The Coming of the GreeksMiddle Helladic Greece.4<" Most important of all is the fact
(long acknowledged by specialists) that the chariots of Late
Helladic Greece are in all essentials parallel to those of the Near
East. Wiesner's thesis—that Indo-Europeans from the north
brought the chariot simultaneously to Greece and to the Near
East early in the sixteenth century—has been rendered unten-
able by the evidence that the horse-drawn chariot was known
in the Near East well before that time. As both Schachermeyr
and Crouwel have plainly said, the chariots used by the first
shaft-grave princes came to Greece from the east.
The manner of their coming, however, is variously under-
stood. Thus A. W. Persson and Fritz Schachermeyr proposed
that Greek soldiers of fortune went from the Aegean to Egypt
early in the sixteenth century B.C. to assist the Egyptians in
expelling the Hyksos. It was in Egypt, Persson and Schacher-
meyr believed, that these Greeks were introduced to chariot
warfare, and after their mission in Egypt was accomplished,
they came back to Greece and built chariots for themselves and
their countrymen. 46 Frank Stubbings put forward a variant of
- Crouwel, Chariots, 54—58. From the Bronze Age Aegean only
one representation of a wheeled vehicle other than a chariot has come to
light: a terracotta model of a wagon, dating to the early second millen-
nium, was found at Palaikastro in Crete. Despite the archaeological argu-
mentum e silentio, however, the pre-Greek inhabitants of Greece undoubtedly
did build a modest number of carts and wagons. Wyatt, "The Indo-Euro-
peanization of Greece," 104—106, notes that although the Greeks' technical
terms for chariot elements came from Indo-European roots, their wagon no-
menclature was non-Indo-European. The implication is that although the
first Greeks in Greece built their own chariots, they depended upon the in-
digenous population for wagons and utilitarian carts. These could not have
been numerous, since most of Greece was mountainous and deficient in
large hardwood trees. As Crouwel notes, the use of wheeled transport in
Greece was relatively limited until very modern times, and one may assume
that throughout antiquity, wagons and carts were far rarer in Greece than
they were in most of Eurasia. - The thesis was proposed by A. W. Persson, New Tombs at Den-
dra near Midea (Lund: Gleerup, 1942), 178—96, and is at the heart of
Schachermeyr's "Streitwagen." Although many of Schachermeyr's observa-