The great border walls had set an inharmonious world into stark relief, casting it into regions of light and shadow, like some dramatic chiaroscuro painting by Caravaggio. On one side of the walls were the builders, their history illuminated by every sort of literature. On the other were the people without any history. They fortified neither their borders nor their settlements, and appearing out of the darkness, they terrified the builders.
In the early sixth century AD, a Chinese general spoke on the topic of walls. Living in an era when borders were being fortified almost around the world, he was convinced of their necessity. Walls, he felt, were the only way to separate “those who eat grain, live in towns and houses, wear silk and walk like scholars from those of wild appearance, who wear wool and drink blood, who live with birds and beasts.” This segregation was all well and good except when the Chinese found themselves in need of troops. Then they hired as many of the wild-looking, wool-wearing barbarians as they could.
Roman attitudes toward the peoples beyond their borders were equally ambivalent. By far, the bulk of Roman authors, safely ensconced in a walled capital deep in the heartland of a civilized empire, admired the unwalled outsider. They viewed peoples such as the Scythians and Germans as virtuous exemplars of the natural life—chaste, moral, and generally uncorrupted by the vices of civilization. Rarely, an author such as Ovid would be given a closer view of these outsiders, and this would prompt him to sing a rather different tune. Either way, the Romans agreed with the Chinese: the barbarians were best kept out—unless they could be recruited into the army.
The Chinese and the Romans were not the first to distinguish between those who built walls and those who lived outside them. Bronze Age writers had reduced the differences to symbols. To represent urban communities, they might draw a cross inside a circle, signifying streets intersecting within city walls. Those who lived outside city walls were generally designated in a more pejorative fashion—perhaps by images of the weapons they carried or the mountains from whence they came. In time, virtually every language spoken in the ancient Near East had developed a vocabulary to describe the unwalled outsider. A strange pattern presented itself: namely, if the original meaning of a word referred to nomadism—a way of life manifestly antithetical to walls—then the term inevitably became associated with raiding, robbery, and other criminal activity. If the original meaning denoted criminality, then it quickly acquired an association with nomadism.
Across Europe, Asia, and North Africa, authors described the people outside the walls in much the same terms: crude, tough, hardy, warlike, and aggressive, useful as allies but terrible as enemies. Even the contrarian Spartans, ruminating on walls, concluded, not too differently from the Chinese general, that walls bred scholars who were accustomed to soft clothes and fine buildings. The Spartans had, of course, taken up the other side of the debate. They regarded the cultured inhabitants of walled cities as weaklings and romanticized the primitive lifestyle of their unwalled ancestors. Otherwise, consensus prevailed.
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It may seem incredible that the presence or absence of walls should render some men more warlike than others, yet support for this omnipresent ancient thesis is not lacking. We need only observe what happens when a people make the transition from unwalled to walled. We might consider, for example, the curious case of the Gauls.
When the Romans first encountered the Gauls in the fourth century BC, they considered the warlike northerners more like beasts than men. Polybius wrote that the Gauls slept on leaves and lived in unwalled villages where they knew nothing of art or science but much of war. A reputation for truculence and physical prowess—and an abundance of men with no skills other than fighting—made the Gauls attractive mercenaries, drawing them ever deeper into Italy, but this caused more problems than it solved, as the Gallic warriors inevitably looked with contempt upon their employers, who huddled behind city walls, unwilling to fight their own battles. When Roman ambassadors inquired of the Gauls by what right they had dispossessed Italian peoples of their lands, the Gauls replied that they carried their right at the tip of their swords.
In the early fourth century, the Gauls marched on Rome. Peasants fled their arrival, and nearby towns retreated behind their walls, but the Gauls ignored all targets of opportunity en route to the city. Roman leaders hastily levied troops and marched out to confront the Gauls at the river Allia, eight miles from the city. There they suffered one of the worst defeats in Roman history. No sooner had the Gauls attacked than the main body of the Roman army began to dissolve. Scores of Roman soldiers fled to the walls of nearby Veii. Others were cut down fleeing or drowned trying to swim across the Tiber.
The news from Allia generated hysteria in Rome. Most of the commoners fled the city altogether. The remaining able-bodied men and their families sought refuge in the citadel. Only the older folk, many dressed in ancient robes once worn by some ancestral magistrate, stayed in their homes, awaiting death. The Gauls, entering the city unopposed, rooted about for booty, a bit spooked by the spectacle of the elderly in their finery, until finally an old Roman broke the spell by striking a Gaul with a mace. The quiet plundering of the city then turned into a massacre. The Gauls looted and burned Rome for several days, during which time the Gallic leader Brennus reportedly uttered his famous dictum, “Woe to the conquered.”
The defeat at Allia and the sack of Rome traumatized the Romans. The Gauls became a whisper on their lips, memorialized forever after in the Latin language by a phrase symbolizing the panic brought on by barbarian invasion: metus Gallicus, “dread of the Gauls.” The survivors of the horror responded in the usual manner of civilized people recovering from barbarian invasion: they built walls. Rome’s new fortifications took full advantage of the region’s hilly terrain, stretching some seven miles around the city and reaching a height of over thirty feet. Aside from building walls, the Romans also took measures to ensure that they would never again be vulnerable to attacks by northern barbarians and that, above all, complacency never take root. Toward that end, they established an annual remembrance of Allia, a somber holiday during which no sacrifices could occur. Any subsequent appearances of Gauls resulted in a declaration of tumultus Gallicus, which required cessation of all regular business and a general mobilization of able-bodied men.
Three hundred years later, the Romans and Gauls met again, but on starkly different terms. By the time of Caesar’s Gallic campaign in the mid-first century BC, the Gauls no longer even resembled the wandering cattlemen and warriors who’d once laid Rome low. The first-century Gauls lived in walled towns, called oppida, and had even developed a national technique for wall building. In every way, they had become more like the Romans: settled, agricultural, and urban. They lived in states that minted coins, maintained written documents, took censuses, collected taxes, held elections, and conducted trials. They built roads and bridges. The strongest evidence of their transformation can be seen in their attitudes toward foreigners: in the manner of wall builders everywhere, the Gauls of the first century lived in fear of their more primitive German neighbors. They competed for the services of German mercenaries who boasted of never sleeping under a roof. It comes as no great surprise, then, when we read accounts of Gallic men forming a civilized phalanx in the forum of their city, and even less surprise that the Romans should prevail over such foes. Caesar reduced the Gauls city by city, standard work for a Mediterranean army. Who’s afraid of Gauls with walls?
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The transformation of the Gauls was not unique. It may have been the common course for every ancient culture that developed civilization. Certainly, the Spartans believed that people became less warlike as they became more dependent on fortifications. Practically every Spartan wit employed some form of the quip in which one pointed at a walled city and asked, “What sort of women live there?” Only recently, however, have modern researchers started to get the joke.
The past twenty years have seen a revolution in our understanding of prehistoric and primitive peoples. A deeply entrenched dogma has been overturned, upsetting careers, touching nerves, and rendering obsolete decades of tainted research. The revolution commenced in the 1990s, when anthropologists such as Lawrence Keeley first openly attacked the commonly held and seemingly innocuous belief that warfare began with the walled cities of civilization. Keeley demonstrated that, for decades, scholars had ignored, explained away, or actively suppressed any evidence of war before or outside civilization. The belief in primitive pacifism had become, like all academic orthodoxies, an article of faith, fiercely defended by its high priests, who controlled hiring and publishing decisions. The paradigm shift did not come easily—Napoleon Chagnon was once physically attacked at a conference for daring to present firsthand observations of primitive tribesmen at war—but, in the end, all but the most die-hard proponents of the former dogma had been forced to concede to the voluminous evidence arrayed against them. Archaeologists everywhere, it seems, had been collecting piles of arrowheads, spear tips, mace heads, cracked skulls, burned settlements, and mutilated skeletons. It was only a matter of compiling it all. Yet Keeley, Chagnon, LeBlanc, and the other revolutionaries were concerned chiefly with anthropological rather than historical data, and even their evidence may have underestimated the centrality of warfare in the unwalled world.
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The voice of the unwalled is perhaps first heard directly in Irish poems that originated as oral compositions around the time of Christ and were eventually transcribed by Christian monks. With these works we can finally glimpse something of that barbarian world that so terrified the civilized, causing them to live “like birds in a cage,” behind walls guarded mostly by other barbarians. The Irish bards make no apologies for cattle raids and killings. They celebrate them. Their tales divulge a chaotic world of armies and herds, where kings and queens boast of their wealth in soldiers, cattle, and chariots, and wars are incited by cattle raids. The bards describe every manner of maiming and death in frank and sometimes scatological detail. In sharp contrast to the bloodless battle accounts of the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese, the lurid verse of the Irish tells of bloody sinews, smashed skulls, broken bones, and geysers of dung.
For the ancient Irish, who had neither cities nor walls, war was a way of life. Irish boys, much like Spartan youth, left their families to learn to fight. Even before puberty, they were organized into troops. The Irish hero Cúchulainn studied the warrior’s arts as a child, when he mastered a long list of “warrior’s feats,” all with comically descriptive titles: the thunder feat, the feats of the sword edge and the sloped shield, the spurt of speed, the stroke of precision, the heroic salmon-leap, and so forth. These were the only things the young Irishman needed to know.
Socialized to think of themselves only as warriors, young Irish spoiled for battle. Their petty kings and queens provided them with ample combat opportunities. They were routinely roused to war by minor insults, lust, or simply greed for a fine cow that belonged to another man’s herd. It wasn’t that the Irish didn’t seek peace. They never even considered the concept. Life for them was a series of raids and counterraids, and if a young warrior was lucky, he might return home from one enriched by cattle, gold, or, even better, some skull or other trophy proving that he’d fought well.
The Old English poetry of the early Middle Ages reflected a world not too far removed from that of the ancient Irish. Who can forget the death of Beowulf? The grasping old bastard had but one dying wish: to see for a final time the treasure he’d acquired by killing a dragon. His death would leave his loyal Geats in a terrible position, weakened and in possession of a pile of loot that would draw enemies like flies, but none of this concerned him. He thought only of the silver and precious gems.
Beowulf’s values were the values of unwalled peoples across Eurasia. Raiding and warfare were viewed with amoral complacency, devoid of any ideological preference for peace or nonviolence. “Born in a tent, die in a battle,” goes a Qashqai saying. The Bedouins of the Arabian desert—another unwalled people who inspired their share of walls built by others—spoke with similar matter-of-factness: “Raids are our agriculture” went a common dictum. The bulk of Bedouin culture consisted of poetry that boasted of their raids:
We came upon the host in the morning, and they were like a flock of sheep on whom falls the ravening wolf. . . .
We fall on them with white steel ground to keenness;
We cut them to pieces until they were destroyed
And we carried off their women on the saddles behind us, with their cheeks bleeding, torn in anguish by their nails.
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Warfare did not merely exist in the unwalled world; it defined it. To a degree entirely alien to the Mesopotamians, Greeks, or Chinese, the preparation of young men for war was the dominant concern. Among the ancient Germans, for example, naked youths learned to dance while swords and lances were thrust at them. Once a boy had attained the age of manhood, he was rewarded with weapons of his own. He then went about armed as a matter of routine. German men transacted business armed and even used their weapons to signal their support of proposals at public assemblies.
The pressure on younger men to prove themselves in battle was tremendous. If a young German male found his tribe too long at peace with its neighbors, he sought opportunities to fight for other tribes. He might also seek his fortune as a mercenary in service of a civilized state. In one Germanic tribe, the males allowed their hair and beard to grow uncut until they had killed a man in battle. Shaving over the slain, the young warrior finally revealed his true face to his victim, only then having proven himself worthy of birth. Some German youth took the custom further, committing themselves to wearing a symbol of servility until they had killed a man.
The male of an unwalled society, training always for war, learned no other skills. “A German,” noted one Roman author, “is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.” All real work was left to women and the elderly.
Germans weren’t alone in their expectation that all young males become warriors. Huns reputedly slashed the faces of newborn babies, teaching them to endure pain before they were even allowed to eat. Scythian men celebrated their first kill by drinking some of the victim’s blood. Lusitanian youths without other prospects would take up their arms and form into large robber bands.
A Chinese author lived for a while among the Huns. He was astonished to learn that warfare was their only occupation. He observed that the best food and drink were reserved for those still young and strong enough to fight and that the Huns regularly practiced their riding and shooting. Other Chinese descriptions of the Huns could be curt: The Huns have no trade but battle and courage, wrote one author. They live not by plowing but by killing, wrote another. They take robbing and stealing as their business, wrote a third. There is no reason to question the accuracy of these statements. Of the two great steppe nations who succeeded the Huns, neither the Turks nor the Mongols even possessed a word for “soldier.” The word for “man” sufficed.
Material possessions were few in the world beyond the walls, and weapons were prized above all things. Scythians swore oaths by dipping an array of arms into a blood-infused bowl of wine. Other possessions advertised success in battle. The Gauls, for example, collected heads. They returned home from battle with skulls dangling from the necks of their horses, then nailed the dreadful trophies over the doors of their homes. In the case of a particularly impressive kill, a Gaul might embalm the victim’s head in cedar oil so that he could pull it out from time to time and show it off to dinner guests. The Irish shared this head-hunting habit. Scythians did, too. They presented the heads of the men they’d killed to the king, who checked their contributions before granting them a share of the loot. Some warriors preserved the skulls, cleaned them out, and used them as drinking cups. Those with gold might gild the skull. Chinese accounts of the Huns parallel Greek descriptions of Scythians almost exactly.
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The desire for walls is not innate to the species; the need for security is. Reading the accounts that the ancient Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, and Chinese wrote about those outsiders they considered barbarians, it is evident that a great revolution had already split human societies. That divergence first appeared late in prehistory, just before the development of writing, when a small subset of peoples responded strategically to their insecurity by surrounding themselves with ditches, palisades, or mounds, then finally walls. To follow only their story and speak of the “birth of civilization” is to ignore, for most of history, the rest of the planet. Outside the clusters of walled cities—and, eventually, outside the great border walls that contained those clusters—other peoples continued to live in unfortified settlements, if they settled at all. The outsiders dwelled in an open and therefore dangerous world. Survival, in their eyes, depended solely on the skill, fitness, and courage of their “walls of men.”
Unlike the wall builders, the outsiders didn’t have the luxury of distinguishing between soldier and civilian. Every male was born to the warrior’s life, and the measure of a man was his skill in battle. The relative impoverishment of the warrior societies—that dearth of cultural productivity that has generally struck civilized societies as “primitive”—stemmed directly from this limitation of men’s roles. The warrior’s disdain for what he perceived as “women’s work” exacerbated this cultural impoverishment by forcing women to concentrate solely on domestic and agricultural chores.
The wallers were altogether different. If the building of walls turned men into women, as the Spartans alleged, then it was only because the women had previously done all the work and now the men pitched in, too. The more the men took up the life of labor, the less they wanted of war. They resigned themselves to long days of stacking bricks or tamping dirt because it kept war at a distance. They became like the Chinese, who, as a matter of philosophy, preferred civil and literary virtues (wen) to martial ones (wu).
If the barbarians could have read the books of the wallers, they might have noticed that even the finest military minds, such as China’s celebrated Sun Tzu, valued clever strategizing over heroism, attaching little importance to warrior qualities such as courage and skill. Whereas warrior cultures celebrated deeds of valor in their songs, the histories of the wallers recoiled from providing detailed descriptions of military encounters, frustrating modern researchers with a studied silence, the “ellipsis of battle.” Of the ancient honor of soldiering, little remained. The Chinese pressed vagabonds and criminals into service, drawing soldiers from the dregs of society—that is, from those who had no proper civilian vocation. As one Chinese proverb went, “One doesn’t use the best metal to make nails, nor the best men to make soldiers.” Other communities of wallers relied on citizen-soldiers—individuals such as Socrates or Aeschylus, who fought for Athens—but these weren’t warriors, either. Socrates was, after all, principally a philosopher and Aeschylus a playwright. As soldiers, they were part-timers, for whom war was a temporary distraction from their true callings. That their callings had little to do with either warfare or agriculture only demonstrates how quickly the labor of the wallers had diversified. Freed from the expectation of lifelong soldiering, the male inhabitants of walled communities had learned to dabble in other pursuits. They had become scribes, authors, architects, mathematicians, playwrights, poets, philosophers, actors, athletes, and archivists. To the extent that they participated in necessary chores, they potentially freed up women for other occupations as well.
Societies of wall builders arose independently around the world, leaving behind concrete symbols of this revolution in human society. Yet the walls also stigmatized the builders in the eyes of the warriors, who questioned the courage and manliness of those who chose to live in cages. Over time, the gulf between those who would build walls and those who would roam freely across a world without boundaries only grew wider. The coexistence of workers and warriors was never peaceful. Soon that conflict spawned the great border walls that would give form to much of the modern world.