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9-03-2015, 09:16

Mycenaean Greece

There is currently a great deal of interest among historians in issues of “periodization” - that is, why we carve up historical time into periods the way we do. Until recently, accounts of Archaic Greece tended to begin in the eighth century because it was widely believed that this is when the polis or city-state first emerged in the Greek world. In the next four chapters, I will suggest that the formation of political communities was a far more gradual phenomenon that played out over the course of several centuries, and that to understand their origins we need to examine not only the unsettled centuries that went before (the “Dark Age”) but also the Late Bronze Age “Mycenaean” civilization that flourished in mainland Greece in the second half of the second millennium.

On November 28, 1876, the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann wrote to George I, King of the Hellenes, grandiosely announcing his discovery of the graves of Agamemnon, the Homeric king of Mycenae, and his companions. The five shaft graves (supplemented by a sixth the following year) were grouped inside a funerary circle, known as Grave Circle A, immediately inside the famous “Lion Gate” at Mycenae, and contained between them nineteen bodies, accompanied by costly weapons and gold jewelry, vessels and death masks (Figure 3.1). Dating to the sixteenth and early fifteenth centuries - and thus too early to be associated with any historical Agamemnon - the exotic nature and extraneous origin of many of the grave offerings initially prompted speculation that the burials were those of newcomers to Greece, and some have even

A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 3.1 Grave Circle A, Mycenae. Source: photo by author

Suggested that these warriors were the first Greek-speakers in the peninsula. In 1952, however, a second funerary enclosure of twenty-five graves (Grave Circle B) was discovered some fifty meters to the northwest of the first. The later burials overlap with those in Grave Circle A, but the earliest date back to the later seventeenth century and establish beyond much reasonable doubt a continuous cultural tradition, stretching back into the Middle Bronze Age, to which the warriors inhumed in Grave Circle A were the heirs. It is preferable, then, to regard the burials as indications not for the arrival of an outside population but for the emergence of a new elite class from within the ranks of the existing population - something that can also be documented for Messenia at the end of the Middle Helladic period.

By the fourteenth century, the Mycenaean elites had begun to invest their wealth in monumental constructions - first tholos tombs (domed chamber tombs for multiple inhumation) and then palaces and impressive fortifications at mainland Greek sites such as Mycenae, Tiryns, and Midea in the Argolid, Pylos in Messenia, Thebes in Boeotia, and lolcus in Thessaly. Although the “type-site” of Mycenae has given its name to the generally common culture that these palatial centers share, there is no compelling evidence that Greece was politically unified in the Late Bronze Age. The idea of the palace itself is one that almost certainly derived from Minoan Crete - a civilization with which the Mycenaeans were in close contact - and, beyond there, from the Near East.

The Mycenaean palaces are far less impressive and generally much smaller than their Cretan counterparts, but like the Minoan palaces, the Mycenaean citadels functioned as economic centers. Although it is now becoming clear that the palaces did not have absolute control of all economic activity in the territory under their dominion, evidence from the storage magazines excavated in various palaces and from detailed inventories of what was stored - recorded on clay tablets in a syllabic script known as Linear B - shows that they functioned to acquire the goods deemed necessary to maintain the ruling elites.

Since the decipherment of Linear B in 1952, the clay tablets - especially those from Pylos, Cnossus, and Thebes - have revealed much about the administration of the Mycenaean kingdoms. A number of different occupations are mentioned, including weaving, carpentry, leather-working, metal-working, and arms manufacture, thus attesting to a relatively complex and specialized division of labor. An extensive hierarchy of named administrative offices, headed by the wa-na-ka (“lord”), exercised military, judicial, fiscal, and religious functions. At Pylos, we learn that the territory controlled by the palace was divided into two provinces, governed by a da-mo-ko-ro and a du-ma, with each province being further subdivided into districts under the authority of a ko-re-te, assisted by a po-ro-ko-re-te. We also know that most - though perhaps not all - of the names of the deities that Greeks of the Archaic and Classical periods worshipped were already known in the Mycenaean period.

Around 1200, however, towards the end of a ceramic phase known as Late Helladic IIIB (LHIIIB), the Mycenaean world was overwhelmed by a mysterious catastrophe. The palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, and Pylos, together with Megaron A and Megaron B at lolcus and a building dubbed the “Mycenaean mansion” at Therapne in Laconia, appear to have been destroyed in violent conflagrations (Thebes may have been a rather earlier casualty). There are indications that some sort of impending disaster was anticipated. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the fortifications at both Mycenae and Tiryns were strengthened and extended, and provisions were taken to safeguard the water supply through the construction of concealed passageways leading to underground cisterns. What appears to be a wall running across the Corinthian isthmus has been interpreted as a preventive measure against attack from the north and Linear B tablets from Pylos refer to the stationing of watchers and rowers. Periodic destructions, partial or complete, were certainly not unusual at Late Bronze Age sites in Greece: Mycenae may have suffered damage, perhaps as a result of earthquakes, on three occasions in the thirteenth century prior to the final disaster, while Tiryns experienced no fewer than eight destructions between the middle of the thirteenth century and the first quarter of the eleventh century, six of which date to the LHIIIC phase (ca. 1190-1070). What distinguishes the series of destructions ca. 1200 is their violence and their approximately simultaneous occurrence. The causes of the catastrophe continue to be debated, though when evidence for the palatial destructions first came to light in the late nineteenth century suspicion immediately fell upon the Dorians.



 

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