Sumerian war chariot (restored) on the Standard of Ur. See it in its original condition.
What did a Sumerian war chariot really look like?
On the Standard of Ur, the panel with the double-curved top is shown on the side, though it actually represents the front of the chariot. The artist has turned it toward the viewer to show its shape, in the same way that the rein rings are turned sideways to show their details. Modern depictions of Sumerian war chariots sometimes show the panel in front, sometimes on the side, and sometimes both. The panel is actually the front "shield" of the chariot, as illustrated below.
The gold helmet, dagger, spear, battleaxe, and rein rings topped with a horse figurine, used by the warrior-king in this picture can also be seen in Weapons, The Royal Tombs of Ur.
Note the quiver of javelins slung on the side. Sumerian war chariots are always depicted with the weapons in a separate container mounted on the exterior of the chariot.
When viewed from the side, the flat shield appears as just a straight vertical line. All modern depictions of Sumerian war chariots show the front shield as completely flat and vertical. They also show a Sumerian chariot as being very "wagon-like". This is perfectly justified because there are ancient models of Sumerian war chariots that show the same configuration:
Perhaps there really were Sumerian war chariots with this configuration. Then again, perhaps these models were overly simplified because they were merely meant to be children's toys, and not accurate scale models of real chariots. In either case, the war chariots on the Standard of Ur are different. All of them have a distinctly angled front:
Why do the chariots have this angled front? It seems to be a needlessly complicated design. It would have been much easier to tack a flat shield to the front of a wagon and call it a chariot. It would be quicker and cheaper to build them this way, something to be considered when many handbuilt chariots needed to be manufactured during an ancient "arms race".
The angled front is too obvious to be ignored. It has to be accounted for. There must have been a good and necessary reason for the Sumerians to go through the added effort and expense of manufacturing a complicated structure instead of a simple one. A flat shield on front is the simple and obvious design choice, so why isn't it used?
I've always been interested in aircraft design, so I tend to look at vehicles from a "structural" standpoint. I also know that an ancient war chariot, like a modern warplane, needs to be strong but lightweight, fast but maneuverable. This is the design criteria that best explains the unusual configuration of the chariots on the Standard of Ur.
Sumerian two-wheel chariot, from Ur. See a picture of the chariot with its relevant features labeled for the purpose of this discussion.
Notice how the front shield has a side panel (partly obscured by the leopard skin covering). It’s not just a flat board. This chariot also has the same angled front as the chariots on the Standard of Ur. There’s a reason for this:
Imagine a driver standing in the chariot, directly above the wheels. He would have his hands in front of him, at shoulder-height, holding the reins above the front shield. The top of the shield, being slanted forward, creates more space for his hands while allowing him to remain standing directly above the wheel axle. For the same reason, the shield is angled forward on the bottom to provide more foot room, and it probably also housed some structural reinforcement for the attachment of the central yoke. If the front shield were straight-up vertical, the driver would have to stand further back on the chariot to have the same amount of room for his hands, but on this chariot there is no “further back”. Of course the chariot could be built longer in the back (or the front) to accommodate a vertical shield, but this would add extra structure and weight, thus making the chariot heavier and therefore slower. The forward slant of the front shield effectively increases the interior space of the chariot without increasing its overall length and weight. This is an important consideration because the Sumerian horses (asses, donkeys) were rather small and not very strong, so the chariot needed to be as lightweight as possible.
It’s important that the driver stand directly above the wheels for “center of gravity” reasons, to make the chariot more maneuverable. The center of gravity (CG) is the “balance point” for an object. In the case of a chariot, the CG is the balance point for the combined weights of the chariot structure and the occupant(s). Without going into a lengthy technical explanation, a chariot is most maneuverable if the CG is directly above the wheel axle. The angled front of this chariot is designed to minimize the weight of the structure and to keep the CG as close as possible to the wheel axle. This is the lightest, fastest, most maneuverable design possible for a two-wheel chariot.
The angled front of the four-wheel chariots on the Standard of Ur serves the same purposes. It minimizes the overall weight of the structure while maximizing the interior space. It also helps to maintain a favorable CG by allowing the driver to stand as far forward as possible (perhaps even ahead of the front axle) to compensate for the rearward shift of the CG when another soldier is on board. A forward CG, closer to the front wheels as they change direction, improves the chariot's maneuverability.
It seems the Sumerians applied the same design principles of a two-wheel chariot to their four-wheel chariot. It was their attempt to offset the inherent disadvantages of a "four-wheeler"-- greater weight and less maneuverability. They were willing to sacrifice ease of production for increased performance on the battlefield. (Greater performance is the same reason why the British were willing to invest the additional labor necessary to manufacture the complicated elliptical wing of the Spitfire during WWII.) It's not at all surprising that the Sumerians took such a sophisticated approach to chariot design, since they're the ones who invented chariots in the first place.
Getting back to the subject of the true appearance of a Sumerian war chariot:
The weapons compartment is shown as an intregal part of the chariot, and not as a separate attachment. A triangular "corner brace" behind the shield is used to reinforce the unsupported part of the shield above the railing. This reinforcement is absolutely necessary to prevent the shield from bending. The mark at the angle in front, seen on most of the chariots, indicates that the side railing, the angle, and the point where the diagonals cross, were all in alignment. It also suggests that the side railing continued around the front to the edge of the shield.
To get an idea of what a Sumerian war chariot really looked like, we need to remove the shield from the side and then rejoin the front and back, like so:
Watch what happens to the triangular corner bracing on top of the railing:
Sumerian war chariot deconstructed. The shield is on the front so it's no longer visible when the chariot is viewed from the side. The upper portion of the shield has a side panel that wraps around to the railing. It is wide enough to accomodate a rather large decorative square of woven reeds at the top. Notice how the triangular corner brace behind the shield is no longer visible. That's because it's actually the bottom corner of the side panel It merged seamlessly with the side panel at the exact same angle. The triangular corner bracing is no longer necessary because the side panel by itself gives the shield enough structural rigidity to prevent the shield from bending backwards and forward.
The railing continues around to the front of the chariot and terminates at the edge of the shield at the same level where the diagonals on the shield intersect. In this way, all the lines converge at a central point to create a dramatic and unifying effect.
If this chariot were drawn realistically, it would look something like this:
With the shield removed, the driver can now be pictured further forward, so there is room in the chariot for the other soldier and he needn't stand with just the tip of his toes on the back of the chariot. Notice how the forward slant of the front shield makes room for the driver's hands, allowing him to stand further in front, above the front axle. This shifts the CG forward, to compensate for the rear passenger, thus making the chariot more maneuverable. This also creates more space between the soldiers so they have more room to wield their weapons.
The weapons (spears and maces) were carried inside the chariot, and not in a separate quiver attached to the side. This made the weapons easily accessible to both the soldier and the driver, but not accessible to the enemy during close combat (the driver fought when he could while he maneuvered the chariot; most of the drivers in the attack scene on the Standard of Ur are wielding weapons). The spears were arranged along the interior walls of the front shield and the side panel with the minimum amount of attachment necessary to hold them in place. The spears were not in a quiver, so the soldiers could just grab a spear as needed without having to pull the spear its full length out of the quiver, like pulling a nine-iron out of a golf bag.
A quiver mounted on the outside of a chariot is completely impractical. Look again at the modern pictures of Sumerian chariots shown at the top of the page. It would be quite difficult for the soldier in back to pull a long spear out of a long quiver that is placed far ahead of him, up high, and tilted away from him.
Assyrian four-wheel chariot. This picture illustrates how the side panel flairs into the curves at the top of the shield.
On the Standard of Ur, the front wheels of the chariots are consistently shown as larger than the back wheels. Perhaps this is because they are the main load-bearing wheels, but the larger wheels in front would make the floor of the chariot slope upward. This could be compensated for by placing blocks on the axle of the rear wheels to level the floor, but this would make the chariot heavier and slower. Even so, all of the chariots on the standard seem to have bottoms with an upward slope. Perhaps the wheels were actually the same size, but the front wheels only appeared to be larger because they were offset farther from the sides of the chariot (and closer to the viewer) than the back wheels, so they wouldn't scrape against the sides of the chariot during sharp turns. None of the other chariot models have front wheels that are larger than the back wheels.
Higher-resolution photograph of the two-wheel chariot previously shown: The wheels have the same construction as the chariot wheels on the Standard of Ur. Note the leather "tire" around the wheel. The chariots on the Standard of Ur would likewise have the same kind of tires to protect them against splintering and damage. Tires were also found on a chariot from Kish.
The above photo clearly shows the reed and wicker construction of the body of the chariot. Woven reeds are also used to reinforce the chariot's central yoke. Reed (such as bamboo) is a tough yet lightweight material, an important factor in keeping the chariot as light as possible to enhance its speed. The Sumerians made extensive use of reeds because they didn't have a lot of wood. There weren't many forests in Sumer, but there were plenty of marshlands; so the Sumerians didn't have a lot of timber but they did have plenty of reeds. Like the chariot pictured above, a chariot on the Standard of Ur was constructed of reed and wicker panels stretched on a wooden frame, which brings us to an interesting point:
Chariot #1, which I reconfigured above, and the king's chariot, which is shown below, both have sharply angled fronts. The other three chariots are more rounded in front. I would suggest that Sumerian war chariots were a lot more "curvier" than is generally supposed, because of their wicker construction. They were not so "wagon-like". Wicker construction readily lends itself to compound curves and complex shapes (think wicker furinture and baskets). Although the sides of the chariots were probably flat, it's difficult to imagine why the Sumerians would build boxy chariots when it's so easy to form the wicker into smooth shapes and transitional curves (like around corners). Even if the shield itself were flat (except where it's folded) the corners at the front of the chariot would have been rounded off. It is also possible that the entire front of the chariot was rounded, with the shield composed of compound curves. In either case, a chariot on the Standard of Ur would closely resemble later chariot designs. It would look more like a chariot and less like a wagon.
Throughout the ancient world, chariot warfare was always the domain of the wealthy nobility because the chariots were expensive to build (a modern estimate is that it took 600 man hours to build a two-wheel Egyptian chariot) and the horses were expensive to buy and costly to feed and maintain. It seems that Sumerian war chariots were quite flashy and sporty, as befitted the nobility, with the bright red chassis and light colored trim, the crossed diagonals, the spotted rear fenders and the double-curve shields, the decorative panels on the side, and the brightly caparisoned horses. On the Standard of Ur, the king himself is shown driving a chariot, and it's highly doubtful that he would be seen driving a boxy, glorified hay wagon.
So, to summarize: A Sumerian war chariot had an angled front with a side panel on the upper part of the shield. The weapons were carried in the interior of the chariot, not in a quiver attached to the side. In addition, the front of the chariot had some curvature because of the wicker construction.
Just for the fun of it, I also deconstructed the king's chariot:
The King's chariot. The royal prince is seen in front of the horses.
The king's chariot has a peaked panel on the side that is different than the other chariots. See "The Standard of Ur, war side".
Eannatum. His chariot on the Vulture Stele is like the chariots on the Standard of Ur, with the crossed diagonals on the front shield. The chariot is drawn in the same unusual manner, with the front on the side and the side on front. His chariot also has the same peaked panel as the king's chariot pictured above. See "The Standard of Ur: King".
Because of the perishability of wood and wickerwork, no example of an actual war chariot has survived the millennia, so we only have pictorial evidence as to its true appearance. Fortunately, we have the artist of the Standard of Ur as our main authority on the subject. He is an expert on military hardware. The structure of the chariot wheels, for instance, is exactly like that on the Ur chariot seen above; the spears, maces, battle axes, helmets, rein rings, etc are exactly like those found in the Royal Tombs of Ur. Were it not for his detailed and accurate depiction of a Sumerian war chariot, we would have no idea what it really looked like.
