Military History: The Birthplace of War

Strategic hamlet programs appeared under Tiglath-Pileser III. Rather than weaken his magnificent war machine by detaching forces to garrison the vast areas they had conquered, he ordered his troops to round up the members of the defeated local population most needed to raise rebellion — commanders, armorers, smiths, warriors, etc. — and resettle them in new communities in foreign lands, where they had nothing in common with the indigenous populations.

No detail was too humble for Assyrian ingenuity as long as it related to war, right down to the footgear of their troops. Understanding that troops are only as healthy as their feet, they issued the first standardized military footgear, an early jackboot. This consisted of a knee-high leather boot with iron plates sewn into the shins, and thick heels studded with hobnails. This boot could be worn in any climate or terrain, minimized foot injuries both on the march and in combat, and kept the formidable Assyrian army on the move.

That was a good thing, because they had a lot of territory to cover. The Iron Age Assyrian Empire covered more than five times the area of Bronze Age Sumer, and included history’s earliest geographic ‘choke point,’ Palestine — the crucial land bridge connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sandwiched between sea and desert, it was the battleground by default for competing ancient empires. Its possession remained indispensable throughout much of ancient and even modern history, putting that small part of the Fertile Crescent under what Israeli historian Chaim Herzog described as ‘constant concentric pressure.’

As the birthplace of three great Western religions, this area was probably doomed to give rise to a few particularly vicious blights: religious warfare, genocide, and terrorism. The first war for religious freedom (of which we have any knowledge) is the second century b.c. rebellion of the Maccabees against their Seleucid overlords.

During the centuries to come, both jihad and crusade would boil through the region, leaving their particularly bloody palm prints behind. The pages of the Bible reverberate with accounts of genocide, commands by God to the Israelites to exterminate their Canaanite foes. One bloodcurdling example will suffice: ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’ (I Sam. 15:3).

Terrorism too has numerous precedents in the turmoil of the Fertile Crescent. At the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (a.d. 66-69), the Jewish nationalists called themselves Zealots. But to their Roman enemies, they were the Sicarii, thus called for the sica, or short daggers they carried under their cloaks and used to murder their religio-political opponents. Contemporary Jewish historian Josephus attested to the vague fears the Sicarii inspired, writing in Bellum Judaicum: ‘…[M]any were slain every day, while the fear men were in of being so served was more afflicting than the calamity itself….’

Even the root word for assassin comes to us from the region, via the story of the ‘Old Man of the Mountain,’ Hasan ibn-Sabah. In the eleventh century a.d., ibn-Sabah, an early practitioner of psychological warfare and brainwashing, created a secret corps of elite killers, fidais, whom he sent out to terrorize and murder his opponents with ruthless efficiency. Allegedly users of hashish, these fidais were dubbed ‘hashish-eaters,’ or hashishin, from which the modern word is derived.

Skipping ahead nearly a millenium, at the outbreak of 1973’s Yom Kippur War in which Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack against Israel, military scholars thoughtfully declared the debut of what they called the ‘electronic battlefield.’ After two wars against Iraq and various interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere, during which the technology of war took center stage, this new form of warfare has become increasingly familiar to us in the early twenty-first century.

There is that one biblical concept that remains as yet untried, one that we want desperately to avoid: apocalyptic war — war that destroys the world. The concept of a final Armageddon comes down to us as a distant echo of another of the region’s choke points. (The word ‘Armageddon’ is derived from the Hebrew name Khar [Mount] Megiddo.)

Its ominous implications commend yet another biblical precept on warfare, one that has had little currency to date. It is the famous response in 1 Kings 20:11 of King Ahab to Ben-Hadad of Aram’s arrogant threat to reduce Israel’s capital of Samaria to no more than a small pile of dust: ‘Tell him, ‘Let not the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off.”

This article was written by Ira Meistrich and originally published in the Spring 2005 edition of MHQ. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History today!