At the end of LH IIIB2, circa 1200—1190 BC, the Mycenaean palace states collapsed amidst destructions and abandonments at the palaces themselves as well as broadly across the Mycenaean world. The distinctive palatial buildings and fortifications, along with the organization and administration of the state as recorded in the Linear B archives, disappeared forever. There are two important caveats regarding the seemingly sudden and dramatic collapse, however: first, destructions and disruptions began considerably earlier at many sites, revealing a more protracted process of decline leading up to the final collapse; and second, material culture and ways of life that are recognizably Mycenaean did not vanish, but carried on through a tumultuous time of reconfiguration and change in the twelfth century, before finally fading out by Submycenaean times, circa 1075 BC.
At the end of LH IIIB!, circa 1250, localized destructions by fire occurred at Tiryns' citadel and in the elaborate houses (the Oil Merchant group, the Panayia houses) outside the citadel walls at Mycenae. In Boeotia, an initial destruction affected part of the palace at Thebes, and a more generalized devastation seems to have put the vast fortified site at Gla out of commission. Some of the damage may have been caused by earthquakes, but in many of these cases a violent destruction at human hands cannot be ruled out. There is incontrovertible evidence that in the decades that followed, inhabitants of the palatial centers feared a protracted assault or siege. At Mycenae and Tiryns, the fortification walls were strengthened and expanded to encompass previously undefended portions of the lower slopes, and at Mycenae much of the workshop and storage activity that had been situated outside the walls was relocated inside. New fortification walls were also built at Midea and Athens. Most revealing of the dangerous environment was the construction at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens of subterranean passages inside the citadel leading to underground springs outside the walls. Pylos, by contrast, was unfortified in the palatial period, but warnings of impending danger have been read into a set of Linear B tablets recording the mobilization of 800 rowers, with the heading “Thus the watchers are guarding the coasts" (Chadwick 1994: 175). It is not certain whether this recruitment was an emergency measure or a routine annual conscription.
None of these security measures prevented the final destructions of the palaces or the collapse of the palatial system that accompanied them, by circa 1190 BC. Nonpalatial centers, both large and small, were also destroyed or abandoned. The twelfth century was one of considerable upheaval, a complex patchwork of migration, depopulation, and refugee settlement on the mainland (Middleton 2010: 71—92). Entire regions such as Messenia and Laconia were largely depopulated; estimates of the overall decrease in population in the Mycenaean heartland range as high as 75% for the period 1200—1000 (Tandy 1997: 20; but Dickinson 2006: 93—98 doubts this figure). Other settlements and regions became centers for resettlement of refugees. The mountains of Arcadia may have absorbed some of the population fleeing the troubles in Messenia, while at Tiryns the population actually swelled as the Upper and Lower Citadels were reoccupied and the Lower Town expanded, perhaps with refugees from destroyed or abandoned towns of the Argolid (Maran 2001). Much of the settlement within the walls of Mycenae was rebuilt and occupied at a diminished level throughout the twelfth century. Meanwhile, areas on the edges of the former Mycenaean world with good access to the sea prospered in the postpalatial period: the Ionian Islands, the coastal northwestern Peloponnese, the east coast of Attica, and certain of the Aegean islands flourished, perhaps energized by immigration. Some refugees migrated out of the Aegean entirely, finding their way particularly to Cyprus and the Levantine coast (Yasur-Landau 2010). Even on the devastated mainland, the chaotic early decades of the twelfth century gave way to a modicum of stability — a final “twilight" of the Aegean Bronze Age — in the second half of the twelfth century, corresponding to the ceramic phase designated LH IIIC Middle (Thomatos 2006).
For more than a century, scholars have sought explanations for the rapid and permanent collapse of the palace states, giving rise to a range of hypotheses of varying plausibility (helpfully summarized in Deger-Jalkotzy 2008; Dickinson 2006: 41—57; Drews 1993; Middleton 2010; Schofield 2007: 174—82). Each focuses on a single cause or related set of causes deemed to have been a significant trigger setting into motion the process of collapse. Although a detailed examination of these hypotheses is beyond the scope of this historical summary, the main categories of explanation can be mentioned: (1) external invasions by “Dorian" descendants of Herakles in the generations after the Trojan War (Herodotus 1.56—57; Thucydides 1.12), or the marauding “Sea Peoples" mentioned in the Egyptian records of Merneptah and harnesses III in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC; (2) internal disturbances including internecine warfare among the palace states or social unrest within a palace state; (3) natural disasters such as droughts or earthquakes, whose effects were sufficiently widespread to precipitate a palatial collapse in a short period of time; and (4) inherent economic/political instability that caused the palaces to collapse of their own weight.
No single explanation has been found satisfactory to account for the widespread and roughly synchronous demise of the palaces. We will probably never know which factors caused the decline and fall of each of the palace states, but we can be sure that no single cause can account for the process. A multicausal approach recognizes that the Mycenaean kingdoms were not optimized for “sustainability," as we would term it today, suffering from inherent organizational weaknesses, notably overspecialization and overcentralization, which made the state susceptible to internal and external threats. Earthquakes, droughts, diseases, and disruptions in trade may have exacerbated social stresses in a strongly hierarchical society, but the combination of factors will have been different in each case, and the cause and effect relationships among primary and secondary triggers will remain speculative. It is important to bear in mind that the collapse of complex society in the Aegean involved mainly the dismantling of an elite superstructure, leaving behind a considerably less complex agropastoral society that was still culturally Mycenaean.
Long-distance exchange in raw materials and exotic finished goods is central to the story of both prosperity and collapse. Mycenaean palatial elites relied on imports for the purposes of self-definition via conspicuous consumption and display, and to ensure the loyalty of potentially adversarial factions among the aristocratic elements of society (Bennet 2008; Sherratt 2001). In the fourteenth and early thirteenth centuries, the Mycenaeans participated in an eastern Mediterranean world increasingly interconnected by maritime networks; as archaeological, archaeometric, and textual data show, goods flowed relatively efficiently, promoting general prosperity. There is some evidence, however, that in the second half of the thirteenth century, maritime trade routes to the palaces were disrupted, possibly a repercussion of the unstable political climate in the eastern Mediterranean. There is a marked reduction in the amount of Mycenaean pottery exported to the east in LH IIIB2, and imported material at Mycenaean sites seems to decrease at the same time, though the quantities of imports are too small for statistical validity or to form definitive patterns. At Pylos, several Linear B tablets detailing the careful rationing of bronze to as many as 400 smiths in the kingdom have been interpreted to reflect a shortage of metal circa 1200 (Chadwick 1994: 140—41). Such a shortage is possibly corroborated by the presence mainly of scrap metal in the Gelidonya shipwreck and absence of metal in the Point Iria wreck, both dated to around 1200, in contrast to the abundance of copper and tin in the Uluburun wreck a century earlier, but other explanations for this difference are possible (see below). Some of the trouble may have come at the hands of pirates and coastal raiders, the sort of seaborne marauders that later coalesced in Egyptian narratives as the Sea Peoples. It could also be the case that the Mycenaeans, always marginal actors in the east, were cut out of long-distance trade routes and rendered irrelevant as Near Eastern polities had more important concerns close to home (Sherratt 2001: 222—24, 237). A strong orientation to the sea survived the collapse, however: in the twelfth century, many prosperous settlements were situated near the coast and maritime trade was apparently just as important as it had been in the palatial period (Dickinson 2006: 69).
Mycenaean Long-Distance Maritime Activity
As outlined in Chapter 1, research on Mycenaean maritime activity has focused almost exclusively on long-distance trade. The following discussion characterizes the variable patterns of long-distance maritime connections with different areas of the eastern and central Mediterranean over time, before moving to a consideration of the nature of this activity at scales from local to interregional.
World History
