Between 1450 and 1425 BC, there was another wave of destruction of the Cretan palaces. The palace at Knossos survived intact but not the areas around it. The rest
Were devastated by fire and abandoned for some time. When occupation was resumed a new culture had emerged. Its chamber tombs, those at Sellopoulo near Knossos, for instance, were similar to those of the mainland, and it was using a script, Linear B, which was contemporaneous with Linear A but distinct from it. What had gone on is still disputed. The palaces may have been destroyed by earthquakes followed by fires or as a result of conflict between rival centres. At some point invaders entered the island, either as conquerors or appropriators of the ruined palaces. The fact that Kommos, the major harbour in southern Crete, was not damaged might suggest destruction of the palaces by the invaders after a landing there. Knossos was probably used as a base by the newcomers but was to be itself destroyed at a later date, sometime between 1400 and 1200. The invaders were the Mycenaeans, the first known civilization of mainland Greece.
It is an exhilarating experience to visit the citadel of Mycenae in the Greek Pelo-ponnese today, especially if one arrives early, before other visitors, when the deserted ruins appear suddenly on the hillside. Well inland from the sea in a landscape that does not seem especially fertile, it seems an unlikely site for the city ‘rich in gold’ as described by Homer in the eighth century BC. Yet gold there was. In 1876 the German merchant turned archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, digging inside the massive stone walls of the citadel, uncovered a circle of stone slabs within which were six shaft graves (now known as Grave Circle A). The graves, deep rectangular pits some of which contained several burials, were filled with an array of rich grave goods, including gold cups, haunting face masks, and a mass of weapons. They still dazzle the visitor to the Mycenaean rooms of the National Museum of Athens. Schliemann, who had immersed himself in the epics of Homer with their tales of the great Trojan War, was convinced that Mycenae was the capital of those Greeks who had sailed off to Troy and that he had found no less than the grave and funeral mask of Agamemnon, their leader.
In fact the graves were much earlier than any conceivable date for the Trojan War. They, and an earlier, less rich, set of shaft graves (only discovered in 1951, the so-called Grave Circle B), dated from perhaps as early as 1650 and had been used and reused until about 1500 BC. At first they seemed so distinct culturally from what had gone before that it was assumed that they were the work of newcomers to Greece. However, there are earlier stone tombs that are structurally similar to the chambers of the shaft graves, while recent work on the pottery associated with the tombs has shown that it is a direct continuation of earlier styles. There is now no doubt that Mycenaean civilization developed directly from what had gone before. What is hard to explain is why this opulence developed so suddenly and unexpectedly in areas that had no ports and no great agricultural resources.
The answer seems to lie in the consolidation of elites. The shaft tombs and tholos tombs, round tombs with domed chambers found in Messenia, suggest families distancing themselves from the mass of population and perpetuating themselves as kinship groups through their own segregated tombs. The Mycenaean graves contain the remains of men, women, and children and the adults were healthy and robust, with an average age at death of 38. In physical terms these were certainly an
Elite and the reuse of tombs show that they expected to pass power down the generations. One of the discoveries in Grace Circle A is the gold covering for a child who must already have been marked out for high status before his or her early death.
There were several parts of Greece where Mycenaean settlements sprang up: the Argive plain in the eastern Peloponnese, which included Mycenae, Messenia in the western Peloponnese, and Attica and Boeotia on the Greek mainland. In Boeotia the citadels of Gla, Orchomenos, and, above all, thanks to a spate of recent excavations under the modern town, Thebes, are becoming better known and are challenging the perception that the Peloponnese was the core of Mycenaean civilization. The emergence of these settlements suggests that local leaders were exploiting their land more effectively in the hope that a surplus of the enduring local staples of the Greek mainland, olive oil, wine, wool, flax, and hides, could be squeezed out and then used for exchange in overseas trade for status symbols. Culturally the Myce-naeans were much less sophisticated than the Minoans but already before 1600 some sites had begun importing Minoan goods and craftsmen and even using their styles for inspiration.
Wider interaction with the Mediterranean may have stemmed from the Mycenaean control of copper, silver, and lead mines at Laurion in Attica. Metal analysis now shows that copper and silver found at Mycenae originated at Laurion but, even more tellingly, that the Minoans were importing Laurion copper. As their confidence and demands grew the Mycenaeans searched after further resources in the Aegean; copper and tin for bronze weapons, gold and silver for the finer metalwork, amber from northern Europe, lapis lazuli and dyes from the east. The Minoans may have been used as middlemen. Expansion was underpinned by a readiness to glorify war, clearly another means for the elite to achieve status. The famous bronze cuirass found at Dendra, in the eastern Peloponnese, seems designed for one to one combat on the model of the Homeric hero. Weapons found in the shaft graves include short swords suitable for thrusting and cutting in close combat that show signs of having been used in battle. One of the frescos from Acrotiri depicts what appear to be well-organized groups of Mycenaean soldiers. (A tell-tale sign is helmets adorned with boar tusks, as have actually been found in Mycenaean tombs.) These may have been mercenaries provided to rival Aegean cities by opportunistic Mycenaean leaders.
By the fifteenth century a Mycenaean presence was apparent throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The mercenaries may have become an expansionist force in their own right as it was now that Crete was overrun and its culture absorbed. There was the diffusion of Mycenaean artefacts, especially pottery, throughout the Cyclades, and a Mycenaean settlement with its own defensive walls has been found on the Asian mainland at Miletus. At Phylakopi on the island of Melos a community already rich in Minoan culture was fortified by the Mycenaeans. Trading routes, plotted as a result of finds of Mycenaean pottery, ran as far west as Sardinia, Italy, and Malta and as far east as the Levantine coast (ninety known sites with Mycenaean pottery most of them near the coast) and Egypt. There was a major increase in trade with Cyprus after 1400. Twenty sites in Egypt, some far up the Nile, have
Produced Mycenaean pottery; figures of warriors on a papyrus from Tell el-Amarna might represent Mycenaean mercenaries. Yet there is no mention in the Linear B tablets of a Mycenaean merchant class and it may be that it was seafarers from the eastern Mediterranean that continued to do much of the carrying.
By the fourteenth century the Mycenaeans had themselves become fine craftsmen, particularly in bronze and ivory but also in gold and silver. They were also accomplished builders. From the fifteenth century monumental tholos tombs were pervasive—nine remain at Mycenae alone. The most spectacular of these is ‘the Treasury of Atreus, attributed by Schliemann to Atreus, in legend the founding king of Mycenae and father of the Homeric Agamemnon. It is now dated to c.1350 bc. a dromos or entrance passage thirty-six metres long leads to the great entrance door one of whose lintels alone weighs a hundred tonnes. The stress is lessened by incorporating a triangular opening above the lintel. Inside the domed roof rises to thirteen metres and there is a separate burial chamber off the main room.
Even before they came directly into contact with Crete, the Mycenaeans must have been aware of the existence of Linear A script. By about 1400 they were writing their own language in a similar syllabic script, known to scholars as Linear B—in fact the two scripts have been called ‘cousins. What this language was remained unclear for many years but the assumption was that it was pre-Greek. The collection and ordering of the tablets, after a large collection was uncovered inside the palace at Pylos in the south-west Peloponnese in 1939, was intensive. Then in 1952, in one of the more important archaeological achievements of the century, a young architect, Michael Ventris, who had had an enthusiasm for languages and cryptography since he was a boy, made a stunning proposal. He had deciphered the values of several syllables and had re-created words that appeared close to those of the earliest surviving Greek texts, those of Homer’s epics. Among them were ‘shepherd, ‘bronzesmith, and ‘goldsmith’ and polo for foals, the same as in classical Greek. Not everyone was convinced, but the next year a new batch of Linear B tablets emerged from Pylos. One of them was a list of furniture. Beside a vessel with three supports were Linear B syllables reading, according to Ventris’s theory, TI-RI-PO. Earlier in the text two similar vessels had an adjoining text reading TI-RI-PO-DE. The Homeric Greek for a single tripod and a pair of tripods corresponded exactly. By now there were very few doubters—although when one set of academic diehards was confronted by a new batch of tablets from Pylos that confirmed Ventris’s decipherment, they claimed they had been deliberately forged to support his claim! (The story is well told by John Chadwick in his The Decipherment of Linear B, Cambridge and New York, 1990. See also Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, New York, 2013.)
Scholars were enthusiastic to find that Greek had been spoken so early, 500 years before the first Homeric text. As the Linear B tablets, particularly those of the large batch from Pylos, were deciphered, new evidence for the antiquity of Greek religion appeared. Zeus was already known to have roots deep in Indo-European cultures, but there were now the first mentions of other Greek gods and goddesses—Aphrodite, Ares, the god of war, Apollo, and Poseidon. At Pylos itself the tablets suggest that Poseidon was the presiding god, and it is particularly fascinating to find Homer,
Several centuries later, talking of the townsmen of Pylos offering sacrifices of black bulls to him. The goddess Potnia, literally ‘she who has power’, is listed in one Linear B tablet as the Potnia of Athana (sic), and reappears in the Iliad as ‘the Athenian Potnia, an early linking of Athens to her patron goddess. A recent, and totally unexpected, find has been the god Dionysus, as the recipient of an offering of honey at a sanctuary of Zeus at Chania and again identified with an altar at Pylos, here in the countryside.
The Linear B tablets make it clear that there were regular festivals linked to the agricultural year for which offerings of animals, wine, and cheese were brought to sustain communal feasting. There is increasing evidence of the importance of the funeral as a ceremony in Mycenaean society. Surviving fragments of frescos, painted vases, and larnakes, the pottery boxes in which human ashes were buried, show women with the hair shorn and their faces scarred accompanying the bier that was drawn by horses. Communal feasting took place at tombs and the horses appear to have been sacrificed. The ordinary members of the community were buried in chamber tombs cut into the rocks. A survey at Mycenae has identified twenty-seven different cemetery sites and some 250 tombs—these were family tombs, sometimes with as many as twenty bodies inside. Ancestors were given enduring respect by their descendants.
Independent palaces and citadels, Mycenae, Tiryns, Athens, and Pylos among them, lorded it over their local territory. (Schliemann was wrong to see Mycenae as a capital of Greece, although it may have been first among equals.) Palaces centred on a hall, the megaron, with a central hearth, a throne on the side wall, and an entrance vestibule graced by columns. There were domestic rooms around it, at Pylos even a bathroom with built-in bath. The walls, like those of the Minoan ‘palaces, were decorated with frescos. Who ruled here? The Linear B tablets talk of a wanax, a figure unknown in Minoan society, with authority over a defined territory. The tablets suggest that the wanax appointed officials and carried out religious rituals. At Pylos, in the western Peloponnese, a tradition going back to the Greek traveller Pausanias in the second century ad identified the area as the home of Homer’s hero, Nestor, and to this day the palace at Pylos is referred to as his. Homer’s Nestor presides over the sacrifice of bulls. Mycenae had a cult centre of several rooms approached from the palace through a frescoed processional way, so linking ruler and ritual. Cult images and figurines have been found there as well as altars for offerings.
Another official, the lawagetas, oversaw groups of people. These included rowers and warriors so he may have been a state general and a second megaron found in some palaces may have been his audience room. At Mycenae the palace also included workshops for artisans. The pottery of the Mycenaeans was especially fine: stirrup jars, for the transport of olive oil, drinking cups, and pithoi for storage are common shapes with designs adapted from Minoan art but given an exuberance of their own, notably in the use of sprawling octopuses, rosettes and whorls, and some primitive figure scenes, of warriors (the famous vase from Mycenae shows marching soldiers) and sailors on board ship. On Mycenaean seals it
Is telling that the nature themes of the Minoans were rejected in favour of those showing prestige items such as chariots and even bulls leaping as if the rough upcoming Mycenaean chieftains needed to appropriate the symbols of the civilization they were supplanting. Another appropriation was the Minoan double axe, itself a symbol of authority.
Towns grew up around the citadels. Mycenae’s may have had 6,500 inhabitants at its height. At Pylos urban sprawl stretched along the neighbouring Englianos Ridge for a kilometre. The rulers of each centre controlled trade and industrial production through an impressive bureaucracy. Several sites name officials whose title translates as ‘Collector’ and who had privileged access to resources. At Pylos there are records of the issue of bronze to the local smiths and the supervision of huge flocks of sheep by ‘Collectors’. This was at a time when agriculture, especially the cultivation of olives, was booming. Damming and draining improved access to water, always essential in a parched landscape such as Greece. The various processes of textile manufacture appear to have been under the Collectors’ control and in Crete there are detailed accounts of the gathering in of wool from some 600 different flocks. The wool was then allocated to women workers for production and dyeing. Each independent flock owner paid dues in the shape of wool to the centre and similarly some 775 tonnes of grain are recorded as being sent to Knossos as ‘tax’ from one harvest alone. One Collector at Knossos seems to have been responsible for the supervision of perfumed oil. The centres certainly had trading links with each other (one text at Mycenae records cloth bound for Thebes) and the use of similar names for officials at different sites suggests a shared political economy. The inter-state contacts may have extended to joint raids into the Aegean and beyond as Homer’s description of Agamemnon as leader of a band of hero chieftains each with his own followers suggests.
Yet the aggressive expansionism of the Mycenaean warlords was now being challenged. In the thirteenth century the fortifications of the Mycenaean centres became more massive. Unworked limestone was extracted in rough blocks from local quarries and levered into place to make formidable walls. At Gla, in Boeotia, there is a particularly extensive set but those at Mycenae and Tiryns also tower above the onlooker. In Mycenae the citadel is entered through the celebrated Lion Gate, in which two lions flanking a column perch upon a massive lintel. This suggests that the chieftains were competing in the display of their wealth and authority but it soon becomes clear that defence is also becoming a priority. So the walls at Mycenae and Tiryns are extended to enclose more of the community (at Mycenae the grave shafts are considered important enough to be included within the new walls), cisterns and storage chambers are incorporated, and elaborate entrance passages are designed to cut off and eliminate intruders. By 1200 sally ports are added at Mycenae, allowing the defenders to rush out into the midst of aggressors. A defensive wall was built across the Isthmus of Corinth, probably as a protection against invasion from the north. Even Pylos, where the palace has a domestic atmosphere very different from that of the typical Mycenaean stronghold, was rebuilt to make it more defensible.
The evidence suggests that this was a time of rising tension probably affecting the Mediterranean area as a whole. It has proved impossible to disentangle the sequence of events between 1200 and 1100. Earthquakes, followed by fires, were responsible for the collapse of some palaces in the eastern Peloponnese but the destruction of cities did not take place simultaneously. Some centres such as Athens, remained largely unscathed (according to the limited evidence surviving from a site on which there has been continuous rebuilding), others were destroyed, then reoccupied, then destroyed again. Pylos came under attack about 1180. The Linear B tablets, preserved by the heat of the fire which burned the palace, record hurried preparations for defence with, according to one interpretation, watchers sent to the coasts, bronze gathered in from the temples, and levies of gold. There are even hints that human sacrifices were carried out to appease the gods. It was of little use. The palace was destroyed completely.
It has been argued that there was a Mycenaean revival in the mid-twelfth century that was then snuffed out by further onslaughts. In some cases refugees carried their culture to other sites (such as Lefkandi on the island of Euboea and, possibly, recent excavations suggest, to the Chalcidice peninsula) and preserved it intact. In Tiryns there was even a revival of the settlement in the twelfth century, suggesting that new elite families had replaced the old. However, Mycenaean civilization had depended on a combination of strong and ordered leadership and administrative efficiency. By 1100 bc this had gone. With it disappeared literacy, fresco painting, stone building, and craftwork in gold and silver. William MacDonald’s survey of Messenia and southern Elis, in the Greek Peloponnese, in the 1960s, showed 195 sites active until about 1200 and only 16 afterwards.
The causes of the collapse of Mycenaean civilization have been hotly debated. The traditional view that it was the result of the marauding ‘Sea Peoples’ now appears to be simplistic in that the ‘Sea Peoples’ may themselves have been casualties of the breakdown rather than its instigators. The invaders of the Egyptian coastline are not necessarily the same peoples as those recorded threatening Pylos from the sea. There is increasing support for the idea that the economies of the Mycenaean centres became simply too complex, unable to sustain their prosperity as their populations rose. As resources became scarce, the Mycenaeans may have turned on each other, leading to a massive ‘systems collapse’, a civil war in which all ultimately lost out.
There is also a legend, preserved by the later Greeks, that Mycenaean civilization had been destroyed by invaders from the north-west, the Dorians. There is little archaeological evidence to support this invasion, though recently some archaeologists have suggested that handmade burnished pottery found on several twelfth-century sites, the so-called ‘Barbarian Ware’, may be that of incomers from the north. In short, there is continuing controversy over whether the reduced and impoverished communities of the twelfth and eleventh centuries were newcomers or the old populations adapting to new circumstances, although scholarship tends, in the present state of archaeological evidence, towards the latter view.
The collapse of Mycenaean civilization was followed by what scholars have traditionally called a Dark Age, from 1100 bc until the emergence of a new Greek world after 800. As with many other Dark Ages, however, the Greek Dark Age has proved vulnerable to the work of archaeologists, who are gradually finding evidence that life was, perhaps, not quite so shadowy as was once assumed. Without doubt, however, the unity of the Mycenaean world had been shattered. What did remain among the dispersed populations of the old Mycenaean centres and in the depopulated countryside was life carried on according to old traditions but at a much lower level.
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