Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

In Western history and geography, ancient associations between environment and war can be gleaned from the ancient records, chronicles, artefacts, and religious and mythological manuscripts of Mesopotamia, the Levant, Greece, and Rome. The Zoroastrian Avesta (First Millennium BCE), the Epic of Gilgamesh (1600–1155 BCE), and the Hebrew Torah (8–1 BCE) provide perspectives originating in the Fertile Crescent’s Agricultural Revolution that budded in 10,000 BCE. In the Greek Classical world Homer’s epics, the Iliad and Odyssey (800 BCE) Thucydides’ histories, and Sophocles’ dramatic tragedies speak to perceptions on the environmental degradations of sieges, combat, and conflict. Across the seven volumes of Bellum Gallicum (58–49 BCE), Julius Caesar presents and invents Gaul as an uncivilized territory that needed to be conquered, creating a rhetorical political weapon with which to maintain the Roman Senate’s support for his military campaigns. By defining the physical and human geographies of the “Other,” Caesar created a geo-imperial template, critiqued by Suetonius’s account of the loss of three Augustan Roman Legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9CE and later in Tacitus’ Germania (98 CE).