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▶ war and conquest

introduction

In general, historians writing about the ancient world tend

to defi ne war as a military enterprise that required long-term

preparation and planning and was carried out by one state

or national government against another state or government.

For the purposes of the defi nition, nomadic peoples united

under a single leader or governing council count as a nation,

which is why some historians will refer to nomadic peoples

as “nations” even though they did not live in one place with

defi ned borders.

Most anthropologists believe that people have been kill-

ing people from the beginning of modern humans. Th ose

very ancient disputes may have begun over off ended honor,

a mistreated daughter, or the claiming of rights to a fertile

territory. Rock paintings dating to tens of thousands of years

ago, from Europe, Africa, and Asia, show people killing one

another with bows and spears. Some of the combat looks or-

ganized, with fi gures wearing special clothes or body decora-

tions specifi cally meant for battle.

Exactly when small confl icts became large ones is un-

known. For a time the rise of cities in Sumer was thought to

have brought about the beginning of war. As the cities grew,

they needed more lands to feed their people, and they became

envious of each other; for this reason they started killing each

other to acquire land and to steal one another’s wealth. Th is

would not have begun before 3500 b.c.e. Yet Çatalhüyük in

modern-day Turkey dates from about 7200 b.c.e. and was

built for defense against large-scale attacks. Between 10,000

and 8000 b.c.e. the residents of Jericho built massive walls

and an extraordinarily well-designed tower. Th ose battle-

ments would seem to have been pointless wastes of valuable

time and labor unless they were meant as defense against

a large and dangerous threat, such as an army with leader-

ship that would devote time to planning how to defeat such

a stronghold. It is possible that someday the exact place and

time the fi rst war was fought will be discovered, but at present

archaeologists and historians can study only the wars they

know about.

War was expensive. It required a large investment of time,

people, and goods to wage war. For a society to invest its en-

ergy in war, it needed to see value come from war. People had

to believe that they were either gaining something valuable

through aggression or keeping something valuable through

defense. War had objectives that were perceived as valuable,

and those objectives could be met only by sacrifi cing other

valuables, such as human lives, money, and labor for public

works. In societies in which people had to spend almost ev-

ery waking moment working just to feed themselves, taking

time for war was a great sacrifi ce. Some societies solved the

problem by giving up making their own food and goods and

devoting themselves to taking food and goods from other

people. In northern China and northern Mesopotamia, for

instance, there were nomadic peoples whose lives focused on

war and whose societies’ eff orts centered on annual raids for

looting farming communities to the south. In China hun-

dreds or thousands of lives, much labor, and a great deal of

wealth was spent on such defenses as tall, wide walls around

every city.

Th e constant warfare that marred much of the ancient

world generated an arms race in almost every culture. Th e

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