The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

Adding to our confusion about chariot tactics in Late Hel-

ladic Greece is some ambiguity about archers in Mycenaean

warfare. It was once believed, because of the battle descriptions

in the Iliad, that the Mycenaeans did not use the bow in battle.

That belief has been undermined not only by the Linear B tab-

lets' references to large stores of arrowheads, 35 but also by rean-

alyses of artifacts that Schliemann found in the Mycenaean

has more often been interpreted as the armor of a charioteer than of an in-
fantryman. In Early Greek Armour and Weapons from the End of the Bronze Age
to 600 BC (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1964), A. M. Snodgrass
concluded that "such ponderous apparatus can only have been worn by
chariot-borne warriors, fighting actually in their chariots rather than merely
from them in the Homeric manner" (p. 35). Reviewing Snodgrass's book in
Antiquity 42 (1968): 69, Sylvia Benton agreed: "Fancy trying to walk under
the Greek sun in a red-hot panoply of that weight. Surely it would only
have been worn in a chariot." Crouwel disagrees, contending that no one
enclosed in such armor could have stretched a bow or thrown a spear from a
chariot. Noting that a man wearing the Dendra corselet would not have
needed a shield, Crouwel concludes (p. 127) that the warrior "would have
had both hands free to handle his weapons. At the same time, his mobility
on the ground would have been minimal, and he would surely have needed
a vehicle to convey him any distance once he was armed. The development
of this type of body-armour presupposes the availability of chariots, and
may even have given a new impetus to their military use. The vehicles
would then have functioned as carriers to and from the battlefield." I find it
much more credible that the Dendra corselet was worn by one of the chariot
crew, whether the fighter or the driver. The Nuzi charioteers seem to have
managed adequately in their twelve-pound corselets. That Homer himself
knew far less about chariotry than had his remote predecessors is indicated
by the fossilized formulas for chariots in the Iliad; on these see Page, History
and the Homeric Iliad, 280^63.

35. For the relevant tablets, along with chests of arrowheads (and
    the carbonized debris of arrow shafts) found at Knossos, see Sir Arthur Ev-
    ans, The Palace of Minos, vol. 4, pt. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1935), 836ff.
    These Knossos "Armoury" tablets referred to enormous lots of arrows
    (6,010 in one lot, 2,630 in another), and the chests corroborated the fig-
    ures. According to Evans (p. 837), "there seems to be some probability that
    these 'Armoury' chests were made to contain 10,000 arrows." We are ob-
    viously dealing here with archers who were something other than hunters or
    sportsmen.