by John Keegan
Ancient historians are fascinated by the representations of siege practices and siege engines that excavations in Mesopotamia and Egypt have revealed — battering-rams, scaling-ladders, siege towers, mineshafts. Written accounts of Greek siege warfare disclose the appearance of the catapult, earliest of projectile-throwers, in 398–7 BC.23 The earliest representation of a ram — of very flimsy type, though apparently protected by a roof — is from Egypt and dated to 1900 BC; the scaling-ladder was depicted about 500 years earlier. A much more formidable battering-ram, mounted in a wheeled carapace, is shown in a palace relief sculpture from Mesopotamia of about 883–59 BC, together with a scene of engineers undermining a wall. A mobile siege tower, also Mesopotamian, is shown in another relief dated to 745–27 BC, by which time the construction of ramps to fill a moat and reach the crest of the wall had also been brought into use; large siege-shields, to protect archers shooting at the defenders on the parapet, were apparently also by that time an item of siegecraft. There are also allusions to the use of fire to attack gates, and possibly also the interior of a fortification, while interruptions of the water supply, where practicable, and, of course, starvation had become standard siege techniques.24
All the works of siegecraft available to commanders before the invention of gunpowder were, therefore, devised between 2400 and 397 BC. None, except starvation, offered a certain, or even very effective, means of bringing a fortification to surrender. A besieger’s best hope of a quick result, according to the classical strategist Polybius, lay in exploiting the defenders’ complacency or achieving surprise. Treachery was another device — it brought the fall of Antioch to the Crusaders in 1098, for example, and that of many other strongholds as well.25 Those methods apart, an attacker might sit for months outside the walls, unless he could find a weak spot or create one himself. Chateau-Gaillard was taken in 1204 through an unguarded latrine tunnel; Rochester, on the other hand, besieged by King John in 1215, lost the southern corner of its keep to undermining and the firing of the tunnel timbers — which consumed the fat of forty bacon pigs — but was eventually taken only because the garrison had run out of food after fifty days of continuous investment, the greatest siege in England up to that time and for long after.26
The taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099 with a siege tower was an exceptional event, ascribed in part to the weakness of the garrison, in part to the religious inspiration of the attackers. In general, the advantage in siege warfare before gunpowder always lay with the defender, as long as he took the precaution of laying in supplies, and to such an extent that it was a convention of siege warfare in the medieval West for the parties to agree on a time limit, at the expiry of which, if the siege had not been raised by a relieving force, those inside the walls were allowed to march out without penalty.27 Since the attackers might themselves run out of food, or even more probably succumb to disease in their unhealthy encampments, such an agreement was a sensible option for any garrison.
We ought, therefore, to treat with extreme reserve all representations of siegecraft and siege engines, if offered as evidence of their importance in ‘the art of war’ at any time before the gunpowder age. Warfare in art always calls forth from the artist the representation of the potential and the sensational, rather than that of documentary realities; in that light, Egyptian and Assyrian wall-paintings and sculpture reliefs of royal triumphs under the walls of cities are no more to be relied upon as testimony of contemporary actualities than the heroic portraits of Napoleon by David and Le Gros are to be taken as depictions of his behaviour as a general in the field; between war art and the war comic interposes a very narrow gap, and probably has done so since the first court painter was commissioned to paint the first king-conqueror. Fortifications, and all actions to bring them low, are a ready subject for the war artist, whose misrepresentation of what passed between defender and attacker may well have imposed a grave distortion on our understanding of defensive warfare in the pre-gunpowder age.
The subject of fortification may be left with these thoughts in mind: stoutly defended and well provisioned strongholds were difficult to take at all times before the gunpowder age; such strongholds were often as much instruments of defiance of central authority — or, a subject to be explored later, a means to overawe free citizens or cultivators — as components of a strategic defence; strategic defences, never easy to align with natural frontiers and always costly to build, maintain, provision and garrison, ultimately depend for their strength on the will and the capabilities of the power they were conceived to defend. ‘They labour in vain who build’ defences that are expected to stand by themselves.
3
Flesh
FEW FORTIFICATIONS YET STOOD when charioteers first drove forth to topple thrones and found dynasties of their own. Such as did exist offered little obstacle to their conquests. About 1700 BC a Semitic people, known to us as the Hyskos, began to infiltrate Egypt through the Nile delta and soon set up a capital of their own at Memphis. A little later, Mesopotamia, then united under the Amorite dynasty founded by Hammurabi about 1700 BC, was overrun by people from the northern mountains between modern Iraq and Iran; they appear to have made themselves overlords of the ancient inter-riverine kingdom by 1525 BC. Shortly afterward Aryan charioteers from the steppe lands of eastern Iran, speaking an Indo-European language, entered the Indus valley and utterly destroyed its civilisation. Finally, about 1400 BC, the founders of the Shang dynasty, perhaps also originating from the Iranian steppe, arrived with their chariots in northern China and set up the first centralised state, based on a superior military technology and the institution of the walled camp.
The adoption of the war chariot and the imposition of the power of war charioteers throughout the centres of Eurasian civilisation in the space of some 300 years is one of the most extraordinary episodes in world history. How did it come about? It depended on many developments — in metallurgy, woodworking, tanning and leatherworking, and the use of glues, bone and sinew — but above all on the domestication and improvement in physique of the wild horse. Even today, when mankind everywhere expects to travel by internal combustion engine, horseflesh engages passions and mobilises money on a vast and universal scale. The richest men in the world compete to display their wealth through the ownership of thoroughbred horses. Horseracing is ‘the sport of kings’, on which republican multimillionaires rejoice to expend fortunes; but few kings or millionaires ever risk as much of what they have as the common man who believes he knows a winner. In the world of the horse the poorest feel themselves the potential equals of the wealthiest in the land because, as the saying goes, ‘animals can make fools of us all’. The horse, however pampered, whatever its bloodlines, may choose to repay an owner’s expectations in hypochondria or ill-will; contrarily, an unknown horse may stay the course against all odds, make its rider, trainer, breeder and owner men of stature overnight, bring joy to the hearts of a thousand humble punters and send bookmakers home with lighter pockets than they set out with. The modern thoroughbred is a force to be reckoned with, and the great thoroughbred may end his days more famous than most statesmen of his lifetime. The greatest of thoroughbreds acquire regal and dynastic status: pilgrimages are made simply to see them run, while the descent of their genes into subsequent generations is catalogued with all the care taken to establish the legitimacy of a Bourbon or Habsburg. A great horse, in a sense, becomes a king. It is not surprising that kings were made by the first great horses.
THE CHARIOTEERS
The horse that homo sapiens first knew was a poor thing; so poor, indeed, that man hunted it for food. Equus, the ancestor of equus caballus, our modern horse, was actually hunted out of existence in the Americas by the Amerindians who crossed into the New World at the end of the last ice age. In the Old World the return of the forests after the end of the ice age drove equus caballus out of Europe on to the treeless steppe, where it was first hunted and then domesticated for its flesh. In the settlements of the so-called Srednij S
tog culture on the River Dnieper, above the Black Sea, the bones of apparently domesticated horses form a majority among those excavated from village sites dated to the fourth millennium BC.1 Stone Age man chose to eat the horse rather than drive or ride it, because the animal they knew was almost certainly not strong enough in the back to bear an adult male human, while men themselves had not yet designed a vehicle to which a draught animal might be harnessed. The relationship between man and the equine species is, in any case, extremely complex. Unlike the dog, which, though a pack animal, appears to associate itself as an individual quite easily with a human individual, and may have begun to do so about 12,000 years ago, the horse has to be cut out of a herd and tamed if a useful ‘mutualism’ is to arise between it and its human master.
There was no reason, moreover, why Stone Age man should have identified the horse as potentially more useful to him than its equine cousins — the widespread donkey or ass, the hemione of Mongolia and Turkestan, the kiang of the Tibetan plateau, the khur of western India or the onager of Mesopotamia and Turkey — which we now know lack, for genetic reasons, the potentiality for selective breeding to larger, stronger or faster varieties. The early equus caballus outwardly resembled the still-existent equus przewalskii (Przewalski’s horse) and the equus gmelini, the tarpan which survived on the steppe until the last century; all in turn resembled the asses, hemiones and onagers, in colour, size and shape. Genetic analysis now tells us that equus caballus, with 64 chromosomes, is a different beast from Przewalski’s, with 66, from the donkey, with 62, and from the hemiones, with 56; to Stone Age man, however, there can have been little to choose between them.2 Caballus, in particular, with its short legs, thick neck, pot-belly, convex face and stiff mane must have defied distinction from the tarpan, which apparently resisted before its extinction all efforts to refine its appearance or performance.
Man seems to have approached neither driving nor riding through the horse or its allied equids at all, but via the cow and perhaps the reindeer. Cultivators in the fourth millennium BC discovered that castrating the male domesticated cow, to produce the ox, gave them a tractable animal that could be harnessed to a simple plough such as men themselves pulled; the attachment of such draught animals to a sledge, in treeless environments like the steppe and the alluvial plains, was a natural development. Mounting the sledge on captive rollers then followed, and from the captive roller the wheel, rotating on a fixed axle as the potter’s already did, must have evolved quite simply.3 A set of pictographs from the Sumerian city of Uruk, dated to the fourth millennium BC, shows the progression from the sledge to the sledge-on-wheels in a fairly direct line. A famous representation known as the Standard of Ur, of the third millennium BC, shows a four-wheeled cart drawn by four onagers as a vehicle for a king and a platform for his weapons — axe, sword and spear — on the battlefield. This cart, with its two-piece wooden wheels, descends from the solid-wheeled prototype, and we may suppose that the Sumerians had recognised the onagers as superior draught-animals — faster and more spirited than oxen.
As anyone who has kept a donkey as a childhood pet knows, however — and the onager is only a slightly larger and leggier donkey — this lovable animal has severe drawbacks. Its stubbornness can outlast that of its master; it has a very high pain threshold and therefore easily resists whip, spur and bit; it can carry weight only over its hindquarters and cannot therefore be ridden from the forward, ‘control’ position; it has only two gaits — the walk and the run — the first being slower than an even human pace, the latter tending to breakneck speed. These characteristics, which no amount of selective breeding succeeds in altering, relegate the ass, with the hemione half-asses, to a menial role. As a beast of burden both its range and load-carrying capacity are limited; as a mount it is an animal of last choice.
It is therefore not surprising that, about the beginning of the second millennium BC, the domesticated horse should have begun to have its role transformed from that of meat-giver to load-puller. Even the small horses of the wild vary in size, and while small mares of the Stone Age stood less than twelve hands at the shoulders (a hand is four inches), the larger stallions could exceed fifteen hands.4 Herdsmen had already learnt the rudiments of selective breeding through their management of sheep, goats and cows; to apply it to the horse was a natural step. It may not, however, have had the immediate effects expected from it. The first strains of selectively bred animals tend to diminish in size, which in the case of the horse would reduce its suitability for riding and even more so its tractive power.5 There was, moreover, a new difficulty in using the tractive power of the horse. The donkey, though its tractive power is low, is fairly easily controlled by reins to a nose band and sensibly will not pull any more heavily against neck harness than it finds comfortable; the placid ox needs only the touch of a whip to set it in forward motion, which is easily transferred to a cart through a yoke shaped to fit its prominent shoulders. But the much more spirited horse can be controlled only by fitting its mouth with a bit — and over the proper design of the bit horsemen continue to debate to this day; its narrow shoulders slip through a yoke while a neck band constricts its windpipe. Man would very slowly discover that the correct method of harnessing a horse for traction is either with a breast band — attributed to the Chinese — or by a padded collar encircling its whole neck. Until he did so, his methods of controlling and harnessing the horse actually worked against each other: constricting its mouth, to guide it but also to vary its pace, threw it against its neck band which, by tending to choke it, slowed it down.
The harnessed horse was therefore unsuitable as a draught-animal both for the heavy waggons and the deep-furrowing plough that began to appear in Europe in the second millennium BC.6 That meant that the vehicle to which it was harnessed should be made as light as possible. The result was the chariot. The historian Stuart Piggott, in an arresting and highly convincing reference to what appears to be a timeless and universal psychology of transport — that the fast and dashing vehicle confers on its possessor social prestige and undoubtedly also sexual allure, as well as material advantages and physical thrills — has suggested that a light chariot with two spoked wheels appeared suddenly and almost simultaneously throughout a ‘technological koine’ which embraced all the lands of civilisation from Egypt to Mesopotamia.
The new factor involved was speed provided by a new motive force, which in the instance of the small horses of antiquity could only be exploited by a combination of lightness and resilience of a new kind. To adopt a concept from structural engineering, the disc-wheeled ox-wagon might be seen as a slow, heavy, timber-built compression structure, and the chariot as a fast, light wood structure, largely in tension with its bent-wood felloes [tyre segments] and frame.
As Piggott points out, the appearance of such a chariot cannot have failed to be revolutionary, if only psychologically: ‘speed for human transport on land was suddenly multiplied by something like 10 — from the [2 miles] an hour for ox-transport to the [20 miles] an hour reached with ease with a modern representation of an ancient Egyptian chariot with a pair of ponies, the chariot itself with its harness weighing only [75 lbs].’ (It is worth remembering in this context that only two centuries ago Dr Johnson, who thought driving in a carriage with a pretty woman the best of pleasures, gave it as his opinion that the human frame could not sustain a speed of motion of more than twenty-five miles an hour.)
The effect of the chariot was not, however, merely psychological. It led to the emergence of a chariot-warrior group, skilled fighters who monopolised the use of their specialised and extremely expensive vehicles, together with complementary weapons, such as the composite bow, and who dominated an entourage of secondary specialists — grooms, saddlers, wheelwrights, joiners, fletchers — essential to keeping war chariots and horses on the road.
Whence came these charioteers? Clearly not from the still-forested lands of western Europe, even though pockets of wild horses may have survived there; its forests formed an o
bstacle that delayed the arrival of chariot aristocrats for at least 500 years. Nor again from the alluvial plains of the great rivers, since there the horse did not roam. The steppe — dry, treeless and offering good going in all directions — was unquestionably the main home of the wild horse but, though highly suitable for the passage of wheeled vehicles at all periods outside the spring and autumn rasputitsa, it is so deficient in the metals and woods necessary for chariot construction that it too may be discounted as the place of origin. By a process of elimination, therefore, the proposition that chariots and charioteers first appeared in the borderlands between the steppe and the civilised river lands seems convincing.
The historian William McNeill, following the generally accepted view that a warlike ‘battleaxe’ folk, speaking Indo-European languages, migrated from the western steppe to dominate the ‘peaceful megalith builders of the Atlantic coast’ in the second millennium BC, goes on to argue that the metalworkers who sold them the high-priced and mystic skills that gave them dominance over Europe’s Stone Age peoples also migrated, but in the opposite direction, from Mesopotamia to the edge of the steppe in northern Iran.