[An earlier and much abridged version of this essay was published in "Military History Magazine", in the June, 2005 issue. I am grateful to Editor Emeritus C. Brian Kelly for permission to reprint some portions of that article in this new and definitive version; and to Jim Zabek, for going at least half-way out on a limb to publish it . WRT]

Music has been an integral part of warfare, and of soldiers' lives, since the dawn of history. Even the instruments used to play music have acquired great symbolic power - in the British Army, a regiment's drums are second only to its colors as an emblem of pride and heritage. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, the act of enlisting was described as "following the drum". Although drums and trumpets have been retired from the battlefield for at least sixty years, those ancient symbols continue to be evoked in book titles, films, poetry, and song lyrics - for example, David R. Palmer's well-regarded study of strategy in Vietnam, Summons of the Trumpet.

The function of music in warfare has always been twofold: 1) It has been used as a means of communication for many centuries and was still being used that way in the 1950s by the Red Chinese in Korea; and, 2) it has been employed as a psychological weapon – sometimes, a rather surprisingly potent one. Perhaps the oldest surviving reference to the latter function appears in Chapter 6 of the Book of Joshua, which contains an exceptionally detailed account of the deployment of rams; horns against the defending garrison of besieged Jericho, the oldest fortified settlement known to archaeology. Alas for military historians, much of the account simply has to be hyperbolic rather than literally factual. While a mass of rams’ horns do indeed make a powerful “blast of sound” (to quote the phrase preferred by the editors of the King James version of the Bible), it stretches credulity to imagine that those instruments, in and of themselves, could have set up a vibration sufficiently potent to undermine Jericho’s seven-foot-thick walls of massive undressed stone. Still, the Biblical account of Joshua’s campaign makes it clear that he was a most subtle general who compensated for the numerical and technological inferiority of his Israelite troops (at least some of Jericho’s Canaanite garrison was armed with iron, rather than bronze, weapons) by employing hit-and-run tactics, organizing and running a superior intelligence-gathering service, and a diabolically clever aptitude for psychological warfare.

Barring the incredibly coincidental occurrence of an earthquake, the Old Testament description of the collapse of Jericho’s walls is almost certainly allegorical. Even if the exact nature of Joshua’s stratagems remains conjectural, however, it seems clear that his elaborate staged maneuvers before the city’s walls both confused and exhausted the defenders – who may have been well-protected and better armed, but who didn’t outnumber their besiegers by much and who didn’t remotely have the same fire-in-the-belly motivation as the Israelites. It appears that Joshua kept up these feints for several days, now appearing to threaten one part of the walls, now massing at another, causing the garrison to respond by massing the majority of its troops against one seemingly endangered point while simultaneously weakening other points. Who knew if the Israelites had hidden a strong reserve assault force in the rugged terrain around the city, ready to launch a furious assault when the defenders’ attention was turned elsewhere?

That may, in fact, have been what happened; we simply don’t know. But at some point, Joshua judged the Canaanites’ morale to be at its lowest ebb, and he assembled his best troops for an assault. The attack was preceded by a phalanx of priests, who arrayed themselves on high ground just outside of bow and sling-range, and blew coordinated signals on their rams’ horns, saving the loudest and most demoralizing “blast” to signal the start of the assault on Jericho’s walls. The raucous volley of horn calls fired up the attackers’ spirits and further weakened the garrison’s will-to-resist; perhaps a concerted blast on the rams’ horns was the Israelites’ way of signaling “No Quarter”, and at this time in their history, the Old Testament Jews were regarded by their neighbors as a merciless and bloodthirsty lot, even by the standards of the Fertile Crescent! Whatever the details of Joshua’s victory, the carefully-timed “blasts” of massed rams’ horns clearly was a significant ingredient of his strategy, else historians would not have focused on it and passed the information on to future generations.