The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great by Arther Ferrill

Abstract

136 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE no stretch of the imagination restricted, as he alleges, to “periodi­ cals in the fields of Classics and Archaeology.” A closer scrutiny of this rubric might, indeed, have prevented certain omissions—Ovid’s knowledge of cosmetics, for example, in the AmericanJournal ofPhilol­ ogy 100 (1979): 381—92, cited in APh 50 (1981): 210. But granted its inherent limitations—no scholar is likely to make it a substitute for the indispensable APh—this bibliography remains a useful addi­ tion to technological reference works, which are, as Oleson says, thin on the ground. Peter Green Dr. Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications include Alexander ofMacedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Histori­ cal Biography (1974), and the forthcoming Alexander to Actium: An Essay on the Histori­ cal Evolution of the Hellenistic Age. The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great. By Arther Ferrill. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985. Pp· 240; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95. It has long been customary for military historians to treat war­ fare as if it were a Greek invention or, at the very least, to regard it as lacking in both interest and historical value before the develop­ ment of the hoplite phalanx. It is against this attitude that Arther Ferrill consciously pits himself. In this relatively brief survey—three chapters pursue developments in the Near East, two, trends in Greece, with a sixth chapter devoted to the campaigns of Alexan­ der the Great—he argues that a richly innovative military tradition began in the Near East in the Late Paleolithic period that ulti­ mately culminated in the complex and sophisticated military sys­ tems of Assyria and Persia. The most conspicuous flaw in this Near Eastern tradition was its lack of emphasis on heavy infantry, which emerged independently in the Greek world around 700 B.C. The two traditions first clashed in the Persian Wars, where the process of integration also began. “Greece learned much about the use ofcav­ alry, skirmishers, and light infantry from Persia, and Persia learned the use of heavy infantry from Greece, until finally, Philip and Alex­ ander blended the best of the two traditions and carried military strat­ egy and tactics to a point rarely achieved and much less often exceeded by generals down to the time of Napoleon” (p. 8). Histories of Greek warfare abound, and it would be difficult for anyone to breathe new life into such familiar material. Any reader al­ ready versed in the subject will certainly find Ferrill’s treatment of 5th-century hoplite warfare unrewarding, but his thesis does shed new and valuable light on the equally well-known innovations of the 4th century. Even the most jaded student of Alexander the Great, for example, will appreciate Ferrill’s analysis of the battle of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 137 Issus, a clash of two integrated armies pursuing virtually identical bat­ tle plans that nicely illustrates the fusion of two distinct traditions. Still, laymen and professional historians alike will probably derive greatest benefit from the three chapters given over to Near Eastern warfare. The pace of Neolithic weapons development described at the outset adds a new dimension to our understanding of the “Neo­ lithic revolution,” and the fortification systems employed at such Neo­ lithic sites as Jericho and Qatal Huyiik, in all likelihood a response to this rapidly developing technology, offer a sobering demonstra­ tion of the influence of warfare on cultural development even at this early date. One should, however, approach his correlate argu­ ment that Neolithic warfare was “organized”—that is, made use of formations such as the column and line—with caution. This claim rests on artistic evidence, which is susceptible to more than one inter­ pretation. With their pronounced emphasis on Egyptian, Assyrian, and Per­ sian “grand strategy,” the second and third chapters usefully ex­ tend the conceptual framework of Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 1976) to the ancient Near East, but these chapters would have been considerably more useful if Ferrill had ad­ dressed two glaring deficiencies. Bronze Age warfare in the Near East...