Here Buchholz presented in detail the archaeological and documentary evidence
both for chariots and for bows and arrows in LH Greece.^77
The Linear B tablets have shown how involved the palaces were in the
production of bows and arrows. A tablet from Knossos refers to enormous arsenals
of arrowheads: 2630 in one batch and 6010 in another.^78 If every chariot archer
carried sixty arrows in his quiver, the latter store would have equipped 100
chariots. Another tablet, this one from Pylos, records a requisition of approximately
51 kg of bronze and specifies that various officials and supervisors “will contribute
bronze for shipsand the points of arrows and spears.”^79 In his recent survey of
the tablets’ contents Thomas Palaima called attention to “the Mycenaean military
industrial complex” and calculated that the bronze in question was “sufficient for
33,000 arrowheads or 143 spearheads.”^80
More specialized than the making of arrows was the making of bows. These
too were a high priority for the palaces, as Buchholz observed:
The manufacture of bows is of no concern to Homer. The Mycenaean palace
authorities, however, reserved this industry, as we see from its inclusion in
the Pylos archive, under state control. To-ko-so-wo, according to the
decipherers, corresponds to toxo-worgoi, τοξοποιοί [bow-makers]. The root
word, τόξον, evidently a loan-word from Old Iranian, was already adopted
into the Greek language in Mycenaean times, and thereafter passed into early
Greek epic.^81At the beginning of the Mycenaean period, of course, there were not yet palaces
to see to the manufacture of bows and arrows, and the shaft-smoother in Shaft
Grave VI was necessary for the archer who was responsible for supplying his own
weapons.
As Buchholz indicated, the Classical Greek word for “bow”—τόξον—is attested
in Linear B tablets, although an older word for “bow”—βιός—was still used
occasionally in the Iliadand Odyssey. The newer word, τόξον, seems to have a
connection with Proto-Iranian. It has recently been argued by Pierre Sauzeau that
although Greek warriors in the Iron Age disdained the bow, the proto-Greeks seem
to have shared with Indo-Iranians a high regard for the bow that is not evident in
Keltic, Italic and Germanic societies.^82 Sauzeau cites the archer gods Apollo and
Artemis, and heroes such as Herakles and Odysseus, but he depends also on
linguistic evidence.
Whether Mycenaean warriors were equipped with composite bows or some
variation of self bows is debated. Helen Lorimer’s Homer and the Monuments
insisted that although the Minoans used the composite bow the Mycenaeans did
not. The weakness of that argument was shown by Wallace McLeod in his 1966
dissertation, but Lorimer’s views remain influential.^83 McLeod concluded that the
Mycenaean bow may have been either a composite bow or an “angular” bow: made,
that is, from a single stave of wood, but having a stiffened grip, or center, that
remains straight when the limbs are drawn forward. One argument that the
Mycenaeans used the composite bow relates to the possible use of horn in their
Militarism in Greece 193