On the historical chronology used in this book, however, Troy VI was built closer
to 1600 than to 1700 BC. Manfred Korfmann’s excavations of the lower city found
that Troy V, the immediate predecessor of VI, was still standing in the MM IIIA
period.^31
Whoever built Troy VI brought horses with them, and some of the horses were
food animals: no horse bones have been found in the first five settlements at Troy,
but in the garbage dumps containing Troy VI pottery, including the earliest
Troy VI pottery, Carl Blegen’s team found many horse bones.^32 It is very unlikely,
however, that the people who built Troy VI brought horses with them only for
the purpose of eating horsemeat. By the second half of the seventeenth cent -
ury BCpaired draft horses not only had been familiar on the steppe for more t
han 300 years, but also were pulling chariots in battle in Anatolia, the Levant
and Egypt. Archaeological evidence for chariots at Troy VI has yet to be found,
but that is not very surprising because when such evidence is found it usually
comes from tombs or graves. Unlike their spectacular success on the Greek
mainland, archaeologists digging at Troy and in its immediate vicinity have found
very few burials from the Late Bronze Age. The few that have been found date
toward the end of the Troy VI period, and they are mostly pithos burials: close
to the surface, badly disturbed, and rarely accompanied by grave goods of any
kind.^33 Material evidence for Troy in the Late Bronze Age comes from the settle -
ment itself.
That the Trojans in the Late Bronze Age drove chariots depends on literary
evidence, and it is strong. One of Homer’s favorite epithets for Troy, or Ilios, is
εὔπωλος, which can be translated literally as “well-foaled,” and more freely as
“abounding in horses.”^34 That the horses Homer had in mind were driven rather
than raised for their meat is very clear. In twenty-one passages of the Iliadthe
Trojans are described as “horse-taming” (hippodamoi). These descriptions of Troy
and the Trojans were not coined in Homer’s own time, when a horse was rarely
to be found at Troy, but were passed down from the Bronze Age.
Turning to the Greek mainland, we find that in the LH II period a good number
of military chariots were apparently employed there. When Attarissiya of Ahhiya
caused trouble on the coast of Anatolia he seems to have had an army based on
many chariots, perhaps as many as 100.^35 Attarissiya lived toward the end of the
fifteenth century BC, however, long after the first signs of militarism on the Greek
mainland. Much earlier evidence—from the beginning of LH I—is available. At
Mitrou, on the Lokrian coast of the Euboian gulf, Maran and Van de Moortel have
recently found very important changes connected with the presence of tamed horses
and of what they call a “warlike elite.” The excavations unearthed a small artifact:
a Stangenknebel(the first cheekpiece of that kind found in Greece) with the wave-
band decoration much favored in the Carpathian basin. They also unearthed a town
that was constructed early in the LH I period, and that seems to have been
designed with chariots in mind. A network of broad orthogonal streets, wide enough
for the passage of chariots, marks Mitrou as an urban community very different
from anything in Greece that had preceded it. Maran and Van de Moortel define
the transformation coincident with the arrival of tamed horses:
182 Militarism in Greece