Violent death, however, does not necessarily imply war or even a battle: indi -
vidual homicides and family feuds may have accounted for much of the skeletal
trauma. Even the massacre of an entire community may not easily fit most
definitions of “war,” although the word has an unusually elastic meaning (in his
History of WarfareJohn Keegan devoted ten pages to the question, “What is war?”).
Succinctly, the 1969 edition of American Heritage Dictionarydefined war as “a
state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states,
or parties.” A recent study argues in considerable detail that in the Near East the
evidence for war in the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Early Neolithic period
is very slim.^4 Others suggest that the various forms of mass violence were less
frequent than Keeley thought they were. John Carman charged that Keeley’s
conclusions rest on only eleven instances of mass violence in 30,000 years of
European prehistory, and that “on the basis of this short list, Keeley attempts to
persuade us that war was widespread in Europe before the Bronze Age and that
it was as violent and unpleasant as any modern war.”^5
Some opinions about warfare in the Bronze Age
The discussion about pre-state violence, and the prevalence of it, will continue
to be intense, especially because the topic is an aspect of a larger debate about
human nature and human potential. A topic much less controversial is the incidence
of warfare in the period of the early civilizations in the ancient Near East.
Assyriologists, Egyptologists, archaeologists and military historians are all agreed
that with the appearance of the state, whether territorial kingdoms such as Egypt
or city-states such as those of southern Mesopotamia, wars were an important part
of human history.
How these wars were fought, however, is far from clear, despite the confidence
with which they have often been described. Warfare in the ancient Near East
was hardly a scholarly subject at all until 1963, when Yigael Yadin’s semi-popular
The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Archaeological Studywas
published. As its title suggested, Yadin’s two-volume set was a merger of archae -
ology and the Bible, its chapters marked off by biblical signposts (“Before
Abraham,” “The Patriarchs,” “Moses and the Exodus,” and so forth). Yadin pre -
sented a good picture of Iron Age battles in the Near East and also added his
authority to several points that others had long recognized about the Late Bronze
Age.
Yadin’s pioneering survey might have launched a critical history of Bronze
Age warfare. Instead, because of the author’s distinction both as an archaeologist
and as a general officer in the Israeli army, his Art of Warfareseemed definitive.
For a long time deskbound scholars, including the present writer, saw no reason
to question Yadin’s conclusions, several of which—especially on the third and
second millennium BC—are now clearly wrong. Much of Yadin’s reconstruction
of Early Bronze Age warfare was based on the visual evidence that was available
in 1963, and not well understood. Especially influential were the Ur Standard and
58 Warfare in Western Eurasia