War and Game

In 653 be the Assyrians inflicted a decisive defeat on the Elamites at the Ulai River in south-west Iran. On this relief from Ashurbanipal's palace at Nineveh, the Assyrian infantry drive back the Elamites. On the left an Assyrian holds up the head of the king of Elam. On the upper register vultures pick at dead Elamites. In the Iron Age infantry took the offensive and became the ‘queen of battle'. Mass infantry armies gave rise to imperial states of unprecedented size and complexity.



Basalt stele with an Assyrian two-horse, two-man chariot, eighth century. This chariot is transporting an officer. In battle the chariot was still used as an archery platform but at this time was becoming obsolete because of the development of true cavalry.


This spectacular civilization collapsed with astonishing suddenness. Within a few decades, around 1200 BC, practically all the cities and palaces of the eastern Mediterranean basin north of Egypt were sacked and destroyed by enemies. The Mycenaean culture of the Aegean disappeared utterly, except for the hazy recollections of a lost world that turn up in Greek mythology and the Homeric poems. In western Asia the destruction was not so total; the art of writing survived, and city life eventually revived; but the Hittite kingdom was obliterated and nothing replaced it. The kingdom of Egypt survived after beating off many invasions, but lost its empire in the Levant and was never again to be a dominant power in the Middle East.

Egyptian inscriptions have left us the only contemporary records of this mysterious catastrophe. In 1208 BC the pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses II, defeated an invading army of Libyans, who were accompanied by many northern allies, especially the people known to the Egyptians as Ekwesh (Achaeans), with other groups who can be identified as Sardinians, Sicilians, Tyrrhenians (Italians) and Luwians (Anatolians). Twenty years later the Nineteenth Dynasty faded away and was replaced by the Twentieth, which was to be the last of the great dynasties. In 1179 BC Ramesses III defeated invasions on both land and sea by Philistines from the coast of Canaan, accompanied by other barbarians. The inscription commemorating his victories says, 'The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands ... Noland could stand before their arms.' They defeated the Hittites and other countries in the north and then came against Egypt. 'They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth ... ' Hence the invaders are commonly called the 'Peoples of the Sea'; but the Egyptian language had no word for island, and the term 'isles' may be better translated as 'coastlands'. In their inscriptions kings had always portrayed themselves surrounded by hordes of enemies. Now rhetoric had become reality.

It was once thought that massive barbarian migrations must have been responsible for the disasters, but there is no evidence for any large population movements. It was believed that these invasions brought the Greeks or Achaeans (which is what the Greeks call themselves in the Homeric poems) into Greece. But when the Linear B script used in the Mycenaean world was finally deciphered in the 1950s it unexpectedly turned out to be a sort of Greek, which means that the Achaeans of Homer were already in Greece in the High Bronze Age.

There was a tradition, recorded in the Bible (Amos 9:7, Jeremiah 47:4), that the Philistines had originally come from 'Caphtor' (Crete), so it was assumed they were part of the general Volkerwanderung. But the later Philistines, as revealed by archaeology, were as thoroughly Semitic and Canaanite as any people in Canaan, which would later be called Palestine after them; the legend of Cretan origins possibly started with a band of Achaean refugees who settled in Canaan during the upheavals around 1200 BC. The Indo-European invaders who inaugurated the chariot age have been compared to the medieval Normans; the invaders who ended it were more like Vikings, destructive raiders who founded no lasting dynasties and left nothing behind in the cities they ruined, many of which were never inhabited again. It was once thought that they brought iron weapons, but iron was still rare in the Middle East at this time and did not generally replace bronze as the common metal until after 1000 BC. The transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age could have been in some way a result of the fall of the palaces, but could not have caused it.

The end of the Early Bronze Age a thousand years before might be explained in terms of systems collapse. The High Bronze Age societies, however, do not seem to have been under any unusual stresses on the eve of their fall. There is no evidence for general environmental deterioration; and warfare was not becoming more frequent in the thirteenth century, rather the contrary. Pitched battles between Great Kings seem to have been rare in the High Bronze Age. Great Kings were expected to go on campaigns from time to time to show that they were Great Kings, especially at the start of a reign, but these martial demonstrations were largely symbolic. This is virtually admitted in a letter written by the old Hittite king Hattusilis III to a young Assyrian king who had just been enthroned:

I have heard that my brother is grown into a man and goes often to hunt ... My brother, you should not stay at home. Go out into the enemy country and defeat the enemy! But when you go out, go against a country on which you are three or four times superior. 

A young king must prove his valour, but let him pick a small enemy. In addition to keeping up appearances, the raid will serve a useful purpose, as it will overawe his client states and perhaps acquire some new ones. Ramesses II was unusual in selecting another Great Kingdom for his target. But even Ramesses never fought another major campaign after Kadesh, even though he lived on for more than sixty years. The High Bronze Age states, it has been argued here, were the first to be capable of offensive warfare; but it would be wrong to think of warfare as endemic among them, in the sense that it was in classical Greek and Roman times.

Hence the most plausible explanation so far offered for this catastrophe is that it was a result of the transition from chariot to infantry warfare. The High Bronze Age states, because of their exclusive reliance on chariot armies, had always been vulnerable to concentrated infantry attack, but it was a long time before their vulnerability was perceived. Chariots, so deadly to heavy infantry, could easily be disabled by swarms of light infantry with missile weapons. Archaeology suggests that the weapon which accounted for most of the chariots was the simple javelin, most ancient and basic of missiles. This was a poor weapon compared to the composite bow, which was arguably the most effective firepower known before the nineteenth century AD.

But composite bows were expensive machines that took years to make, and the training of an archer took years more. Javelins were cheap and abundant and any active young man could throw them. Active, poor and hungry young men were one commodity the barbarian world produced in unlimited numbers. Many such young men had learned about chariots in the service of the Great Kings, who had long recruited their chariot-runners from the tribes of the deserts and mountains and the islands of the sea.

Some dramatic event must have revealed the vulnerability of the chariot armies. Perhaps it was the Achaean sack of Troy. The city known as Troy VI to archaeologists was destroyed in the late thirteenth century BC, and it is hard to explain the mesmerizing effect of the Trojan War on the later Greek imagination if something similar to that event had not happened. If so, the Achaeans who took Troy should be pictured as tribesmen from the Greek mountains, not the civilized Achaeans of Mycenae and Cnossus, though later legend mixed them up. Legend has it that the Trojans were 'tamers of horses', and that Achilles was killed by an arrow. This would have happened in the last years of Ramesses II (died 1212 BC), under whom the eastern Mediterranean world had enjoyed a long peace. After he died, the news from the north inspired a Berber chieftain to think the unthinkable; that with this new method of fighting Egypt itself might be taken, and for this he recruited great numbers of javelin-men from all over the north. Then the sacking of cities began. It might well seem to the Egyptians that the foreigners had made a conspiracy on their coasts to seize the circuit of the earth.

Kingdoms that survived the collapse had to learn a new art of war. Egypt beat off the invasions by relying on infantry armies. Why Mesopotamia remained immune is not entirely clear, but the Assyrian kingdom served as a shield against invaders from the west, and it is possible that Assyria, a hilly land that had never been counted as one of the major chariot states, may have depended already upon a militia of foot soldiers. The early Iron Age was to be a world of such infantry militias, like the host of Israel in Canaan and the Dorian spearmen of Greece.