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The shield, then, is not an Ionian buckler worn on the left arm, but is suspended by a belt, and covers a man, or most of him, just as Mycenaean shields are suspended by belts shown in works of art, and cover the body and legs. Their great shield answers to the great mediaeval shield of the knights of the twelfth century, the "double targe," worn suspended from the neck by a belt.
In this case the Iliadic and earlier Odyssean houses are those of a single definite age, neither Mycenaean of the prime, nor Hellenic a fact which entirely suits our argument.
Homer, then, describes armour later than that of the Mycenaean prime, when, as far as works of art show, only a huge leathern shield was carried, though the gold breastplates of the corpses in the grave suggest that corslets existed.
The variations in form and ornamentation are considerable, as is natural with an article whose production was carried on at different centers and during a period of centuries. The Mycenaean vases are mostly wheel-made. The decoration, in the great majority of examples, is applied in a lustrous color, generally red, shading to brown or black.
Meanwhile they are accused of introducing the bronze corslets and other defensive armour of their own period. Defensive armour was unknown, we are told, in the Mycenaean prime, which, if true, does not affect the question. Homer did not live in or describe the Mycenaean prime, with its stone arrow-tips. Why did the late poets act so inconsistently?
There is here nothing to suggest the Doric of Paestum and Selinus, much to recall the megalithic buildings of Syria, and the sculpture of the farther East. The evidence is almost entirely that of pottery discovered on the site. The whole question of the relations of Minoan to Mycenaean art, and of this archaic art to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea, is very obscure and uncertain.
In neither passage cited is anything said about resting the lower rim "on the ground," and in the second passage the warrior is actually advancing. Mr. But the Algonquins and Iroquois wore such breastplates as they could manufacture, though they also used shields of great size, suspended, in Mycenaean fashion, from the neck and shoulder by a telamon or belt.
Such is the Reichelian theory. As regards armour, controversy is waged over the shield, corslet, and bronze greaves. In Homer the shield is of leather, plated with bronze, and of bronze is the corslet. No shields of bronze plating and no bronze corslets have been found in Mycenaean excavations.
The ornamentation shown on them occurs, too, on Mycenaean shields in works of art; in short, these little objects are representations in miniature of the big double-bellied Mycenaean shield. Mr. Ernest Gardner concludes that these objects are the "schematised" reductions of an armed human figure, only the shield which covered the whole body is left.
That the connection existed as late as the time of the XXth Dynasty we know from the representations of golden Bügelkannen or false-necked vases of Mycenaean form in the tomb of Ramses III in the Bibân el-Mulûk, and of golden cups of Vaphio type in the tomb of Imadua, already mentioned. This brings the connection down to about 1050 B.C.
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