It still seems supportable to claim that in the long term, the definitive emergence of the Mycenaean civilization by 1400 BC represents a civilizational climax to a progressive development on the Mainland from simple early farming villages ca. 7000 BC. The emergence of politically stratified villages or those with a putative “city-state character” in later Neolithic Greece is followed by the EH corridor houses with their associations of local organization and administration. Despite apparent devolution of sociopolitical and economic complexity in MH, the LH period exhibits a revived growth of elaborate social hierarchies and central-places, with complex division of labor and intensive administrative procedures for states of some size. Scholars have identified an accumulation of innovations and stimuli which are relevant to this trajectory: metallurgy, polyculture, advanced sailing-ships, increased incorporation into the economic and political world of the Near Eastern states, as well as the potential over millennia for status rivalry between families within rural communities to develop into ranking of wealth and influence.
Yet the rise ofMycenaean states cannot be explained merely through such contributory or even necessary preconditions. Some regions of the Southern Mainland do not (at least yet) exhibit state formation and major centers (the Corinthia and Achaea for example), and the fact that Mycenaean achievements appear to focus on particular settlements which are not always those with more natural advantages to become the seats of power, also requires that we call upon the other levels of Annaliste time-perspective.
The medium term of several centuries finds the Mycenaean era conform to a standard timescale for the cyclical growth and decline of state systems; from ca. 1600—1200 BC comes an oft-identified wave of emergence, climax, and collapse. Admittedly the precise reasons for the rise of powerful states from around 1700 BC, as well as the forces which destroyed Mycenaean states by 1200 BC, are disputed, although we should bear in mind the long-term tendency just identified, which in Complexity Theory terms was a civilizational structure waiting for the right conditions to emerge. Chaos-Complexity Theory is an approach widely used in several scientific disciplines, in which highly elaborate structures can “emerge” out of innumerable diverse components into repetitive and relatively stable structures (attractors), yet at the same time a small yet critical change in a minor element can destabilize such structures and project them into new formations (the “butterfly effect”) (Bentley and Maschner 2003, Bintliff 2007). A medium-term perspective is in any case more about recognizing the generic character of the cyclical rise and fall of certain complex forms of society, and we can discuss this for the Mycenaeans without resolving the details of those processes that lit up and then destroyed their civilization. One is struck by the early phase marked by display burials, only much later followed by monumental power centers and elaborate state administration. Then rapidly, massive defensive systems are put in place, before a growing series of destructions takes the civilization apart step by step. Here the attractiveness of Peter Warren’s outsider perspective (Warren 1975, and in Bintliff 1977b) is clear: the early, unparalleled Mycenaean prestigious burials occur at a peak of Minoan cultural and political impact on the Mainland, the Second Palace era, whilst closer at hand the Kolonna center on the island of Aegina is flourishing (putatively a significant maritime player too). Voutsaki has suggested that the Mainland chieftain families are both stimulated by, and also wish to assert themselves against, these well-established and influential outsider societies. For Warren, the erection of the Mycenaean palaces from around 1400 BC follows the takeover of Crete by Mainlanders, and their adoption of the archival and other administrative habits of the Minoans, as well as their creation at Knossos, the grandest Cretan palace, of a new Mycenaean state.
The coincidence of the ca. 400-year time-span for the Mycenaean rise and fall with other Aegean cultural climaxes of earlier and later times, points to a degree of inherent instability in these phenomena, an element of Complexity Theory allowing us to link the Mycenaean cycle with other global early civilizations in a stimulating way. Of course our current uncertainty as to the key elements in the initiation and collapse of Mycenaean state-societies hinders closer parallels at the medium-term perspective.
Another element of the Annales approach may also be relevant: the mentalite (ways of seeing the world) of this culture. It remains attractive to associate the civilization with the “heroic” values of Homeric poetry, even though the final version of these tales postdates the LBA by some 500 years and certainly incorporates much intervening and indeed earlier lifestyles and culture. This aristocratic machismo and militaristic ethos does suit distinctive aspects of Mycenaean art, burial symbolism, the emphasis on fortifications, and increasingly the Hittite records when they refer to the constant aggression of the “Achaeans.”
The Annales short term brings us directly to processes which could be hidden by the absence of local political texts, and perhaps might mislead us into giving credence to every relevant Greek myth in our search for some historical events and personalities. Nonetheless some progress is possible even at the level of generational history. All scholars agree that the displacement of the natural center of the Argive Plain at Argos, at the end of MH, by a place previously of no importance, Mycenae, signifies a claim to importance by local elite families which can only be due to some unique and short-lived historical events involving a few individuals. Service as mercenaries or raiders abroad is an attractive theory, or some regional power-game in which the elite at Mycenae gained an early lead and were able slowly to consolidate into a lasting preeminence. Perhaps the current physical anthropological research, including DNA tests, of the high-status burials in the Argive Plain may shed insights into inter-settlement family dynamics. One suspects that short-lived events and the role of individuals were indeed crucial in the power-game as to which centers grew to the top level in the later settlement hierarchy. Even the success of the rise of Mainland civilization in the wider Aegean world and beyond may owe much to chance events and personalities, especially as regards potential rivals for power in the Aegean such as the Minoan palace-states, island statelets on Aegina, Melos, and Thera, as well as the more distant expansive empires such as the Hittites in Asia Minor.
In the same way, the general collapse of the Mycenaean states during the thirteenth century was not necessarily inevitable: if it was the result of internal conflicts then the probability of one center emerging as a survivor and victor would seem a far likelier outcome than the mutual destruction of all the competing forces. Some would use this argument to support an external enemy, such as the elusive Sea Peoples, or the even more elusive Dorians. Or perhaps the collapse of all centers of power would suit a popular rising throughout the Mycenaean world, leaving merely local chieftains (called in the subsequent period the basileus class), still in power. I confess to finding inadequacies in all these scenarios to account for the absolute disappearance of all central power, except the most traditional of all, the external or peripheral invasion theory. If a powerful group of tribes without an equivalent complex political hierarchy overwhelmed Southern “palatial” Greece, it would produce exactly the effect we seem to observe in subsequent centuries. We would need to assume that these arrivals absorbed local material culture and contributed very little of their own to subsequent societies. The result would be the disappearance of the entire palace-society way of life and its replacement by a less complex social system, with nonetheless the survival of important memories of former days which could remain embedded in the conquered indigenous and soon assimilated conquering populations. The Slav and Albanian settlements of the Early and Final Medieval eras, respectively (see later Chapters), seem to represent appropriate models for such colonizing groups. Countering criticism of the poverty of material-culture traces for non-Aegean invaders, one might adopt the suggestion of destruction by groups on the margins of the Mycenaean palatial states, within the borders of Modern Greece.
World History
