crew of twenty-four rowers. It is approximately 20 m long, can carry a cargo of
17 tons, and moves at slightly more than 6 knots per hour.^122 The ship that wrecked
off Uluburun must have been somewhat larger than Min of the Desert, because
the cargo that has survived weighs approximately 20 tons.
We have some evidence for the general importance of ships on the coast of
Greece at the beginning of the Mycenaean period. Most obvious are the coastal
location of key sites, and the wealth of imported objects buried in early LH tombs.^123
Although Egyptian and Levantine imports may well have been brought to Greece
by Cretan ships, it appears that Mycenaean ships plied the Mediterranean very
soon after the Mycenaean period began.^124 A few representations hint at the
importance of ships for the early Mycenaeans. The Flotilla Frieze fresco at
Akrotiri is well known, but not all specialists agree that the ships in the flotilla
are Mycenaean. Earlier and less controversial evidence comes from what remains
of a tomb (possibly a tholos tomb) at the village of Dramesi, on the coast of Boiotia
and usually identified as the Homeric Hyria. Dramesi lies an hour’s walk southeast
of Aulis, famous as the port from which the ships in Homer’s catalogue departed
for Troy. A rectangular stone pillar that stood in the Dramesi tomb was incised
with crude images of five long ships, each powered by multiple rowers. Although
the tomb was plundered, the pottery that the robbers passed over dates the tomb
shortly before 1600 BCon the historical chronology.^125
The pentekonter or the ordinary troop-ship would not have carried horses, and
the oversea transport of horses in the second millennium BCmust have been an
ordeal. Horses are frightened when the surface on which they stand begins to sway
or to heave, and in their fear they tend to kick, to bite and to rear. In order to
prevent a horse from injuring itself or other horses, each horse on board a ship
needs to be closely stalled or boxed in. As a further precaution, the handler might
protect a horse’s rear legs with wrappings, to prevent it from breaking one of them
in a frenzied kick against its stall.^126
Despite the difficulties, horses in the second millennium BCmust often have been
transported on ships. Even bringing horses across a river—the Volga, for example,
or the Nile—required putting them on a ship. This is a topic on which our
information is minimal and scholarly debate has not yet begun. Although Mary
Littauer and Joost Crouwel did not discuss the transportation problem they
assumed that at the end of the MH period horses and chariots came to Greece by
sea, and their assumption must be correct.^127 The horses at Mitrou, Marathon and
the coast of the Argolic bay, as well as those attested in the earliest levels of Troy
VI, presumably got there by ship. We must assume that if Attarissiya did indeed
have 100 chariots when he encroached upon the Hittite Empire he must have
shipped at least 200 horses across the Aegean. Few chariot horses weighed as much
as half a ton, and a ship with a cargo capacity of 7 or 8 tons would have been able
to carry five or six chariot teams. The several hundred horses available to the
Knossos palace in LM III were necessarily brought to Crete by horse-transports,
just as were the horses on Late Bronze Age Cyprus. The bringing of horses to Crete
was apparently celebrated on a sealstone: at Knossos, in a LM II context, Arthur
Evans found a seal impression of a gigantic horse aboard a many-oared ship.^128
Militarism in Greece 203