1121
▶ 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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