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 In
about 1100 B.C.E., at the turning point between the Bronze and Iron
Ages, the Philistines restricted the use of iron by the Israelites.
In 546 B.C.E., following the first recorded arms control conference,
a "cessation of armaments" ended seventy-two years of
hostilities in China's Yangtse River Valley. Athens and Sparta agreed
to dismantle fortifications and demobilize part of their fleets
after the Peloponnesian War in the fourth century B.C.E. Plato's
Republic quotes Socrates as forbidding the use of poisoned
weapons or poisoned water. In addition, India's third-century B.C.E.
Book of Man forbade weapons concealed in wood, barbed and
poisoned points, and points "blazing with fire."
One of the best-known of the ancient arms control
agreements was negotiated between Rome and Carthage following Scipio
Africanus's victory over Hannibal in the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C.
This treaty required the Carthaginians to surrender all of their
war elephants and all but ten of their much-feared triremes.
This photo shows a 16th-century tapestry depicting the Battle of
Zama and is used with permission of the Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid,
Spain. More
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