The people from the east seem to have learnt the use and value of horses in battle earlier than the Egyptians, and fighting from chariots seems to have been an earlier custom than fighting on horseback. It is said that there are no pictures or carvings of an earlier date than the Hyksos showing any of the Egyptians riding on horses, but in the eighteenth dynasty they had their cavalry—that is to say, their mounted soldiers on horseback—as well as their fighters in chariots. The chariots were not very elaborate. They were two-wheeled. The boarding came up fairly high in front, to the height of a man's elbows or thereabouts as he stood upright, but sloped away at the sides towards the back; and the back was often quite open. We see a pair of horses or even three abreast in some of the gravings of the chariots.
The men in them, as I say, stood upright. Often there were two, of whom one was for the driving and the other for the shooting, which was nearly always with the bow and arrow. I suppose we may say that the bow and arrow was their great weapon. Slings were used, as you will know from the story of David and Goliath, but the disadvantage of the sling, as compared with the bow and arrow, except for skirmishing troops, is quite obvious. The slinging requires the twirling of the sling, with the stone in it, round the head, before the stone can be sent frying out; it requires plenty of room, or else, in the twirling, you may easily break the next man's head! So it is only of value to troops in "open formation," that is, with spacious room between one man and the next. It does not do for close formation. The bow and arrow is a far more convenient weapon for this kind of fighting.
Weapons and armour
I have said that we often see gravings of one man driving the horses—the charioteer—and of the other using the bow. We also sometimes see that, in horseback fighting, one man, riding on one horse, would lead and control another horse, on which would be riding a man who would then have both his hands and all his attention free for shooting with his bow and arrow. That is not always, nor perhaps most often, what we find. The more usual way was for the rider to control the horse with his own hand on the reins as best he could while he shot his arrows as he had opportunity and time. And they were fine riders, turning round in the saddle—if they had a saddle; but often they are shown riding bareback, and never, till much later, with stirrups—and shooting backwards, over the horse's tail, as he gallops away.
The battle-axe was a very common weapon; and a short sword and a club, sometimes with a stone fixed in its head to give weight to the blow, are also shown. The long spear appears to have come into common use only gradually, and is not seen in the earliest pictures of the fighting, though we do see short spears, for throwing.
It was not at all uncommon for the fighter on foot to have a man with him who carried a large shield, which covered them both. I imagine that an arrangement of that kind is meant when we read, as we do in the Bible, of the "shield-bearer." For a man to carry a shield of such size as this with any ease, it had to be a light shield, and we know that the shields were commonly made of osier, like our baskets, and covered with the skins of oxen or other beasts.
In the earliest times they seem to have worn very little armour, to protect them from arrow or sword strokes, on the body; but helmets, at first soft and padded, but later of metal, to defend the head, were in early use, and they were usually made with a peak at the top and sloping sides which would make a blow glance off them. Bronze, as we have seen, was the metal which they first learnt to work, but as they learnt to make weapons of iron, which was harder and could be worked to a sharper edge, bronze went out of use.
By the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the great empires began to meet in serious fighting, it is likely that both knew something about the arrangement of their armies into separate bodies of infantry and cavalry, and of the one supporting and helping the other in somewhat like the modern manner.
This, then, would have been their way of fighting when they met in the open field. It was a different matter when they came to the assault of great cities, especially such as Babylon and Nineveh, which were surrounded and protected, as we know, by walls of vast height and thickness. The walls of Nineveh, for instance, were so broad, even on the top, that three chariots could be driven along them, one beside the other, and of course the width at the bottom must have been very much larger. They had the material very ready at hand for the making of these immense walls—in Babylonia and Assyria at all events. They had abundance of clay, and for the greater part of the walls they used the sun-dried bricks. But for the lower parts, which had to bear the weight, they probably used harder bricks, burnt in the kilns, for there are engravings of soldiers with some kind of battering-ram hammering at the bricks from the lower part of the wall of a city which they are attacking. The diggers would be protected, by a shield held over their heads, from the missiles sent down from the wall above.