Bows and arrows

The bow is the least publicized of the weapons prized in the new militarism on the Greek mainland. In Mycenaean art the bow seldom appears. It is true that scenes of violence in Mycenaean art usually included both opponents, and that inclusion of both an archer and the person or animal he was targeting demanded a considerable space (a wall of an Egyptian pharaoh’s mortuary temple served very well). The absence of the bow in Mycenaean art is nevertheless striking. Helen Lorimer, discounting the Silver Siege Rhyton as Minoan, found only two representations, both from Shaft Grave IV.

Surviving arrowheads indicate that impressive bows were placed alongside many of the men buried in the Shaft Graves, but no Mycenaean bow has survived to be uncovered by archaeologists. Self bows are entirely perishable, but a composite bow can leave durable traces. Although the wood core and the sinew on the outer face of a composite bow must have perished long ago, as must have the bow string (often made from the sciatic nerve of an ox or some other large animal), the inner facing of horn can survive. At Sintashta, as we have seen, pieces of horn have been identified by Russian archaeologists as the remains of composite bows. No such pieces have yet been noticed in LH tombs.

Although Mycenaean chariot kraters do not show archers riding on chariots, neither do the kraters or other LH media (with the probable exception of the Shaft

Grave stelae) show chariots in military action of any kind. For that, we must therefore look elsewhere. In the Near East, as is well known from textual and pictorial evidence, the chariot warrior was an archer. The same can be said for India, as the hymns from the Rig Veda show so clearly. For the Eurasian steppe of course we have no such literary evidence, but the discovery of bow fragments and of arrowheads show that here too archers armed with composite bows rode in the chariots. In southern Caucasia, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the chariot buried at Verin Naver carried a quiver stocked with sixty arrows. It is hardly a surprise, finally, that Chinese chariots also carried archers:

As in Indian and West Asian chariot battles, the prime weapon of attack and defence was the arrow fired from a composite bow. Its power, we are told, was enough ‘to pierce seven layers of armour’. Everything possible was done by the arrowsmith to ensure ease of firing and trueness of flight.⁷⁰

Grisly evidence for the chariot archer in China comes from the “chariot pits” that were adjacent to the large tombs of Shang rulers. Several of the pits contained, in addition to the chariot, the skeletons not only of the horses but also of the three crewmen who were ritually slain to accompany their ruler into the Underworld. In M20, the most informative of the pits, the skeleton in the middle was the driver and the skeleton to his right was probably a shield bearer, although nothing of the shield remains. The figure to the left, as detailed by Edward Shaughnessy, “was armed with a bow and arrows, a bronze knife and a whetstone. This corresponds exactly to descriptions in texts from later periods of the composition of a chariot team.”⁷¹

Like their counterparts everywhere else in Eurasia, the Mycenaeans should be assumed to have used their chariots as mobile firing platforms for archers.⁷² Such an assumption, however, meets much resistance. Until the 1950s, despite the number of arrowheads that had already been discovered in LH contexts, archaeologists were quite certain—such was the authority of the Iliad—that although the bow may have been important to Minoans the Mycenaeans made little or no use of it in combat.⁷³ The stone arrowheads from the Shaft Graves were assumed to have been intended for hunting, the bronze arrowheads from Knossos were assumed to have been used by Minoans, and the hundreds of arrowheads from Pylos were supposed to have been made and used by Minoans who had moved to the Greek mainland after Knossos was destroyed.

Although these assumptions were upended by Ventris’ demonstration that the Linear B tablets were written in an early form of Greek, the bow still has not received the attention it deserves. My attempts to place archers on Mycenaean chariots were quickly met by the considerable authority of Jan Driessen:

Although Drews pays little attention to the Homeric warrior, it seems obvious that the latter was a man of status, especially capable of man-to-man fighting, and thus not merely an archer, a man of lesser reputation and of secondary status as was for instance the case in Egypt. One of the arguments used by

Drews to associate chariotry and archery in Mycenaean times is the fact that quite a few Linear B tablets at Knossos were found together with tablets inventorying more than 8000 arrows as well as with many real bronze arrow heads in a building therefore called the Arsenal. Leaving aside the extremely rare iconographical association of chariots and archers, I will try to show in this paper, firstly, that the chariot tablets found in the Arsenal deal primarily with inventories of storage and less with distribution and that those records dealing with the allotment of chariots give no clue about this presumed archery association. Moreover, since it is assumed that those using the chariots, the warriors, were clad in bronze armour, it is unlikely that they could actually manipulate bows.⁷⁴

Driessen then goes on to accept Littauer and Crouwel’s thesis that the Knossos chariots were used to transport armored infantrymen. Proceeding as it does from the equation of “the Homeric warrior” with the warriors of LH Greece, the argument not surprisingly relegates the archer to a secondary status. It is surprising, however, that Egyptian archers are cited as examples. I suspect that every Egyptian pharaoh from Ahmose to Ramesses III, proud to be depicted in temple reliefs as shooting an arrow from a swiftly moving chariot, would have been apoplectic at being described as “merely an archer.” The argument also seems to imply that the thousands of arrows stored in the Knossos Arsenal were intended for archers on foot, although no evidence for companies of infantry archers has yet been found in LH Greece. The argument closes with the implication that although the bronze armor prevented a warrior in a chariot from drawing a bow it would not have prevented a warrior on the ground from wielding a sword or thrusting a spear.

Let us look yet again at the evidence for bows and arrows in Mycenaean Greece. Arrowheads, in contrast to bows, have been found in large numbers in LH contexts. They are too small and homely to attract the average museum visitor or weapons aficionado, but we are fortunate that the bronze arrowheads from the Greek mainland (although not from Crete) were catalogued and published by Robert Avila for the Prahistorische Bronzefunde series.⁷⁵ In the LH III period arrowheads were made of bronze, and were made by the thousands in workshops overseen by the palaces. Evans found several hundred in corpore arrowheads in his excavation of “the Palace of Minos.” At Pylos, in one room of the palace Carl Blegen came upon a store of 500 bronze arrowheads, all of them barbed and therefore meant for battle.

Some recognition of the importance of archery early in the Mycenaean period came in 1962 with a lengthy article by Hans-Gunter Buchholz. Buchholz showed that the grooved stone that Schliemann had found in Shaft Grave VI was designed to smooth the shafts of arrows, and Buchholz then went on to offer a basic classification of the arrowheads known from Greek prehistory, from the Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age.⁷⁶ Unfortunately, in the first two fascicles (1977 and 1980) on Mycenaean warfare that he wrote for the Archaeologia Homerica series Buchholz did not deal either with long-range weapons or with chariots. That huge gap was not repaired until 2010, when the third Kriegswesen fascicle appeared.

Here Buchholz presented in detail the archaeological and documentary evidence both for chariots and for bows and arrows in LH Greece.⁷⁷

The Linear B tablets have shown how involved the palaces were in the production of bows and arrows. A tablet from Knossos refers to enormous arsenals of arrowheads: 2630 in one batch and 6010 in another.⁷⁸ If every chariot archer carried sixty arrows in his quiver, the latter store would have equipped 100 chariots. Another tablet, this one from Pylos, records a requisition of approximately 51 kg of bronze and specifies that various officials and supervisors “will contribute bronze for ships and the points of arrows and spears.”⁷⁹ In his recent survey of the tablets’ contents Thomas Palaima called attention to “the Mycenaean military industrial complex” and calculated that the bronze in question was “sufficient for 33,000 arrowheads or 143 spearheads.”⁸⁰

More specialized than the making of arrows was the making of bows. These too were a high priority for the palaces, as Buchholz observed:

The manufacture of bows is of no concern to Homer. The Mycenaean palace authorities, however, reserved this industry, as we see from its inclusion in the Pylos archive, under state control. To-ko-so-wo, according to the decipherers, corresponds to toxo-worgoi, то^олтт [bow-makers]. The root word, to^ov, evidently a loan-word from Old Iranian, was already adopted into the Greek language in Mycenaean times, and thereafter passed into early Greek epic.⁸¹

At the beginning of the Mycenaean period, of course, there were not yet palaces to see to the manufacture of bows and arrows, and the shaft-smoother in Shaft Grave VI was necessary for the archer who was responsible for supplying his own weapons.

As Buchholz indicated, the Classical Greek word for “bow”—to^ov—is attested in Linear B tablets, although an older word for “bow”—Pt6q—was still used occasionally in the Iliad and Odyssey. The newer word, to^ov, seems to have a connection with Proto-Iranian. It has recently been argued by Pierre Sauzeau that although Greek warriors in the Iron Age disdained the bow, the proto-Greeks seem to have shared with Indo-Iranians a high regard for the bow that is not evident in Keltic, Italic and Germanic societies.⁸² Sauzeau cites the archer gods Apollo and Artemis, and heroes such as Herakles and Odysseus, but he depends also on linguistic evidence.

Whether Mycenaean warriors were equipped with composite bows or some variation of self bows is debated. Helen Lorimer’s Homer and the Monuments insisted that although the Minoans used the composite bow the Mycenaeans did not. The weakness of that argument was shown by Wallace McLeod in his 1966 dissertation, but Lorimer’s views remain influential.⁸³ McLeod concluded that the Mycenaean bow may have been either a composite bow or an “angular” bow: made, that is, from a single stave of wood, but having a stiffened grip, or center, that remains straight when the limbs are drawn forward. One argument that the Mycenaeans used the composite bow relates to the possible use of horn in their manufacture. Ideograms on Linear B tablets of the Mc class at Knossos show that the palace acquired goat horns, and because these tablets came from the palace’s “Armoury” one obvious purpose for the horns would be to face a composite bow.⁸⁴ Other arguments that the Mycenaeans knew the composite bow are literary. In the eighth century bc Homer and his audience had a vague notion of how a composite bow was made. Describing the origin of Pandaros’ well-polished bow, Homer told (Iliad 4. 105-111) how Pandaros killed a wild goat and took the horns, which were sixteen palms long, to a craftsman skilled in working with horn. The story of the stringing of the bow, in Odyssey 21, seems to have originated in a society familiar with composite bows: the stringing of a composite bow is far more difficult than the stringing of a self bow.⁸⁵

Mycenaean archers were probably not above dipping their arrows into poison. Obviously we have no archaeological or documentary evidence for the practice, but the literary and linguistic evidence is considerable. Homer and his audience knew about poisoned arrows. At Odyssey 1.260-262, the poet has Taphian Mentes (Athena in disguise) recalling that as a lad he first met Odysseus when the hero had journeyed to Ephyre in order to get from King Ilos some “man-killing poison” with which to smear his arrowheads. Fearing the gods, Ilos refused to give Odysseus the poison, so Odysseus next betook himself to the palace of Anchialos, Mentes’ father and king of the Taphians, and Anchialos gave Odysseus the poison that he sought. Myths told of Herakles killing the Stymphalian Birds with poisoned arrows, and of Apollo spreading plague with poisoned darts. On the linguistic side, the Greek words for bow and arrow were associated with poison. The Greek noun i6q (cognate with Sanskrit isu- and Avestan isu-i) meant both “arrow” and “poison.”⁸⁶ The Greek x6^ov also had connotations of poison. The adjective to^ik6v went directly into Latin as the noun toxicum (“a poison into which arrows were dipped”), whence the French toxique and the English “toxic.” Poisoned arrows would have been meant for combat, and not for hunting.

That the bow was carried in Greece by the first military men, at the end of the Middle Helladic and the beginning of the Mycenaean period, is very clear. In Shaft Grave VI at Mycenae was the stone tool that Buchholz identified as a scraper or smoother of arrow shafts. The graves also yielded an array of arrowheads, all made from flint, obsidian or other stones. Shaft Grave IV yielded thirty-eight arrowheads (twenty-six of flint, and twelve of obsidian),⁸⁷ enough to have filled a quiver for an archer to take to the Underworld. Still earlier are the arrowheads from Grave circle B. Mylonas found seventeen flint arrowheads in grave Delta, and in Lambda twenty-four of flint and twenty of obsidian.⁸⁸ As mentioned above, the two representations of archers that Lorimer identified as Mycenaean came from Shaft Grave IV. Bows and arrows had been known in Greece since the Paleolithic period, but toward the end of the MH period their importance made a quantum leap. The men buried in the warrior graves at Kolonna (end of MH II) and Thebes (end of MH III), like many of the men buried in the Grave circles at Mycenae, went to the Underworld with arrows and therefore surely with a bow no less impressive than their other weapons.