The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

found at Grave Circle B and eleven at Grave Circle A. Unfor-

tunately, the scenes on only six stelai can be confidently recon-

structed. On five of the six (Stelai i, iv, V, vni, and ix), a

charioteer is depicted. 6 The grave-circle reliefs are crude and

primitive (they are among the earliest preserved portrayals of

the chariot), but perhaps for that very reason they testify that

for the men buried beneath the stelai nothing in life had been

more important than charioteering. Nor should there be any

doubt that the chariot was important to them because it helped

them to kill. Although Mylonas argued that the stelai portray

chariot racers, 7 it now appears that all six of the intelligible

stelai portray combat: men fighting lions, or men fighting

against other men. 8

The stelai are not the only evidence for charioteering found

in Grave Circle A. A gold ring found in Shaft Grave iv carries

an engraving of a chariot, pulled by horses at full gallop; in the

chariot are two men, one of them an archer taking aim at a stag

(see Fig. 8). 9 Fully as interesting, although not so immediately

obvious, are four small bone objects from Grave IV. These dis-

coid objects (each with three studs protruding from one face)

seem to comprise two pairs and were identified as the cheek

pieces of horse bits in a 1964 article. 10 Although the identifi-

cation was not immediately accepted, it now seems secure. 11

6. See Crouwel, Chariots, plates 35—39.


7. G. Mylonas, "The Figured Mycenaean Stelai," A/A 55 (1951):
   134—47, and Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
   Press, 1966), 93ff.


8. Crouwel, Chariots, i19—20, makes the argument against Mylo-
   nas's interpretation. From Crouwel's plate 37, for example, it is evident
   that what Mylonas called the "rocky landscape" of a race course is in fact
   the prone and helmeted body of a fallen enemy. And on two other stelai,
   Mylonas's "umpires" turn out to be armed, and one "appears to be aiming
   a spear at the chariot."


9. Ibid., plate 10 (the scene is also used as a cover illustration for
   Crouwel's book); Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments, fig. 38 (p. 311).


10. A. M. Leskov, "The Earliest Antler Psalia from Trakhtemi-
    rova," Sov. Arkh (1964, i), 299-303 (in Russian).
    n. Piggott, Earliest Wheeled Transport, 100—101. Although Lit-

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