![]() Agents of espionage spied on rival city-states, providing rulers with information on military strength and defenses. In the era of democratic Greek city-states, espionage was chiefly employed as a political tool. The legendary incident of the Trojan Horse, a wooden structure given to the city of Troy as gift, but which contained several hundred Greek soldiers seeking safe entrance into the heavily fortified rival city, became the symbol of Grecian intelligence prowess. So renowned were Greek employments of deceptive strategies, that Greek literature from antiquity celebrated its intelligence and espionage exploits. The early Greeks relied on deception as a primary means of achieving surprise attacks on their enemies. and 1200 b.c., Greece's many wars with its regional rivals led to the development of new military and intelligence strategies. The rise of the Greek civilization brought forth new concepts of government and law enforcement. Egyptian spies were the first to develop the extensive use of poisons, including toxins derived from plants and snakes, to carry-out assassinations or acts of sabotage. The use of written messages necessitated the development of codes, disguised writing, trick inks, and hidden compartments in clothing to his communications. ![]() As the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome employed literate subjects in their civil services, many spies dealt with written communications. onwards, Egyptian espionage operations focused on foreign intelligence about the political and military strength of rivals Greece and Rome.Įgyptian spies made significant contributions to espionage tradecraft. Early Egyptian pharos employed agents of espionage to ferret-out disloyal subject and to locate tribes that could be conquered and enslaved. Egyptian hieroglyphs reveal the presence of court spies, as do papyri describing ancient Egypt's extensive military and slave trade operations. Historical and literary accounts of spies and acts of espionage appear in some of world's earliest recorded histories. Its practice and implications, however, are widely diverse. ![]() Throughout history, intelligence has been defined as the collection, culling, analysis, and dissemination of critical and strategic information. Clandestine and covert operations garner the most intrigue, but the history of espionage is better described in terms of the evolution of its more mundane components of tradecraft. The rise of the greatĪncient civilizations, beginning 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, begat institutions and persons devoted to the security and preservation of their ruling regimes. Espionage and Intelligence, Early Historical FoundationsĮspionage is one of the oldest, and most well documented, political and military arts.
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