in Greece. In addition we have a considerable body of circumstantial evidence,
some of it historical and more of it linguistic, pointing in the same direction. The
expedition that came to Greece, I believe, was probably launched from the lower
Rioni (Phasis) river in Colchis, by men who came from across the Likhi range.
Initially, we must note the limitations of archaeology in southern Caucasia.
In comparison to Egypt, the Levant, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, relatively little
archaeological work was done in southern Caucasia during the 70 years that
followed the First World War. As part of the U.S.S.R. it was not open to western
archaeologists, the Soviet authorities did not often prioritize excavators—Boris
Kuftin and Boris Piotrovsky were shining exceptions—who wished to work in
the southern Caucasian republics, and what was found there was not readily
communicated to scholars outside the U.S.S.R. Since 1990 Georgian and Armenian
archaeologists have begun to close the gap. As Adam Smith has observed,
however, southern Caucasia is still a “marginal” area and is strikingly absent from
our histories of the ancient Near East.^9
The archaeological evidence tying Mycenaean Greece to southern Caucasia
comes conspicuously from metalwork: rapiers, spearheads and vessels. Very few
bronze swords—and none so early as 1600 BC—have been found on the steppe,
and this absence contrasts sharply with the prominence of swords in Mycenaean
Greece.^10 In southern Caucasia, as Mikheil Abramishvili has pointed out and as
we have seen in Chapter 3, at the very beginning of the second millennium BC
(and so before the first swords appeared in the Aegean) the long sword was a mark
of status for the men buried under kurgans. Typologically, the southern Caucasian
sword closely matched the Cretan sword: both were Type A rapiers, the organic
hilt—often covered with gold leaf—precariously attached to the blade with rivets.
The rapier connection between southern Caucasia and the Aegean evidently began
in the Middle Minoan II period, and suggests that a few chariot crews from southern
Caucasia may have been employed by the rulers of Crete. Aegean archaeologists
are well aware of significant parallels between the warrior burial at Kolonna, on
the island of Aigina, and the burials in the Shaft Graves. The men buried in these
graves may well have had a common background and profession.
The metal vessels from southern Caucasia with close resemblance to those from
the Aegean are prestige items. Although reckoning with Mycenaean influence in
southern Caucasia rather than the other way round, Stefan Hiller pointed out “an
impressive, still unpublished silver vessel from Kirovakan in Armenia which
represents a kind of over-dimensioned Vapheio cup.”^11 Kurgan burials in the
Trialeti have produced other parallels to Aegean artifacts. As described by Karen
Rubinson,
A group of extremely rich burials under mounds, the burials span a period
from about 2000 B.C.E. through about 1450 B.C.E. It is the burials belonging
to the last phase, Middle Bronze III, ca. 1600 to ca. 1450 B.C.E. from which
the materials with Aegean parallels are found. From Kuftin’s first publication
of his excavations, the weapons were considered of “Aegean” type, especially
the socketed spear-point from Burial XV.^12220 The question of origins