History: War Photography

War has generally been considered to be a seemingly inescapable and integral aspect of human culture, its practice not linked to any single type of political organization or society. Rather, as discussed by John Keegan in his History Of Warfare, war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. The conduct of war extends along a continuum, from the almost universal primitive local tribal warfare that began well before recorded human history, to advanced nuclear warfare between global alliances, with the recently developed ultimate potential for human extinction. More recently, other experts Douglas P. Fry and Judith Hand have argued that war only emerges in certain types of societies or cultures, being rare or absent, for example, in nomadic foragers societies and becoming common when humans take up settled living, particularly at the Agricultural Revolution.
From late Old English (c.1050), wyrre, werre, from Old North French werre "war" (Fr. guerre), from Frankish werra, from Proto-Germanic werso (Compare with Old Saxon werran, Old high German werran, German verwirren "to confuse, perplex"). Cognates suggest the original sense was "to bring into confusion."
There was no common Germanic word for "war" at the dawn of historical times. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian guerra are from the same source; Romanic peoples turned to Germanic for a word to avoid Latin "bellum" because its form tended to merge with bello- "beautiful."