The position occupied by chariots in the military system of Assyria is indicated in several passages of Scripture, and distinctly noticed by many of the classical writers.  When Isaiah began to warn his countrymen of the ’miseries in store for them at the hands of the new enemy which first attacked Judea in his day, he described them as a people “whose arrows were sharp, and all their bows bent, whose horses’ hoofs should be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind.”  When in after days he was commissioned to raise their drooping courage by assuring them that they would escape Sennacherib, who had angered God by his pride, he noticed, as one special provocation of Jehovah, that monarch’s confidence in the multitude of his chariots.  Nahum again, having to denounce the approaching downfall of the haughty nation, declares that God is “against her, and will burn her chariots in the smoke.”  In the fabulous account which Ctesias gave of the origin of Assyrian greatness, the war-chariots of Ninus were represented as amounting to nearly eleven thousand, while those of his wife and successor, Semiramis, were estimated at the extravagant number of a hundred thousand.  Ctesias further stated that the Assyrian chariots, even at this early period, were armed with scythes, a statement contradicted by Xenophon, who ascribes this invention to the Persians, and one which receives no confirmation from the monuments.  Amid all this exaggeration and inventiveness, one may still trace a knowledge of the fact that war-chariots were highly esteemed by the Assyrians from a very ancient date, while from other notices we may gather that they continued to be reckoned an important arm of the military service to the very end of the empire.

Next to the war-chariots of the Assyrians we must place their cavalry, which seems to have been of scarcely less importance in their wars.  Ctesias, who amid all his exaggerations shows glimpses of some real knowledge of the ancient condition of the Assyrian people, makes the number of the horsemen in their armies always greatly exceed that of the chariots.  The writer of the book of Judith gives Holofernes 12,000 horse-archers, and Ezekiel seems to speak of all the “desirable young men” as “horsemen riding upon horses.”  The sculptures show on the whole a considerable excess of cavalry over chariots, though the preponderance is not uniformly exhibited throughout the different periods.

During the time of the Upper dynasty, cavalry appears to have been but little used.  Tiglath-Pileser I. in the whole of his long Inscription has not a single mention of them, though he speaks of his chariots continually.  In the sculptures of Asshur-izir-pal, the father of the Black-Obelisk king, while chariots abound, horsemen occur only in rare instances.  Afterwards, under Sargon and Sennacherib, we notice a great change in this respect.  The chariot comes to be almost confined to the king, while horsemen are frequent in the battle scenes.