An outline, era by era

Mycenaean Greece

Linear B; the world of the Trojan War legends

Bronze Age · ~3300 – ~1200 BCE

Mycenaean Greece was the Bronze Age civilization of mainland Greece, flourishing from about 1600 to 1100 BCE. It takes its name from Mycenae in the Argolid, but similar palace centres grew up at Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes, Orchomenos and Athens. Each was ruled from a fortified palace by a king, called the wanax, and run by a corps of scribes and officials. The Mycenaeans traded widely across the Mediterranean and took over much of Minoan Crete around 1450 BCE.

They used a script called Linear B, adapted from the Minoan Linear A, to keep palace records on clay tablets. In 1952 Michael Ventris showed that it records an early form of Greek, which made the Mycenaeans the first Greek speakers known in writing. The tablets are inventories of goods, workers and offerings, not stories. The Mycenaean world is also the setting remembered in the Trojan War legends, set down in Homer's poems centuries later. Around 1200 BCE the palaces were destroyed or abandoned, and the civilization faded by about 1100 BCE.

Things happened, and the rest is history

  1. The Trojan War and Agamemnon's expedition

    Heroic tale

    The legend

    Paris of Troy carries off Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta. Menelaus' brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gathers a great fleet of Greek kings and sails to Troy. After ten years of siege, the Greeks take the city by trickery and burn it.

    The rest is history

    The Iliad and Odyssey were composed around 750 to 700 BCE, some five centuries after the supposed events, and were shaped by long oral tradition. They mix Bronze Age memories, such as boar's tusk helmets and bronze weapons, with the customs of Homer's own time. Hittite letters mention a land called Ahhiyawa, widely thought to be the Mycenaeans, and a place called Wilusa, which may be Ilios, or Troy. Excavations at Hisarlik in Turkey, begun by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, found a fortified city, and the level called Troy VIIa shows burning around 1200 BCE. Whether a single great war lay behind the poems remains debated.

    Sources

    1. PrimaryHomer. Iliad. Greek epic poem, c. 750-700 BCE. Many editions, e.g. translated by Robert Fagles, New York: Viking, 1990.
    2. BookLatacz, Joachim. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Argues for a historical Troy and a Bronze Age background to the epic.
    3. BookFinley, M. I. The World of Odysseus. New York: Viking Press, 1954.Classic argument that the poems reflect the society of Homer's own age.

  2. The Mask of Agamemnon

    Popular belief

    The legend

    In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann digs into a royal grave at Mycenae and lifts a gold death mask from a skeleton. He is said to have telegraphed that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. The mask is still widely called by that name.

    The rest is history

    Schliemann found the mask in Grave Circle A at Mycenae. The shaft graves date to about 1600 to 1500 BCE, so the dead lived some three centuries before any plausible date for the Trojan War. The famous telegram is doubtful and may have been embellished later. The graves held rich gold, silver and bronze weapons, showing a wealthy warrior elite in early Mycenaean times. The mask is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

    Sources

    1. BookSchliemann, Heinrich. Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns. London: John Murray, 1878.Schliemann's own account of the grave finds.
    2. BookDickinson, Oliver. The Aegean Bronze Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Standard survey, with the dating of the shaft graves.
    3. BookCline, Eric H., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  3. The Cyclopes build the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns

    Origin story

    The legend

    The walls of Mycenae and Tiryns are made of stones so huge that no human could have lifted them. The Cyclopes, one-eyed giants from Lycia, are said to have come to build them for Perseus, the founder of Mycenae, and for the king of Tiryns.

    The rest is history

    Later Greeks told this story, and it is recorded in writers such as Pausanias in the 2nd century CE, who saw the walls still standing. The name Cyclopean is still used for this kind of masonry. The walls were built by Mycenaean workers using large rough limestone blocks, mostly in the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. The Lion Gate at Mycenae dates to about 1250 BCE. The story shows how the ruins were explained once the builders were long forgotten.

    Sources

    1. PrimaryPausanias. Description of Greece, book 2. Greek travel guide, 2nd century CE. Many editions, e.g. translated by W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, 1918.
    2. BookWace, Alan J. B. Mycenae: An Archaeological History and Guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
    3. BookDickinson, Oliver. The Aegean Bronze Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

  4. Deciphering Linear B

    Popular belief

    The legend

    It is often said that Linear B was a secret Minoan language, and that the tablets would never be read. Then in 1952 a young architect and amateur, Michael Ventris, cracked the code alone and proved that it was Greek.

    The rest is history

    Arthur Evans found the tablets at Knossos from 1900 and believed they were Minoan. Ventris, an architect, did make the breakthrough in 1952, building on the grid work of the American scholar Alice Kober, who died in 1950. He was helped by the Cambridge scholar John Chadwick, with whom he published the decipherment in 1953. A tablet found at Pylos in 1939 by Carl Blegen supplied much of the evidence. The tablets turned out to be lists of goods and workers, and they show that Greek was spoken on the mainland and Crete by the 13th century BCE.

    Sources

    1. ArticleVentris, Michael, and John Chadwick. "Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives." Journal of Hellenic Studies 73 (1953): 84-103.
    2. BookChadwick, John. The Decipherment of Linear B. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
    3. BookFox, Margalit. The Riddle of the Labyrinth. New York: Ecco, 2013.Popular account that restores Alice Kober's role.

  5. The Return of the Heraclids and the Dorian invasion

    Origin story

    The legend

    After the death of Heracles, his descendants are driven out of the Peloponnese. Generations later they return with the Dorians and take back their ancestral lands, including Argos, Sparta and Messenia. This is how the old kingdoms fell.

    The rest is history

    The story was told by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Thucydides in the 5th century BCE, as an account of how the Peloponnese came to be ruled by Dorian Greeks. Modern scholars doubt that a single Dorian invasion destroyed the palaces. The collapse around 1200 BCE is now linked to a wider crisis across the eastern Mediterranean, in which causes such as earthquakes, drought, internal conflict and disrupted trade have all been proposed. The Dorian dialect of Greek is real and was spoken in the Peloponnese in later times. The Linear B tablets stop in the years after about 1200 BCE, and writing was lost in Greece for some four centuries.

    Sources

    1. PrimaryThucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War, book 1.12. Greek history, late 5th century BCE. Many editions, e.g. Loeb Classical Library.
    2. BookCline, Eric H. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.Surveys the causes proposed for the Bronze Age collapse.
    3. BookDrews, Robert. The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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