Thread on Robert Drews most recent book on arrival of militarism in Europe and relationship to Indo-Europeanization. This will be just on changes in Carpathians around 1600-1500 BC; let’s start with the summary…Drews sees Carpathians as point of first arrival for IE in Europe
Drews said:
The advent of cheekpieces and battle weapons in the Carpathian basin indicates that ca. 1600 BC much of the basin-beginning with Transylvania was taken over by men equipped with chariots, axes and spears. Soon after their arrival the military men obtained Type A rapiers to display their position, and within a generation or two they replaced the Type A with the shorter but much more serviceable Apa sword. The intruders evidently came from a land where chariots were drawn by horses bridled with Scheibenknebel cheekpieces, and that points to the steppe beyond the Dnieper. Motivation for the takeover seems to have been the gold and copper in the Carpathian and Apuseni ranges.
Beyond these conclusions, based on the material record, we must resort to speculation. The intruders probably came on ships over the Black Sea and up the Danube. And the takeover may have proceeded piecemeal over several years, with each of several expeditions taking control of yet another portion of the metal-rich ranges. We need not imagine that the expeditions together consisted of more than a few hundred chariots and a few thousand men, enough to take control of a population of a few hundred thousand people who had neither chariots nor any military tradition.
Although these would have been entirely military expeditions, after their domination was established the men would have fetched their wives, children and faithful retainers. Because the military forces must have come from far to the east, where Indo-European languages were apparently widespread, I will suggest that the militarizing of Transylvania, western Romania and eastern Hungary ca. 1600 BC may have been the starting point for the Keltic, Italic and Germanic subgroups of Indo-European, as well as for Albanian and for extinct but once- important languages such as Venetic and Dacian.
Chariots arrived in Europe late but when they did there is evidence they arrived together with full warrior set and toolkit, and already fully developed. Point of arrival (besides Mycenae and contemporaneous with it) was Carpathian basin. Steppe type and probably seaborne
Drews said:
Domestic horses had been kept here and there in the Carpathian basin at least since 2500 BC and possibly since 3000 BC but they were food animals (and probably also pressed into service as pack animals). The "taming" or controlling of horses and the exploitation of their speed as draft animals was not possible until the invention of the bit. In an important article that appeared the year after his catalogue, Hüttel made a very good case that the cheekpieces were evidence of a "chariot age" in the Danubian lands, as they were in Greece, and he regretted that this Streitwagenalter was generally ignored in scholarship on the Carpathian basin. It is hard to overstate the importance, Hüttel observed, of what the chariots meant both for the Carpathian basin and for Greece. In both places a military elite made its sudden appearance, whose members drove the chariots or fought from them, carried rapiers, and took possession of akropoleis for themselves and their dependents. In a later study Hüttel stressed the synchrony between the appear- ance of the tamed horse and of new weapons (spears and swords) in the Danubian lands. I will add that this would not have been a matter of borrowing, of influence, or of an indigenous development. Chariotry and militarism arrived together—in a complex package—in a land in which both were alien, and they came from a land in which they were not.
Drews later said:
Although they signaled the commencement of militarism in the Carpathian basin, chariots were never so important in temperate Europe as they were in the Near East or in the Aegean. Not surprisingly, we have no pictorial evidence for chariot warfare in temperate Europe at any time in the Bronze Age. When chariots in Scandinavia are depicted in rock carvings they seem to be parade or recreational vehicles, carrying only a driver.66 More importantly, a burial that included a chariot and a team of horses has yet to be found in Bronze Age temperate Europe. Also pertinent is that in the late Bz A2 period and what followed in central Europe, Scandinavia and northern Italy, bows and arrows were less important than swords, spears and axes. It is therefore likely that soon after its arrival in the Carpathian basin the chariot became more of a status symbol than a military necessity. The reason, I believe, was that the inhabitants of the basin had no knowledge of war. They had never seen an army, and had established no states for a chariotry to conquer. Instead, there were villages, some of them large and on elevated sites, but all of them unprepared for battle and even without weapons designed specifically to kill men. It is quite possible that a small force from the east that was bent on conquest—100 chariots on which rode archers carrying composite bows, and a few hundred men on the ground with spears and leather shields— would have been sufficient to take control of a metal-rich sector of the Carpathians or the Apuseni range. Although the chariot would have given the aggressors the confidence to set out on their expedition, on arrival at their destination they would have discovered that chariots would seldom be needed to maintain their control and to extend it in a society unfamiliar with combat.
And again later Drews said:
What has recently been articulated as the military doctrine of "shock and awe" seems to have been applied for the first time in the Early Bronze Age of temperate Europe. The armed and organized intruders would not have intended to kill the men of the villages or to capture their women and their livestock, but only to establish a vague "control" over the villages and over the mining and refining of metals. In return for this novel control, the intruders offered an equally novel offensive capacity: against wolves, bears, wild boars and the occasional lion, first of all, but also against any conceivable human enemy. They also offered connections to a much wider world and access to exotic and beautiful things. The conquest of western Transylvania may have been a bloodless affair, as the very appearance of impressive military gear may have persuaded the indigenous population to submit. To the northwest of Transylvania, along the Carpathians in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, an elite may already have been in control, and when the intruders ventured that far they must have encountered some resistance. There too, however, because offensive weapons were not yet in use (even the "princely" burials at Leubingen and Helmsdorf contained no weapons more formidable than daggers and hatchets) and the concept of conquest was unfamiliar, resistance may have been slight and brief. That the charioteers took over the tell- settlements (evidently encouraging a gradual exodus of the natives) is fairly clear: most of the cheekpieces were found in destruction (or abandonment) levels of the tells, where the rulers evidently lived.
Metal tipped spears arrived in Europe late, arrived according to latest models from steppe/Near East. Contrary to intuition, there’s no evidence for combat spears in temperate Europe before 1600-1500 BC or so. Entry point again Carpathians.
Drews said:
The advent of cheekpieces and battle weapons in the Carpathian basin indicates that ca. 1600 BC much of the basin-beginning with Transylvania was taken over by men equipped with chariots, axes and spears. Soon after their arrival the military men obtained Type A rapiers to display their position, and within a generation or two they replaced the Type A with the shorter but much more serviceable Apa sword. The intruders evidently came from a land where chariots were drawn by horses bridled with Scheibenknebel cheekpieces, and that points to the steppe beyond the Dnieper. Motivation for the takeover seems to have been the gold and copper in the Carpathian and Apuseni ranges.
Beyond these conclusions, based on the material record, we must resort to speculation. The intruders probably came on ships over the Black Sea and up the Danube. And the takeover may have proceeded piecemeal over several years, with each of several expeditions taking control of yet another portion of the metal-rich ranges. We need not imagine that the expeditions together consisted of more than a few hundred chariots and a few thousand men, enough to take control of a population of a few hundred thousand people who had neither chariots nor any military tradition.
Although these would have been entirely military expeditions, after their domination was established the men would have fetched their wives, children and faithful retainers. Because the military forces must have come from far to the east, where Indo-European languages were apparently widespread, I will suggest that the militarizing of Transylvania, western Romania and eastern Hungary ca. 1600 BC may have been the starting point for the Keltic, Italic and Germanic subgroups of Indo-European, as well as for Albanian and for extinct but once- important languages such as Venetic and Dacian.
Earlier Drews said:
Bronze spearheads came to the Carpathian basin late in the Bz A2 period. In his comprehensive study of the Otomani-Füzesabony culture, Matthias Thomas included spears as one of the important novelties in western Romania and eastern Hungary at this time. 84 The spear, although not with a metal head, had been known forever in temperate Europe: even Neanderthal hunters seem to have used spears with stone heads to bring down their prey. Metal spearheads, however, were apparently unknown in temperate Europe until the second quarter of the second millennium BC. This was not only 700 or 800 years later than their first use in the Near East, but also 300 years after they had come into use in southern Caucasia and on both sides of the Ural mountains. Not surprisingly, when metal spearheads finally arrived in the Carpathian basin they were fully fledged. In the Near East spearheads were for several centuries attached to their shafts by tangs, and the tang was not replaced by the socket until ca. 2000 BC. In temperate Europe even the earliest metal spearheads were socketed, indicating that they were brought in from some place where socketed spearheads were familiar. Unlike their counter- parts in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the earliest spearheads in the Carpathian basin were cast (by the lost-wax method) rather than forged.
On present evidence we may say that the metal spearhead came to the Carpathian basin within but closer to the end than to the beginning of the Bz A2 period. In our chronology we may place its arrival ca. 1600 BC. At the important tell-settle- ment of Feudvar in Serbia a stone mold for the casting of bronze spearheads was found in the destruction level that separated the Early from the Middle Bronze Age (or Bz A2 from Bz B).85 In Moravia also the earliest bronze spearhead seems to date from late in the Bz A2 period, although a copper object from the Bz Al period has sometimes been interpreted as coming from a spearhead.
Drews also said:
Throughout the Bronze Age the spear had much less prestige than the sword, and although some spearheads were decorated most were not. While the owner of a sword was proud to be seen in public with his sword suspended from a belt or a baldric, it is difficult to imagine a man strutting around his town with a spear. The disparity between spear and sword is reflected in scholarship. Bronze Age swords have been very well published, but publication of spearheads from the same period has been slow. Hundreds of bronze spearheads have been found in Romania and Hungary but still await cataloguing, and the number of unpublished spearheads from all of temperate Europe runs in the thousands. We are fortunate that a considerable part of the story of the spear in Bronze Age Bulgaria has now been reconstructed.
It is obvious from the numbers that the spear became very important as a weapon in the Carpathian basin and elsewhere in temperate Europe. In northern Italy, the Pila del Brancon votive deposit from ca. 1200 BC included ten times as many spears as swords. Surprisingly, however, for a long time after the spear's introduction in temperate Europe the demand for it seems to have been relatively limited. Of the dateable Moravian spearheads catalogued by Jiří Říhovský, only seven date from the Bz A2 through the Bz C periods, while more than 100 date from the Late Bronze Age. This suggests that although warfare in temperate Europe was endemic by the end of the second millennium BC, in the middle of that millennium it was not.
Defensive combat armor and shields again appear in Europe very late around same time in question 1600 BC. Although a common shield type is named after a site in Denmark its earliest archaeological appearance is in the Carpathians together with the other weapons set in question.
Drews said:
Another pointer in the same direction is the considerable delay in the manufacture of defensive armor in temperate Europe. It is likely that already in the Bz A2 period the man who was armed with a sword or a spear wore a leather helmet and corselet and carried a leather shield stretched over a wooden frame, but these would not have given the man much protection against an opponent's sword or spear or against an arrow shot from a composite bow. Already by 1600 BC chariot crews in the Near East were protected by scale corselets, and in Greece plate armor was worn by chariot drivers at least by the end of the fifteenth century BC. In temperate Europe, in contrast, bronze armor and shields are unattested until late in the Bz D period. Marianne Mödlinger has studied this closely and gives us a succinct summary:
Bronze Age European metal defensive armour, as opposed to weapons, is scarce. With a few exceptions such as the armour from Biecz, Dendra or Knos- sos, the first armour appears in Central and Eastern Europe in the beginning of the Urnfield culture (ca. 1300 BC).
Mödlinger goes on to say that "we know of approximately 120 helmets, 95 shields, 55 greaves and 30 cuirasses from the European Bronze Age," but most of these date from the centuries just before and just after 1000 BC.
Marion Uckelmann, whose catalogue of European bronze shields was published in 2012, found that the earliest known bronze shields in Europe were made in the Bz D or the Ha A1 period, and no earlier than the thirteenth century BC. The earliest (nos. 1-6 in Uckelmann's catalogue) are the Lommelev types, named after a type- site in Denmark but coming mostly from hoards deposited in the Carpathian basin. On the use of bronze shields as such, Uckelmann proposed that "their development and spread should probably be seen in relation to the use of swords," and he is probably correct. Because in temperate Europe metal shields lagged some 300 years behind the appearance of swords, however, it is reasonable to wonder how frequent was the use of swords or of any other weapons in combat in the Bz A2-Bz C periods.
Swords didn’t exist in temperate Europe before 1600 BC —the first specimens appear to be same type as at Mycenae (also absent from that region before 1600 BC) in Carpathians but very quickly were innovated upon until a serviceable sword was designed that then spread across Europe
Drews said:
The most obvious sign that militarism and a ranked society came to the Carpathian basin along with chariots is the sudden appearance of swords, which from the beginning were prestige weapons meant for display. Not a single sword has been found in this region in Chalcolithic or Bz Al contexts, but the Bz A2 period saw the dramatic beginning of swordsmanship, a tradition that was to last for well over three millennia. In his catalogue, Die Schwerter in Rumänien, Tiberiu Bader identified 470 bronze swords or fragments of swords from Romania. He also included (no. 20) the broken but spectacular gold sword found in a hoard at Perșinari. Of the bronze swords, 331 came from hoards, each hoard usually containing a few swords but several containing a great many. Greatest of all was a Halstatt hoard found at Uioara de Sus (in western Transylvania, not far from the eastern slopes of the Apuseni range), in which were seventy swords. Another seventy-seven swords were single finds, many of them turned up by farmers or diggers. Only a few swords have been found in rivers or streams (these are likely to have been votive deposits), and even fewer come from graves.
with the shoulder of the blade still visible (no. 11 in Bader's catalogue) had three rivets, and so is closer to the Aegean rapier than to the single-riveted and somewhat earlier rapiers in southern Caucasia. Bader identified eleven Type A rapiers from Romania, all but one of them being single finds and so suggesting that for at least a short time the type was fairly widespread in Transylvania and western Romania. Because of its place in the typological evolution of swords it is quite certain that the Type A arrived in Romania late in the Bz A2 period, but further precision is not possible. The archaeological contexts of these Type A rapiers are not known, and dating them depends mostly on comparison with the more securely dated Aegean specimens. Bader concluded that the Carpathian rapiers are "somewhat later" than those from the Shaft Graves. Analyses of their manufacture indicated to Bader that the rapiers were not made in the Carpathian basin, but were imported. Unless evidence to the contrary is found, I think we can tentatively conclude that swords were probably not carried by the military men when first they came to the Carpathian basin, but were soon brought in from Mycenaean Greece.
Just as significant as the arrival of the Type A in Romania is the sword's rapid evolution there. The Type A rapier, as described in Chapter Three, was often close to 100 cm long (and sometimes a prodigious 110 cm long), was poorly hilted, and was surely meant more for display than for combat. A few rivets attached the bronze blade to an organic hilt. Although hilts were made of bone, horn, or even ivory, most often they were of well-polished wood. Here it may be useful to explore more generally the hilting of swords. Unlike the wooden shaft of a spear, easily graspable, a long metal blade presented problems of grasping and gripping. Organic hilts were well suited for gripping, but the attachment of an organic hilt to a metal blade was quite insecure. On some swords (the Type A rapier) it depended on a few rivets and on a short tang that protruded a few centimeters from the blade into the hilt. Weapons so hilted could seem serviceable for thrusting, but not for slashing, because the force of a vigorous slash would break the blade from the hilt. Another unsatisfactory hilt was the Griffplatt. Here the top of the blade swelled and flattened out into a thin and circular "grip plate," through which four or six rivets were driven in order to attach it to an organic hilt. On many of the Griffplattenschwerter that have been found the rivet holes are torn through, a clear sign that the hilts of these swords had come loose from the blades. A much more secure hilting characterized the all-metal sword, which in German is called a Vollgriffschwert. The earliest of these were cast as a single piece, blade and hilt coming from the same mold. Later and more popular versions featured a blade with a stout tang, over which a thin (and separately cast) bronze hilt was fitted. Although a Vollgriffschwert was securely hilted, it had a disadvantage. Without a glove, grasping a bronze hilt could be painful, especially in very hot or very cold temperatures. That problem was finally solved by the Griffzungenschwert. This sword was cast with two metal "tongues," or flanges, extending all the way to the pommel. Organic plates were then inserted into the flanges, so that the palm of the hand did not come into contact with the metal. The result was a hilt that was not only very sturdy but also easy to grasp.
In the Carpathian basin the fragility of the Type A rapier and the Griffplattenschwert gave rise, evidently within one or two generations, to the Apa Vollgriffschwert. This was a well-hilted short sword, capable of slashing as well as stabbing. The Apa, or more fully the Apa- Hajdúsámson, is named for two villages near the northern end of the Romanian-Hungarian border. On the Romanian side, at Apa, a hoard of bronze objects included two of these swords, and in 1907 a third was found in a hoard at Hajdúsámson, on the Hungarian side of the border.
The Hajdúsámson hoard was certainly a votive deposit: carefully placed across the sword were twelve bronze axes. The date of both hoards has usually been put ca. 1600 BC or earlier, and still within the Bz A2 period, but Wolfgang David has argued for a slightly lower date: early in Bz B1. In the chronology followed here, the hoards date ca. 1500 BC. Apa swords come from twelve find-spots in Romania and Hungary. Bader concluded that the Apa, and therefore the Vollgriffschwert, was invented in the Carpathian basin toward the end of the Bz A2 or the beginning of the Bz B period, and that it was roughly contemporary with the Shaft Graves at Mycenae.
Drews also said:
By ca. 1400 BC a sword superior to the Apa and the Boiu was in use at the western end of the Carpathian basin. This was the Sprockhoff Ia, a cut-and-thrust Griff- zungenschwert and in some respects the first true slashing sword. J. D. Cowen was insistent on locating the origin of the flange-hilted cutting sword in central Europe (or, more narrowly, in Hungary): first came the Boiu, then the Sprockhoff Ia, and finally the Naue Type II. Although both the Boiu and the Sprockhoff Ia were effective for either a thrust or a slash, the improvements in the Sprockhoff Ia made it a more reliable slashing weapon. The sword was between 70 and 80 cm long, and its blade was much less tapered than that of a Boiu (the Boiu is often described as a rapier). The blade of a Sprockhoff Ia was close to 3 cm wide, and was strengthened by its high midrib. The flanged hilt, into which organic hilt-pieces were inserted, was much easier to grasp than the Apa's Vollgriff. Soon after its development in central Europe the Sprockhoff Ia appeared in the far north of Europe, where most of the in corpore specimens have been found. Remarkably, in less than two centuries swords in the Carpathian basin had evolved from the wobbly Type A rapier to an extremely effective and sturdy sword that was to remain standard-first in bronze and then in iron-until the middle of the first millen- nium BC.
I’m not presenting Drews full text or argument here, read his book. But his method is interesting and in my view correct: instead of following the trail of eg pottery development he follows the spread and trail of weapons and combat tech; this is fruitful path I think
People who comment on remote history are unaware of the relatively recent development of combat, true battles and militarism. Humans have always practiced low level violence and massacres but they didn’t have open battles and a warrior class didn’t exist for most history
This is obvious from weapons set: taking just Europe, hatchets and daggers existed but no swords, no true axes, no combat (metal tipped) spears and no defensive armor, shields. Evidence exists for massacres etc but no real battles before 1600-1500 BC nor any of these other things
These things appear more or less all at once both in Mycenaean Greece and in Carpathians around 1600 BC, maybe slight earlier; they spread from Carpathians to Scandinavia and north Europe very fast and to north Italy
Some time ago Dumezil postulated a tripartite structure to Indo-European society. There’s no strong evidence for this (protests, warriors, farmers) but there’s very strong evidence for a warrior class and indeed that it was a warrior society with elite warrior class…
Drews is therefore ingenuous and I think correct to track the appearance of militarism in Europe. It is significant that it appears furthermore not as a slow indigenous development or borrowing but “all at once” in a complete toolkit and together with evidence of battle chariots
The places where developed combat weapons/war chariots/evidence of elite warrior class appear in Europe and then spread also Drews gives satisfactory explanation: Carpathians were major gold producing region and Scandinavia (where some go soon after) amber production region