If you carefully study the life of ancient people, you can conclude that a person in a primitive society rarely killed his own kind. There were so few people that each member of the society was an important element in the chain, ensuring the survival of the entire group. The exceptions were the tribes of cannibals and quite rare, even at that time, ritual sacrifices. However, the cannibals were eliminated by themselves - either being eaten by each other, or falling victim to prion diseases transmitted by eating brain tissue. There could be no talk of any wars or massacres at that time. Firstly, because there was nothing for which, and secondly, because there was no one and no one to fight with.
The situation changed radically after the discovery of agriculture, the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and the appearance of private property in a person. And where there is private property, there is already soil for trade, and for crimes, and for the emergence of statehood. In addition, the Bronze Age made weapons massive and more reliable - the armies of the first rulers were armed with bronze weapons. Well, then everything was simple …
Despite the fact that the formation of the first states resembled all modern police operations, military thought of that time was a very dynamically developing science. By the time of the heyday of antiquity, man had learned to masterfully send other representatives of his species to another world, thereby making killing a profession. Well, what else can you call the military? And for many hundreds of years, the ability to kill their own kind has been perfected in all armies of the world with the use of a wide variety of weapons. The military, naturally, looked for a variety of ways to kill enemies as much as possible, faster, and so as not to lose their own. Eventually, the concept of weapons of mass destruction emerged and began to develop.
We are used to the fact that weapons of mass destruction have relatively little time. Alas, this is not the case. Humanity has long known and applied methods of mass impacts on the enemy. It is not known exactly when it started, but the earliest mentions in historical chronicles date back to about the second millennium BC: the Assyrian chronicler gives a description of the action and method of using toxic substances obtained from the ergot mushroom. Spores were both sprayed in the wind and poured into the wells; this is the first recorded use of biological weapons of mass destruction.
And already about 200 years after this use, the ancient Sumerians had a whole science of using poisons in the field. Huge cuneiform tables describing the rules for the use of a wide variety of chemical warfare agents date back to 1770 BC.
Enlightened Greece also used this kind of weapons with might and main. Naturally, educated Greeks contributed to these tactics. For example, the Greeks first thought about the use of anopheles mosquitoes and chemical poison bombs launched from catapults. Everywhere in the armies besieging cities, they were amused by the fact that corpses of those who died from infectious diseases and pots of excrement were thrown into the city to the enemy. Actually, the great plague that mowed down half of Europe in the XIV century was presented to the Europeans in the form of a corpse-gift thrown over the fortress wall of Kaffa by the Tatars.
But these were all impromptu. In the ancient world, only one civilization put questions of the use of bacteriological weapons "on the stream". These were the ancient Hittites. Several times they won wars (often with the enemy, much stronger than themselves) with the help of epidemics among the enemy's transport animals. The Hittites most often used tularemia. In the Middle East at that time, the expression “Hittite pestilence” was common. But how the Hittites managed to preserve the bacteria for their further use remains a mystery.
Over time, thanks to the development of natural sciences, weapons of mass destruction appeared in the arsenal of many states. In addition, nuclear weapons were invented, superior in efficiency to anything that had been invented before. Some enlightened minds even began to express opinions that, well, they say, we understand the whole danger of using this weapon, because if it appeared a couple of thousand years ago, humanity would have destroyed itself long ago … Alas, there are still people in our world, who think that we have somehow changed in the last few millennia. And, meanwhile, for example, we do not differ from the ancient Egyptian either externally or internally; undoubtedly, we know more than him, but we think and act the same way as he does. So it is possible that nuclear weapons will also be used for their intended purpose for some time …
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And we can argue about the fact that we have owned atomic energy only since the middle of the 20th century. In the folklore of India and some Middle Eastern peoples, there are references to weapons, the striking factors of which, like two drops of water, resemble nuclear weapons. It is possible that Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, knew something, because, answering the question of whether his bomb was exploded first on our planet, he evasively answered: "In modern times, yes!" However, due to the lack of any archaeological evidence, such assumptions can only remain theories.
But time passed and the first circumstantial evidence confirming the possibility of using nuclear weapons to our time was obtained in 1947; then whole deserts were found, consisting of sintered glass. Archaeologists were struck by the shape and color of the glass, since the same glass was obtained by the explosions of atomic bombs, which had already been tested by more than a dozen.
Finds like these made us look anew at such historical sites as Mohenjo-Daro and Srinagar. These ancient destroyed cities, discovered relatively recently, have a look similar to Hiroshima after the atomic bombing: characteristic destruction of buildings, many skeletons lying right on the streets in unnatural poses, melted sand and clay. Even the radiation level in the ancient ruins still exceeds the normal background by 3 to 50 times!
If such assumptions are confirmed, then scientists will not only have to revise the picture of historical events that took place thousands of years ago, but also explain how our distant ancestors were able to create what modern civilization has been moving step by step for more than 1000 years …