those plates had been sewn to clothes covering the chest or the thighs, but some
had evidently been sewn to headgear. In the Neolithic period the plates were
presumably decorative, with no military purpose. David Anthony describes the
grave of a child at Mariupol: “he or she (sex is indeterminate in immature
skeletons) wore forty-one boar’s-tusk plaques, as well as a cap armored with eleven
whole boars’ tusks, and was profusely ornamented with strings of shell and bone
beads.”^107 The Mariupol cemetery dates to the fifth millennium BC, and it is very
unlikely that the vogue of warriors in Late Helladic Greece wearing boar’s-tusk
helmets owed anything to the Dnieper-Donets steppe. It is possible, however, that
in the Bronze Age such helmets had occasionally been created as impressive
headgear in lands where wild boars were hunted. But such possible experiments
led to no continuous tradition.
A less costly alternative to the boar’s-tusk helmet was eventually produced: the
conical bronze helmet. The earliest securely dated bronze helmet from anywhere
comes from a warrior grave at Knossos and dates to the LM II period, late in the
fifteenth century BC. The bronze helmet was clearly less prestigious than the boar’s-
tusk helmet: another conical bronze helmet, possibly earlier than the one from
Knossos, is decorated with incisions that simulate boar’s-tusk plates. This helmet,
almost certainly from the Aegean, has only recently been published, and because
it was an illicit or a chance find its date is problematic.^108 Although the first conical
bronze helmets were evidently made in the Aegean, by the fourteenth century BC
they were also prized in other lands newly dominated by a military class. Helmets
very similar to the one from Knossos have been found in northern Europe and
especially in the Carpathian basin.^109 Most interesting is a helmet that was included
in a hoard found in 1847 at the Polish village of Biecz. This village lies near the
left bank of the lower Oder, along the German-Polish border and about 90 miles
from the Baltic sea, and is not to be confused with the city of Biecz in southeastern
Poland. After the Knossos helmet was discovered Hugh Hencken pointed out its
striking similarity to the Biecz helmet,^110 and it is possible that the Biecz helmet
came from the Aegean in exchange for amber. The distribution of the conical
helmets, each topped by a spool-shaped knob (to which a plume was very likely
attached), is an index of how connected were the Aegean, the Carpathian basin,
and the far north of Europe in the middle centuries of the second millennium BC.^111
In contrast, western Europe seems to have lain outside the militarized area. Of
the 120 bronze helmets found in Europe only one has come to light in central or
western France and another in the Iberian peninsula.^112
Shields were as important as helmets in the militarizing of the Greek mainland.
Here we are dependent on representations, because in Late Helladic Greece
shields were made of organic material and have not survived. The “Sea Battle
Fresco” from Thera shows each warrior carrying a tower shield: one or more
oxhides stretched over a wooden frame, the shield protecting the warrior from his
shoulders to his knees. An inlaid dagger from Shaft Grave IV shows two men
carrying tower shields and two others carrying the even larger figure-of-eight
shields. At Iliad7.220–223 the shield carried by Telamonian Ajax is described
as having seven plies of oxhide and an eighth of bronze, a shield so heavy that
200 Militarism in Greece