Mycenaeans

The Mycenaeans, named in modern times after the city of Mycenae, which was the first site where Mycenaean culture was recognized, were a Bronze Age people of the peloponnese (southern Greece). Mycenaean civilization flourished from about 1600 to 1200 b. c.e. and was one of three known highly developed Bronze Age cultures of pre-Hellenic Greece, the other two being the Cycladites of the Cyclades island group to the north of Crete and the Minoans on the island of Crete. All three are discussed as Aegean civilizations as distinct from the later Hellenic civilization of the Greeks.

ORIGINS

The origins of the Mycenaean civilization are still uncertain. In 1876-77 at the ancient site of Mycenae (from the root word mukes)—the city named for a mushroom supposedly found at its site by its legendary founder perseus—the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann located deep shafts containing rich grave goods. Schliemann went on to explore the tholos (beehive-shaped) tombs at Mycenae, the ruined palace at Tiryns, and what he believed to be the site of the Greek poet Homer’s Troy in Asia Minor, all as part of his obsessive quest to demonstrate that the Trojan War was an actual historical event. The magnificence of his finds convinced him that Mycenaean civilization must have been the society ruled by Homer’s Agamemnon and the other heroes of the Trojan War.

Schliemann worked at a time just before a rigorous science of archaeology had been developed to assess the chronology of finds through careful and thorough excavation. By documenting the placement of all artifacts and by examining their context and depth archaeologists can make inferences about relative age (deeper being older) and can reconstruct a “holistic” picture of a site that provides insights into the way people actually lived. This work depends as much or more on commonplace objects such as potsherds as on more glamorous items such as swords and gold face masks. Schliemann’s contribution to Greek archaeology, although considerable, was thus a double-edged one, in that he destroyed much evidence that would have yielded worlds of information on Greek prehistory, making the Greek Bronze Age paradoxically less well documented and understood than the same period in many other European countries. For this reason crucial questions about the Mycenaeans, such as the cause of the collapse of their civilization in the 13th century b. c.e., are still far from answered.