The Linear B tablets, as we saw in the previous chapter, do not enable us to write a history properly so called of the late Mycenaean period. However, the use of tablets made of clay does suggest at least a prima facie comparability with the contemporary civilizations of Egypt, Anatolia and the Levant and so provides a convenient transition to what I believe to be a proper context for studying late Mycenaean Greece. The documentary evidence for contact or conflict between the Mycenaean Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the political, diplomatic or military spheres may in many cases merely be the spurious outcome of ‘a sort of philological game of hopscotch’ (Carpenter 1966, 45). But the intercourse in articles of trade (actual finds and inferences from the Linear B tablets), linguistic borrowings, artistic interconnections and, I should say, the very use of the unsuitable medium of clay for Linear B script—these are not so easily dismissed. I am of course far from believing that Mycenaean Greece was just ‘a peripheral culture of the Ancient East, its westernmost extension’ (Astour 1967, 357f.). But I find it implausible that the contemporaneity of the Mycenaean ‘time of troubles’ with the series of destructive upheavals engulfing the whole eastern Mediterranean basin was just a coincidence, even if the nature of the connection between them cannot be precisely demonstrated.
Underlying tensions in the Middle East were given ominously concrete expression in c. 1300, when Egypt and Hatti (the Hittites) fought a major but inconclusive battle at Qadesh in Syria. Sixteen years later Rameses II and Hattusilis III concluded peace on terms which included guarantees of mutual aid in case either power was attacked by a third party. The treaty was then sealed in the accepted manner by a marriage-alliance. The practical effect of this elaborate diplomacy, however, was relatively short-lived. In c. 1232 Merenptah was obliged to repulse an invasion of Egypt mounted by Libyans from Cyrenaica and ‘northerners from all lands’; and in c. 1191 and again in c. 1188 Rameses III defeated insurgents who came by land and sea from the north-east to settle in the Nile delta. In the interval between these onerous but successful exploits of the two Pharaohs the capital of the Hittites at Hattusas
In Anatolia was destroyed and their empire disintegrated. The kingdoms of Ugarit, Alalakh and Alasia (Cyprus?) met a similar fate, and there were further disasters elsewhere in the Levant. In the space of about a century the balance of power in the Middle East had been forcibly and irretrievably altered.
In round numbers 1300 can therefore legitimately be regarded as a pivotal date in the history of the Bronze Age civilizations abutting the east Mediterranean basin. In Greece it was approximately then that the Mycenaean civilization received its diagnostic expression in the construction of massive fortifications and palatial complexes at Mycenae and elsewhere. To be more exact, 1300 was the date now most widely accepted for the transition from the LH IIIA style of pottery to LH IIIB. This may seem an improbable way of making a historical assertion, but history is nothing without chronology, and the chronology of the Aegean Bronze Age, as already remarked, is a matter of the typology of its pottery. The three main ceramic phases of the Mycenaean period (LH I-III) are not incompatible with the few available excavated stratigraphies (most recently that from Nichoria in Messenia). But the sub-divisions of these phases—seven for the third alone and ten in all, according to the still generally useful scheme of A. Furumark first proposed in 1941—are based on somewhat subjective judgments of the direction and pace of stylistic change and on arbitrary decisions as to where one sub-phase ends and the next begins. Absolute dates, moreover, may be derived only from the association of Mycenaean pottery in datable Egyptian contexts or with objects that can be cross-referenced with the Egyptian series. Thus it is hardly surprising that both the initial and the terminal dates of LH IIIB pottery are disputed (1300 and 1200 are strictly approximations and perhaps considerably too low) and that the nature and pace of stylistic change are detectable with assurance only at Mycenae. These are not trivial matters, since the ‘historiography’ of the late Mycenaean period depends upon them.
It is not disputed though that pottery can and must be used as evidence for chronology. However, deeper problems confront those who wish to draw other kinds of inference from the various facets of pottery manufacture and distribution. These problems are particularly acute when pottery, thanks to its fitness to survive, constitutes the bulk of the artefactual or—as so often in prehistoric contexts—the total evidence, and when the amount of controlled excavation has been comparatively slight. Such is the situation in Mycenaean Lakonia. Take, for instance, the question of population density. Of the inherent limitations of evidence from survey listed in Chapter 4 the one particularly relevant here is that not all types of pot have the same or even comparable potential for survival or for survival in an obvious or diagnostic way. For the overwhelming proportion of Lakonian LH IIIB sites identified by surface survey alone made their presence known through the medium of kylikes, deep bowls and stemmed bowls, often by a combination of sherds from all three shapes. Since the stems of the kylikes and stemmed bowls are particularly durable and eye-catching, it is theoretically possible that the apparently high relative density of population in Lakonia in LH IIIB is a mirage arising from an accident of cultural choice in the ceramic sphere. Fortunately this inference can be checked against evidence of other kinds and from other areas and is unlikely to be correct. But it is not beyond a doubt incorrect, and the possibility underlines the urgency of the need for more excavation.
Mycenaean IIIB pottery was diffused very widely. ‘Developed LH IIIB is the great period of the koine and mass production’ (Wace 1957, 222). On the mainland it enjoyed common currency as far north as Thessaly, though it was imported only desultorily into the mountainous interior of Epirus. Overseas it was used in the east and the west both by non-Greeks and by temporary or permanent Mycenaean expatriates. The concentration of exports, which had begun to gather momentum during LH IIIA, may be somehow connected with the fall of Knossos c. 1375 or more directly with the establishment of Mycenaean traders in semi-permanent overseas emporia, for example at Scoglio del Tonno in the instep of Italy (near the later Spartan settlement of Taras: Chapter 8), Ugarit in Syria and various places in Cyprus. However, along with the increasing weight of production and breadth of distribution there developed a striking homogeneity of fabric and style which makes it difficult to discover the provenance of individual pots or sherds. Thus the hope expressed by Wace and Blegen (1939) that it would one day be possible to differentiate Lakonian and Corinthian LH IIIB pottery in the same routine way as their Archaic successors has so far proved vain, although some progress has been made through optical emission spectroscopy and neutron-activation analysis. There is, however, a certain amount of regional differentiation, visible to the naked eye and apparent to the touch, in both clay and paint.
So far thirty-five sites in Lakonia have certainly yielded LH IIIB pottery, and four more doubtfully so (Figure 7). Of the maximum of thirty-nine, however, only five are scientifically excavated habitation-sites. I shall return to these in due course, but first I want to dwell briefly on Pavlopetri in the Malea peninsula, the chief site in the Vatika plain and so the prehistoric forerunner of classical Boiai. This would have been the sixth excavated habitation-site were it not now underwater, where natural conditions prevented the recovery of more than a bare outline. But even this outline is instructive, in three main ways. First, the divers located only two chamber-tombs, which are usually considered the customary receptacles of dead Mycenaeans, as against thirty-seven cist-graves, which had been typical of the MH period. In view of this find (if the cists are indeed Mycenaean) and of recent discoveries of cist-grave cemeteries in Boiotia and Thessaly, it is perhaps prudent to suspend judgment on what was normal Mycenaean burial practice. Second, the settlement came to an end in LH IIIB and was not apparently reoccupied for many centuries. This experience is repeated throughout Lakonia. Finally, and uniquely, it was possible to get some idea of
Figure 7 Late Helladic IIIB Lakonia
The total area of the settlement (at least 45,000 m.2) and to rescue something of its plan, including rectilinear streets with their frontages of houses. These details bear directly and informatively on our discussion of Renfrew’s estimate of the population of prehistoric Greece which we left hanging in the air in Chapter 4.
For Renfrew assumed that Late Bronze Age settlements in the Aegean were typically ‘of urban or proto-urban nature’. This assumption may perhaps not be contradicted by Pavlopetri; but his second assumption, that the average size of a Mycenaean settlement was 20,000 m.2, certainly seems to be. The difficulty of course is to decide whether Pavlopetri was of ‘average’ size, since what Renfrew keeps well hidden is that in the absence of total excavation or survey there is no scientific way of estimating the size of an ancient settlement with any precision. True, Hope Simpson (in Loy 1970, 149-55) has attempted a self-confessedly subjective classification of some ninety Mycenaean sites in Messenia as Small, Small-Medium, Medium, Medium-Large or Large on the basis of the scatter of surface sherds. But the sherd-scatter is a wildly unreliable criterion: for example, the area of some 200,000 m.2 assigned on this basis to the Palaiopyrgi hill near Vapheio, which thus becomes the largest known site in prehistoric Lakonia, seems utterly disproportionate. However, to be fair to Hope Simpson, a cursory comparison of his individual classifications with the evidence of the sherd-scatter ostensibly supporting them reveals no strict correlation. In other words, factors besides sherd-scatter—such as extent of arable land (by far the most important), strategic/commercial position and available water supply—were equally and rightly taken into account. Thus, to sum up our long discussion, Renfrew’s estimate of 50,000 inhabitants for Mycenaean Lakonia may or may not correspond to reality. We just cannot say for certain. However, since this is the figure attributed by McDonald and Hope Simpson to the larger and far more intensively surveyed region of Messenia in LH IIIB, I should suppose it to be a considerable overestimate, at least on present evidence.
The five excavated LH IIIB habitation-sites in Lakonia are Amyklai and the Menelaion complex in the Spartan basin, Karaousi and Ay. Stephanos on either side of the Helos plain, and Anthochorion in west Vardhounia. The results from Karaousi and Anthochorion were relatively disappointing, but the other three were interesting in their different ways. Amyklai’s chief significance lies in its evidence of late Mycenaean cult (below). The akropolis of Ay. Stephanos was fortified, perhaps more than once, during LH IIIB (to judge from the associated pottery). It thereby takes its place with Mouriatadha in northern Messenia among fortified settlements in the southern Peloponnese, and its identification with the Helos of the Homeric ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (Appendix 2) is a definite possibility. Certainly the site was strategically placed to guard both the western side of the lower Eurotas valley and the approach to Lakonia via the Lakonian Gulf and was advantageously situated to exploit marine resources. On the other hand, the surrounding arable land is extremely poor, a deficiency which was remedied maybe through symbiosis with ‘the land-locked Panayiotis community around the extensive Neogen soils on the north-east corner of the plain’ (Bintliff 1977, 476). Thus the main focus of interest must be the apparently unfortified settlement on the site of the historical sanctuary dedicated to Menelaos and Helen.
As we have seen, the archaeological picture for the Mycenaean occupation has been clarified by the recent (and not yet finally published) British excavations, but there is still no conclusive corroboration of the widespread view that this was the palatial seat of a Mycenaean Menelaos. The settlement was undoubtedly the central place of Mycenaean Lakonia, but archaeologically all we have is a well-appointed ‘mansion’ reoccupied partially, after a gap of more than a century, during LH IIIB (‘Dawkins House’) and then destroyed by fire, together with its store of sealed wine-jars, towards the end of the same phase. The agents and motive of the destruction are alike unknown, and it would be incautious as yet to link this destruction of a single building with those attested on a number of the major Mycenaean centres elsewhere on the mainland in LH IIIB or C, let alone to think of the settlement as a whole in terms of Mycenae, Tiryns or Pylos. An isolated find complicates the picture further. This is a fibula (safety-pin) of the ‘violin-bow’ type which Blinkenberg in his classic synoptic study (1926, 50) deemed to be the earliest of the class and of LH IIIB/C origin. Our example could have come from a late Mycenaean tomb. Alternatively, like a handful found in the Orthia sanctuary at Sparta itself, it was dedicated in the eighth century or later and had survived the interval perhaps as an ‘antique’ heirloom.
The evidence for cult in LH IIIB Lakonia is even less extensive than that for habitation, being practically confined to the site at the historical sanctuary of Apollo at Amyklai four to five kilometres south of classical Sparta. There was a Bronze Age settlement here from EH times but this seems to have been temporarily interrupted at the close of the MH period. In LH IIIB a sanctuary was established, as is shown by the large number of terracotta figurines of stylized ‘goddesses’ and animals found, together with two fragments of almost life-sized human figures in clay. The motive for setting up the cult is of course unknown, and, given the nature of our evidence for Mycenaean religion—inferences from archaeological material, later literary testimony and in some cases Linear B tablets—it is always hazardous to conjecture the identity of Mycenaean deities, let alone their possible powers and attributes. But Amyklai is one of the places where the evidence has seemed to justify bolder hypotheses. Since this has a more immediate bearing on the ‘Dorianizing’ of Lakonia, discussion has been deferred to the next chapter.
The remainder of the excavated LH IIIB evidence comes from tombs distributed throughout Lakonia, nearly all of the chamber-type (Melathria,
Krokeai, Tsasi, Mavrovouni, Pellana, Kotroni, Epidauros Limera and Kythera). Krokeai, however, in east Vardhounia has also produced a slab-covered shaft-grave in use from LH II onwards. The associated settlement was probably connected with the ‘antico verde’ or ‘lapis Lacedaemonius’ (i. e. labrador porphyrite) quarries at the appropriately named Psephi. The stone was widely used in Mycenaean Lakonia; worked cores have been found, for example, at Ay. Stephanos. Indeed, it was certainly being used in Crete by LM I for both vases and sealstones (Warren 1969, 132f.). Like the ‘antico rosso’ from Kyprianon in south Mani, it was employed to face the thirteenth-century tholos tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. Neither stone, however, appears to have been used in Lakonia between the thirteenth century BC and the Roman period, although there may be a reference to ‘verde antico’ in Theophrastos (De Lapidibus 4.25, if the emendation Lakainon is adopted). The tholoi at Analipsis and Kambos may just have remained in use until LH IIIB, suggesting the continued existence of local nobilities. The other side of the social coin may be represented by the above-mentioned cists from Pavlopetri and some single inhumations from Ay. Stephanos.
This leaves twenty-one sites where occupation is attested by surface finds alone and one, classical Sparta, where LH IIIB has indeed turned up in excavation on the akropolis hill but (despite the intensity of exploration) in such minute quantity as to suggest a minor and perhaps not even a permanent settlement. This is of considerable significance, as we shall see in the next chapter.
The resulting settlement-pattern suggests a relatively high density of population in thirteenth-century Lakonia, concentrated unsurprisingly in the Eurotas valley but extending suggestively into upland and sometimes mountainous country too. As Bintliff (1977, 699) has noticed, the major settlements in the Sparta plain are regularly spaced at intervals of five kilometres so as to exploit the adjacent terrain with maximum efficiency. If we include those sites whose surface pottery cannot be more precisely classified than LH III, the total of sixty-three does not lag so conspicuously behind that obtained for south-west Peloponnese after several seasons of intensive and coordinated survey work. The latter region too shows a maximum density of settlement in the LH IIIB period, as one might have inferred from the plentiful archaeological and documentary evidence from the ‘Palace of Nestor’ not far north of classical Pylos. However, the Messenian evidence is perhaps significantly richer and more variegated: the palace has its mortuary correlates in a finely constructed and lavishly endowed tholos and impressive chamber-tombs for which the only real Lakonian parallel, Vapheio, belongs to an earlier epoch. The correspondence, in short, is only of a very general nature.
Nevertheless, one aspect of this generally weak correspondence has been heavily stressed in some recent ‘historical’ accounts of the Mycenaean period, perhaps with good reason, namely the exponential decline in the number of Lakonian sites attested for the LH IIIC period (seven certain, another eight possible) in contrast to the LH IIIB peak of thirty-nine (max.). The corresponding figures for Messenia are thirteen certain and another three possible LH IIIC sites as against sixty-seven (min.) LH IIIB. It therefore seems a fair inference that ‘in the twelfth and eleventh centuries this fertile and well-watered area was occupied by scarcely more than 10 per cent of the people who had lived there in the thirteenth century B. C.’ (MME 143). The rest of this chapter will be addressed to an attempted explanation of this massive problem.
First, though, the evidence for LH IIIC occupation of Lakonia (Figure 8). At Amyklai there is actually an observable increase either in population or perhaps just in cultic activity; continuing external contact is shown by one sherd and a fragment of a wheel-made terracotta statuette, both decorated in the ‘Close Style’ of the Argolis. Occupation may have continued in the area into the eleventh century, but thereafter, archaeologically at any rate, there is a break in continuity—to whose significance I return in Chapter 7. Geraki yielded three ‘goddess’ figurines apparently of the ‘psi’ type, but these may not even be Mycenaean (French 1971, 139). A little LH IIIC pottery has been excavated at Karaousi and Anthochorion and found on the surface at Apidia. The excavated tomb-sites are slightly more promising. A kernos of unique form from a chamber-tomb at Krokeai shows that life was still supportable in eastern Vardhounia. Seven LH IIIC vases from two chamber-tombs at Pellana (Kalyvia Georgitsi) and one whole pot and some sherds from Ay. Stephanos indicate the same for the northern and southern ends respectively of the Eurotas furrow.
But most impressive and revealing of all in their richness and chronological range, together with their evidence of external contacts, are the finds from chamber-tombs at Epidauros Limera. These may be thought to represent some general trends of the period in Greece as a whole. The area undoubtedly received an influx of settlers during LH IIIC. We cannot be sure whether their Aegean connections (below) were established before or after their arrival, but in view of the evidence for depopulation elsewhere in Lakonia it is reasonable to suggest that the newcomers were displaced Lakonians. The most obvious point of origin is the Spartan basin, which has easy routes of communication with Epidauros Limera (Chapter 10) and suffered apparently the greatest depopulation. It is at least highly suggestive that this area was precisely the place of refuge selected by the inhabitants of the Sparta area in face of the Slav invasions of the late sixth century AD (Pavlopetri was another). Once established at Epidauros Limera, these Mycenaeans formed part of an Aegean koine embracing sites like Perati in Attika (probably another refugee-settlement), Asine in the Argolis and Naxos in the Kyklades. Indeed, their pottery in the earlier stages of LH IIIC shows contact even with Crete. The cemetery, moreover, remained in use into sub-
Figure 8 Late Helladic IIIC Lakonia
Mycenaean times, perhaps as late as c.1050. When the other members of the koine dropped away, the potters of Epidauros Limera may have turned for their continuing inspiration to the communities of central Greece. The latest finds, however, fail to bridge the all-important transition from the subMycenaean to the Protogeometric period, and the subsequent fate of the erstwhile refugees is unknown. In fact, Epidauros Limera ceases to exist, archaeologically, until the seventh century.
To sum up, the LH IIIC settlement-pattern marks a radical departure from that of LH IIIB in Lakonia. The number of inhabited sites is reduced by about 62.5 per cent overall and by a greater percentage in the Eurotas valley. Some habitation, it is true, is apparent in all the main geological areas of the region, but it is on an enormously reduced scale. Conversely, Amyklai possibly and Epidauros Limera certainly increased in size. After c. 1100, however, Lakonia to all outward appearances was uninhabited for the first time since Middle Palaeolithic times, but that is a problem to be considered in Chapter 7.
The phenomenon of late Mycenaean decline, if correctly identified, is by no means peculiar to Lakonia. The parallel situation in Messenia has already been noted and in fact it extends to all the major regions of Mycenaean settlement. Equally the internal redistribution of population inferred from the Epidauros Limera evidence is written large in the influx of settlers during LH IIIC to previously marginal areas such as Achaia and the Ionian islands of Ithaka and Kephallenia, not to mention those who went as far afield as Cyprus and Crete. Indeed, there is later literary evidence which suggests that Lakonians figured prominently among the emigrants. However, these parallels should not perhaps be pressed. The Lakonian evidence is provisional, and in particular there is only the destruction of the ‘Dawkins House’ at the Menelaion site to compare to the disasters which overtook Thebes, Gla, lolkos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos (to name only the more prominent centres) during LH IIIB and C. None the less, the mainland Greek disequilibrium coincides broadly with the upheavals that engulfed the entire east Mediterranean basin at about the same time, and it would be anomalous, I think, if the Lakonian development were wholly independent of them.
At first blush a hypothesis which accounted for all these geographically disparate yet superficially similar and roughly contemporary phenomena would appear to have the merits of simplicity and economy. But in the present state of our knowledge no such hypothesis can be convincingly advanced. That of Rhys Carpenter, for example, which postulates a shift in the trade winds bringing on an extended drought and consequential famine, disease and possibly riots, seems unsupported and possibly falsified by what relevant evidence there is from Greece (Chapter 1). Nor does the documentary evidence of famine at Hattusas and Ugarit c. 1200 prove that there was a climatic change then either in the central Anatolian plateau or anywhere else in the Near East, let alone Greece. Conversely, the theory of a widespread epidemic of bubonic plague cannot be evaluated for lack of evidence. Nor can it be shown that the peoples who confronted the Egyptian Pharaohs were directly responsible for the downfall of the Hittite empire or the destructions of Ugarit and other sites in the Levant and Greece.
It is therefore permissible to look for more localized and specifically Greek explanations. Using the evidence of archaeology and the Linear B inscriptions, it could be argued that the intensification of settlement, large-scale pasturage and expansion of overseas trade during LH IIIB had led to extensive forest-clearance and the exhaustion of marginal land, and that the resulting deforestation and erosion had had a critically deleterious effect on the vegetational climax. Thus the depopulation in LH IIIC could have been the consequence both of flight to less heavily settled areas in search of food and of the death by famine and disease of many of those who remained behind.
Deforestation and soil-erosion, however, are not a sufficient explanation of the material record: they leave out of account the destructions. Since these were inflicted by people who have left no other distinguishing mark of their presence, and since the Mycenaean way of life continued thereafter, albeit on a reduced scale, it follows that the attackers either were themselves Mycenaeans or were outsiders whose material accoutrements were either Mycenaean or perishable or hitherto unrecognized or not left behind. Unfortunately, the Linear B tablets—despite the ingenuity of those who regard a possibly extraordinary requisition of bronze, the disposition of a coastal watch and possible human sacrifice as signs of a military and social crisis in the Pylos kingdom—cannot shed further light on the nature of the crisis or the identity of the destroyers. The wall across the Isthmus of Corinth (if, as it surely is, it is a fortification-wall and spanned the entire Isthmus) is ambiguous too: it was built in the LH IIIB/C transition by users of Mycenaean pottery and, like the attempts to safeguard water-supply at Athens, Mycenae and Tiryns, seems to betoken exceptional concern for defence; but the dispute over relative pottery chronology at this critical point leaves open the possibilities that it was constructed after some, most or even all of the LH IIIB destructions in the Peloponnese.
Two competing hypotheses, which are not in fact mutually exclusive, have therefore been proposed to explain the archaeological ‘facts’ of destruction followed by dispersal and reduction of population. The first, which brings invaders by land from north of the Isthmus and indeed of Greece, suits the LH IIIC picture of relative prosperity in the Aegean and influxes of population into Achaia, the Ionian islands and further afield to south and east. It might also account for a number of intrusive artefacts of vaguely ‘northern’ type, especially hand-made pottery, which made an appearance in southern Greece around the LH IIIB/C transition. On the other hand, the marked increase in cist-burials after c. 1150, which has been claimed as another indication of northern intruders, could be a purely endogenous phenomenon. More important still, though, this hypothesis fails to explain satisfactorily why the postulated invaders confined their attention in western Peloponnese to the ‘Palace of Nestor’ and why they did not settle in Greece—unless, that is, they were in fact Mycenaeans and so archaeologically indistinguishable.
It is this latter possibility which has given rise to the second main explanatory hypothesis, embraced for example by Hooker (1977), namely civil war. For if the destroyers were Mycenaeans, then they could be either the common people in opposition to the palace-bound ruling class in each region, or disaffected members of the ruling stratum and their supporters, or rulers (or coalitions of rulers) of other regions. Further speculation could be, and usually is, conducted on the basis of the material remains alone. But as a rule it is not long before recourse is had to the very much later literary sources to eke out the archaeological evidence. For the reasons set out in Chapter 5 and Appendix 2 I do not believe such recourse is legitimate.
However, if pressed to provide an explanation I would adopt elements of the two main hypotheses outlined above and combine them with my starting-point in this chapter, the wider upheavals in the east Mediterranean basin. Thus a domestic economic slump aggravated by the disruption of overseas trade could have weakened the authority of the Mycenaean rulers and impelled them to solve their problems, in a manner familiar to students of the eighth century (Chapter 8), at the expense of the cultivable land of their neighbours. The resulting warfare, perhaps accompanied by civil strife and influxes of barbarian intruders, might have destroyed the finely balanced economic and social system which the palace-bureaucracies administered, together with the palaces themselves. Once their centripetal force was gone, the unified regions of the Mycenaean cosmos will have dissolved once more into isolated islands of population adrift in an uncharted political sea and forced back on their own immediate resources much as at the beginning of the MH period.
Notes on further reading
The problem of correctly characterizing the political and economic structure of the (tablet-using) Mycenaean state can only be complicated by the use of misleading analogies or loose terminology, above all that of feudalism: Finley 1957. On the other hand, that mediaeval analogies can elucidate Mycenaean economic development is shown in Hutchinson 1977, even if many of his historical conclusions are unconvincing.
The ‘philological game of hopscotch’ referred to by Rhys Carpenter is best exemplified in Astour 1967, ch. 1. Like hopscotch, this sort of approach explains nothing and gets you nowhere. For artistic interrelations between Greece and the Orient see Kantor 1947 and Smith 1965. The mechanisms of foreign trade, however, are opaque: it could perhaps be argued that the need for metals impelled the Mycenaeans to take to the sea, but the equally crucial Athenian corn-supply in the Classical period was by no means in Athenian hands exclusively; and the only excavated wreck of the period, really a travelling bazaar, is probably Syrian or Palestinian (Bass 1967).
For the absolute chronology of the Late Bronze Age I have followed Thomas 1967 and Rowton 1970. The destructions and upheaval in the east Mediterranean basin are discussed by Hooker (1977, 156-60). I agree with his rejection of ‘the picture of the Sea Peoples as a powerful army, moving irresistibly and of set purpose, until their final defeat at the hand of the Egyptians’ and with his explanation of the ferment as stemming from the collapse of the Hittite empire; on the ‘Sea Peoples’ see now the intelligent synthesis of Sandars (1978).
The standard textbook of Mycenaean pottery is still Furumark 1941. For the LH IIIA and B phases at Mycenae a stream of articles by E. French is indispensable reading, but the details of the sequence elsewhere are still controversial: ‘when we say Mycenaean IIIB pottery, what exactly do we mean?’ (Mylonas 1964, 373). For more recent developments in scientific analyses of Mycenaean pottery see Bieber et al. 1976.
The most convenient reference work on Mycenaean sites is Hope Simpson 1965; a second edition by Hope Simpson and O. Dickinson is in preparation. For the stoppered wine-jars from the Menelaion see Vickery 1936, 32, 59. Pace Oliva (1971, 16), there is no evidence that they were ‘clearly ready for despatch’.
Mycenaean cult-places are conveniently listed in Hagg 1968. For some sensible remarks on the difficulties of discussing Mycenaean religion see Hooker 1977, 192ff. (but even he succumbs to the desire to know).
The evidence of destructions in LH IIIB is given in Buck 1969. For the decline in population in LH IIIC in Greece generally see the table in Alin 1962, 148 (now considerably out of date).
World History
