Chariot People, The
HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
SPRING 1998
30 JANUARY
THE CHARIOT PEOPLES
DICTIONARY TIME-LINES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- You will be able to define, explain, and/or describe the following terms:
Neolithic civilizations, Hittites, Hebrews, Canaanites, chariot people,
Aryans, Achaeans, Tocharians, bronze, the Iliad, the
Bhagavad Gita, aristocratizing, and "heroic age."
- You should have become acquainted with the major Eurasian centers of
civilization and the characteristics of the cultures that arose in them:
Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, the Yellow River Valley.
- You should have recognized the close relationship between a society and
its technology, and to understand how some technological innovations
concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few.
- Finally, you should understand how the invasions of the chariot peoples
brought to an end the limited and almost exclusively agricultural neolithic
empires.
We can regard the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the cities of Sumerian Mesopotamia,
and the Harappan civilization of India as more or less neolithic
civilizations. Although they reached great heights of organization and
developed complex and sophisticated cultures, they did not progress
technologically to any great degree. Their tools remained largely tipped with
stone, and agriculture was pursued with wooden spades for plowing and wooden
sickles for harvest. They remained restricted to the river valleys where
irrigation was a simple matter of digging a ditch and where Spring floods
brought fresh layers of silt that maintained the fertility of the
soil. As population slowly increased, warfare between city-states for land
became common, and successful leaders managed to consolidate several city states
into small empires. From time to time, nomadic peoples from the
surrounding hills and mountains would attack, attracted by the relative riches
of the civilized areas. For the most part, such invaders did not last long. They
were either driven off or, being relatively few in number, were absorbed into
the much larger population they had conquered. In any case, their culture and
technology were not superior to that of these neolithic empires, and they
contributed little to their further development.
This situation began to change sometime about 2000 B.C. We are not sure how
this occurred or how the necessary technology was developed, but the agriculture
of the neolithic empires began to spread from the river valleys and dependence
upon irrigation to the hills, where farming soils watered only by rain began to
flourish. Smaller civilizations began to emerge around the great centers,
deriving their cultural inspiration from their older and more populous
neighbors. The Hittites in what is now the nation of Turkey
eventually grew into one of the great empires of the Middle East, while the
Canaanites in Palestine developed the land that the nomadic
Hebrews would eventually claim as their own. There were other such
city-states and kingdoms, and many of them developed a lively commerce, acting
as middle-men between their wealthy neighbors and the raw materials of the vast
spaces of the North. It may well be that similar derivative civilizations arose
near Egypt and the Indus Rivers, but little archaeological evidence has yet been
found to prove or disprove that possibility.
This slow growth and expansion changed radically in about 1700 B.C. A group
of people called the Hyksos invaded Egypt and ruled its richest
part until they were expelled after about a century. At the same time, the
Kassites invaded Mesopotamia, the Achaeans took over
the peninsula of Greece from its original inhabitants, and a people calling
themselves Aryans destroyed the cities of the Indus Valley and
ruled the region. Still other peoples, called by various names --
Cimmerians, Celts, Galatae -- made
their way into the great European peninsula, almost entirely displacing the
area's original inhabitants. Still another group, the Gutae, may have
swept across North Africa to reach the Atlantic in what is now Morocco. There is
still a great argument whether the Tocharians may not have been
another group of such invaders, settling on the western borders of China.
All of these groups shared certain similarities. Perhaps the most important
was that they used bronze and implements. Peoples in the area of
the Caspian Sea appear to have been developing bronze since about
2000 B.C., but the invaders had developed bronze fittings to build two-wheeled
chariots, with light spoked wheels, from which they waged war, and pursued
horse- raising to provide themselves with the animals to pull their vehicles.
Wherever they appeared, they were associated with horses, chariots, and
conquest.
Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is not exactly
rare, but it is not very evenly distributed over the face of the Earth and
deposits lie a long distance from some people. Besides, it combines readily with
some other substances, such as sulfur, and it requires a great deal of fuel to
turn copper ore into usable metal. Tin, for its part, tends to be both rare and
even more unevenly distributed than copper. So one must be able to collect
copper and tin, along with plenty of wood and workers who are trained in a
rather complicated and delicate, and sometimes dangerous, pursuit. The result of
this sort of effort was bronze, a lighter metal than copper alone, but one that
is much harder. Like copper, however, it is also malleable, and
can be beaten out into thin but hard sheets, or into finely carved implements
that do not easily wear out in use, or into knives and swords with sharp and
durable edges. It can be polished to fine and brilliant shine, and, for all of
these reasons and more, is still in use today for both utilitarian and
ornamental purposes such as nails, faucets, chains, and belt-buckles. We call it
brass.
It was perhaps easier for the peoples of the great Eurasian
plain, with its long rivers and broad open stretches, to do this since travel
and commerce were much easier than in the zone of civilizations to the south,
and easily transported trade goods -- cattle, sheep, horses, furs, and the like
-- were more available to them. Whatever the reason, these "less advanced"
peoples were the first to develop bronze, and they put it to use long before
their civilized neighbors. We have noted one of these uses, the construction of
light and tough horse-drawn chariots that became the dominant battle-field
weapon and remained so for hundreds of years. The warriors of these peoples went
into battle armed with bow and arrow, or sword and javelin, cutting down the
people who stood against them while their war-horses trampled anyone whom their
masters missed. Some such chariots were equipped with long, curved bronze blades
attached to the hubs of the wheels. These would whirl about like a lawn mower as
they went against the enemy, and literally mow them down like grass. Sometimes
the warrior would guide his horses himself, but more often he was accompanied by
a companion who did the driving.
This was a very effective but extremely expensive weapon, and no people could
equipped also of their fighting men in such a fashion or allow them to spend
their entire lives training for a form of fighting that required an
extraordinary amount of dexterity and coordination. So bronze and chariots were
aristocratizing innovations. The warrior was the chief of a tribe
or a city-state and perhaps had a few nobles who could furnish themselves with
chariots and fight for him. Most of the people were peasants who
worked to enrich their chief and some of whom went with him to war as footmen to
protect him from being overwhelmed by commoners like themselves. In battle, the
noble warriors would usually seek out the enemy nobles and fight on foot. If
this society sounds familiar to you, it is because it was the society of the
Iliad, Homer's epic poem about the Achaean siege and capture of
the city of Troy, and the great Indian poem of the Bhagavad Gita.
The age of the Bronze Age warriors is what we sometimes call a heroic
age and its remains are ancient palaces, elaborate tombs (although not
of the magnitude of the pyramids of Egypt), finely worked gold jewelry, and epic
poems of battle.
ASSIGNMENTS
REQUIRED
Another of the Washington State modules offers
an introduction to Ancient Greece, while
Barbarians and
Bureaucrats: Minoa, Mycenae, and the Greek Dark Ages is concerned primarily
with the period of the Bronze Age society. The coming of the invaders to India
is presented in The Aryans and the
Vedic Age. The Hittites were one of the earliest of the invading peoples
and, over a period of centuries, fought the Egyptian Empire until both were
exhausted and the Hittite city-states were themselves over-run. The best
introduction to the study of the people may be found at The Hittites.
RECOMMENDED
You may wish to review Wednesday module on
Shang
China, since the relationship between the chariot peoples and the origins of
Chinese civilization is a matter of some dispute. The Chinese argue that Shang
culture is a native and independent development, but others point out that 1)
Shang civilization arose late, the last of the Old World civilizations to
develop, 2) it is distinguished by very advanced techniques of bronze-work for
which no formative stage can be found, 3) the early Shang rulers were buried in
impressive tombs along with their chariots and war-horses, and 4) some of the
Shang pictographic characters are almost identical in shape and meaning to those
of Babylonia. The Tocharians, just to the west of Shang China, were probably a
branch of the chariot peoples and may have introduced civilization to the Yellow
River Valley. The Chinese refuse to accept this idea and have generally blocked
attempts to do archaeological work in the land of the Tocharians.
Although the Hittites are fell less well known that the Greeks, Egyptians, or
even the Canaanites, considerable work is being done on them, particularly at
the University of Chicago (Indiana Jones' school), and a much better picture of
them is beginning to emerge. One might start the study of this people with The Hittite Home
Page, but HATTI -
Homeland of the Hittites is also an excellent site.
Finally, the chariot peoples probably had their most lasting effect in India,
where they set many of the basic patterns of Indian life and belief, patterns
that remain firm and powerful even to the present day.
This text was produced by Lynn H. Nelson, Department of
History, University of Kansas.
26 January 1998
Lawrence KS
.
