Rather over a month ago I wrote about my first impressions of Robert Drews’ book The End of the Bronze Age, concerning the catastrophe that swept around the eastern Mediterranean civilisations around 1200BCE. Since then I have been working my way slowly through the book and have now almost finished.

Drews set out to show that the underlying reason for the collapse of these various city states and regional empires was military, in contrast to other theories such as climate change, famine, drought mass migration etc. He recognises that any or all of these might be contributing factors, but makes the basic case that they had all been experienced beforehand without leading to this kind of large-scale collapse. What, he asks, made this episode so qualitatively different from the others?

After reviewing various theories he describes what we know of military actions in Late Bronze (roughly 1550 to 1150 or so) – and the surprising answer is “not a great deal“. It is easy for those of us who know the huge reliefs commissioned by Ramesses II of his Qadesh battle to be misled into thinking that we are overflowing with pictorial information… but this is not the case.

So Drews reconstructs the battlefield from a mixture of text, picture and archaeology, the latter including analysis of the causes of battlefield death. The picture he builds is that Late Bronze battles between established states were very much set-piece affairs, dominated by chariot action. From the Greek city-states round the eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent to northern India we find that a light, two-horse and two-man chariot was the norm, in which the second man wielded a bow. Sometimes a third man might ride along to get to the battle, but would routinely dismount once action started. Such infantry as there were served two distinct purposes – static defence of key locations such as a camp, and support ‘runners’ for the chariots to finish off fallen enemies and protect fallen comrades. Unlike later battles, the infantry were not the main event, but a sideline.

According to Drews, this changed within a few decades when groups from the northern Mediterranean (who became known as the Sea Peoples and entered the text of the Hebrew Bible as Philistines) mastered two new methods of waging war: firstly they armed themselves with javelins and long swords, and secondly they took the infantry battle to the chariots. For a few decades they were unstoppable – horse and rider were suddenly vulnerable in ways they had not been before, and battle after battle was lost outside the gates of city after city until someone worked out that the game had changed.

That someone was Ramesses III (or at least one of his generals) who took the attackers on at their own game with a determined infantry defence and managed to stall the seemingly relentless advance. He fought them to a standstill in the Levant and compromised by granting them land in a series of towns along the coastline. But the social change that had begun could not be halted. Chariotry was not just a way to wage war – for the previous few centuries it had been the domain of the elite. Maintaining a chariot arm was expensive in land, time, food, equipment, and cost, and although chariots remained in use as a prestige conveyance, the time of their military dominance was gone. So to was the position of social dominance that the charioteer used to hold.

You can be sure that these insights will find their way into my fictional writing, in particular in the work-in-progress which now has a provisional title – The Flame Before Us.