of these funerals would have had no doubt about the social consequences of the
tamed horse’s arrival in Greece.
Bridle bits came to Greece at the same time they came to Transylvania, but not
as many have been found in Greece as may have been expected. It is unfortunate,
for example, that no horse harness has been published from the burial of the draft
team in the Marathon tholos. Four bronze bits found in LH contexts (along with
dozens of metal bits from Iron Age Greece and Cyprus) were published by Helga
Donder in 1980, and a year later Crouwel published a more complete catalogue
of twelve bronze bits from Mycenaean Greece.^44 Most recently, a jointed bronze
snaffle was found at Thebes.^45 The bronze bits used in the Aegean were quite similar
to those used in the Near East: some with straight bar mouthpieces, and some with
jointed canons. Bronze bits of either type, however, seem to have been fairly late
in coming to the Aegean, and must have been far outnumbered by bits made from
organic material. Because none of the bronze bits seems to antedate the LH IIIB
period, it appears that from the seventeenth century BCinto the thirteenth most
chariot horses in Greece were controlled with bone or horn cheekpieces, and with
leather or cord mouthpieces. Even in the LH IIIB period, as Crouwel pointed out,
the Linear B tablets imply that many of the cheekpieces dispensed from palace
workshops were being made from horn.^46 In this respect, therefore, the Aegean
was very different from the Near East, where (except in Hatti) bronze bits were
the norm all through the Late Bronze Age. Like their contemporaries in temperate
Europe and the Eurasian steppe, chariot drivers in Greece must have been satisfied
with the less rigid control that organic bits provided.
The earliest cheekpieces found in Greece are organic disks (Scheibenknebel),
usually with studs on their inner face. These cheekpieces were not included in
Donder’s and Crouwel’s catalogues. For a long time after Schliemann’s discovery
of four of these in Shaft Grave IV nobody knew what these strange little disks
were (guesses ranged from pot covers to helmet knobs). In 1964 Aleksandr
Leskov, in a very short article (in Russian), made his first major contribution to
archaeology: discussing two bone disks found at Trakhtemyriv, on the Dnieper
about 100 km downstream from Kiev, and noting their similarity to the four bone
disks from Shaft Grave IV, Leskov proposed that they were cheekpieces for a
horse’s bridle.^47 Other Soviet scholars found the idea persuasive as more such disks
were found, although decisive confirmation did not come until Nikolai Vinogradov
found two of the disks alongside each of two horse skulls in a Bronze Age burial
at Krivoe Ozero. Western scholars began to accept the identification of the disks
as cheekpieces when Hans-Georg Hüttel and Stuart Piggott—separately—
presented the case.^48
Most of the Mycenaean Scheibenknebel have now been described and classified
by Elena Kuz’mina and have also been presented—along with excellent
drawings—by Silvia Penner.^49 The four Scheibenknebel from Shaft Grave IV were
made from bone and—except for their elaborate decoration—are exactly parallel
to cheekpieces found along the southern Urals and also at Kamenka in eastern
Crimea. In addition to the four from Shaft Grave IV, two bone Scheibenknebel
were found at Dendra. Especially impressive are ivory Scheibenknebel. Two of
184 Militarism in Greece