War..

A reading from the Book of Revelations 6:2  And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

War: the first of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the other three depicting civil strife, famine, and death.

From the earliest times, war has been part of man’s history. The story of one tribe’s struggle against another occurs repeatedly in ancient writings, and it is interesting to note how often the word ‘war’ is used in some well-known works. In the American Declaration of Independence the word ‘war’ is used 3 times; in the Koran 8 times; in the Book of Mormon 101; and in our Bible the word is used 225 times! No wonder then, that our history, tied as it is to the Bible and its stories of war and struggle, can be viewed as a depressing sequence of war, treaty, uneasy peace, suspicion, and more war; and so the cycle continues down the ages with the causes of conflict as many and varied as the conflicts themselves.

In around 1200 BC Paris, a prince of the city-state of Troy, in what is now known as Turkey, travelled to the Greek city of Sparta. There he fell in love with Helen, King Menelaus’ queen, and persuaded her to go with him back to Troy, thus starting what we know as the Trojan War. After ten years laying siege to Troy, the Greeks finally destroyed the city, Helen went back to Menelaus, and bore him a daughter, Hermione.

As a result of the fall of Troy, many surviving Trojans reached the west coast of the Italian Peninsular. There, they either made treaties with the local tribes (the Latins) or subdued them by military force, and those survivors were the founders of the mighty Roman Republic, which became the Roman Empire, and still later, the Holy Roman Empire.

The story of the Hebrews is one of continuing conflict with other tribes in Canaan, called Palestine today, which began around 1300 BC and in some respects is still continuing to this day.

The rise of the Egyptian Civilisation from mud-hut dwellers to Pyramid builders is one of the great stories of the ascent of man, but by the time Ramses II became Pharaoh, the Hittites were also building their civilisation, which of course led to war. The major battle of this war was fought in 1274 BC at Kadesh, in northern Syria, and was hailed by Ramses as a great triumph. Ramses exaggerated somewhat, because neither Egypt nor the Hittites achieved a conclusive victory, and in 1258 BC a treaty was signed whereby the contested lands were divided and Ramses agreed to marry the daughter of the Hittite king.