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

The Coming of the Greeks

tice began during the Dark Age. 31 It may be, then, that for at

least the first century or two of the Dark Age, the chariot had

served very much as the riding horse served in the Archaic pe-

riod.

That possibility, however, does not help us to visualize how

the chariot was used in Greece when the chariot was still mil-

itarily effective—before the end of the LH IIIB period. As

Greenhalgh has argued, the Late Helladic chariot was necessar-

ily much more than a taxi. The alternative view—that in the

Late Helladic period chariots were indeed nothing more than

battle-taxis—appeals for support to the bronze corselet discov-

ered at Dendra, in the Argolid, in 1960 (the corselet was found

in a tomb that dates from shortly before 1400 B.C.). According

to this argument, the corselet is so bulky and restrictive—it

consists of fifteen pieces of plate armor—that an infantryman

encased in it would have needed to be hauled to the scene of

the battle, and deposited in front of the enemy, by a chariot.

One might object, however, that the corselets known from the

Near East were regularly worn by chariot personnel, not by

men who fought on foot, 32 and the same seems to have been

true in the Aegean. 33 And one would also suppose that, had

transport been their objective, the Mycenaeans would have de-

vised more commodious personnel carriers, capable of deliver-

ing not just a solitary warrior but an entire platoon to the crit-

ical point of the battle. 34

31. The third chapter (pp. 40-62) of Greenhalgh's Early Greek
    Warfare makes the argument that the hippeis of the later Dark Age were
    horse-owning infantrymen, and the fifth and sixth chapters (pp. 84—145)
    focus on the "mounted infantry" of the Archaic Period.


32. The Nuzi corselets were not plate armor, but were covered with
    bronze scales. Nevertheless, one would suppose that the function of the cor-
    selet was the same in Greece as it was in Nuzi ca. 1400 B.C. On the paral-
    lels between the Nuzi helmets and Mycenaean helmets, see Kendall, "The
    Helmets of the Warriors at Nuzi," 224-3 1 •


33. The Linear B tablets from Knossos record the issue of numerous
    corselets, apparently to chariot crews. See Crouwel, Chariots, 124—25.


34. The Dendra corselet has been a problem since its discovery, but

166