obsidian arrowheads, bronze axes, daggers, rapiers, and socketed spearheads.^158
A find especially informative about warfare was made by Armenian archaeologists
in 1987. In excavating a kurgan near the town of Karashamb, in central Armenia,
they found the cremated remains of the man for whom the kurgan was raised, the
bones of animals slaughtered as grave offerings, and a variety of weapons and
other metal objects. The most impressive of these was a silver goblet, evidently
of local origin and resembling a silver goblet that had earlier been excavated in
Kurgan XVII of the Trialeti kurgans in Georgia. The Karashamb goblet is
embossed with scenes of ritual, of combat, and of decapitation.^159 With spears the
men depicted on the Karashamb goblet are attacking their enemies, and also
important as signals of an organized army are the shields with which the men protect
themselves. In the lower register prisoners are being decapitated, a scene
reminiscent of the pit-grave at Pepkino, in the Abashevo culture north of the
Caucasus.
The military scenes on the Karashamb goblet, and the number of weapons found
in burials, suggest to those who have studied the matter that early in the second
millennium BCmilitary ambition or pretense was not uncommon among the
chieftains or local rulers in southern Caucasia. Christopher Edens sees in the
Karashamb goblet and in the similar silver goblet from Trialeti “expressions of a
Transcaucasian elite political culture that emulated some symbolic representations
of state power borrowed from the south.”^160 Philip Kohl suggests that “[m]ilitarism,
as reflected in the arrayed weaponry and depictions of combat and decapitation,
appears endemic in the society. Social hierarchy and differential access to power
are also clearly evident in these scenes.”^161 Adam Smith, who is working with
Project ArAGATS in Armenia, sees the Middle Bronze period there as
characterized by mobility and militarism. According to Smith, horses and oxen
became important in southern Caucasia in the Middle Bronze II period, and both
mobile pastoralism and increased violence “appear to have been closely tied to
the emergence of radical inequality between a martial elite and the remainder of
the social body.”^162
That chariots were used in battle in southern Caucasia by the end of the Trialeti
(Middle Bronze II) period is probable but not demonstrable.^163 Horse and vehicle
archaeology here was for a long time synonymous with what Soviet archaeologists
found at Lchashen before the Second World War,^164 and those finds provided little
evidence for either horses or chariots before the middle of the second millennium
BC. More evidence has been found recently, and although of great interest it is
not yet well understood. In 2005 workmen completed construction of the South
Caucasian Pipeline, which brings crude oil from the oil fields in the Caspian off
Baku northwest to Tbilisi and then southwest to Ceyhan. During trenching in
Georgia an archaeological site was exposed at Jinisi, a village 160 km southwest
of Tbilisi. This is the first settlement found from the late stages of the Trialeti
(MB II) period. The osteological evidence from Jinisi showed that in the
eighteenth/seventeenth century BCthe inhabitants of the village were eating
horsemeat regularly: 35 or 40 percent of the bones found at the Jinisi site were
horse bones.^165
90 Warfare in Western Eurasia