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Warfare has been a constant throughout human history and conflict can certainly be traced back to our hominid ancestors in our evolutionary past. While technology today is often used as the distinguishing characteristic of warfare, the development of the professional army, that is fulltime soldiers and formations of a standing army, was also an important factor in making warfare an affair conducted throughout the year and allowed the establishment of large-scale states and empires to be possible.<ref>For general information about the history of war and armies, see: Chaliand, Gérard, ed. 1994. ''The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age''. Berkeley: University of California Press.</ref> This also paved the way for early states and empires to compete more with each other, helping to develop a variety of other social and technical innovations, including shaping our own world.
==Early Origins of Professional Armies==
In early warfare, from what we can tell when textual sources first become available to us at around the 3rd millennium BC, men would be conscripted for specific campaigns or years when kings were fighting neighboring kingdoms, where the conscripted soldiers would not be required to serve for very long periods and would simply return to their previous employment/professions after the campaign would finish.<ref>For information about early conscription in warfare in city-states, see: Trigger, Bruce G. 2007. ''Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study''. 1. paperback ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.</ref> By the mid 3rd millennium BC, there were attempts to create standing armies of professional soldiers.<ref>For information on early professional armies in Mesopotamia, see Bauer, S. Wise. 2007. ''The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome''. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, pg. 167.</ref>
==Key Reforms==
[[File:Ashurnasipal with official.jpg|thumbnail|250px|left|Figure 3. An Assyrian official meeting with the Assyrian king.]]While these early armies may be considered professional and represent transformations in how warfare was conducted with standing armies, it was not until key reforms under the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911-612 BC) do we now see consistent use of professional armies that becomes prominent in the Near East from this period onwards. This begins to spreads to Europe and eventually influence the Roman Empire.<ref>For information about the Neo-Assyrian state and its development, see: Radner, Karen. 2015. ''Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction''. First edition. Very Short Introductions 424. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.</ref> However, what preceded the professionalization of the military was the professionalization of the provincial and administrative system. In other words, running an empire became a more professional task. Beginning in the 9th century BC, we begin to see a new pattern, where kings appear to depend more on trained high officials who are eunuchs and a host of other bureaucratic officials began to be associated with the royal court and provinces. The empire appears to depend on officials, or “Great Ones,” who obtained their position, in part, based on merit and not simply through family or lineage connections to the royal family. <ref>For more information, see: Karlsson, Mattias. 2016. Relations of Power in Early Neo-Assyrian State Ideology. Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records, volume 10. Boston: De Gruyter, pg. 38.</ref> Thus, it was the realization that professional administration was needed that likely suggested that other aspects of empire needed to become professional (Figure 23).
==Later Adoptions==
The key development of the Neo-Assyrian Empire now became adopted by later armies, as new states began to realize the advantages of having a full-time army able to march as needed. The Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BC) in particular utilized many innovations by the Neo-Assyrians and even more greatly utilized different ethnic groups into its formations as the empire expanded.<ref> For a history of the Achaemenid Empire and its armies, see: Sekunda, Nick. 1992. ''The Persian Army: 560 - 330 BC''. Edited by Simon Chew. Elite Series 42.
see: pg. 3.</ref>
==Conclusion==
Although the first professional armies were likely founded in the 3rd millennium BC, what we can see is that by the 2nd millennium BC the use of foreigners, elite soldiers, and officers were used within military units. By the 2nd millennium BC, warfare was also happening in increasingly diverse places, including war conducted by navies as they battles to control important sea lanes and trade or communication routes. By the first half of the 1st millennium BC, armies became more consistently professional with full time soldiers and specialized troops. This professionalization facilitated warfare by not making it bound by the agricultural cycles that would have limited when armies could fight.
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