The Coming of the Greeksoughly unremarkable. Then, ca. 1600 B.C. the place was cho-
sen to serve as a fortress-capital. The choice was evidently based
on the strategic advantages of the site, remarked upon by ob-
servers from Schliemann to the present: it commands the Ar-
give plain as well as the routes from the plain to the Isthmus
of Corinth. Eventually, the place required fortification walls,
but the wisdom of the charioteers' choice is manifested in the
fact that for four hundred years, without discernible interrup-
tion, the site provided security for rulers of the Mycenaean
kingdom.
The kind of event that occurred in the Argolid ca. 1600 B.C.
fits squarely within the category of takeovers described in the
preceding chapter. Just as charioteers appropriated thrones and
states throughout the East, so PiE-speaking charioteers invaded
Greece and took over for exploitation the population they
found there. Although circumstances must have varied consid-
erably from one land to another, the rudiments of the pattern
were apparently similar in the takeover of northwestern India
by the Aryans, of southern Mesopotamia by the Kassites, of
Egypt by the hyksos, of Mitanni by Aryans, and of many small
Levantine states by Aryan and Hurrian maryannu. All of the
takeovers occurred within a few generations after the perfec-
tion, around the middle of the seventeenth century B.C., of
chariot warfare and the demonstration of its possibilities by
Hattusilis I and by the hyksos who set themselves up in Egypt.
It has occasionally been argued, and more often assumed,
that the first shaft-grave charioteers were natives of Greece, de-
scended from Greeks who had been in the Aegean since ca.
1900 B.C. In a naive form, this argument supposes that chariot
warfare evolved in Greece itself. That possibility is, of course,
excluded by the evidence (most fully and recently presented by
Littauer and Crouwel in Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in
the Ancient Near East) that the light chariot was known in cen-
tral Anatolia and Syria at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury B.C., and by the fact that to date we have no archaeolog-
ical evidence for wheeled vehicles of any kind in Early or
172