The Coming of the Greeks
The chariots in which the charioteers of Mycenae delighted
were of the same kind that swept the world from Egypt to India
at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, and it is as likely as
such things can be that Greece was taken over by charioteering
invaders ca. 1600 B.C. Possession of horses and chariots seems
to have been not an incidental, but a fundamental feature of
Shaft Grave Mycenae, enabling the Mycenaeans to do whatever
else they did. In retrospect, it appears that the coming of the
charioteers was an event fraught with no less significance for
Greece than for India. The chariot, as William Wyatt has ob-
served, is sufficient evidence that it was ca. 1600 B.C. that a
form of Proto-Indo-European came to Greece. 4 It was then that
Greek history began.
Testimony to the Mycenaean lords' charioteering comes
from the well-known stelai that stood on the grave circles, each
stele marking a single burial. 5 Two sculptured stelai were
- Wyatt, "The Indo-Europeanization of Greece." See especially his
summary on page 107: "My conclusion is inextricably bound up with the
chariot: if a chariot, or evidence for a chariot, is found in Greece dating
from before 1600, then my argument will lead me to assume that the
Greeks can have arrived at that earlier date."
- Exactly where each of the eleven stelai found by Schliemann orig-
inally stood is not entirely clear, but most of those of importance to us came
from Grave v. The definitive publication of Grave Circle A is Georg Karo's
Die Schachtgraber von Mykenai, 2 vols. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1930 and
1933). The conventional dates for the graves of Grave Circle A range
through the sixteenth century B.C.: Graves n and vi are regarded as the ear-
liest (first half of the century), Graves IV and v are dated to the middle of
the century, and Graves I and ill ca. 1500 B.C. For a good description of
Grave Circles A and B, see Chapter iv ("The Shaft-Graves," 82—110) of
Emily Vermeule's Greece in the Bronze Age (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1964). Fritz Schachermeyr, "Streitwagen," thoroughly discussed the evi-
dence for chariots in Late Helladic Greece, but from an odd angle; his un-
conventional thesis in this article is that the Greeks (who by 1600 B.C., he
supposed, had been in Greece for several centuries) learned of the chariot
because some of them went to Egypt to participate in the native Egyptians'
revolt against the Hyksos. The definitive work on Mycenaean chariots is
now Joost Crouwel's Chariots.
159
