light spoked wheels, and the whole chariot only weighted perhaps 50 kg. Even steppe ponies could pull it at about 15 km/h - faster than a man could run for more than a short distance, particularly if armed and armored.
The chariot carried a two-man crew, the driver and an archer. On the ancient battlefield its impact was something like that of a fighter-bomber today. A squadron of chariots could sweep in on a body of foot soldiers and pepper it with arrows, while easily avoiding counterattack. In principle, well-trained infantry could stand up to a chariot charge, as to a later cavalry charge, but in practice troops must often have broken in the face of a line of charging chariots, thus exposing themselves to annihilation. A battle between chariot forces must have been a fluid environment not unlike an aerial dogfight.
Between about 2000 and 1700 BCE, steppe charioteers swept across the Middle East. The major geographical features and crucial centers in the early wave of chariot conquest are shown in Drews, The Coming of the Greeks (32, Figure 1). Kingdom after kingdom fell to them, culminating with the fall of Egypt to the Hyksos. Civilization was transformed, molded in the aristocratic image of the charioteer. Homer's Iliad reflects a chariot-warrior society, though by Homer's time the actual tactics of chariot warfare seem to have been largely forgotten; his heroes ride chariots to battle but then fight on foot. The first well-attested battle in history, the Battle of Megiddo, was fought c. 1400 BCE by armies centered on about 2000 chariots on each side (Drews Bronze Age 129-30). The powerful and lasting impression made by this battle is attested by the the biblical word Armageddon, a variant of Megiddo. Later the chariot would be superceded, in par
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