History
The scythed chariot was a modified war chariot. The blades extended horizontally for about 1 meter (3 ft) to each side of the wheels. The Greek general Xenophon (430−354 BC), an eyewitness at the battle of Cunaxa, tells of them: "These had thin scythes extending at an angle from the axles and also under the driver's seat, turned toward the ground".
Dismissing completely 17th to 19th century ideas of a Canaanite, Assyrian, Indian or Macedonian origin, Nefiodkin also challenges Xenophon's attribution of scythed chariots to the first Persian king Cyrus, pointing to their notable absence in the invasion of Greece (480−479 BC) by one of his successors, Xerxes I. Instead, he argues that the Persians introduced scythed chariots sometime later during the Greco-Persian Wars, between 467 BC and 458 BC, as a response to their experience fighting against Greek heavy infantry.
Read more about this topic: Scythed Chariot
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)