The chariot in Egypt

One common objection to the revised chronology of ancient Egypt is that it places the Exodus before the Hyksos invasion and even suggests that the Exodus made it possible. Yet in the Exodus, the army of Pharaoh (whoever he was) used chariots. Conventional Egyptologists see a contradiction--but in fact no reason exists to suppose a contradiction here.

The Egyptians probably did not invent the war chariot, but they did improve upon it and perfect it. An Egyptian war chariot had two horses to draw it, and carried two men--a driver and an archer. Chariots were expensive, and so the Egyptians used their chariots as a counter to the opponents' chariots, to protect their infantry, and as a shooting platform. (In contrast, the Hittites, for example, used their chariots to run over enemy infantry.)

Chariots have not--so far--been recovered from tombs or other digs dating to the Old Kingdom. Thus conventional Egyptologists assume that the Hyksos used chariots to conquer Egypt, and when the Egyptians finally expelled the Hyksos, they captured enough prototypical chariots to start designing their own. Thutmose III without doubt used chariots in battle, and so did Ramesses II.

Gerald E. Aardsma probably made the best counter-argument to the proposition that the Exodus could not have taken place during the Old Kingdom, because the Old Kingdom did not have chariots. Aardsma begins by citing an important axiom of archaeology (and presumably paleontology as well):

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

In this case, it means that the mere lack (thus far) of any finds of chariots (or even horse remains) in Old Kingdom tombs, battlefields, cities, or art is not sufficient to say that the Egyptians did not have chariots in those days. The further back in time one dates a dig, the less likely is any particular class of artifact to be preserved--and if so much as one artifact of any given type be found in a dig dated to a given era, that constitutes presumptive evidence of presence.

Aardsma then cites this authority, claiming to have found horse remains at a site in the northern portion of the Negev in Israel called Nahal Tillah:

“The most surprising feature of the assemblage is the large number of equid remains, some of which are from domestic horses (Equus caballus). ... There was a general supposition that domestic horses were not introduced into the Levant and Egypt until the second millennium, but Davis (1976) found horse remains at Arad from the third millennium and small domestic horses seem to have been present in the fourth millennium in the Chalcolithic period in the northern Negev.” (Grigson 1993)

The above does not definitively place horses in Egypt, but it does place horses at a major trading post where Egyptians came to trade, at the time of the earliest years of the Old Kingdom. That the Egyptians would never import horses into their country in the centuries preceding the Hyksos invasion strains credulity. (The dates given are conventional, but suggest that the dig dates to a few centuries after the Flood, and about the time of Abraham's visit to Egypt.)

Aardsma finally cites Stuart Piggott (The Earliest Wheeled Transport From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea, 1983), who provides further reminders that wooden structures of a size comparable to the chariot are not preserved, and the wheel and its associated inventions would necessarly spread rapidly and indeed show evidence of independent and parallel development.

Thus the presence of chariots in the Old Kingdom, and specifically at the Exodus, is not far-fetched. Indeed, the absence becomes far-fetched, because horses have long been known to be at a key stop along a known trade route to and from Egypt.

Source: Examiner