Again, classical era cataphracts were heavily armored lancers, and they didn’t have stirrups. Stirrups increased the power of both heavy and light cavalry, but the stirrup wasn’t introduced until after the classical era, and chariots had been obsolete for a thousand years by then.
Yes. Archery is indeed a ridiculous idea, since chariot-mounted archers were perhaps the main use of chariots. The advantage being, you could outrun footsoldiers, stay at range, and keep shooting arrows without getting rushed.
The developments of the saddle and the stirrup were only possible once larger horses had been developed.
Thus, it was the breeding of horses large enough to carry a man on their backs for long distances that made the chariot unnecessary. Horses can operate in much rougher terrain than wheeled chariots too, and the chariot itself (although fairly lightweight) is unnecessary weight if you can just carry the man.
Good lord, I’ve already posted in this thread. Didn’t even realize there were more posts in it after the post I quoted here.
We still have chariot races (and gambling on them) here in Wyoming and elsewhere in the West.
http://www.saratogachamber.info/CHARIOT%20RACES.htm
Already by Homer’s time, the details of chariot warfare were forgotten; the Iliad has the heroes using chariots merely as transportation to the battlefield, then dismounting and fighting on foot.
There was plenty of javelin throwing from chariots in the Iliad.
As civilizations developed Polytheism, they were replaced by elephants, and later, with the ascendance of Monotheism, by Crusaders? 
Really Not All That Bright:
Or the Legion of Super-Heroes.
although it looks quaint to us, it’s worth noting that in its day, the chariot was a fearsome instrument of war, dominating ancient battlefields. Most of the early empires in the Fertile Crescent fell to successive waves of chariot conquerors. In fact, shortly after chariots were developed (around 1700 BC), chariot empires overran, well, just about everything they could reach, and chariot conquerors ruled autocratically for five hundred years.
citation: Men, Machines, and War
Contrast this with, say, the tank. The first tanks went into action in 1916, and by, let’s say, the Battle of Kursk in 1943, the tank had become merely one cog in the tactical machine of combined arms – still important, but it had lost the ability to dominate infantry by itself.
So the tank was the dominant instrument of warfare for perhaps 27 years, and the chariot for 500 years.
Argent Towers said:
I’m not sure that qualifies as a chariot. It’s more a horse-drawn artillery piece. That’s like a Civil War cannon.
That’s interesting, because as I mentioned in another thread I recently read the original H.G. Wells novel The Shape of Things to Come, (written in 1933). In it, Wells more or less dismissed tanks as of any significance in the next big war:
Evidently, Wells seemed to think that tanks could be completely nullified by properly designed barriers. IRL, though efforts were made with mines and antitank traps, tanks in fact did tear triumphantly across Europe. I wonder if Wells was simply a pessimist, or if some advance in design made tanks much more unstoppable.
I think that speaks more about the pace of technological development than the superiority of the chariot.
I’ll add a possible advantage for the mounted archer. When he shoots at full gallop at the precise moment none of the horses legs are on the ground, he gets a very smooth shot. I wonder if the chariots of that time gave much real hope of hitting while moving at all, unless you have some super-smooth road - tough luck if your enemy doesn’t want to fight there. And then I’ll remind that war is not just bigt battles - mounted troops are better in reconnaissance and this is the reason no army could do without horses before the invention of aeroplane.
I don’t think composite bows require less force, it’s just that you don’t need to stand. All the energy of the arrow comes from the potential energy you store in the bow with your hands. To give your arrow a good combination of flying far and piercing things you’ll want to to use as much force as possible, in fact as stiff bow as your strength allows. The shortness of the composite bow allows the force in your hands to be supported by your sitting position as opposed to having to stand with the long bow, still allowing the same potential energy stored in the bow.
My WAG for why the chariots lost most of their power as opposed to infantry is that armies just got bigger. I’m drawing an analogy to the European early modern age armies. They had at least as much expensive heavy knights, crossbowmen etc. as their earlier predecessors, but they had been swarmed with cheap pikemen, lighter cavalry and musketeers. This led to people asking for a long time what killed the medieval armies before the actual contents of the armies were studied: the knights were still there and there were still hundreds, sometimes even thousends, of them. Just like before. It just looks different when they are standing next to 40000 pikemen.
Now tin is not as abundant (except when you go to modern mine depths) as iron. So metal was in bronze age a more precious commodity than in iron age societies. Productivity must have been lower (because the scarce bronze is not given to e.g. farmers, not in great quantity). A poorer society with more stratification (those who control tin imports and those who don’t) will be unable to field a big army as well as being more prone to elite soldiers (the elite doesn’t want to arm the poor folks). The advance of iron technology will lead to lots of cheap infantrymen appearing along the elite soldiers. They can not only pay more men but before all have the resources to send standing armies far away. The societies which dare to arm middle class and even beyond will have an advantage in clashes between societys.
I got quite far with little information. People who actually know about bronze age, feel free to show the most obvious flaws.
Composite bows require less force to be held drawn that a straight bow with similar pull.
Sorry to Hijack a zombie but can you explain that a bit more? I can see why a modern compound requires less force but why does a composite require less than a straight bow?
Edit: 17 months - that has got to be the longest delay between the question and the thanks for the answer!
I’m trying to understand this in terms of simple physics, so excuse me while I hijack. If the bow was a linear spring (I’m sure it is more advantageous to make it regressive, i.e. make it store more energy early on), the energy stored is E=1/2 x k x s^2, where k is spring constant and s the pull. The maximum force F you need is, again in a linear system, k x s. This means the energy is E=1/2 x F x s. So this means that a bow that uses longer pull can store more energy for the same force. Bows with longer s have smaller k so keeping them drawn at less than max pull must require less force.
So if composite bows have longer pull, I understand why they can be held at same pull with lower force. Is this the case? The other possibility is that they are more regressive, they are stiffer at the early stage relative to long bows. Or both.
Still, everybody seems to think that there were some sort of light cavalry bows that are as good as long bows but require less force. Why would that be? Can’t you use the excellence of composite bow to pierce more armor? In fact, I remember having read that this is what Romans complained in Carrhae. The Parthian arrows went thru both shield and armor.
Nah, it’s pretty accurate. As I said, a big reason for the disappearance of chariots was that the cost-benefit scheme they required no longer made sense. Too much metal, too little gain.
Well, state-of-the-art British tank design when Wells was writing was something like the Vickers Medium Mark II. By the standards of WWII, the Vickers was slow, thinly-armored and undergunned, but it was still a major technological advancement over contemporary competitors. Wells description of “armored Wurms,” however, leads me to think he was still thinking of tanks like the Mark IV of WWI. Compared to even the early-war Panzer III these were very slow, weak, and vulnerable AFV’s.
So the answer is really a bit of both: tank design advanced in the decade before the war started, and Wells was thinking very conservatively.
In Wells’s defense, however, such conservative thinking was not unusual. He was writing soon after the demise of the RA’s brief interwar flirtation with combined-arms armored tactics. For various political, institutional, and doctrinal reasons, the results of the EMF were discounted and emphasis on attritional tactics based on infantry was retained as the Army’s dogma. Wells’s views were not far from the professional leaders of the Army, whereas what he calls “the British dream of the next…war” was the vision of a small number of theorists. Basil Liddell-Hart and JFC Fuller were essentially the RA’s version of US Army General Billy Mitchell.
I glossed over it because I was focused on what replaced chariots…but what finally defeated chariots was, in large part, as you guessed, large infantry & cavalry armies equipped with iron.
This is hard for modern readers to understand, but bronze is better than iron (at least before steel). It’s just much, much rarer (especially the tin ingredient). The advent of iron enabled armies to field large numbers of moderately-armed troops , overwhelming the much smaller armies of well-armed elites that characterized the chariot era.
The link I provided above goes on to say:
Chariot use certainly lasted well after this point in any case. Julius Caesar describes chariot warfare in Britain, for example:
“Firstly, they drive about in all directions and throw their weapons and generally break the ranks of the enemy with the very dread of their horses and the noise of their wheels; and when they have worked themselves in between the troops of horse, leap from their chariots and engage on foot. The charioteers in the meantime withdraw some little distance from the battle, and so place themselves with the chariots that, if their masters are overpowered by the number of the enemy, they may have a ready retreat to their own troops.”
It seems to me that this sort of tactic is basically about harassing and scattering the enemy. Would you, as an infantryman, want to stand in the way of one? (In Ireland, the mythic hero Cu Chulainn was said to have faced an entire army on his spiked chariot with sickle blades attached to the wheel hubs. That seems pretty much like the gold standard in the ancient world for death on wheels.)
Anyway, use as a terror device works pretty well with irregular forces, but not so well against trained, well-ordered militaries (like Greek phalanxes and Roman troops), in particular with their own trained – and more maneuverable – cavalry.
There’s a lot of confusion here.
The “pull” length (actually the term of art is “draw length”) of a bow (as opposed to its “pull” or “draw weight”) is determined by the length of the archer’s arm. A trained archer will always draw to the exact same point on his body (varying by culture) for a simple reason: varying the draw length varies the ballistic result and makes calculating aiming point impossible. Archery is a muscle-memory skill; you do the same thing every time to all extents possible, so that you can predict the result with confidence. The bow is chosen, crafted, or adjusted to the individual archer’s draw length.
I think there’s confusion about composite bows and compound bows. These terms are frequently confused because they sound alike.
The modern compound type is designed to use pulleys to “let off” the draw weight – it’s hard to draw at first, but past a certain point suddenly requires much less force to hold (because of leverage). This is designed mainly for hunting, where one has to remain still and in position for long periods of time, and a sudden drawing motion might startle the prey.
Composite bows are much older in design (Parthians, among others, as you say) and made of composites of more than one material with different tensile strengths so that the bow can be made stiffer and harder to draw – it can be made with a heavier pull. The usual purpose of this is military. They do not require less force to hold – that’s a confusion with compound bows. Their purpose is to have a heavy pull, providing more force to the arrow.
English (Welsh) longbows worked on a similar principle – the bow is made of a wood that has contains outer and inner woods with differing strengths and elasticity, so that it can be made stronger and pack more range and punch.
Unlike longbows, composite bows could be made short-limbed and used from a sitting position on horseback (without hitting the horse with the lower limb).
Before composite bows were developed, all bows were made of a single material, and lacked the real spring power of their later descendants. These early bows could not be made very strong, and threw a weaker arrow a shorter distance, which is why they were much less feared in early battles. Your stronger men would take up hand weapons; their strength could not be imparted through a weak bow anyway. Your weaklings would harass them with bows – weak bows they could draw.
Composite bows (and, later, longbows) changed that dynamic and made archery much deadlier. Short-limbed composite bows fired from horseback – combining mobility with accurate, long-ranged killing power and the ability to dictate the distance of the fight – overran the world in the hands of successive waves of Huns, Mongols, Turks, and Tartars.