by John Keegan
Because such a destiny — to be bound to the wheel of endless propitiation of an unloving and blood-hungry divinity — coincides with no vision of the world to which any modern holds, the temptation is to dismiss Aztec warfare as an aberration, having no connection with any system of strategy or tactics that we would consider rational. That, however, is because we have come to separate the need for security from trust in a divine yet immediate intervention in worldly affairs. The Aztecs saw things in an exactly contrary light: only by repetitive satisfaction of divine needs could divine harshness be held at bay. Their warfare, as a result, was limited by a belief about the object it should achieve — the taking of prisoners, some of whom should be voluntary participants in their own ritual murder — and, as a further and even more arresting consequence, Aztec weapons of the first quality were designed within the limitation that they should wound but not kill.
There is an important qualification to be set against this account of Aztec warfare: it tells us only about the warfare of the Aztecs at the height of their power and not of how they fought when they were struggling to achieve it. The probability is that then they slaughtered those who opposed them, as all conquerors have always done. The ‘flower battle’ is an institution not only of a very sophisticated but also of a self-confident society, which could afford to ritualise warmaking because it was not challenged at its borders by potential usurpers. It was also an enormously rich society, which could afford the wastefulness of sacrificing captives in thousands, rather than putting them to productive work or selling them into slavery elsewhere. The Maya of Central America, whose monuments exceed those of the Aztecs in scale and quality, seem to have done the opposite, sacrificing only noble captives and putting the rest to labour or into the market. Mayan practice was far more of a pattern with that of other martial peoples, for whom slave-taking was normally an important reward of warmaking and sometimes a principal motivation for it.62
The Aztecs who fought were warriors, not soldiers; that is to say, they expected and were expected to fight because of the place they held in the social order, not because of obligation or for pay; they also fought with stone weapons. These two conditions further define the sort of warfare we are examining. Aztec warfare no doubt represents pre-metallurgic warfare in the most refined and one of the most eccentric forms it could take. It still belongs, all the same, with that of the Maoris and even of the Maring and the Yanomamö, rather than with that which the discovery of metal and, later, the raising of armies ushered in. All four were warfares of encounters fought at close range, with weapons of little penetrating power and therefore without the dense bodily protection needed to stop puncture wounds to the head or trunk. They accorded a high degree of ceremony and ritual to combat, the spur to and ends of which bore scant relation to the causes and results which modern man perceives in the wars he fights. Revenge and the expiation of insult were commonly the spur, satisfaction of mythic necessity or divine demands equally commonly the end. Such causes and results can subsist only below what Turney-High called the ‘military horizon’. But when and how and — if we dare ask it — why did war begin?
THE BEGINNINGS OF WARFARE
We date ‘history’ from the moment when man began to write or, more precisely, from when he left traces of what we can recognise as writing. Such traces, left by the people of Sumer, in what is now Iraq, have been dated to about 3100 BC, though the precursors of the symbols used may be 5000 years older still, and originate at the time, around 8000 BC, when man was ceasing in certain favoured areas to live by hunting and gathering and had begun to farm.
Modern man, homo sapiens sapiens, is much older than the Sumerians, of course, and his hominid ancestors — those to whom he is recognisably related in size, carriage and capabilities — so much older again that the time distance which separates them from us cannot easily be invested with meaning. One historian, J.M. Roberts, who has tried to chart prehistory — the aeons before writing — in a way that has graphic sense, suggests that we think of the birth of Christ as an event that happened twenty minutes ago, of the appearance of the Sumerians as forty minutes earlier, the establishment in western Europe of ‘recognisable human beings of a modern physiological type’ five or six hours before that and the appearance of ‘creatures with some manlike characteristics’ two to three weeks from the present.63
The history of warfare begins with writing, but its prehistory cannot be ignored. Prehistorians are as sharply divided as anthropologists by the issue of whether man — and ‘pre-man’ — was violent toward his own species or not. It is a dangerous debate to enter, but we must at least see what they are arguing about. The debate may be said to begin with the differentiation of social roles between male and female. Australopithecus, an ancestor of man of whom traces have been found from perhaps as long ago as 5,000,000 years and who has left verifiable traces of his existence 1,500,000 years old, appears to have taken food from the place where it was found to the place where it was eaten, perhaps to have made a shelter at the eating-place and certainly to have fashioned and used the first tool, a roughly flaked and therefore edged pebble. Excavations in the Olduvai gorge in Tanzania have revealed the bones of animals smashed for the extraction of marrow and brain.
It has been suggested that the offspring of Australopithecus lost the capacity to cling to its mother for long periods, while she roamed abroad with her mate as nursing primates usually do, and that the eating-place was therefore a home to which the males brought food. In homo erectus, who descended from Australopithecus about 400,000 years ago, this trend was heightened. The size of its brain and therefore head greatly increased, without proportionate increase in body size before birth. The infant homo erectus remained immature for much longer than Australopithecus had done, in consequence, thus tying its mother more tightly to the feeding-place; the skeletal change the female underwent to accommodate the larger head in pregnancy further unfitted her to range with food-gatherers. It has been suggested that it was at this stage of evolution that females underwent loss of oestrus — fertility only at restricted periods, as in all other mammals — and became attractive to males at all times; they were therefore more likely to be singled out as — and themselves to single out — long-term mates and to avoid, or to be forbidden, sexual relations with close blood relations. It seems certain that loss of oestrus, by liberating the female from the frenzy of the rut, allowed her to persist in the careful maternity which her slow-maturing, large-brained offspring needed to grow to adulthood.
This, at any rate, is one explanation of the growth of the family unit, of its needs for shelter and transported food, and of its solidarity. Homo erectus has left us traces of his family and perhaps his social life, according to Roberts, in relics of ‘constructed dwellings (huts, sometimes fifty feet long, built of branches with stone-slab or skin floors), the earliest worked wood, the first wooden spear and the earliest container, a wooden bowl’.64 This, of course, from a time when he not only gathered edible roots, leaves, fruits, grubs, but also hunted small and large mammals, in an environment of climate fluctuations that drew game animals across an enormously wide range of territory as vegetation flourished or withered with the advance and retreat of the ice-sheets.
These fluctuations were spaced at vast intervals in time — four intermissions have been identified in an ice age that lasted 1,000,000 years and ended only some 10,000 years ago — and many small human groups must have failed to survive changes in their environment and died out. Some, nevertheless, adapted, learnt the use of fire, and acquired the skills — probably cooperative skills — to trap and kill very large mammals that would provide food for many. It is supposed that hunting-parties combined to drive elephants, rhinoceroses or mammoths over cliffs or into swamps, where they would die from their injuries or from cumulative wounding by early man’s primitive weapons.65
The earliest stone tools to be found could not have been used as weapons of the chase, and therefore certainly not of war. Australopithecus’s
was a hand-held pebble, roughly chipped to give it a cutting-edge. Chipping, however, produces flakes — particularly from flint, identified early as the most rewarding stone with which to work — and once man had identified that both nucleus and flakes were valuable he began to produce the two deliberately. As his skill increased, and he learnt to use first a stone anvil and then a bone point as a pressure tool, he was able to fashion large tool-heads and fine, long blades, sharpened where needed on both edges. These indeed provided hunting-weapons, the spear point for throwing or thrusting and the axe-head for dismembering fallen carcasses. Tools of this refinement are found in sites dated to the end of the Old Stone Age, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
Those were violent times, as were the hundreds of thousands of years in which man pitted himself against large animals. At Arene Candide, in Italy, has been found the skeleton of a young man who died at the end of the Old Stone Age, at least 10,000 years ago. Part of his lower jaw, his collar-bone and the shoulder-blade, together with the top of the thigh bone, had been carried away by the bites of a large, savage animal, perhaps a bear which had been cornered in a pit or cave that the hunters dug or adapted as a trap. The wounds had been inflicted in life, for the body had been carefully buried, with a cosmetic application of clay or yellow ochre over the damaged parts.66 The victim may have been unlucky in a bear drive, for the discovery of a flint point in the skull of a bear found at Trieste, and dated to the last interglacial period 100,000 years ago, indicated that Neanderthal man, homo sapiens sapiens’s ancestor, had already learnt how to fix a blade into a handle at right-angles and to deliver a skull-smashing blow from close quarters.67 From the same period dates a spear of yew wood found lodged in the ribs of an elephant killed in Schleswig-Holstein, while the pelvis of a Neanderthal skeleton excavated in Palestine bears the unmistakable trace of a deep penetration by a spear point.
All this suggests that man the hunter was brave and skilful. There was, suggest the prehistorians Breuil and Lautier, no
great abyss separating [him] from the animal. The bonds between them were not yet broken, and man still felt near the beasts that lived around him, that killed and fed like him … From them he still retained all the faculties that civilisation has blunted — rapid action and highly trained senses of sight, hearing and smell, physical toughness in an extreme degree, a detailed, precise knowledge of the qualities and habits of game, and great skill in using with the greatest effect the rudimentary weapons available.68
These, of course, are the qualities of the warrior across the ages, which modern military training-schools of Special Forces seek to re-implant in their pupils at the cost of much time and money. The modern soldiers learn to hunt to live; but did the prehistoric hunters fight men? The evidence is scant and often contradictory.
The Neanderthal pelvis with the spear wound is no evidence at all, since it might have been inflicted by accident among a hunting-party in the tumult of the kill; everyone who handles weapons knows that the most dangerous ones are those held by immediate neighbours. Does the wonderful cave art which began to appear during the last ice age, some 35,000 years ago, offer any proof of man’s inhumanity to man in what was still a hunting culture? All the human inhabitants of the earth were by then homo sapiens sapiens, who had appeared only some 5000 years earlier but rapidly supplanted the Neanderthals in a way which no prehistorian has succeeded in explaining. Several thousand cave paintings have been found at sites all over the world — dating from a time when the human population was under a million — and in 130 of the earliest, which may be 35,000 years old, there are representations of man or man-like beings. Some interpreters of the paintings believe that they show dead or dying men; some also think that the reverently depicted animals bear spear, dart or arrow symbols. Others disagree; the majority of the human figures shown are in peaceful scenes, while the arrow symbols may be of ‘sexual significance — or meaningless doodles’.69
The men of the Old Stone Age, in any case, had not yet invented the bow.70 At the beginning of the New Stone Age, however, some 10,000 years ago, there occurred ‘a revolution in weapons technology … four staggeringly powerful new weapons make their appearance … the bow, the sling, the dagger … and the mace’. The last three were refinements of weapons already in existence: the mace derived from the club, the dagger from the spear point and the sling from the bolas, the last a pair of stones covered with leather and joined by a thong, thrown to entangle the legs of deer or bison which had been herded into a killing-place.71 The atlatl, or spear-throwing lever, was probably also an indirect precursor of the sling, since it worked by the same principle. The bow, however, was a real departure. It may be seen as the first machine, since it employed moving parts and translated muscular into mechanical energy. How the men of the New Stone Age hit upon it we cannot guess, though it spread very rapidly once invented; why they did so has most probably to do with the progressive retreat of the last ice-sheets. The warming of the temperate zones completely changed the movement and migration patterns of the hunters’ prey, abolishing the old pelagic areas where game was predictably found, and, by liberating animals to roam and feed further and more widely, forced the hunter and the hunting-party to find a means of bringing down a more fleeting target over longer ranges.
The simple bow, as the original is called, is a piece of homogeneous wood, typically a length of sapling, and it lacks the opposed properties of elasticity and compression that gave the later composite and long bows, made of both sapwood and heartwood, their greater carrying and penetrative power. Even in its simple form, however, the bow transformed the relationship of man with the animal world. He no longer had to close to arm’s length to dispatch his prey, pitting at the last moment flesh against flesh, life against life. Henceforth he could kill at a distance. In that departure ethologists like Lorenz and Ardrey perceive the opening of a new moral dimension in man’s relations with the rest of creation but also with his own kind. Was man the archer also man the first warrior?
Cave art of the New Stone Age undoubtedly shows us scenes of bowmen apparently opposed in conflict. Arthur Ferrill claims to perceive in the painting from caves in the Spanish Levant roots of battlefield tactics, with warriors forming columns behind a chief, shooting arrows in a ranked formation and even practising an outflanking movement in an encounter between what he calls the ‘army of four’ and the ‘army of three’. It should be clear from what we know about both the Yanomamö (who knew the bow even though they did not fashion stone) and the Maring that all three scenes are explicable in terms of the formal displays of force they practise. The Yanomamö chief, for example, produces his bow and threatens club fighters with it when violence takes a dangerous turn. The Maring shoot arrows from the rear in both ‘nothing’ and ‘true’ fights, but at distances which threaten little harm to anyone; the apparent proximity of the archers of the ‘armies’ of both ‘four’ and ‘three’ has less to do with reality than with the cave artists’ treatment of perspective.
If we are to think of the bowmen of the New Stone Age as prototypical of the hunters who still survive in the modern world, it is certainly not safe to invest them with strong warrior qualities; it is equally unsafe to argue that they were peaceful people. Ethnographers who have devoted themselves to the study of some still-existent groups are champions of the view that hunting-gathering is compatible with an admirably pacific social code, and that the former may indeed foster the latter. The San (Bushmen) of the South African Kalahari Desert are commonly held up as models of unassertive gentleness, and a similar claim has been made for the Semai who seclude themselves in the Malaysian jungle.72 The trouble, however, with attempting to argue backward from the characteristics of surviving hunters to the behaviour of our common ancestors is that the survivors are probably very unlike Stone Age men. The Semai, for example, supplement hunting with crop-raising, a means of subsistence unknown in the times of cave art, while the Bushmen are unquestionably ‘marginalised’: they have been thrust into the arid zone
s they now inhabit by the advance of the cattle-herding Bantu and they may owe their evasive and uncontentious habits to a decision not to attract the attention of their aggressive neighbours.
