As we saw in Chapter 1, once chariot warriors appeared on the stage, they dominated the early history of warfare, forming military and social elites in many of the societies of Eurasia before 1200 bce. Although they would disappear from Greek history when the socioeconomic arrangements that supported them collapsed in the wake of the Trojan War (see Chapter 3), and were never a force in the Italian peninsula before the rise of Rome (see Chapter 4), they remained a significant force in Egypt, and southwest, south, and east Asia. After about 800 bce, an age that witnessed greater interactions between civilizations, greater social and cultural complexity within civilizations, and technological innovations including the spreading use of iron technology for both agriculture and war, those elites mostly adapted, becoming cavalry elites who, if not dominating warfare the way chariot warriors had in the Bronze Age, still played an important role on the battlefield and in politics.
The new cultural and political systems societies developed between 800 bce and 200 ce in response to the challenges of this new age were significant enough that some historians call the early centuries of this period an Axial Age, a time when the development of civilizations turned on an axis and pointed in new directions. Crucial to this conception was the rise of new philosophies and religions: This was the age not just of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece but of Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, and other thinkers whose influence is felt to this day. But the rise of many of these systems of thought was intimately connected with the military transformations that formed part of the political response to the new challenges the world posed. Indeed, the combination of sociomilitary transformation and emerging ideology proved a key tool in the formation of a set of empires that characterize the latter centuries of this period, often called the Age of Empires.
The relationship of the old chariot elites (and their successors, the cavalry elites) to the new forces of centralization and empire building was a crucial element in the history of this period militarily, socially, and politically. The ideological arrangements that emerged often reflected the role (or lack thereof) that such elites assumed in the new order of things. The symbolic displays imperial rulers deployed to promote and legitimize these arrangements—including the use of elephants, the creation of parade armies, and the staging of grand imperial hunts—were, as a result of their origins in the chariot or cavalry elites, almost always military in form. Thus, in this chapter, we focus on the military history of much of Asia in this period as the story of empires, elephants, and ideologies.