War itself has made military history more of a pariah than it was 100 years
ago. Since the advent of chemical and nuclear weapons we have come to recognize
that unless war itself becomes obsolete we will destroy ourselves and render the
earth unlivable. The writing of military history easily veers into the justification
or even the glorification of war, toward which few historians wish to contribute.
Even while we see the suicidal character of what war has become, however, and
begin to de-glorify what it once was, historians must continue to learn what they
can about the evolution of warfare. Wars have shaped much of what we are and
what we are not, as historians beginning with Herodotos have been well aware.
Warfare in pre-classical antiquity is especially in need of critical study. Ancient
warfare is treated regularly by commercial presses and now by websites on the
Internet, because the public appetite for it is almost inexhaustible. Such presen -
tations may be correct enough on warfare in Greek and Roman antiquity, but on
earlier periods they often leave much to be desired. In the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, military historians—Clausewitz and Delbrück more broadly,
Kromeyer and Veith in detail—described what warfare was like in classical
Greece and Rome. From the war monographs of Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius,
Caesar and Sallust they drew pragmatic lessons about the winning of battles and
wars. Warfare in the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, however, was so
obscure—estimates depended mostly on the Iliadand the Bible—that the military
historians had little use for it.
Some opinions on primitive warfare
Still more obscure is the subject of warfare before civilization. If we are guided
by what was observed about primitive societies in the nineteenth or early twen -
tieth century, we may suppose that from time to time pitched battles were staged
in the Paleolithic period, but these would have been what anthropologists
have called “ritual battles.” Men from competing communities met on a “battle -
field” to exchange insults and arrows, and after a few casualties brought the
event to a close. Another kind of battle that must have occurred in Paleolithic
times was far more serious and costly. When a massacre was planned, but the
target community learned of the plan early enough to prepare for it, a real battle
may have taken place, as the aggressors were themselves surprised. The battle
would have continued until either the aggressors were repelled or the defenders
were killed.
How often such encounters occurred is much debated by anthropologists. The
generalization that simple or pre-civilized societies were peaceful, a generalization
that Margaret Mead based on field work in Samoa, has for some time been rejected
by many anthropologists and prehistorians. One of the first to object, in the 1940s,
was Harry Turney-High, an anthropologist whose specialization was society in
pre-Columbian America.^2 In 1996 the revisionist view was fully articulated by
Lawrence Keeley.^3 Wielding statistics from osteological evidence, Keeley
concluded that people in primitive societies were much more likely to die a violent
death, by human hand, than people in civilized societies have been.
Warfare in Western Eurasia 57