6 The beginning of militarism
in Greece
A hundred years ago, in the wake of Evans’ discovery of the “Minoan” culture
at Knossos, several archaeologists suggested that “the Greeks” did not arrive in
Greece until after the great palaces had been built on Crete. Wilhelm Dörpfeld
believed that the culture found on Crete was the work of Carians, and that only
with the Shaft Graves at Mycenae could one begin to see a Greek presence in the
Aegean.^1 Studying the origins of Greek mythology, Martin Nilsson seconded the
archaeologists’ suggestion and placed “the coming of the Greeks” at the end of
the Middle Helladic period.^2 In 1970 William Wyatt advanced a much more robust
argument, based on linguistics: the people whose language evolved into Greek
could hardly have arrived in Greece before the end of the Middle Helladic period,
because they brought with them their Indo-European terminology for chariots and
their components.^3 Persuaded that this conclusion was correct, and fortified by
the recent (in 1988) identification of the “mysterious” bone objects from Shaft
Grave IV as cheekpieces for organic bits,^4 I argued that the newcomers were able
to take over parts of Greece precisely because they had military chariots, chariots
having introduced a new kind of warfare (although how new it was, I greatly
underestimated).
Since the late 1920s the majority view among archaeologists has been that “the
Greeks” arrived in Greece no later than the end of EH III and probably well before
that, in either case long before chariot warfare began. For a long time the preferred
date for “the coming of the Greeks,” was ca. 1900 BC, the beginning of the Middle
Helladic period, because it seemed that Minyan ware first appeared at that time.
When it became clear that the Minyan ware of the MH period had evolved from
pottery in use during the EH III period, “the coming of the Greeks” was raised to
ca. 2200 BC, the transition from EH II to EH III. Widespread destruction at the
end of EH II was proposed by John Caskey, who in the 1950s had found it (along
with antecedents of Minyan ware) at Lerna, and Caskey associated the destruction
with the arrival of a new population. When a closer examination of the EH II/III
transition concluded that destruction at the end of EH II was visible at relatively
few sites, the case for “the coming of the Greeks” ca. 2200 BCwas weakened.^5
In response, an argument was made—on other archaeological grounds—that the
Greeks arrived in Greece almost 1000 years earlier, at the beginning of EH I.^6
The various arguments from pottery and artifactual innovations do not confront
the single linguistic argument, which now is considerably stronger than it was when