War is one way cultures express their hostilities and individuals further their ambitions. It probably is as old as human groups, and disruption of such groups is a legacy of its practice. War presents humans at their worst, but frequently in the past some have seen it as a noble endeavor devoted to the protection of particular groups.
Our study of the wars of the ancients tends to stress their achievements in logistics, in organizing and supplying armies especially in lands far from home. Ancient sources underline such triumphs and tend to ignore refugees and even casualties on our side, though the many killed and captured among the enemy may be noted, to our glory.
We think war was central to the organizing of some if not all ancient states, by which we mean large political organizations that proceeded more on the basis of the continuity of the institution rather than the personality of an individual leader. Without military coercion the famous states might not have arisen or might have had a very different shape from what they actually had.
This process may be most clearly seen in Egypt where sources early and late stress war’s power to shape and reshape Egypt’s organization. The other state with a long military history is Assyria, but its prowess is not attested over so long a period, only about 1400 to 612 bce, while Egypt’s stretches from 3100 bce through to Cleopatra, who died in 30 bce, and beyond. And the Assyrian sources have not been so fully exploited as for Egypt (Saggs 1984; Fales 2001).
Thus we will concentrate here on Egypt, but Egypt was not isolated in the development of military organization or of equipment. Here we shall try to give a sense of developments from earliest times to the end of the New Kingdom in the 1000s BCE, though of course the story continues after that.
Egyptian weaponry was not highly developed in Pre-dynastic times (Dreyer 1998). There appear to be no differences between north (Lower Egypt) and south (Upper Egypt), since differences do not show up in writing of key military terms in ancient Egyptian (Loprieno 1995a).
The sources stress the naval profession in the Old Kingdom (Third to Sixth Dynasties about 2650-2175 bce), and the extensive maritime trade with the Levant, the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea, provides additional clues of the importance of the navy (Eichler 1993). Late Old Kingdom scenes from private tombs also show the beginning of siege warfare with infantry. The military system and equipment seem primitive (Shaw 1996: 242-3, 259). The development of warfare may have been arrested early in Egypt around 3100 bce, when kings united the Nile valley, secured internal stability, eliminated opposition, and so required no more innovation. The Egyptian state wanted increasingly to protect its trade routes in the northeast, south, and west and to establish a series of border posts (Ziermann 1993). The Old Kingdom sent garrisons to Nubia for diorite mine development and occupied the oases in the Sixth Dynasty (2325-2175 bce) (O’Connor 1991: 145-65).
From its etymology we can see that the word ‘‘army’’ originally referred to a host which went forward or proceeded. The word was not limited to a group of armed individuals. Hunters as well as teams of quarrymen were called by this term, and the official in charge was an ‘‘overseer’’ (Posener-Krieger 1992: 44-8; Berlev 1971).
The military men were called ‘‘troops,’’ and they performed such activities as patrolling the frontiers, heading quarrying expeditions, and they were even found instructing royal children (Posener-Krieger 1992: 44-8). Perhaps this word for troops in the Old Kingdom meant young men, but the early Middle Kingdom (1975-1640 bce) indicated soldiers under a more general designation of‘‘young men’’ (Berlev 1967a: 11-14). Yet we also read of‘‘men’’ among such troops. Both age groups composed the ‘‘troops.’’
But there appears to have been no need for a permanent army in the Old Kingdom. In this period temple decrees frequently described hired male Nubian servants as guards, equivalent to security police (Goedicke 1967: 62-3). Texts from Aswan in the south of Egypt show that in the Sixth Dynasty (2325-2175 bce) the import trade in luxury goods from the interior of Africa had been put in jeopardy (Lichtheim 1973: 23-7). And small independent city-states had sprung up in southern Palestine.
The foreign situation was fraught with trouble because the state of military preparedness and development was poor. There was no metal armor. Horses and chariots did not exist. There were no sharp and light swords (Shaw 1991: 31-9).
Texts from the First Intermediate Period (Ninth to Eleventh Dynasties 2175-1975 bce) as well as the archaeological data still indicated a rudimentary military system. Furthermore, the danger to the state of young men in arms was recognized in biographical texts of local leaders and in the Instruction for Merikare (Seidlmeyer 2000: 127-37; Lichtheim 1997: 25-6).
The leaders of this uncertain time, whether pretender pharaohs or local ‘‘big men,’’ developed a new politics in which the head of state was at the same time the head of an army. In their propaganda the ‘‘good shepherd’’ motif was introduced, balanced by the ‘‘astute leader’’ (Gnirs 1999: 78-9).
We find Nubian archers in Upper Egypt where they hired out their services to the local war leaders and then to the young Theban state. They also held large plots of land (Fischer 1960).
There were two main divisions in the military. The first consisted of naval troops who provided the most rapid means of transportation. The second group, the foot soldiers, was divided into archers and axe men who fought as a solid mass. They stood a distance from the enemy, often behind firmly planted shields or a protective wooden wall (Shaw 1991). With this arrangement the Egyptians employed their archers more to impede the advance of enemies than to kill them. The main burden remained on those foot soldiers who directly faced the enemy and pushed their way up against them. Near the end of the Eleventh Dynasty (1940 bce) we have wooden statues of soldiers that enable us to re-create what the soldier looked like (Winlock 1945); their weapons and protection still seem very simple.
The southern Theban Kingdom pushed downstream as well as upstream, and the Mentuhotep II Ballas Inscription lays emphasis upon the ‘‘comradeship’’ between pharaoh and troops around 1948 bce (Franke 1997). Now it was necessary to claim the beneficent aspects of royal leadership along with the martial ones.
As the Middle Kingdom began, the importance of the navy in the use of the Nile waterway for quick and dependable service in war grew (Berlev 1967b, 1972). The pharaohs of the newly reunified Egypt were able to found a true empire to the south with a time-consuming project of fortress construction, especially at the Second Cataract (Shaw 1991: 18-23; Kemp 1986, 1989: 172-9).
World History
