A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  The rapid dispersion of the chariot ought not to surprise us. Indeed, there may have been a chariot industry and chariot market — akin to the high-technology arms industry and market that has equipped new Third World states with what are called ‘state of the art’ arms in our own time, light, easily transportable and judged by the purchaser worth every unit of hard currency expended to buy them. Once perfected, the technology of the chariot would have been easy to replicate and even easier to transport and sell; an Egyptian bas-relief of c. 1170 BC shows a chariot being carried on the shoulders of one man — no feat if it weighed, as a reconstruction did, less than a hundred pounds — and such a highly marketable product would have stimulated production wherever craftsmen with the necessary skills resided. The check on overproduction of such a saleable and high-priced item would have been, in practice, not shortages of skills or raw material but a dearth of suitable horses. The chariot horse had to be a selected and highly schooled animal. The earliest known schooling of horses, apparently to dressage standard if an elaborate contemporary vocabulary of horsemastership is a reliable indication, can be dated from a group of Mesopotamian texts to the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC; then as now, the young horse was intransigent in any language spoken to it.19

  Language supplies one clue as to who the first conquering charioteers may have been. The Hyskos who invaded Egypt originated on the semi-fertile northern fringe of the Arabian desert and spoke a Semitic language.20 The Hurrians and Kassites who divided and overthrew Hammurabi’s Mesopotamian empire came from the mountainous headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, still ethnically one of the most complex regions in the world; the Kassites spoke an unidentified tongue, classified as ‘Asianic’, while the Hurrians — and the Hittites who established an empire in what today is Turkey — spoke Indo-European languages. So, too, did the Aryan invaders of India, and it is possible that the charioteers who founded the Shang dynasty in China may have made their way thither from northern Iran also — though perhaps from some proto-Iranian heartland in the Altai.21

  The obscure identity of the chariot rulers is an indication of their chief characteristic: they were destroyers rather than creators and, in so far as they civilised themselves, it was through the adoption of the manners, institutions and cults of their subjects rather than by developing any culture of their own. Within Mesopotamia the empire of Hammurabi, which had emerged from a time of troubles brought by border peoples known as the Gutians and the Elamites, succeeded in re-establishing the authority once exerted by Sargon, in rebuilding a bureaucracy and a professional army akin to his and in ruling from Babylon. The army of this Amorite empire, however, remained an infantry force which was no match for the charioteering Kassites and Hurrians when they broke through the frontiers in the seventeenth century BC. The Hyskos invaders of Egypt, though they became effective rulers of northern Egypt, did so only by Egyptianising themselves, taking an Egyptian deity as their state god and adopting pharaonic administrative practice. The Shang, too, seem to have taken over a pre-existing culture in northern China, rather than to have brought one of their own. Inscriptions reveal that they were hunters from the chariot, killing game as big as the tiger and the horned ox with the composite bow, and that they practised human sacrifice, probably of slaves though perhaps also of prisoners of war. Grave goods found in excavation indicate that they monopolised the use of bronze, while the cultivators who were their subjects continued to use stone tools. Eventually the Shang were overthrown in 1050–25 BC by a native southern dynasty, the Chou, which had learnt the use of the horse and the chariot from another source.

  The tyranny of the charioteers was everywhere short-lived. The Aryan rulers of the Indus civilisation seem to have been the only charioteer invaders not overthrown from within; some scholars, however, regard the appearance of Buddhism and Jainism as a native reaction against the tyranny of caste that the Aryans had introduced. The Hyskos were cast out of Egypt by a revival of pharaonic power under Amosis, founder of the New Kingdom, about 1567 BC. Other charioteers, the Hittites of Anatolia — modern Turkey — and the Mycenaeans of modern Greece, who were perhaps responsible for the destruction of Minoan civilisation in Crete and may have inspired Homer’s story of the Trojan War, were both toppled by peoples from northern Greece, Phrygians and Dorians, about 1200 BC. Most significant of all, however, the native Mesopotamians, under the kingship of Ashuruballit, concluded about 1365 BC a protracted campaign against their Hurrian overlords and re-established their ancient kingdom, known to us from its capital city of Assur as Assyria.

  Our image of the Assyrians, derived from their magnificent royal art excavated at Nineveh and Nimrud, is of a charioteering race. So, indeed, their kings and nobles were and the pharaohs of the New Kingdom became. Their ancestors, however, had not been. It is this transformation of the role of kings in the civilised world that we must regard as the most significant, lasting and baleful effect of warrior domination of the ancient theocratic states. The Egyptians of the Old and Middle Kingdoms had scarcely been warriors at all; even Sargon’s standing army was a bumbling and ineffective organisation by comparison with its Assyrian successor. To the Assyrians and Egyptians the chariot peoples taught both the techniques and ethos of imperial warmaking, and each within its own orbit became an imperial power. The impulse that drove the pharaohs of the New Kingdom to expel the Hyskos carried their armies in the years that followed to plant Egypt’s frontiers far from the Nile, in the uplands of northern Syria. After the expulsion of the Hurrians, the Assyrians solved the besetting problem of Mesopotamian civilisation — the encirclement of its rich but naturally defenceless land by predators — by going over to the offensive, and progressively extending the boundaries of what became the first ethnically eclectic empire to include parts of what today are Arabia, Iran and Turkey, together with the whole of modern Syria and Israel. Thus the legacy of the chariot was the warmaking state. The chariot itself was to be the nucleus of the campaigning army.

  THE CHARIOT AND ASSYRIA

  At the height of its powers, say in the eighth century BC, the Assyrian army revealed features on which many of those of successor armies in other empires were to be modelled; some of them have come down to our own day. Foremost among them were its logistic arrangements: supply depots, transport columns, bridging-trains. The Assyrian was the first true long-range army, able to campaign as far as 300 miles from base and to move at speeds of advance that would not be exceeded until the coming of the internal combustion engine.

  Assyrian resources did not extend to the paving of roads — of little point, in any case, in a climate which is excessively dry but, when wet, washes away untarred road metal — but the kingdom had an extensive network of royal highways, often mentioned as boundaries to fields in the land registration documents that cuneiform scribes wrote in vast numbers on the clay tablets which provide archaeologists with their information.22 Along these roads the horsed elements of an army might move as fast as thirty miles a day — a good march even for a modern force. Of course, the roads deteriorated in quality beyond the central plain and inside enemy territory, where military engineers would have to improve the going up hillsides and through mountain passes. The army also made use of water transport where appropriate, though both the Tigris and Euphrates are difficult to navigate, because of shoals and uneven seasonal water-flows. In the early seventh century, Sennacherib brought Syrian shipbuilders to construct ships at Nineveh for a campaign against the Elamites, in what is now southern Iran. He apparently wanted sea-going craft, as used in the Mediterranean, which were beyond the skills of the riverside boat-builders of Mesopotamia. Once launched, they were sailed by Phoenician seamen as far down the Tigris as it was navigable, manhandled to a canal leading to the Euphrates and then sailed into the Persian Gulf, where they loaded troops and horses for a landing in Elamite territory.23

  Stores, war material of all sorts, chariots and horses were held at central depots, called the ekal masharti, ‘palace of the place for marsh
alling forces’. That at Nineveh was described by Esarhaddon in the seventh century BC as made by ‘the kings who preceded me … to provide proper arrangements for the camp, to look after the steeds, the mules, the chariots, the battle equipment and enemy booty’; it had ‘become too small for horse training and chariot exercises’. It is not known how much prepared food the army took with it on the warpath; the Assyrians seem to have expected largely to live off the country in enemy territory.24 In his campaign against the powerful northern state of Urartu in 714 BC, Sargon II records that he sent to one captured fortress ‘corn, oil and wine’ but his son Sennacherib, when fighting the Chaldaeans in southern Mesopotamia in 703 ‘let [the] troops eat up the grain and dates in their palm groves, and their harvest in the plain’. Laying waste the enemy’s land, after the army had eaten its fill and taken what it could carry, was then as later a standard practice. In his final campaign against Urartu, Sargon destroyed irrigation systems, broke open granaries and cut down fruit trees.

  Sargon’s ire may have been aroused by the difficulty of the campaign: his troops ‘had crossed and re-crossed mountains innumerable’ and had ‘turned mutinous. I could give no ease to their weariness, no water to quench their thirst.’ He was campaigning north of the Zagros range, in the broken lands between Lakes Van and Urmia, a region still regarded today as almost impenetrable by formed units. It was in such difficult country that the Assyrian engineering arm came into its own. Sargon recorded that during the Urartu campaign ‘I equipped my sappers with strong copper [probably bronze] picks, and they shivered the crags of steep mountains to fragments as though limestone, and made a good way’. The army was even better at negotiating waterways: Ashur-nasir-pal, campaigning against the always troublesome southern power of Babylon centuries before, ‘crossed the Euphrates at the town of Haridi … by means of the boats I had made — boats of skins that had moved along the roads with me’. These skin boats, used in Iraq into modern times, may have been one-man inflated sheepskins or, more probably, kelek rafts, a wooden platform supported by a number of such skins. The army also made use of reed boats, still in use by the Marsh Arabs who live in the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. Assyrian bas-relief representations show disassembled chariots being conveyed in them across waterways.

  Assyrian military organisation also foreshadowed that of later imperial armies. For one, Assyria appears to have been the first power to recruit troops without ethnic discrimination. Ruthless in its population policy — it resettled dissidents far from their homelands in order to assure internal security, as the Ottomans and Stalin were later to do — it was at the same time quite prepared to integrate into the army both subject peoples and prisoners of war, as long as it was sure it could count on their loyalty. Language and a common religion were the adhesives: Assyria propagated a primitive monotheism, through the cult of Assur, and opened its official language to loan words from others, which it allowed to be used in tandem in the interests of intercomprehensibility. For another, subject peoples often entered the army, as Rome’s were later to do, with their own distinctive weapons — slings or bows — and formed corps ancillary to the army’s main fighting-force. They may also have provided the siege engineers, whom Assyrian artists portray attacking the foundations of walls, digging mineshafts, building siege-ramps or working siege-engines. The Syrians were great besiegers. Sennacherib described his siege of Hezekiah in Jerusalem — and it is recorded in the Old Testament, 2 Kings 18 — as follows: ‘[he did] not submit to my yoke. I besieged and captured forty-six of his strong walled towns with innumerable surrounding villages, by consolidating ramps to bring up battering rams, by infantry attacks, mines, breaches and siege engines … He himself I shut up inside Jerusalem, his royal city, like a caged bird.’ Hezekiah, rather than face the consequences, capitulated and paid tribute.25

  For all its imperial accretions, the Assyrian army remained at heart a charioteering force. Sennacherib, fighting the Elamites in 691 BC, had his court historiographer describe how he ‘transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows’.

  The commander-in-chief of the king of Elam, together with his nobles … I cut their throats like sheep … My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariots were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage … [There were] chariots with their horses, whose riders had been slain as they came into the fierce battle, so that they were loose by themselves; those horses kept going back and forth all over [the battlefield] … As to the sheikhs of the Chaldaeans [Elamite allies], panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troops as they went … [In their terror] they passed scalding urine and voided their excrement in their chariots.26

  This was a battle to the death, as the highly realistic details convey, brought only perhaps because the Elamites had positioned themselves so as to deny Sennacherib’s army access to the Tigris and thus, as his scribe points out, to drinking-water also; as was to prove so often the case in the future, battle in these circumstances was a matter of necessity, not choice. Sargon’s final battle against Urartu, however, had revealed a trace of chivalry: Rusa, the king, had sent a message to challenge the Assyrians to meet him.

  Chariot grandees, like later cavaliers, thus may have already begun to reckon that quarrels between them were best settled by chivalric encounter, leaving the footmen and other hangers-on to form a rough line of battle in their rear, heap up the spoils if victory came, or suffer the consequences if it did not. Chinese charioteers of the Chou period were clearly infected by chivalry, as is recorded also in the succeeding Spring and Autumn period. In a battle between the rival states of Ch’u and Sung in 638 BC, the Duke of Sung’s minister of war twice asked permission to attack the enemy before they had formed ranks, making the perfectly reasonable point that ‘they are many but we are few’; he was refused. After the Sung had been defeated and the Duke wounded, he justified himself as follows: ‘The gentleman does not inflict a second wound, or take the grey-haired prisoner … Though I am but the unworthy remnant of a fallen dynasty, I would not sound my drums to attack an enemy who had not completed the formation of his ranks.’ Other practices deemed unchivalrous among Chinese chariot aristocrats were taking advantage of a fleeing enemy who was having trouble with his chariot (he might even be assisted), injuring a ruler, or attacking an enemy state when it was mourning a ruler or was divided by internal troubles.27

  Exemplary behaviour between charioteers is typified by an incident from a later Sung war, when the then duke’s son found himself opposite a warrior with an arrow already notched to his bow. He shot, missed and notched another arrow before the duke’s son was ready to shoot. The duke’s son then called out, ‘If you don’t give me my turn, you are a base fellow’ (literally, not a gentleman). His opponent gave him his chance and was shot dead.28

  These are the manners of the duel, or of the ceremonial encounter of champions, encounters that require arrangement. And arrangement seems to have been accepted in chariot warfare. Not only did Urartu challenge Assyria to fight; the Chinese of the Spring and Autumn period disdained those who launched surprise attacks while they themselves normally sent messengers to arrange a time and place for battle; they also asked for fields to be ploughed in such a way as to allow chariots easy movement, and there are repeated inscriptions about the need to fill in wells and cooking-pits before a battle so that the chariots should have free passage. Even in modern warfare battlefields need preparation if there is to be a test of arms, and there are legal prohibitions against, for example, laying unmarked minefields. In the ancient world, where logistic difficulties — the labour of getting an army into proximity with another, the near impossibility of keeping it fed in one place for more than a day or two — were paramount, it made sense to remove obstacles to the manoeuvre of the leading warriors’ principal weapons.
At Gaugamela, the battlefield near the Tigris where Alexander the Great defeated the Persians in 331 BC, his opponent Darius not only levelled the area thoroughly before the encounter but also built three ‘runways’ for his chariots. Alexander, it might be added, had earlier dismissed entreaties by his subordinates to make a night attack, on the grounds that if he lost it would mean obloquy but that, even if he won, victory would carry the taint of unfairness.

  Chariot fighting was an activity nearly 1500 years old when Alexander — riding his legendary horse Bucephalus — defeated Darius. It was by then fading into obsolescence: only peoples at the margin of the civilised world — like the Britons who opposed the Roman invasion — continued to think it a useful way of making war. Despite all the years it had been practised, however, we lack any clear idea of its nature; historians of the ancient world differ sharply over how the chariot was used. Professor Creel, for example, thinks that it provided a ‘mobile point of vantage’ in Chinese battle and he quotes Professors Oppenheim, Wilson and Gertrude Smith to the effect that it was used in Egypt as a command post and in Mesopotamia and Greece as battlefield transport; Professor M.I. Finley, on the other hand, thinks that Homer’s descriptions of the chariot as a ‘taxi’ to battle represented practice in Homer’s time only, and that the heroes of the Iliad had fought otherwise.29