14 Chapter Onein g roads to facilitate military movement across long distances, and of
mobilizing labor for the erection of fortifications.
Precedents going all the way back to the third millennium B.C. can
be found for many of the administrative patterns that the Assyrians
made normal; but historians’ appraisal of the Assyrian achievement
has commonly been colored by the fact that we inherit from the Bible
a hostile portrait of the fierce conquerors who destroyed the kingdom
of Israel in 722 B.C. and came within a hairsbreadth of doing the same
to the kingdom of Judah in 701 B.C. Yet it seems no exaggeration to
say that the fundamental administrative devices for the exercise of
imperial power which remained standard in most of the civilized world
until the nineteenth century A.D. first achieved unambiguous defini
tion under the Assyrians between 935 and 612 B.C. The conquering
kings also put considerable ingenuity into the development of new
military equipment and formations. They invented a complex array of
devices for besieging fortified cities, for example, and carried a siege
train with them on campaign as a matter of course. Altogether, a
radical rationality seems to have pervaded Assyrian military adminis
tration, making their armies the most formidable and best disciplined
that the world had yet seen.
Ironically, readiness to experiment with new military modes may
have accelerated Assyria’s downfall. Cavalrymen, mounted directly on
the backs of their horses, were a new element in the military coalition
that sacked the capital of Nineveh in 612 B.C. and thereby destroyed
the Assyrian empire forever. No one knows for sure when the prac
tice of riding on horseback first became normal, nor where. But early
representations of horseback-riding show Assyrian soldiers astride.^14
It seems likely therefore, that in their restless search for more effec
tive ways of managing armed force, Assyrians discovered how to ride
and retain control of a horse while using both hands to shoot with a
bow. At first they did so by pairing riders so that one man held the
reins for both mounts while the second drew the bow. This arrange
ment replicated the long-standing cooperation between driver and
- Men occasionally rode horseback as early as the fourteenth century B.C. This is
proved by an Egyptian statuette of the Amarna age, now in the Metropolitan Museum
of New York. See photograph in Yadin, Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, 1:218; another
equestrian figure, from the British Museum, of the same age is reproduced, ibid.,
p. 220. The difficulty of remaining firmly on a horse’s back without saddle or stirrups
was, however, very great; and especially so if a man tried to use his hands to pull a bow
at the same time—or wield some other kind of weapon. For centuries horseback riding
therefore remained unimportant in military engagements, though perhaps specially
trained messengers used their horses’ fleetness to deliver information to army com
manders. So, at least, Yadin interprets another, later, representation of a cavalryman in
an Egyptian bas-relief recording the Battle of Kadesh (1298 B.C.).