The Coming of the Greekswest wing of the palace, in what has inevitably been called
"The Room of the Chariot Tablets." One Mycenologist has es-
timated that the Knossos palace had available a thousand pairs
of wheels, and well over three hundred chariot bodies. 25 Even
John Chadwick, who believes that one class of the Chariot Tab-
lets is merely a batch of scribal exercises (why the lords of the
palace would have found such tablets valuable enough to keep
is not clear), estimates that the Greek masters of Knossos had
at least two hundred chariots at their disposal. 26 At Pylos, Ble-
gen found the "wheel tablets" but not the tablets totaling the
complete chariots. The "wheel tablets" indicate that the palace
at Pylos had on hand "at least two hundred pairs of wheels, and
no doubt the figure was very much larger." 27
Although there can be no denying that chariots were at the
heart of Late Helladic armies, it unfortunately must be admit-
ted that we do not know how the chariots were used. The de-
tails of chariot warfare in Mycenaean Greece (as in most lands
other than Egypt) are not documented and are therefore a mat-
ter of considerable controversy among specialists. As we have
seen, an occasional LH cylinder seal or ring depicts an archer or
a spearman in a chariot, but chariot warfare does not appear in
these miniature scenes. Chariots are a commonplace in the Il-
iad, but they do little more than carry the heroes to and from
the battlefield. In one of the few passages that describes fight-
ing from a chariot (Iliad 8.n8ff.), Diomedes and Nestor in
one chariot bear down upon Hector and Eniopeus in another,
and from his chariot Diomedes hurls a javelin at Hector (he
misses Hector, but kills Eniopeus). Thus, one might sup-
- M. Lejeune, "La civilization mycenienne et la guerre," in Pro-
blems de la Guerre en Grece Ancienne, ed. J.-P. Vernant (Paris: Mouton,
1968), 49. - J. Chadwick, "The Organization of the Mycenaean Archives,"
in Studia Mycenaea. Proceedings of the Mycenaean Symposium, Brno, ed. A. Bar-
tonek (Brno: Universitas Purkyniana Brunensis, 1968), 17; Crouwel, Char-
iots, 127-28, does not find Chadwick's characterization persuasive. - Greenhalgh, Early Greek Warfare, n.
164