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 Dörpfeld 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, ⁴ I 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).