Laboratory - Shield-bearers

I recently got the idea of checking whether there have been other instances in ancient armies, beyond Ey-de-Net and Dolasilla, of archers fighting as a team with a shield-bearer for their defense. What I found, by now, looks pretty interesting.

As a matter of fact, it seems that the only ancient people who were accustomed to fight that way, were the Assyrians. See the detail at right, illustrating a combat team, dated about l'884 B.C. (today at the British Museum). In this case we have two archers and a shield-bearer, who propped up the huge structure, probably wooden, insisting on the ground and providing also some protection from above. The bearer looks to be using his left hand for the shield, while the right one holds an edeged weapon, maybe a short one; or it may be a second handle used to turn the big thing around. He wears a cover cap like the archers, but his gown is short instead of coming down to his feet, and probably he wears an armour and shin protectors, while the archers appear to be fighting bare-breasted. Notice the latters' quivers, strapped across one shoulder, and the swords at their belts, maybe in a sheath. Last, while one archer and the shield-bearer wear their classical long beards, the closer archer wears none. Age difference, national usage, or just fashion? A final remark: what appears on the opposite side of the shield? It may look like a flame outburst, or an explosion. The shield, perhaps, was foreseen not only as a shelter against arrows and javelins, but also from "grenades" like Greek Fire (and maybe also from scythed chariots as well). In any case, the thickness of the shield is huge: the structure must have been extremely heavy and very little mobile. Teams like this could also be composed by an archer, a shield-bearer and a swordman, or by two men only, the bearer and one archer.
		This type of combat by small teams was not used, as far as I know, by other populations, with the exception of the teams mounted on chariots. What we can see at left is an egyptian representation of a hittite chariot. We have a charioteer an presumably a warrior, although the schematic sketch doesn't allow to understand which weapons does he carry along; besides, we have the shield-bearer, who makes use however of a much smaller and nimbler object than the colossal object of the Assyrian unit on feet.

In the Homeric description of the war of Troy, it seems that the chariot team was composed by two people only, the hero, who was completely armed, and his charioteer. But the Greeks (I might generalize and talk of Europeans), don't seem to conceive any combat by small teams. Heroes fight alone, and the mass all together. Archers, when they are present, fight each by himself. It seems that archers never were considered of relevant importance in Greek armies, as well as in Balkan, or Italic, or Celtic ones; less so, that any of these populations ever felt the need to assign a man to the specific task of shielding an archer. The Macedonian phalanx (yet to come) will later use (several) "shield-bearers" to shelter its right side, relatively unguarded, but in a quite different tactical situation.

The King's idea of protecting her archer daughter with a large metallic shield, carried by a man devoted to this task, appears therefore as being an absolutely unique concept: unless we admit that the Fanes' King, who certainly was in touch with the Palaeo-Venetic civilization, if not a Palaeo-Venetic himself, was acquainted with the tactics used in Mesopotamia in his age!