The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism and cruelty.
It is the riskiest field on which to match wits and luck: no peaceful endeavor can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.
It remains the most theatrical of human activities combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce and even low comedy.
War displays the human condition in extremes.
It is thus not surprising that the first recovered histories, the first written accounts of the exploits of mortals, are military histories.
War is an interaction in which two or more militaries have a “struggle of wills.”
A civil war is a dispute between parties within the same nation. War is not considered to the same as occupation, murder or genocide. Because of the reciprocal nature of the violent struggle, and the organized nature of the units involved.
A proxy war is a war that results when two powers use third parties as substitutes for fighting each other directly.
The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs record the victories of Egypt’s first pharaohs, the Scorpion King and Narmer.
The first secular literature or history recorded in cuneiform recounts the adventures of the Sumerian warrior king Gilgamesh.
The earliest written part of the Books f Moses, the “J-strand”, culminate in the brutal Hebrew conquest of Canaan.
The annals of the Chinese, Greeks, and Roman are concerned with wars and warrior king.
Most Mayan hieroglyphic texts are devoted to the genealogies, biographies and military exploits of Mayan kings.
Wars happen when a group of people or an organization perceives the benefits that can be obtained to be greater than the cost. This can happen for a variety of reasons:
1. To protect national pride by preventing the loss of territory.
2. To protect livelihood by preventing the loss of resources or by declining independence.
3.To inflict punishment of the “wrongdoer”, especially when one country is stronger than the other and can effectively deal out the punishment.
Anthropology of War
