I have said that we often see gravings of one man driving the horses--the charioteer--and of the other using the bow. We also sometimes see that, in horseback fighting, one man, riding on one horse, would lead and control another horse, on which would be riding a man who would then have both his hands and all his attention free for shooting with his bow and arrow. That is not always, nor perhaps most often, {91} what we find. The more usual way was for the rider to control the horse with his own hand on the reins as best he could while he shot his arrows as he had opportunity and time. And they were fine riders, turning round in the saddle--if they had a saddle; but often they are shown riding bareback, and never, till much later, with stirrups--and shooting backwards, over the horse's tail, as he gallops away. The battle-axe was a very common weapon; and a short sword and a club, sometimes with a stone fixed in its head to give weight to the blow, are also shown. The long spear appears to have come into common use only gradually, and is not seen in the earliest pictures of the fighting, though we do see short spears, for throwing. It was not at all uncommon for the fighter on foot to have a man with him who carried a large shield, which covered them both. I imagine that an arrangement of that kind is meant when we read, as we do in the Bible, of the "shield-bearer." For a man to carry a shield of such size as this with any ease, it had to be a light shield, and we know that the shields were commonly made of osier, like our baskets, and covered with the skins of oxen or other beasts. In the earliest times they seem to have worn very little armour, to protect them from arrow or sword strokes, on the body; but helmets, at first soft and padded, but later of metal, to defend the head, were in early use, and they were usually made with a peak at the top and sloping sides which would make a blow glance off them. Bronze, as we have seen, was the metal which they first learnt to work, but as they learnt to make weapons of iron, which was harder and could be worked to a sharper edge, bronze went out of use. {92} By the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the great empires began to meet in serious fighting, it is likely that both knew something about the arrangement of their armies into separate bodies of infantry and cavalry, and of the one supporting and helping the other in somewhat like the modern manner.