The chariot in hunting
Much more important than display or recreation was hunting.^83 Archers in horse-
drawn chariots could move swiftly enough to hunt prey that was too fast or
predators and wild boars that were too dangerous to approach on foot. Having
nothing to fear from wild animals, we forget how wary people necessarily were
of the great predators before the chariot age. Early in the second millennium BC
lions were apparently a danger to flocks and herds not only over all of the Near
East, but even—as has recently been discovered—in Greece, the Balkans and the
Ukrainian steppe.^84 With the advent of the chariot men could for the first time go
into the wilderness in pursuit of these and other predators. Although in doing so
they still risked their lives, as well as their horses, if they returned with a trophy
the men would be greeted as heroes.^85 Even one man could with some difficulty
and much practice both drive the chariot and handle a bow. In the earliest known
representation of a chariot in a hunting scene, on a cylinder seal from Syria, the
driver of a chariot has tied the reins around his waist and is drawing his bow.^86
Almost from the beginning of the second millennium BCmen on the steppe
must have hunted—whether prey, steppe wolves, or an occasional lion—from the
spoke-wheeled carts attested along the southern Urals. In Grave 30 at Sintashta
the “chariot” burial includes a knife, a socketed bronze spearhead and an array of
stone arrowheads.^87 Although one man in a chariot may have been a successful
hunter, a more effective strategy was to expand the chariot box so that two men
could stand side-by-side on the leather straps that formed the car’s platform, one
man driving while the second handled the bow. The engraved gold signet-ring
that Schliemann found in Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae portrays two men in a chariot
hunting a stag. A very similar configuration appears in bronze models found in
southern Caucasia.^88
The chariot in raids, rustling and war
The archer’s skill required for hunting animals from a chariot could obviously be
used just as effectively against humans. In the Near East references to chariots in
war become significant only ca. 1640 BC, with the reign of Hattushili I in Hatti.
Relatively few texts, however, have been recovered from the century prior to
Hattushili’s reign, and one of these—the “Anitta Text”—indicates that in central
Anatolia chariots had begun to play a military role already ca. 1750 BC. In Chap -
ter 4 we will take a closer look at the Anitta Text and the beginnings of chariot
warfare in the Near East.
On the steppe chariots were probably used against men well before they were so
used in Anatolia or anywhere else in the Near East. The most visible and valuable
commodity on the steppe was livestock, and archers in chariots would have had no
difficulty in driving off or killing shepherds or herdsmen and stealing their livestock.
There is some reason to think that this is what happened: as will be seen in Chapter 3,
very soon after the invention of the chariot nomadic pastoralism in the steppe seems
to have become less attractive. The Yamna culture, from which very few settlements
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 47