The English word war grew from an old Germanic root meaning confusion
Trace the word war back far enough and it stops meaning battle. It came into English in the eleventh century through Old French werre, the ancestor of modern guerre, from a Frankish word rooted in a Proto-Germanic term for mixture or confusion. Its modern German relative, verwirren, still means to bewilder.
How far back war itself goes is argued over. Remains from the Palaeolithic are too sparse to settle whether hunter-gatherers fought organised group battles, and some researchers think many such societies were broadly egalitarian and rarely did. Signs of violent conflict become more common in the Mesolithic, from roughly 10,000 years ago. The anthropologist Raymond Kelly argued that raiding tends to start in the richest environments, where surplus makes theft worthwhile. Lawrence Keeley, in his 1996 book War Before Civilization, took a darker view, estimating that 90 to 95 percent of known societies fought at least occasionally.
With states came armies. The oldest known battlefield in Europe is thought to date to around 1250 BC, and the Bronze Age, with its professional warriors and metal swords, is often picked out as a turning point, along with the Axial Age and the modern era. The sociologist Charles Tilly compressed the relationship into a famous loop: wars built states, and states went on to wage wars. His account remains the leading theory of how states formed.
Counting the dead has proved slippery. William Eckhardt produced the lowest figure, 151 million from 3000 BC to 1991, by averaging recorded casualties and multiplying by the number of known wars, a method that misses unrecorded conflicts and indirect deaths; only 18 wars are documented worldwide for 3000 to 1500 BC. Later scholars estimated the share of all deaths instead, giving totals from about 1 billion to roughly 9 billion. A widely repeated figure of 3,640,000,000 war dead circulated in scholarly literature for decades before being recognised as a hoax.
Whether war is fading is also contested. Since 1945, wars between great powers, outright conquests of territory and formal declarations have all become rarer, and battle deaths have fallen, partly thanks to better military medicine. Western Europe, which saw some 600 battles from the late eighteenth century onward, has seen none since 1945. Writers such as Steven Pinker and John Mueller read this as a real decline; Bear Braumoeller disputes it, and civil wars have risen in number over the same period.
Source: War
