Tag: Bronze Age

[Bronze Age] composite bows were also notoriously expensive. Such a bow was a very effective weapon, having double or triple the range of a self bow, but its manufacture was costly and difficult (the layering and lamination of wood, horn, and sinew was done at long intervals, and a properly aged bow would leave a bowyer’s shop five or ten years after he had brought in the raw materials from which it was made).

— The End of the Bronze Age, p. 110

The few demigods, such as Aineias, who receive miraculous rescue [in the Iliad] are saved only by the direct intervention of a patron divinity, not by any special ingredient of their own semidivine nature. The flesh of the demigods is wholly vulnerable, the blood is the blood of mortals, the pain of injury that of ordinary mortal men, as is the inevitability of death. Nothing the men have inherited from their divine parents is itself protective; what saves them is the physical removal from the danger of the battlefield. The vividly evoked vulnerability of demigods such as Aineias will also have bearing upon the nature, and limitations, of the epic’s most outstanding demigod—Achilles.

— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 4

The Olympians of the Iliad know everything about the mortals they look down upon; Zeus himself is eurúopa, “far-seeing,” a direct legacy of his origins as the all-seeing God of the Bright Sky, to whose celestial vantage the events on earth are laid bare. Rarely indolent, usually zestful and opinionated, the extended family of Zeus aggressively engages with the mortal world. In disguise, the Olympians move, speak, and act freely among men, partaking of the human experience. There is nothing about the men and women at Troy that the gods do not know, even to foreknowledge of their individual fates.

By contrast, despite the busy flow of divine activity that drums through their lives, the Homeric heroes and heroines know very little about their gods. Few could claim to know what a god looks like, as most encounters take place with the deity in disguise. There are exceptions: Helen famously recognizes Aphrodite, despite her masquerade as an old servant woman, by the “round, sweet throat of the goddess / and her desirable breasts and her eyes that were full of shining.” Likewise, Poseidon’s disguise as the seer Kalchas is betrayed by his footprints: “‘this is not Kalchas, the bird interpreter of the gods,'” Aias the son of Oïleus says to Telamonian Aias, “‘for I knew / easily as he went away the form of his feet, the legs’ form / from behind him. Gods, though gods, are conspicuous.'”

By and large, however, the men at Troy fight in a kind of fog of existential ignorance, never knowing where or who the gods are or what divine activities and plans already under way may affect their own actions. Nor do they know what they must do for their supplications and prayers to be received. A very few incidents appear to suggest that Zeus, at least, punishes the wicked, which, if true, would furnish some minimal guidance for gaining his favor and avoiding his wrath. Menelaos, for example, rants at the Trojans for taking Helen away: “‘wretched dogs, and your hearts knew no fear / at all of the hard anger of Zeus loud-thundering, / the guest’s god, who some day will utterly sack your steep city.'” On closer look, however, in this and other such cases, it is clear that punishment is to be meted out by Zeus only in his capacity as patron of a specific institution: he is Zeus Orkios, “Zeus who upholds oaths,” or Zeus Xenia, the god of guest friendship. Zeus’ loyalty, then, is in fact to himself in his particular cultic aspects, not to a principle of overarching justice.

— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 6

Emphasis mine.

To rule, after all, is to have power, whether over things, over men (by other men or some god), or over men and gods together (by Zeus). But the bardic formulas sometimes add a little touch that is extremely revealing. In five instances anassein is qualified with the adverb iphi, ‘by might’, so that king’s rule (but never the householder’s) becomes rule by might. This must under no circumstances be taken to imply tyranny, forcible rule in the invidious sense. When Hector prayed for his son to ‘rule by might in Ilion’ ([The Iliad, Book] VI 478), he was asking the gods that the boy succeed to the throne, not that he be endowed with the qualities of a despot….

Iphi quietly directs attention to the limits upon the parallel between head of a household and king. One critical test lay in the succession. The kings, like Hector, were personally interested in pushing the family parallel to the point at which their sons could automatically follow them on the throne as they succeeded them in the oikos. ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ That proclamation is the final triumph of the dynastic principle in monarchy. But never in the world of Odysseus was it pronounced by the herald. Kingship had not come that far, and the other aristocrats often succeeded in forcing a substitute announcement: ‘The king is dead! The struggle for the throne is open!’ That is how the entire Ithacan theme of the Odyssey can be summed up. ‘Rule by might’, in other words, meant that a weak king was not a king, that a king either had the might to rule or he did not rule at all.

— The World of Odysseus, pp. 83-84

Emphasis mine.

Anthropologists commonly use the term “chiefdom” for a primitive culture that has developed a formal social hierarchy in which the war leader holds a unique and permanent rank above all his tribesmen, often with theocratic and redistributive functions as well…. They provided a transitional stage in social development between the tribe and the state. At the level of the chiefdom, the causes of war become more complicated and the motives for war become separable. We can now distinguish among ideological, economic, and political motives.

1. The articulated motives for war are still revenge and prestige. The difference is that wars are now fought to avenge wrongs against the chief and for the honor and glory of the chief. Primitive militarism is being replaced by kingly or theocratic militarism, an ideology that continues without much change until the time of Louis XIV [of France].
2. The economic causes of war become more compelling. Genuine conquests and occupations are now possible, so wars can be fought more openly and directly to gain territory. The values of honor and glory may become a pretext, masking a chief’s grab for land and wealth.
3. Finally, war becomes an organizational source of power. It is now possible to fight wars simply for political reasons, and the martial values may become a pretext for a chief’s grab at power for its own sake.

The more advanced chiefdoms appear to practice what is today called warfare in every sense, except for the lack of an ideology that permits self-conscious strategic thinking. The history of political warfare should therefore begin with these chiefdoms, except that they have no history. In spite of their efficiency, chiefdoms do not seem to last. Only a bare handful of chiefdoms have ever made the full transition to bureaucratic state. The process of military escalation and political centralization is reversible, and normally, it is reversed. The disadvantages of losing freedom to the chief are as obvious as the advantages of military superiority, so the chiefdom rarely survives the death of the chief, which is likely to be premature. Countless societies may have come to the edge of statehood and drawn back from that brink. Chiefdoms do not last because of their efficiency.

— The Origins of Western Warfare, pp. 35-36

‘Warrior’ and ‘hero’ are synonyms, and the main theme of a warrior culture is constructed on two notes—prowess and honour. The one is the hero’s essential attribute, the other his essential aim. Every value, every judgement, every action, all skills and talents have the function of either defining honour or realizing it. Life itself may not stand in the way. The Homeric heroes loved life fiercely, as they did and felt everything with passion, and no less martyr-like characters could be imagined; but even life must surrender to honour. The two central figures of the Iliad, Achilles and Hector, were both fated to live short lives, and both knew it. They were heroes not because at the call of duty they marched proudly to their deaths, singing hymns to God and country—on the contrary, they railed openly against their doom, and Achilles, at least, did not complain less after he reached Hades—but because at the call of honour they obeyed the code of the hero without flinching and without questioning.

— The World of Odysseus, p. 113

Emphasis mine.

Hoplite technology was craftsmanship at its highest. The three-foot in diameter shield, sometimes known as either the aspis or hoplon, covered half the body. A unique combined arm- and hand-grip allowed its oppressive weight to be held by the left arm alone. Draw straps along the inside of the shield’s perimeter meant that it could be retained even should the hand be knocked from the primary grip, a common mishap given the shield weight and the constant blows of massed combat. The shield’s strange concave shape permitted the rear ranks to rest it on their shoulders. Anyone who has tried to hold up fifteen to twenty pounds with a single arm, even without the weight of other armor amid the rigor of battle, can attest to the exhaustion that sets in after only twenty minutes. Yet the hoplite shield was an engineering marvel: the round shape allowed it to be rotated in almost any direction even as the sloped surface provided more wood protection from the angled trajectory of incoming spear points.

— A War Like No Other, p. 139

The subject of heroic poetry is the hero, and the hero is a man who behaves in certain ways, pursuing specified goals by his personal courage and bravery. However, the hero lives in, and is moulded by, a social system and a culture, and his actions are intelligible only by reference to them. That is true even when the poet’s narrative appears to ignore everything and everyone but the heroes.

No one who reads the Iliad can fail to be struck by the peculiar character of the fighting. There are tens of thousands of soldiers on hand, yet the poet has eyes only for Ajax or Achilles or Hector or Aeneas. In itself, such a literary device is commonplace; it is a very rare artist who has both reason and genius enough to re-create masses of men in battle. Nor is there historical objection to the individual combat between champions, as between Achilles and Hector, or, even more interesting in some ways, between Ajax and Hector, ending in a draw and an exchange of gifts. The false note comes in the full-scale fighting. There the confusion is indescribable. No one commands or gives orders. Men enter the battle and leave at their own pleasure; they select their individual opponents; they group and regroup for purely personal reasons. And the disorganization, unlike the chaotic movements in a war novel like Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, does not stem from the breakdown of an original plan of action but from the poet’s concentration on his heroes as individuals. He must bring in the army as a whole to maintain the necessary realism of the war story, but he returns to the central figures as quickly as possible.

— The World of Odysseus, p. 74

Pure copper…is a soft metal and cannot be given an effective cutting edge. It is made up of layers of minute crystals; to hold the crystals together, one needs grit. Yet if one adds a particular, yet softer metal—tin—one obtains bronze; tin’s impurities combine with copper to make a far stronger alloy. Much stronger, in fact: about 5 percent tin to 95 percent copper makes bronze three times as hard as the copper alone. Bronze was discovered in the Middle East around 3800 [B.C.E.] and became…”a material for all purposes, the plastic of its age.”

— By The Sword, p. 110

…No one now alive has witnessed combat between organized forces using hand-to-hand weapons, for the last vestige of it disappeared one hundred fifty years ago when the bayonet charge became obsolete. We tend to think (assisted by the movies) that direct shock combat of the sort described above was much more common in premodern warfare than it was. In reality, it was always difficult to make foot soldiers seriously engage one another with edged weapons because of their natural tendency to keep out of one another’s way. We have already seen that the Persian and other Eastern armies put no faith in heavy infantry assault. The main function of their spearmen was to provide cover for their archers, and battles were won by cavalry and archers with a minimum of physical contact. Only the Greeks had developed a style of warfare that made shock combat inevitable, because their infantry formation was no loose huddle but a tight rectangle (phalanx) often eight ranks deep or more, its heavy shields a collective locking device, its sheer depth and weight propelling the men in the front ranks onto the spears of the enemy.

— The Origins of Western Warfare, p. 48

Siege warfare became a highly specialized technique in the Neo-Assyrian period and many of the skills developed by the Assyrians were subsequently adopted, improved upon, and expanded by later imperial powers including the Romans. Against the moats and ramparts of the well-fortified garrisons the Assyrian engineers brought a variety of engines and skills. There were the enclosed battering rams on wheels, in effect primitive tanks, with archers ensconced in turrets on top to pick off defenders on the wall who would attempt to burn the machine with torches or dislodge the battering rams with ‘wolves’, looped chains lowered from the walls. As for scaling techniques, in addition to using ladders, earthen ramps were sometimes heaped up against the wall for battering rams to roll up and demolish the upper defences and allow the infantry to rush up and over. The Assyrians also used sappers to burrow under or through the walls and fires were set with torches at wooden gates. Engineers engaged in these various activities were under constant threat from the defenders who shot arrows and spears at them, dropped rocks and scalding liquid. Cover was provided by the archers who took up strategic positions with their shield-bearers.

If the initial attempts at taking a city by siege failed, the Assyrians usually withdrew, but not before ravaging the surrounding countryside, burning and destroying crops, trees and houses. Only on occasion would they settle down for a long siege. When they did this, they stationed small groups of men in redoubts and siege towers near the wall, particularly near the gates, in order to prevent any traffic in or out of the city and to warn of any planned sortie from the gates. Once ensconced, the Assyrians were willing to wait many months or even a year or more, until the starved inhabitants capitulated.

— The Cambridge Ancient History, volume III, part 2, p. 220

…From the late seventeenth to the late thirteenth century [B.C.E.], for the eastern Mediterranean kingdoms warfare was a contest between opposing chariot forces, and the only offensive infantrymen who participated in battle were the ‘runners’—the skirmishers who ran among the chariots…. Although there is distressingly little information for the centuries following the Catastrophe [in the 12th century B.C.E.], what there is suggests that all over the eastern Mediterranean the principal role in battle was now borne by offensive infantrymen. Thus chariot warfare, which in the Late Bronze Age had distinguished cities and kingdoms from the barbarous hinterlands (where horses and a chariot were a luxury that few, if any, could afford), did not survive into the Iron Age, and even the wealthiest kings had now to depend primarily upon footsoldiers.

It is generally recognized that the chariot was less important in the Iron Age than in the Late Bronze Age. By the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III [of Assyria] (745-27 [B.C.E.]) the light, two-horse chariot rarely appeared on the battlefield, since by that time the tasks hitherto assigned to chariots were normally carried out by cavalry. As a result, the Neo-Assyrian chariot became an enormous and cumbersome vehicle, carrying a variety of passengers and drawn by three or four horses. Such vehicles had little in common with the war chariot of the Bronze Age and seem to have served as prestige conveyances for the king and lesser dignitaries. In classical times (if we except the dreadful but ineffective ‘scythed’ chariots of the Persians) the chariot was associated almost entirely with status, parades, and recreation. We may thus say that in the Iron Age cavalry ‘replaced’ chariotry as an effective military arm.

The earliest representations of archers shooting from the backs of galloping horses are ninth-century Assyrian reliefs. These reliefs show the cavalry archers operating in pairs: one cavalryman holds the reins of both his own and his partner’s horse, allowing the partner to use his hands for the bow and bowstring. The early cavalry teams thus parallel exactly the charioteer and chariot archer. The cavalry archer was undoubtedly less accurate than his counterpart on a chariot (bouncing on a horse’s back was less conducive to a good shot than standing—knees bent—on the leather-strap platform of a chariot). But in other respects the cavalry teams were surely superior. They were able, first of all, to operate in terrain too rough for wheeled vehicles. And their chances for flight, when things went wrong, were much better: when a chariot horse was injured, both crewmen were in immediate danger, but if a cavalryman’s horse was killed or injured the cavalryman could immediately leap on the back of his partner’s horse and so ride out of harm’s way. Yet another advantage of cavalry over chariotry was economic, since the cost of purchasing and maintaining a vehicle was considerable. The Chronicler claims…that in the tenth century [B.C.E.] the chariot itself cost twice as much as the team that pulled it.

How early in the Iron Age kings began to use cavalries in place of or alongside chariotries cannot be determined, since there is so little documentary and pictorial evidence for the period 1150-900 [B.C.E.]. By the middle of the ninth century cavalries were obviously well established, since at the Battle of Qarqar Shalmaneser III faced many men on horseback (and some on the backs of camels) and since he himself claimed to have 2,002 chariots and 5,542 cavalrymen. For earlier centuries all we have are Hebrew traditions, and although they are hardly trustworthy it must be noted that they routinely associate cavalries with the kings of the period. Solomon was said to have maintained twelve thousand parashim; David was believed to have defeated enormous horse troops consisting of both chariots and cavalrymen; and Saul was reported to have been slain on Mt. Gilboa by Philistine parashim.

— The End of the Bronze Age, pp. 164-65

Copper was the first metal regularly exploited by humans, smelted far back into the Neolithic. For use in large tools and weapons, it was characteristically cast as a substitute for stone in ax and mace heads along with dagger blades. Yet its softness precluded much more in the way of new types of arms.

This changed dramatically with the discovery that copper could be combined effectively with arsenic or tin to produce a far harder but still ductile alloy, bronze. Not only could it be cast into the most complex shapes, but after cold-working, yielded weapons of a hardness and tensile strength rivaling those of iron, until Roman times, when tempering came to be understood. The toughness and ductility of bronze made it possible for the dagger form to be stretched to generate a true sword by the middle of the third millennium [B.C.E.] Such an instrument, by virtue of its superior reach, maneuverability, and capacity to inflict both slashing and puncture wounds, was ideal for the kind of close combat that was the specialty of the elite warrior class. Bronze also substantially increased the penetration of holdovers like the spear, arrow, and battle-ax, which, in combination with the sword, rather quickly brought forth defensive reciprocals in bronze and bronze-reinforced helmets, shields, cuirasses, and greaves, to produce a metal-clad combatant largely immune to any but similarly accessorized adversaries.

War’s appetite for bronze fed on itself further encouraging political centralization and the dominance of military elites intent upon controlling the sources of supply: Deposits of tin, in particular, were scattered and relatively difficult to extract. Literary allusions and other records from the Bronze Age make it clear that the metal and its constituents remained valued, rare, and monopolized by those in control.

Iron changed things somewhat. Anatolian armorers had experimented with the metal, probably derived from meteoric deposits, to produce blades as far back as 2500 [B.C.E.]. Iron weapons were tough and held an edge, but were subject to rapid and continuous deterioration through rust. Rather than superiority, its large-scale use was driven more by the relative abundance of ferrous deposits. Once the higher heats required for extracting terrestrial iron were mastered, it could be produced in quantities necessary to begin to provide whole armies with at least some metallic implements.

But bronze had staying power. Because it was only minimally affected by corrosion, it could be used repeatedly and for different purposes simply by melting and recasting. Iron emerged as a red-hot pasty ball that had to be worked by hammering, rather than as a liquid that could be poured into molds. Shaping remained difficult and labor-consumptive. Gradually, a better understanding of metallurgy—basically tempering and the development of steel—led to an increased reliance on ferrous-based weapons, particularly during the [European] Middle Ages.

Yet in the age named for bronze there was no question who and what ruled the battlefield. Here there were two classes of opponents: a relative few wielding and protected by bronze, and the nonmetallic masses, essentially designated victims. Although armies ranged from the low thousands up to around 20,000, battles could be and were decided by several hundred elite fighters. A combat environment in the Bronze Age typically consisted of opposing lines of archers (often supplemented by slingers and javelin throwers) exchanging desultory fire, while champions on each side sought each other out to wage what amounted to individual combat. Yet prior to and particularly after the leadership fought each other, common soldiers were subject to promiscuous killing.

— Soul of the Sword, pp. 70-71

Emphasis mine.

…Taken together the data [on ancient battles] suggest that seven of every ten soldiers of the defeated force would become casualties by day’s end. About one-third of the force would be killed and another third wounded severely enough to be left behind to die or shift for themselves on the battlefield. The victors could expect to lose to enemy arms approximately one in every ten men, either killed or wounded.

— From Sumer To Rome, p. 88

Consider a commander before 1800 [C.E.], sitting in his capital and preparing to launch a war. The sources of strategic intelligence open to him included books—Napoleon, for example, is known to have read every available description and military history of Italy before setting out to conquer it in 1796, and Caesar…probably did the same—as well as maps, however primitive; from these and from the newspapers that began to be published early in the seventeenth century one could glean general information concerning the theater of operations, its resources, it climate, and the nature of the people inhabiting it. This written information was supplemented—or in some periods (such as the almost bookless early Middle Ages) replaced—by oral sources, the tales of traveling merchants, artists, pilgrims. To obtain more specific geo-military information about such things as roads, fords, bridges, and fortresses and about the enemy’s moves and intentions, it was necessary to rely on diplomats and spies. The two were often indistinguishable, and still are.

As even a cursory glance will reveal, each of these sources had its own strengths and weaknesses. Some were insufficiently specialized to bring in the specific information that a commander might need, while others were of questionable reliability. Intermittent at the best of times… the flow of information was likely to be reduced still further upon the actual outbreak of hostilities, thought the absence of continuous front lines and the inability of armies to police extensive tracts of territory meant that it was unlikely to dry up altogether.

In the absence of…regular mail service…the speed at which information was able to travel varied greatly. Rumor, especially concerning ‘great events’ such as a battle won or lost, moved fastest of all—speeds in excess of 250 miles a day are on record—but only at the price of the subject matter being neither selective nor reliable. On the other hand, books, maps, and travelers could hardly be expected to move at more than a walking pace, say ten or fifteen miles a day over extended periods. Somewhere in between these extremes came the reports that agents, stationed in friendly or hostile territory or else reporting on the moves of some neutral ruler, sent back to their employer. When properly utilized and taken together, such sources were often able to present a commander with a fair basis for strategic planning. But their limitations—especially in regard to speed—were such that their usefulness for operational purposes in the field was always questionable.

If obtaining long-range enemy intelligence always constituted a problem, so did communicating with one’s own forces. In the present day of radiotelephone and data links it is difficult to recapture the sort of utter isolation that ensued until about 1900 whenever detachments were sent out or an army was separated into several forces. Hannibal in Italy, to cite one extreme example, is said to have had no idea of what the second Carthaginian Army under his brother Hasdrubal was up to until the Romans informed him by tossing Hasdrubal’s severed head into his camp. Napoleon at Bautzen in 1813 could do nothing to communicate with Ney, on whose advance the outcome of the battle depended, even though their respective headquarters were less than ten miles apart…. For thousands of years before that, the speed at which field armies could communicate with each other was essentially limited to the speed of the horse—say no more than ten miles per hour on the average, given conditions that were not too unfavorable and over comparatively short distances.

The fact that communications were slow and insecure explains why commanders were always reluctant to send out detachments (the term, remaining in usage until the middle of the nineteenth century, speaks for itself); once detached, they would become all but impossible to control. Nor does the remedy—the establishment of proper strategic units capable of independent action—appear to have suggested itself before the end of the eighteenth century….

— Command In War, p. 19