The Sea Peoples

[Watchman]

Modern analyses to the fall of the chariot I've seen have tended to emphasize the "barbarians'" developement of steady, aggressive, decently armoured infantry armed with javelins and to a lesser degree (as they cost an arm and a leg) improved sword designs, who even if they couldn't catch the lighter chariots (the Egyptian ones for example were essentially mobile archeyr platforms) could destroy the old-style infantry line anchoring them and hence win the field virtually by default.

The war chariot didn't die out overnight of course. In one form or another it remained in use for quite a while, although it is perhaps telling that some of the last serious users dwelt in the out-of-the-way periphery of the Celtic Fringe. But it lost its central dominant place as the central tool of military power to the infantry and the upstart cavalry.

Most of the cultures whose military power was first and foremost built on the chariots had by necessity those so closely tied to their social structures (in the form of a social as well as military elite of charioteers) that they simply could not adapt even if they wanted to. Even if the chariot warriors realized they needed to change, to change the basis of the military power would have stripped them as a class of much of their rights and priviledges; and this was naturally rather inconceivable for most of them. And thus they went down swinging.

The Assyrians had developed a strong native infantry arm by the necessity of their mountainous northern border (where chariots obviously didn't work too well) and having to fight off barbarians in that direction, and also had a budding decent cavalry arm. This gave them enough flexibility to be able to see off most attempts in their direction, and look scary enough that apparently not too many were made in the first place.

The Egyptians didn't have such advantages, but they had enough loyal barbarian mercenaries in their infantry to help turn the tide. If the various invading Sea Peoples themselves didn't fit in the same sentence with "unity", one can only imagine what the relationship between them and Egypt's heterogenic mix of mercenaries from all over the place was.
The Eggies went into terminal decline very soon afterwards though.

[Kraxis]

Most of the cultures whose military power was first and foremost built on the chariots had by necessity those so closely tied to their social structures (in the form of a social as well as military elite of charioteers) that they simply could not adapt even if they wanted to. Even if the chariot warriors realized they needed to change, to change the basis of the military power would have stripped them as a class of much of their rights and priviledges; and this was naturally rather inconceivable for most of them. And thus they went down swinging.

Do not agree about the chariots and their crew.
The charioteer would still be a furious tempest in battle. He would still kill enemies right and left to use and extreme way of saying it. So from his POW he was not the problem. But perhaps he didn't understand the problems the infantry faced, and perhaps that his own equipment (chariot, horses, armour, weapons) was simply too expensive to warrent his position. And that seems natural enough. He would simply think "why fix something that isn't broken?"
I think it would have been very hard to understand what was going wrong.

Meanwhile the barbs that were making the trouble weren't likely to have developed their tactics specifically as a counter to chariots, but more likely to counter each other. Close formed infantry is a natural develoment where you live in valleys and similar. Only the wide open plains/deserts are the natural habitat of the chariot.

[Watchman]

Given the amount of raiding and fighting the "barbarians" did with and for the chariot-riders of the plains, in the latter context commonly alongside of and against chariotry, that they developed effective counter-chariot tactics would have been nearly a foregone conclusion.

Broken and uneven terrain tends to be the natural breeding gorund of at least relatively loose-order light infantry, though. Phalanxes, massed shield walls, cavalry and chariotry tended to be something the lowland folk went for.

Your take on the attitude problem of the chariot warriors strikes me as having merit, although it should be noted a core problem was they no longer were the Lord Death On Wheels they used to be, when pitted against the masses of tenacious barbarians with javelins and a bad attitude.

But then, a certain brand of arrogance and a stubborn refusal to admit the rules have been changed has long been a feature of warrior aristocracies whose power base just got sidewinded.

One thing must be said of the war chariot though. As war machines go, it reallt has a certain unusual degree of charisma to it - even today the very word elects interesting (and, I must admit with embarassement, flighty and romantic) symbolic associations even in educated peacenicks such as myself, and still sees fairly common use in only vaguely related contexts. Case in point: the militaria section of the local bookstore has a book titles Chariots of Fire, which if I recall correctly concerned itself with modern tanks and their crews...

Cavalry had somewhat similar (and at the time somewhat similarly unfortunate) associations back in the day and still does, but there must be something special about those ancient wheeled death-machines for their powerful image to remain over three thousand years after their heyday passed.

Maybe its just the wheel though. The thing had very considerable and profound effect on human civilization as we know it, as well as the deep symbolic associations of the unbroken circle.

[Kraxis]

Yes, the charioteer wasn't the ultimate killer that he used to be in generations past. But if he still did well in battle (but not well enough) and didn't know eaxactly how well his ancestors had done he couldn't possibly see himself as the problem. That is not arrogance but logic. He was arrogant as well, but at times arrogance actually leads to changes as the arrogant person can't stand to get his arrogance kicked over. He want's to retain his position of arrogance.

The barbs fought mostly for the chariots, and as such were most likely under the command of the chariot-peoples. If they had been using chariot-defeating tactics, that were obvious because of their frequent employment by the chariot-peoples, then it seems claer that those peoples would have made notice of that. If however they were using the 'classical' setup then they wouldn't have been wiser.
So when their more homely elements finally came over the mountains, they fought unlike the barbs used previously.

In any case it is hard to dertermine what really was the truth of the matter, and often it turns out that several sides of a single case can have both merits and truth in what they say. History isn't a set fact, and people aren't homogenous, they diverge and itsn't impossible that we are both right.

[Watchman]

The problem with employing barbarian mercenaries is that many of those will eventually take their pay and go back home, and you'll be hiring new ones. Now, the problem with this is that they'll have picked up quite a bit of "odds and ends" during their stay in your sophisticated army. If one of the most important roles they were employed for in your army was as a support for your own "super weapon" when it fought the essentially identical "super weapon" of your peers, among the things they'll pick up is how to fight these "super weapons".

This knowledge then gets diffused to their home regions, and no doubt occasionally put to good use by raiders. But this isn't really a major concern.

It turns into such, however, if and when entire barbarian populations get on the move and pour into your lands. Now that they're being pitted against your "super weapons" on a large scale they'll obviously be adopting the ideas and techniques about fighting those en masse, and if these "super weapons" are what your military power chiefly revolves around...
Of course, major barbarian incursions into civilized lands have a tendency to coincide with larger periods of decline of those civilizations, which isn't going to help matters one bit.

Well, the end result was that with a handful of exceptions the ancient "civilized" chariot powers collapsed one after another and the rampaging hordes sacked a better part of the major urban centers.