The End of the Bronze Age
In the half-century around 1200 BCE, that openness to migrations, invasions, and external influences played a significant role in bringing the Bronze Age and the age of chariot warfare to an end. Between about 1225 and 1175, the centers of virtually every major civilization in the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia suffered destruction. From Egypt, Crete, Troy, and Mycenaean Greece to the realm of the Hittites, dynasties fell and entire kingdoms dissolved, many never to return. The Kingdom of Assyria, successor to the Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia, survived the initial crisis but by a century later had shrunk to a small heartland.
The causes and even the nature of the transition marked by these events are complex and controversial (see the Issues box “Catastrophism and ‘Military Revolutions’”). Military changes may well have played a part and certainly constitute one of the features that marked the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. In fact, these traditional names for the two historical periods reflect an older notion of causation rooted in changing technology, including military technology. But modern accounts stress a number of contributing factors that are both interrelated and hard to distinguish from one another in the limited evidence available through archaeological and written sources.
Unlike the crisis of 2200 BCE, when the Akkadian Empire collapsed, no general ecological change is evident, though some major earthquakes may have coincided with the crisis in some areas. Nor is there clear evidence of massive migrations. But increased raiding by barbarians from around the fringes of the civilized worlds does seem to have played a role, though whether as cause or effect is debatable. And those barbarians, at least in some cases, were armed with better shields, personal armor, and short slashing swords (first bronze and later iron), which increased their effectiveness as infantry fighters and challenged the supremacy of chariot warriors. Increased raids may have contributed to the disruption of trade networks that supported the wealth of the central palace-based authority in settled states. Such disruptions, in turn, may have contributed to internal changes in the economy and social structure that tended to spread effective power to a broader ruling class, leading to a general systems collapse. Whatever the exact sequence and relationship of causes that contributed to the transformation, the foundations of palace-based chariot warrior states crumbled.
Infantry Effectiveness and the End of Chariot Warfare
Whatever the precise causal role changes in warfare played in the demise of the Bronze Age kingdom system, that warfare changed during that time is undeniable. Heavy infantry played a newly prominent role, assuming the central place in warfare that it has never relinquished since, although effective cavalry, which emerged by the eighth century BCE, joined infantry as the other major component of most military systems until well into the nineteenth century CE. We therefore need to pause and consider the bases of infantry effectiveness.
The key to effective infantry is cohesion: An infantry unit must be able to hold together while marching, defending, attacking, or facing the threat of attack. Keeping individuals from running away, and thereby reducing their unit to a crowd or a scattering of individuals, is the toughest task facing military leaders. And doing so with masses of men on foot, men who may come from various, mostly nonmilitary backgrounds, is usually harder than getting socially elite warriors—men raised to fight (at least in part in defense of their social privileges)—to stick together whether they fight on foot or, as they more often did, on horseback. Cohesion may be encouraged by the use of deep, dense formations, and better armor and weaponry can help. However, the main sources of military cohesion in infantry are either preexisting social cohesion—the men of a unit are already neighbors, friends, and communal coparticipants—or training directed by a central authority capable of gathering and forging an infantry unit into an artificial community through drill. These sources are not mutually exclusive. And, in either case, experience on campaign and in battle vastly increases the effect of communal or training-based cohesion: In effect, experience anneals the forging accomplished by community or training. (Cavalry, of course, benefits from cohesion as well, but its mobility both complicates and complements cohesion as a source of effectiveness, making cohesion less central to cavalry than to infantry.)
It appears to be a reasonable hypothesis that, up until the end of the Bronze Age, these two sources of infantry cohesion were weak. Early states, though they had the resources to gather fairly large numbers of conscript infantry, did not have the resources, material or administrative, to train them rigorously. At the same time, the agricultural and hierarchical organization of society militated against the development of social cohesion among an infantry class. The societies outside early states, though sometimes warlike, did not have the combination of large enough numbers and social cohesion to produce effective infantry, especially since community size and social cohesion would have varied inversely.
The success of the Bronze Age kingdoms, however, probably contributed to new contexts that made better infantry possible and simultaneously undermined the bases of the palace-based chariot warrior elite. The economic prosperity they were built on and that they fostered and spread across trade networks inevitably enriched both broader sections of their populations and of the societies around their margins. Richer, somewhat larger communities, instantiated as small kingdoms such as the Aramaeans, Israelites, and city-states in Greece, began to emerge in the centuries after 1200 bce as new sources of military power, and each relied on community-based infantry. Richer communities could also afford better armor and weapons. Some of their early activities may have disrupted the same trade systems that helped spawn their power. However, such systems tended not to end catastrophically, but to diffuse, and where connections were eventually broken, they inevitably reappeared later in a less centrally monopolized form.
In Greece and Rome, this communal infantry model would have a longer and more notable history than elsewhere in the Mediterranean and southwest Asia. We will examine these cases in Chapters 3 and 4. Two further developments, however, limited the impact of the small powers outside of Greece and Rome built around communal infantry. One was the emergence by 800 bce of effective true cavalry. The other was that a large state, Assyria, learned to harness both cavalry and drilled infantry together into a system backed by large state resources, enabling the creation of a new form of empire. The Romans eventually converted to the Assyrian training model for maintaining their infantry armies. It was also on the basis of training and large state resources that effective infantry and centralized imperial government emerged in China, completely separately, several centuries after Assyria’s rise, led by Qin, the state that created the first Chinese Empire (see Chapter 2).
These armored, disciplined warriors formed the core of the Assyrian army.
Cavalry, Assyria, and the “Modern” Military-Political Package Although horses had been domesticated on the central Asian steppes as early as 4000 BCE, as noted above, and riding as a skill emerged well before 1000 bce, wild horses and their early domesticated kin were too small to carry men far or in battle, accounting in part for their military use as chariot drawers. But selective breeding for size or at least toughness (steppe ponies remained relatively small down through the time of the Mongols and beyond) eventually produced horses capable of acting as battle platforms themselves, and by 750 bce, cavalry had replaced chariots as the mobile element in Assyrian armies. The skills of mounted archery and shock combat then spread rapidly.
But the core of the Assyrian army was its heavy infantry—armored, armed with spears, and operating in dense, disciplined formations that could attack and defend equally well. Cavalry support led to the creation of the first true combined arms tactics. Assyrian siege capabilities were equally impressive, and the Assyrians pioneered the use of deliberate mass terror in siege warfare: Having captured a city, they would not just sack but destroy it, piling the skulls of their victims up as monuments to their ferocity, in a display designed to encourage the rapid surrender of subsequent targets.
After an initial expansion in the tenth century bce that operated on the loose, hegemonic pattern of Bronze Age kingdoms had collapsed, connected reforms of political and military administration created the basis for the Assyrian Empire of 750-600 that employed the combined arms and terror tactics just described. New conquests were divided into provinces just as the Assyrian heartland was, each ruled by an Assyrian governor and providing standardized units of the standing Assyrian army, which therefore included an increasing number of non-Assyrian auxiliaries. The Assyrians also engineered mass deportations of conquered populations in order to break up local opposition to their rule, divide conquered elites from their peoples, and repopulate devastated areas of the empire. Such techniques aroused intense opposition, and the empire collapsed suddenly around 600, overthrown from within by the Babylonians and Medes and succeeded by the Persians. But the utility and effectiveness of Assyrian techniques is attested by the fact that their successors borrowed most of their administration and military organization. The parallels with Qin China and its replacement by the Han, who adopted Qin administration but gave it a more humane face, is striking. Variations on the Assyrian-Qin theme would dominate the warfare of sedentary states until the Industrial Revolution.