The Earliest Greeks: The Mycenaeans

      Mainland Greece developed in the same way as Crete, and at about the same pace, down to around 2000 BCE. Neolithic farming villages were scattered in the narrow valleys of Greece from ca. 65000 BCE to 3000 BCE. Then, as elsewhere around the Aegean, bronze came into common use, people learned to exploit natural resources more effectively, contacts with other regions increased, and life slowly changed. A new era began, now called the Early Helladic period, to distinguish this culture from the Early Minoan. Archaeologists have excavated several large, carefully planned houses that show the increased wealth of the Early Helladic people at this time. Then, toward the end of the third millennium, development was interrupted by episodes of destruction and signs of depopulation, a pattern widely found around the eastern Mediterranean, including Crete. Why this happened is now well known, but in mainland Greece, one cause might have been invasions of various peoples that began some time after ca. 2300 BCE. By ca. 2000 BCE, most vestiges of the prosperous Early Helladic culture were gone and a simpler, less wealthy farming-herding culture (called Middle Helladic) had taken its place. Meanwhile, in sharp contrast to mainland Greece, the Minoans on Crete had recovered from their late third-millennium disasters and begun reaching new heights of prosperity, including the construction of huge palaces for their monarchs.
      There is no evidence that the invaders of mainland Greece at the end of the third millennium spoke Greek. The Greek language might have developed after their arrival as the language of the invaders mixed with that the Mycenaeans, the descendants of these Middle Helladic peoples, did speak an early form of Greek.
      During the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE (1700-1500 BCE), a surprising change occurred in Greece, or so it seems from the evidence first revealed by archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890). Powerful and wealthy chiefdoms sprang up and consolidated control of the small farming villages of the previous few centuries. What caused this rapid and important transformation is still not well understood. Most archaeologists now call this new culture Mycenaean, after its largest political centre, Mycenae. By the fourteenth century BCE, these chiefdoms had been further transformed into well-defined states ruled by kings with administrative centres (in palaces), a writing system for record keeping, and state institutions including a state religion.
      Schliemann did not know what he had found when he uncovered the fabulously wealthy graves at Mycenae in the fall of 1876. He thought he had discovered the burials of King Agamemnon and his family. He then declared that the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were based in history. The two poems describe the adventures of Greek heroes who fought in the Trojan War around 1200 BCE, about 450 years before Homer's own time. Agamemnon of Mycenae, the leader of the Greek army at Troy, returned home from the war successfully, only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra.

The Legend of the Trojan War

Sing of the building of the horse of wood, which Epeius made with Athena's help, the horse which once Odysseus led up into citadel as a thing of guild, when he had filled it with the men who sacked Troy.

Homer Odyssey VII. 492-495 

      The Trojan War itself, despite Homer's long descriptions, is still a vaguely understood event in Mycenaean history, if it was an event at all, and not pure legend. Excavations at Troy show that a city there was destroyed in a battle ca. 1240 BCE. At that time, the city was really just a fortified town, only 2 ha in area, with a rather poor standard of living. No wonder some scholars have suggested that the Trojan War was merely a dispute over fishing rights or control over shipping, and not the great conflict of West versus East, as later Greeks believed.
      Schliemann could not have known that the graves he had found actually belonged to a royal family of Mycenae, which predated the legendary Trojan War by 300-400 years. The wonderful gold funeral masks, inlaid bronze daggers, and other exquisite objects of gold, silver, ivory, and faience are stunning testimony of a wealthy and powerful royalty or nobility living in Greece ca. 1650-1550 BCE.
      Mycenaean rulers were similar to feudal lords, each governing his own wide area of central or southern Greece from a well-fortified palace. All of them might have owed some allegiance to the king of Mycenae. Indications from the tombs and the walls at Mycenae certainly point to it being the most powerful of the Mycenaean states. They wealth of these kings probably came from trade, particularly in metals like gold or tin. We known from the Linear B tablets that the palaces acted as redistribution centres, taking in commodities from the areas under their control, storing them, and then sending them (or products made at the palace workshops -- pottery, weapons, etc.) to places within the kingdom and beyond.

The End of the Mycenaean World

      The archaeological evidence shows that the first widespread destruction of Mycenae occurred around 1250 BCE. In order to protect water supplies,workshops, and storage areas from further destruction, the rulers extended the fortification walls. But around 1200 BCE, another series of disasters brought an end to the centralized administration, including the use of writing, and caused great depopulation in some areas. People continued to live at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Athens, but the monumental palaces fell into disuse. There was certainly a long process of decline, when the political and economic structure was weakened. Scholars continue to debate the cases of this decline, focusing on three main reasons: natural catastrophes (probably earthquakes), foreign attacks, and internal strife, or a combination of these factors. Clearly, the Mycenaean world had come to an end, leaving many impressive ruins and a deep-seated memory of a glorious past.

The Dark Ages

     There was a period of recuperation lasting about 350 year,s during which various groups of Greek-speaking peoples from the north settled in the Peloponnese (the Greek peninsula), established new homes,built new sanctuaries for their gods, farmed their new land, and built secure communities. But beyond vague notions of what life was like based on sparse archaeological finds, or what political changes were occurring, we know very little about this period. The collapse of the Mycenaean civilization took with it both the wealth and the writing used to keep track of that wealth. There are absolutely no written documents from this 350-year period and later Greeks did not preserve anything about his part of the past in their collective memory. For this reason, the period is called the Dark Ages of Greece. The Greeks did remember their distant, Mycenaean past as an age of heroes and supermen, like Herakles, Hector, Jason, and Achilles. Minstrels wandered from village to village, finding the houses of local nobles and singing their tales of past glory and brave adventures. In return, they would get a bed for the night, a meal, and a small gift. By the second half of the eighth century, the handing down and constant enhancing of these tales provided Homer with they details he used to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Geography and the Greek City-State

      In what kind of land did the Greeks make their home? Flying into Athens today, a visitor is struck by three things: the tall grey mountains are everywhere, isolating one valley from another, one small cultivable area from its neighbour, and reducing the habitable land by well over half. But these mountains are more like partitions than real barriers. They trap the fall and winter rains, provide pasturage fro animals, yield highly prized marble, but otherwise keep the nation separated into small communities. any of these isolated communities quite naturally grew and developed into what the Greeks called a polis, an independent city-state.
      While the mountains hindered communication and transportation between city-states, the sea was a special blessing -- a vast blue highway linking all parts of the country. This highway, however, extended well beyond the bounds of the Greek nation, stretching hundreds of kilometers in all directions to join the Greeks to all the other nations of the Mediterranean. Since at least 7000 BCE, geography has forced the people of Greece to become fine sailors. Greek sailors brought home ideas and wealth from abroad and this gave their culture a special advantage in antiquity.

Writing: ECHOES from the past published by McGraw-Hill Ryderson Ltd.