Warfare in Asia Minor

Abstract

T HE brief discussion of warfare in Asia Minor which here follows will be limited to the Hittite period (about I800-I 200 B.C.). It is the only period of Anatolian history illuminated by written sources which are indispensable for deeper penetration into life, motivations and thinking of the ancient. I have to forewarn you that nothing much can be said that has not been said before. No doubt warfare in Asia Minor goes back to the very beginnings when the land was first settled. But what could be said about warfare in prehistoric times? Only the fortifications of the prehistoric settlements have survived, the weapons found in them; the tombs of their warriors and that which accompanied them into the beyond. These relics acquire significance beyond the antiquarian interest they command as soon as they can be fitted into a comprehensive picture of historical development; as soon as states, archaic and primitive as they may seem, city-states, kingdoms etc., emerge. This is the case in Asia Minor with the beginning of the second millennium B.C. Archaeologically speaking the Hittite period in its entirety falls into the Bronze Age, more precisely into its middle and late phases. The catastrophe which marks its end-observable almost everywhere in the Near East-ushers in the Iron Age. This is an incision which means more than merely the introduction of a new material, incidentally important for the history of warfare. Development in the centuries comprising Hittite growth, greatness and downfall does not by any means move in an evenly rising and then suddenly broken curve. The middle part of the span is occupied by the so-called ' Dark Age'; the length we assign to it depends on our views on the vexed and often discussed problem of chronology. Fortunately, it need not be taken up here again; may I be pardoned for re-affirming my conviction that it actually existed and cannot be erased from history by manipulating some figures. What is important for us here is the role played in the Dark Age by the TIurrians and by the thin layer of Indians which revitalized them from about I650 on. For to them can be traced a fundamental change in the technique of warfare which is recognizable everywhere in the Near East at that time and characterizes the period as nothing else. It is the introduction of the light horse-drawn chariot. The impact of the new machine-this it may be called with full right-on warfare generally and also on the structure of society can be observed nowhere better than among the Hittites. Chariots in action are