this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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You can say that scorched earth techniques are timeless. Absent a broader strategic goal, armies have more or less always went across the land like a swarm of locusts, destroying all in their path - partly out of nature (trampling crops on the march, etc), partly out of the wrath of the soldiery, and partly out of greed.
Scorched earth in the sense of deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure for the fulfillment of war aims goes back to at least the Second Punic War (~210 BCE), in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal destroyed Roman property in Italy as a means of reducing their will and capacity to resist in the long-term (and to induce them to come to terms). Chevauchee in the Hundred Years' War (England and France, 1300s and 1400s AD) was also used in this sense.
Scorched earth in the sense of destruction of one's own infrastructure to slow or damage an enemy is also ancient, though the first example that comes to mind is of Imperial Russian troops destroying crops and housing as Napoleon's army advanced through Russian territory (1812 AD). It's definitely much older than that, I'm just drawing blanks on other examples.
Scorched earth in the modern sense of systemic destruction of economic capacity is usually credited to General Sherman of the US Civil War (1861-1865 AD), if not in origin, at least in popularization. By the utter destruction of the productive and logistical capacity of the Confederacy, he sought to cripple their ability to support their own armies even far from the front he was fighting on. He went so far as to have railroad rails bent around trees so they couldn't be recovered, these being called "Sherman's neckties" because they resembled a necktie around the 'neck' of a tree trunk when so bent. He would later, and more gruesomely, use a similar technique in advocating for the destruction of the buffalo herds of the Western US to starve out Native American tribes.
The most classic case is probably the Scythian campaign of Darius I, when the Scythians burned their own fields ahead of the invading Persians until Darius was forced to retreat.
It probably should be noted that history gets really fucky before the Iron Age.
Bronze age collapse means that most of the writing and tradition before the year 1000BCE has been lost. Furthermore, the concept of history itself was only invented in 500BCE or so by Herodotus. So the fragments of 'history' found before that time is basically religion.
The problem with Religion in trying to understand earlier stuff is that it's filled with myth and mythology. We can say that a city exploded some time in that period (Given the Hebrew story of Soddom and Gamora) , which other religions at the time concur with. But the exact means at which that happened is lost to time
Asking about Bronze Age tactics is almost as relevant to asking a Dinosaur expert what color the dinos were.
No Bronze Age expert has any idea how tactics back then worked. All we have are a bunch of old armor and old weapons. We don't know their organization, their supply lines, their capabilities or philosophies. People probably killed each other and had wars but we don't know how.
The period between 4000BCE and 1000BCE is extremely mysterious. To the point that the few documents we find we don't even know how to read. So even if someone invented history at that time, we won't know how to read it today.
We do have some idea from preserved writing and depictions contemporary with the Bronze Age. The evidence is much less plentiful than in later societies, though, which, themselves, are often hotly debated due to the paucity or vagueness of available evidence.
We can read hieroglyphics and most forms of cuineform.
I'd argue that hieroglyphics and cuneiform are exceptions to the norm. They only cover the largest of ancient civilizations with the largest troves of writing.
IIRC, stuff like Indus River Valley writing has never been decoded.
The Rosetta Stone came in very handy.