Ancient Greece

by Thomas R. Martin

  The mystery surrounding the relationship between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans deepened with the startling discovery in the palace at Knossos of tablets written in an adaptation of Linear A. This same hybrid script had also been found on tablets excavated at Mycenaean sites on the mainland, where scholars called it Linear B. Michael Ventris, a young English architect interested in codes, startled the scholarly world in the 1950s by demonstrating that the language being written with Linear B was in fact Greek and not the Minoan language of Linear A. Because the Linear B tablets from Crete dated from before the final destruction of the Knossos palace in about 1370 B.C., they meant that the palace administration had for some time been keeping its records in a foreign language—Greek—rather than in Cretan. Presumably this change in the language used for official record keeping means that Greek-speaking Mycenaeans from the mainland had come to dominate the palaces of Crete, but whether by violent invasion or some kind of peaceful accommodation remains unknown. Certainly the Linear B tablets imply that the mainland had not long, if ever, remained a secondary power to Minoan Crete.

  TABLE 1. EXAMPLES OF WORDS IN LINEAR B SCRIPT

  THE HIGHPOINT OF MYCENAEAN SOCIETY

  Archaeology helps us uncover the basis of the power of Mycenaean society from about 1500 to 1250 B.C. Archaeologists love cemeteries, not because of morbid fascination with death but because ancient peoples so often buried their dead with goods that tell us about life in the society. Bronze Age tombs in Greece reveal that no wealthy Mycenaean male went to the grave without his fighting equipment. The complete suit of Mycenaean bronze armor found in a fourteenth-century B.C. tomb from Dendra in the northeastern Peloponnese shows how extensive first-class individual equipment could be. This dead warrior had worn a complete bronze cuirass (torso guard) protecting his front and back, an adjustable skirt of bronze plates, bronze greaves (shin guards), shoulder plates, and a collar. On his head had rested a boar’s-tusk helmet with metal cheek pieces. Next to his body in the grave lay his leather shield, bronze and clay vessels, and a bronze comb with gold teeth. Originally his bronze swords had lain beside him, but tomb robbers had stolen them before the archaeologists found his resting place. This warrior had spared no cost in equipping himself with the best technology in armor and weaponry, and his family thought it worthwhile as a demonstration of status to shoulder the expense of consigning this costly equipment to the ground forever rather than pass it on to the next generation. His relatives expected other people to see them making this expensive demonstration as proof of their superior wealth and status.

  Mycenaean warriors outfitted like this man could ride into battle in the latest military hardware—the lightweight, two-wheeled chariot pulled by horses. These revolutionary vehicles, which some scholars think were introduced by Indo-Europeans migrating from central Asia, first appeared in various Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies not long after 2000 B.C. The first Aegean depiction of such a chariot occurs on a Mycenaean grave marker from about 1500 B.C. Wealthy people evidently craved this dashing new invention not only for war but also as proof of their social status, much like modern people rushing to replace their horse-drawn wagons with cars after the invention of the automobile. It has been suggested that the Dendra armor was for a warrior fighting from a chariot, not for an infantryman, on the grounds that a foot soldier would not be able to move freely enough in the metal casing of such a suit. On this argument, chariots carrying archers provided the principal arm of Mycenaean armies, supplemented by skirmishers fighting on foot, not unlike the tank battles of World War II, in which infantrymen crept along into battle in the shadow of a force of tanks as mobile artillery. These supplementary infantrymen escorted the chariot forces, guarded the camps at the rear of the action, chased fugitive enemies after the main clash of battle, and served as attack troops on terrain inaccessible to chariots. Many of these Mycenaean-era foot soldiers may have been hired mercenaries from abroad.

  The Mycenaeans in mainland Greece had reached their pinnacle of prosperity between about 1300 and 1200 B.C., the period during which the enormous domed tomb at Mycenae, called the Treasury of Atreus, was constructed. Its elaborately decorated facade and soaring roof testify to the confidence of Mycenae’s warrior princes. The last phase of the extensive palace at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnese also dates to this time. It was outfitted with everything that wealthy people of the Greek Bronze Age required for comfortable living, including elaborate and colorful wall paintings, storerooms crammed with food, and even a royal bathroom fitted with a built-in tub and intricate plumbing.

  War was clearly a principal concern of those Mycenaean men who could afford its expensive equipment. The Mycenaeans spent nothing, by contrast, on the construction of large religious buildings, as Near Easterners did on their giant temples. The nature of religion in mainland Bronze Age Greece remains largely obscure, although the usual view is that the Mycenaeans worshipped primarily the male-dominated pantheon traditionally associated with the idea of an Indo-European warrior culture. The names of numerous deities known from later Greek religion occur in the Linear B tablets, such as Hera, Zeus, Poseidon, and Dionysus, as well as the names of divinities unknown in later times. The name or title potnia, referring to a female divinity as “mistress” or “ruler,” is very common in the tablets, emphasizing the importance of goddesses in Bronze Age religion.

  The development of extensive sea travel in the Bronze Age enabled not only traders but also warriors to journey far from home. Traders, crafts specialists, and entrepreneurs seeking metals sailed from Egypt and the Near East to Greece and beyond, taking great risks in search of great rewards. Mycenaeans established colonies at various locations along the coast of the Mediterranean, leaving the security of home to struggle for better opportunities in new locations. Seaborne Mycenaean warriors also dominated and probably put an end to the palace society of Minoan Crete in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C., perhaps in wars for conquest or commercial rivalry in Mediterranean international trade. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Mycenaeans had displaced the Minoans as the most powerful civilization of the Aegean.

  THE END OF MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION

  The emergence in the Bronze Age of extensive sea travel for trading and raiding had put the cultures of the Aegean and the Near East in closer contact than ever before. The wealth that could be won by traders and entrepreneurs, especially those seeking metals, promoted contacts between the older civilizations at the Mediterranean’s eastern end and the younger ones farther west. The civilizations of Mesopotamia and Anatolia overshadowed those of Crete and Greece in the size of their cities and the development of extensive written legal codes. Egypt remained an especially favored destination of Mycenaean voyagers throughout the late Bronze Age because these Greeks valued the exchange of goods and ideas with the prosperous and complex civilization of that ancient civilization. By around 1250–1200 B.C., however, the Mediterranean network of long-established states and trading partners was weakening. The New Kingdom in Egypt was losing its cohesion; foreign invaders destroyed the powerful Hittite kingdom in Anatolia; Mesopotamia underwent a period of political turmoil; and the rich palace societies of the Aegean disintegrated. The causes of these disruptions are poorly documented, but the most likely reasons are internal strife between local powers and overexploitation of natural resources in overspecialized and centralized economies. These troubles, whose duration we cannot accurately gauge, apparently caused numerous groups of people to leave their homes, seeking new places to live, or at least weaker victims to plunder. These movements of peoples throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East further damaged or even destroyed the political stability, economic prosperity, and international contacts of the civilizations of most of these lands, including that of the Mycenaeans. This period of violent turmoil certainly lasted for decades; in some regions it may have gone on much longer. As a rough generalization, it seems accurate to say that the period from about 1200 to 1000 B.C. saw
numerous catastrophes for Mediterranean civilizations. The consequences for Greeks were disastrous.

  Egyptian and Hittite documents record the impact these disturbances inflicted. They speak of foreign invasions, some from the sea. According to his own account of attacks by warriors landing from the sea, the pharaoh Ramesses III around 1182 B.C. defeated a fearsome coalition of invaders from the north who had fought their way to the edge of Egypt: “All at once the peoples were on the move, dispersed in war. . . . No land could repulse their attacks. . . . They extended their grasp over territories as far as the circuit of the earth, their spirits brimming with confidence and believing: ‘Our plans will succeed!’ . . . The ones who came as far as my border, their seed is no more, their heart and their soul are done for forever and ever. . . . They were dragged in, surrounded, and laid prostrate on the shore, killed, and thrown into piles from tail to head” (Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 262–263).

  The Egyptian records indicate that many different groups made up these Sea Peoples, as the attackers are called today. We can guess that these raiders originated from Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean islands, Anatolia, Cyprus, and various points in the Near East. They did not constitute a united or uniform population; rather, they should be thought of as independent bands displaced and set in motion by the local political and economic troubles of their homelands. Some had previously been mercenary soldiers in the armies of once-powerful rulers, whom they eventually turned against in a grab for power and booty. Some came from far away to conduct raids in foreign lands. One scholarly hypothesis explaining, at least in part, the origin of these catastrophes theorizes that this period saw a reconceptualization of military tactics. Previously, the key to success in battle had been to deploy chariots carrying archers. Bronze Age kings waging war had supplemented their chariot forces with infantrymen, mostly foreign mercenaries. By around 1200 B.C., the argument goes, these hired foot soldiers had realized that they could use their long swords and javelins to defeat the chariot forces on the battlefield by swarming in a mass against their vehicle-mounted overlords. Emboldened by this realization of their power and motivated by a lust for booty, spontaneously formed bands of mercenaries rebelled against their former employers, plundering and looting. They conducted raids on treasure-packed settlements, which were no longer able to defend themselves with their old tactics that depended on chariots. Lacking any firm organization or long-term planning, the rebels fatally weakened the civilizations they betrayed and raided, but they were incapable of or uninterested in putting any new political systems into place to fill the void created by their destruction of the Mycenaean world.

  Whether this explanation for the downfall of the civilization of the Greek Bronze Age will prove correct remains to be seen, if only because we have to ask why it took the mercenary infantrymen so long to grasp their advantage over chariots, if they truly had one, and then to put it into effect to crush their opponents. But one important assumption of this scenario does ring true: What archaeological evidence we have for the history of the Sea Peoples points not to one group spreading destruction across the eastern Mediterranean in a single tidal wave of violence, but rather to many separate bands and varied conflicts. The initial attacks and spreading destruction spurred a chain reaction of violence that put even more bands of raiders on the move over time.

  These various groups most likely had different characteristics and different goals. Some bands of Sea Peoples were probably made up only of men conducting raids, who expected to return to their homeland eventually. Other groups of warriors may have brought their families along, searching for a new place in which to win a more-prosperous and secure existence than in the disturbed area from which they had voluntarily departed or had been violently driven by other raiders. Regardless of its composition, no band on the move could expect a friendly welcome on foreign shores; those looking to settle down had to be prepared to fight for new homes. The material damage such marauding bands of raiders would have inflicted would have been made worse by the social disruption their arrival in a new area would also have caused to the societies already in place. However common such migrations may have been—that they were widespread has been both affirmed and denied in modern scholarship—destruction and disruption were widespread in the Mediterranean in this period of the Sea Peoples. In the end, all this fighting and motion redrew the political map of the region, and perhaps its population map as well, although it is unclear how many groups actually resettled permanently at great distances from their original sites.

  Even if the reasons for all the violent commotion of the period of the Sea Peoples must still be regarded as mysterious in our present state of knowledge, its dire consequences for Near Eastern and Greek civilization are undeniable. The once-mighty Hittite kingdom in Anatolia fell about 1200 B.C., when invaders penetrated its borders and incessant raids cut its supply lines of raw materials. Its capital city, Hattusas, was burned to the ground and never re-inhabited, although smaller Neo-Hittite principalities survived for another five hundred years before falling to the armies of the Neo-Assyrian kingdom. The appearance of the Sea Peoples weakened Egypt’s New Kingdom by requiring a great military effort to repel them and by ruining Egypt’s international trade in the Mediterranean. Struggles for power between the pharaoh and the priests undermined the centralized authority of the monarchy as well, and by the middle of the eleventh century B.C., Egypt had shrunk to its old territorial core along the banks of the Nile. Egypt’s credit was ruined along with its international stature. When an eleventh-century Theban temple official named Wen-Amon traveled to Byblos in Phoenicia to buy cedar for a ceremonial boat, the city’s ruler insultingly demanded cash in advance. The Egyptian monarchy continued for centuries after the New Kingdom, but internal struggles for power between pharaohs and priests, combined with frequent attacks from abroad, prevented the reestablishment of centralized authority. Egypt never again assumed the role of an active and aggressive international power that it had enjoyed during much of the Old and New Kingdoms.

  The calamities of this time also affected the copper-rich island of Cyprus and the flourishing cities along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The Greeks later called these coastal peoples the Phoenicians, apparently from the name of the valuable reddish-purple dye that they extracted from shellfish; they apparently called themselves Canaanites. The inhabitants of cities such as Ugarit on the coast of Syria thrived on international maritime commerce and enjoyed a lively polyglot culture. A catastrophic attack of the Sea Peoples overwhelmed Ugarit, but one of its most brilliant accomplishments lived on: the first alphabet. The letters representing the sounds of a phonetic alphabet offered a simpler and more flexible system of writing than the other writing systems of the ancient Near East or the syllabary of Linear A and B. This invention had emerged from about 1700 to 1500 B.C. in this eastern Mediterranean crossroads of cultures; its later form eventually became the base of the ancient Greek and Roman alphabets and, from there, modern Western alphabets.

  The Mycenaeans’ wealth failed to protect them from the spreading violence of the late Bronze Age. Ominous signs of the dangers of this period occur in Linear B tablets from Pylos, which record the disposition of troops to guard this unwalled site around 1200 B.C. The rulers of most palaces had constructed walls for defense built from stones so large that later Greeks thought that Cyclopes, one-eyed giants, must have built these massive fortifications (fig. 2.3). The defensive walls at locations such as Mycenae and Tiryns in the eastern Peloponnese could have served to protect these palaces situated near the coast against raiders attacking from the sea. The palace at Gla in central Greece, however, was located far enough from the coast that foreign pirates presented no threat, but it too erected a huge stone wall to defend against enemy attacks. The wall at Gla reveals, then, that Mycenaeans had above all to defend themselves against other Mycenaeans, or perhaps their own mercenaries, not against seaborne raiders. Never united in one state, the rival “princes” of Mycenaean G
reece by the late thirteenth century B.C. were fighting each other at least as much as they were fighting foreigners.

  Fig. 2.3: Like the Minoans, the Mycenaeans in the Peloponnese and central Greece lived in politically centralized states with redistributive economies. Their centers, however, had massive stone fortification walls and gates like this one at Mycenae, a feature not found in Minoan civilization. Andreas Trepte, www.photo-natur.de.

  Internal wars among the rulers of Mycenaean Greece, not foreign invasions, offer the most plausible explanation of the destruction of the palaces of the mainland in the period from about 1200 to 1000 B.C. Earthquakes probably increased the destructive consequences of these local wars; Greece is a seismically active region, and devastating quakes that killed many people are documented from later historical periods. Near-constant warfare placed great stress on the administration of the closely managed redistributive economies of the palaces and hindered recovery from earthquake damage. The eventual failure of the palace economies had a devastating effect on the large part of the Mycenaean population that depended on this system for its subsistence. Peasant farmers, who knew how to grow their own food, had a chance to go on supporting themselves even when the redistributive system for foodstuffs and goods broke down, if they were not killed in the violent disruptions. The inhabitants of the palaces, however, who depended on others to provide them food, starved when the system disappeared. Warriors left unattached by the disintegration of the rulers’ power set off to find new places to live, or at least to plunder others, forming roving bands of the kind remembered by the Egyptians as Sea Peoples. The later Greeks remembered an invasion of Dorians (speakers of the form of Greek characteristic of the northwest mainland) as the reason for the disasters that struck Bronze Age Greece, but archaeology suggests that the Dorians who did move into southern Greece most likely came in groups too small to cause such damage by themselves. Indeed, relatively small-scale movements of people, not massive invasions, probably characterized this era, as bands of warriors with no prospects at home emigrated from lands all around the eastern Mediterranean to become pirates for themselves or mercenaries for foreign potentates.