infrequently, the thrusting spear had largely although not entirely replaced the axe.
The socketed spear was standard in the Near East, in southern Caucasia, and along
the southern Urals. First in southern Caucasia and then on Crete an ornate Type
A rapier was a sign of status, but that these swords were practical weapons is
unlikely.
The evidence suggests that by the middle of the eighteenth century BCsome
form of chariot warfare was waged in the steppe, in central Anatolia, and probably
in the highlands south of the Caucasus. Occasionally sieges may have been laid
in the steppe, where several dozen small towns or large villages were enclosed
by modest fortifications. The variety and quantity of weapons found in graves both
in the steppe and in southern Caucasia suggest that in those places combat was
not unfamiliar. That the rulers of Middle Minoan Crete went to war is not likely,
although they indulged in some kind of military display and certainly had the means
with which to intimidate Aegean islands and the coasts of the Greek and Anatolian
mainlands. On the Greek mainland and in temperate Europe we have no evidence
for warfare at so early a date (homicides and massacres are another matter). An
indication that battles were not yet fought in Greece and in temperate Europe is
the absence of meaningful fortifications and of spearheads. The material record
in the Indus valley includes few if any weapons and no portrayal of combat.
Altogether, warfare ca. 1750 BCseems to have been geographically limited. In
most of the Near East wars were frequent but they were very different from what
they would be in later antiquity. The following chapter will show that by ca. 1750
BCat least one king in Anatolia—Anitta of Kanesh—seems to have employed a
small unit of military chariots. In Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt this was
not yet the case: Hammurabi and the other Great Kings of his generation had not
yet experienced the clash of two armies on a battlefield, which was soon to become
the centerpiece of warfare. A heightened militarism seems to have appeared first
in the horse country of the steppe and southern Caucasia, and it is probable—
although not demonstrable—that early in the second millennium BCa new form
of warfare had begun there, in which chariot-borne archers played the central role.
Notes
1 Luttwak, “The Best and the Fastest,” The New Republicvol. 240, issue 16 (Sept. 9,
2009), pp. 45–47.
2 Turney-High 1949.
3 Keeley 1996.
4 See now Ferguson 2014. At pp. 210–219 Ferguson argues that skeletal remains indicate
that from the Natufians to ca. 3000 BCwarfare was either rare or completely absent
in the southern Levant. In the Jezirah he identifies the Halafians in the 6th millennium
BCas “the first cultural group to expand via war.”
5 Carman 2013, p. 25.
6 Yadin 1963, pp. 36 and 39.
7 Yadin 1963, p. 35.
8 See, for example, Bradford 2001, p. 4:
Phalanx tried to break phalanx by shoving, jabbing with the spear, and hacking
with the axe. The ensi’s also employed carts pulled by four onagers (wildWarfare in Western Eurasia 97