The Mycenaeans held sway in central and southern Greece during the Late Helladic period (the term used to denote the Late Bronze Age on the Greek mainland), from ca. 1650—1050 BC. Their culture jelled in two regions, in Messenia in south-west Greece, and in the home region of Mycenae, the Argolid, the area dominated in Classical Greek times by the city of Argos. From the fifteenth century BC on they expanded their holdings across the Aegean to the Anatolian shore, taking over the territories once controlled by the Minoans. They developed extensive contacts not only with the established civilizations of Egypt and the Levant but also with Europe and the lands of the western Mediterranean. At some point they fought the Trojans of north-west Anatolia, ifwe accept that some kernel of truth lay behind the later Greek legends of the Trojan War. Economic conflicts may have sparked the war, perhaps a dispute over access to the rich lands of the Black Sea.
The Mycenaeans were speakers of the earliest known form of Greek. They wrote in the Linear B script, a syllabary derived from the Minoan Linear A. It is not known when the Greek language originated or where, whether inside Greece or brought from elsewhere, but its development has been connected with the movements of peoples speaking other Indo-European languages of which Hittite was another early example (see Chapter 8). The archaeological record shows major changes in material culture during the final phases of the Early Bronze Age, ca. 2300—2000 BC, but after that, a smooth development through the Middle Helladic into the Mycenaean period. We might postulate, as many have, major immigrations of people from Anatolia and south-east Europe into Greece toward the end of the Early Bronze Age, with a continuing trickle afterwards, and gradual fusion of the newcomers’ language with those of the locals into what we know as Mycenaean Greek. But this is only a hypothesis. Movements of language groups cannot always be traced in distribution of pottery or other objects, and conversely, a change in material culture need not indicate a change in ethnic group.
World History
