Grave stelae) show chariots in military action of any kind. For that, we must
therefore look elsewhere. In the Near East, as is well known from textual and
pictorial evidence, the chariot warrior was an archer. The same can be said for
India, as the hymns from the Rig Veda show so clearly. For the Eurasian steppe
of course we have no such literary evidence, but the discovery of bow fragments
and of arrowheads show that here too archers armed with composite bows rode
in the chariots. In southern Caucasia, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the chariot
buried at Verin Naver carried a quiver stocked with sixty arrows. It is hardly a
surprise, finally, that Chinese chariots also carried archers:
As in Indian and West Asian chariot battles, the prime weapon of attack and
defence was the arrow fired from a composite bow. Its power, we are told,
was enough ‘to pierce seven layers of armour’. Everything possible was done
by the arrowsmith to ensure ease of firing and trueness of flight.^70Grisly evidence for the chariot archer in China comes from the “chariot pits”
that were adjacent to the large tombs of Shang rulers. Several of the pits contained,
in addition to the chariot, the skeletons not only of the horses but also of the three
crewmen who were ritually slain to accompany their ruler into the Underworld.
In M20, the most informative of the pits, the skeleton in the middle was the driver
and the skeleton to his right was probably a shield bearer, although nothing of the
shield remains. The figure to the left, as detailed by Edward Shaughnessy, “was
armed with a bow and arrows, a bronze knife and a whetstone. This corresponds
exactly to descriptions in texts from later periods of the composition of a chariot
team.”^71
Like their counterparts everywhere else in Eurasia, the Mycenaeans should be
assumed to have used their chariots as mobile firing platforms for archers.^72 Such
an assumption, however, meets much resistance. Until the 1950s, despite the
number of arrowheads that had already been discovered in LH contexts,
archaeologists were quite certain—such was the authority of the Iliad—that
although the bow may have been important to Minoans the Mycenaeans made
little or no use of it in combat.^73 The stone arrowheads from the Shaft Graves
were assumed to have been intended for hunting, the bronze arrowheads from
Knossos were assumed to have been used by Minoans, and the hundreds of
arrowheads from Pylos were supposed to have been made and used by Minoans
who had moved to the Greek mainland after Knossos was destroyed.
Although these assumptions were upended by Ventris’ demonstration that the
Linear B tablets were written in an early form of Greek, the bow still has not
received the attention it deserves. My attempts to place archers on Mycenaean
chariots were quickly met by the considerable authority of Jan Driessen:
Although Drews pays little attention to the Homeric warrior, it seems obvious
that the latter was a man of status, especially capable of man-to-man fighting,
and thus not merely an archer, a man of lesser reputation and of secondary
status as was for instance the case in Egypt. One of the arguments used byMilitarism in Greece 191