The New WarfareChronology
Let us now look at the chronological question in detail. Surveys
of this kind become obsolete as new documents are discovered,
and it is inevitable that the conclusions reached here will
sooner or later need some revision. 46 It is unlikely, however,
that the main lines of the present chronology will prove to be
very far wrong. As mentioned above, the horse was occasionally
imported to Mesopotamia in the third millennium, where it
undoubtedly served as a riding animal. One would suppose
that in the Near East during the third millennium the horse
may also have served, in multihorse teams, as a draft animal.
Our earliest evidence for draft horses, however, comes from the
nineteenth century B.C., and is thereafter continuous. One
may therefore generalize that the horse does not seem to have
become important as a draft animal until after 2000 B.C.
The nineteenth-century evidence is supplied by cylinder
seals and sealings from the karum of the Assyrian merchants at
Kiiltepe, in central Anatolia. One cylinder seal from that ka-
rum depicts a god standing upon a horse. The scene fits within
the motif of a "god on a beast" (lions, stags, eagles, and bulls
were favorite pedestals) common to the region throughout the
Bronze Age. Since the horse on the cylinder seal is managed by
a line attached to a ring through the nostrils, one may assume
that at the time and place of the seal's manufacture the bit and
bridle were not yet known. 47 That at least some of the horses
of Kiiltepe in the nineteenth century B.C. were used for pulling
"chariots" is shown by two sealings. The first of these, from
seum and Viking Press, 1973), p. 13. For the text see J. A. Knudtzon, Die
El-Amarna-Tafeln (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1915), 17.
- Moorey's "Emergence" also provides a good, up-to-date survey
of the chronology. I would disagree only with his statement that "the war
chariot was well established in North Syria and Anatolia by the second half
of the seventeenth century B.C." ("Emergence," 205), since to me the evi-
dence indicates that the war chariot was very much a novelty in both Syria
and Anatolia at that time. - For the cylinder seal, see Hangar, Das Pferd, 485—86.
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