Warfare

Warfare is generally understood to be the controlled and systematic waging of armed conflict between sovereign nations or states, using military might and strategy, until one opponent is defeated on the field or sues for peace in the face of inevitable destruction and greater loss of human life.

The first recorded war in history is that between Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia in 2700 BCE in which Sumer was victorious and the first peace treaty ever signed ending hostilities between nations was between Rameses II (the Great) of the Empire of Egypt and Hattusili III of the Hittite Empire in 1280 BCE.

Warfare in ancient times was conducted differently than what would be deemed 'acceptable' by today’s standards and the vanquished could be certain that slavery or summary execution awaited them. When Alexander the Great took the Phoenician city of Tyre in July of 332 he had most of the population killed and sold the rest into slavery. In September of 52 BCE, when Julius Caesar defeated Vercingetorix and his Gallic tribes at Alesia, the garrison was sold into slavery and each man in Caesar’s legions received, as a gift, one Gaul as a personal slave (over 40,000 Gauls were taken as slaves by the legionaires alone, not counting those others sold to tribes who made peace with Caesar and formed alliances after Alesia) and when Octavian defeated Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE a similar fate awaited Antony’s forces not fortunate enough to die in battle.

Battle strategies and and methods of warfare differed by country, by ruler and by era. In ancient Egypt the army was equipped with a simple spear and a leather shield but, by 1600 BCE, when the Egyptians defeated the Hyksos of lower Egypt, they artfully employed the horse and chariot, body armor and the bow as well as the sword. The Persian Empire favored armored cavalry, heavy infantry (of whom the elite were known as the 10,000 Immortals) and archers who would rain down arrows on an opposing force to create 'awe and wonder’ in the ranks. The ancient Greeks relied on armored infantry (the Hoplites) and the phalanx formation, a dense grouping of soldiers with long spears and interlocking shields. In Greece the infantry did most of the fighting, no matter what city-states were involved, the notable exception being the naval battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. Philip II of Macedon introduced the sarissa (a long spear) to the phalanx which greatly enhanced the formation’s effectiveness on the field and Philip’s son, Alexander the Great, made use of the sarissa in his infantry phalanxes in his own campaigns but also employed light and heavy cavalry and chariots to effect. The three-line legion of the Roman Empire, equipped with body armor, spear, shield and short sword replaced the phalanx formation and, supported by cavalry, proved itself the greatest fighting force in antiquity after Alexander the Great.

Writtenby Joshua J. Mark, published on 02 September 2009 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms.