Neolithic Revolution and Warfare: characterized by the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, ed to man’s first high civilizations, a change that included a vast increase in warfare. Living closer together, with larger populations, and with more possessions to fight over, people now practiced war on a scale hunter-gatherer societies of the past had not.  
By the time humans first developed writing, they were warriors; a considerable part of early written history details military activities.
Fertile Crescent: Arc-shaped strip of agriculturally productive land that curves up from the Persian gulf, follows the path of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through Iraq, then swings west through Syria,and finally runs down along the Mediterranean coast, to the borders of Egypt.  Region where most of the great early breakthroughs in military technology originated.
Mesopotamia (from the Greek, “land between the rivers”):  Eastern end of the Fertile Crescent where large-scale warfare first appeared andunderwent much of its earliest evolution.
Why Mesopotamia rather than the comparably old society of Egypt?
Comparison shows that for most of its history, Egypt was much more peaceful and secure place than the Fertile Crescent. This cultural difference in culture results in large part from geographical diffence.  Despite similarities in respect to physical environment between the two societies (hot dry climate, lack of rainfall, dependence on river water and annual flooding), there were also significant differences; in particular, the degree of isolation.
Geography of Ancient Egypt:  Geographically-isolated society consisting of a long, thin river valley surrounded by high cliffs and desert. Cut off on the north by the sea and in the south by the waterfalls of the Nile. Ononly from one direction was ancient Egypt truly vulnerable to invasion through the northeast corridor that we today call the Gaza Strip.
Geography of the Fertile Crescent: Region has faced a continuing threat of invasion from the vast Arabian Peninsula to the south and the mountains to the north and east. These invasions have made the fertile strip of land between a battleground over the centuries.
Semites: Tough nomadic tribesmen from Arabian Peninsula who speak semitic languages; they have periodically migrated into the Crescent in search of better living conditions.  
Semitic languages: related languages that may have descended from a single parent tongue; the two best known that survive into the modern world, are Hebrew and Arabic.
Indo-Europeans:  New group of invaders who began to threaten the crescent starting around 2500 BCE.
The dangerous and unstable situation in the Crescent sparked the development of military science.  By 3000 BCE, the warring city states of Mesopotamia had advanced militarily far beyond the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.
Mesopotamian Military Advances:
(1)  Use of metal weapons and metal body armor
(2)  Invention of Compound Bow
(3)  Introduction of horse into warfare (both to pull war chariots and to ride)
Metal weapons:  First copper, later bronze, then iron.
Chalcolithic Period: Literally “the copper-stone period,” it came after the Neolithic, but before the Bronze Age.  During this period, humans continued to use stone alongside copper, since copper’s usefulness was limited by the fact that it is a relatively soft metal.
Bronze:  term referring to various alloys of copper formed by mixing the metal with another element for the purpose of hardening it. Historically,the most frequently used additive has been tin.  Optimum mixture is 60% copper to 40% tin.  Bronze is better than the metal that would ultimately replace it, iron. (It is stronger ; easier to work since it has a lower casting temperature; less brittle; and does not rust.)
Steel:  an iron alloy with most impurities, aside from a small amount of carbon, burned out.  Enormous improvement over iron since it is extremely strong while avoiding the brittleness that often characterizes iron.
Slow spread of steel:  Since Steel requires very high temperatures and considerable labor to produce, Throughout the Mediterranean zone, the metal remained exceedingly rare throughout the Middle Ages.  Most steel-production was smallscale and took place in Moslem lands, where smiths developed techniques as early as the 9th century.  The best steel weapons were forged in Islamic cities such as Damascus and Toledo.  Not until the nineteenth century, with such developments as the open hearth and the Bessemer Process, did steel become the very widely used metal it is today. Until then, iron continued to predominate.
Superiority of bronze over early iron has led historians to speculate why a switch-over ever occurred.  The best argument has to do with availability.  Iron ore occurs extensively in nature and once man learned to heat it to very high temperatures in a charcoal fire, he had an almost inexhaustible supply.  By contrast, bronze requires tin which was relatively harder to obtain.  (The major source for the west was the British Isles, out on the perifery.)  Sometime as early as 1500 BCE, population throughout the eastern Mediterranean began to experience severe dislocation due to war and migration.  Many scholars believe that this turbulence, by disturbing the trading patterns, may have been the major reason for a shift-over from bronze to iron.  In some places where tin was more easily obtained, use of bronze continued for a longer period.
Bronze was resurrected in the later Middle Ages for making artillery.  Due to their greater strength and resilience, bronze cannon were substantially superior.  Casting of bronze statues and cannon progressed in tandem.
Shiftover began slightly before 1000 BCE in the region of the Fertile Crescent.
Hittites: people inhabiting what is today Turkey were the first to make use of iron weapons in their wars against the Egyptian Empire
Philistines:  brought iron usage to the southeastern Mediterranean coast from which it spread inland to the Israelites
Assyrians:  first to arm their soldiers almost exclusively with iron
All of these major developments (metal for weaponry, compound bow, horse-drawn war chariots) arrived in Egypt only much later, through cultural borrowing rather than independent creation.
Necessity is the mother of invention!  The people of the Fertile Crescent needed to develop militarily and did so.
Arnold Toynbee:  A leading British historian in the first half of the 20th century; he developed the Theory of  Challenge and Response.  
In order to progress, humanity has to be challenged.  Otherwise, man will simply drift along in his old ways.
Progress results from the human response to the challenges encountered.
Some of the most important challenges facing any civilization, especially in the early period, are challenges of the environment.
The challenge of periodic invasion led the people of the Fertile Crescent to respond by developing militarily. Geographical isolation allowed Egypt to escape this cutting-edge military development.
Two ancient societies in particular moved the art of war forward, first the Greeks (including in this category the Macedonians) and later the Romans.
Macedonians:   a people who lived just to the north of Greece; despite their proximity, the Greeks considered them barbarians, a Greek term originally used to refer to all non Greeks.  The languages are highly similar and by around the 4th century BCE, Macedonia had, for all intents and purpose, became a part of Greece (whatever the Greeks thought about it.)
Both the Greeks/Macedonians and the Romans based their developed military systems, the finest in the ancient world, on the use of heavy infantry.
Heavy Infantry:  A term refering to footsoldiers, who carried swords, shields, and spears, and wore extensive metal armor.
Hoplites:  Greek word for such warriors who began to appear which the Greeks were still living in the Bronze Age.  Their proficiency on the battlefield is reflected in the fact that from about 600 BCE until the time of the Roman conquest, they were the great mercenary soldiers of Mediterranean world whom everybody tried to hire.
Significance of military power to Greek culture:
(1) Colonization:  Much of the Greek peninsula is mountainous and unfit for agriculture and so the Greeks, like the earlier inhabitants of the region, the Minoans, turned to the sea to make their living as fishermen, merchants, occasionally as pirates and as colonists.  Greek colonies were spread around the Mediterranean from Russia and the Near East to Italy, Spain, and southern France.  They became an important source of contact with other populations to which Greek culture spread. The prime example of this cultural influence is Rome.  Greek military and naval power were critical to the establishment and protection of Greek colonies.
(2)  Victory in the Persian Wars (492-479 BCE): Early in the fifth century BCE, the Greeks had to fight the Persian Empire, the mightiest that had yet existed, in order to maintain their freedom.  Their victory in these wars helped make possible the cultural flowering of Greece without which the subsequent history of western civilization would be quite different.  Although Greek heavy infantry was not capable of the rapid movement characterizing Asian armies, hoplites were unsurpassed when it came to fighting at close quarters, a fact they demonstrated at the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, and at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea a decade later.
Greek ships:  The Greeks borrowed and improved upon the technology of earlier sea-going civilizations (Egyptians, Minoans, Phoenicians) which had developed the galley, a vessel dependent primarily upon its oars, but one which was also equipped with a sail, making it possible for wind to supplemented the power of the rowers. This combination remained typical of western ships until the end of the Middle Ages.  Phoenicians developed galleys with two decks for rowers (biremes); the Greeks eventually added a third deck, creating the trireme, one of the best ships of the ancient world.  The Greek navy played a critical role in the colonization movement and helped defeat the Persians.
Phalanx:  Greek word meaning “a line of battle,” it was not so much a line as a rectangular mass of men many files wide and some ranks deep (through most of Greek history not fewer than four ranks).  The Greek phalanx was composed of hoplites with their shields overlapping and the spears of the first few ranks sticking out in front like a hedge-hog.  Phalanx-like formations had been used since the time of the Sumerians, history’s first highly-civilized people, and among the various societies of the ancient Near East.  However, it reached it apex in Greek armies of the 5th—4th centuries BCE and with the Macedonians who learned from the Greeks.
After winning glory in the Persian Wars, the Greek cities entered a long struggle to determine if any one of them would be strong enough to unify Greece.  During this internecine conflict, they turned their phalanxes on one another.  In the end, none of the cities, including the two strongest, Athens and Sparta, proved strong enough to impose its brand of unity; as a result, the Greeks fought to an exhausted stalemate and fell prey to a new power waiting in the wings—Macedonia.