with all their animals, they would have taken steps to discourage pursuit. The obvious steps were terror, atrocity and massacre.
Ruthless Nomads?
Fighting between groups who recognise their common humanity is generally constrained by custom and ritual, while the same groups approach hunting wild animals in a more ruthlessly pragmatic spirit: deceive the animal, then kill it. The psychological relationship between nomads and farmers was similar: the settled peoples were seen as lesser beings, no longer fully human. As prey to the nomad predators, they could be killed without compunction, and the whole history of attacks by nomads on farming peoples is one of remorseless cruelty and contempt by the former towards the latter.
This could be another explanation for the walls. It wouldn’t take many terrifying attacks to cause a wave of wall-building among the farming communities – and a wave of militarisation too. Indeed, some historians have argued that such raids were the main driver behind the growing intensity of warfare between settled communities, as the farmers gradually imported nomad ruthlessness into their own conflicts.2
If you are fighting nomads, the penalty for losing is close to total. So we can imagine a gradual rise in the discipline demanded of the individual warrior and the control exercised by the commander, because these changes bring more success in battle. Against nomadic raiders, these new, more efficient ways of fighting were indispensable – but once people had worked them out, would they revert to the old, inefficient ways in the increasingly frequent wars with rival farming communities? Of course not. And thus the lethality of battle started to rise.
Organised Slaughter
Meriones pursued and overtaking [Pheraklos] struck in the right buttock and the spearhead drove straight on and passing under the bone went into the bladder.
He dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist about him.
Meges… killed Pedaios…
Struck him the sharp spear behind the head at the tendon and straight on through the teeth and under the tongue cut the bronze blade
and he dropped in the dust gripping in his teeth the cold bronze.
Euryplos… killed brilliant Hypsenor…
Running in chase as he fled before him struck in the shoulder with a blow swept from the sword and cut the arm’s weight from him,
so that the arm dropped bleeding to the ground, and the red death and destiny the powerful took hold of both eyes.
So they went at their work all about the mighty encounter.
Homer, Iliad 3
The battle under the walls of Troy, as described above, actually took place ca. 1200bc, but he composed his epic poem around 800bc. Homer obeys the conventions of his culture and describes the battle in terms of single combat between named heroes, but that is not what actually happens on the ground. This is the war of infantry phalanxes – the first real armies – and it is indeed a mighty encounter.
The men in an infantry phalanx are doing something that has never before been asked of people. Holding spears and shields, they have to form three or more straight lines hundreds or even thousands of men long. They have to stay in that formation, despite any bumps or hollows in the ground, until they make contact with the enemy, who is arrayed in an equally unwieldy manner – and once the two phalanxes collide they must push and stab, with the leading edge of the two formations eroding moment by moment as men go down, until one side panics and tries to retreat. But there are other lines of men behind who have not yet caught the panic and continue to press forward, so the cohesion of the losing formation crumbles. Once that happens it is doomed: the men attempting to flee find themselves trapped in their own crowd and are cut down from behind.
It is this last and ugliest phase of the battle that Homer is describing, with ‘heroes’ being cut down from behind as they try to escape. The elevated ‘warrior’ verse sets the epic tone, but the reality is one of frightened young men running for their lives and not making it. It is ruthless, deliberate slaughter on an unprecedented scale, and it began not in the age when Homer lived or even when he set his great poem, but over a millenium earlier in the rival city-states of Mesopotamia.
Detail from the Stele of the Vultures, c.2500bce
You can see a phalanx on the Stele of the Vultures, the first representation of a Mesopotamian army, dating from around 2500bc. Eannatum, the ruler of Lagash, is leading his army out to battle, and behind him are the soldiers of the city. They are shoulder to shoulder, their shields overlapping, several rows deep, with the spears of all the rows bristling ahead of the formation. Almost certainly, they are marching in step. When they met the enemy formation, from the neighbouring city of Umma, there would have been a brief but savage face-to-face struggle, certainly less than five minutes, followed by the slaughter of the phalanx that broke first. The Stele of the Vultures claims that 3,000 men of the army of Umma died on the battlefield – and those who were captured were marched to the foot of their own city’s walls and slaughtered.
More People, More Cities, More Wars
The willingness of large numbers of men to stand their ground despite the high probability that they will die there in the next five minutes has no precedent in the long human, primate or even mammalian past. To find anything comparable, we must go to the battles fought between ant colonies, but at least the ants have the excuse of a shared genetic heritage. Nomad attacks may have been responsible for a general trend towards greater ruthlessness in war, but that does not get us all the way to the astounding discipline and bravery of a city-state’s phalanx.
The saga of Gilgamesh, ruler of the city-state of Uruk about 2700bc, may be showing us some of this process. Written history is kicking in, so at last we have some names, dates and stories, and centre-stage at once is the hero Gilgamesh, who becomes the big man (‘lugal’) or king of Uruk. The epic is the usual quest story – Gilgamesh seeks eternal life – combined with some encrypted renderings of local politics in 27th-century bc Uruk. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that he subverted the old, participatory institutions of Uruk – a senate-like assembly of elders and a general body of all adult men – and turned them to his own purposes. Exploiting a quarrel with Kish and using a combination of rhetoric and threats, Gilgamesh persuaded these assemblies to accept his ascendancy over the city. But even after gaining power, Gilgamesh did not become an absolute monarch: he had to keep the people on his side, and most of them probably continued to see themselves not as mere subjects of his will, but as full citizens. He couldn’t just order them around.
The epic may be a snapshot of a transitional stage. Property and social class were now setting some people above others, but the myth of equality lived on in the assembly of all adult males. Allowing for 2,000 years of technological and cultural differences, the city-states of early Sumer were the Greek city-states of early classical times: the rich and well-born generally got their way in the end, but the proprieties of public consultation and consensus in assemblies of all citizens capable of bearing arms still had to be observed.4 This precarious survival of egalitarian values may be what made phalanxes possible, for if the whole adult male population felt involved in the decision to go to war, then you could legitimately demand that they follow through by putting their lives on the line.
The phalanx was an awesomely effective military tool, and it was also cheap. The soldiers in the ranks could be trained to use their simple shields and spears effectively and to move in tight formations in one free afternoon a week. Bronze spearheads were the only significant expense in equipping them, although the better-off members of the community would certainly invest in bronze helmets and shin protection as well. It’s one of history’s great bargains: a truly effective military force, practically unstoppable except by another phalanx, for little more than a song.
As the centuries passed and the tyrannies deepened in the Sumerian cities, the phalanx style of warfare eroded and vanished, because absolute monarchs preferred to fight battles with standing armies of hired soldiers, leaving the mass of the citizenry unarmed, untrained and politically inert. By the latter part of the third millennium, phalanxes had virtually disappeared from Mesopotamian battlefields. But the battles continued.
The thirteen city-states of classic Sumer existed for many centuries in a permanent state of alternating hot and cold wars with their neighbours. They had fallen unwittingly into a balance-of-power system in which most players survived, but at a high cost. If you were on the losing side, you would just hang on until some of the other players got nervous about the growing strength of the big winners and changed sides to contain their power. Yanomamo villagers would recognise what was happening; it was just on a far larger scale.
The balance-of-power system produces frequent wars, but it has lasted, with only rare interruptions, for five thousand years. It was the organising principle in the global rivalries of the early 20th-century great powers as much as it was in the local squabbles of the Sumerian city-states. The alliances would shift but the wars were a constant: since 1800 Britain and France, France and Germany, the United States and Britain have all been both enemies and allies. Kish, Shuruppak, Ur, Nippur and Lagash were doubtless just as fickle in their loyalties, although we don’t know the details of their local game. And although people told themselves each time that the war was about something specific – ‘The War of the Spanish Succession’ or ‘The War of Jenkins’ Ear’ – it was really the system itself that produced the wars.
Modern nation states went to war, on average, about once per generation in the period 1800–1945, and were at war for about one year in five during the entire period. National sovereignty makes every state exclusively responsible for its own survival, which it can only ensure by having enough military power, generally obtained by making alliances with other states. Sooner or later you are bound to get it wrong – your allies betray you, your forces are in the wrong place – which is why at least ninety percent of the states that ever existed have been destroyed by war.
So what became of the conflict depicted and described on the Stele of the Vultures – Lagash versus Umma, whose phalanxes clashed some time around 2500bc, leaving 3,000 men from Umma dead on the battlefield? The two city-states were trying to establish their hegemony over all of Sumer, and the strategic advantage swung back and forth for 150 years as battles were lost or won and their allies repeatedly changed sides. In the end the army of Umma triumphed, sacked the city of Lagash, looted its temple, and lorded it over Sumer for a few years. Then Umma itself was conquered by a new phenomenon: the world’s first military empire.
The First Military Empire
Sargon, the Mighty King, King of Akkad, am I.
He who keeps Travelling the Four Lands
By the mid-2300s bc, newcomers speaking Semitic languages were moving down from the Eastern Mediterranean area occupied today by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel into the fertile Mesopotamian plains and setting up their own cities, but Sargon, though of Semitic origin, grew up in the old Sumerian city of Kish. He rose to become cup-bearer to King Ur-Zababa before seizing power himself in a coup whose details remain unknown. He conquered Uruk, then all the other cities of Sumer, then the upland kingdoms of Elam, Mari, and Ebla. He appointed governors, installed permanent garrisons, drew up tax lists in each new conquered province, and created a centrally controlled bureaucracy to run it from his newly built capital, Akkad. It was the world’s first multinational empire.
Sargon’s army was a professional, multi-ethnic force of considerable size: one of his inscriptions boasts that 5,400 men daily took their meals in his presence. It was the first army that could campaign far from home, since it had a logistical train to bring supplies up behind it. It could capture heavily fortified cities by undermining the walls or going over the top on scaling ladders.
Scythians shooting with composite bows, Kerch, Crimea, 4th century bce
Sargon’s soldiers probably never fought in a classic phalanx formation. It would have been a waste of their special talents. These men had the time and the skill to master not only the spear but also the composite bow, a recent innovation that would remain the best projectile weapon for thousands of years to come. They could even fight from war chariots. His army won almost every time.
Sargon of Akkad was the prototype of Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler: a man who set out to conquer the world, or at least the parts of it that seemed important at the time.. His propagandists boasted that his empire ran ‘from the Lower Sea to the Upper Sea’ (from the Gulf to the Mediterranean), but nothing held it together except military power. The conquered cities and provinces rebelled whenever his army was committed elsewhere, and Sargon’s successors were eventually worn down by the ceaseless effort to preserve his empire. The city of Akkad itself was destroyed in 2159bc. Other empires, however, followed in unending succession.
Anthill Society
By 2000bc the overwhelming majority of human beings were farmers, and almost all lived in states that were extravagantly unequal, with semi-divine kings at the top and a mass of serfs and slaves at the bottom. Was this the inevitable consequence of living in mass societies?
The answer, probably, is yes. The problem of numbers was insoluble and would remain so for a very long time. Egalitarianism works in small societies where everybody knows everybody else; where would-be alpha males can be spotted and neutralised before they get too powerful; and where decisions can be debated face-to-face until a consensus emerges. None of this works if your new style of life requires you to live in far bigger groups. New tools like writing, money and bureaucracy could help to manage these large new societies, but there was no way traditional human politics could continue. What works for a society of forty people cannot work for a society of forty thousand, let alone four million. Until and unless some innovation comes along that enables huge numbers of people to make decisions together, the old political system is dead. So is equality.
The only system that did work was one in which orders were passed down from the top and slavishly obeyed at the bottom. The social structure of the average ancient empire was closer to the ant-hill than to our own hunter-gatherer past. Yet the empires were always unstable, because human beings had not actually become ants; behind the bitten tongues and the bowed heads they remained the same people they had always been. Physical force, or at least the permanent threat of force, was needed to keep all these newly tamed heirs of the hunter-gatherers in line, so militarisation and tyranny became almost universal.
Most of the people of the agricultural mass societies were stunted and bent by poor diet and endless labour. Women were the biggest losers, reduced to social inferiority and confined to narrow lives of endless child-bearing, but few men would freely choose the life of a peasant farmer over that of a traditional hunter either. Thousands of years later, the experiment of civilisation would eventually pay off for at least some of its children, but from the standpoint of 2000bc it was a human disaster. Then things got worse.
Steppe Change: Horses and Wheels
There has been more than one Dark Age. The first was between about 2000 and 1500bc, when pastoral peoples equipped with war-chariots conquered all the centres of civilisation in Eurasia. For most of recorded history the civilised societies of the Old World were relatively small areas with dense farming populations – in China, northern India, the Middle East and Europe – that lay just south or west of the steppes, the 5,000-mile-wide ‘sea of grass’ stretching from southern Russia to Manchuria. This was the home of the horse nomads, who periodically burst out of their heartland to smash those civilisations.
Two things enabled these people to colonise the million-and-a-half square miles of the grasslands. The first was horses, domesticated in the southern Ukraine some time before 4000bc. They were far smaller and weaker in the back than modern horses, but they enabled the pastoral peoples to move their herds deeper into the grasslands. The second was the wheel, invented around 3300bc, which let them load their belongings into wagons.
Possible chariot on the Bronocile pot, Poland, c. 3500bce
The nomadic steppe culture that would spawn endless conquerors over the next three thousand years may have sprung into being in only a couple of centuries. But once the pastoral peoples had filled the grasslands to their carrying capacity (perhaps only three to five million people), they came back to conquer the civilised lands.
Their favourite weapons system combined the chariot, invented in the civilised lands as early as 2300bc, with the new composite bow, which was longer-range, faster-shooting, and above all smaller (and therefore perfect for use from a chariot).5 Previously, their raids had relied on surprise and a temporary local superiority in numbers, but now they could actually fight civilised armies and win, especially as the highly motivated volunteer phalanxes of the early city-states had gone the way of the egalitarian values they’d relied upon. The nomads’ advantage was not just their weapons; it was also the fact that they were herdsmen, accustomed to controlling flocks of animals.
It was flock management, as much as slaughter and butchery, which made the pastoralists so cold-bloodedly adept at confronting the sedentary agriculturalists of the civilised lands in battle… [Civilised] battle formations were likely to have been loose, discipline weak and battlefield behaviour crowdor herd-like. Working a herd, however, was the pastoralists’ stock in trade. They knew how to break a flock up into manageable sections, how to cut off a line of retreat by circling to a flank, how to compress scattered beasts into a compact mass, how to isolate flock-leaders, how to dominate superior numbers by threat and menace, how to kill the chosen few while leaving the mass inert and subject to control.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare6
First the nomads would harass the defenders with showers of arrows, only committing themselves to a decisive attack when the enemy began to flee.
Circling at a distance of 100 or 200 yards from the herds of unarmoured foot soldiers, a chariot crew – one to drive, one to shoot – might have transfixed six men a minute. Ten minutes’ work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme-like toll among the small armies of the period.
John Keegan, ibid.7
They were almost impossible for the armies of the early empires to deal with. Hammurabi’s Amorite empire, which ruled most of Mesopotamia from his capital of Babylon, was overwhelmed by the Kassite and Hurrian charioteers flooding in from the highland area that is now Kurdistan in the 16th century bc. The Hurrians spoke an Indo-European language, as did the Hittite charioteers who conquered most of central Anatolia (today’s Turkey) to the west around 1600bc. Still further to the west, the Mycenaeans who swept down the Balkans into Greece had the same chariots and spoke another Indo-European language.
The relatively non-militarised Egyptian kingdom was conquered for the first time ever in the 18th century bc by the Hyksos, chariot-driving pastoralists from north-western Arabia who spoke a Semitic language. Far to the east the Aryans, an Indo-European people originating on the Iranian plateau, replaced the early civilisation of the Indus valley and established their rule over most of northern India. The origins of the Shang dynasty in northern China around 1700bc are disputed, but the sudden appearance of chariots in a part of the world where there had previously been no wheeled transport of any kind suggests that the founders of the Shang state may have been other Indo-European pastoralists.8
The nomad conquerors were tiny minorities ruling over hostile populations with the help of enslaved administrators. (They themselves had neither writing nor bureaucracy.) In some places they stayed in power less than a century: the Egyptians drove the Hyksos out in 1567bc, and the Hurrian overlords of Babylon were overthrown by the Assyrian king Ashur-uballit in 1365bc. The founders of the Shang dynasty were quickly absorbed by the vastly more sophisticated Chinese culture, and presented themselves to the world as a native Chinese dynasty.
Even where the language and culture of the invaders eventually prevailed (as in Greece, in Hittite Anatolia, and in Aryan-ruled India) within a few generations they were not really pastoralists any more, though the modern Indian caste system is an echo of the system of slavery and serfdom with which they secured their hold on power. And whether the invaders stayed in power or not, their impact was enormous; after this first Dark Age, almost everybody was militarised.
Notes
1. Robert L. O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Growth and Death of War (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), 64–66; John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York, Vintage, 1994), 124–26.
2. O’Connell, op. cit., 68–76.
3. Homer, Iliad, tr. Richard Lattimore (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951), 65–84.
4. Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 30–32.
5. O’Connell, op. cit., 77–83; Keegan, op. cit., 156–57.
6. Keegan, op. cit., 181.
7. Ibid, 166.
8. O’Connell, op. cit., 122, 165–66; Keegan, op. cit., 168.