The Coming of the Greeks
Where the hyksos chiefs who took over Egypt ca. 1650 B.C.
may have gotten their chariots and charioteers is not known,
but eastern Anatolia is not an unlikely source. The most direct
evidence for the importance of Armenia in the development
and manufacture of military chariots in the Late Bronze Age
comes from Egyptian tombs. Since Egypt lacked the necessary
woods, one assumes that the pharaohs regularly purchased
from abroad either finished chariots or—after Egyptian wood-
workers had perfected their skills—the requisite chariot wood.
A tomb inscription from the reign of Amenhotep II declares
that the wood for His Majesty's chariot was brought from "the
country of Naharin" (Mitanni). 120 Since Mitanni itself was not
wooded, we may suppose that the material came from the
mountains to the north of Mitanni. In the case of the fifteenth-
century chariot now in Florence's Museo Archeologico, studies
of the wood done more than fifty years ago concluded that the
chariot was made in Armenia, or quite precisely in the moun-
tainous area bounded on the east by the Caspian, and on the
south and west by a diagonal line extending from the southern
shores of the Caspian to the Black Sea coast in the vicinity of
Trebizond. 121 If Egypt was to some extent dependent upon
eastern Anatolia for its chariotry during the Eighteenth Dy-
nasty, there are grounds for suspecting that when chariot war-
fare first came to Egypt, it came from Armenia.
- N. de Garis Davies, The Tomb of Ken-Amun at Thebes (New
York: n.p., 1930), plate 22; cf. O'Callaghan, AramNaharaim, 134.
- For the ecological definition, see H. Schaefer, "Armenisches
Holz in altagyptischen Wagnereien," Sitzungsberichte der preuss. Akad. der
Wissenschaften (1931), 73off. K. H. Dittmann, "Die Herkunft des altagypt-
ischen Streitwagens in Florenz," Germania 18 (1934): 249—52, likewise
concluded that the vehicle came from Armenia-Transcaucasia. Birch bark is
the most important diagnostic item, since birch does not appear south of
Armenia. Littauer and Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, 81, suggest that since
birch bark is "easily transportable," the Florence chariot may have been
built in Egypt. However, since the birch lashings were necessarily applied
while still green, perhaps it is more likely that the finished chariot came
from Armenia.
120
