The Coming of the Greekshorses are encountered, they are almost invariably pulling
chariots (the exceptions are the rare scenes of a horse carrying a
rider).
Horses thus became important in the civilized world when
their speed—and especially their speed as draft animals—was
able to be exploited. The horse's walking speed was almost
twice that of the ox. Better still was the fact that the horse,
unlike the ox, had gaits other than a walk: at a trot the horse
can cover almost ten miles an hour; at full gallop, it can for a
few minutes move at a speed of over 30 mph. Use of the horse
as a draft animal revolutionized transport and travel in the an-
cient world, and the revolution was scarcely less profound than
the advent of the horseless carriage almost four thousand years
later. The prerequisite for exploitation of the draft horse was a
two-wheeled cart of much lighter construction than anything
known in the third millennium. At the outset, these light
carts, or "chariots," were not used for any military purposes,
but were prestige vehicles of kings and high officials. In fact,
quite some time seems to have elapsed between the first ap-
pearance of the horse-drawn chariot in the Near East and the
advent of chariot warfare. We shall return to the chronology of
the development of chariot warfare after a glance at this re-
markable vehicle, and its significance, in its prime.The War Chariot and Chariot WarfareThe design and proportions of the military chariot are familiar
from paintings and reliefs of the Late Bronze Age: two-
wheeled, with four or—later—six spokes to the wheel, the
wheels having a three-foot diameter, the axle being positioned
slightly toward the rear of the car. The chariot that grave rob-
bers found in a fifteenth-century tomb at Egyptian Thebes in
1836 (see Fig. 4), and is now in the Museo Archeologico at
Florence, was expertly built: the pole was made of elm, the
felloes of ash, the axle and spokes of evergreen oak, and the
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