Around the year 1200 b. c.e., the transition from Late Helladic IIIB to Late Helladic IIIC, the entire infrastructure of the eastern Mediterranean came crashing down. The Hittite Empire collapsed in Turkey, Egypt was repeatedly attacked by so-called Peoples of the Sea, and the majority of palatial centers in Greece met with fiery ends. Mycenae was burnt down, as were Tiryns and Pylos. In Crete, the palatial centers and harbor towns were slowly abandoned, being replaced by new villages high in the hills.
The causes of this downfall of civilizations in the twelfth century are still a matter of research. Earlier in the twentieth century c. e., theories were put forward suggesting massive earthquakes, drought (and resulting famine), or some manner of epidemic similar to the Black Plague of the fourteenth century c. e. Now, the common consensus is that an overconnected system collapsed domino-style when one of the pieces fell out of place. There is evidence that the Hittite Empire began to lose cohesion as early as the late thirteenth century b. c.e. Desperate (former) Hittites took to the seas as pirate refugees, attacking towns along the Levantine coast, which in turn sent out its own groups of pirate refugees. Soon the entire eastern Mediterranean was in chaos, with trade and travel dangerous at best and halted at worst. Some of the populations of Turkey, the Levant, and Greece took to the seas searching for new farms to till and new governments to serve.
Of extreme importance was the relocation of great portions of the population. As stated above, in Crete the trend was to head to closely knit communities very high up in the mountains. Leaving behind Phaistos and Mallia, the Minoans moved into the regions of Karphi, Vrokastro, and Kavousi (Drews 1993, 29). Today, getting to that last site requires an hour-long trip uphill by bus, another hour-long ride uphill by truck, and a final hour-long hike straight uphill on foot.
In Greece, Mycenae was abandoned forever, as was Pylos. Some people of the Peloponnese fled to Asine, which lasted longer than many other sites. To the north, Attica became a safe haven, possibly because the soil was so bad that nobody would fight for that city. Thucydides (1, 2, 5-6) wrote, "At any rate, Attica from that time was for the most part without internal strife due to its poor soil, the inhabitants being the same continuously. And not the least proof of this fact is that the other regions of Greece did not grow at the same rate as Attica due to emigrations. For when the most powerful people were driven out of the rest of Greece by war and sedition, they relocated to Athens, as it was secure, and becoming citizens straightaway from earliest times they made the city even larger through the multitudes of the population, so that later, Attica not being sufficiently large, they sent off colonies to Ionia."
But linguistic evidence suggests that many Bronze Age inhabitants of Greece also sought refuge in Arcadia in the Peloponnese highlands. The dialect spoken here was quite similar to that preserved in the Linear B tablets, suggesting holdouts from older traditions in a society preserved in the hills (see chapter 6).
This Arcadian dialect is called Cypro-Arcadian, as it shares a number of similarities with the Greek dialect spoken in Cyprus. This brings us to the next group of relocations: those that brought the Greeks out of Greece entirely. Many Greeks of the twelfth century moved east and settled the islands off the coast of Turkey, such as Samos, Lesbos, and Rhodes. Some of these, such as Rhodes, had already been settled by the Mycenaeans, so in many ways the Greeks were heading out to familiar territories. Likewise for a longtime trading partner of the Minoans and Mycenaeans—Cyprus. The Mycenaeans settled on the western edge of Cyprus at Maa-Palaikastro as early as 1190 b. c.e. Within a few decades, they moved into the Cypriot city of Paphos (also called Palaipaphos, to distinguish it from the later Roman town of Nea Paphos) and shared the city with the Cypriot inhabitants. The Minoans also moved to Cyprus, settling the north and east of the island in the early eleventh century. By the tenth century, much of Cyprus was Hellenized.
Farther east, a group of "barbarians" settled in the southern Levant, a group called Philistines in the Bible and Peleset in the Egyptian records. These Philistines appear in the Bible wearing Mycenaean-style armor, including the distinctively Greek greaves on the shins. The biblical book I Samuel 17:4-6 says, "And there came out from the camp of the Philistines a champion named
Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. He had a helmet of bronze on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze. And he had greaves of bronze upon his legs, and a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders" (Revised Standard Version).
Archaeology has shown that the pottery of these Peleset was in most respects similar to that used by the Late Helladic IIIB and Late Helladic IIIC populations of Greece and Cyprus. It appears that some of the disenfranchised Mycenaeans, having attempted some mercenary attacks against Egypt, relocated north and settled in the land that eventually came to take their name—Palestine (from Peleset). They set up cities in the Philistine Pentopolis (Pentopolis = "five cities") at Ekron, Gath, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza (Mazar 1985, 308). Unlike Cyprus, where the Greeks became the dominant culture, the Peleset quickly adopted the culture of their Levantine neighbors, such that it was only in the past century that the original Greek origins of the Philistines were discovered.
World History
