Chariots and Elites Horses were domesticated, probably first in the steppes north of the Black Sea, as early as 4000 bce by nomadic pastoralists who would later constitute a source of significant military power in Eurasia (see Chapter 6). But, as yet, the combination of riding and shooting had not been mastered, at least as a military skill, and horses spread southward into southwest Asia and eastward into China initially as draft animals for ceremonial carts. A suite of new technologies that seems to have come together by 1700 bce then combined with the horse to create a major new weapons system, the war chariot, with major implications for the social and political structures of the kingdoms it affected.
The technology suite consisted of two horses pulling a light chariot with two spoked wheels, a vast improvement over solid wooden disks. Reins connected to bits, another invention, allowed a driver to control the horses while an expert archer wielding an improved composite bow fired at the enemy. (Later, especially in the Hittite tradition, a third man was added as a shield bearer.) This innovation, in turn, stimulated the development of the first significant body armor, bronze scales sewn onto leather, which protected the archer and sometimes the horses. The result was a fast, mobile missile platform, squadrons of which could now dominate battlefields—indeed, their ability to maneuver in units probably made battles in the sense known to military history truly possible for the first time. Furthermore, the warriors who rode on the chariots now possessed specialized skills in combination with expensive technology. Possession of both virtually ensured (or resulted from) their position as not just a military but a sociopolitical elite, and the kingdoms of the age of chariots were dominated by an aristocracy of chariot warriors attached to kings in central palace-cities.
Assyrian War Chariot
This carving shows a chariot with the classic pairing of driver and archer.
The armies of the so-called chariot kingdoms continued to include large numbers of infantry, but they play almost no role in the battles narrated in enough detail by the sources that we can at least attempt to reconstruct them (see the Highlights box “Kadesh,” for example). It may be that this simply represents the elite bias of those sources, but it is more likely that it represents reality. That is, chariot-age infantry remained minimally trained peasant conscripts, useful as labor in siege warfare and as camp or city guards but having little worth on the battlefield. Battles thus consisted of mass confrontations of hundreds of chariots on each side. The lightly built chariots, designed for speed and maneuverability, probably did not charge each other directly, but rather engaged in mass drive-by shootings, something like a mass battle of light tanks. Feats of individual prowess, possible in such loose and mobile action, clearly figured into the culture of chariot warfare.
The relatively untrained and lightly armed conscript infantry would not have been much use against mobile chariots. Therefore, even if they remained on the battlefield, they would have played an immobile and passive role. But there is evidence for more professional light infantry skirmishers or runners who supported chariots in battle, assisting their own fallen chariot warriors and finishing off fallen enemy warriors.
The origins of chariots and chariot warfare are obscure, but linguistic evidence suggests that their inventors were the Aryans of central Asia, speakers of the language ancestral to an entire branch of the Indo-European language family. Certainly, Aryan terms for chariots and chariot warriors and the technologies and tactics of chariot warfare were common throughout southwest Asia even in areas where Aryan was not spoken or had died out in general use, and chariot- using elites were associated with the Aryan pantheon (most familiar still as the main gods of Hinduism) even in the midst of other religious traditions. The Bhagavad Gita, the tale of the chariot warrior Arjuna and his driver Krishna (the god Vishnu in disguise), became a central ethical text of Hinduism, which speaks to the centrality of chariot warrior elites to Aryan (or Vedic, in its Indian context) society.
Chariots and Kingdoms The Aryans and their chariot culture seem to have spread from the area south of the Caucasus Mountains. Evidence for the new style of warfare appears at Troy in Asia Minor shortly after 1700 BCE, and it made its way to Egypt with the Hyksos, Amorite and Hurrian invaders from Asia Minor and Syria, around 1650. The Hittites, also based in Asia Minor, adopted the new style, and in 1595, a Hittite army campaigned all the way down into Mesopotamia, sacking Babylon and demonstrating decisively the range and power of chariot warfare.
The power of chariot warfare contributed to a shared culture of chariot warriors led by kings whose role as leaders of chariot armies became much more important, as attested by a major shift in the style of royal propaganda away from religious legitimation and toward military heroism. (This is not to say that religion became unimportant: It legitimated and even motivated warfare in many places, and provided the ritual elements that held armies together politically, culturally, and in terms of morale on campaign.) The political organization that resulted was based in opulent palaces. That shared culture and the range of chariot armies brought the major kingdoms of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean into regular and direct military and diplomatic contact for the first time. The kingdoms that could afford large chariot forces recognized each other as great powers and disputed control of the lands that separated their respective cores. Syria, in particular, became a prominent battleground, disputed and dominated at times by the Hittites of Asia Minor, the Mitanni based in northern Mesopotamia, and a newly aggressive and imperialistic Egypt—the three mutually recognized Great Kingdoms.
Warfare became one of a number of tools of statecraft in this context. Marriage alliances, economic exchanges and treaties governing trade, and the fortification of frontiers were combined according to circumstances to provide defensive security and pursue imperial expansion where possible. The cultural need for kings to establish their ruling credentials by demonstrating military process prompted a number of campaigns early in reigns by Great Kingdom forces against carefully selected minor targets. However, relations with other Great Kingdoms remained kings’ foremost concern. In those relations, legalistic attention to justifying military action, including formal declarations of war framed in terms of legal disputes, reflects the common culture of chariot elites across southwest Asia and Egypt, despite differences in languages and local cultures within different kingdoms. This common culture included a tradition of battle in which the two sides seem to have agreed ahead of time on a place of battle as a means of settling disputes. Material and logistical considerations contributed to this tendency as well: chariot battles required large, open plains, and the presence of fortifications and fortified cities further constrained where armies could meet. Strategic surprise was therefore difficult to achieve, though tactical surprise based on chariot mobility was possible (see the Highlights box).
A common culture of chariot elites also emerged across the many provinces or small states of Shang China. However, the general cultural framework of Yellow River states was more homogenous than that in southwest Asia, which was more open geographically to migrations, nomadic invasions, and cross-cultural influences.
Disputes over territory in Syria crupted into open warfare between New Kingdom Egypt under Ramses II and the Kingdom of Hatti (the Hittite realm) under Mutawallis II in 1275 bce. Mutawallis gathered the Hittite army and a large number (according to Egyptian sources) of subordinate allies and established a base outside the fortified city of Kadesh in north Syria, at the borders of the kingdom. Meanwhile, in little over a month, Ramses II marched the Egyptian army from Egypt to the vicinity of Kadesh. This rate of progress, approaching fifteen miles a day, compares favorably with rates of march by other infantry or mixed armies throughout history before mechanization. It also speaks to the organization of the Egyptian army and the care taken over supplies, which were probably mostly provided along the route of march by allies and subordinate provinces, who would have been apprised in advance of the coming of the king’s army; carts and pack animals must have carried some supplies and equipment, including stores of arrows. The army was divided into four divisions, named for Egyptian gods. Each contained chariots and infantry; the sources put the total number of Egyptian chariots at 1000. The Hittites are said to have had 2500 of their own chariots plus 1000 from allies, as well as a large force of infantry (Figure 1.1).
The last day of marching brought Ramses’ lead division to a camp northwest of Kadesh, near the Hittite camp northeast of the city, across the river Orontes. Whether from poor scouting, misleading intelligence, or simple overconfidence, Ramses seems not to have anticipated that the Hittites might hit his following divisions as they marched from the previous day’s camp north past Kadesh to join the pharaoh’s force the next day. Mutawallis sent the Hittite chariots across the Orontes south of Kadesh to strike the second Egyptian division on the march. This surprise attack—portrayed in the Egyptian sources as a cowardly ruse—scattered the second division completely, and the Hittites then turned north to attack Ramses’ division in its camp. Ramses managed to get enough of his chariot force deployed west of the camp to counter the Hittite force. Mutawallis, observing from the heights of his camp, sent in his allies as reinforcements. But the timely arrival from the north of a force of Syrians allied with Ramses, and probably of the third Egyptian division from the south, pressured the Hittite force on both flanks. Tired already from long fighting, the Hittites fell back across the river, and fighting ended for the day. The Hittite infantry seems to have taken no part in the battle. The Egyptian second division’s infantry was scattered with their chariots, while that of Ramses’ division was confined to his camp. The battle had been between the chariots on each side.
Fighting resumed the next day, probably on more conventional terms, with neither side having the advantage of surprise. It proved indecisive: The Hittites could not drive the Egyptians off, but Ramses could not drive the Hittites away or into Kadesh and beseige the city. A truce let the Egyptians claim victory, but the true result was reflected in the peace treaty signed fifteen years later, in which each side recognized the other’s possessions and as a result of which Ramses married a Hittite princess.
Figure 1.1 Battle Plan of Kadesh
The causes of the end of the Bronze Age have long been the subject of scholarly debate. Military technology and tactics entered into this debate in full force with the publication of Robert Drews’ The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 b.c. in 1993. Drews placed increased infantry effectiveness, based on better armor and weaponry and heightened social cohesiveness that translated into battlefield cohesion, at the causal center of that debate. Specifically, Drews claimed that it was infantry weapons and tactics that brought down chariot elites, destroyed their palaces and thus their states, and disrupted beyond repair the general system that those states drew on and contributed to.
Drews’ thesis was controversial almost from the moment it was published. While some found it persuasive, many specialists, particularly archaeologists but also ancient historians, criticized his conclusions even as they acknowledged the depth and breadth of his scholarship. In fact, almost every reviewer appreciated Drews’ account of the various events that marked the end of the Bronze Age kingdoms, even those who contested the rhetoric of lumping them all together under the rubric of “The Catastrophe.” Indeed, it was the very complexity of those events and the length of time over which they occurred that led many to doubt what looked like an overly mono-causal explanatory scheme. In addition, the precise mechanisms by which the new military capacities of barbarian infantry spread so rapidly and destructively seemed unclear to many, especially given that many of the external raiders appeared as “Sea Peoples,” not infantry armies, in contemporary records. In fact, Drews conceded the importance of piracy and saw military change not as the sole engine of change but as the central mechanism uniting systems collapse, raiding, and other causes. Further, that military change is associated with the transformation from Bronze Age to Iron Age polities is generally accepted, partly because Drews’ revisionist account of chariot warfare is generally accepted. But his causal emphasis on military change has not won wide acceptance.
The military changes Drew described might well be characterized as a “military revolution.” This concept has gained tremendous traction in military history circles since the late 1980s because of the “Military Revolution” debate among early modern European historians (see the Issues box in Chapter 16) and the “Revolution in Military Affairs” debate among modern military theorists and historians (see Chapter 30). Drews’ thesis demonstrates some of the consistent patterns and problems of Military Revolution historiography that we will revisit periodically throughout this book. The central features of claims for a Military Revolution include emphasis on sudden, broad, catastrophic, or revolutionary change; changes in military practices as the central cause of revolution; and, usually, technological change as the central cause of military change. The simplicity and directness of such theories account in large part for their power and popularity, for the countervailing position is messier, more complicated, and less easy to convey. But the elements of the response are fairly consistent as well. For example, change is slower (and continuity more important) than revolution theories allow, with the impression of revolution as often being a result of historical time compression; military change is almost always a product rather than a cause of broad changes, as military organization reflects underlying social, economic, and political contexts and cultural assumptions; and technological change is not deterministic, because the uses made of technology are so dependent on those same contexts and cultural perceptions.
This text holds firmly to the latter view, as readers will see. That is, military revolutions play only a small role in our account of military history: The two biggest revolutions in military practice that we describe are simply aspects of the two major transformations in human history—the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The former is covered in this chapter, and the latter from Chapter 23 forward. Military Revolution theories are neat and therefore attractive, but reality is messy, and so we prefer more complex explanations of it.