The horse’s skeleton was found directly on the pavement where it had apparently
been stalled: between the third and fourth tower of the fortress’s west wall. Juliet
Clutton-Brock’s analysis of the skeleton showed that the horse—about 19 years
old and more likely a gelding than a stallion—had been controlled by a hard bit,
probably of bronze.^44
That chariotry had come to Egypt from the Levant is fairly clear. When
Egyptian chariots are finally displayed, in temple reliefs from the Eighteenth
Dynasty, they appear to be virtually identical to those used in the Levant. Along
with the chariot itself came the vocabulary for it. In reference to the many loan-
words that came into the Egyptian language from “Canaanite” during the Second
Intermediate Period and the New Kingdom, Donald Redford observed that “fully
one-quarter of those terms that can be identified have to do with the military.
Technical expressions describing the chariot, its parts and accoutrements, account
for half of these.”^45
Metal bits, much more effective than organic bits, are reasonably supposed to
have been produced in order to keep panicked horses under the driver’s control
during a chariot battle. When Flinders Petrie found the first of these metal bits at
Tell el-Ajjul, near Gaza, in a context that he dated to the Second Intermediate
Period, he called it a “Hyksos bit,” because the Fifteenth Dynasty kings were
known to have controlled the region. Littauer and Crouwel argued that all metal
bits, including the one from Tell el-Ajjul, dated no earlier than 1500 BC, and that
“the Hyksos” therefore had nothing to do with the “Hyksos bit.”^46 The bit-wear
on the Buhen horse, from ca. 1675 BC, challenges that conclusion. More decisive
is the recent discovery of a copper “Hyksos” bit at Tel Haror (again close to Gaza)
in an MB III ceramic context,^47 and so between 1700/1650 and 1550 BC. Petrie
was apparently right after all: metal bits were probably first produced under the
“foreign kings” who ruled northern Egypt and the southern Levant.
An even more recent discovery shows that the chronology of the hyksos
rulers of Egypt must be raised by a generation, and that their authority (or at least
their influence) extended into Upper Egypt. At Edfu, upstream from Thebes,
archaeologists found a cache of forty-one scarab sealings bearing the name of
Khayan, the most famous of the Fifteenth Dynasty kings, and the cache dates ca.
1675 BC, far earlier than Khayan’s reign has usually been dated.^48 This new light
on the Fifteenth Dynasty has a direct bearing on the Buhen horse. The skeleton
of the chariot horse found at Buhen, and stratigraphically dated ca. 1675 BC, is
almost certainly to be associated with “the foreign kings.”^49
The expulsion of the hyksos, like their arrival, was implemented by chariots, this
time those that were under the command of Kamose and Ahmose, his brother and
successor and founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Egyptologists have long known
that Ahmose had chariots, but only recently have they had graphic confirmation
of this fact, and of Ahmose’s pride in his charioteering. This we owe to Stephen
Harvey’s excavations and investigations at Abydos, where the king chose to build
his pyramid and mortuary complex.^50 By laboriously reassembling hundreds of
limestone fragments scattered about at Abydos, Harvey has shown that Ahmose’s
pyramid temple featured a relief displaying Ahmose as a colossal chariot warrior
120 Chariot warfare and militarism