Wyatt first formulated it. Because the Greek language inherited PIE terms for a
vehicle (ὄχος), for a wheel (κύκλος), for an axle (ἄξων), and for a yoke (ζυγόν),
the speakers of what became the Greek language must have known the wheeled
vehicle when they arrived in Greece, and thereafter both the various objects and
the terms used to denote them must have been “constantly and continuously known”
to the speakers of that language.^7 It is true, as critics objected, that the vehicular
terms are not specific to chariots and could have been applied to wheeled vehicles
of any kind. As Joost Crouwel’s exhaustive review of the evidence makes very
clear, however, it is also true that nowhere in Greece—just as nowhere in Egypt,
and nowhere in Italy—is there evidence for wheeled vehicles of any kind before
the seventeenth century BC, when chariots suddenly appeared.^8 In the Near East,
on the steppe, and in temperate Europe disk-wheeled wagons and carts were in
use already in the last centuries of the fourth millennium BC. Another millennium
and a half seem to have passed before wheeled vehicles finally were brought—
in the form of chariots—to Egypt, to Italy and to Greece. In the wider Aegean we
have a single earlier representation of a wheeled vehicle: the clay model of a wagon
found at Palaikastro, in eastern Crete, and dated roughly in the MM I period.^9 The
absence of evidence for wheeled vehicles on the Greek mainland prior to ca. 1600
BCis in sharp contrast not only to the steppe, where so many wagons have been
found under Early and Middle Bronze Age kurgans, but also to temperate Europe.
In the Carpathian basin alone dozens of clay models of wagons have been found
in Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age contexts.^10
Despite the linguistic argument, or perhaps because it has not been stated clearly
enough, the belief persists that what was to become the Greek language came
unobtrusively to Greece no later than the EH period. Most Aegean archaeologists
still defend that position, resisting any intrusion by outsiders, but the assault builds.
Silvia Penner has made a good case that toward the end of the MH period
charioteers from the steppe conquered parts of Greece, and Anthony Harding—
looking closely at the horse harness—has taken a long step toward the same
conclusion. Most recently the excavations at Mitrou have given more evidence
of a military (and charioteering) elite in Greece in the LH I period.^11 In this chapter
I will make an argument—more compelling, I hope, than the one I made 30 years
ago—that at the beginning of the Shaft Grave period a military force equipped
with chariots came from a faraway land and took over the most attractive parts
of Greece.
The new militarism
Before militarism came to southern Scandinavia and northern Italy, and at about
the same time that it came to the Carpathian basin, it came also to parts of the
Greek mainland. What happened on the Greek mainland shortly before 1600 BC
has recently been summarized by Helène Whittaker:
Toward the end of the Middle Helladic period we see a fundamental break
with the values of Middle Helladic society. There is an opening up toMilitarism in Greece 177