Throughout history, individuals, states or political factions have gained sovereignty over regions and resources through the use of war. Warfare, regrettably a universal human experience and more specifically battle, is the essential experience of war, containing the moments when the will, the motivation, and the psychological reserves of the combatant were tested to their fullest extent.

An egocentric pursuit of personal glory and booty is generally regarded as characteristic of so-called primitive warriors. Yet at the same time, it is the approach that creates legends and gives material to heroic epic. Heroes of outstanding physical strength or intelligence can conduct superhuman tasks to save and protect their people. Consequently, looking in detail, numerous flaws are allowed to them, they are still humans. On the other hand, the concept of heroes is intrinsically embedded in the concept of tribal mentality. Heroes, real or mythical, are ancestors of a group of individuals that consider themselves as their descendants and usually consider outsiders as dangerous and conflict against them as normal. Such mentality resulted from a dichotomy of an “us” against “them” and engendered a latent fear of the “other” or “diverse” whose culture is at odds or at least differs from one’s own.

Walls make the civilization – they create a sharp distinction between the city and the countryside, between the municipal jurisdiction, law and order and the wilderness where everything is possible. They are not only a defensive architectonic element; they are a political statement indicating that society was able to invest so much money, time and efforts into building them. Consequently, too often historians perceive the construction of urban defences as one of the hallmarks of civilization.

The world’s first historian, the Greek Herodotus, wrote, “No one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace, sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons. However, I suppose some god must have wanted this to happen”. However, his words, when describing Greek warfare as an almost ritual system of total fairness between identical hoplite armies, are less trustworthy and are actually moralising propaganda or deceptive lies. Warfare was never fair nor heroic – it was tragic. Evolving from conflicts between armed bands led by a warrior leader, city militia of part-time soldiers, providing their own equipment and perhaps including all the citizens of the city-state or polis, began to move warfare away from the control of private individuals and into the realm of the state. Assemblies or groups of elite citizen’s sanctioned war, and generals and other military leaders came to be accountable for their actions.