The first recorded act in the Hebraic history of the world after the expulsion of Adam from Paradise is a murder. In patriarchal times we read of contentions between the servants of Abraham and of Lot, and between the petty kings and chieftains of the countries where they journeyed. Long before Abraham was born, violence was the greatest evil with which the world was afflicted. Before his day mighty conquerors arose and founded kingdoms. Babylon and Egypt were powerful military States in pre-historic times. Wars more or less fierce were waged before nations were civilized. The earliest known art, therefore, was the art of destruction, growing out of the wicked and brutal passions of men,--envy and hatred, ambition and revenge; in a word, selfishness. Race fought with race, kingdom with kingdom, and city with city, in the very infancy of society. In secular history the greatest names are those of conquerors and heroes in every land under the sun; and it was by conquerors that those grand monuments were erected the ruins of which astonish every traveller, especially in Egypt and Assyria. But wars in the earliest ages were not carried on scientifically, or even as an art. There was little to mark them except brute force. Armies were scarcely more than great collections of armed men, led by kings, either to protect their States from hostile invaders, or to acquire new territory, or to exact tribute from weaker nations. We do not read of military discipline, or of skill in strategy and tactics. A battle was lost or won by individual prowess; it was generally a hand-to-hand encounter, in which the strongest and bravest gained the victory. One of the earliest descriptions of war is to be found in the Iliad of Homer, where individual heroes fought with one another, armed with the sword, the lance, and the javelin, protected by shields, helmets, and coats of mail. They fought on foot, or from chariots, which were in use before cavalry. The war-horse was driven before he was ridden in Egypt or Palestine; but the Aryan barbarians in their invasion rode their horses, and fought on horseback, like the modern Cossacks. Until the Greeks became familiar with war as an art, armies were usually very large, as if a great part of the population of a country followed the sovereign who commanded them. Rameses the Great, the Sesostris of the Greeks, according to Herodotus led nearly a million of men in his expeditions. He was the most noted of ancient warriors until Cyrus the Persian arose, and was nearly contemporaneous with Moses. The Trojan war is supposed to have taken place during the period when the Israelites were subject to the Ammonites; and about the time that the Philistines were defeated by David, the Greeks were forced by war to found colonies in Asia Minor.