Some equidae had been used in the Near East from as early as the Neolithic Revolution, or, better, Andrew Sherrat’s ‘secondary revolution’. In fact, the donkey was the most widespread draught animal, while the far stronger onager was used for four-wheeled carts. Horses remained undomesticated until the end of the seventeenth century bc. This was mainly due to the areas in which wild horses could be found and the difficulties encountered in their domestication. Naturally, there were some isolated cases in which horses were used. Overall, up until the seventeenth century bc the horse did not have any reason to be historically attested. Its Sumerian designation as ‘mountain donkey’ (anse kur. ra) proves that back then the horse was seen as a wild and exotic variation of the more common and docile donkey.
Around 1600 bc, the horse finally appeared in the Near East, quickly spreading as far as Egypt. The horse was used to pull light chariots with two spoked wheels. This type of chariot was made of a selection of hard woods. The lightness of this vehicle allowed two horses, connected to the chariot via a yoke, to carry two people (a charioteer and an archer) and to move at a considerable speed. The chariot has a long and well-attested history in the Near East. The earliest models were mainly four-wheeled carts with disk wheels, used to transport goods. Two-wheeled carts were relatively rare, usually drawn by onagers and driven by a warrior. The latter was too focused on driving the chariot and staying on it to be able to simultaneously use a bow or other weapons effectively.
The origins of the two-wheeled horse-drawn chariot are mainly attributed to the Iranian plateau. This is because the technical terminology used in Hittite or Akkadian sources to describe this particular and difficult training borrowed Indo-Iranian terms and phrases. This technique was therefore developed by the Indo-Iranians living in the Iranian plateau or even in Central Asia. However, the spread of the practice to Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Syria brought about several technical and socio-political adjustments and improvements. Horses and light chariots could be used for hunting activities, which could have had a symbolic meaning (especially when the king was involved), but not a political one. However, the chariot and the horse found their main application in the military, where they completely revolutionised the fighting techniques of the time.
The wars fought in the third millennium bc and in the first half of the second millennium bc were mainly fought on the battlefield. Armies of soldiers fought with short weapons and were at times supported by the throwing of arrows and javelins. More often than not, these types of conflicts ended with the siege of walled cities through increasingly effective siege engines. These machines were designed to destroy the ever-improving fortifications of the cities. From the mid-second millennium bc to the end of the Bronze Age (the Iron Age would experience further improvements), however, the typical battle was centred on the charge of an army of chariots against other chariots or troops of soldiers. The army, then, began to be divided into two groups, characterised by a different social and military prestige: the infantry and the chari-otry. The former always had more soldiers, but the latter was far more mobile and effective.
The chariot had a variety of functions. It acted both as a mobile platform for archers and as an effective tool to break infantry lines and to follow fleeing enemies. While its use as a mobile platform has been widely accepted by scholars, the idea that it was used to break down troops has been considered impracticable. Logistically, the horses would have refused to charge a stationary obstacle. However, the iconographic and written evidence from the Late Bronze Age consistently indicates that this was a common practice and even the most effective and bravest one. The formation of foot soldiers was not compact enough to constitute a single stationary obstacle. Moreover, the horses’ fear must have been preceded by the soldiers’ terror of being charged by an entire troop of chariots. In other words, the flight and subsequent havoc created by fleeing foot soldiers must have overridden the horses’ refusal to move forward.
Therefore, Late Bronze Age battles began with the initial charge of the chariots of the attacking army on the opposing troops of foot soldiers. They then continued with the attacking army’s infantry moving forwards in the gaps created by the chariots. Meanwhile, the other army’s chariots would have proceeded along the flanks, in order to surround the enemy. Naturally, it is always the winning side that narrates battles, giving us the impression that this assaulting, frontal tactic was successful. However, it is not necessarily true that defensive tactics, supported by strategically located mountains or rivers, were any the less effective.
The beginning of the Late Bronze Age brought other innovations. For instance, there was scale armour, used on both men and horses. This type of armour has been found in excavations, on representations, and is also mentioned in administrative texts. This innovation was the result of the spread of the composite bow, made of two horns linked at the base. The composite bow was able to throw arrows at a greater distance and with much more power than the simple bow. Frontal combat between foot soldiers armed with short weapons thus became less essential. On the contrary, siege engines and techniques continued to be central and of the same type as the ones developed in the Mari Age.
These innovations had a considerable impact on the social structure of Late Bronze Age communities due to the combination of ideological implications with economic ones. On an ideological level, the creation of an army of charioteers playing a significant role in battles made them a heroic ideal and thus part of a specific social class. In the ideological conception of the time, battles were not won by the king anymore, nor by the patron deity of a city, with soldiers merely acting as an anonymous mass following the orders of their leaders. On the contrary, battles were won by troops of charioteers with specific instruments and training, whose essential talent was their bravery. The king shared with the maryannu these essential and elitist ideals of bravery and valiantness, clearly expressed in the literature and iconography of the Near East, from Egypt to Babylonia (Figure 16.1).
Figure 16.1 The king as a hero, fighting alone on his chariot and defeating a multitude of enemies (panels from Tuthmosis IV’s chariot).
The costliness of the equipment (chariots, horses, metal armours for men and horses, weapons and so on) and the complexity of the training process required palaces to employ full-time charioteers with considerable economic means. Thus, palaces resorted to the old system of assigning plots of land with farmers in exchange for the charioteers’ service. This also allowed the training of horses together with the charioteers. The amount of land given, the nature of this service and the solidarity (either through friendship or kinship) between the king and the maryannu, made the old system of royal land grants more ‘feudal’ in nature. This definition is certainly anachronistic, but it is nonetheless useful to approximately summarise the system’s development. For the first time in the history of the Near East the ruling elite included a military class holding a privileged socio-economic position among the classes of functionaries, scribes, priests and merchants.
The birth of this military aristocracy of landowners embodying a heroic ideal coincided with another radical change in the socio-political systems of the Syro-Mesopotamian region. From as early as the Mari Age, but especially in the texts from Hana and Alalah VII, documents providing personal guarantees for debt repayments began to include new types of clauses. These ensured that ‘even in case of a liberation (that is, an edict of liberation), he (the debt slave) will not be freed’. The spread of these clauses caused the disappearance of the royal edicts after the end of the seventeenth century bc. By then, edicts had become completely ineffective. If kings were still interested in the emanation of edicts, they could have banned these clauses, or found ways to make them ineffective. However, they were not interested in maintaining social order through measures considered to be ‘just’ in the Old Babylonian period anymore.
Therefore, the key elements in the formation of common interests between the king and the elite at the expense of the farming population were: the new solidarity between the palace and the military aristocracy; the shift of the military class from groups of farmers providing a corvee type of service to military specialists; and the role of the palace and the military as main money lenders and acquirers of debt servants. Consequently, the farming population was obliged to incur substantial debts and become debt slaves, without any support from the palace. The ideal of the ‘just and fair king’ thus left the Late Bronze Age kingship ideology and its propaganda in favour of the ideal of a strong and brave king, who alone on his chariot terrorises the enemy’s infantry. Even on a practical socio-economic level, the Late Bronze Age was a much more difficult period than the previous one. Debt slavery visibly increased, causing an equal increase in the amount of slaves trying to escape. A counter-reaction to these flights was the development of a process of capture and return of the escaped slaves. This procedure, however, would eventually bring the Near Eastern communities of the Bronze Age to an end.
World History
