Warfare ca. 1700 bc: The Eurasian steppes
Early in the second millennium Bc warfare—at least on a small scale—was apparently more familiar in the Eurasian steppes than it was in India, temperate Europe and the Greek mainland. On the steppe, unlike in the Near East, combat may have occurred more often in the open country than on the siege ramp. A fortification wall on the forest steppe was mostly earth, with reinforcing timbers, and was probably no more than 5 or 6 m high. It is also relevant that early in the second millennium Bc the steppe dwellers had apparently begun to use chariots in battle. Even late in the third millennium Bc, however, and so before the first chariots were built, the steppe dwellers seem to have been familiar with battles.
Between the upper Don and the middle and upper Volga, some 700 miles north of the Caucasus, were settlements and kurgans assigned to the Abashevo culture.142 Mortuary evidence of warfare was found here under a kurgan erected early in the Abashevo period. A long pit-grave at Pepkino, on the Sura river, held the skeletons of twenty-eight young men, many of them decapitated. As described by
Ludmila Koryakova and Andrej Epimakhov, “traces of injuries—broken bones and skulls pierced with metal weapons and stone arrowheads of the Balanovo type (see later)—were detected on the bones of a large number of these skeletons.”143 That the dead were all young males must mean that they were not victims of a massacre or a raid, but casualties in a battle. That their bodies were collected and honored with a burial under a kurgan suggests that their comrades may ultimately have been victorious in the battle, and that the community to which they belonged—perhaps a chiefdom—included several hundred men. In the Pepkino battle bows and arrows were obviously important. The main hand-to- hand weapon may have been an axe, but this battle occurred early (ca. 2200 bc) in the Abashevo period. Later in the Abashevo culture, at settlements and in graves of the early second millennium BC, socketed spearheads were found along with an array of other weapons. Anthony’s generalization is worth noting: “Intense warfare, perhaps on a surprising scale, was part of the political landscape during the late Abashevo era.”144
Some indirect evidence for warfare in the steppe, dating early in the second millennium bc, may have recently come from the Timber Grave (Srubna, or Srubnaya) archaeological culture, to the west of the Urals and south of the Abashevo culture. David Anthony and Dorcas Brown excavated a tiny Srubna settlement at Krasnosamarskoe, on the Samara river close to its inflow into the Volga. In a deep kitchen midden within the largest of the settlement’s three structures were thousands of animal bones.145 Not surprisingly, many of the bones came from cattle and ovicaprids, but what greatly surprised Anthony and Brown was that no less than 40 percent of the bones came from dogs (in the typical Srubna settlement dogs account for no more than 2 percent of the bones). The dogs were apparently sacrificed, butchered and probably eaten in a ritual that came round every year in midwinter.146 Anthony and Brown suggest that the large structure served for gatherings of people from many villages roundabout, and that the sacrifice of dogs was part of a ritual at which adolescent boys were initiated into manhood. The archaeologists reconstruct such a ritual on the basis of the Lupercalia of the early Romans and of several other rituals attested in Indo- European societies. Recalling the krypteia of the Spartans, the Mannerbunde of Germanic societies, and the Vratyas of the Rig Veda, Anthony and Brown propose that the purpose of the ritual at Krasnosamarskoe “was to initiate young men into the warrior category.”147
Apparently the Sintashta culture in the “Country of Towns,” just to the east of the southern Urals, was also familiar with warfare. Archaeologists have found twenty small towns (or large villages) here, most publicized of which is Arkaim in the Chelyabinsk Oblast. Each of the towns was completely encircled by a fortification of mounded earth and a timber palisade. While a far cry from fortifications in the Near East, the mounds and palisades would nevertheless have offered at least temporary protection and they suggest that the men of the town expected that they would have to defend it. This is also implied by the weapons found in cemeteries. Neither here nor elsewhere on the steppe have rapiers been found in early second-millennium contexts, but that is not surprising because they
Figure 3.2 Weapons and armor from Sintashta-Petrovka sites. 1 mace. 2 axe. 5 socketed spearhead. 6 studded disk cheekpiece. 4, 7-16 and 18-23 arrowheads. 17 bone “armour parts.” From Bersenev, Epimakhov and Zdanovich 2011, Figure 2. Courtesy of British Archaeological Reports and of Andrej Epimakhov were just beginning to serve as status symbols. In the same Sintashta graves, however, that yielded horse sacrifices, cheekpieces, and some of the earliest spoke-wheeled carts, archaeologists found many and various weapons and even what seem to be panels of armor.148 Arrowheads were stone, but the hand-to-hand weapons were made of arsenical bronze (tin bronze was not yet produced in the southern Urals).
If the Russian archaeologists have correctly identified the panels of bone as “armour parts,” to be sewn on a leather or cloth corselet, the panels would be the clearest evidence for battle and for a warrior class.
The presence of spoke-wheeled carts and of a warlike society may not be a coincidence. Philip Kohl believes that not all of the “chariots” at Sintashta would have been too small for use in battle:
The larger ones could have accommodated both driver and warrior, but the quarters still would have been somewhat cramped. The abundance of arrowheads found in the graves at Sintashta suggests the increased importance of archery at this time. Individuals or materials could be transported quickly over longer distances using such carts/‘chariots,’ and their ownership and use probably conveyed social prestige. Certainly, the numerous weapons (Figs. 4.15 and 4.16), such as socketed spearheads, axes with secondary blades on projecting butts, tanged knives, stone mace heads, flint and bronze arrowheads, and longer projectile, possibly javelin, points (4-10 cm. in length) are eminently functional, not just prestige ceremonial items, and imply increased militarism, a trend that continues throughout the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age and is not only characteristic of the steppes, but also of the Near East.149
The weapons normally used on the steppe to kill an opponent in hand-to-hand battle were the spear and the shaft-hole axe. The axes carried at Sintashta ca. 2000 BC were not much different in design from those carried in the Carpathian basin three or four centuries later. The presence of socketed spearheads at Sintashta is also worth noting because they were everywhere still a novelty at this time, and west of the Carpathians metal spearheads of any kind were not yet in use.
Although self bows may have been commonly used on the steppe, archaeologists have detected the presence of composite bows at Sintashta and nearby sites. Of the forty-six graves excavated at the Kamennyi Ambar settlement, eight had bone or horn strips that are believed to have come from composite bows (the graves also yielded 237 arrowheads).150 That composite bows may have been known in the southern Urals at this time is not surprising, since they had been known in the Near East through most if not all of the third millennium BC. There and then, however, they had been reserved for the privileged (the wooden figurines in the Tomb of Mesehti all carry self bows). What is surprising at Kamennyi Ambar is that one man out of every six seems to have owned a composite bow. We have reason to think that already ca. 2000 bc the “chariots” at Sintashta were used both in hunting and in combat.
Economy and society in the Eurasian steppe changed quite suddenly ca. 2000 bc. At the beginning of the KMK (or Multi-roller pottery culture), which has been found especially along the Dnieper and the Don river systems, at least 200 settlements were built where previously there had been very few.151 The same was true in the Srubna (Timber Grave) archaeological culture east of the Don, as many pastoralists seem to have abandoned nomadism, choosing instead to live in settlements along the major rivers and their tributaries. Most of these little settlements lay in the forest steppe, but some were built in the grassland steppe.152 The nomadic pastoralism characteristic of the Yamna period of course continued through the Srubna period, but for every known settlement of the earlier culture archaeologists have identified at least ten from the Srubna culture.153 The pastoralists do not seem to have settled down in order to become farmers, because the material record indicates that agriculture was of little importance in the KMK and Srubna settlements. As I suggested in chapter 2, it is possible that chariots made nomadic pastoralism less profitable, and more dangerous, than it had once been. Chariot-borne rustlers and raiders, that is, may have begun to drive off flocks and herds from the open steppe. This surmise must rely entirely on circumstantial evidence. In much of the steppe sedantarization occurred very soon after the invention of the chariot, and the weapons (including composite bows) associated with the chariot burials at Sintashta show at least that the owners of the vehicles were well equipped to engage in raids and razzias.
