War and Game

The abject collapse of the Mycenaean citadels marked the last time Greek culture on the mainland would fall to outside invaders until the Roman conquest more than a millennium later. Whereas Mycenaean culture was heavily indebted to the Near East and Egypt, the later city-states and their warkmaking were antithetical to most of surrounding Mediterranean society.

Until nearly 1200 Mycenaean warmaking was probably not very different from the fighting that had been 'practiced for centuries to the east and south in the Mediterranean by the Egyptians and Hittites: onslaughts of light armed skirmishers and missile-men clustering around chariots equipped with well-armored javelin-throwers and bowmen. From the Linear B tablet inventories, a few painted remains on vases, the finds of metallic armor and weapons, and Mycenaean memories in later Greek literature, we should imagine that the lord, or wanax, of local sovereignties at Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos, Pylos, Thebes, Gla, Orchomenos and Athens directed political, economic and military affairs from fortified citadels - palaces guarded by walls ranging from 10 to 30 feet (3 to 9 m) in thickness and sometimes over 25 feet (7.5 m) in height. Yet the circuits were usually quite small and never encompassed much more than dynastic residences and palace stores. Such massive fortifications - the remains of the walls were imagined by later perplexed Greeks to be the work of earlier superhumans and thus called Cyclopean - reveal the core values of Mycenaean palatial culture. Material and human capital were invested in protecting - and often burying - scribes, bureaucrats and royalty, rather than in fielding large armies of infantrymen to protect surrounding farmlands and general population through pitched battles. Later Classical Greek walls are not so thick, but encompass far greater territory - revealing the emphases of the respective cultures.

In the same way that land was allotted by the Mycenaean wanax to various segments of the population and in turn harvests were brought back to Mycenaean palaces for storage _and redistribution, so too the written records of the Linear B inventories suggest that the king and his chief military commander controlled the fabrication and stockpiling of weaponry and the mobilization of his subjects. Before 1300 bronze armor and weaponry were rigid and cumbersome, which suggests that the Mycenaean chariots were deployed almost like modern tanks, platforms for the discharge of missiles and arrows. These vehicles were used to run over and break through foot soldiers, and to serve as islands of protection for accompanying swarms of lightly clad skirmishers to enter and exit the fra~ Chariot-drivers, archers, and missile troops, who were deployed in and about the citadel fortifications, were specialized warriors rather than part of a large militia.

By the end of the thirteenth century, Mycenaean culture in Greece and the dynasties in the Near East and Egypt were all threatened by new attackers. These seafaring marauders from the north - the polis Greeks thought them Dorians; modern archaeologists prefer 'sea peoples' - fought primarily on foot and in mass formation, without expensive chariotry, horses, or highly trained javelin-throwers and bowmen. And these northerners - as in case of the Spanish conquistadors nearly three millennia later in the Americas learned that their flexible infantry tactics could overturn the entire military arm of a highly centralized regime.

In response to such aggression, we see for the first time the dramatic appearance of newer Mycenaean armor designed to be worn on foot, not on a chariot, and the simultaneous appearance, by at least 1200, of greaves, helmets, and round shields worked variously in bronze, wood and leather. javelins, spears and large cut-and-thrust swords also become more plentiful. Vases suggest that the very last generations of Mycenaeans were reacting to foreign military challenges - if belatedly at least in a most radical way - by retooling and rethinking their entire military doctrine more along the lines of massed infantry. Throughout the thirteenth century the palace overlords who designed, owned and stockpiled Mycenaean weaponry. - must have learned that the prior tactics of chariot-based fighting and skirmishing were no match for well-armed, numerous and cohesive foot soldiers.

Despite this last-ditch change in weapons and tactics, by 1100 almost all citadels on the Greek mainland were destroyed and Mycenaean culture finally ended. This cataclysm of the early twelfth century has been ascribed to various causes: invaders, internal feuding, slave revolts, earthquakes, drought, piracy, or simple systems collapse caused by over-bureaucratization. Whatever the correct explication, there is less controversy that an assorted group of 'sea peoples' appear in Hittite texts and on Egyptian reliefs as barbarian hordes who sailed from the north, landed and challenged palatial kingdoms with mass infantry attacks. The later Greeks remembered them as Dorians, the sons of Heracles who destroyed everything in their path before settling in the Peloponnese. In any case, the sheer rigidity and over-complexity of the Mycenaeans left their palaces ill-prepared and inflexible against evolving tactics and armament of Hellenic-speaking but uncivilized fighters from northern hamlets outside the control of the citadels.

The military lessons were clear enough: loosely organized men, on foot, with heavy armor, were a match for chariotry, bowmen and centralized bureaucracy, Cyclopean walls or not. The Mycenaeans' eleventh-hour turn toward armored infantry with spears was apparently too late to save the palaces, and they went the way of similar planned societies in the southern and eastern Mediterranean which also were weakened or toppled by 'barbarian' infantry. And while archaeologists often talk of a 'catastrophe' that brought on the destruction of an entire culture, from a strictly military standpoint the sudden end to a collective autocracy changed for ever the direction of Greek warfare. For the first time, the very space, time, equipment and purpose of warfare passed from the autocrat in the citadel into the hands of the individual, in a manner previously unseen in the Mediterranean.

Thus the birth of western warfare first begins with the destruction of the entire Mycenaean culture on the Greek mainland. Never again would a collective theocracy field a uniformly Greek-speaking army - in marked contrast to almost every other culture in the Mediterranean. The stage was set for a four-centuries-long political and economic evolution that would culminate in the appearance of a free citizen, who alone determined where and how men like himself would fight.