EIGHT
The Coming of the Greeks
Their bones show that the men buried in the shaft graves at
Mycenae were big men, taller and broader than the typical in-
habitants of Middle Helladic Greece.' The men were also char-
ioteers. That is an old fact, known since Schliemann found the
graves. What has only recently become apparent is that these
charioteers buried at Mycenae were among the pioneers of their
art. Gertrud Hermes supposed that Mursilis and his charioteers
made their expedition to Babylon more than three centuries
before the Shaft Grave Dynasty was established. We now know
that the occupants of Grave v must have been young men when
Mursilis sacked Babylon. And since the discovery of Grave Cir-
cle B (made by the Greek Archaeological Service in 1951, and
published in 1973), 2 it has become evident that it was within
the lifetime of the first shaft-grave princes that Hattusilis ruled
in Hatti and that effective chariot warfare began. 3
- Cf. O.T.P.K. Dickinson, "The Shaft Graves and Mycenaean
Origins," BICS 19(1972-1973): 146. - G. Mylonas, Grave Circle B at Mycenae (in Greek) (Athens: Greek
Archaeological Service, 1973). - Mylonas dated the majority of the tombs in Grave Circle B to the
MH period, but in his critical review of Mylonas's publication (fHS 96
[1976]: 236—37), Dickinson makes a persuasive case against Mylonas's
chronology. Most of the burials in Grave Circle B seem to belong to the
sixteenth century B.C., with only a very few (and these the poorest) dating
to the end of the seventeenth. Nevertheless, it does appear that the earliest
of the warrior graves in Circle B fall within a few decades of the origins of
effective chariot warfare.
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