5 The beginnings of militarism
in temperate Europe
In the second quarter of the second millennium BCa military class appeared over
much of western Eurasia. In the Near East, the only place for which we have written
records for the period, this class was made up of chariot drivers and chariot archers.
From the seventeenth century BCto the twelfth, they were the backbone of the
Great Kingdoms: Kassite Babylon, New Kingdom Egypt, Mittani, and the Great
Kingdom at Hattusha. The minor kingdoms in the region as well as the Mycenaean
palaces in Greece and on Crete also equated their chariotries with military strength.
In temperate Europe too charioteers seem to have made their appearance in
the period 1750–1500 BC. Indirect evidence for chariots at that time has been found
in the Carpathian basin, northern Europe (northern Germany, Denmark
and southern Sweden), and in northern Italy. Although large chariotries were
maintained by the Mycenaean palaces until the end of the Bronze Age, in temperate
Europe the chariot’s military usefulness must have been limited and brief. In the
second half of the second millennium BCchariots in the Carpathian basin, southern
Scandinavia and northern Italy seem to have served as status symbols, while the
men who owned them were at the top of a warrior class that fought on foot with
swords and spears.
Before and through most of the Bz A2 period the material record from temperate
Europe includes no swords and no spearheads. Then, quite suddenly, swords and
spearheads make their appearance, and eventually they are there by the thousands.
They show up occasionally in settlement deposits, more often in graves, and still
more often in hoards and votive deposits. Many of the weapons from Middle and
Late Bronze Age Europe come from dedications made either in lakes and lagoons
or more often in rivers. Running water, as Daniel Neumann has suggested, was
throughout the European Bronze Age the preferred place for making a ritual
offering of weapons.^1 And swords, especially those that were skillfully decorated,
were the offering of choice. The votive deposits show with special clarity how
radically parts of Europe had changed in the Bronze Age, from a society in which
battles seem to have been virtually unknown to the belligerence that was to
characterize Europe for the next three and a half millennia.
The reality of warfare in Late Bronze Age Europe was illustrated recently by
the discovery of a votive deposit made ca. 1200 BCin, or to, the Tartaro river at
Pila del Brancon (near Verona).^2 The deposit lowered into the Tartaro contained