Chariots as equid battering rams

[PMBardunias]

Our problem is that we don't have a crew of willing volunteers ready to line up and be charged by a horse so we can see what exactly happens. I can only work from the sources that have a number of accounts of cavalry charging through a line of heavy infantry (mid-Republican Rome) and the composition of the fulcum designed specifically to stop this happening. The former tells me horses have no problem knocking down men in intermediate order one after the other.

Perhaps we need to clarify our terms. By 'intermediate order' I mean that the ranks are about three feet apart, permitting the horse to knock down one man before reaching the next. By close order I mean something like a Greek phalanx bunched up for othismos. Open order means about six feet between ranks. It doesn't matter how close together the files are.

If a fulcum discourages a cavalryman from charging it, that can only be because the cavalryman knows he won't get through - it's a physical (near) impossibility. Not just because it looks like a wall. A line of men in intermediate rank order also look like a wall.

The fulcum, by this I mean the 2 or 3 tiered overlap of shields did not exist to stop cavalry. We know this because Maurice tells us that you need to form it if your men are unarmored and lack greaves.  The multi-tiered business is to defend against missiles, not shock.  In fact they broke down the tiers when they advanced to shock combat.  Any group of close packed men with pointy sticks will deter horse. An advantage that the fulcum does have against cavalry is that when ad fulco it is much harder to pull apart and run.

The physics is just physics. With a dead horse we have no need to test this.  Now what happens when a live horse meets an immovable mass, that is horse behavior and human psychology and needs testing. The focus of your argument on the physical collision is what is causing me to object, because the mechanics are incorrect. I had to do a similar analysis on the old-school charging hoplite collision rigamarole, so I am somewhat expert at this point is the study of colliding particle swarms.  If we pare back a bit on the  notion of the physical battering ram, and focus on the fact that all the shock victories you describe really did happen, just through a more subtle interplay of physical force and psychology, then I am completely on board.

One thing we do know for sure is that horses will charge into people at speed - the videos demonstrate that.

Horses will charge persons, there is a crucial difference.

Any kind of infantry did not necessarily close up ranks to stop the horses. For this to work you need bodies not shields (besides the one shield in the front) and the bright idea of compacting body against body to create a stable mass the horse can't punch through. Again, there are plenty of examples of horses crashing through a line of shields, wicker and otherwise.

Yes, but men with shields are much more likely to compact than missile infantry, for whom close order is anathema.

To be clear, I see one of two things happening when a group of horses charge formed infantry.

A) The infantry lose their nerve in the moments before impact would occur. It starts at the rear, as men break away, or in the case of a single chariot, compress laterally into the files next to them as well to get out of the way. If all the men clear a path, then the horse charges right through. If most of the men clear enough to be a bit more opened than your intermediate order (I think 1m spacing may still be to close), then the horse collides with a moving crowd of men. At this density the horse slows and wades through the crowd of men.  If enough men flee, then any not fast enough to get out of the way are run over.

B) The infantry does not lose its nerve and stays formed close.  Now the horse balks. This can be a swerve if there is room, or a slowing down before contact, or a complete and abrupt (and comical) halt, like horses that balk in show jumping.  This does not mean combat is over unless the cavalry break off and run away to regroup and try again.  What it means is a fight.  If you are Persian cavalry facing hoplites, you now have to fight a dude with a 9 foot spear with your second javelin.  If you are Alexander, you are fighting a 9 foot spear with a longer spear.  Persians lose, Macedonians have a chance. Of course it usually does not play out this way, because cavalry will not charge home in the first place if they do not see signs of waivering in the infantry.

[Flaminpig0]

But losing a horse at speed is a different matter to bumping into an enemy chariot team at speed: you get shear forces not present in a direct impact.

So, not only do the lines meet head on but the drivers ensure that they are perfectly aligned with each other so each horse meets head-to-head?  Even if this were to happen, the two chariots would meet at about 30mph.  And everyone dusts themselves off and walks away?  Here's an experiment we could try.  Have someone stand up in the back of a open topped car and drive into a wall at 30mph.  Any speculation what happens to the passenger?  Sorry, this is a really silly line of reasoning, Patrick.

The chariot runners are really there to act as stretcher bearers.

[RichT]

Rather than writing anything to this thread, I'll just link to what I wrote last time.

http://soa.org.uk/sm/index.php?topic=2557.msg30371#msg30371

I don't think there's anything new this time around.

[Erpingham]

I find it interesting that when I asked the difference between horse archers combatting chariots and bow-armed light chariots doing so, I got two economic answers and one terrain-capability one.  The only tactical answer was that horse archers would be more effective because they had greater formation density.  I can see a logic to this in that skirmishing chariots would need more manoeuvre room than horses but do we have anything on the relative densities e.g. in manuals?  And would this be critical?

The example provided by Patrick of Alexander v. Indians suggested that the horse archers pinned the chariots who were then charged in the flank by shock cavalry before their own cavalry supports could intervene, rather than the archery took out the chariots.

[PMBardunias]

I find it interesting that when I asked the difference between horse archers combatting chariots and bow-armed light chariots doing so, I got two economic answers and one terrain-capability one.  The only tactical answer was that horse archers would be more effective because they had greater formation density.  I can see a logic to this in that skirmishing chariots would need more manoeuvre room than horses but do we have anything on the relative densities e.g. in manuals?  And would this be critical?

The example provided by Patrick of Alexander v. Indians suggested that the horse archers pinned the chariots who were then charged in the flank by shock cavalry before their own cavalry supports could intervene, rather than the archery took out the chariots.

Horse archers are superior, but they require an advanced set of skills and technology in order to be so. This is why we see horse archers as initially inferior, but ultimately more successful over time.

A successful horse archer requires:
1) A horse that can carry him by itself rather than in a team.
2) A short bow (at least the bottom half) that can be handled on horseback to fire from all angles and yet be powerful.
3) A level of riding skill that allows the archer to compensate for the motion of the horse and ride without using the hands to guide the horse. We usually think of advancements in technology as physical instruments, but riding styles play a big part in this. Of course physical technology helps here too. You will usually see stirrups mentioned in conjunction with shock cavalry, but one of the best things about them is that you can stand up off the horse and use your legs to compensate for its bouncing. It takes a lot of muscle to do this riding bareback and gripping with the thighs.

A man in a chariot is standing, using an infantry bow.  The bouncing of a chariot is less than on a galloping horse. You don't need to spend time learning fancy riding skills- hell you are not even driving. This is a much more attractive option for the elites of an agricultural rather than pastural society.

[Mark G]

Is it a rule that armies only ever have one type of chariot on the field, Patrick?

I have a few lists that beg to differ, so I wonder where you got that idea from.

[Patrick Waterson]

But losing a horse at speed is a different matter to bumping into an enemy chariot team at speed: you get shear forces not present in a direct impact.

So, not only do the lines meet head on but the drivers ensure that they are perfectly aligned with each other so each horse meets head-to-head?  Even if this were to happen, the two chariots would meet at about 30mph.  And everyone dusts themselves off and walks away?  Here's an experiment we could try.  Have someone stand up in the back of a open topped car and drive into a wall at 30mph.  Any speculation what happens to the passenger?  Sorry, this is a really silly line of reasoning, Patrick.

Whoa there a moment!  The fact that two chariots might meet at a combined speed of 30 mph does not mean that each crew is doing 30 mph.  Each crew is still doing 15 mph.  Only if they sail over the top and meet in the middle would they experience a mutual 30 mph impact.

In the absence of chariots, a better experiment would be to line up a row of horses and have them charge another row of quadrupeds at a combined closing speed of 30 mph or thereabouts.  Adding carts, traps or gigs would be a bonus.  I mention this because our old friend T E Lawrence took part in a camelry charge against Turkish cavalry in which several camels impacted against horses and bowled them over - with the horses and riders apparently emerging intact, at least until the Arabs got to them (TEL's participation was less than glorious, as he accidentally managed to shoot his own camel and was precipitated onto the ground at a fair speed, surviving intact bar a few bruises).

I do not maintain that chariot drivers deliberately sought to ram their opponents (Ramses II would never have got away from Kadesh if they did), but rather I am questioning the assumption that a chariot team-chariot team collision would result in a splattery mess of gore and matchwood.

the cavalry, after their victorious charges, were now scattered in frantic terror; horses and men alike were overthrown in their blind flight. Even the standards of the legionaries were thrown into confusion, and many of the front rank men were crushed [obtriti = bruised, trampled, crushed, broken] by the weight of the horses and vehicles [impetu equorum ac vehiculorum] dashing [raptorum = tearing] through the lines.

I would be tempted to reconstruct this as the chariots break the cavalry and drive them back on the infantry.  The infantry are disordered and because of that their lines are broken by the chariots.  Disordered or unformed infantry are the natural prey of chariots and cavalry.

This requires the departing Roman cavalry to have done some formation-breaking against their own legionaries, which is unusual behaviour for routed troops with room to avoid friendly units (the cavalry were on the flank, not ahead of the legionaries).  In any event, our source says the cavalry was 'scattered' by this point and it was the 'weight of the horses and vehicles', not the fleeing cavalry, which did the damage.

I see no sign here of the Gallic chariots launching a deliberate ramming attack on formed legionaries. Rather this is an exploitation or continuation from their earlier defeat of the cavalry.

Whatever their intent, the Gallic chariots ploughed into - or through - the leading lines of Roman infantry.  They did not make any attempt to avoid them.  The point of interest here is that they did not engage in skirmisher-like behaviour at any point in this particular battle, but did engage in 'assault behaviour', both against the Roman cavalry and the infantry.  Granted the legionaries may have been unnerved at seeing their cavalry galloping hell-for-leather to the rear, but we do see the Gallic chariotry in a shock role, and that should give us pause about assigning them to an exclusive 'light/skirrmisher' bracket.

[Patrick Waterson]

Livy X.28.5-10 ...

Ooooh, thanks for that reference, Patrick! Reminds me of Polybios' use of two words in the Telamon description, "hamaxas kai sunoridas" as discussed elsewhere.

Whether this means two vehicle types, or literary "elegant variation", it's apparently not a one-off.

Yes, it seems to be interestingly consistent where Gallic chariot-using armies of the 3rd century BC are concerned.

[Patrick Waterson]

I find it interesting that when I asked the difference between horse archers combatting chariots and bow-armed light chariots doing so, I got two economic answers and one terrain-capability one.  The only tactical answer was that horse archers would be more effective because they had greater formation density.  I can see a logic to this in that skirmishing chariots would need more manoeuvre room than horses but do we have anything on the relative densities e.g. in manuals?  And would this be critical?

Hard to tell.  The Assyrians fielded both chariots and horse archers, so they would have been in a position to make comparisons.

The example provided by Patrick of Alexander v. Indians suggested that the horse archers pinned the chariots who were then charged in the flank by shock cavalry before their own cavalry supports could intervene, rather than the archery took out the chariots.

In Porus' lineup, the Indian cavalry are stated to have been deployed behind the chariots, so I think what happened was that while the horse archers made the chariots' lives miserable, Alexander's cavalry hit the Indian cavalry in flank and drove it off, leaving the chariots vulnerable to having the crews picked off from the rear.  Arrian (via Ptolemy's account) makes much of Alexander hitting the Indian cavalry before it could redeploy to face him and driving it off, but is silent about the exact details of how the chariots were eliminated, merely noting at the end of the battle that all the chariots had become casualties.  Reading between the lines, it looks as if Alexander's initial success against the Indian cavalry left the chariots on that wing high, dry and vulnerable.  Exactly how he dealt with the chariots from the other wing, assuming they transferred over with their cavalry, is anyone's guess.

[Patrick Waterson]

Is it a rule that armies only ever have one type of chariot on the field, Patrick?

I do not know about it being a 'rule', but Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs show only one type of chariot in their army at any one time.*  The point is that these and other major chariot-using Near Eastern nationalities did not field one type of chariot for skirmishing and another for shock (or two different types for skirmishing, for that matter).**

Gauls, at least in the 3rd century BC, seem to have been a consistent exception, but even so appear to have preferred using their dimorphic chariots in a shock role.

*Later Assyrian reliefs do show Elamite or Elamite-style vehicles along with the characteristic Assyrian heavy chariots; their exact role is the subject of conjecture but the Assyrians appear to have built only one type of chariot for themselves in any particular era.

**Someone is bound to ask: what about Ramses II's opponents at Kadesh, with their 2-man and 3-man chariots?  These were in a confederation or coalition of several nationalities, so variant types should not be too surprising; we do however note that they were all the same basic pattern of two-horse vehicles.

[Keith]

Patrick, thanks for taking the time to respond to my points.

"If this were the case, one would expect armies to field two types of chariot as standard: one for skirmishing and one for the decisive blow."

Not sure about this. Army composition was surely the result of many factors, some of them not entirely logical (at least militarily) - perhaps to do with cultural influences, or how a particular army developed over time, or what allied or associated troops were available. I wouldn't necessarily 'expect' any 'standard' rule governing how an army was composed.

[Andreas Johansson]

I find it interesting that when I asked the difference between horse archers combatting chariots and bow-armed light chariots doing so, I got two economic answers and one terrain-capability one.  The only tactical answer was that horse archers would be more effective because they had greater formation density.  I can see a logic to this in that skirmishing chariots would need more manoeuvre room than horses but do we have anything on the relative densities e.g. in manuals?  And would this be critical?

The Arthashastra passage previously mentioned has cavalry and chariots with respectively 3 and 4 samas spacing. I haven't found time yet to read the paper you mentioned as contradicting Duncan's assertion that a sama is about 14 inches, but the proportional difference should be unchanged.

(Now bear in mind that those are spacings, not frontages per file, so it wouldn't follow cavalry had a third more firepower per frontage, even if Indian cavalry of the time had been horse archers, which I don't believe they were. If they were, the difference in firepower would be greater as a horse with rider would take up less than 3/4 the frontage of a chariot.)

[Patrick Waterson]

Patrick, thanks for taking the time to respond to my points.

Thank you, Keith.

"If this were the case, one would expect armies to field two types of chariot as standard: one for skirmishing and one for the decisive blow."

Not sure about this. Army composition was surely the result of many factors, some of them not entirely logical (at least militarily) - perhaps to do with cultural influences, or how a particular army developed over time, or what allied or associated troops were available. I wouldn't necessarily 'expect' any 'standard' rule governing how an army was composed.

Then again, if an army uses a particular tactic, one would expect it to make an effort to optimise its relevant troops for that tactic, so it should configure the 'hardware' (chariots) for their intended role.  Hence, if there were two differing combat roles, one better fulfilled by a light, and one by a heavy, chariot, one would expect two types of chariot to appear in reliefs, each doing their own thing.

As far as I can tell there were no specific 'ordonnances' of the period governing army composition; it seemed to be more a matter of field what you have, but to give the officers and nobles (and workshops) a good idea of what you want.  While we do not have the precise paperwork, we do have the royal reliefs, and at any given time these show one and only one type of chariot in use by Egypt or Assyria (reliefs from other nationalities are too few and far between, or too enigmatic, to draw clear conclusions from).  So while I would agree that there was probably no standard rule, there was nevertheless probably just the one standardised, optimised design with the royal blessing current at any one time.  Hence we find Assyrians starting out with two-horse chariots, moving to apparent complete replacement with three-horse chariots around the time of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) and then four-horse chariots replace them entirely in reliefs of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BC) and subsequent monarchs.  (The chariot-to-other-arms ratio also drops, suggesting that provision and training of chariot horses and/or crews may have been limiting factors.)

Egyptian chariots are not depicted until about half-way through the 18th Dynasty (in reliefs on the body of Thutmose IV's chariot and then in tombs and on furniture), and are not depicted on wall reliefs until the later 19th Dynasty, with the 20th Dynasty also featuring them on wall reliefs.  Apart from a change in the number of spokes in the wheel (from 8 to 6) during the 18th Dynasty, the Egyptian chariot seems to be pretty much the same vehicle throughout, and there is just the one type.

Of course we could be missing part of the 'fossil record', but what we have seems pretty clear: at any given time, there is one type of chariot in the national inventory.

This of course raises the question of how allies fit in.  Egyptian practice seemed to be to use only their own chariots alongside allied (or subject) infantry in addition to their own, but when assembling a coalition of their subjects to oppose Assyria in 853 BC they accepted chariots from everyone, although one power (Israel) fielded most of them.  Since we know of this battle only from Shalmaneser III, who gives the lineup of forces opposing him and tells us no more than that he (probably mendaciously) claims he won, we have no details about tactial use.  It is left to the imagination whether the disparate contingents at Qarqar each had their own divergent tactical doctrines or followed the same general approach.  From the standpoint of logic (and force controllability) I would argue for the latter.

[Keith]

Thanks again Patrick.

I've also just come across Richard Taylor's post above, and the linked post is very useful. I'm relieved to see it fits in with my assumptions!

On the subject of expecting skirmish and shock chariots to be fielded together, this paragraph from Armies of the Ancient Near East (WRG) illustrates what I was thinking:

"The large, four-horse Assyrian chariot was primarily used in a 'shock-charge' capacity. It was a development from the earlier, lighter vehicles which had to be multi-purpose reconnaissance, despatch and shock-charge vehicles. The first two roles had been increasingly taken over by the developing cavalry arm since the 10th century B.C., cavalry being both cheaper and more efficient in these roles. With these limitations on weight removed, the chariot could become far more specialised to meet the purpose for which it was best suited, to deliver an attack by heavily armed elite troops with speed and mobility. As cavalry began to become effective as mobile missile troops, and, to a limited extent, close combat troops, the number of the crew, the amount of protection and the size of the chariot were increased to the detriment of manoeuvrability, and limited further the terrain on which it could be used" (p.60).

So the work of the light chariots (recce, despatch, mobile missile troops) has been taken over by cavalry as the army developed.

[Erpingham]

Whoa there a moment!  The fact that two chariots might meet at a combined speed of 30 mph does not mean that each crew is doing 30 mph.  Each crew is still doing 15 mph.  Only if they sail over the top and meet in the middle would they experience a mutual 30 mph impact.

fair enough, I should have two cars travelling at 15mph colliding head on.

In the absence of chariots, a better experiment would be to line up a row of horses and have them charge another row of quadrupeds at a combined closing speed of 30 mph or thereabouts. 

I don't think the RSPCA would approve

I do not maintain that chariot drivers deliberately sought to ram their opponents (Ramses II would never have got away from Kadesh if they did), but rather I am questioning the assumption that a chariot team-chariot team collision would result in a splattery mess of gore and matchwood.

Well that's a result.  The key thing is that ramming tactics weren't the preferred model.  Any accidentally collisions we can imagine in our own way.

In any event, our source says the cavalry was 'scattered' by this point and it was the 'weight of the horses and vehicles', not the fleeing cavalry, which did the damage.

I was rather thinking that the cavalry horses were included here, unless it specifically uses a word meaning chariot horse ?

Whatever their intent, the Gallic chariots ploughed into - or through - the leading lines of Roman infantry.  They did not make any attempt to avoid them.  The point of interest here is that they did not engage in skirmisher-like behaviour at any point in this particular battle, but did engage in 'assault behaviour', both against the Roman cavalry and the infantry.  Granted the legionaries may have been unnerved at seeing their cavalry galloping hell-for-leather to the rear, but we do see the Gallic chariotry in a shock role, and that should give us pause about assigning them to an exclusive 'light/skirrmisher' bracket.

We see gallic chariots in shock mode against over-extended cavalry, which shouldn't surprise us.  Was there a point in the action where skirmishing would be the obvious tactic?  If we take the analogy several times stated with light cavalry, would they have skirmished or charged in a similar situation?

I still think that opportunistic exploitation against a confused or disordered infantry line, rather than a separate assault against formed troops, is a likelier explanation.