This was the period in which outside contacts grew significantly. An Egyptian alabaster lid found in Knossos dates from around 1640. Two hundred years later, the tomb of the Egyptian vizier Rekhmire outside Luxor was painted with images of the Keftiu bringing gifts; the visitors were dressed as Cretans, with their kilts and semi-naked bodies, and the name Keftiu recalls the ‘Caphtor’ of the Bible, which was Crete. The frescoes are labelled: ‘gifts from the princes of the land of Keftiu and of the isles which are in the midst of the sea’. In return the Cretans received ivory, stone jars containing perfume, gold and chariots in panels ready for assembly – these were not crude self-assembly kits but prestigious decorated vehicles.25 Yet no flood of foreign artefacts overwhelmed Crete; nor were Minoan artistic styles impregnated with foreign models. The Minoans were confident of their own styles, represented by some of the most famous finds at Knossos: the bare-breasted snake goddess figurines; the elegantly shaped goblets decorated with octopus designs. Indeed, it was Minoan culture that was being exported: fine pottery produced on the Greek mainland displays the same patterns and shapes, including the octopus designs.
It was in this period that the Cretans abandoned their hieroglyphs; they recorded their assets in the syllabic Linear A script, less handsome than the hieroglyphs, but quicker to write. It seems that the language they used in these documents was Luvian, an Indo-European language related to Hittite, which was also spoken along the western coast of Anatolia and, if an inscribed seal discovered there is any indication, in twelfth-century Troy.26 Luvian was widely used for official correspondence between courts, and its use in Crete does not mean that some or all of the Cretans were descended from Anatolian Luvians; the fundamental point is that the Minoans (unlike the Trojans) created a civilization that was not simply Anatolian.
IV
The rebuilding of the Cretan palaces coincided with a new burst of energy in the Cyclades, especially Akrotiri on Thera, between about 1550 and 1400 BC. Thera may have been inhabited by natives of the Cyclades, by Cretans or by representatives of all the many peoples who lived around the shores of the Aegean Sea. They came for the obsidian of Melos. Saffron was grown on Thera: a fresco shows the harvesting of crocuses. Yet it was also via Crete and its dependencies such as Akrotiri that the Aegean lands received supplies of more exotic objects – scarabs, faience figurines and beads from Egypt and Syria. Akrotiri grew into an important centre and imported plenty of Cretan pottery. The buildings in Akrotiri followed Cretan designs; the remarkable frescoes on their walls portrayed fleets of vessels manned by kilted Cretans arriving in a port whose houses reached two or three storeys. The ships appear to be ferrying warriors dressed in the style favoured on the Greek mainland; Thera functioned as a bridge between the high civilization of Crete and the developing culture of the Mycenaean Greeks on the mainland, showing that the Minoans had extended their commercial, and probably their political, control beyond Crete.27
The years from about 1525 BC onwards saw troubling signs that the stability of the region was quite literally under threat. Akrotiri stood on the edge of the caldera of a great, partly submerged volcano. Tremors multiplied; an earthquake led to the evacuation of Akrotiri in good time, since around 1500 BC the island of Thera was blown apart in what was one of the greatest volcanic eruptions in human history, leaving the crescent-shaped island of Thera poking above the waves.28 Seismic changes occurred in Crete too, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. Earthquakes caused severe damage at Knossos around 1525, ushering in a period during which parts of the palace may have been abandoned. After Thera exploded, a rain of ash blotted out the sun, perhaps for years, and then fell to earth, so that as much as 10 centimetres of ash fell on eastern Crete. The severe disruption of agriculture resulted in long-term famine. In the small Minoan palace at Arkhanes on Mount Jouktas, chambers previously used for other purposes became storerooms. The need to protect supplies was rendered greater by the devastating effect of the eruption on the entire region, so that it was not possible to rely on trade with neighbours to make up any shortfall. The sense of crisis is conveyed by a gruesome discovery in a building at Knossos known as the North House; around this time four or five children were killed, and their flesh was scraped from their bones in what was surely an act of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.29 The Minoans wished to propitiate gods and goddesses who seemed increasingly wrathful.
The paintings of emissaries reaching the court of Pharaoh at Luxor date from this period. They came, perhaps, in the hope that not ivory, apes and peacocks but the grain of the Nile Valley would be made available to Pharaoh’s Cretan allies. The eruption of Thera weakened but did not destroy the economy and society of Crete, and Knossos retained wealth and influence, if on a reduced scale, for about fifty years. This disruption marked only the first stage in a much wider series of changes that transformed the political, economic, cultural and ethnic identity of the eastern, and possibly parts of the western, Mediterranean.
3
Merchants and Heroes,
1500 BC–1250 BC
I
In the years around 1500 BC Crete experienced not just massive economic changes but very significant political changes. The arrival of a Greek dynasty on the island occurred around the time that many settlements such as Arkhanes were abandoned; Knossos alone survived among the great palaces, and one Minoan site after another was destroyed. Earthquakes and fires have been blamed; so too have invaders from Greece. Since no one really knows who was to blame, clever attempts have been made to integrate the explanations with one another, and to argue that the Greeks took advantage of chaos within Crete to seize charge; or perhaps the Cretans were in need of strong leaders who would take charge, and turned to the Greeks. Unarguably, though, Minoan Crete was drawn into the developing world of the Mycenaean Greeks. An area which had been of relatively minor importance in the trade networks of the Early and Middle Bronze Age now became the focus of political and possibly commercial power in the Aegean: the great centres of Mycenaean culture and power were a line of settlements along the edges of eastern Greece, and a little way inland, from Iolkos (Volos) in the north, through Orchomenos, Thebes, Mycenae, Tiryns, and down to Pylos in the south-west. Early signs of success were already visible in the early fifteenth century, when the kings of Mycenae were laid to rest in Grave Circle A (as it has come to be known), their faces covered by masks of hammered gold that seem to copy their bearded features, and which suggest an attempt to imitate the infinitely grander gold masks of the buried Pharaohs.1 Still, Mycenae ‘rich in gold’ retained its special role and reputation. By the twelfth century BC, if we are to believe the evidence of Homer’s ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (an archaic text incorporated in the Iliad), these statelets generally recognized as their leader the wanax or ruler of Mycenae.2
Descriptions of the Minoans merge imperceptibly with accounts of the Mycenaeans. In part this is because the imprint of Cretan art on that of the Greek mainland was so heavy; objects produced by the Mycenaeans, such as ceramics, only gradually acquired individuality as local potters tentatively developed their own shapes and designs. In part, too, the fuzzy boundary between Minoans and Mycenaeans is the result of the apparent Mycenaean conquest of Crete, and the occupation of Knossos by a Greek-speaking elite from the mainland; but even then the continuities are plain, and the writing system the Mycenaeans developed to record their Greek dialect was an adaptation of the Linear A syllabic system created in Minoan Crete – the Linear B script triumphantly deciphered by Ventris and Chadwick in the 1950s.3 At Knossos the Mycenaeans reconstituted, and at Pylos they developed, elaborate archives of clay tablets on which they recorded the tribute paid to their kings and gods by the subject population. Even in southern Greece, their religious cults were little different from those of the Minoans, to judge from the artefacts left behind: images on seals of goddesses and priests, a depiction on a cup and a panel of the sport or rite of bull-leaping (and even if these objects, though found in Greece, were really made in Crete, a
s some have argued, their presence in Greece reveals an interest in the bull rituals).4 The names of gods and goddesses worshipped in classical Greece often betray pre-Greek roots, and these deities can sometimes be identified in the written records of the Mycenaeans. Trade, too, shows continuities, as Greek and Cretan goods were ferried to Rhodes, Syria and Troy, but longer voyages were now made deeper into the Mediterranean, as far as Sicily and Italy.
What distinguished the Mycenaeans was their warlike character. The Mycenaeans were good learners; they immersed themselves in the existing culture. The classical Greeks told how founding fathers such as Pelops had arrived in Greece from other lands, in his case Anatolia, though the ancestry of the Mycenaeans probably lay in the mountainous southern Balkans. They were great builders of fortifications. The lightly defended palaces characteristic of Minoan Crete became a rarity – Pylos on the south-western Peloponnese is the one significant example, and it almost certainly secured its protection by maintaining a large sea fleet – ‘wooden walls’, as the Delphic oracle would later describe the fleet of Athens. The sea had an important role in Mycenaean civilization; but so did land battles and sieges, represented in their art and even more dramatically by the massive retaining walls of the citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns. Parts of the walls of Mycenae were seven metres thick; at Tiryns narrow tunnels, which can still be visited, ran through the masonry, described by wondering classical writers as the work of Cyclopean giants. The Linear B tablets also reveal the importance to this warrior society of chariots, which were enumerated on the tablets, and which were described by Homer in archaic references to a vanished world full of bronze weapons and helmets made of boar’s tusks.5 Bronze weapons were buried, in quantity, in the tombs of their great war leaders, though they were also well acquainted with paper-thin arrow-heads made of obsidian brought to them from Melos and Lipari.
What the ‘Mycenaeans’ called themselves is an important question. ‘Mycenaean’ is a modern label for Bronze Age Greek civilization; in the fourteenth century BC, it would have conveyed only the sense of an inhabitant of the citadel and surrounding villages that made up the settlement (barely a town) of Mukenai. The plural form of this place-name, as of some others from this period (notably Athenai, Athens), may reflect the fact that these centres were conglomerations of villages.6 Their rulers were a warrior caste, who by the fourteenth century BC lived very luxurious lives. They were buried not just with weapons but with gold and silver goblets, and with delicately inlaid ceremonial knives showing hunting scenes. When historians speak of ‘Mycenaean trade’ what they mean is the trade of those who lived within the political sphere of these early Greek warlords, though it is anybody’s guess whether the merchants and peasants spoke Greek; many, in fact, must have been multilingual Cretans living in the Knossos and Phaistos of the Linear B tablets. References to neighbours known as Ahhiyawa in the Hittite archives, and to the Ekwesh in Egyptian documents, suggest that the name Akhaiwoi, in classical Greek Akhaioi, ‘Achaeans’, was used if not by themselves, at least by outside observers, who took them extremely seriously as a major regional power.7 Building on the trading ties established by the Minoans, Mycenaean merchants maintained links with Cyprus, rich in copper (which continued to use a version of the Linear script right into classical times), as well as a trading presence on Rhodes, at Miletos on the Anatolian coast and on the Syrian coast. There may even have been some contact with the Black Sea, if the story of Jason’s Argonauts has any historical basis. The ‘Gelidonya wreck’, a thirteenth-century shipwreck off the coast of southern Turkey, illuminates the trading world of the Mycenaeans. Most of the wreck was swept away by the waters, but its cargo was too heavy for the seas to shift: half a ton of big copper ingots, as well as bronze goods and seals that suggest the ship had visited Syria and Cyprus. Another slightly older wreck, found at Uluburun off the Turkish coast, contained even larger amounts of copper and, intriguingly, one tenth the amount of tin, the right proportion for the manufacture of bronze.8
One new feature of Mycenaean trade was the link to Italy, with which Minoan Crete did not engage. The first evidence of contact between the Greek mainland and Sicily may reach back as far as the seventeenth century BC, to judge from similarities between Greek (‘Middle Helladic’ period) pottery and that of eastern Sicily, where a handful of Middle Helladic pots have also been found. This does not necessarily indicate regular, direct contact, so much as spasmodic links through a series of intermediaries as these pots passed from Greece through the Ionian Sea, and then around the heel and toe of Italy to Sicily.9 Hard evidence of regular contact comes a little later, when large numbers of Late Bronze Age ceramics were brought to Lipari, and large amounts of obsidian were sent back to Greece; the merchants also left behind faience beads, apparently of Egyptian origin, suggesting that a trade network had come into existence which encompassed great tracts of the eastern and central Mediterranean. By the time Knossos was in Mycenaean hands, however, obsidian was beginning to lose its attraction; new veins of copper and tin were being exploited across the Mediterranean and in Anatolia, and the search for metals was what now brought Mycenaean sailors as far as Ischia and its smaller neighbour Vivara, where they left their ceramics, before heading up the coasts of Tuscany (which offered tin) and Sardinia (where they left behind some copper ingots).10 Representations of ships in the frescoes from Thera leave no doubt that shipping technology had made significant advances, with the use of sail as a supplement to oars and the building of larger vessels with higher bulwarks able to withstand more turbulent seas; to these must be added more detailed knowledge of the shoals, reefs and currents of the eastern and central Mediterranean, without which it was impossible to navigate between the Greek islands and towards Sicily. Coast-hugging routes still prevailed, for the passage taken by Mycenaean pottery traces a line linking the Dodecanese to the heel of Italy, and around the instep down to Sicily.
Close links to Italy resulted in the emergence of overseas trading-stations.11 Although the Mycenaeans sent a great amount of pottery to Lipari, including large pithoi, there is no evidence that the Lipariots were under Mycenaean rule; but the inhabitants of Lipari did establish links with lands further north, as far as Luni in northern Tuscany.12 The attraction of Lipari increasingly became not just its obsidian, but its role as a staging-post between the waters around Sicily and areas to the north. The pithoi were standard products, not objects of beauty, and they contained goods – oil, most likely, for that was one of the favoured exports of the Greek lands. An amber necklace found in a Lipari cemetery has been attributed to the northern Adriatic, not to the eastern Mediterranean. All this indicates that the Mycenaeans were the wealthiest but not the sole merchants who ventured across the waters of the central Mediterranean at this period. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Lipari lived in wooden hut-like buildings clinging to the slopes of the island’s volcano; for them, luxury consisted of amber and glass beads, not of gold and silver jewellery.
A settlement at Thapsos, an offshore island in eastern Sicily, offers evidence of a sophisticated, imported culture, Mycenaean in origin. The settlers created a grid-like town with streets up to four metres wide, spacious houses built round courtyards, and tombs full of Late Helladic wares from the Greek lands, suggesting ‘a veritable foreign colony on the site’.13 Indeed, the closest analogy to the layout of the houses in Thapsos is to be found at the other end of the Mycenaean world, on Cyprus, at Enkomi near Famagusta. It is almost as if a blueprint for a trading colony had been created and then transformed into reality at both ends of the Mycenaean world. Thapsos has yielded very many small perfume containers of Mycenaean origin.14 For it was a centre of industry, specializing in the production of perfumed oils for an ‘international’ market. But Thapsos was not simply an offshoot of Mycenae. It produced plenty of coarse grey pottery in Sicilian styles, indicating that Thapsos contained a mixed population. In the same period, another Mycenaean settlement at Scoglio del Tonno near modern Taranto gave access to Adriatic goods, especially s
outh Italian copper, and acted as a way-station for shipping bound for Sicily.15 It was in the Mycenaean period, then, that the Mediterranean became significantly enlarged in the eyes of those who sailed across its surface.
II
Far more significant to the Mycenaean traders than the undeveloped west were the coasts of what are now Syria and Lebanon.16 By the fourteenth century, traders were leaving large numbers of Mycenaean pots (in the style known as ‘Late Helladic II’) at Ugarit and Byblos, in Syria, and along the coast of Canaan at Gezer and Lachish. A Levantine trade network was coming into being, buoyant enough to sustain wealthy cities in which Aegean merchants mixed with Canaanites, Cypriots, Hittites, Egyptians and other residents and visitors.17 The Levantine ports possessed even older links to the Nile Delta; the tomb of Kenamun at Egyptian Thebes, no longer extant, contained a wall-painting which showed the unloading of goods at an Egyptian port, under the oversight of Canaanite merchants, and these included textiles, purple dye (a speciality of the Levantine coast, made from the murex shellfish), oil, wine and cattle.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 6
