60 Warfare in Western Eurasia
In the same year (1963) that Yadin’s Art of Warfareappeared, a helpful
discovery about Late Bronze Age warfare was published by Egyptologist Alan
Schulman, in his study of chariotry in the New Kingdom.^10 The “runner” (pḥrr)
often shown in reliefs or mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions, Schulman concluded,
was a man on foot who ran along with the chariots to engage the enemy (crewmen
of disabled chariots, as well as enemy “runners”) with hand-to-hand weapons.
Schulman’s publication in a low-circulation periodical was swamped in the wake
of Yadin’s Art of Warfareand no more was done with the “runners” until 1984,
when Nigel Stillman and Nigel Tallis included them in a little book that was barely
noticed by Assyriologists, Egyptologists, or Near Eastern archaeologists.^11 In 1988
I stressed the primacy of chariotry in the Late Bronze Age but made no mention
of “runners,” because I had not noticed them either. And on warfare before the
advent of chariotry I was as far off as everyone else.^12
Five years later, I was still wrong about warfare in and before the Age of
Hammurabi, but did shed some light on warfare in the Late Bronze Age. Having
read what Schulman, Stillman and Tallis had written, and having looked through
our documentary evidence, I argued that in Late Bronze Age battles “runners”
were the only offensive infantry, chariots doing almost all of the offensive work,
and that at the end of the Bronze Age large bands of renegade “runners”—armed
with javelins as long-range weapons, and thrusting swords (not slashing swords)
for hand-to-hand combat—gathered to defeat the chariot armies and to sack the
cities that had depended on them.^13 The other half of the argument was that by
the reign of Ramesses III (and during the LH IIIC period in Greece) kingdoms
began using close-order formations of offensive infantry on the battlefield, each
man equipped with spear and shield, in order to corral and kill the swarming
“runners.”
This view of Late Bronze Age warfare, needless to say, is not widely shared.
Many and probably most scholars still believe that through the entire Bronze Age
formations of infantry clashed on the battlefield, and that when chariots made their
appearance in the Late Bronze Age they were only ancillary to the infantries.^14
Nor is there even a consensus about the role of chariots in the Late Bronze Age.
On Homer’s authority many specialists on the LH Aegean believe that the
Mycenaean palaces kept several hundred chariots to serve as battle-taxis for
several hundred infantrymen, each wearing something like the Dendra corselet of
plate bronze (the weight of the corselet was at least 15 kg). In objecting to my
reconstruction of Late Bronze Age warfare Mary Littauer and Joost Crouwel argued
that even in the Near East chariots were only of limited use, and in Greece merely
“functioned as a means of transport for warriors who fought not from the vehicle
but on the ground with close-range weapons.”^15
As for warfare on the Eurasian steppe and in temperate Europe, many Indo-
Europeanists still accept Marija Gimbutas’ thesis that in the fifth, fourth and early
third millennia BCsteppe warriors on horseback invaded Europe, took over large
parts of it, and introduced militarism into what had until then been a peaceful
society. In one of her last publications Gimbutas reiterated her belief that “the
Kurgan peoples,” having learned to ride the horse ca. 4500 BC, exploited its military