by Ian Morris
I find that nothing brings out patterns quite like a good chart, and I think that Table 2.1 shows nicely how the story played out across the lucky latitudes. Domestication of plants and animals typically began in a region two to three thousand years after cultivation had begun, and walled cities, godlike kings, pyramid-shaped monuments, writing, and bureaucracy typically made their appearance three to four thousand years after domestication (around 2800 B.C. in what is now Pakistan, 1900 B.C. in China, and 200 B.C. in Peru and Mexico).
Table 2.1. Caging and the evolution of military affairs, 10,000–1 B.C. Military developments are in italics and social ones in roman type. The lines linking development are there purely to make the stages clearer, not to imply links between areas.
Table 2.1 also reveals that developments tended to cluster, showing up in packages. Within the Old World, that was very much the case with the invention of bronze arms and armor. This, the second revolutionary change within the broader evolution of military affairs, generally arrived at roughly the same time as fortifications, cities, and governments. Craftsmen in southwest Asia had begun tinkering with copper, making pretty ornaments, as early as 7000 B.C. (just five hundred years after domestication really got going), although it was not until about 3300 B.C. that they learned to make real bronze, mixing copper with tin or arsenic to produce metal hard enough to be useful for arms and armor. Bronzeworking took off in the Fertile Crescent right around the time Leviathan really got going in Uruk. There was probably a connection: bronze also appears in South and East Asia right at the same time as cities and states. (The story was rather different in the Americas, and I will come back to it in Chapter 3.)
Using metal on the battlefield seems to have led directly into a third revolution, which once again happened earliest in the Fertile Crescent. It is one thing to have a spear with a bronze point, but it is another altogether to have the intestinal fortitude to walk right up to someone and stick it in him, especially while he and hundreds of his friends are trying to stick their spears into you. Getting the most out of metal called for the invention of military discipline, the art of persuading soldiers to stand their ground and follow orders.
This was arguably the most important of all the ancient revolutions in military affairs. A disciplined army is as different from an undisciplined rabble as the Thrilla in Manila8 is from two drunks mauling each other in a bar. Soldiers who will close and kill when told to or storm high walls despite boiling oil, falling rocks, and showers of arrows will usually beat those who will not. The evolution of somewhat-reliable command and control, formations that would maneuver more or less as ordered, and men who would usually do what they were told changed everything.
Unfortunately, archaeologists cannot dig discipline up. But even though actual evidence for disciplined troops only appears several centuries later, it seems logical to suspect that they in fact began appearing around the same time as centralized governments and that it was at this point (around 3300 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, 2800 B.C. in the Indus Valley, and 1900 B.C. in China) that wars began to be settled by pitched battles as much as by raids and sieges. Persuading young men to follow orders in life-threatening situations was one of Leviathan’s first great achievements—even if, thanks to the lack of hard data, just how prehistoric chiefs did it remains among the least-understood questions in archaeology.
The first tangible evidence comes from art. Stone Age cave paintings, some of them as much as ten thousand years old, regularly represent gaggles of men firing arrows and tossing spears at each other (Figure 2.5), but the Vulture Stele (Figure 2.6), a Sumerian limestone relief carved around 2450 B.C., is very different. It shows dense, apparently disciplined ranks of infantrymen with helmets, spears, and large shields, led by King Eannatum of Lagash. The men of Lagash are trampling on dead enemies, and an accompanying inscription says that Eannatum had won a pitched battle against the city of Umma, which had occupied some of Lagash’s farmland. Eannatum subsequently incorporated Umma and much of the rest of Sumer into his kingdom.
Figure 2.5. Crying havoc: chaotic fighting in a prehistoric cave painting from Los Dogues rock shelter in Spain, dating between 10,000 and 5000 B.C.
Figure 2.6. The birth of discipline: this relief carving, known as the Vulture Stele and made at Lagash (in what is now Iraq) around 2450 B.C., is the oldest known representation of soldiers drawn up in regular ranks.
Sumerians apparently instilled enough discipline and esprit de corps into their fighting men to settle wars with decisive battles, getting up close regardless of the risk, rather than raiding and running away in the time-honored tradition. In the 2330s, King Sargon of Akkad could even boast of the “5,400 men I made to eat before me each day,” apparently referring to a standing army. His subjects provided food, wool, and weapons so his troops could train full-time.
Wild warriors were being turned into disciplined soldiers. Modern military professionals have elevated loyalty, honor, and duty into cardinal virtues, far removed from the humdrum selfishness of civilian life, and while the discipline of Sargon’s soldiers would probably not have impressed Caesar’s centurions, the kind of man who would die before disgracing his regiment probably made his first tentative appearance in third-millennium Sumer and Akkad.
The results are very clear. Akkad conquered most of what is now Iraq, winning battles against Lagash, Ur, and Umma and pulling down their walls. Sargon set up governors, fortified Syria, and campaigned as far as the Caucasus and the Mediterranean. His grandson even crossed the Persian Gulf, where, an inscription says, “the cities on the other side of the sea, thirty-two, combined for the battle. But he was victorious and conquered their cities, kill[ing] their princes.”
Like Rome two thousand years later, Sargon’s city of Akkad went on to grow rich trading with India, and if the Indus Valley did not have armies with some kind of discipline before 2300 B.C., it probably learned of them now. It has proved particularly difficult, though, to document the rise of such armies in third-millennium South Asia. In fact, the bottom of Table 2.1 reveals that something rather more complicated was going on here. In the third millennium B.C., the Indus Valley had been the second region in the world to come up with cities, governments, fortifications, and bronze weapons, several centuries behind the Fertile Crescent but several centuries ahead of East Asia. By the first millennium B.C., though, South Asia had fallen into third place, well behind East Asia.
In a superficial sense, we know what happened: Indus Valley civilization collapsed around 1900 B.C. Its cities were abandoned, and people turned their backs on Leviathan, shattering the apparently smooth progression in Table 2.1. Nearly a thousand years would pass before cities and governments would reappear in South Asia, this time in the plains of the Ganges rather than the Indus, and by then China, which experienced no such collapse, had pulled ahead.
What we don’t know is why Indus civilization collapsed. We cannot (yet) read the few texts that have survived, and given the continuing challenges involved in excavating in Pakistan, the evidence remains thin. In the late 1940s, when former military men ruled the archaeological roost, it was generally agreed that Aryan invaders, described in later Indian epics, had destroyed the Indus cities. By the 1980s, at the height of Coming of Age-ism, the general agreement was that they had not, and new culprits—climate change, internal rebellions, economic breakdown—were fingered. In the enlightened 2010s, we have to admit that we simply do not know.
I will have a lot more to say about how Leviathans break down as this book goes on, but I do want to dwell for a moment on the Indus collapse four thousand years ago. If, instead of sitting at my desk in California in A.D. 2013, I had written this book in South Asia around 1500 B.C., I might well have concluded that war was good for absolutely nothing. All around me, I would have been able to see the lost cities of the Indus civilization decaying into mounds of mud, haunted by spirits and shepherds. Maybe war made us safer and richer for a while, I might have said, but then it stopped.
Yet
if I had been writing around 500 B.C. (still in South Asia), and if I had known about the lost Indus civilization, I might have reached a very different conclusion. By 500 B.C., the rising states of the Ganges Valley were as remarkable in their own way as the Indus cities had been fifteen hundred years earlier. The obvious implication of this pattern would have seemed to be that productive war was real but cyclical. Out of chaos, Leviathan brought order, only to set off a reaction that returned the world to anarchy. That, however, called forth another Leviathan—and on it would go, in an endless oscillation between order and chaos.
But then again, if I had been writing around 250 B.C., in Ashoka’s heyday, I would surely feel (again, if I had complete knowledge of the past) that I had reached a deeper insight. Yes, I would concede to the me of a quarter of a millennium earlier, productive war is cyclical; but it works in waves, each one cresting higher than the last. Yes, I would go on, the Indus civilization was extraordinary; and yes, the collapse after 1900 B.C. was terrible. But the Mauryan Empire is more extraordinary still. Productive war works.
Armed with this understanding, if I had been reincarnated one last time another 250 years later, I would not have despaired when I looked upon Ashoka’s works. The Mauryan Empire had fallen, like the Indus civilization before it, and its vast territory had been shared out among squabbling princes. But I would remain confident about the future. Leviathan had taken a step back but—just as had happened when the Mauryans filled the shoes of the fallen Indus civilization—would soon take two more steps forward.
What can we learn from this thought experiment? One tempting interpretation is that everything is relative; whether productive war exists at all, or is cyclical, or keeps moving forward depends entirely on the perspective from which we look at it. But that, I think, would be an overhasty conclusion. The real lesson of the last few millennia B.C. in South Asia is that the magic worked by productive war, making humanity safer and richer, only operates over the very long run. Theorizing about how war works over a timescale of millennia would surely have seemed like a cruel joke to the real people killing and being killed in ancient South Asia; once again, the moral implications of the long-term history of war are unsettling. But the evidence keeps pointing us back toward the same paradoxical hypothesis. War has made humanity safer and richer.
Chariots of Fire
South Asia was not the only place where collapses interrupted productive war. As early as 3100 B.C., in fact, something similar might have happened in Sumer. The evidence is obscure, but the control that the city of Uruk had built up now broke down. Uruk itself burned, and for centuries southwest Asia was divided into warring city-states. Around 2200 B.C., an even bigger upheaval came around, shattering both Sargon’s Akkadian Empire and Old Kingdom Egypt and even sending ripples of disaster out all across the Mediterranean. There might have been similar (albeit smaller) collapses in China around the same time. The precise causes of these breakdowns are hotly debated, but matters gradually become clearer after 2000 B.C. At this point, we begin to see that revolutions in military affairs could themselves be the causes of massive destabilization.
The fourth great revolution in military affairs began not in the glittering cities of the Fertile Crescent or Indus Valley but on the arid steppes of what is now Ukraine. Hunters here had managed to domesticate wild horses back around 4000 B.C. Like the men who had domesticated cattle, sheep, and pigs in the lucky latitudes, these herders originally just wanted a more secure supply of meat. Around 3300 B.C., though, they had a bright idea. On the steppes, being able to move quickly from one watering hole to another was often a matter of life and death; by yoking their small horses to wagons, herders vastly increased their mobility and chances of survival.
Further improvements accumulated, and by 2100 B.C. herders in modern Kazakhstan had bred bigger, leggier horses and trained them to pull lighter carts. These horses were still much smaller than most modern breeds, but the light carts they pulled—chariots—were a hit. Traders and/or migrants (probably a little-known group called the Hurrians) brought them across the Caucasus Mountains into the Fertile Crescent around 1900 B.C. At first they were used just for transport, but once they had been adapted into fighting platforms—which took a century or two—they revolutionized productive war.
Despite the way they are often portrayed in sword-and-sandals epics, chariots were not tanks crashing through enemy lines. They were difficult to drive and fragile too (by the fourteenth century, they might have weighed less than a hundred pounds), and horses are in any case terrified to charge disciplined infantry who stand firm. What chariots had going for them was not mass but speed (Figure 2.7). Light chariots, carrying two or three armored men (a driver, an archer, and sometimes a shield bearer), could turn plodding foot soldiers into arrow fodder. So thick was the air with their fire, the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata claimed, that “the sun disappeared behind arrows shot back and forth.”
Figure 2.7. Speed king: Egypt’s pharaoh Ramses II, riding down his enemies at Kadesh, the biggest chariot battle in history (1274 B.C.)
Chipped stone arrowheads found in South African caves show that people have been using bows for more than sixty thousand years. So far as we can tell, though, archers got by until nearly 2000 B.C. with what modern specialists call the self bow, a single stave of wood strung with animal gut. Since wooden bows rarely survive for archaeologists to excavate, the details are foggy, but at some point—perhaps on the central Asian steppes—bowyers began laminating two or more strips of different woods together to increase the weapon’s power. Inventiveness then accelerated, and by 1600 B.C. a new type, the composite bow, was in use in the Fertile Crescent. Instead of producing a simple stave, craftsmen now started curving the bow tips forward, allowing the archer to produce far more force. Most self bows had an effective range of less than a hundred yards, but composite bows could shoot four times as far, driving arrows hard enough to penetrate everything except metal armor.
The composite bow might also have been invented on the steppes, and it might even have entered the lucky latitudes along with the chariot. But whatever the details, the chariot-plus-composite-bow package transformed the battlefield. Initially, charioteers probably had a secondary role, firing arrows at enemy infantry to disrupt their formations before spearmen delivered the final blow, but chariots proved so effective that rulers gradually stopped deploying large masses of infantry at all. Battles came to be decided almost entirely by “the chariot fighters [who] circle each other on their chariots, loosing arrows as nimbly as clouds let go their water streams” (the Mahabharata again).
Battlefields had been gruesome enough before the seventeenth century B.C., with thousands of infantrymen pushing and shoving, stabbing bronze spears above enemy shields into throats and faces or below them into thighs and groins. Big battles left hundreds dead and even more hundreds dying slowly—“some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left,” as Shakespeare would one day put it. “I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle.” By 1600 B.C., though, a whole new level of horror had been added. Horses were bigger targets than men and usually unarmored. The fastest ways to stop a chariot were either to shoot its horses or for men with nerves of bronze to stand firm as the vehicle thundered past and then leap out to hamstring or disembowel the horses from behind. (Skirmishers carried nasty, sickle-shaped knives specifically for this purpose.) For the next three and a half thousand years, right into the twentieth century A.D., Eurasian battlefields would be choked as much with mute, bleeding horseflesh as with shrieking, bleeding humans.9
Chariots took several centuries longer to spread from the Kazakh steppes to China but got there around 1200 B.C. and got to India (still recovering from the Indus collapse) by 600 B.C. In each part of Eurasia’s lucky latitudes, chariots arrived as they had in the Fertile Crescent, brought by immigrants and traders from central Asia (from the Mediterranean t
o the China Sea, the design of chariots was virtually identical, indicating their shared origin). In each place, chariots answered the same military need for mobility and firepower, and in each place they had similarly chaotic consequences.
It is perhaps part of human nature that organizations that work well with one way of doing things sometimes seem reluctant to embrace a new way, and this certainly seems to be what happened with chariots. In the Fertile Crescent the early adapters were not great kingdoms like Egypt and Babylon; they were smaller, marginal groups such as the Kassites, Hittites, and Hyksos, who—starting around 1700 B.C.—defeated, looted, and sometimes even overthrew the rulers of richer states. Similarly, in China, the Shang dynasty was brought down in 1046 B.C. by more chariot-friendly Zhou tribes. However, it was only when the biggest, wealthiest states finally embraced chariots (around 1600 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, 1000 B.C. in China, and 400 B.C. in India) that their real golden age began. This was because only rich states could afford to use chariots properly.
Chariots were expensive. According to the Bible, Israel’s King Solomon paid 600 silver shekels for each chariot and a further 150 for each horse, at a time when slaves were valued at just 30 shekels. A fourteenth-century text from the Hittite Empire gives us some idea of what cost so much, with a day-by-day account of a seven-month training program required for chariot horses.
