Zaludis, the commander of the Manda-troops, (and) Zukra(s)sis, the comman -
der of the heavy-armed (?) troops [of the Ruler (?)] of Aleppo came down
from Aleppo with the foot-soldiers and his charioteers.^36The Manda-troops, the umman-manda, to whom this text refers almost certainly
manned chariots because in the only other reference to Manda-troops in Hittite
documents they are quite clearly a chariot force.^37 That in the middle of the
seventeenth century BCthe king of Aleppo was apparently employing chariot troops
from Manda is a point to which we shall return.
The Hyksos dynasty and the beginnings of chariot warfare
in Egypt
Chariot warfare in Egypt seems to have begun ca. 1675 BC. The Fifteenth Dynasty
in Egypt, the so-called “Hyksos” dynasty, has been conventionally dated from
ca. 1650 to ca. 1540 BCbut new evidence raises the date of the dynasty’s com -
mencement. The Egyptian term heqau khasutmeant “rulers of mountainous—i.e.
foreign—lands.”^38 Archaeological evidence comes mostly from Avaris, in the
eastern Delta. In their palace at Avaris the “foreign kings” ruled both Lower Egypt
and the southern Levant, from which they had come. This unprecedented turn of
events—a foreign dynasty establishing itself in Egypt—seems to have been made
possible by the advent of military chariots.
It is regrettable that from Egypt under the Fifteenth Dynasty we have almost
no inscriptional evidence.^39 Whatever inscriptions the hyksoskings may have set
up were destroyed by their Theban successors. Thanks only to the boasts of his
opponent, we know that Apopi—the last significant king of the Fifteenth Dynasty
—had military chariots. The Theban Kamose, the last ruler of the Seventeenth
Dynasty, battled successfully against Apopi shortly before 1550 BCand in his
victory taunts he twice referred (on his first and his second stela) to the horses of
“the vile Asiatic.”^40
The role of the “foreign kings” in introducing the chariot to Egypt (which for
2000 years had managed well enough without wheeled vehicles of any kind) has
long been assumed and has recently been restated by Anja Herold. In her study
of Egyptian chariot technology Herold states without further ado that chariots came
to Egypt “erst während der ersten Fremdherrschaft in der Geschichte des
Pharaonenlandes, in der Hyksoszeit,” and that the Fifteenth Dynasty kings seem
to have had horses and chariots from the very beginning.^41 That the “foreign kings”
had chariots from the outset is indicated most vividly by the skeleton of a horse
killed ca. 1675 BCduring a Kushite storming of the fortress at Buhen, near the
Second Cataract of the Nile and so on Middle Kingdom Egypt’s southern border.^42
As described by Walter Emery, who led the expedition that excavated the site,
Fortress Buhen was probably the administrative centre for the whole of the
fortified region of the Second Cataract. With the fortified settlement of Kor,
4.5 km. to the south, Buhen controlled the first navigable stretch of the Nile
north of the cataract, which was impassable for ships of any size.^43Chariot warfare and militarism 119