Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

If only . . . In 1959 Raymond Dart published an analysis of an Australopithecine chin and concluded that ‘it was bashed in by a formidable blow from the front and delivered with great accuracy just to the left of the point of the jaw’. The instrument, in his view, was an antelope humerus.⁹² In the proto-Neolithic period, four ‘staggeringly powerful’ new weapons appeared ‘that would dominate warfare down to the present millennium: the bow, the sling, the dagger and the mace’.⁹³ Cave paintings from Spain show warriors carrying bows and arrows, the leader marked out by a more fancy headdress. Other paintings show archers arrayed into a firing line. ‘The appearance of the column and line, which imply command and organisation, is synonymous with the invention of tactics.’⁹⁴ Other paintings depict what appears to be protective clothing – armour – over the warriors’ knees, genitals and shoulders. Slings are shown being used at Çatal Hüyük and the spread of fortified sites took place all over the Middle East from 8000–4000 BC.⁹⁵ There was no golden age of peace.

By the time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the pharaohs could put armies of up to 20,000 in the field. This implied vast organisation and logistical support. For comparison, at Agincourt (1415) 6,000–7,000 Englishmen defeated a French force of 25,000 and in the battle of New Orleans (1815) 4,000 Americans defeated 9,000 British troops. The introduction of the chariot meant that rapid reaction was more necessary than ever, which in turn provoked the idea of standing armies. In Egypt the army comprised professional soldiers, foreign mercenaries (Nubians, in this case) and, sometimes, conscripts. The title, ‘overseer of soldiers’ was equivalent to our term ‘general’, of whom, at any one time, there were about fifteen.⁹⁶ Conscripts were recruited by special officers who toured the country and were empowered to take one in a hundred men. Assyria’s awesome power as a fighting nation was due to two factors over and above the chariot: iron and cavalry. Iron, in particular the Assyrians’ discovery of how to introduce carbon into red-hot iron to produce carburised, or steel-like, iron, favoured the development of the sword – with a sharp edge – as opposed to the dagger, with a point.⁹⁷

Given that the horse was not indigenous to Assyria, the measures they adopted to acquire animals were extraordinary. This was revealed in 1974 by Nicholas Postgate, a professor at Cambridge, in his Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire. He showed that around 2,000 ‘horse reports’ were written daily, addressed to the king, who had two men in every province specifically searching out horses and transporting them to the capital. Collectively, these agents, or musarkisus, sent around one hundred animals per day to Nineveh over a period of three months. Nearly three thousand animals are mentioned in the Horse Reports, of which 1,840 are ‘yoke’ or chariot horses, and 787 are riding or cavalry horses. ‘Though the Assyrians were the classic charioteers of all time, the more mobile cavalry would soon displace them, and from around 1200 BC formed the elite of the world’s armies until the arrival of the tank in the First World War, in 1918.’⁹⁸

One of the duties of the king in Mesopotamia was the administration of justice. (In the early cities, injustice was considered an offence against the gods.⁹⁹) For centuries, it was thought that the most ancient laws in the world were those of the Old Testament, concerning Moses. At the start of the twentieth century, however, this idea was overturned, when French archaeologists excavating at Susa in south-west Iran in 1901 and 1902 unearthed a black basalt stele over eight feet high (now in the Louvre), which proved to be inscribed with the law code of the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, who ruled early in the second millennium. The upper section showed the king praying to a god, either Marduk, the sun-god, or Shamash, the god of justice, seated on a throne. The rest of the stone, front and back, was carved with horizontal columns of the most beautiful cuneiform.¹⁰⁰ Since the French discovery, the origins of law have been pushed back a number of times but it suits us to consider this sequence in reverse order because the evolution of legal concepts becomes clearer.