Hittite chariots

[Justin Swanton]

Warfare is a hardheaded business. If you can't perform then don't posture: it won't be long before your opponent works out that all you can do is bluff.

I think you're being over-analytical in a way that wouldn't happen on a battlefield.  You'll be telling me next that there's no randomness in warfare...

There's no randomness in warfare!*

A thought experiment for you.  Go to the viewing platform on top of a very tall building, and look down at the streets below the building.  99% of people will feel apprehensive, even though no-one has ever fallen from there.

So infantry seeing a chariot charging towards them at high speed will feel anxious.  They'll feel even more anxious if it's a big chariot with four horses rather than two, especially if they're not 100% sure how quickly it can stop.  And yet more anxiety if there are big blades on the ends of the axles, or the driver is wearing a big plume of feathers in his helmet.  This has very little to do with rational calculations of risk.

Sure, no-one has fallen from that tall building, but plenty of people have fallen from high places and they have to pick up their bodies with a spade. It's quite possible, if circumstances are right, to fall to your death from a high building, cliff, tree, ladder or whatever. This is why we are instinctively apprehensive of high places - instinct isn't stupid.

Try another thought experiment: imagine you are standing in the open and a huge fog bank approaches you. Do you feel apprehensive? No, and why? Because a fog bank can never hurt you no matter what the circumstances.

Now which thought experiment best fits chariots? Fog bank or high places?

Plus there's always the risk that the opposition chariots are commanded by some sort of ancient Justin Swanton who doesn't realise what a daft idea it is for chariots to charge into infantry.  Yes, the chariots may get repelled with heavy losses, but that's not a lot of consolation to you if you're the guy crushed under the chariot.

Or the chariots are crewed and commanded by the most experienced soldiers in the army, who are perfectly aware of the capabilities of their chariots and know when the moment is right or wrong to charge infantry.

[Tiger Joke:  Two men walking down a track see a tiger coming towards them.  One of them starts to run away.  The other one says "Don't be stupid, you can't outrun a tiger!".  The first one replies "I don't need to - I just need to outrun you".]

So if you're in an infantry unit being charged by chariots, it's not the chariots that you're scared of.   What you're really scared about is that the guys standing next to you might start running before you, and leave you alone to be run down.

If you're veteran infantry you're less likely to run as you know the tiger will probably chomp your mate and you in the bargain. Better to stand your ground.


*there's imperfect intel which is not the same thing and who ever heard of a unit throwing a 6 in one turn and killing the best enemy unit and then throwing a 1 in the next turn and getting clobbered by trash and stop-start movement from command pips totally unrelated to the battlefield situation and terrain being generated by completely arbitrary dice throws as if a general couldn't choose his battlefield and the whole thing is tosh and...

[Erpingham]

There's no randomness in warfare!

"Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.  The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction. . . .  This tremendous friction . . . is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance. . . .  Moreover, every war is rich in unique episodes."  Clausewitz.

[Justin Swanton]

There's no randomness in warfare!

"Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.  The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction. . . .  This tremendous friction . . . is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance. . . .  Moreover, every war is rich in unique episodes."  Clausewitz.

It depends. If a gunpowder stash blows up on a battlefield and frightens the army into a precipitate a rout then, fine, you call that a chance event that is big enough to affect the outcome of the battle. But this is precisely the kind of thing we don't simulate in wargaming. A chance event we could simulate is if the kink in the intestines is wrong and the augurs predict a gloomy future and the army is demoralised as a result and fights badly. Then one simply begins the battle by downgrading the combat effectiveness of the troops, reclassifying veterans as average and average as levy, or whatever. If a chance event has an ongoing effect on the battle then it can be represented by a combat modifier.

Outside of this Clausewitz doesn't apply. Friction averages out when enough individuals are involved, and you can quantify it. I can't offhand think of any real-life chance events that have a significantly variable effect on troops' combat effectiveness from one quarter-hour to the next, making them fight like lions in one moment and like lambs in the next. The only imponderable left is intel, not having perfect knowledge of where the enemy units are and what they are doing. In that case dice are a very poor substitute for fog of war.

[simonw]

Having been lucky enough to visit Abu Simbel and having seen the reliefs showing Kadesh, apart from a 'pinch of salt' regarding the actual outcome and course of the battle and the involvement of Pharaoh himself, I do not see any reason to question the depiction of the Hittite chariots with respect to those of the Egyptian ones (and Canaanite/Syrian bow-armed chariots as well).

There are a variety of 'styles' of Hittite, 'allied' and Egyptian chariots depicted.

Looking at the depictions, it is readily apparent that some of the Hittite chariots are shown with rectangular cabs with the axle located under the cabs rather than along the rear edge This is presumably to 'save the horses' due to the extra weight of the vehicle wrt. the Egyptian chariots which do tend to have their axle shown to be located at the rear edge of the base of the cab. There are also (some) Hittite chariots depicted with crews of 3; in the cab.

Now the actual duties of the individual crew members must remain a mystery (in detail) and I tend to agree wrt. the use of 'lances' but spears could be used to defend the charioteers from enemy infantry/runners rather than against enemy charioteers. So, they could well have carried thrusting spears in addition to the usual javelins and bows.

What seems to be likely to me though, is that the Egyptian artists at Abu Simbel have  indeed accurately highlighted differences between Egyptian and Hittite chariots and that these differences include (some of) the Hittites  having 3 crew as opposed to the Egyptian 2 and  that these Hittite chariots were heavier (i.e. square cabs with axle beneath) than their Egyptian opposition (and so were likely to have been a little less manoeuvrable).

Always, always we need to be aware that although to our 'modern' eyes  the technology and social structures of the ancient world may seem  to be somewhat simpler than ours, this is probably illusory in some respects at least. So much knowledge of ancient technology, techniques and the use of materials has been forgotten. In fact, in some matters such as the organisation of large bodies of men under arms, the ancients may well have been more expert than our modern societies. They were sophisticated in their own ways.

So, I feel that we should definitely believe what the Egyptian artists actually show of the materials and equipment differences at Kadesh as well as being just as sceptical of the 'spin' of the 'political' messages.

Cheers
Simon

[Erpingham]

Outside of this Clausewitz doesn't apply. Friction averages out when enough individuals are involved, and you can quantify it.

Wise commanders minimise friction and plan to mitigate its effects.  Getting your tabletop commander to confront and overcome friction is part of the generalship experience, IMO.  However, I think, as has been proven several times before, we do have a fundamental disagreement in this area and I don't think there's any purpose in derailing things here.

[Justin Swanton]

Outside of this Clausewitz doesn't apply. Friction averages out when enough individuals are involved, and you can quantify it.

Wise commanders minimise friction and plan to mitigate its effects.  Getting your tabletop commander to confront and overcome friction is part of the generalship experience, IMO.  However, I think, as has been proven several times before, we do have a fundamental disagreement in this area and I don't think there's any purpose in derailing things here.

Might be worth a separate thread, what do you think?

[Erpingham]

Outside of this Clausewitz doesn't apply. Friction averages out when enough individuals are involved, and you can quantify it.

Wise commanders minimise friction and plan to mitigate its effects.  Getting your tabletop commander to confront and overcome friction is part of the generalship experience, IMO.  However, I think, as has been proven several times before, we do have a fundamental disagreement in this area and I don't think there's any purpose in derailing things here.

Might be worth a separate thread, what do you think?

We've done it before, but if you think there is more to learn, by all means.

[simonw]

I think that until somebody invents a time machine, we will just have to accept that ancient armies used chariots in battle. so:

1. They must have been effective in some contexts
2.  We know that they were generally high-prestige troop types , not the least because of the expense of their development, training and maintenance
3. Numerous artistic and textual records are available that  would suggest that they could be effective against at least some infantry formations
4. Experimental archaeological research has shown that they can be ridden up to and across the face of infantry formations discharging missiles against a stationary target (infantry) whilst themselves being harder to hit (critically)
5. They were the most mobile arm of the army (in suitable terrain)
6. they were used in large numbers (1000s) at times.
6. They generally increased in size, heaviness, horse team numbers and crew numbers with time; akin in some ways to armoured fighting vehicles in WW2
7. When cavalry became effective, chariots were rendered largely redundant; certainly in most of their roles. The main reason for this is probably the increased mobility of a single horse and rider as compared with a chariot and the relatively decreased expense (no actual chariot needs to be built).

So perhaps wargames rules should simply just treat them as a cavalry 'equivalent' with one or two additional movement constraints. Which is what they seem to do, by and large.

There are light cavalry with bow, javelins even lance, medium cavalry, heavy cavalry and cataphracts. These seem to be reasonably 'translatable' to the various chariot types that we know of.

I would therefore tend to propose the 'Anatolian' type Hittite chariot to be a Medium to  'Heavy cavalry equivalent and the Egyptian style chariot as a Light to Medium Cavalry' equivalent.

Cheers
Simon

[Jim Webster]

Simon's suggestion does seem to be the way rules covering a broad time span cope with chariots.

Thinking about 'battle taxi' chariots, I confess I remain entirely unconvinced. If you take Mycenaean and then Hellenic Greece, in Hellenic Greece you had 'cavalry' who were mounted infantry who just wanted to ride their own horse into combat. I cannot remember reading that they were numbered in thousands in any army.
With the Mycenaean state, it was the state providing the battle taxi. Whilst I could see them providing one for senior commanders who might gain from speed and height, I cannot see the state feeling the need to provide large numbers to prevent quite low ranking gentry from having to walk 

[Andreas Johansson]

Simon's suggestion does seem to be the way rules covering a broad time span cope with chariots.

Triumph would be an exception. They've got two basic troop-types for chariots, "Chariots" and "Battle Taxi". The latter is rather a misnomer, as it in practice means more like  "chariots we don't think were good enough to ride down decent infantry" (yes, they're Swantonians of a sort), whether they dismounted or not.

[Erpingham]

Thinking about 'battle taxi' chariots, I confess I remain entirely unconvinced. If you take Mycenaean and then Hellenic Greece, in Hellenic Greece you had 'cavalry' who were mounted infantry who just wanted to ride their own horse into combat. I cannot remember reading that they were numbered in thousands in any army.
With the Mycenaean state, it was the state providing the battle taxi. Whilst I could see them providing one for senior commanders who might gain from speed and height, I cannot see the state feeling the need to provide large numbers to prevent quite low ranking gentry from having to walk 

It is, of course, possible Homer is describing the use of chariots in his own time, rather than the time the poem is set.  Another possibility, already mentioned, is that, in representing a sea-borne attack, there are less chariots and their use is out of the ordinary because of this.

On the general "battle taxi" idea, I think it is ill-served by it's off-hand name.  If we called them mobile strike forces or some such (which seems to fit Caesar's description), would we think differently about them? 

[DBS]

On the general "battle taxi" idea, I think it is ill-served by it's off-hand name.  If we called them mobile strike forces or some such (which seems to fit Caesar's description), would we think differently about them?

Definitely ill-served by the name.  It is not clear that they ever really existed anyway.  I think I am correct to say that the only culture for which we have incontrovertible proof of chariot warriors routinely dismounting to fight (as opposed to sometimes having to get out because the terrain is awful) is that of the Britons, thanks to Caesar's detailed account.

As I said above, I think they are (probably by extension other Western Celts, though again, that is an assumption, not a demonstrable fact) are possibly sui generis.  They may not have been conceived as a weapon for large pitched battles, because we do not know whether, before the coming of the Romans, whether the Britons ever had cause to fight large pitched battles.  So it may be that their usage of the vehicle reflected feuding, raiding, duelling in an heroic but small scale style.  It is noteworthy that the only times they seem to have caused the Romans any real difficulties was when being used to harass or skirmish, albeit sometimes on a grand scale.

Otherwise, the only other so-called battle taxis are those credited to the Archaic Greeks.  But the assumptions surrounding those are an amalgam of suppositions based upon pottery depictions of "elite infantry" getting in or out of a vehicle, but not in combat, plus their armament (spears, not a good primary armament for a chariot being used as a chariot), and more than a dash of Homer. Even if this interpretation is correct, there is no evidence that they were used en masse, so, unless playing a 1:1 skirmish game, one could  question whether they are even worthy of depiction on the table, if they simply represent one or two noble warriors leading their retinue of infantry.

[Erpingham]

Can't disagree there David. I would note, though, that European, as opposed to Mediterranean or Near Eastern, are not well served with evidence.  How, for example, were Bronze Age chariots in Scandinavia used?  I find it unlikely they were used en masse .  So, for all we know, we could have a wider "battle taxi" culture in Europe. 

Jim's point about Homer's chariots being a poor fit for Mycenaean palace culture, which suggests a centralised chariot force rather than a  "fuedal" type of heroes with their own chariots, is interesting.  Unfortunately, the complexities of social structure and land owning in that period is a mystery to me.