The Handy Military History Answer Book. Samuel Willard Crompton

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      Who cast the first stone (of human history)?

      How historians wish they knew! They could, then, cast all the blame and attribute all the subsequent mayhem to that person. But he remains anonymous to us.

      Are we quite sure that it was a “he” or “him”?

      Historians are not one hundred percent certain, but it seems very likely. Women are not inherently more moral or altruistic than men, but throughout human history they have shown much less propensity for settling matters by means of armed combat.

      This does not mean women have not figured in the history of war, however. Far from it. Our best surmise is that many ancient battles and skirmishes—those which took place before the development of writing—may have been fought over who possessed the land, animals, and not so incidentally, women.

      Can historians assign any sort of date to the beginning of armed combat?

      They really can’t. Archeologists examine Stone Age tools, such as the Acheulan Axe, for clues, but we cannot be certain whether they were used in human-on-human combat or for scraping the skin from animals. What we can say, with some confidence, is that nearly all the things—or aspects—that we today identify with being human had evolved around 50,000 years ago and that it is quite likely that there was some armed combat by that time.

      As to the age-old question of whether humans are naturally competitive or naturally cooperative, we cannot render any firm assessment. Both traits clearly exist within the great majority of humans, and it may be a matter of circumstance which trait is dominant at any place or time.

      Is there any truth to the belief that precivilized warfare was largely ritual in nature?

      Much of it probably was. Chiefs and shamans may well have organized the first battles of human history and done so in a way that minimized casualties. That does not lessen the impact of conflict in the lives of our ancestors, however. Some of them survived, and quite a few died in a time that has been accurately characterized as “red in tooth and claw” (the expression was coined by the nineteenth-century English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson).

      What tools, or weapons, did ancient peoples use?

      Between about 50,000 years ago and about 10,000 years ago, weapons were limited to the bone knife, the stone axe, and the throwing spear, known as the atlatal. By the time humans began settling into farming communities, however, roughly 10,000 years ago, their capacity for building larger, more effective weapons was apparent. At the same time, early farmers may have had fewer conflicts than nomadic peoples.

FIRST SETTLEMENTS

      Where did humans first settle on the land?

      There may have been some early human settlements in China and Meso-America, but the first truly successful settlements seem to have been in the Middle East. The area was cooler and drier than it is today, and a proliferation of plants and seeds made it an attractive place to settle. To the best of our knowledge, the area historians call the Fertile Crescent, ranging from southern Iraq to southern Turkey and northern Syria, was the first place where long-term human settlement succeeded.

      Is there any truth to the biblical stories of a Great Flood and the disappearance of most of the human race?

      That there was a Great Flood seems undeniable, because stories of the inundation appear in many tribal and national histories. It seems unlikely that it wiped out all the humans because if it did, we would not, today, possess the rich variety of DNA samples that geneticists use to trace human lineage. The idea that a God or gods would wipe out the “other” humans, leaving the more virtuous ones in control of the earth, is as old as civilization itself.

      On balance, it seems that many—if not most—human groups have asserted that “God is on my side,” and that he or she is against the enemy. The trouble with this thought, is, of course, that the enemy is saying and thinking the same thing. Given that one contestant usually prevails, God or gods cannot answer the prayers of both.

      Is there anything to the Homeric tales of Greece and Troy?

      For a very long time, scholars believed that Homer—a blind, Greek poet who composed poetry in the eighth century B.C.E.—had invented the Trojan War. In 1871, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) unearthed not one but seven levels of civilization on a Turkish hillside near the Aegean Sea. Although no single piece of evidence has ever emerged with the name “Troy” or “Trojan,” scholars generally believe that there is some truth to the Homeric tales.

      A seventeenth-century painting by Anton Mozart depicts what one of the battles of the Trojan War might have looked like.

      Where Homer lets us—his modern readers—down, time and again, is in his lack of detail concerning the average soldier; and civilian. To Homer, war was about the heroes, men like Achilles, Ajax, Hector, Paris, and even old King Priam. Homer tells us almost nothing about the struggles of the average soldier; historians do not even know what he looked like. Even so, most people who read Homer—whether in the original Greek or in translation—agree that he had a magnificent bird’s eye view of war, that he “saw” the battlefield better than any of his contemporaries.

      Does archaeology tell us anything about the Greeks from that time?

      It was, again, Heinrich Schliemann who did much of the work. Schliemann is often called the man that modern-day archaeologists love to hate, because his digs were so sloppy. He was in far too much of a hurry to get beneath the soil, and once there he dug so ferociously that thousands of artifacts were destroyed or lost. But we can thank Schliemann, first for discovering Hissarlik—the hillside in modern-day Turkey—and then for unearthing much of the Mycenaean civilization on the Greek mainland.

       Is there a reason why so many great archaeological discoveries were made during the nineteenth century?

      Literary scholars—who study the Old Testament and the works of such authors as Homer and Hesiod—led the way, but it was the men with their hands in the dirt—the nineteenth-century archaeologists—who made the most astonishing discoveries. A Frenchman found the ruins of ancient Assyria, an Englishman deciphered the Old Persian inscriptions on Darius’ rock in present-day Iran, and a German found what may have been the city of Troy and what was most certainly Mycenae.

      At Mycenae, Schliemann unearthed enormous tombs, a throne room, and a suggestion of just how impressive the Mycenaean civilization was. His discoveries, naturally, led to another question: What happened to Mycenae and its people? To the best of our knowledge, they were overthrown by wild men from distant places: the barbaric folk that we often call the Sea Peoples.

      What these men—and perhaps a score of others from that time—had in common was a classical education and a lot of time. Some were men of leisure and others had acquired their wealth the hard way, but they all believed the ancient world more fascinating than their own and were determined to ferret out its most remarkable ruins. Today there are far more archaeologists in the field, but few of them get to experience the amazing discoveries available to nineteenth-century amateurs, who literally turned studies of the ancient world on their heads.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE

      How was bronze superior to СКАЧАТЬ