The Coming of the Greekspose—despite the fact that it is uncommonly difficult to hurl
anything while standing flat-footed in a moving vehicle—that
in Mycenaean Greece the chariot fighter relied mainly on his
throwing-spears or javelins. But there are other possibilities.
Fritz Schachermeyr reasonably assumed that chariot warfare in
the Aegean paralleled what is known for New Kingdom Egypt
(and for most of the East): the pharaoh's chariot fighters were
archers, armed with the composite bow. 28 It has also been sug-
gested that in LH Greece the chariot fighters relied primarily
on thrusting-spears (their chariots would have charged in
massed formations). 29
Knowledgeable scholars have also periodically proposed that
in Heroic Greece the chariot was indeed mostly a conveyance,
exactly as Homer describes it, used to transport spearmen on
and off the battlefield. 30 This hypothesis may contain a partial
truth. It may very well be that toward the end of the second
millennium, by which time new styles of fighting (especially,
perhaps, the transition from thrusting-spears to throwing-
spears) were making chariotry obsolete, the chariot was little
more than a prestige vehicle in which a basileus might ride to
and from the battlefield. P.A.L. Greenhalgh has shown very
clearly that in Archaic Greece noblemen regularly rode horses
to the battlefield, where they would dismount and join their
poorer comrades as foot soldiers, and has argued that this prac-
- Schachermeyr, "Streitwagen," nowhere stated how he imagined
the Greeks fighting in their chariots, but his thesis—that the Greeks
learned chariot warfare in Egypt—makes bowmen of them. - Greenhalgh, Early Greek Warfare, 7-18; Greenhalgh assumes
that the Hittites used chariots in the same fashion. One might object, how-
ever, that the evidence on Hittite chariot tactics is so limited that it does
not provide a very solid analogy. - J. K. Anderson, "Homeric, British and Cyrenaic Chariots,"
A/A 69 (1965): 349-52; M. Littauer, "The Military Use of Chariots in the
Aegean in the Late Bronze Age," AJA 76 (1972): 145—57; Anderson,
"Greek Chariot-Borne and Mounted Infantry," A/A 79 (1975): 175-87;
Crouwel, Chariots, 126—27.