Hittite chariots

[Jim Webster]

I think you underestimate the number of times chariot horses would campaign. Certainly Frankish warhorses had a service life of seven or eight years. Given a lot of armies over this period would campaign every year, you'd expect a horse to face combat three or four times at least. Probably more because chariots could well skirmish ahead of the army when scouting etc

Sure, but how many times would a chariot horse (or a cavalry horse for that matter) take part in a major pitched battle where it might be required to charged a battleline of infantry that could not be easily flanked?

nobody can ever know the answer to that question. Some horses will do it multiple times, some will never do it (much like soldiers)

[DBS]

Feel free to detail exactly why they are fallacious.

Horses knocking people over like nine pins?  One, assumes that the horse hits the infantry at full pelt.  Two, these are small horses - ponies in size, not modern horses.  Three, still damned stupid thing to do with horses that are worth an entire village or three of peasants.  Four, why, why, why do it?  Five, how many ranks deep are the infantry?  You might flatten the first rank, maybe the second.  By the time you get to the third or fourth, you had better hope they are running or you are now at a standstill, with angry peasants on either side, your horses are REALLY unhappy, and you are in a right pickle.

By extension, the idea that a chariot just knocks over even more peasants than a single horse, and in a manner that just makes the aristocratic crew laugh despicably rather than hanging on for dear life as the vehicle bounces up and down over bodies, shields and spears (hope they don't stick into the horses or the vehicle), the horses get very distressed, and the axle possibly breaks...

Isn't that a bit of a contradiction? Defeating chariots wins the battle, but Ramses dare not charge into the undefeated infantry? If you win a battle then you win a battle: the enemy army is beaten meaning it is either dead or routed. If a large part of the enemy army remains on the field then you haven't won the battle. You still have to defeat the part of that army that stands its ground.

Dead or routed is the only definition of victory?  Seriously?

And infantry can't protect routing chariots. The infantry are pretty much immobile leaving enemy charioteers free to roam around them and chase their defeated counterparts at will.

Depends what state the winning chariots are in.  Horses blown, arrows expended, crews knackered, or simply too busy looting their fallen enemies.  Steady infantry can make all the difference between a merciless pursuit and a "Hey, that is a good enough enough result, now let us loot the enemy charioteer corpses and round up the loose horses before those thieving Sherden catch up."

If infantry are worthless then why are they necessary?

The point is that all armies in this period deployed significant numbers of infantry in set piece battles, so they must have served a purpose (as cheerleaders?...warning: sarcasm alert). Shooting infantry certainly disorganised them and softened them up, but it still required a knockout blow to send them packing - again, I don't have the sources at hand. 

Infantry are there because any major strategic campaign in the Bronze Age is almost always focused on capturing or defending one or more important towns.  Hittite kings defined their success by taking enemy towns and deporting people, goods, herds.  These are tasks that need infantry.  As the Hittites record, sometimes the enemy tries hiding up a mountain and it needs infantry to flush them out  The infantry do not suddenly disappear from your army because the opposition decides to offer a field action, but does not mean that they will always be assumed to have a major role in that field action.

At Kadesh, the Egyptians seem to have left the Hittite infantry untouched.  Now, we may suspect that Ramses massively exaggerates his success in the battle, but even taken at face value, his account regards the battle won when numbers of the Hittite chariots have either been trapped against the city walls, with their crews forced to abandon them and seek sanctuary inside, or trapped against the rivers and the crews forced to swim or drown.  No mention of engagement with the Hittite infantry is mentioned, let alone any knockout blow to send them packing, but it is still a most glorious victory for Pharaoh.

[RichT]

I see that the last time this topic was beaten to death was 16 Aug 2018 - is this International Talk About Chariots Day or something? I'm not surprised to see that nothing was learned from that (20 page) thread.

In 2018 I linked back to a post of mine from 2017 so I'll do so again now, rather than boring anyone with new words.

[Justin Swanton]

I see that the last time this topic was beaten to death was 16 Aug 2018 - is this International Talk About Chariots Day or something? I'm not surprised to see that nothing was learned from that (20 page) thread.

In 2018 I linked back to a post of mine from 2017 so I'll do so again now, rather than boring anyone with new words.

Thanks Rich. People may have noticed that I generally avoid contentious topics relating to military history these days as I find (which you may also have) that people have generally made up their minds a long time ago on the topics in question and tend to bring out the same arguments that were aired three or four or five years ago. To answer David Stevens' first point in his last post I suggest clicking on Rich's first link (see the first post there). I substantially agree with what Rich said in his second link. I'll briefly answer the rest of David's post separately.

[Justin Swanton]

Isn't that a bit of a contradiction? Defeating chariots wins the battle, but Ramses dare not charge into the undefeated infantry? If you win a battle then you win a battle: the enemy army is beaten meaning it is either dead or routed. If a large part of the enemy army remains on the field then you haven't won the battle. You still have to defeat the part of that army that stands its ground.

Dead or routed is the only definition of victory?  Seriously?

Seriously.

Edit: also surrender and conceding the battle like a gentleman. But I think those two were rare enough occurrences on a Fertile Crescent battlefield (if they ever happened there at all) for me not to think of them in the context of chariots. I'm rather reminded of African bush wars, where "prisoner of war" was a funny concept.

And infantry can't protect routing chariots. The infantry are pretty much immobile leaving enemy charioteers free to roam around them and chase their defeated counterparts at will.

Depends what state the winning chariots are in.  Horses blown, arrows expended, crews knackered, or simply too busy looting their fallen enemies.  Steady infantry can make all the difference between a merciless pursuit and a "Hey, that is a good enough enough result, now let us loot the enemy charioteer corpses and round up the loose horses before those thieving Sherden catch up."

A horse can gallop for miles without getting seriously winded, and even in a large battle a couple of km is about as far as they need to go. Victorious charioteers will have no trouble seeing their defeated opposite numbers off the field and then turning on the infantry. In later battles where cavalry feature the only way to shelter them is in a hollow infantry square (e.g. Carrhae, Byzantine armies) and as far as I know Egyptians, Assyrians & co. didn't go in for hollow squares.

If infantry are worthless then why are they necessary?

The point is that all armies in this period deployed significant numbers of infantry in set piece battles, so they must have served a purpose (as cheerleaders?...warning: sarcasm alert). Shooting infantry certainly disorganised them and softened them up, but it still required a knockout blow to send them packing - again, I don't have the sources at hand. 

Infantry are there because any major strategic campaign in the Bronze Age is almost always focused on capturing or defending one or more important towns.  Hittite kings defined their success by taking enemy towns and deporting people, goods, herds.  These are tasks that need infantry.  As the Hittites record, sometimes the enemy tries hiding up a mountain and it needs infantry to flush them out  The infantry do not suddenly disappear from your army because the opposition decides to offer a field action, but does not mean that they will always be assumed to have a major role in that field action.

At Kadesh, the Egyptians seem to have left the Hittite infantry untouched.  Now, we may suspect that Ramses massively exaggerates his success in the battle, but even taken at face value, his account regards the battle won when numbers of the Hittite chariots have either been trapped against the city walls, with their crews forced to abandon them and seek sanctuary inside, or trapped against the rivers and the crews forced to swim or drown.  No mention of engagement with the Hittite infantry is mentioned, let alone any knockout blow to send them packing, but it is still a most glorious victory for Pharaoh.

If infantry are of little or no use on a battlefield then they will not be deployed on a battlefield, certainly not in the numbers given by the sources (even if one accepts those numbers are exaggerated). Warfare is a hardheaded business. A general learns what works and doesn't work or he pays the price. I'll have a look at Kadesh.

[Justin Swanton]

Thinking of chariots as multi-purpose weapons brought up the question: how exactly do chariots fight chariots? They can't charge each other as the horses would either refuse to gallop into each other or if they did the result would be an instant lose-lose. That leaves the archer. It seems obvious that what happened was that the two chariot lines drew close to each other then stopped. The archers would start shooting at the enemy charioteers since killing the charioteer neutralises the chariot. He would also shoot at enemy archers to remove them as a problem. The charioteer can't himself hold a shield as he has his hands full with the reins and daren't let go of them for an instant, so it makes sense that the shieldbearer protects them both. Since the archer also has a spear - in some cases - it makes sense that he could cover the distance between the two chariot lines at a run and take out the enemy archer and charioteer with his spearpoint.

If one side lost more charioteers/archers than the other, the surviving chariots would experience an increasing rate of arrow fire from the enemy archers, now able to concentrate on fewer targets. Their opponents would quickly work out that they were getting more than they were giving and hence were losing the battle. At a critical point they would break and run.

In this scenario the quality of the archer is all-important. Foot-archers don't have to be especially good; they are required to drop arrows into the area covered by enemy troops, and since that area was a large one for Fertile Crescent armies accuracy wasn't a feature. Chariot archers on the other hand had to target individual enemy charioteers and archers and skillful archery was a must. Good bows were also essential. It is perhaps for this reason that Egyptian art emphasises the bow in its depictions of chariots. It would have been a prestige weapon in that context.

[Jim Webster]

Thinking of chariots as multi-purpose weapons brought up the question: how exactly do chariots fight chariots? They can't charge each other as the horses would either refuse to gallop into each other or if they did the result would be an instant lose-lose. That leaves the archer. It seems obvious that what happened was that the two chariot lines drew close to each other then stopped.

Firstly did chariots advance in lines or columns?
If lines how wide the spacing?
I've seen arguments that the chariots basically drove across each other's front shooting, or drove through each other because the gaps were so wide, or formed small 'cantabrian' circles shooting at each other. Yours is the first time I've ever seen anybody assume they would stop.
(It's not that you're right or wrong, it's just not obvious    )

Actually I cannot see them stopping because then you're dead meat for anybody who has got infantry or chariot runners with them.

[Justin Swanton]

Thinking of chariots as multi-purpose weapons brought up the question: how exactly do chariots fight chariots? They can't charge each other as the horses would either refuse to gallop into each other or if they did the result would be an instant lose-lose. That leaves the archer. It seems obvious that what happened was that the two chariot lines drew close to each other then stopped.

Firstly did chariots advance in lines or columns?
If lines how wide the spacing?
I've seen arguments that the chariots basically drove across each other's front shooting, or drove through each other because the gaps were so wide, or formed small 'cantabrian' circles shooting at each other. Yours is the first time I've ever seen anybody assume they would stop.
(It's not that you're right or wrong, it's just not obvious    )

Actually I cannot see them stopping because then you're dead meat for anybody who has got infantry or chariot runners with them.

I suspect they would have to stop, even if only momentarily, to enable the archer to target enemy charioteers/archers (think WW2 tanks). A chariot bumping over uneven ground would make serious archery impossible. Or maybe they kept moving but drew really close to each other to make the inaccuracy less of a problem - but then getting too close opens them to being rushed by infantry. It's an iffy thing. Either way it was all about the archer.

I think chariots would form up in line, at least when close to enemy chariots, to allow more chariot archers to target opponents.

Chariot runners...I hadn't though of those. They would be ideal for rushing enemy chariots that had stopped or weren't moving fast enough or couldn't break off fast enough. It fits.

[Erpingham]

I've been engaging in a bit of nostalgia and rereading the old posts.  There are actually some important differences - no-one believes chariots deliberately rammed each other any more it seems and the scythed suicide machine is no-ones default model for all chariots.  As for people making up their minds already, this is likely to be true unless new evidence comes along or persuasive near interpretations are advanced.  I, for example, have a different view of hoplite warfare than I had before we began to pick away at things, having been exposed to new ideas and evidence. 

On Justin's ideas on chariot v chariot combat, a lot there makes sense and fits with what we have from our sources.  I'm not sure that targeting the charioteer was the priority rather than the archer - a social argument could be made charioteers would target their peers and killing charioteers might not be considered cricket.  My knowledge of the Iliad is shamefully lacking but I believe some have interpreted a set of conventions about charioteers from it, and the much later Irish hero tales also suggest conventions around chariot drivers.  According to Nefedkin's reading of the Mahabharata, the primary target for chariot heroes were other chariot heroes.

Another question is why not target horses?  Disable a horse and a chariot can no longer sustain the fight - it might be recovered to its own lines at best.  Again, there may have been conventions about this among chariot crews, possibly with an eye to future loot - though this may not have applied to infantry, who may have taken a more pragmatic "It's Dobbin or me" approach.

[Andreas Johansson]

Another question is why not target horses?  Disable a horse and a chariot can no longer sustain the fight - it might be recovered to its own lines at best.

That ANE chariot horses were commonly armoured surely implies they were commonly targeted.

[Erpingham]

Another question is why not target horses?  Disable a horse and a chariot can no longer sustain the fight - it might be recovered to its own lines at best.

That ANE chariot horses were commonly armoured surely implies they were commonly targeted.

Yes, but by whom?  As I've already suggested, the PBI are unlikely to be part of any social convention to preserve horses.

[Andreas Johansson]

That ANE chariot horses were commonly armoured surely implies they were commonly targeted.

Yes, but by whom?

Ramses II?

Among the fleeing and fallen Hittites before the (literally) great man in the relief, I see at least two horses with arrows sticking out of them.

[DBS]

I dug out last night my copy of Crouwel's opus magnus on pre-Roman wheeled vehicles in Italy.  Now, of course, this is largely focused on the Iron Age, and Crouwel himself cautions against drawing excessive inferences from the Bronze Age Near East and vice versa.  But given that Prof Crouwel is the greatest living authority on the subject, some of his general discussion points on chariotry are interesting, especially where he notes that his own views have changed over time thanks to further research and testing.

1) He took part in the reconstruction of Assyrian chariots and was surprised by the result.  He had previously assumed that such a heavy chariot would have less manoeuvrability than earlier vehicles, but this proved to be to a less dramatic extent than he had expected.  He states that he had hitherto assumed that the Assyrian chariots must have made firing runs across the front of enemy forces, because it would be suicidally insane to drive actually into the enemy lines, and the chariots would want to keep moving because that is their raison d'etre.  Following this reconstruction, he realised that it would be possible for even an Assyrian chariot to advance towards the enemy to close within range, fire a shot or two, then turn away before it became exposed unacceptably to return fire.  A caracole if one wishes to use the later term.

2) He still regards the thought of thrusting spears as a primary weapon from a chariot as preposterous - excessively long lances would be required, how do you hold such a long thing steady to be able to aim meaningfully, and if you do somehow hit something or someone, the chap wielding it is likely to be propelled backwards out of the chariot by the impact unless his grip is so loose that he is able to let it fly out of his hand... which not only means that aiming with a loose grip is even more difficult, but also means it is a one shot weapon.  Jousting charioteers do not have a nice saddle to hold them in place!

3) A lot of ancient chariots have damned big axle protrusions.  These mean that you really do not want to get too close to anything else, enemy or friendly, lest you smash the axle.  So again, close passes on each other is severely sub optimal.  By extension, line abreast is probably pretty open order as well.  Not too allow interlacing with enemy chariots, but to avoid collisions with one's own vehicles and to allow greater safe turning space.

4) Trampling one's enemies underfoot is metaphorical, because equids really, really do not like treading on people or animals, not least because they risk serious injury to their own legs.

[Erpingham]

That ANE chariot horses were commonly armoured surely implies they were commonly targeted.

Yes, but by whom?

Ramses II?

Among the fleeing and fallen Hittites before the (literally) great man in the relief, I see at least two horses with arrows sticking out of them.

That seems reasonable evidence that horses could be targeted in Egyptian practice, and would support armouring horses for chariot v. chariot actions.  Thanks Andreas.

[Justin Swanton]

On Justin's ideas on chariot v chariot combat, a lot there makes sense and fits with what we have from our sources.  I'm not sure that targeting the charioteer was the priority rather than the archer - a social argument could be made charioteers would target their peers and killing charioteers might not be considered cricket.  My knowledge of the Iliad is shamefully lacking but I believe some have interpreted a set of conventions about charioteers from it, and the much later Irish hero tales also suggest conventions around chariot drivers.  According to Nefedkin's reading of the Mahabharata, the primary target for chariot heroes were other chariot heroes.

Bearing in mind that cricket was invented in Britain and the Ancient Middle East never heard of it nor probably of the concept of "playing cricket." Honourable warfare applied only to some cultures and then only to an extent. I mentioned African bush wars. Taking prisoners in those wars (except for interrogation then execution) was something nobody ever thought of doing. In the case of the Rhodesian Army (and we were quite Britishy in our colonial way) the only unit that took prisoners with any intention of keeping them alive were the Selous Scouts, who selected suitable candidates and then offered them a position in the Scouts. If they refused they were executed - with a boot in the head rather than a bullet. If you really hate your enemy then that justifies anything you do to him.

Another question is why not target horses?  Disable a horse and a chariot can no longer sustain the fight - it might be recovered to its own lines at best.  Again, there may have been conventions about this among chariot crews, possibly with an eye to future loot - though this may not have applied to infantry, who may have taken a more pragmatic "It's Dobbin or me" approach.

As Andreas said, shooting horses was a thing in Egyptian art. Horses though are much harder to kill than men, especially from the front. We humans are terribly badly designed for warfare.