The position of the Mycenaean kingdoms within the larger context of Greek history raises a much-vexed question. Did the Mycenaean kingdoms stand at the beginning of a long and continuous line of historical development stretching from the Bronze Age past the classical age into the Hellenistic world and beyond? Or were the Mycenaean kingdoms a dead end, with the slate wiped clean at their destruction, circa 1200 BC, so that the later Greeks had to start afresh?
Certainly, as has been discussed in this chapter, there is clear evidence of continuity between the Mycenaean and the later periods, for example, in the realm of religion, language, and even literature (see chap. 4). The more closely the Linear B texts are examined, the more continuity emerges. For example, the Mycenaean temenos, the plot of land held by the wanax and the lawagetas, and the Homeric temenos, which a king or another benefactor of the community may hold (Iliad, VI 194), are clearly the same institution. Similarly, some Linear B texts (e. g., Jn 829) mention a functionary with the title of klawiphoros (“key-bearer[ess]”). In one case (Ep 704) the functionary’s name is known: Karpathia (i. e., she is female). In classical Greece the functionary who held the keys to the treasury in a sanctuary, the kleidophoros or kleidouchos (“key-bearer[ess]”), was usually female. There is continuity, then, even in so small a detail as the gender of a minor functionary.
Although the disruption caused by the kingdoms’ downfall circa 1200 BC must have been severe, the people who had lived there before the catastrophe remained in the land. They rebuilt using the physical and cultural materials which they had inherited. What they built owed a great deal to their forebears, even if it inevitably differed somewhat from what had gone before. Nevertheless, the line between the Mycenaeans and the later Greeks, their descendants, was essentially unbroken.
World History
