With the Dorians absolved of responsibility for the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces, suspicion has turned upon raiders from further afield and especially the so-called “Sea Peoples.” The important thing about the palatial collapse in Greece is that it seems, by and large, to coincide with a series of destructions at numerous other cities on Cyprus, in Anatolia, and in the Levant. An inscription from the great temple at Karnak commemorates a victory by the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, in the fifth year of his reign (1208), over Libyan invaders of the western delta. We are told that the Libyans were led by their chief, Meryre, and were accompanied by northerners named as the Ekwesh (Achaean Greeks?), Teresh (Etruscans?), Luka (Lycians?), Sherden (Sardinians?), and Shekelesh (Sicilians?). The Shekelesh are also listed, alongside the Peleset, Tjeker, Denyen, and Weshesh, in another inscription, set up at Medinet Habu to commemorate further victories by land and sea - this time by Rameses III over Levantine invaders in 1179. There are, however, problems in assuming that these two inscriptions reveal the identity of the agents responsible for the widespread catastrophes at the end of the thirteenth century. Although the ubiquity of the turmoil could be accounted for by the apparently far-flung origins of the invaders, the temptation to “identify,” simply on the basis of apparent lexical similarity, correspondences between Hittite and Egyptian names, on the one hand, and Greek names, on the other, has a long but not necessarily creditable history. The equation, for example, of the people that Homer calls Achaeans with a kingdom of Ahhiyawa mentioned in Hittite texts, or of both with the Ekwesh of the Karnak inscription, is not accepted by everyone. And if we were to admit that the Ekwesh who invaded the western Delta were not only Achaeans from Greece but the inhabitants of the Hittite Ahhiyawa and that they were responsible for the more widespread catastrophes, then we would also have to assume that the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed by the very people who are supposed to have built them. Furthermore, Egyptologists are suspicious about the Medinet Habu inscription. Rameses Ill’s claim that Carchemish was a casualty of the invaders appears to be belied by archaeology, while we know from earlier inscriptions that groups such as the Peleset and Shekelesh, far from sweeping into Syria in 1179, were already resident in the region, serving as mercenaries in Egyptian and Hittite armies. It has been suggested that Rameses invented his heroic defense of Egypt out of a series of minor local clashes and even that he claimed the earlier victories of Mernep-tah for himself.
Another variation of the Sea Peoples hypothesis has, however, recently been put forward, prompted by the appearance, in the twelfth century, of new weapons such as the Naue II slashing sword and the javelin as well as defensive armor like the waist-length corselet, greaves, and the round shield. On this basis, it has been suggested that the introduction of mass infantry tactics allowed the raiders and pirates - “barbarian hill people” - to overwhelm the chariot forces employed by the Late Bronze Age kingdoms. The insistence that the appearance of these new types of weapons signals new modes of combat is probably apposite, although the Naue II sword is, as noted above, already attested prior to 1200. But these innovations can only really be linked to external raiders if one assumes that chariot warfare and mass infantry tactics were each the exclusive preserve of different populations. The paucity of evidence for infantry warfare in Mycenaean Greece is not entirely surprising: if foot soldiers were employed in Mycenaean armies they were probably lightly armed and presumably of too low a status to be represented in pictorial scenes, which tend instead to focus on more unusual - and perhaps mythical - scenes of individual combat. It is true that infantrymen become more prominent on LHIIIC vases - notably the famous Warrior Vase from Mycenae - but the new attention given to humble foot warriors could be a consequence of the disappearance of an elite class rather than an indication for an entirely novel mode of combat.
As for chariots, while it is clear from the Linear B tablets at Cnossus and Pylos that they were a familiar vehicle in Mycenaean Greece, it is not absolutely certain that they were employed primarily, if at all, in a military function. It has been argued that the Homeric depiction of the chariot - as a “taxi” for infantrymen - was probably true of the twelfth century but that earlier chariots performed the same combat functions in Mycenaean Greece as they did in Egypt and the Near East. Yet such pictorial representations as survive from this earlier period in Greece invariably portray chariots in a more ceremonial role. Nor is the terrain of Greece particularly suited to wheeling chariot formations. The Argive plain, for example, is crossed by seasonal torrent beds and in antiquity a good part of it was marshy. In fact, a recent study of the Mycenaean roads in the region concludes that they were designed for heavy-wheeled traffic - presumably the carts that conveyed agricultural produce to and from the palatial center - rather than for military purposes. The whole hypothesis is also heavily dependent upon a characterization of the Sea Peoples as freebooting raiders rather than immigrants - a judgment based largely on the earlier attestations of Peleset and Shekelesh mercenaries - but the Karnak inscription explicitly mentions that the invaders were accompanied by their families and cattle.
Some scholars have supposed that the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces was caused not by external invaders or raiders but rather by internal factors. This shift of perspective can only really be understood within the context of theoretical and ideological developments that took place in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Marxism, for example, tended to eschew explanations that attributed change to external conquerors and invaders in favor of those that privileged technological factors and internal class-based revolutions. Thus, Gordon Childe hypothesized in the 1940s that the Hittite Empire collapsed when the masses acquired the knowledge of ironworking, previously restricted to the elite, and then employed it in forging weapons against their former masters; buoyed by success, they subsequently took to the seas and overran other Late Bronze Age kingdoms. The problem with the hypothesis as far as Greece is concerned is that iron, as we have seen, did not enter into mass use until considerably later than the palatial destructions.
From the 1950s, environmental factors came to be invoked more frequently in explaining culture change. According to one theory, a contraction of the polar ice caps towards the end of the Bronze Age led to the northward displacement of the jet stream during the autumn and winter months; the consequence would have been arid conditions, followed by drought and famine. The palatial centers were destroyed by hungry populations desperate for the grain that was stored in the magazines, but the higher mortality rates that accompanied the famine led to depopulation and to the abandonment of many Bronze Age centers of habitation. Some environmental evidence in support of the drought hypothesis has been marshaled - for instance, tree ring patterns in Californian bristle-cone pines, the diminution of lake levels in Switzerland, and the advance and recession of glaciers in the Himalayas - but some climatologists are equally convinced that the end of the Bronze Age witnessed a mini ice age. A food shortage appears to be indicated in Merneptah’s inscription at Karnak though the Pylos tablets contain no hint of provisions being taken to avert famine.
Another theory appeals to economic factors and systems collapse, normally in conjunction with other variables. According to one view, the Mycenaean palaces encouraged excessive specialization in a limited number of crops with the result that a series of bad harvests left them unable to feed their dependent populations. According to another, the palatial centers engaged in a spiraling increase of expenditure that compelled them to exact ever higher rates of taxes from the surrounding countryside until the system could no longer cope and the palace elites, left resourceless, also lost their status and authority. In such circumstances, the weakened palatial centers presented attractive and easy pickings for raiders and looters.
Finally, it has been suggested that the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces was due to unusually violent seismic action. The suggestion was first made by Spy-ridon lakovides, the excavator of Mycenae, and then extended to Tiryns by Klaus Kilian. There have been a number of objections to the earthquake hypothesis. Cities, it is argued, are seldom completely destroyed by earthquakes and are normally swiftly repaired by the survivors. Ash and blackened destruction levels indicate that the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed in a fierce conflagration but, prior to the advent of electricity and gas, it is unlikely that earthquakes in antiquity would have been accompanied by such devastating fires. Had the palaces been destroyed by an earthquake, we would expect to find the remains of those who were trapped by falling masonry while trying to make their escape; the absence of skeletons, instead, should suggest that the populations of the palaces were able to flee before marauders set fire to the cities. At Mycenae and Tiryns, the chief casualties seem to have been houses; the massive fortification walls, by contrast, appear to have remained completely unscathed by the hypothesized earthquake. Finally, given that earthquakes not infrequently trigger tidal waves, it is strange that LHIIIC survivors of the disaster should have chosen to build their settlements so close to coastlines.
Not all of these objections are, however, equally valid. Earthquakes strike with varying intensities and with various results. In 1953, much of the island of Kephallenia - including entire villages - was destroyed by an earthquake and new settlements built in different areas. But this is clearly not what happened at sites such as Tiryns and Mycenae, where rebuilding and repair are attested for LHIIIC. It is not impossible that the massive fortification walls withstood a seismic shock that proved too much for ordinary dwellings. Of fifteen houses excavated in the Lower Citadel of Tiryns, only one showed clear effects of fire damage and, in fact, one skeleton was found crushed beneath the masonry of one of the buildings. One casualty hardly amounts to a catastrophe, but it should be remembered that only a fraction of the Lower Citadel has been excavated and that earthquakes can often inflict heavy physical damage with compara tively light loss of human life, depending upon the season and time of day at which they strike. Some indications for more localized fires, perhaps resulting from toppled lamps and braziers, rather than a massive conflagration also come from Mycenae, where the Citadel House was the casualty of an incendiary destruction while the mud brick and plaster walls of the cult center next door showed no evidence of burning. As for the wisdom of situating new settlements in coastal areas, we cannot discount the possibility that Bronze Age Greeks displayed the same blend of fatalism and optimism that can be found today among residents of California’s Bay Area. In fact, evidence for two inundations, probably caused by tidal waves, is attested for the Lower Citadel of Tiryns during the first phase of LHIIIC. The fact that the zone continued to be inhabited for approximately another century offers some clue to the Tirynthians’ mentality in this regard.
Midea was almost certainly the casualty of an earthquake; it is not unreasonable to assume the same for nearby Mycenae and Tiryns, although there is currently no positive confirmation for this. It is less likely, however, that the mansion at Therapne or the palaces at Pylos or Volos were casualties of the same tremor, and this serves to illustrate the limitations of unicausal and universal explanations. We tend to talk about simultaneous destructions ca. 1200 but what we actually have is a series of episodes that date towards the end of the LHIIIB ceramic phase. In real terms, the destructions could have taken place over a period as long as thirty years or so and this allows for more complex causes, effects, and consequences. It is still significant that so many Late Bronze Age centers could have been delivered an ultimately fatal blow within the course of a single generation, but the apparent ubiquity of the catastrophe may be due not so much to there being a single cause as to the fact that the palatial economies of centers in the Aegean and the Near East were interlocked. In other words, a systems approach that focuses on the economic relations not only between the palatial center and its rural periphery but also between different palatial centers probably offers a more powerful explanation as to why the catastrophe was so widespread, but there can be little doubt that a systems collapse, if it occurred, was both the cause and the result of a wide range of factors that varied from region to region. Raiders and pirates could well have been responsible for harrying or even severing important economic networks between kingdoms and it is hard to believe that they would have refrained from preying on those already debilitated, but it would surely be a mistake to assume, on the basis of two Egyptian texts, that the identity of these raiders was the same in southern Greece as it was in the southern Levant. Earthquakes that destroyed palace storage rooms would have had a deleterious effect on the economic functioning of the palaces, just as they would have further demoralized and left even more vulnerable to external attack a population on the brink of starvation.
And drought and famine could have served as either a preliminary trigger or the final death knell for a redistributive system that could no longer sustain itself. Whatever the causes behind the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces, the answer must lie in the complexity of the world that the Bronze Age Greeks and their Near Eastern neighbors had created.
World History
