Ancient

 Weapons, as man-made things, with the purpose of killing or harming living things, were used in the war. Weapons are of great significance because mankind wanted to win the war unharmed, which means one side must kill the other quickly and deadly. As the only tool man could use, the level of weapons decides the live or death, mostly.

At ancient times, materials that human being could access to were far limited, which were only ones came directly from nature, like wood, stone, bones, etc. As a half man-made thing, weapons in that time was only used to hunt in order to survive. Wars were only between human being and nature. Weapons, as the major tools for human being to survive, were developed in order to get more efficiency.

With the development of productive forces, there were enough food for everyone to survive and even some left. As the left things got accumulated, selfish was firstly came up and this led to the fights between man and man, which was "true war" or the war we now defined.

In order to win the war, mankind were forced to invent more powerful weapons. But the renovation of weapons need great society source support, which means the richer a society was, the more advanced weapons they probably own. Of course there were exceptions. Like China in Qing dynastic.

So on this level, the relationship between weapons and the level of society was some how promote each other.