3 Warfare in Western Eurasia
in the third and early second
millennium BC
In the September 9, 2009 issue of The New RepublicEdward Luttwak reviewed
two books on Attila and the nomads of central Asia. In the course of his review
Luttwak noted that Attila’s meteoric success has attracted relatively little scholarly
attention, and he observed somewhat sourly that for most academicians military
history of any kind is not of much interest:
There is almost no place, and almost no prestige, for anyone who wants to
research and teach how and why battles and wars were won or lost—that is,
military history strictly defined—as opposed to social history, economic
history, and some forms of political history, including newly rehabilitated
biographical approaches but excluding “kings and battles.” Even research on
“presidents and wars” is unwelcome unless there are cognitive or psycho logical
pathologies to be studied. And there is the added impediment that military
historiography is an arcane field, requiring serious archival research, often in
languages other than English. While scholarly readers have an insatiable
demand for military historiography, and students are very keenly interested
in battles and wars, the faculties at our universities prefer to scant both. Appoint
a military historian? The eminent Chicago Byzantinist Walter Emil Kaegi has
explained why it almost never happens: tactics cannot matter, weapon
techniques cannot matter, operational methods cannot matter, theater strategies
cannot matter, because wars do not matter—as a subject of their own, rather
than as epiphenomenal expressions of other causes and realities. Given the
academic consensus that wars are almost entirely decided by social, economic,
and political factors, there is simply no room for military history as such.^1It is not surprising that academics today are less interested in military history
than were academics 100 years ago. One of the important trends in historiography
since the 1950s has been the increasing focus on the longue duréeand a
corresponding neglect of histoire événementielle. The crucial factors in human
history, as seen by Fernand Braudel and the Annales School, are the environmental
or socio-economic conditions that operate over centuries or even millennia. These
are the subjects that serious historians are encouraged to study, leaving narrative
history to popular writers, authors of text-books, and story-tellers.