Chariot warfare and a warrior class
In a long series of articles and books Georges Dumezil argued that in Proto-Indo- European society men were divided into three classes: priests, warriors and producers (artisans and farmers).2 Dumezil found such a division especially in ancient India and Italy, but also in early Keltic and Germanic societies. The assumption that a tripartite society was characteristic of the Proto-Indo-European speakers, however, was supported by no archaeological evidence, as Colin Renfrew objected in his critique of Dumezil’s interpretation of Indo-European mythologies.3 Although Renfrew put Proto-Indo-European back in the seventh millennium bc, he had no doubt that even if one accepts the “short” chronology and puts the PIE society late in the fourth millennium bc there is no archaeological evidence whatever—in any of the possible PIE homelands—for either the priestly or the warrior class that Dumezil posited. Renfrew was right, so far as I can see, that the tripartite scheme cannot fit the PIE speakers, regardless of where or when one places them.
In the middle centuries of the second millennium bc, however, the existence of a warrior class in several Indo-European subgroups is very clear. For Aryan India it is attested by literary evidence, for considerable parts of temperate Europe by archaeological evidence, and for Mycenaean Greece by all sorts of evidence: documentary, archaeological and literary. There is also ample archaeological evidence for a warrior class in northern Italy in the middle centuries of the second millennium bc. Although Dumezil ignored the time, the place and the circumstances of the warrior class’s appearance, he was right to emphasize—as also did Emile Benveniste and other Indo-Europeanists before and since—the existence of an elite warrior class in many prehistoric Indo-European societies.
As I have argued in the preceding chapter, before ca. 1750 bc most of western Eurasia had no warrior class and certainly no military elite. Clearly there was none in the Greek mainland or in temperate Europe, where weapons designed for battle were not yet in use. Neither was there a warrior class—to say nothing of a military elite—in the Near East during and before the Age of Hammurabi. Siege warfare required the service of thousands of laborers, whom royal officials conscripted either from the kingdom’s ilkum-servants or from its general population. When battles needed to be fought they were fought largely by rural youths, many of whom the kings hired from nomadic pastoralist tribes. Although these hand-to-hand warriors were supported by grants of land or by daily provisions, they were far from an elite. They were simply doing for a king what they had learned to do in order to protect their flocks and herds, and with the same weapons. The only hints of an elite military class in western Eurasia prior to ca. 1750 bc are the spears and arrows included in chariot burials in the steppe, and the bronze rapiers found under kurgans in southern Caucasia and at several Minoan sites.
The military use of chariots in the second quarter of the second millennium bc, therefore, seems not merely to have revolutionized the way that battles were fought in the civilized world, as I had once supposed, but to have moved warfare from the city wall to the battlefield, and in so doing to have marked the beginning of militarism. During the century and a half after Hammurabi’s death offensive warfare began and war was glorified, with the emergence of a class of men whose profession was combat. The members of this class prided themselves on their weapons, their armor, their prowess in battle, and the number of opponents they had killed. Here was the warrior class that Dumezil saw in Indo-European myths. Kristiansen and Larsson have explored in depth the interconnections of this warrior class, with special reference to the Nordic Bronze Age but casting their net over all of western Eurasia.4
Membership in this class was neither cheap nor easy. The skills of the chariot archer and chariot driver depended on natural talent and long practice, and the material investment was considerable: the crew not only had to have a chariot and a team of well-trained horses (and perhaps a replacement or two), but also would have an expensive composite bow and scores of arrows to go with it,5 bronze rapiers, and leather tunics and helmets covered with bronze scales. For the crewman all of these things were practical and essential, although they also became status symbols for the rich and powerful. Militarism had appeared suddenly, and it led to profound changes over most of western Eurasia.
Our most eloquent evidence for the new outlook comes from India. Chariot warfare continued in India long after it had ended in the Near East and the Aegean, and the Mahabharata and the Ramayana present vivid descriptions of it. Arthur Cotterell, making excellent use of Indian and Chinese iconography for his very accessible book on chariotry, observed that “representations of Rama nearly always show him armed with a composite bow, not least because prowess as an archer is inseparable from the development of the Ramayana tale."6 In Vedic, rathestha is an epithet of Indra, and in Avestan a radaesta is a ruler, but literally is “a man who stands in a chariot."7 The hymns of the Rig Veda, dating to the second half of the second millennium BC, are replete with imagery drawn from chariot warfare. These Sanskrit texts take us as far as we are likely to get inside the mind of the chariot archer and driver. Indra, the supreme god of the Aryans, who drinks deep draughts of soma juice and then plunges into battle, is regularly described in the first book of the Rig Veda as driving his heavenly chariot, and his arrows are the thunder-bolts. The mentality of the chariot warrior is especially clear in Hymn 6.75 of the Rig Veda, which Ralph Griffith titled “Weapons of War" in his 1896 translation:
1 THE warrior’s look is like a thunderous rain-cloud’s, when, armed with mail, he seeks the lap of battle.
Be thou victorious with unwounded body: so let the thickness of thy mail protect thee.
2 With Bow let us win kine, with Bow the battle, with Bow be victors in our hot encounters.
The Bow brings grief and sorrow to the foeman: armed with the Bow may we subdue all regions.
3 Close to his ear, as fain to speak, She presses, holding her well-loved Friend in her embraces.
Strained on the Bow, She whispers like a woman—this Bowstring that preserves us in the combat.
4 These, meeting like a woman and her lover, bear, mother-like, their child upon their bosom.
May the two Bow-ends, starting swift asunder, scatter, in unison, the foes who hate us.
5 With many a son, father of many daughters, He clangs and clashes as he goes to battle.
Slung on the back, pouring his brood, the Quiver vanquishes all opposing bands and armies.
6 Upstanding in the Car the skillful Charioteer guides his strong Horses on whithersoe’er he will.
See and admire the strength of those controlling Reins which from behind declare the will of him who drives.
7 Horses whose hoofs rain dust are neighing loudly, yoked to the Chariots, showing forth their vigour,
With their forefeet descending on the foemen, they, never flinching, trample and destroy them.
8 Car-bearer is the name of his oblation, whereon are laid his Weapons and his Armour.
So let us here, each day that passes, honour the helpful Car with hearts exceeding joyful.
9 In sweet association lived the fathers who gave us life, profound and strong in trouble,
Unwearied, armed with shafts and wondrous weapons, free, real heroes, conquerors of armies.8
We have nothing like this from the millennium before chariots. Cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts from the Age of Hammurabi and the ages that preceded it glorify gods and kings, but not weapons and warriors.
Chariot warfare and militarism 113 The Indo-European (and Hurrian) connection
As we have seen in Chapter 3, the new militarism seems to have arisen north and south of the Caucasus, in lands where horses were common. How much of the “horse country” was home to Indo-European languages we do not know, since illiterate societies left no clue. It is quite clear, however, that Indo-European speakers made up a large part—although only a part—of the new military class. Our best evidence for that comes from India and Greece: in both places the entire military class seems to have consisted of men who spoke an Indo-European language. Other evidence comes from the Near East, where many but not all of the early chariot crews were recruited from Indo-Iranian communities.
In the armies of the Hittite and the “Hyksos” kings at least some of the chariot crews were home-grown. Hittite texts describe the training of archers who rode on the chariots of Hattushili I. In Egypt, many of the chariot crews of the early Fifteenth Dynasty presumably spoke the Northwest Semitic language of the Levant. Other crews and trainers in the Near East, however, came from lands where an Indo-European language was spoken. The chariot force that Hattushili met at Aleppo consisted of “Manda” troops, and Manda seems to have been the mountainous country of southern Caucasia. The Indo-Iranian technical terms in the horsetraining treatise of Kikkuli are well known. Less well known is that the Akkadian tablets at Nuzi (like those from Kassite Babylon) included Indo-Iranian terms for the colors and ages of horses.9
Still more important are the warriors—attested from Anatolia to Egypt—known as maryannu. This word attaches a Hurrian suffix to the base marya (“hero,” or “young warrior”), which is either an Indo-Aryan or—more likely—a Proto-Indo- Iranian word.10 Hanoch Reviv, in his study of the term maryannu, stated the generally accepted view, with which he agreed:
[T]he maryannu were a class of warriors whose expertise in handling chariots and caring for horses was an ancestral tradition which made them the nobility of this region. The privileges and advantages of this class and the role it played were rewards for their ability to use chariots in battle, something which had been previously unknown in this area. The military heritage and social distinction of this class are strongly emphasized in Egyptian and Hittite sources.11
The high status of the maryannu was an important novelty, as they were the first recognizable warrior class in the civilized world. No such social distinction had been attached to the slingers, spearmen and archers hired by kings in and before the Age of Hammurabi. The term’s derivation suggests that in the early years of their employment in the Near East many of the maryannu came from Indo-Iranian communities.
Many other maryannu, however, presumably did not speak an Indo-European language. Instead, as the suffix of the term suggests, their native language was probably Hurrian. The Hurrian language—unrelated to Indo-European—was spoken throughout the drainage area of the Khabur river and also along the upper
Tigris, lands eventually comprised in the Great Kingdom of Mittani. In the second millennium bc Human may have also been spoken, as either a first or a second language, across the Bitlis-Zagros mountains as far as Lake Van (in the first millennium bc the kings at Van used “Urartian”—a late relative of Hurrian—for their inscriptions).
Horses and chariots arrived early in lands where Hurrian was spoken. As mentioned in Chapter 2, already ca. 1800 bc the palace at Chagar Bazar, on a Khabur tributary in northeastern Syria, owned twenty chariot horses and employed grooms and trainers for them. Hurrian speakers were undoubtedly important in bringing chariot warfare to the Near East. The term maryannu is one piece of evidence, and equally important is the reputation of Kikkuli. No later than the fifteenth century bc and probably a century earlier Kikkuli wrote or more likely dictated the first and the most respected text on the training of chariot horses, and he did so in Hurrian. The text—in Raulwing’s translation—announced its author in its first line: “Thus [speaks] Kikkuli, the horse trainer from the land Mittani.”12 At the bidding of one of the early Hittite kings several scribes, whose native language was Hurrian but who also had various levels of competence in Hittite, translated Kikkuli’s instructions from Hurrian into Hittite.
