Horses Change the Battlefield: The Chariot

^{Assyrian bow, arrow, and quivers. With weapons like this, the charioteers of Assyria conquered most of the ancient Near East.}

An army of enemies was approaching Egypt and they were coming from the northeast, not the south, the only direction from which enemies had come before. Nubians had occasionally marched north, along the Great River, but no large armies had ever come from either the east or the west. The barren, water‑less deserts that stretched on either side of the Nile Valley had a way of discouraging invaders. The Pharaoh called up all the men of Lower Egypt to meet the invaders. They appeared with their copper axes, copper‑headed spears, stone maces, and simple self‑bows.

Egyptian weaponry was nowhere near as advanced as that of the people of Mesopotamia, where warfare was almost constant. The deserts had protected the Egyptians from all but occasional clashes with the Nubians, the black inhabitants of the much‑less‑populous kingdom on the Upper Nile. And if the Egyptians’ military equipment and organization was primitive compared to that of the peoples in the valley of the Two Rivers, it was light‑years behind what they faced now.

The enemy, called the Hyksos, which has been variously translated as “Lords of the Uplands” or “Shepherd Kings,” had sharp bronze weapons, including swords, bronze scale armor, and powerful composite bows. (See Chapter 2.) They also had something utterly unknown to the Egyptians: horse‑drawn chariots.

Egyptian tradition says the Hyksos took Lower Egypt without a fight. That doesn’t mean they slowly infiltrated. Archaeological evidence shows that they suddenly took possession of the Delta and all of Lower Egypt after thoroughly sacking it. “Without a fight” means that there was no toe‑to‑toe infantry slugging match – what the Egyptians meant by “fight.”

On their light, fast chariots, the Hyksos literally rode circles around their enemies and shot them down. There were two men to a chariot: a driver and an archer. The Hyksos powerful composite bow easily outranged the bows of the Egyptians. The mobile Hyksos could concentrate on any part of the Egyptian line they chose and shoot down the unarmored Egyptian infantry with impu‑nity. When at last the Egyptians broke and fled, the Hyksos charioteers rode them down, shooting arrows and slashing with their curved bronze swords. They stayed in the Delta and Lower Egypt for a century. They didn’t try to conquer Upper Egypt, where the valley is narrow – not ideal chariot country – and most transportation was by boat.

Staying proved to be a mistake. The southern Egyptians learned to make composite bows and bronze weapons and armor. Most important, they learned to make and use chariots. They drove the Hyksos out of Egypt and ended Egypt’s centuries‑old isolation. The Egyptians became conquerors and pursued the Hyksos into their homeland.

The Hyksos homeland is believed to be the Arabian Desert, south and east of the cities of Syria. Not much is known about the Hyksos. Some of their rulers had Semitic names like Jacob‑her; others had names that cannot be identified ethnically. Their invasion, in about 1750 B.C., was at the southwestern end of a human avalanche that began on the steppes of what is now southern Russia and was sparked by the invention of the light, horse‑drawn chariot.

A chariot of sorts had been around for centuries, not in Egypt but in Mesopotamia, in the lands of Sumer and Akkad. The first was a clumsy vehicle with four solid‑disk wheels. It was pulled by two donkeys, because no horses had been domesticated. It had high sides and the front of it was almost as high as its occupants’ heads. There were two occupants, a driver and a man who threw javelins at enemy troops. There was a supply of javelins in a quiver hung on the side of the chariot. It was obviously heavy, and the four wheels on fixed axles made turning it extremely difficult. Later Sumerian chariots had only two wheels, but they were still heavy and though these donkey‑powered war machines must have been slow, nevertheless they proved to be valuable in the many wars between the city‑states of Mesopotamia. The high sides protected the warriors in the chariots, and they were faster than infantry, especially infantry formed into a stiff, massive phalanx.

Word of the Sumerian war cart probably worked its way across the Caucasus.

There, the steppe peoples had learned to domesticate horses. The horses weren’t strong enough to ride, but they could pull carts. The steppe people then developed a specialized war cart. It was light, had two spoked wheels, low wicker‑work sides, and a floor made of criss‑crossing strips of leather.

The steppe nomads had already developed a composite bow, probably because trees were scarce, and trees providing good bow wood were scarcer. Their bow had a thin strip of wood in the center, but the back was a think layer of animal sinew and the belly was strips of horn. These parts were all glued together and covered with bark or leather and lacquered to keep dampness out. A bow of this type was more elastic than a wooden bow, so it could be much shorter than a wooden bow shooting the same length of arrow. It was so elastic, in fact, that it could be made to curve away from the belly when unstrung.

Protecting their herds from predators and their camps from enemies required a lot of long‑range shooting, so the nomads developed very powerful bows and excellent archers.

But predators like wolves and leopards were fast‑moving beasts. It wasn’t until they had their fast, light chariots that the herdsmen hunters could really deal with the hostile fauna effectively. They soon found that what worked on animals worked on human enemies, too. The combination of chariot and composite bow rapidly spread through all the Iranian language speakers of the steppe. The new weapons system led to more far‑ranging wars, and tribes began to push each other into new territories. Early in the second millennium B.C., the charioteers from the steppes began to invade the settled lands. They drove east into central Asia and from there into China, where they founded the first historical dynas‑ties. The Aryans, an Iranian people, galloped over the deserts of Iran and through the mountain passes to the Indus Valley, where they wiped out one of the world’s three literate civilizations. Other Iranian charioteers, the Mitanni, invaded Anatolia, where they established a kingdom. Some of the Mitanni mixed with the Hittites, who had invaded Anatolia previously, and others moved into Syria, where they made themselves the leaders of the Hurrian people already there.

The Mitanni were acknowledged to be masters of horse training. Among the correspondence of the Hittite kings is a letter to a Mitannian seeking information on the subject. The military success of the Iranian charioteers was so striking that all the peoples of the east Mediterranean shore adopted chariot warfare. Only the Egyptians, happy in their isolation, seemingly protected by their flanking deserts, remained innocent of chariot warfare. That is, until the Hyksos arrived.

After conquering the Hyksos, the Egyptians followed them into what became Palestine and Syria, conquering the cities and nomad tribes of that area.

Egypt’s charioteers were the Pharaoh’s striking force, but he had infantry spearmen and archers to hold the enemy in place. The archers introduced a new tactic: volleying on command. The impact of thousands of arrows striking simultaneously proved to be almost as disconcerting to enemies as a chariot charge. The Egyptian move into Asia brought these African warriors into conflict with another rising power, the Hittite Empire. The clash of the Hittites and Egyptians at Meggido – Armageddon in Hebrew – became legendary in the Near East, a kind of “mother of all battles.” Tactically, it was a Hittite victory, although Egyptian inscriptions try to make it otherwise. Strategically, it was a draw, as neither empire advanced any farther.

Chariots were also used in central and western Europe, where the terrain was much less favorable. Forests covered much of the area, and the Balkans, Greece and Italy were mountainous. Farther north, marshes covered wide areas, forests were huge and dense, and wide rivers cut through the land. Chariots seemed to have been used by European nobles to carry them to the scene of a battle, after which they would dismount to fight. Homer’s The Iliad is full of descriptions of this kind of fighting. In Cyprus, a large and largely deforested island that was a kind of Mycenean backwater in classical times, chariots were still used in the old way during the Greek‑Persian Wars. And in Britain, the Romans encountered British chiefs still using chariots long after even the Gauls had abandoned them. The British chariots had sides but no front walls. The Britons would run out on the yoke poles to throw their javelins at the Romans.

As a tactic, that wasn’t very effective, but the British nobles delighted in showing off their athletic prowess. By that time, the rest of the world had abandoned chariots for everything but triumphal parades and races.

The chariot was gradually abandoned because people had learned to breed horses that were bigger and stronger and capable of carrying men on their backs.

When warriors learned to shoot from horseback, they effectively doubled the firepower of their armies. Instead of two horses pulling one chariot containing two men (and only one an archer), cavalry decided that the same number of horses and the same number of men provided twice as many archers. And a few centuries later, a very simple invention gave cavalry even more striking power, as we’ll see in Chapter 7.