Greek speakers of the Late Bronze Age
The Mycenaeans were the Greek-speaking people who dominated mainland Greece, and later parts of the Aegean, from roughly 1600 to 1100 BCE. Their name comes from Mycenae in the Argolid, the site that Homer’s poems associate with King Agamemnon. Homer composed his epics several centuries after the Mycenaean world ended, so the poems mix memories of the Bronze Age with later customs and invention. That is why Mycenaean archaeology is a better guide to the period than the legends it gave rise to.
Citadels and palaces
Mycenaean power centres included Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, Orchomenos and Athens, among others. Several were built on defensible hills and surrounded by huge walls of rough stone blocks. Later Greeks believed such walls must have been built by the mythical Cyclopes, so the style is now called Cyclopean masonry. At Mycenae, the Lion Gate, built around the thirteenth century BCE, still stands at the entrance to the citadel.
The great buildings inside were palaces, with a central hall called a megaron, a hearth and a throne room, decorated with wall paintings. The plan differs from the Cretan courtyard palaces, though Minoan art strongly influenced Mycenaean taste. Mycenaean palace centres seem to have been independent but related states, and we do not know how closely they cooperated. Hittite texts mention a land called Ahhiyawa that many scholars equate with the Mycenaean Greeks, a link that is plausible but unproven, and the Hittite kingdom’s records are among the few foreign texts that may refer to them.
Shaft graves and tholos tombs
At Mycenae, Heinrich Schliemann excavated a circle of royal graves in 1876 that is now known as Grave Circle A. The shaft graves, dated to roughly the sixteenth century BCE, contained gold masks, swords, daggers inlaid with scenes, jewellery and cups. Schliemann famously thought he had looked on the face of Agamemnon, but the grave goods are several centuries earlier than any date plausible for a Trojan War, so the identification was mistaken. A second circle, Grave Circle B, lay outside the walls and is somewhat older.
Later elites built tholos tombs, large beehive-shaped chambers approached by a long passage. The so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, dated to the thirteenth century BCE, is the best-known. These monumental tombs show a wealthy ruling class able to command labour and materials.
Linear B and the palace economy
Mycenaean palaces kept records on clay tablets in Linear B. Michael Ventris, an architect and amateur linguist, showed in 1952 that the script writes an early form of Greek, building on the work of others such as Alice Kober and with later help from the scholar John Chadwick. It was one of the great decipherments, and a worthwhile comparison with the story of the Rosetta Stone and decipherment.
The tablets are not literature. They are administrative lists of people, livestock, textiles, oil, wine, grain, metals and offerings to gods. They record titles such as wanax, often translated as king, and name deities including some familiar from later Greece, such as Zeus and Poseidon. The tablets from Pylos, Knossos, Thebes and Mycenae reveal a palace economy in which scribes tracked rations, craft production and land. Because the tablets were baked hard when the palaces burned, destruction ironically preserved them. They are a snapshot of one final year, not a history.
Warriors, weapons and trade
Mycenaean elites are shown in art and graves as warriors. Typical equipment included bronze swords and spears, boar’s-tusk helmets, body armour and the use of war chariots, though the rough terrain of Greece may have limited how chariots were used. Surviving items of ancient weaponry suggest craftsmanship of a high order.
Mycenaean pottery turns up from Italy and Sicily to Egypt and the Levant, evidence for a wide trading network. Cargoes like those from the Uluburun shipwreck show how metals, ivory, glass and other goods circulated among the powers of the time, and Mycenaean material appears in that wider system.
The collapse around 1200 BCE
Around 1200 BCE, and over the following decades, many Mycenaean palaces were destroyed or abandoned. Pylos was burned, Mycenae and Tiryns suffered damage, and the palace system with its Linear B record-keeping disappeared. Writing seems to have vanished in Greece for several centuries.
Explanations include:
- Earthquakes, which may have struck several sites.
- Invasion or raiding, perhaps linked to the groups the Egyptians called Sea Peoples, though their role is disputed.
- Internal conflict or rebellion against palace elites.
- Climate stress or drought leading to food shortages.
- The breakdown of trade networks on which the palaces depended.
Most scholars now favour a combination of causes rather than one event. The same era saw the fall of the Hittite empire and troubles in Syria and Egypt, so the collapse of the Aegean palaces was part of a wider crisis in the eastern Mediterranean.
What remained
Mycenaean sites were not emptied overnight. Some places continued in reduced form for generations, and Greek continued to be spoken. Later Greeks preserved memories of the heroic age in epic poetry, and some Mycenaean names, such as those of gods, survive in classical religion. Cult sites such as Mycenae and Tiryns were later venerated in the historical period. The Mycenaeans therefore stand between the palace world of the Bronze Age and the Greece of city-states, and they are best seen as early Greeks in their own right, rather than as the cast of a legend.