occasionally a bronze dagger. Atrocities occurred from time to time, as wrongs
or perceived wrongs were avenged by massacres. The general lack of fortifications,
however, together with the primitive state of weapons and—as everywhere else—
the absence of any defensive armor, suggests that in Europe battlefield warfare
had not yet begun in the early second millennium BCand the idea of an army had
not yet been conceived.
Warfare ca. 1700 BC: The Indus valley
Sir John Marshall and Sir Mortimer Wheeler—both of whom directed excavations
at Mohenjo-daro—concluded that warfare was rare, and perhaps altogether absent,
in the earliest civilization of the Indus valley. The excavators and Stuart Piggott,
whose Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C.presented what had been learned in the first
half of the twentieth century, all found “a distinct lack of evidence for warfare.
Where were the arms? Where was the enemy?”^137 Archaeological discoveries in
the seventy years since Wheeler’s time have hardly changed that perception.
Recently an attempt has been made to identify weapons among the many bronze
artifacts found at Harappan sites, but the results are not very impressive.^138
The apparent peace of the Mature Harappan period (ca. 2500–1900 BC) is in
sharp contrast to Akkadian and Neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia, with which the Indian
cities seem to have been in contact. The Indian cities were not fortified. Even the
two “citadels”—one within Harappa and the other within Mohenjo-daro—identi -
fied by the early archaeologists are now thought to have been some thing other
than citadels or fortresses.^139 The abandoning of Mohenjo-daro and many other
sites on the lower Indus ca. 1900 BC, and the transition to Late Harappan, were
not the result of hostilities.^140 It seems that in the Asian sub continent warfare did
not really begin until well into the Late Harappan period (1900–1400 BC).^141
Warfare ca. 1700 BC: The Eurasian steppes
Early in the second millennium BCwarfare—at least on a small scale—was
apparently more familiar in the Eurasian steppes than it was in India, temperate
Europe and the Greek mainland. On the steppe, unlike in the Near East, combat
may have occurred more often in the open country than on the siege ramp. A forti -
fication wall on the forest steppe was mostly earth, with reinforcing timbers, and
was probably no more than 5 or 6 m high. It is also relevant that early in the second
millennium BCthe steppe dwellers had apparently begun to use chariots in battle.
Even late in the third millennium BC, however, and so before the first chariots
were built, the steppe dwellers seem to have been familiar with battles.
Between the upper Don and the middle and upper Volga, some 700 miles north
of the Caucasus, were settlements and kurgans assigned to the Abashevo culture.^142
Mortuary evidence of warfare was found here under a kurgan erected early in
the Abashevo period. A long pit-grave at Pepkino, on the Sura river, held the
skeletons of twenty-eight young men, many of them decapitated. As described by
Warfare in Western Eurasia 85