Drews to associate chariotry and archery in Mycenaean times is the fact that
quite a few Linear B tablets at Knossos were found together with tablets
inventorying more than 8000 arrows as well as with many real bronze arrow
heads in a building therefore called the Arsenal. Leaving aside the extremely
rare iconographical association of chariots and archers, I will try to show in
this paper, firstly, that the chariot tablets found in the Arsenal deal primarily
with inventories of storage and less with distribution and that those records
dealing with the allotment of chariots give no clue about this presumed archery
association. Moreover, since it is assumed that those using the chariots, the
warriors, were clad in bronze armour, it is unlikely that they could actually
manipulate bows.^74Driessen then goes on to accept Littauer and Crouwel’s thesis that the Knossos
chariots were used to transport armored infantrymen. Proceeding as it does from
the equation of “the Homeric warrior” with the warriors of LH Greece, the
argument not surprisingly relegates the archer to a secondary status. It is surprising,
however, that Egyptian archers are cited as examples. I suspect that every Egyptian
pharaoh from Ahmose to Ramesses III, proud to be depicted in temple reliefs as
shooting an arrow from a swiftly moving chariot, would have been apoplectic at
being described as “merely an archer.” The argument also seems to imply that
the thousands of arrows stored in the Knossos Arsenal were intended for archers
on foot, although no evidence for companies of infantry archers has yet been found
in LH Greece. The argument closes with the implication that although the bronze
armor prevented a warrior in a chariot from drawing a bow it would not have
prevented a warrior on the ground from wielding a sword or thrusting a spear.
Let us look yet again at the evidence for bows and arrows in Mycenaean Greece.
Arrowheads, in contrast to bows, have been found in large numbers in LH
contexts. They are too small and homely to attract the average museum visitor or
weapons aficionado, but we are fortunate that the bronze arrowheads from the Greek
mainland (although not from Crete) were catalogued and published by Robert Avila
for the Prähistorische Bronzefundeseries.^75 In the LH III period arrowheads were
made of bronze, and were made by the thousands in workshops overseen by the
palaces. Evans found several hundred in corporearrowheads in his excavation of
“the Palace of Minos.” At Pylos, in one room of the palace Carl Blegen came
upon a store of 500 bronze arrowheads, all of them barbed and therefore meant
for battle.
Some recognition of the importance of archery early in the Mycenaean period
came in 1962 with a lengthy article by Hans-Günter Buchholz. Buchholz showed
that the grooved stone that Schliemann had found in Shaft Grave VI was designed
to smooth the shafts of arrows, and Buchholz then went on to offer a basic
classification of the arrowheads known from Greek prehistory, from the Neolithic
to the end of the Bronze Age.^76 Unfortunately, in the first two fascicles (1977 and
1980) on Mycenaean warfare that he wrote for the Archaeologia Homericaseries
Buchholz did not deal either with long-range weapons or with chariots. That huge
gap was not repaired until 2010, when the third Kriegswesenfascicle appeared.
192 Militarism in Greece