manufacture. Ideograms on Linear B tablets of the Mc class at Knossos show that
the palace acquired goat horns, and because these tablets came from the palace’s
“Armoury” one obvious purpose for the horns would be to face a composite bow.^84
Other arguments that the Mycenaeans knew the composite bow are literary. In
the eighth century BCHomer and his audience had a vague notion of how a
composite bow was made. Describing the origin of Pandaros’ well-polished bow,
Homer told (Iliad4. 105–111) how Pandaros killed a wild goat and took the horns,
which were sixteen palms long, to a craftsman skilled in working with horn. The
story of the stringing of the bow, in Odyssey21, seems to have originated in a
society familiar with composite bows: the stringing of a composite bow is far more
difficult than the stringing of a self bow.^85
Mycenaean archers were probably not above dipping their arrows into poison.
Obviously we have no archaeological or documentary evidence for the practice,
but the literary and linguistic evidence is considerable. Homer and his audi -
ence knew about poisoned arrows. At Odyssey1.260–262, the poet has Taphian
Mentes (Athena in disguise) recalling that as a lad he first met Odysseus when
the hero had journeyed to Ephyre in order to get from King Ilos some “man-killing
poison” with which to smear his arrowheads. Fearing the gods, Ilos refused to
give Odysseus the poison, so Odysseus next betook himself to the palace of
Anchialos, Mentes’ father and king of the Taphians, and Anchialos gave Odysseus
the poison that he sought. Myths told of Herakles killing the Stymphalian
Birds with poisoned arrows, and of Apollo spreading plague with poisoned darts.
On the linguistic side, the Greek words for bow and arrow were associated with
poison. The Greek noun ἰός(cognate with Sanskrit iṣu-and Avestan išu-i) meant
both “arrow” and “poison.”^86 The Greek τόξον also had connotations of poison.
The adjective τοξικόν went directly into Latin as the noun toxicum(“a poison into
which arrows were dipped”), whence the French toxiqueand the English “toxic.”
Poisoned arrows would have been meant for combat, and not for hunting.
That the bow was carried in Greece by the first military men, at the end of the
Middle Helladic and the beginning of the Mycenaean period, is very clear. In Shaft
Grave VI at Mycenae was the stone tool that Buchholz identified as a scraper or
smoother of arrow shafts. The graves also yielded an array of arrowheads, all made
from flint, obsidian or other stones. Shaft Grave IV yielded thirty-eight arrowheads
(twenty-six of flint, and twelve of obsidian),^87 enough to have filled a quiver
for an archer to take to the Underworld. Still earlier are the arrowheads from
Grave Circle B. Mylonas found seventeen flint arrowheads in grave Delta, and in
Lambda twenty-four of flint and twenty of obsidian.^88 As mentioned above, the
two representations of archers that Lorimer identified as Mycenaean came from
Shaft Grave IV. Bows and arrows had been known in Greece since the Paleolithic
period, but toward the end of the MH period their importance made a quantum
leap. The men buried in the warrior graves at Kolonna (end of MH II) and Thebes
(end of MH III), like many of the men buried in the Grave Circles at Mycenae,
went to the Underworld with arrows and therefore surely with a bow no less
impressive than their other weapons.
194 Militarism in Greece