Page 250 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

warfare, origins of 2027

ple that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, 17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the
and they shall serve thee. Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the
Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD
12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will
thy God hath commanded thee:
make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:
18 That they teach you not to do after all their abom-
13 And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it
inations, which they have done unto their gods; so
into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof
should ye sin against the LORD your God.
with the edge of the sword:
19 When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in
14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle,
making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy
and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof,
the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for
shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the
thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them
spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God
down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ
hath given thee.
them in the siege:
15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are
20 Only the trees which thou knowest that they be
very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of
not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them
these nations.
down; and thou shalt build bulwarks against the city
16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued.
thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt
save alive nothing that breatheth:

and far more precise than that which was imagined even eastern Levant and northern Mesopotamia, by which
just a few years ago. time these regions form one large “Crescent system.” War-
fare is fully developed in the Levant by at least 4300 BCE,
Levantine based on the garrison at Mersin fort and other centers. By
The earliest plausible evidence of warfare in the Levant— ca. 2000 BCE the Ugaritic text of the epic of Baal is com-
arguably the oldest in the world—comes from Natufian pletely fluent in the language of warfare.
human remains, at ca. 10,000 to 7500 BCE, from Nahal
Oren, Israel, which were quite possibly cannibalized. Mesopotamian
Cannibalism often accompanied warfare in all six regions In the area of Mesopotamia warfare appears first in the
of the Old World and the New World. Soon after this, northern part of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, with mace
during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, at ca. 7500 heads already present at Jarmo by 7000 to 6000 BCE,
BCE, the first fortifications were erected at Jericho, Pales- which is somewhat earlier than the earliest maces in the
tine, including the oldest known massive walls and a nearby Levant region at ’Ain Ghazal, Jordan. Locational
tower. Other key centers followed soon after Jericho, evidence at ca. 6000 BCE also showsTell es-Sawwan being
including Beidah, Jordan, and Haçilar, Turkey. Simulta- built on a cliff over theTigris River, and soon after, at ca.
neously, Ugarit and Byblos on the Mediterranean coast 5600 BCE, being fortified with a system of moat, wall, and
are settled on high defensible locations, and mace heads baffled entrances. In the southern part of Mesopotamia,
begin to appear in Jordan, followed by stocks of sling pel- the first ’Ubaid-period agricultural settlements, starting at
lets at the Mersin fort in southern Turkey. By the sixth mil- ca. 5500 BCE, are being defensively located on islands—
lennium BCE numerous fortifications already exist in the arguably the only defensible locations in the southern