Hittites

Bloody fighting between rival tribes and clans has existed since the dawn of Homo sapiens, but war as we knew it began to take the more organized forms we recognize today in the ancient Near East, starting in the vital region near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (modern Iraq) and ultimately extending west to the Mediterranean Sea through what became the Holy Land of the Bible, a region eventually contested by Egypt, the Roman Empire, and others, and extending north and east into the mountains of Persia (modern Iran). In this informed and accessible history, Arthur Cotterell tells the story of how the story of the development of civilization is also the story of the development of organized warfare