Chariot warfare, the beginning of militarism and its Indo- European connection

Many aspects of the chariot revolution are now well understood. In his pages simply titled, “The Chariot Revolution,” Barton Hacker reviewed the recent literature dealing with chariots, their construction and maintenance, and the care and training of chariot horses. A chariotry was very expensive, the cost of the horses and the chariots being only a beginning. For his vehicles a ruler fielding even a modest number of chariots needed wheelwrights, joiners, tanners and smiths, all with their own workshops, and for his horses he needed trainers, grooms and stable-boys, veterinarians, either traders or breeders, and tracts of pasture and grain fields.

Most important of all, of course, were the skills required of archer and driver. These skills were spectacular enough that several modern scholars have doubted that an archer standing on a rapidly rolling chariot could even draw his bow, to say nothing of hitting a running target. But that is precisely what many men in the second millennium BC, over months of training and practice, learned how to do. By the Late Bronze Age, Hacker observed, “prowess in the military use of chariots had come to define a new, high-status social group that moved into the highest reaches of royal and imperial governments, completing the social transformation that marked the military revolution wrought by the chariot.”¹

What still needs emphasis is how radical this revolution was in terms of combat. Chariots did not merely provide an edge in battle, but seem to have marked the beginning of battlefield warfare between states. The Sumerian cities and Akkad must have engaged in some kind of шё1ев warfare against mountaineers or nomads, but among themselves warfare was the mounting or the weathering of a siege. In the Age of Hammurabi a Near Eastern kingdom’s only encounters on a battlefield seem to have been skirmishes against pastoralists or other stateless troublemakers. When a king went to war against another king, the encounter was a siege and the only battle of significance seems to have taken place along the city wall. In siege warfare the opponents tried either to maintain or to break a defensive system. Offensive warfare between states, as opponents tried to destroy or to cripple each other’s offensive capacity, apparently began with the chariot revolution.

Even more broadly, as will be argued in this chapter, chariots seem to have ushered in militarism. A man’s pride in his role as a warrior, in his skills, and in the equipment that he brought to the task, seems to have begun with the driver of a chariot and the archer who drew his composite bow on a rapidly moving vehicle. There had been warriors in the third and early second millennium bc, but neither in the Near East nor anywhere else were they an elite class. For the rest of the Bronze Age the new military class was to be near, or at, the top of a ranked society.