battle conditions. To give greater stability to the heavily loaded
vehicle, the axle was shifted from the vehicle’sreartoitsmiddle.
I should say that apart from the record of the Qadesh
engagement, we have no evidence of the use by the Hittites of three-
man chariots in warfare. This leads me to suspect that the three-
man crew was purely a one-off tactic – an attempt to give the
Hittites an edge over their opponents after theirfirst apparently
disastrous encounter with Egyptian forces at Qadesh some years
earlier during Seti I’s reign. We have no indications that the three-
man chariot was ever used again by the Hittites after Qadesh.
Despite the theoretical advantages of the three-man chariot,
there were obvious significant limitations to its use in battle. The
main one was that it must have been slower, less manoeuvrable,
and less stable than its two-man counterpart–much more likely to
spill its occupants if it had to make a sharp turn, however great
the driver’s skill. Very likely, then, it was used primarily at the
beginning of a battle, with a chariot contingent acting like a
modern tank formation, travelling at speed before the other troops,
crashing into and creating mayhem among the enemy forces, and
thus paving the way for the infantry to move in for the kill. The
speed of a chariot contingent in full attack mode has been estimated
at 45 km (about 28 miles) per hour. It’s interesting to recall the
words of a number of Hittite kings that their gods‘ran before them
into battle’. If taken literally, the gods could thus have outperformed
many a modern Olympic athlete! But of course if you’re a god,
why not?
There is also the question of how the chariots were actually
transported to distant battle sites, often hundreds of kilometres
away, over rough terrain, and still be in a sound enough state to
carry their warriors in full battle gear into the heat of thefighting
without the risk of their falling apart. Ifind it hard to believe that
they were actuallydrivento distant theatres of war, with all the
wear and tear they would have suffered on the way. Rather, in my
opinion, they werecarriedthere–in wooden carts, perhaps after
being disassembled. As the army approached the battlefield, the
chariots could quickly be unloaded, reassembled if necessary, and
thus still be infirst-rate battle condition. (Part of a chariot-team’s
174 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA