War chariots

The story

A spoked wheel changes warfare

For centuries, in Mesopotamia, wheels were solid discs of wood, heavy and noisy. We see this in the Standard of Ur: four-wheeled carts pulled by donkeys, slow and hard to turn. Then, between 2000 and 1700 BC, someone had a simple and brilliant idea: instead of a disc of wood, a wheel made of a thin rim and many little rods, the spokes, joining it to the centre. It was much lighter and faster. On two such wheels you could mount a tiny chariot, light as a basket, and have it pulled by two horses at a gallop. This is how the light war chariot was born, and nothing would be the same again.

Where was it invented?

On this scholars do not agree. The oldest evidence of chariots with spoked wheels comes from the steppes east of the Ural mountains, from the Sintashta culture (about 2100–1800 BC), where in warriors' tombs horses have been found buried with the marks of wheels left in the ground. For many researchers, then, chariots were born there and spread south, to Iran, Anatolia, Syria and finally Egypt. Others think the idea arose more or less at the same time in the Near East: on Anatolian seals of about 1900 BC chariots with spoked wheels can already be seen. The question is not closed.

What it was like and how it was used

The light chariot was a small wooden platform, with a railing at the front and no seat. The wheels, made of wood bent with steam or fire, had four or six spokes. A central pole was hitched to the two horses. On it stood two men: the driver, who held the reins, and an archer or javelin thrower. To use it well you needed the composite bow, made of wood, horn and sinew, small but extremely powerful, which could be drawn while standing on a bouncing platform. The horses, too, needed long training: a Hittite text of about 1350 BC, attributed to a master named Kikkuli, describes a 184-day programme for preparing chariot horses, with rations, runs and rests.

In battle the chariot was like a flying weapon. The archers raced in front of enemy ranks, shot arrows and withdrew before they could be caught. They struck from the side, put the infantry to flight, chased the fugitives. But chariots were expensive: between worked wood, bronze, horses and training, a crew cost a great deal. So a military elite was born. In Mitanni, in the north of Mesopotamia, the aristocratic chariot warriors were called maryannu.

The Hyksos and Egypt

Around 1650 BC a group of peoples from Syria and Palestine, whom the Egyptians called Hyksos (“rulers of foreign lands”), conquered the Nile delta and ruled there for a century from a capital, Avaris. With them came to Egypt horses, light chariots, the composite bow and the most modern bronze weapons. The Egyptians, who had never before seen a war horse, learned quickly after the humiliation. Around 1550 BC the pharaoh Ahmose drove out the Hyksos, using weapons and techniques partly learned from them (perhaps chariots too), and founded the New Kingdom, an age of great conquests, in which the chariot became the symbol of the warrior pharaoh.

The great chariot battles

The Near East of the Late Bronze Age (1600 to 1200 BC) was the world of chariots. There are images of pharaohs such as Thutmose III, who won at Megiddo (about 1457 BC), and Ramesses II, who at Kadesh, in Syria, in 1274 BC fought the Hittites in one of the greatest chariot battles in history: historians estimate that a few thousand chariots took part in all, although ancient figures must always be taken with caution. In Tutankhamun's tomb six chariots were found, dismantled, covered in gold. In China the kings of the Shang dynasty used chariots, and at Anyang chariots have been discovered buried with their horses and drivers.

The end of an age

Around 1200 BC the dominance of chariots ended. New tactics, with infantry armed with javelins and long swords, managed to defeat chariots in the battles of the time of the Sea Peoples. Later, horses, selected and bred larger, could be ridden directly: cavalry was born, which the Assyrians used systematically for the first time in the 9th–8th century BC. Chariots did not vanish at once, but moved into the background: they were used for kings' parades, for hunts and, in the following centuries, for races, from the Greek games to the Circus Maximus in Rome.