THE ORIGINS OF WAR Arther THE ORIGINS OF Ferrill with 68 illustrations, maps and battle plans WAR FROM THE STONE AGE TO ALEXANDER THE GREAT REVISED EDITION A Member of the Perseus Books Group To Gretchen and Chester Starr In Admiration and Affection History and "Warfare HALF-TITLE PAGE: The origins of war can be traced back into prehistory; These Neolithic Spanish archers appear to be wearing some kind of protection (early armor?), probably made of leather, for their chests, loins and knees, TITLE PAGE: Ramesses II in his war chariot at the battle of Kadesh fe. 1285 BC). All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © 1997 by Westview Press, A Member erf the Perseus Books Group Published in 1997 in the United States of America by Vfetview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877. First published in 1985 by Thames and Hudson Ltd, Lon- don. © 1985 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubiication Data Ferrill, Arther. The origins of war ; from the Stone Age to Alexander the Great / Arther Feiritl.—Rev. ed. p. an,—(History and warfare) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8133-3302-4 (pbk.) 1. Military history, Ancient. 2. Military art and science— History. I. Title, 0. Series. U29.F47 1997 355',QG5>3—dc21 97-1420 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z3S.4S-1984. 10 9 8 7 6 5 PERSEUS POD ON DEMAND Contents Preface to the Revised Edition 6 Preface 7 1 Prehistoric Warfare 9 2 Ancient Near Eastern Warfare: the Copper-Bronze Age 33 3 Assyria and Persia: the Age of Iron 65 4 Classical Greek Warfare 91 5 The Military Revolution 149 6 Alexander the Great and the Origins of Modern War 187 Notes 224 Selected Bibliography 233 Illustration Credits 235 Index 236 5 Preface to the Revised Edition This book has been in print for more than z decade, and I am grateful to Westview Press and to Peter Kracht for keeping it available in the History and Warfare Series. The revised bibliography contains some important items that appeared after the original publication of The Qrigi»$ of War but there t are no changes in the text. Much has been written in the past ten years on prehistoric warfare, yet present scholarship confirms the view set forth in this book that prehistoric man was a warrior long before the emergence of civilization. If I were to rewrite the book today, I would state my thesis even more strongly. When the book was first published, I was afraid that the final section, enti- tled "Alexander at Waterloo: His Place in the History of Warfare," would seem fanciful. In fact, it has received considerable favorable attention, and I continue to believe its validity. Ancient warriors carried warfare to a high level of skill, and until the dramatic changes in the delivery of firepower in the last half of the nineteenth century, the best ancient armies would have held their own on any battlefield. Arther Ferrill 6 Preface There is an inevitable quaintness about ancient warfare, an element of romance and glory, of bloodshed and savagery, the use of bows and arrows, of cavalry without stirrups, of slings, spears, swords and javelins, all of which give it a fairy-tale aura of limitless antiquity and almost total irrelevancy to modern times. In fact, the high degree of sophistication attained in ancient warfare is rarely given its due, except for the way in which ancient armies shaped the fate of rising and falling empires. Although ancient warriors did fight without benefit of stirrups and gunpowder, one of the themes of this book is that the developments that led to the tactically integrated army of Alexander the Great laid the foundation and shaped the practice of modern warfare down to the time of Napoleon. Western medieval armies could not have held their ground in the face of Alexander's attack. Even the introduction of gunpowder led to remarkably few changes in the practice of warfare until the rifled infantry weapon became standard in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the final chapter I shall try to show how the commonplace features of Alexander's generalship, had they been applied on the field by his admirer, Napoleon, would have led to a French victory at Waterloo, At the beginning of this century Hans Delbriick opened his History of the Art of War Within the Framework of Political History with the observation that military history begins with the history of man, but that the military historian should not start 'at the point when the first more or less recognizable events begin to emerge from the twilight of the prehistoric era, but rather at the point where the source material begins to provide a full and valid glimpse into the events.' For Delbruck that meant the Persian Wars, and probably in 1900 his view was justified. But the present century has seen so much advancement in our knowledge of prehistory and the ancient Near East that now, as 7 Preface we approach the end of the century, Delbtitck's attitude is no longer valid. It is, however, still widely practised; General Sir John Hackett's justly acclaimed and recently published book, The Profession of Arms (1983), begins with Spartan warfare. Furthermore, the tendency to begin military history with Greek heavy infantry, the so-called hoplite phalanx, has led to significant misunderstanding of the main features of ancient military history. In the period before Alexander there were two independent lines of military development. One of them starts in the Late Palaeolithic and extends down through prehistoric times to Egypt and Mesopotamia and culminates in the empires of Assyria and Persia. Another begins in Greece around 700 BC with the emergence of the hoplite phalanx at a time when Greece was isolated from developments in the Near East. For 2,00 years these two lines evolved side by side but apart from one another, and they started tentatively to come together during the Persian Wars of the early fifth century. Greece learned much about the use of cavalry, skirmishers, and light infantry from Persia, and Persia learned the use of heavy infantry from Greece, until finally, Philip and Alexander blended the best of the two traditions and carried military strategy and tactics to a point rarely achieved and much less often exceeded by generals down to the time of Napoleon. I have tried in this book to look at war generally in terms of actual combat on land and sea. As a result readers can expect to find little here on the 'causes' of war or on the broader political, economic and social results. The omission is not intended as a reflection on the historical importance of causes and results, but my purpose in this book has been, wherever possible, to elucidate the less frequently analyzed, more purely military, aspects of war. I owe thanks to a large number of friends and colleagues. Fritz Levy read each chapter and offered many valuable and judicious comments that have made this a better book, as did Captain Michael Byrne of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Carol Thomas, Solomon Katz, Jon Bridgman, Maclyn Burg, Donald Treadgold and Scott Lytle each read some of the chapters, Chester Starr and Thomas Kelly, to whom I owe so much, responded willingly, as they always do, when I asked for help. Finally, Kathleen Harrison did a superb job of typing. Arther Ferrill 8 Chapter One Prehistoric Warfare What is War? *! am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine, , , . War is hell.' WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, 19 June 1879 And so it is - vividly so for those of my friends who suffered, some of them horribly, in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam, 'I can still hear the horses screaming,* says a veteran of the campaign against Hitler. The Germans had used horses from the beginning of World War II, but, as the war ground to an end, and fuel was scarce, they began to rely even more heavily on the animals for transporting artillery. The sounds of the dying horses reverberated over the battlefields. Reflections of intensely personal human feelings, of pain and tragedy, darken the pages of modern warfare. Cavalie Mercer, a captain of artillery, remembered some years after the battle of Waterloo how the loud, shrill agony of a gunner whose arm had just been shattered struck him 'to the very soul'.1 A sentence from John Keegan's masterpiece of military history, The Face of Battle (1976), describing the 'disaster' of Waterloo, summarizes the 'hellishness' of war with an eloquence vivid in its portrayal of reality: 'Within a space of about two square miles of open, waterless, treeless and almost uninhabited countryside, which had been covered at early morning by standing crops, lay by nightfall the bodies of forty thousand human beings and ten thousand horses, many of them alive and suffering dreadfully,*2 We shall often have occasion in the pages of this book to examine ancient warfare in the light of Waterloo. Napoleon and the Iron Duke fought the last battle between major powers in the history of warfare in which Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) would not have been out of place. To be sure, the introduction of the stirrup in the Early Middle Ages and of gunpowder in the Late Middle Ages made some 9