Arms and Society in Antiquity 15bowman that had made chariot fighting possible. Such paired cavalry
men were, in fact, charioteers sans chariot. After learning to ride their
team directly, charioteers could simply unhitch the chariot, which had
become an unnecessary encumbrance.^15 Subsequently, man and horse
became so attuned to one another that solitary riders dared to drop
the reins and use both hands to bend their bows.
Most historians assume that steppe nomads, who benefited spectac
ularly from the cavalry revolution, were the pioneers of this new
means of exploiting the speed and endurance of horseflesh. That may
be true, but there is no evidence for such a view. The fact that nomads
in the later ages became past masters at riding and shooting does not
prove that they invented the technique; it only shows that they were in
a position to take fuller advantage of the new style of warfare than
other peoples. The initial use of paired cavalrymen in the Assyrian
army surely makes it look as though they had been the principal
pioneers of this new way to exploit the fleetness of horseflesh in war.
Even after steppe nomads took to horseback in sufficient numbers
to organize massive raids on civilized lands, several centuries passed
before the techniques of cavalry warfare spread throughout the length
and breadth of the Eurasian grasslands. The horizon point for cavalry
raiding from the steppe was about 690 B.C. when a people known to
the Greeks as Cimmerians overran most of Asia Minor. This, in
cidentally, was nearly two centuries after Assyrians had begun to use
cavalry on a significant scale in war. The Cimmerians inhabited the
grassy plains of the Ukraine, and returned thither after devastating the
kingdom of Phrygia. Subsequently a new people, the Scythians, mi
grated west from the Altai region of central Asia and overran the Cim
merians. The newcomers sent a swarm of horsemen to raid the Middle
East for a second time in 612 B.C. and shared in the plunder of
Nineveh.
These two great raids announced the onset in the Middle East of a
new era in military matters that lasted, in essentials, until the four
teenth century A.D. In the Far East, records of cavalry harassment
from Mongolia and adjacent regions do not become unambiguous
until the fourth century B.C., although some scholars think that the
collapse of the western Chou Dynasty in 771 B.C. may have been a
result of a Scythian cavalry raid from the Altai region.^16
The enduring consequences of the cavalry revolution in Eurasia
- For photographs of a bas-relief portraying Assyrian paired cavalrymen see Yadin,
2:385. - Karl Jettmar, “The Altai before the Turks,” Museum of Far East Antiquities,
Stockholm, Bulletin 23 ( 1951): 154—57.