Subject: e-qe-ta 'follower' as heavy infantryman
Culture: Achaean/late Mycenaean
Setting: Late Helladic, Aegean late 2nd millennium BC
Event Photos
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Primary Sources
* Snodgrass 1999 p33
"We can best sum up the developments in warfare in these years by returning once again to the Warrior Vase found in Mycenae and dating to its last days. The figures on the vase are plain and unheroic; their armament is far from magnificence. But they are organized forces, in uniform equipment. The men on the reverse side have their spears raised, on the point of joining battle, but they are in step and move in unison. There could be no clearer portrayal of the change from the excessive individual splendour of the Shaft-grave princes to a standardized army. It is in some such array that we should imagine the Mycenaeans taking the field in the various wars of which we hear, in contemporary documents or in tradition, in the latter part of the thirteenth century."
Secondary Sources
* Cleator 1967 p67
"From Homeric descriptions and other sources of information, we learn that the protagonists of the Greek Bronze Age made extensive use of two-wheeled chariots as an aid to mobility, though much of their fighting on the actual field of battle, apart from some spear throwing, was done on foot by dismounted warriors wearing helmet, cuirass, and greaves, and equipped with a short sword and round shield. Their undoubted proficiency and valour, however, proved of no avail against the iron-possessing Dorians, and the destruction (c. 1100 B.C.) of Mycenae and its associated civilisation by these untutored kinsmen resulted in a period of backwardness which persisted for the next three and a half centuries or so."
Field Notes
