{"id":94456,"date":"2025-08-28T01:00:46","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T05:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=94456"},"modified":"2025-08-27T09:59:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T13:59:09","slug":"qotd-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-chariot-in-combat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/08\/28\/qotd-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-chariot-in-combat\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The rise and fall of the chariot in combat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Horses<\/a> had been domesticated long before the Scythians<\/a>. Horses, along with dogs and reindeer, are the only animals domesticated by foragers, rather than farmers. The first significant use of horses in battle was to draw chariots<\/a>. Chariot archers could shoot, and javelins could be thrown, further from a chariot than a horse.<\/p>\n

The classic chariot was driver and archer or spearmen. A friend describes them as being like a pilot and a navigator (or bomb-aimer) on a bombing run. The pilot\/charioteer concentrates on getting the pair of you where you need to be (or not to be). The archer\/spearmen\/navigator\/bomb-aimer concentrates on killing the enemy.<\/p>\n

The most famous driver\/warrior pairing in myth and literature is Krishna<\/a> and Prince Arjuna<\/a> in the Mahabharata<\/em><\/a> and, specifically, the Bhagavad Gita<\/em><\/a>. (Normally, the driver serves the warrior, but if your driver is an incarnation of Vishnu<\/a>, things work differently.) The warriors of the Iliad<\/em><\/a> are also chariot-driving warriors \u2014 hence scenes such as Achilles<\/a> dragging Hector<\/a>‘s dead body behind his chariot. Chariots were a major element in Chinese warfare up to the Warring States<\/a> period. New Kingdom Egypt<\/a> was very much a chariot empire, as were their great rivals, the Hittites<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Once recurve bows able to match chariot archery from horseback arrived, chariots largely disappeared from combat in the major Eurasian civilisations. This began to occur around the time of the Assyrians \u2014 who were a transitional case using both chariots and cavalry \u2014 about a thousand years before the invention of the stirrup and even longer before the stirrup’s arrival in the Mediterranean world. Lancers \u2014 the heavily armoured version of which was the cataphract<\/em><\/a> \u2014 then developed as a way of dealing with horse archers.<\/p>\n

Lorenzo Warby, “Stirrups, a rant”, Lorenzo from Oz<\/em><\/a>, 2025-02-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Horses had been domesticated long before the Scythians. Horses, along with dogs and reindeer, are the only animals domesticated by foragers, rather than farmers. The first significant use of horses in battle was to draw chariots. Chariot archers could shoot, and javelins could be thrown, further from a chariot than a horse. The classic chariot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,5,41],"tags":[1594,31,1102,174,822],"class_list":["post-94456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-archery","tag-army","tag-cavalry","tag-innovation","tag-mythology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ozu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97537,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94456\/revisions\/97537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}