The Ancients - The Golden Age of Chariots

Episode Date: May 30, 2021

Taxis to the front line or ancient tanks? Through archaeological remains and ancient depictions, we have some idea of what the ancient military vehicles of the ancient world looked like, but how were they ridden and what for? In this first of two conversations, Mike Loades and Tristan discuss the chariots of Egypt, Anatolia, Troy and China. Mike is a writer, television presenter, director and military historian who has personally tested many replica chariots.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, it's the start of a new mini-series on that incredible ancient military vehicle that was the chariot. Now, in this first episode, we're going to be focusing on, shall we say, a golden

age of the chariot in the second millennium BC. We're going to be looking at the use of this ancient military vehicle by the Egyptians, but also by the Hittites. We're going to be looking at its use in the Trojan War, and also we're going to be going to the Far East, to ancient China, and see what the archaeology is telling us about how the chariot was used, was designed in the far eastern part of the world. Now to talk through all of these topics I was delighted to get back on the show the chariot expert, the one and only military historian Mike Lodes. Mike is a good friend of mine, it was great to get him back on the podcast. He has tested out various chariot designs from ancient history, he knows his stuff

and he goes into incredible detail. So without further ado, here's Mike. Mike Lodes, it's fantastic to have you back on the podcast. Always a pleasure to be here. Now last time we talked about horse archery which was a huge topic in itself, we're talking about another huge topic now, chariots across antiquity, because one of the things that you've told me that you find most interesting is the pan-cultural activity of chariots in ancient history. Yeah, I love it. I mean, chariots have long been a passion and they've given me a ride to all these different cultures. You know, I've been to China with chariots. I've driven chariots across the sands in Egypt in front of the pyramids. I've ridden across the plains of

Troy in a chariot with Bettany Hughes as my passenger. That was a pretty glamorous sports car moment. I've driven Celtic chariots with Alice Roberts as a passenger. I need to get a third glamorous historian lady to whiz about in the sports car that was the chariot. And I've been to ancient Assyria in Turkey now, but Haran, you know, the site of Battle of Karai, which was originally an Assyrian place, and I've driven Assyrian chariots there. So chariots have taken me all over the world and they've taken my interest all over the world. For me, it's one of the great things about history is it's a passport to travel, that you get a general interest in something.

And for me, it was military history. And then you start delving into this and that and you go to places, whether physically or just in your mind, just in picking up the books from the shelves and time travelling to a different place as well as a different time. And it's such a gift that history has to give us with that. And I just love it. And chariots are my preferred conveyance for going into the past. That's a lovely way to finish that statement. I mean, let's delve into it now. You mentioned all those places across the past. That's a lovely way to finish that statement. I mean, let's delve into

it now. You mentioned all those places across the globe. Let's focus first on ancient Egypt, particularly the new Egyptian kingdom in the second millennium BC, because Mike, this feels like a golden age of chariot warfare. Well, it was. I think it reached its pinnacle there. And that was the high point. The Egyptians and the Hittites, who frequently at war with each other, that was it. That, for me, chariot warfare did hit its pinnacle there. Of course, the chariot didn't arrive on its own. It arrived in conjunction with the composite bow. So whether that was the Hyksos, we can't be 100% sure, but it seems to have sort of coincided with that Hyksos period. And after that, Egypt was never the same.

After that, Egypt became expansive. You know, Egypt was far more parochial up until that point. But it was after that she went beyond her borders and created a kind of proto-empire. So the chariot, together with the composite bow, enabled that. And those twin technologies came in. So what does the chariot do for you on a battlefield? Well, one of the things it does is it gets you there quicker. So you have a form of cavalry, with all advantages of cavalry that takes you on the campaign road as well as having value in the battle itself. At this stage in history, horses were not very large. Horses were extremely small, little kiddie pony size to modern eyes and not strong enough to carry an armoured warrior.

We see as early as 1400 BC, adolescent messenger boys in a loincloth on a horse, but that's about as much weight as they can carry. So horses have not yet been selectively bred by humans to carry a warrior rider. But two horses pulling a wheeled vehicle, well, you could stick two or three people on that and they've got the traction to be able to pull them along because there's no weight bearing. The weight goes over the axle. And this is very important to understand about chariots and early harness systems is the weight of people is not bearing down on the horses and I know this because it's one of my things that whenever we do something with

chariots I always put the yoke of the chariot on me and get the crew to get on board the chariot and I pull them around the desert and say, look, see, I'm a little old man and it's really no problem. We're not putting any strain on the horses. And that's an important point to understand. And that gives the horses plenty of stamina because they're just running around pulling these wheeled vehicles. Now, what do you do with this wheeled vehicle? Well, because it coincided with the development of the composite bow, you put an archer in there. Why is the composite bow significant? Because it was a technology that enabled you to make a powerful bow with a shorter limb length. And that makes it much more manageable in the confined space

of a chariot. And the Egyptian chariot and the Hittite chariot were absolutely designed for the archer. They were mobile platforms for archers. From front to back inside the chariot, once you step aboard, it's no more than about 50, 51 centimetres. So that's very narrow seemingly, but it has an advantage for the archer because what you do is you put one foot on the sort of wooden bar at the back and you

push your hip into the front rail. The front rail, I'm obviously a good Egyptian size, but the front rail comes up to my waist. And so I can lean into that and I'm in a very good braced position to be able to shoot a bow. If the platform is deeper than that, then I'm wobbling around trying to keep my balance or I haven't got anything to get a push support against. So the narrowness of the platform appears disadvantageous, but in fact is perfect for the job of moving an archer around the battlefield and giving him stable positions to shoot from. It also focuses that weight of archer and driver over the axle. So it all combines to make a very intelligent engineering decision in that chariot construction. Now, what is a

chariot archer? Well, he's a horse archer with wheels. So his tactical deployment has to be similar to a horse archer. You don't want to get in amongst the enemy. You don't want to use the chariot. Everybody says, just because the thing's got bloody wheels, everybody thinks you've got to use it like a tank. Oh, the ancient tanks. You know, TV people always searching for these erroneous metaphors. No, it's not a tank. Horses are soft targets. You don't really want to get them mixed up with infantry if you can possibly help it. So you ride in to a distance shooting and you turn and ride away, shooting as you go away. Or you encircle. Or, of course, once you've got chariots, then the Hittites have got chariots, then you also get cavalry on cavalry.

You get chariot to chariot warfare. Well, in that situation, it's a skirmish. It's the same as a World War II dogfight, because what every individual charioteer is doing is jockeying for position to get his archer to have a good shot at the enemy. So they're all turning and spinning and swirling. And we never know whether to believe the numbers of Egyptian warfare.

But, you know, it's certainly thousands, whether it's tens of thousands that they sometimes talk about, probably not. But it's certainly thousands of chariots in some of these battles. Probably not. But it's certainly thousands of chariots in some of these battles. You imagine the dust in that kind of region of the horses and the wheels and moving around, sliding the wheels around to get into position. You can't see. So you need to be getting into close range. It really is like a World War Two Spitfire Messerschmitt dogfight. is like a World War II Spitfire Messerschmitt dogfight. It's the same thing. And so the archer needs to be able to switch sides very quickly because there you are on the left, nicely lining up,

and you say, there's somebody coming up on the right behind. Well, it's a simple two-step. You just say, change to your driver, and he moves across at the front, and you spin around at the back, and you're in position. It can be done as quickly as it can be said. So that works very well. So you therefore can shoot 360 degrees around the chariot. You've got your forward shot, obviously you could do a side shot. You simply turn around and lean against the rail to shoot behind you and then shout change. And you, one step, you and the driver

have both changed swap positions on the other side. And if you look at Egyptian chariots, which we're so fortunate in having so many survive archaeologically, I mean, it really is a wondrous thing. You know, there are four sets of quivers. It's got ammunition stores all around it, absolutely bristling with arrows.

I mean, it's a terrific bit of military equipment. Well, absolutely. I mean, Mike, that was all amazing. You you mentioned kadesh so i'd like to go into that in a second but just before we do i think you made a great point with the dust there and the planes so the topography is it not surprising that we see this golden age of chariots occurring in let's say a part of the world eastern mediterranean where there are lots of deserts, there are lots of large plains, which are ideal for this type of warfare. Exactly. So it is a very terrain-specific vehicle, although the Iron Age chariots of Europe, which are found in Yorkshire, they're found in northern France, they're found in Wales, they're found in Scotland, they're not known for their desert plains, these undulating, irriguous places. They're wet, they're marshy, they're found in Scotland. They're not known for their desert plains, these undulating, irriguous places.

They're wet, they're marshy, they're bumpy. So yes, the fact that you have these hard desert plains where the battles are fought does help with that. Having said that, don't forget that there is the other cavalry advantage of getting an army there quickly. So, you know, one of the things about Kadesh is how quickly the Egyptians moved up there to make this assault on Mu'talas army. Wonderful images of Assyrians on campaign, taking their chariots over mountains, taking their chariots across rivers. You see them with goat skins sewn up and inflated as buoyancy aids to swim their chariots over rivers. And the charioteers with a sort of inflated goat skin under their arm to keep them afloat. I think they probably weren't very good swimmers to get across. And you see them

going over mountains, a three-man crew. You take the wheels off, which is by far the heaviest part of a chariot, one man each with the wheels and another man with a chariot on his shoulder, and you yomp it over the hills. So in the same way that the Vikings very often manhauled their longships on little tricky bits of the rivers when they were coming inland, they didn't let terrain stop them when they wanted to get to somewhere. But for it to be useful in battle, you do need a flattish area. But there will be some caveats on that when we get to Chinese chariots and Iron Age European chariots. But yes, it was absolutely the military apparatus of the time and of the region that was perfect. Something which came to the fore of my mind when you talked about wheels,

and something I find really interesting, is the importance of suspension. Something that we sometimes don't think of in the ancient world as much, but suspension for these ancient chariots, say New Kingdom chariots, Hittite chariots, that must have been absolutely crucial. Well, it's a very, very bumpy ride, whatever you do. And the suspension is your knees, ultimately. So again, when we make these TV programs, people are always wanting us to make statements and look for things that will correlate to the modern world. And suspension is a little bit overstated. So there are aspects of it which shock absorbency, it would be a better way but suspension is often said so the Egyptians for

instance people come solve the same problem with lots of different technologies so the Egyptian wheels very ingenious thing what they wanted to do was to keep their chariots as lightweight as possible not least of all to conserve the stamina of the horses. Some Egyptian chariots only have four spokes, but those four spokes are made up of a series of V-joins, and those are grown bends. So a lot of stuff in the ancient world, well indeed the medieval world, and in fact some people are making furniture today this way, are made from grown beds. So in other words, you grow trees and train them with wires and things

specifically to shapes that you need for manufacturing. And one of the things that you needed for an Egyptian chariot wheel is a lot of Vs, because a grown V, a fork, is so much stronger than a jointed V or a spliced V. So you get these grown Vs. And if you put a V against a V, the two arms of one side of the branch become a single spoke. But if you like, it's a bifurcated spoke. So that under load, so as you imagine, as a wheel turns, every time that spoke gets to the bottom, that's the spoke under load. So virtually imperceptible to the human eye, but as it gets there, it can open slightly.

So that's not really giving you a more comfortable ride, but it is enabling you to make a lighter weight wheel that can take the stresses and the loads, quite literally. chariots is an interlaced mat of woven rawhide. So it has a certain amount of spring in it, but not too much spring. The hardest thing to do would be to stand on something floppy. You know, it'd be like going into battle on a bozu ball. You'd come back with very good quads, but it would be hard work. So although looks like oh that must be a suspension this woven rawhide mat it's actually as hard as steel and it's actually a really firm platform it was just an expedient way of making a platform with that consideration of lightness so there are things like that like egyptian spokes like the woven platform oh that's to cushion the ride it doesn't it's like going down the road

on a bone shaker. It really, really jiggles you around. So we overstate the suspension. The one thing that will allow you to go over more challenging terrain would be to make bigger wheels. And that was something the Assyrians opted for. The Assyrians opted for a much bigger wheel, opted for. The Assyrians opted for a much bigger wheel, which gave a smoother ride, except it enabled them to go over rougher terrain. So you still ended up with a very bumpy ride. The Chinese had enormous wheels. But again, it enabled them to go over more challenging terrain. I mean, I drove a Chinese, a Vettica of a Chinese chariot, down some really steep inclines, up and down, just to test this.

And it was like, well, that's pretty good cross-country work. That was good. Mike, this is all super interesting, but there's that famous image of the pharaoh on his own on the chariot. What's the story behind this? So this is absolutely, whether it's Ramesses or Gamun or whatever, it's like the pharaoh on his own in the chariot. This was a thing. This is the pharaoh.

If you're the pharaoh, you need to be a military leader. You need to show that you have prowess. And this is something that they would do. So first of all, there's two types of images. Don't forget chariots were also for hunting. So going out hunting in your chariot. And they may have been slightly different you know the hunting chariot may have been slightly more lightweight even

than the battle chariot because you need less protection so you don't need such thick leather covering the rail and things like that so very much the pharaohs going out on the hunt in the chariot is a thing but they had a thing where they would put up targets made of bronze about an inch thick in the shape of a hide. Now, hides were a currency. That's what you traded with, leather hides. And when you traded in bronze, the ingots were made into a hide shape

because that's what the shape currency had been. And with these became an inch-thick panel of bronze. It's quite something to shoot through with a bronze array, which is the only metal they had at their disposal. And the pharaoh would tie the reins around his waist and gallop forward along a line shooting at these targets. You know, there's a quote, you know, one pharaoh holding four arrows in the hand to do that. So we would think there would be at least four, not five, of these targets in a row.

The penetration aspect is interesting because it speaks to the power of the bows and they need to be pretty beefy bows to do that. And I've not done it and I don't know anybody who has shot through. I think it's something we need to find out. How powerful does it need to be to do that? And as far as riding with the reins around your waist i

have done that i've done that in egypt and tied the reins around my waist and to a limited extent you can kind of keep them straight but there is a challenge when you're shooting the bow you've got to work your upper body but you don't want your hips to twist because suddenly the horses will turn left and you also need to carry a knife because in case it all goes wrong and you get dragged you'd need to be able to cut yourself free but there are a lot of challenges when we do chariots with ancient harness systems suffice it to say it's very very very different to modern harness systems and that has an effect on how you drive the horses and how you can control the horses etc etc, etc. I remember the first time I went to Egypt to do something about Egyptian chariots was way back in the 1990s.

And I remember the excitement at the hotel as this truck drew up with our chariot on the back. The craftsman there had made this chariot to spec. It was a copy of one of the ones from Tutankhamun's tomb. And it was a glorious thing, this golden chariot to spec. It was a copy of one of the ones from Dutton Cummins' tomb. And it was a glorious thing, this golden chariot, heart going ten to the dozen, just the excitement. And then it dawned on us, there was no means of attaching it to a horse.

So we're up all night trying to find leather workers, and we had to go and find this leather worker in Cairo. And his leatherworking shop was above a camel stables. And we went in the evening when the camels were all back in the stable. And they're all lying on the floor, less than a hand's breadth in between them. And to get to the little ladder that went up to his workshop, we actually had to physically climb over the back of 20 camels, all having their dinner to get up

and have this man stay up all night stitching bits of harness. But the point is, traces had not yet been invented. Now, traces are the leather straps that come back from people who've seen modern horse and carriage. The horse has a collar around its neck, big fat collar. And from that collar are these straps called traces. Same word derivation as tractor, they're for pulling. So traces attach from the collar back to the vehicle and the horse leans into his collar and pulls the vehicle along. All very comfortable, all very nice. They have a secondary function that it stops the horse's hindquarters from swinging out.

In other words, they come along his side and keep him nicely parallel with his partner horse. Unless, of course, he kicks over the traces. Everything gets in a muddle and a tangle, and it all goes horribly wrong, because he's a boisterous horse who kicks over the traces. Everything gets in a muddle and a tangle and it all goes horribly wrong because he's a boisterous horse who kicks over the traces. But Egyptian chariots and Hittite chariots and Mycenaean chariots and Assyrian chariots, they didn't have these. They had a pole that went down the centre with two neck forks that went over and they could lean into these neck forks. But that was the traction was via the pole, not by straps. But it meant that the horse's hindquarters can swing out. And if you don't have the horses properly trained, which has almost always been my experience of the 20 odd times I've done various chariots for television,

because they say, oh, this chap says he's got them. And you turn up and he hasn't. They've just borrowed them from a farmer the day before and it all goes wrong. The horses are uncomfortable in the harness and they don't know what to do and they nip at each other and the hindquarters swing out and it all goes horribly wrong. But the advantage of it from a military point of view is it's a really quick change system.

So there's a pin that goes in the centre of the yoke, the hester, which of course it's theoretically the gordian knot was used to secure that enthusiastic nodding from an alexander buff there we go there we go good to get alexander in nice one mike fantastic but you could switch the teams really quite easily whereas putting a modern harness with collars and traces and things, you know, it takes 20 minutes. And of course, one of the things about horses for a battle chariot is they're going to get shot. So you do need to be able to replace the teams quickly. And this is all following from a question of the single pharaoh. So we do have perfectly good evidence

for a single rider in a chariot, whether he's out hunting or whether he's performing this pharaonic feat of arms on his own. But in battle, always a driver and an archer and always a third person. The Egyptians called him a perere, the Chinese called him a rongu, because chariot teams need infantry support. Now, he may sometimes hop aboard the chariot, but he hops off to change the horses, to jiggle, to grab extra arrows. If you get surrounded, he's part of the infantry support with a spear to help you defend yourself in that. The third person on a chariot is often missed off the images we have, because he was a much lower status fellow potentially, probably a sergeant compared to the colonel and general of the driver and the archer. But he's vital. Anybody who's driven horses will know that you always have to have somebody to hop

on and adjust this bit of harness, tighten that strap, loosen that strap, lift that leg out of that muddle. You've always got to have that third person. And what we see a lot with Kadesh and the Ramesses depictions of that, you often will see the third person on the Hittite chariots, but not on the Egyptian chariots. Now, why they made that decision, I don't know, but it has led to what is in my mind an erroneous assumption that Hittite chariots were bigger and heavier and that's why the Egyptians won, because their chariots were faster. Well this is complete nonsense. So first of all, if the Hittite chariot is a fraction bigger, it's not going to make it heavier, because all you're doing is you've got more air in the middle.

It doesn't necessarily have heavier timbers or heavier weight. Nor does that make it faster or slower. Whether it's fast or slow is entirely dependent on the speed of the horses. A little bit of extra weight, a kilogram here or there, at the end of five days may make some difference to stamina. But unless you're saying, oh I'm putting five extra people in here, it's not going to make a blind bit of difference for an hour's action. So they're going to be equally maneuverable, equally fast, entirely

dependent on the quality of the horses. And we know from the Hittites that there's a Hittite called Kekali who had these incredibly sophisticated horse training and breeding programs that have come down to us, very much like modern interval training. And so the Hittites were every bit as good as the Egyptians in their chariots. So it was a tactical error where they lost at Kadesh. Nothing to do with any disparity in the chariot types. And the Egyptians also had a third person, though very seldom do they feature the third person in their representations. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now?

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Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. it's really interesting how he said this third person who you say maybe not on as high a prestige level as those two prominent figures in the chariot before we go to china let's go a bit further west and keeping on the prestige element because we do see the chariots featuring that famous mythical semi-legendary siege the siege of of Troy and in the Mycenaean period? Yes, absolutely we do. And when I told you at the beginning, this is my globetrotter passport as chariots because I have driven a replica of a Mycenaean chariot

on the plains of Troy. You've been Achilles himself, Mike. I have. Now, I have a little theory about Achilles. So what we know is Homer is a version of the story, but we also know that there was a siege of Troy many centuries before Homer. And that what Homer is writing about, although he references chariots, he knows chariots were in use at the time, but he has them all fighting on foot. The most likely interpretation, I think,

is that at the time, they would have actually fought on chariots. And if you think of something like the Dendro Panoply, which, you know, people tend to think is pretty heavy and it's bronze full armour, it's ideally suited to somebody on a chariot. It gives you cover where you need to be covered on a chariot. The interesting thing, because you need to bend your knees, we also need to be able to bend your ankles and things. And if you look at the Dendron panoply, he's got greaves over his shins, but there's nothing protecting the heel. And if you're standing on a chariot, the bit that's exposed behind is your heel. Well, obviously, into realms of fantasy here, but you know, if Hector had a good driver that could get himself round behind Achilles and just get that key shot,

that would have been his potentially vulnerable point, wearing the Dendro Panoply, fighting on a chariot. And who knows how that may have got mixed and come down to us. But you have to say that the planes at Troy, it's perfect chariot country. When I went there, it was for TV, as always, because they pay,

so you don't get to choose things. And they thought it would be wonderfully amusing if we purchased local horses to do this with. So I've seen in the thing of my good friend Jonathan Water, who's a wonderful horseman and driver, and he used to be my driver that day. They put the word out, you know, in the village, and all these gypsies flocked in from all around with their flea bitten horses and we both nearly got bitten and kicked in the face 20 times just milling around this but you know look at my horse hooves flying past your ear they're just crazy things but anyway Jonathan's so brilliant he chose the best ones and got them trained in 24 hours. One of the interesting things about the Mycenaean chariots is not only is it a platform for archers, but there is one image where they're using a lance. How often that was done, I don't know.

But they're using a long spear, which can be used under the arm, you know, kind of jousting. which can be used under the arm, you know, kind of jousting. We did try this and I was able to land a pretty solid impact on my friend in an opposing chariot. He was in a replica of a Hittite chariot and sort of coming towards us. And we did kind of joust and I gave him a pretty good thump on the shield with my lance and it didn't knock me out the back of the chariot was the point of the exercise. I was able to lean in and brace in enough to deliver a full body impact smack onto somebody. He fared slightly less well when we were doing some archery because they carried enormous shields. And of course, that's one of the other jobs of the third man is he can be a shield bearer

in certain circumstances and protect you, give you good cover. The archer can shoot round. But John was manning his own shield at the time and I had rubber blunts on the arrows but there's a lot of moving parts in chariot to chariot stuff and you're spinning around and I'm shooting and he's kind of tucked in behind his shield so I'm shooting at him in the other chariot

and there's a sort of rhythm to how I'm knocking and releasing the arrows and I think I had a little bit of a fumble and so my rhythm got momentarily, momentarily interrupted. And John Dundas takes his shield away. He said, is there another one? At that moment, that other one arrived and hit him in the groin. But it was a blunt arrow, I have to say.

So in his case, it wasn't the heel that was the vulnerable thing. But just coming back to the theatrical aspect of his selling of troy below the ruins of the town there this is where heroic warriors could display in front of a spectator crowd on the walls of troy looking down i mean it's a stadium for heroic warfare it's just perfect it's super interesting for heroic warfare. It's just perfect. It's super interesting what you're saying there, Mike, because sometimes when we think of Troy, when we think of Mycenaeans with their chariots and the heroes,

we think of the chariots more as battle taxis, shall we say. You're transporting them up to the battle line, then they hop off and then they fight on foot or whatever. But from what you're saying, actually, it's just as possible that the chariots were used in the combat itself. Only because of our dating for the Battle of Troy. So subsequently, the battle taxi thing holds true. And certainly when we get to Iron Age European chariots, the battle taxi thing is absolutely true. We know that for a certain fact because Caesar tells us in great detail.

So there are circumstances when chariots can be used as battlefield taxis. But the conflict at Troy happened, and it happened 1450, something like that, peak period of this golden age of chariot warfare. Effectively, it's Mycenaeans against Hittites, effectively. And we know the Hittites are very much a chariot warfare civilization. So it seems to me more likely that the literal original conflict would have been chariot warfare on the same model as the chariot warfare at Kadesh between the Hittites and the Egyptians. That was how warfare was conducted between elites. And it was the elites, it was the nobility who were the cavalry were the chariotry and that's the heroic way they fought and this theatrical aspect as late as the american civil war it was

not unusual for people to ride out and watch battles i think this would have suited that hero culture and why it's come down but you know homer was a lot later. He's wonderful. The language is incomparable. It's wonderful. It's not documentary historical fact. Absolutely. There you go. That golden age of chariot warfare and the Marianu, etc, etc. So let's continue our globe trotting adventure. You've mentioned it earlier. We're going to go east to ancient China because, Mike, as you've mentioned before, the Chinese, they also embraced chariots and chariot warfare at this time in antiquity. So China certainly had chariot warfare, and it certainly had chariots at the same time as the Egyptians and the Hittites and the Mycenaeans. With 1500, 1400, 1300 BCE Shang Dynasty China, certainly

there were images of people in China. Not so much images of chariot warfare. Where the chariot came from is also slightly conjectural. It may well have started in Central Asia. And it almost certainly started for hunting, as a way of pursuing animals with an archer. It's almost certainly where the rationale started. We really start to see chariot warfare going in the Shu Dynasty and the Warring States period in China. Chinese chariots are completely different in design concepts to the Golden Age chariots, Hittites, Egyptians, Moslems, which are all very, very similar, very skeletal frame.

A rail that comes up to your waist, which you could lean in as an archer, and also which defends the lower half of your body so you know if you've got thick hide on there or you know rawhide scales and things on that from the waist down you're in an armored vehicle that's reasonable proof against the weapons of the day and with a shield you're upper half so you are completely covered in that sense in that egyptian design the chineseiot is a, the platform is a rectangle, it's a box, not this narrow front to back. And the rail only comes up to your knee, not quite even to your knee. Now, there are images from the Shang Dynasty of people with these low

rail chariots standing up galloping across the countryside which if you're hunting it's fine and I did it with some trepidation got on a fine replica Chinese chariot and galloped it all over the place and made sure not to fall off into the well between chariot and horse's hooves which is not where you want to be because you would get dragged by the axle while you're being pounded by the hooves and you wouldn't really get out so not having that front rail is very disconcerting and in fact the low rail almost makes it a trip hazard rather than anything else but it's perfectly possible to stand and drive it because i did that and i and standing i took it up some pretty steep inclines and down some pretty steep inclines on bumpy ground to test its terrain versatility.

There are no images of it being used otherwise. But my approach to looking at things like this is to let the object inform how it needs to be used. And it was just crying out for me to kneel down and as soon as I dropped to one knee in the chariot that rail tucked perfectly into my waist and I was wonderfully secure as an archer. And what we do see a lot in Chinese chariots is seated drivers. And very often the driver, rather than seated, is kneeling on both knees, sitting back on his heels. So if the driver kneels on both knees and sits back on his heels, and the archer drops to one knee, leaning into the corner of this thing,

now you really have got a wonderfully stable shooting platform. And at the same time, you have reduced your vulnerability as a target. You have the same ability simply by switching knees. I could be at the front corner and the back corner in the blink of an eye. It takes a little bit longer to switch sides, but not much. So with practical trials, it struck me, this has to be how it was used. Why else would you have such a low rail? And this makes complete sense to be able to make yourself a smaller target. And you are, this is the important bit, you are so much more stable going over bumpy ground. You raised a very

important and key point when talking about Egyptian Hittite chariots that they are for warfare on flat hard desert plains. China had some of these but a lot of the action is in grassland, in bumpier country. They had conspicuously bigger wheels which allows them to go over rougher terrain, hillier terrain, not big hills, but undulating stuff and bumpy stuff. If you're going over bumpy stuff, you need to drop your centre of gravity and tuck into that corner, be a loadster. Unless, of course, you're looking for girls. If you're looking for girls, then you want to stand up and show off and drive in the sort of sports car mode of the chariot, which is why I think we see those early depictions of the driver standing up. It's a heroic, impressive looking thing. But everything about the construction of the Chinese chariot shouts to me, although I cannot support it with original textual or visual references, but just the machine

itself says you've got to kneel down in this. It sounds like, as you say, there's definite contrast with the Egyptian and Hittite chariots. But when we look at, let's say, the Assyrian chariots, which you mentioned earlier with the larger wheels that you mentioned, that seems more similar to, shall we say, the Chinese chariots, at least in regards to the wheels themselves. Yes, those colossal wheels that we see on the Assyrian chariots are very similar to the colossal wheels on the Chinese chariot. The thing about the Chinese chariot wheel is it has so many spokes. I can't remember off the top of my head how many, but it has an incredible number of spokes.

So this is the Warring States period. You know, it's a sort of 480 to sort of 220 BCE. It's the golden age, I'd say, of Chinese chariot warfare. But they still exist, of course, into the Qin Dynasty. And famously, in the Terracotta Army, there's a chariot. You look at the spokes on that that and they're the shape of an oar in other words for half of their distance they're cylindrical dowel and then about halfway they change into like the blade of an oar so again that's doing something to do with trade-offs

between rigidity and flexibility and how many you can cram into the hub and needing it to be thinner there and stronger out the load bearing at the edges so there's an awful lot of interesting engineering going on with these wheels and the size of the wheels i think does very much reflect the kind of terrain you're going over but the bigger the wheel then you really are that's where all the weight is you You are making a heavier vehicle. And of course, the Chinese also had this third person, they called him a Rongyu, who was basically a spearman. But, you know, he'd be the one to jump off and bump it if it got stuck in a muddy bit and have to do all that or grabs the horse's heads to pull them out of a difficult situation

but you know certainly you know Chinese text tell us you know don't use your chariots in woodland don't use your chariots here and there it still requires an open area to be able to use it but we see an interesting change between Warring States period and the Qin dynasty period. And I was lucky enough doing a program about Chinese chariots to go to China at the excavation of a chariot burial. I think 28 chariots, 28 chariots in there, and their horses buried in an adjacent but separate grave. And we're looking at this and I said, what's this? And on my finger was a flake of paint, a flake of lacquer. It was red. It's one of the most exciting things ever. I love it that I can actually touch a bit of colour. And then I looked around, there were various specks of red, when they excavated, you know, those little specks of paint all over the place in this grave. And then we had

to rush to get it filmed, because the archaeologists had looked at it, and they were now filling it back in, because the farmer wanted to plough his field. So they never lifted them, it all got filled in again. But that was very much the golden age, where the weapon of choice was the composite bow. Archer shooting 360 all around, used, I believe, in very much the same way as the Hittite chariot or the Egyptian chariot in that horse archer manner. What we see with the terracotta army and the Qin dynasty one is you'll note that there's a crossbow hanging from the chariot. is you'll note that there's a crossbow hanging from the chariot. And of course, that was one of the great innovations in the Chin dynasty, was the crossbow trigger.

They had crossbows before, but they developed a bronze trigger mechanism. That crossbow mechanism could be mass produced because it was bronze parts in a mould. So you could produce it on an industrial scale. That meant that you could arm relatively untrained troops in colossal numbers, hitherto unheard of numbers. This is what the Qin Emperor did with these crossbows. And that spelled the demise of the chariot in China, because you had such a volume of missiles, arrows, bolts coming at the horses that that wasn't good. But we see an interesting change at this time when we see this crossbow hanging on the thing. Because you wouldn't use a crossbow hanging on there because you wouldn't

use a crossbow in the same way from a chariot the bounciness the crossbow is not going to be so useful your reload time takes so much longer with a crossbow and the whole point of horse archery is you have to have that rapid reloading whether you're on a horse or a chariot. If you're using the expense of horses and the expense of a chariot and you're galloping around, well, you don't want to use that energy and that expense to get off one arrow. You've got to be able to be delivering burst shooting, multiple shots. And you can't do that with a crossbow unless it's a chinese repeating crossbow that's another story so why are we starting to see crossbows associated with chariots we see something else differently the wrong you the third person his g his spear

doubles in length it changes from being something that's only sort of seven or eight foot tall perfectly serviceable for stabbing down all around you on a chariot or kababing a few people as you chase them off in the route. Perfectly serviceable for that. But now it goes to 14 feet. Well, that's not manageable on a moving chariot. So I think that tells us that they're now still using the chariot as a mobile artillery platform, but parking it. In other words, they can move it to a point on the battlefield. And we know by now that every chariot is being accompanied by 25 infantry.

So it is part of a block of combined forces. And it's there, parked up, regiments of chariots parked up, that they're using the crossbow. But they have this infantry support and the chariot guy has got a pike, effectively, which is exactly what you want. So that's exactly the hedgehog defence that we see for archers through the ages. So they're little bits of clues. And Chinese history is not my strongest point, but it's just full of interest to look how different cultures have used the same basic idea of a wheeled vehicle pulled by horses to shift troops around the battlefield. And how do

you maximize that mobility? So you've got the hit and run idea. But now in China, you're starting to come with this other idea, which is mobile, but can be used as a static force once it gets there. So Mike, going on, we see with the Assyrians this important evolution, transformation in the chariot to something else. Yeah, exactly. It's not necessarily the Assyrians who made the transition first, but they have the art that's showing us those incredible friezes now in the British Museum, which were my first glimpse of chariots as a kid of about nine years old. What's that? I want to ride one of those one day.

You know, British Museum always fires the imagination for so many things. And yeah, those wonderful friezes of the Ashnabandhapur Lionhunt at the British Museum were it. And there we see chariots and then we see horse archers. We see that transformation.

We see that change. That is not to say that the Assyrians were the first people to do horse archery because they weren't. But it's a very interesting timeline to watch it change in one room in the British Museum. You see that evolution. You see one thing first that's slightly curious with chariots. So we're using a two-horse chariot, very much like the Egyptians and the Hittites and the Chinese. Slightly bigger chariots, you know, in terms of

physical mass, with much much much bigger wheels which i think meant that they wanted to because they were a very aggressively expansive empire and needed to be able to work on more different terrains always with a three-man crew at one stage experimented with a three-horse chariot now why would you do that and did an interesting experiment with it the third horse doesn't seem to be attached. So going back to this ancient harness system, the way they're attached is you have a pole, a wooden pole coming from the center of your chariot and a horse under a neck fork either side of that. Where do you put the third horse? Well, he could just

run beside on reins alone if you train them and we were in turkey doing a documentary about assyrian chariots many many many years ago and my good friend jonathan waterer he purchased horses locally again and we were actually staying in haran the old assyrian capital and where karai was this wonderful really wonderful part of the world And every day we would drive these chariots on the Turkish-Syrian border and the border guards would wave to us. It was quite a time. But they experimented with the three-horse chariot. And a skilled driver with a trained horse can have that horse run alongside. Now, if you're going in to a block of infantry, shooting as you go, there comes a point where you need to turn

to wheel away. And it's that point that you turn that your horses are most vulnerable, because they're sideways for a moment. And you try and make it as sharp a turn as you can, but they're sideways for a moment. And that's where they're most likely to be hit by the enemy's arrows. So this, my theory, our theory, was that this third horse could be a sort of sacrificial animal. A spare tyre, if you like. If he gets a puncture, the whole team doesn't come to a halt. You just let him go for that turn. So that may be the reason for why they did that third horse thing, which tells us a lot about the use of chariot horses and the idea of them turning and their vulnerability and the need, perhaps, for some armour for the horses. But we also start to see chariot archers without the

vehicle, without the chariot. I would still call them chariot archers because they did a very strange thing. What you see in these bas-reliefs is a driver, a rider, on a horse and an archer on a parallel horse adjacent to him. But the archer is not holding the reins. The driver is holding the reins. The man who was your buddy, your driver, your pilot when you were on a chariot, he's still your man guiding your horse and you're just sitting there shooting. And this, of course, is before the development of the saddle, before the development of stirrups. You're riding bareback with perhaps just a saddlecloth. I have that saddlecloth here in my study right now.

It's the one I bought from the market there, and it was very coarsely textured. And actually, you get quite a good bit of grip on a good textured carpet as a saddle cloth and we did this on these crazy horses that we bought from the local market that were absolutely never been backed or trained before and Jonathan had a week to try and train them and they stuck me on as a horse archer in this sort of rock strewn gully and all the little kids of the village seemed to pop out of everywhere to watch these crazy people do this and Jonathan was on his horse and he had a hold of mine and we galloped around

this gully with me shooting the bow to my astonishment I did actually manage to hit the target but it's the scariest most frightening thing I've ever done in my life you're a horseman not to have control of your horse not knowing it's going to start the things you feel when you're a horseman, not to have control of your horse, not knowing it's going to start. The things you feel when you're riding a horse were absent. Somebody else was controlling this. And it was weird. No wonder it didn't last. It was the bizarrest thing. And so eventually they said, well, OK, we'll ditch him and we'll just go on our own as horse archers.

And then Assyrian horse archers appear. such as appear, but it's a very curious means of transition that they didn't let go of that old idea that it's a pair of you, that it's a team. I can't quite explain why they did it because you think, well, you know, if you're good enough to sit on the horse and shoot your bow, you're good enough to ride it yourself. There's no two ways about it. It must have been a cultural thing that made this happen for a while so it's a very curious thing but it also highlights that interconnection between chariotry and horse archers they're two types of the same cavalry mike this has been a great chat so far i mean it really emphasizes really emphasises, as you say,

this pan-cultural activity of the chariots with Golden Age, Egypt, the Hittites, Trojan War, and China. Of course, you've been on the podcast once before to talk about horse archery, and you've talked a lot about bows during this podcast. So your book on that topic is called? It's called War Bows. Thank you for the plug. And yeah, it's got a little bit about Egyptian archery and the Chinese archery and pictures of Egyptian chariots, Chinese chariots in there. So some of those things I've touched on in this are expanded a little more in that book. That's for sure. Fantastic. Well, we'll get you back on for part two to talk about Iron Age Britain, Hellenistic and Roman chariots in due time but in the meantime Mike thanks so much for coming

back on the show well I look forward to coming back and thank you so much for having me Thank you.