I consider the topic of the Mycenaean army to be very difficult because all we know about it comes from archaeology, so I thought I would like to hear your input on this topic.
But first off, here are some quotes from The Mycenaeans, Angus McBridge:
Quote:Pg. 8: The backbone of a Mycenaean army was its heavy infantry. In the early period (c. 1650-1300 B.C.) they were armed with a long spear (enkhos) as their main weapon, and a sword. Clothing was minimal, consisting only of a cloth kit or loincloth, and warriors went barefoot; however, this lacks of body armor was compensated for by a large shield (sakos) which covered the body from neck to shins, as well as a helmet.
Page 9: These shields appear to have been made of wickerworks upon a wooden frame; they were faced with one or more layers of hide, as can be seen in several colored depictions of them from frescoes. They were carried by means of a telamon, a strap which passed over the left shoulder diagonally.
Pg. 11: The early Mycenaean spear consisted of a long wooden shaft about 12ft long with a socketed spearhead made of bronze. The earliest style of spearhead was of unusual form and is sparsely represented: the blade had a shoe-socket cast on one or both sides of it, into which the split end of the wooden shaft was inserted. Examples have been found at Sesklo, Leukas, Asine and Mycenae, and this style of spearheads seems to have been of mainland origin. However, the more common type of spearhead, in use throughout the whole of the Mycenaean period, was a narrow leaf-shaped blade with a strong mid-rib and a socketed base. This was secured to the shaft by a metal collar at the base of the socket, as well as by holes through the socket for pins. The origin of this type seems to be Cretan. Several long, heavy spears of this kind were buried in the shaft graves at Mycenae,...
Ironically, the Mycenaean influence on Greek and Hellenistic armies was large. The “large wooden shaft” of the Sarissa was probably adopted from the Mycenaean spear described above. So, what do you think?
The ancients often said that the Macedonians had adopted the mode of fighting of the Greeks at Troy. Especially their "synaspismos". However, in reality, the two eras are so remote to each other that such interpretations are kind of too bold to make. Whatever love a Macedonian king could have for Homerus, however "influenced" he was, he could not copy what had been lost. Homerus' texts are not military treatises and the fact that they depict a realistic battle-array of the 13th century BC is highly improbable. Plus, there are many differences between the few depictions we have of Mycenean soldiers plus what assumptions we make of how they would fight and that of the Macedonian phalanx. The smaller shields, the fact that the sarisa is held underarm etc. The shield stripe would be a convenient similarity but one that was not hard for a military reformer to devise. In my opinion, the time gap is too great to speak of an adoption of Mycenean tactics in any degree. Nevertheless, there is evidence that at the time of Alexander, there were many texts that spoke of remote wars in adequate detail, texts that unfortunately do not survive. If the campaigns of Hercules and Dionysus, for example, were described in much detail in these works, maybe the ancients were more informed about warfare in those times than we give them credit for and then, an adoption of tactics would sound more possible.
What I have always found intriguing is the fact that the Greeks had been using a kind of sarisa in naval battles. This is described by Homer but we also find it in use in much later times. This very long spear (10.4 m in the Iliad, 15.677) was also used by the Romans against Hannibal at Nola, where supposedly Marcellus instructed his soldiers to equip with these and thus snatched the victory (Plutarch, Marcellus 12.4.5.).
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George C. K.
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I agree. The time difference between the Mycenaean army and Alexander's army (or another Greek army) is probably too big in trying to devise a detailed relationship between the two. There was also the pakana used by the Mycenaeans, we know they used these from the Shaft Grave excavations. Later on, though, it seems that the spear was shortened to 5-6 feet which allowed the soldier to carry his shield, which at the time would've been either a aspis or an inverted pelta.
See McBridge, p. 16.
Quote:This very long spear (10.4 m in the Iliad, 15.677) was also used by the Romans against Hannibal at Nola, where supposedly Marcellus instructed his soldiers to equip with these and thus snatched the victory (Plutarch, Marcellus 12.4.5.).
Do you by chance know the passage where Homer describes it?
Macedon basically has it...unfortunately the Homeric corpus has been severely mistreated by enthusiastic members of the public and bronze age archaeologists a like, well beyond either cultural context or logical tenability.
It's interesting that you bring up the Homer/Macedon parallels and I'm glad you point out some of the problems with it, this is one of those overly facile and flawed observations that has sort of stuck with us over the years but there is a pretty good article in the "Alternatives to Athens" books which summarises the problems with such interpretations, not in a military sense of course, but you might still enjoy it.
The long spear thing in the Iliad is that which Aias uses to smack up the Trojans in book 16, I always remember that scene actually it starts with Aias not pleased in his great heart and ranging up and down, I won't bother quoting the Greek since it would be verbatim and the text in my head is not 100% metrical and therefore flawed. Besides, Macedon gave the reference. I remember the spear being specifically described as being ναὐμαχον actually.
Pakana? Right, I think you mean /phasganon/ which would have been written as pa-ka-na (plrl) due to the orthographical constraints of Lin B. Just a common Greek word and can mean anything from dagger to sword, still does in modern Greek actually (Cretan dialect). So saying they have swords/knives doesn't mean much.
Matching epigraphic evidence to physical realien is harder than one would imagine, though there has been some serious work done in the last 40 years discussing the date of the texts contra various find spots and possible production records. Molloy's article in AJA either 2010 or 2011 is the easiest up to date, if basic, summary.
To be fair, looking and trying to reconstruct the Mycenaean military method (which in itself is flawed) and focusing on the weapons rather than what we can tell of the economic and socio-cultural evidence is utterly fallacious.
You should talk to Dan Howard here, he's put a lot of ground work in on this sort of stuff and doesn't come out with the usual Osprey crap and has some well thought out opinions on the weapons and stuff.
Quote:Pakana? Right, I think you mean /phasganon/ which would have been written as pa-ka-na (plrl) due to the orthographical constraints of Lin B. Just a common Greek word and can mean anything from dagger to sword, still does in modern Greek actually (Cretan dialect). So saying they have swords/knives doesn't mean much.
That's what the McBride book says, although I never learned ancient Greek so you're probably right.
Quote:To be fair, looking and trying to reconstruct the Mycenaean military method (which in itself is flawed) and focusing on the weapons rather than what we can tell of the economic and socio-cultural evidence is utterly fallacious.
You should talk to Dan Howard here, he's put a lot of ground work in on this sort of stuff and doesn't come out with the usual Osprey crap and has some well thought out opinions on the weapons and stuff.
Will do. Thanks for all the information, McBride's was the only work I was aware of but it seems you have a sound grasp of the subject and the flaws with his work.
Personally I think that there have been enough finds in the archaeological record to conclude that the equipment described by Homer was real and dates to the end of the Bronze Age, not to the alleged time that the Iliad was written down.
I think the above book was written by Nicolas Grguric, not by McBride. McBride was an illustrator, not a writer. The equipment described by Grguric was valid in the 15th-16th century but not in the 12-13th century (using the current dodgy chronology).
This might help http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Bronze-Ag...nt/p/3272/
It covers Aegean equipment in some detail. Two of the appendices have analyses of what is actually written about equipment in the Iliad. There aren't any "tower" or "figure-8" shields for example.
FWIW here is how I think Mycenaean equipment evolved. Grguric is right that in the early period (15th-17th C) the Mycenaeans wielded two-handed pikes and full-length shields (possibly made of wicker). There is little armour except for helmets.
Advance a couple of centuries (13th-15th C) and you have the Mycenaean elite fighting as chariot archers like all of the major cultures at the time. Metal armour includes scale sariams and dendra-style cuirasses. I think that leather/hide scale armour was fairly common but there isn't much evidence.
By the time of the alleged Trojan War (10th-12th C) the chariot evolved into a skirmishing platform for javelineers and the infantry became dominant again. Spears were one-handed - the 2-handed pikes were normally only used on ships. Shields were exactly as dscribed in the Iliad - circular and made of multiple layers of hide faced with bronze. Armour consisted of scale, lighter variants of the Dendra armour, or simple bell-cuirasses.
Unfortunately, though archaeology can tell us much about the equipment used, it can tell us nothing important about the actual tactics. We may make educated guesses as to how certain equipment might have been used with most efficiency but there is no way we can actually form an adequate picture of their actual tactics. I agree with Dan that the ancients had at least some knowledge about the form and make of older Mycenean equipment (hence the archaeologically sound Homeric descriptions thereof), I myself tend to believe that the many texts that speak of dedications made by the "ancient heroes" in terms of equipment are good evidence that some of that equipment had been saved to their time. Yet, regarding tactics, things are much more obscure.
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George C. K.
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Yeia Giorge, tell me about it! I've been traipsing to and fro conferences for the past few months and now have a massive stack of "almost done" work I need to fix up and submit as well as a cheeky application to the British School at Athens to make since I need access to some stuff there and don't want to pay. Lefta lefta...
You make a good point about archaeology, it's not necessarily the most helpful of things in general. I know little of warfare specifically, as I've mentioned before, but this can definitely be seen in terms of religious studies where often what archaeologists claim from their data is directly against the best ancient testimony and anthropological evidence.
With warfare and the Mycenaeans we are lucky though in that we also have their contemporary neighbours as well as the epigraphic evidence.
I can try and summarise briefly. We have evidence in the PY A series for weapon production at Pylos, the JN series specifically talks about bronze production and allotment and we have one tablet actually ordering temple (?) bronze to be turned to weapons. So, state owned armouries backed up by a traceable economic and social system, good.
At Knossos we have similar evidence, that of the state keeping count of how much weapons they have access to. Now, significantly they also appear to keep tabs on how many fighting men they have (Kn B I believe) as well as who has or needs what (Sc/Vc?).
Before doing anything you have to ask yourself why? why do Mycenaean polities do this? what does this mean? Well, obviously you're looking at warfare as part of the state machinery, a significant level of sophistication is involved in equipping its warriors. There is evidently a social hierarchy in place to. Depending on how one interprets the so called watcher tablets at PY this could then be taken to imply that the Mycenaeans were also interested in troop deployment. Considering the ridiculous amount of effort which into stratifying and organising industry, topography, work groups etc this is unsurprising.
The very fact that they had swords btw points to something of a training system. I've tried to emphasise this before...but swords are abnormal. They are utterly useless outside of warfare, delicate and awkward objects with require quite a bit of practice to get anything useful from them. Look at your re-enactor doing test cuts or "showing off his moves" right? now put up a video of a sikh or a HEMAist or a FMAist...yes the difference is massive. Swords require a lot of time and effort investing in footwork, timing, cutting practice etc. So the Mycenaeans must have had some sort of machinery for this. The Phyrrike? Possibly...
Archaeology is sort of useless here. We can see from the swords that they didn't tend towards developed quillions and guards, which meant that the sword must have taken second place to the shield, like classical Greece, the vikings, the sudanese etc. So we don't need anything like modern levels of sword training, but still...they would have had to be fit and still needed some footwork, timing etc. Bone evidence is interesting; they ate a lot of meat and imported grains, these people were well looked after nutritionally, certainly taller and healthier than their classical heirs and were taller too which suggests good food for a young age. We know they had good medical care too. Anyway back to swords, it would be nice to have preserved profiles to see where the damage lay, unfortunately everything is highly decrepit and I haven't been able to learn much from the originals I've seen and touched.
But, as I'm trying to emphasise, this is just the elite, those with palatial affiliation and appear in the documents and the better burials. We can compare population sizes to these heavily armoured guys and see that they're not really proportional. Obviously there would have been many lightly/not at all armoured light troops supplementing these people. So if you're imgining them fighting you need to bear this in mind, these people were the esthloi, the few and the best.
As for the reception in Homer, well its difficult to specifically delineate and typify descriptions and terms. I can use "meli" now to mean the stuff I buy from the shop, or I can use it when talking about 5th century Athenian honey trade, or I can re-add the lost dental, "melit", and talk about the bronze age. How do you divide that? Likewise with a lot of the words Homer uses. In fact this is longer than any discussion on Homer and "history" should have gone without anybody citing either Chadwick or I Morris' article...
Certain features may have been ossified in Homeric language, its obvious that the boar tusk helmet for example could just have easily been inspired by a no longer productive formula for a hero just as much as from physically seeing one, or an old catalogue or arming scene. Certain things are admittedly formulae, like silver studded swords. Its also poignant how completely "wrong" Homer is on things like social structure, geography, religion (!!!!) and so on. Why some few non-Homerists seek to privilege military matters I've no idea...you can't excavate Homer like a grave site.
Any work in this area has to start with a solid groundwork in the era itself and look at related, contemporary, cultures and sort of...guess. Unfortunately that usually ends up with the kind of shit men like Drews write, rather than...say the Aegeum Polemos books which are fundamental.
Quote: Anyway back to swords, it would be nice to have preserved profiles to see where the damage lay, unfortunately everything is highly decrepit and I haven't been able to learn much from the originals I've seen and touched.
Barry Molloy reckons that the swords he has examined with battle damage show that damage to be more consistent with sword-on-shield rather than sword-on-sword.
Quote:Its also poignant how completely "wrong" Homer is on things like social structure, geography, religion (!!!!) and so on.
You have to be careful with some of this. The geography around Hissarlik has been independently reconstructed and mapped to look as it did during the alleged time of the Trojan war and the geography is a lot closer to the descriptions in the Iliad than one would suspect by looking at modern maps.
Quote:What I have always found intriguing is the fact that the Greeks had been using a kind of sarisa in naval battles. This is described by Homer but we also find it in use in much later times. This very long spear (10.4 m in the Iliad, 15.677) was also used by the Romans against Hannibal at Nola, where supposedly Marcellus instructed his soldiers to equip with these and thus snatched the victory (Plutarch, Marcellus 12.4.5.).
I will have to disagree with this. Strongly. No matter how much anyone of you/us wants to find a certain proof at a certain place for a certain point, we can not shape things the way we need it to be shaped.You people gave yourselves so much credit in editing history it became a vague concept suspiciously similar to your reenactorial experience.
The super big weapons, precious thought totaly unusable materials in armor, superhuman strength are all heroic or fantastic elements in the Ilad. Aas H.V.Wees briliantly put it:
,,The case of the spear, the most important Homeric weapon, is similar.
Hektor twice makes an appearance holding a spear 'eleven cubits', or some
five metres, long (6.319; 8.494). Such a weapon would in reality have to be
wielded with both hands and could only be used for thrusting. Yet Hektor
and other heroes frequently brandish a pair of spears, and they throw as
often as they thrust spears at the enemy. It is commonly concluded that
Hektor's spear is a Mycenaean 'survival' at odds with the shorter and
lighter weapons used more generally in the Iliad. Again, it has not been
realized that even Hektor's spear can be thrown, because its fantastic size
is matched by Hektor's superhuman strength. So too, Akhilleus, as the
greatest of heroes, can throw a spear which is too 'heavy, big and sturdy'
for anyone else to handle...''
So super long spear is not Mycenean or Archaic sarrisa but ,,heroic'' spear which just couldn't be the size of the spear used by regular mortals. I am surprised by the bad understanding of this EPIC. What do you make out of huge shields, returning spears, and golden and silver armor I don't even want to ask!
Quote:Personally I think that there have been enough finds in the archaeological record to conclude that the equipment described by Homer was real and dates to the end of the Bronze Age, not to the alleged time that the Iliad was written down.
Unfortunatelly those with same or similar conclusions write our schoolbooks and best selling ,,history'' books. This is time when everyone can simply take evidence which suits them, and disregard all others which suit him not. It is not bad when an enthusiast as yourself does it, but it is spitting in the face of history at it's best. I am not going to apologize for this verbal attack, since there is so much nonsence written here by quasi historians that it is becoming too hard to cope with.
Personally I think quite the opposite. I am sure you would not mind presenting evidence and counter evidence for your claims. Something those traditionalists never ever dare to do. The Homeric Way of War by H.V.Wees I think will defeat any of your claims.
Many good arguments are being made about Mycenean element as rare, usually completely lacking. While certain random elements are real,as you say, and DID belong to the Mycenean times,it is often just a deliberate archaism by the author, never consistent enough to be called contemporary, and anyone honest enough will see it. No offense, but the frantic drive and stubbornness of some of the reenactors are becoming quite famous...Homer certainly had knowledge of Mycenean armor and customs, and it is clear he deliberately implemented some of those, usually in a clumsy way, and always describing it way too much for a contemporary object...
Strongest arguments were made by those who claim the equipment and tactics of the Iliad being those from late 8-and more probably early 7th BC.
I will just remind you all of the famous ironic lines by E. Vermeule who had written in her Greece in the Bronze Age (1964) demonstrating against dominant traditional views: We say in justification [of the dominance of Homer in reconstructions of Mycenaean Age] that large parts of the poems incorporate Mycenaean traditions, that the five hundred years separating the fall of Troy VIIA from the Homeric version of its fall have wrought only minor innovations, a few misunderstandings of the past and adaptations to a more modern experience. We hope that the core of those great poems has not been terribly changed by successive improvisations of oral poets – surely poets will guard for us the heritage of the past
