One of the earliest descriptions of war is to be found in the Iliad of Homer, where individual heroes fought with one another, armed with the sword, the lance, and the javelin, protected by shields, helmets, and coats of mail.  They fought on foot, or from chariots, which were in use before cavalry.  The war-horse was driven before he was ridden in Egypt or Palestine; but the Aryan barbarians in their invasion rode their horses, and fought on horseback, like the modern Cossacks.

Until the Greeks became familiar with war as an art, armies were usually very large, as if a great part of the population of a country followed the sovereign who commanded them.  Rameses the Great, the Sesostris of the Greeks, according to Herodotus led nearly a million of men in his expeditions.  He was the most noted of ancient warriors until Cyrus the Persian arose, and was nearly contemporaneous with Moses.  The Trojan war is supposed to have taken place during the period when the Israelites were subject to the Ammonites; and about the time that the Philistines were defeated by David, the Greeks were forced by war to found colonies in Asia Minor.

After authentic history begins, war is the main subject with which it has to deal; and for three thousand years history is simply the record of the feats of warriors and generals, of their conquests and defeats, of the rise and fall of kingdoms and cities, of the growth or decline of military virtues.  No arts of civilization have preserved nations from the sword of the conqueror, and war has been both the amusement and the business of kings.  From the earliest ages, the most valued laurels have been bestowed for success in war, and military fame has eclipsed all other glories.  The cry of the mourner has been unheeded in the blaze of conquest; even the aspirations of the poet and the labors of the artist have been as nought, except to celebrate the achievements of heroes.

It is interesting then to inquire how far the ancients advanced in the arts of war, which include military weapons, movements, the structure of camps, the discipline of armies, the construction of ships and of military engines, and the concentration and management of forces under a single man.  What was that mighty machinery by which nations were subdued, or rose to greatness on the ruin of States and Empires?  The conquests of Rameses, of David, of Nebuchadnezzar, of Cyrus, of Alexander, of Hannibal, of Caesar, and other heroes are still the subjects of contemplation among statesmen and schoolboys.  The exploits of heroes are the pith of history.

The art of war must have made great progress in the infancy of civilization, when bodily energies were most highly valued, when men were fierce, hardy, strong, and uncorrupted by luxury; when mere physical forces gave law alike to the rich and the poor, to the learned and the ignorant; and when the avenue to power led across the field of battle.

We must go to Egypt for the earliest development of art and science in all departments; and so far as the art of war consists in the organization of physical forces for conquest or defence, under the direction of a single man, it was in Egypt that this was first accomplished, about seventeen hundred years before Christ, as chronologists think, by Rameses the Great.