Has there ever been a period of time without war?
May 13th, 2008 May 13th, 2008 Posted in CJknowsHowNo Comments
This timeline of
military history, taken primarily from George C Kohn’s "Dictionary of
Wars," indicates that from roughly 2925 B.C. to, oh, now, an unbroken
period of hostility between one group of people and another has existed.
A
Short History of War, published by the U.S. Army War College, actually
dates the advent of societal warfare back to 4000 B.C. Prior to that,
"…warfare itself had not in any meaningful sense been invented. There
were only the embryonic beginnings of a warrior class still loosely
embedded in a tribal social structure that lacked both the physical and
psychological requirements to produce war on any scale."
So do
the 5000s B.C. and before represent a pax pre-historica? Maybe, maybe
not. According to Wikipedia, "The beginning of prehistoric wars is a
disputed issue between anthropologists and historians." The controversy
includes purported archaeological evidence of a battle on the Nile that
some sources date as far back as 12,000 B.C. 59 bodies were found at
that site; compare that to the well over 100 million deaths attributed
to war in the 20th century, and the pre-historic era
does start to sound like the good old days. Perhaps this century will be the one to reverse the trend.
