Pellets, not balls. They were specifically shaped. They did not have penetration power at all, you're right. But they were not meant to penetrate, but to concuss: you do not need to slice or cut in order to kill or disable.
"Warring States" ... like I said, economics, with wars all the time they became too expensive. Persians did not use chariots against Alexander ... where did you read that? The skythed ones they had are a completley different weapon system, incomparable to the ones used by chariot armies.
The Persians did use chariots against Alexander. Guess who lost. To be fair, the Persians were already on the way of decreasing its use when Alexander gatecrashed.
I suggest you just do a Google search to find it. If you ever go to Egypt, you won't find the flat land you're demanding but soft sand, rocks, gulleys, brush etc ... all the things you say make use of chariots impossible. Likewise in the other places.
That does not prove anything. It only means you use chariots on flat ground, infantry on the other.
The Shang Dynasty used a lot of chariots, and I am pretty sure China is a rocky place. But that only means chariots are used only where it is appropriate.
I am just wondering where in heaven's name you are assuming that the chariot has the offroad capabilities of an SUV.
Please don't keep twisting historical examples to mean something very different from what everyone can see from an engineering perspective.
No taunt meant. But according to the books I read and judging from the chariots I studied they could and did do all the things that you find impossible. They even charged across streams.
Shallow only. No one will doubt that the horse is superior offroad. Why are you twisting common sense?
Even if that archery was not strong, they still had slings with lots of stopping power. Egyptians had the other, 'super' bows you mention, and that was during the time they most heavily relied on chariots.
The Egyptians do not have the laminar recurved bows like the Hun. They were using single curved bows like everyone else. And again, they are a Bronze age culture, and none of their weapons have the direct stopping power of an Iron Age culture.
And I suppose horses in a close cavalry formation will magically float over the crashing horses in front of them? Chariots of course were also armed with all those weapons. Even better, they often had a small contignent of infantry, either riding or running with them ... combined arms in the best possible way: extremely mobile.
Lol. If a chariot crashes in front of all the other chariots it literally stops all the other chariots behind it into one massive crash.
With horsemen, a downed horse may cause some people right behind to crash with it, but this will visually warn others in the back and they can turn around or jump over. Plus a rider who is down has much better chances of getting up than a crashed chariot.
The decline of the chariot in the Persian Empire began with an important development, the breeding of the Persian or Arabian horse. Before then, horses were like small ponies and could not mount an armed and armored soldier. It was the introduction of bigger and more powerful horse breeds that began to turn things around.
Alexander was one of those who saw the early value of this, since not many rulers before his time fought in horseback like Alexander did with his Bellepheron.
Of course, tradition has its inertia, so Persians did have chariots around but it was already in the decline.
The Parthians took the Persian horse, not the Scythian ponies, and evolved the breed further to an even more magnificent animal.
The Chinese who were impressed by it, traded the horses for silk. These horses were specially bred by the imperial stables, and became the core of an elite heavily armed cavalry intended to defeat the Xiongnu.
Another invention the chariot wielding ancients did not have was the saddle. It was the Scythians that did introduce this. It made the back of the horse a much stabler platform to fire from. To make it complete, you would need the stirrup, but you have to go to China to see the early beginnings of it, and by the end of the Han dynasty, the stirrup was already being mass produced via castings.
Which brings you to to the development of iron casting.
Or specifically, the mass production of iron and the way to quickly shape it into different forms.
"The Far East
The Chinese probably discovered copper-smelting and bronze-making independently of the West, because their pottery kilns were much superior. However, their advanced technologies of melting and casting made it unlikely that they would independently discover iron-working.
Sometime after 1000 BC, knowledge of iron-forging techniques reached China from the West. The Chinese then applied their superior furnace technology.......... to take iron-working........ to new levels of expertise.
They were the first........... to cast iron into useful objects, because they could routinely melt iron...... on a large scale. Some Chinese smelter must have reached such a high temperature (around 1150° C) that the iron, instead of remaining as a bloom.......... that could be hammered into wrought iron ("ripe iron" or shu thieh), combined with the carbon and carbon monoxide in the furnace..... to produce an iron-carbon alloy with more than 2% carbon.
No doubt to the astonishment and dismay........ of the discoverer, this promptly melted into a liquid........... that solidified to cast iron ("raw iron", or shêng thieh. This could be tapped off into molds, (a process that was already completely mastered by bronze-smiths), and a new industry could be built around it.
The Chinese iron industry grew quickly. By 512 BC the Chinese were casting all kinds of iron objects, including large cauldrons.
The Chinese invented sophisticated bellows, for their iron furnaces, before 100 BC, so that a single continuous stream of air entered the furnace, rather than intermittent puffs. The process uses a lot of fuel, but gives higher temperatures.
This invention is, for practical purposes, a blast furnace; by 100 AD, the Chinese were driving blast furnace bellows with water wheels. This technology was not invented in (or transmitted to) the West.......... until the 15th century.
About 300 * 400 BC, the Chinese learned that if a cast iron object is reheated to 800° or 900° in air, it is decarburized, that is, it essentially, has some of the carbon burned out of the surface layer.
This process......... forms a skin of lower-carbon iron (steel) over the cast iron core. The finished tool is hard and wear-resistant, and for most uses is comparable with the end product of Western forging, in which a skin of steel is formed over a core of wrought iron by forging.
But the Chinese technology.......... was far more efficient. The Chinese cast objects........... already had the precise shape required, whereas, Western smiths, had to produce the right shape......... by hammering wrought iron on a forge.
The Chinese could effectively mass-produce cast, steel-jacketed, tools of all kinds, while Western smiths had to make them one at a time. By about 250 BC, one iron works in Szechuan...... employed 1000 people, and the Chinese were producing much more iron by casting, than by forging.
The Chinese used the new tools.......... to tremendous effect. Steel tools allowed the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) to develop intensive agriculture and major irrigation and drainage projects, with a concomitant increase in population and wealth.
The Han seem to have used their iron and steel technology to dominate the "barbarians" north and south of them: imperial edicts forbade the export of iron tools and weapons. Salt and iron, were declared to be state monopolies........ in 117 BC.
The Chinese were building cast iron suspension bridges from the 6th century, 1200 years before the Europeans. The iron and steel production of the Sung Dynasty........ was greater than early industrial Europe. In 1061 AD, the Chinese used 53 tons of cast iron...... in building the 13-story pagoda of the Yü-chhüan Ssu temple, at Tang-yang in Hopei."
This meant iron swords, iron spear heads, iron arrowheads. Then all these technological developments began happening and coming together in a whole contigous period, and the result is a revolution in warfare in the form of the mounted cavalryman.
+ Parthian/Arabic horse that can carry much greater weight.
+ Development of the Saddle
+ Use of Trousers for horserider
+ Development of recurved laminar bow.
+ Development of blast furnace for metal weapon mass production
+ Which makes possible the development of iron and steel weapons, leading to iron arrowheads, single edged swords, lances, spears, halberds.
+ Which also makes possible the development of metal stirrup.
All these came together at the Han period, and the last stage, the stirrup, was complete by the time China entered the Three Kingdoms period.
By extension, the development of blast furnace, and precise casting techniques, along with the recurved laminar bow, and you got the crossbow.
