Arms and Society in Antiquity 23routine dominated everyone’s behavior. Large-scale changes in human
conduct, when they occurred, were more likely to be in response to
commands coming from some social superior than to any change in
supply and demand, buying and selling.
Much more important than any human action in most people’s lives
were natural disasters like crop failure and epidemic outbreaks of
disease. Even the sporadic ravages of armed raiders—coming from
nowhere and disappearing into the distance when their work was
done—partook of the character of natural disaster from the point of
view of the plowing peasants who were their principal victims. Scope
for deliberate conscious action remained very small. Human beings
were part of an ecological equilibrium whose impact on their survival
was not cushioned by anything like our modern skills, organization,
and capital. Custom and immemorial routine provided precise
guidelines in most life circumstances. Change, whether conscious and
in accord with someone’s intent or generated in moments of despera
tion when old patterns of life had broken down, remained sporadic
and exceptional.
Getting enough to eat was the central task of life and presented a
perpetual problem for most persons. Everything else took second
place. The industrial basis of large-scale enterprises though real
enough—public works required tools as much as armies required
weapons—was a trivial element in the sense that access to tools and
weapons was seldom felt to be a real limit upon what human beings
could or did undertake.
The commercialization, followed in due season by the industrializa
tion, of war began to get under way, in a more meaningful sense, only
after A.D. 1000. The transformation was slow at first; it attained runa
way velocity only in very recent centuries. The following chapters will
attempt to survey the major benchmarks in that momentous change.ward. They appear to have behaved as private capitalists, quite in the spirit of medieval
merchants two thousand years later. Family firms exchanged letters: hence the archive.
Profits were high—up to 100 percent in a single year, if all went well. Cf. M. T. Larsen,
The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies, Studies in Assyriology, vol. 4 (Copenhagen,
1976). Clearly rulers and men of power along the way permitted their donkey caravans
to get through, perhaps because of the strategic value of the tin. But the archive is silent
about such arrangements. For traders and their role in ancient Mesopotamia generally,
see also A. Leo Oppenheim, “A New Look at the Structure of Mesopotamian Society,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10 (1967): 1–16.