The Hurrians’ steppe connections gave them easy access to the new weapons, and their looser social structure probably raised fewer barriers to adoption. Neither they nor the Kassites of western Iran, the Hittites of Anatolia,41 the Hyksos of modern Israel and Jordan, and the Mycenaeans of Greece were as organized as Egypt or the Mesopotamian city of Babylon, but for a while that did not matter, because chariots gave these formerly peripheral peoples such an edge in war-making that they could plunder or even take over their older, richer neighbors.
