The beginning of militarism in Greece
A hundred years ago, in the wake of Evans’ discovery of the “Minoan” culture at Knossos, several archaeologists suggested that “the Greeks” did not arrive in Greece until after the great palaces had been built on Crete. Wilhelm Dorpfeld believed that the culture found on Crete was the work of Carians, and that only with the Shaft Graves at Mycenae could one begin to see a Greek presence in the Aegean.1 Studying the origins of Greek mythology, Martin Nilsson seconded the archaeologists’ suggestion and placed “the coming of the Greeks” at the end of the Middle Helladic period.2 In 1970 William Wyatt advanced a much more robust argument, based on linguistics: the people whose language evolved into Greek could hardly have arrived in Greece before the end of the Middle Helladic period, because they brought with them their Indo-European terminology for chariots and their components.3 Persuaded that this conclusion was correct, and fortified by the recent (in 1988) identification of the “mysterious” bone objects from Shaft Grave IV as cheekpieces for organic bits,41 argued that the newcomers were able to take over parts of Greece precisely because they had military chariots, chariots having introduced a new kind of warfare (although how new it was, I greatly underestimated).
Since the late 1920s the majority view among archaeologists has been that “the Greeks” arrived in Greece no later than the end of EH III and probably well before that, in either case long before chariot warfare began. For a long time the preferred date for “the coming of the Greeks,” was ca. 1900 bc, the beginning of the Middle Helladic period, because it seemed that Minyan ware first appeared at that time. When it became clear that the Minyan ware of the MH period had evolved from pottery in use during the EH III period, “the coming of the Greeks” was raised to ca. 2200 bc, the transition from EH II to EH III. Widespread destruction at the end of EH II was proposed by John Caskey, who in the 1950s had found it (along with antecedents of Minyan ware) at Lerna, and Caskey associated the destruction with the arrival of a new population. When a closer examination of the EH II/III transition concluded that destruction at the end of EH II was visible at relatively few sites, the case for “the coming of the Greeks” ca. 2200 bc was weakened.5 In response, an argument was made—on other archaeological grounds—that the Greeks arrived in Greece almost 1000 years earlier, at the beginning of EH I.6
The various arguments from pottery and artifactual innovations do not confront the single linguistic argument, which now is considerably stronger than it was when
Wyatt first formulated it. Because the Greek language inherited PIE terms for a vehicle (oxo^), for a wheel (кпкЯо^), for an axle (a^rov), and for a yoke (Zuyov), the speakers of what became the Greek language must have known the wheeled vehicle when they arrived in Greece, and thereafter both the various objects and the terms used to denote them must have been “constantly and continuously known” to the speakers of that language.7 It is true, as critics objected, that the vehicular terms are not specific to chariots and could have been applied to wheeled vehicles of any kind. As Joost Crouwel’s exhaustive review of the evidence makes very clear, however, it is also true that nowhere in Greece—just as nowhere in Egypt, and nowhere in Italy—is there evidence for wheeled vehicles of any kind before the seventeenth century bc, when chariots suddenly appeared.8 In the Near East, on the steppe, and in temperate Europe disk-wheeled wagons and carts were in use already in the last centuries of the fourth millennium bc. Another millennium and a half seem to have passed before wheeled vehicles finally were brought— in the form of chariots—to Egypt, to Italy and to Greece. In the wider Aegean we have a single earlier representation of a wheeled vehicle: the clay model of a wagon found at Palaikastro, in eastern Crete, and dated roughly in the MM I period.9 The absence of evidence for wheeled vehicles on the Greek mainland prior to ca. 1600 BC is in sharp contrast not only to the steppe, where so many wagons have been found under Early and Middle Bronze Age kurgans, but also to temperate Europe. In the Carpathian basin alone dozens of clay models of wagons have been found in Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age contexts.10
Despite the linguistic argument, or perhaps because it has not been stated clearly enough, the belief persists that what was to become the Greek language came unobtrusively to Greece no later than the EH period. Most Aegean archaeologists still defend that position, resisting any intrusion by outsiders, but the assault builds. Silvia Penner has made a good case that toward the end of the MH period charioteers from the steppe conquered parts of Greece, and Anthony Harding— looking closely at the horse harness—has taken a long step toward the same conclusion. Most recently the excavations at Mitrou have given more evidence of a military (and charioteering) elite in Greece in the LH I period.11 In this chapter I will make an argument—more compelling, I hope, than the one I made 30 years ago—that at the beginning of the Shaft Grave period a military force equipped with chariots came from a faraway land and took over the most attractive parts of Greece.
