The Mycenaeans
On the Greek mainland, the apex of the Bronze Age is the period known as the Mycenaean period. The city of Mycenae in the Peloponnese appears to have played the most prominent role in the growth and development of this civilisation. The main characteristic features of Mycenaean civilization are a relatively centralized economy and political organisation alongside the specialisation of activities and the standardisation of certain products. The wealth and artistry of the period is exemplified by the gold and silver finds in the shaft graves at Mycenae.
The civilization that took root on the mainland is called Mycenaean after the first major archaeological site where this culture was identified. The Mycenaeans, an Indo-European group, were the first speakers of the Greek language. They may have entered Greece at the end of the early Bronze Age; in the middle Bronze Age, or in the Neolithic period. The excavation of exceptionally wealthy graves, and the size and spacing of palace foundations, indicates that the Mycenaeans formed an elite and a chieftan-level society (one organized around the judicial and executive authority of a single figure, with varying degrees of power) by the late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 BC). Mycenaean palatial society was at its zenith in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. At some point in the middle of the fourteenth century, Mycenaeans, whose society stressed military excellence, conquered Knossos and the rest of Crete.
The Mycenaeans employed a form of syllabic writing known as Linear B, which, unlike the Linear A developed by the Minoans, used the Greek language. The script's usage spanned the time period between approximately 1500 BC and 1200 BC, and geographically covered the island of Crete, as well as the southern part of the Greek Mainland. Micheal Ventris (1922-56) eventually deciphered Linear B in 1953. His interest had been sparked in 1936 on a school trip to an exhibition about the Minoan world organised by Arthur Evans. For the next 17 years, Ventris struggled to understand Linear B. Initially he was sceptical that the language of Linear B was Greek, even though many of the deciphered words resembled an archaic form of Greek. Later, with the help of John Chadwick, an expert on early Greek, he showed beyond reasonable doubt the Linear B did indeed represent Greek.
Ventris and Chadwick uncovered a script that consists mostly of syllabic signs, a fair number of logograms, a base-10 number system, and short vertical lines as word separators. The logograms stand for whole words and mainly represent items that were traded. As Linear B was used mainly for recording transactions, this is not surprising. Some of the logograms resemble the things the represent, so could be called pictograms. Not all the logograms have been deciphered. It appears that the Mycenaeans used writing not to keep historical records but strictly as a device to register the flow of goods and produce into the palaces from a complex, highly centralized economy featuring regional networks of collection and distribution. Besides being at the center of such networks, palaces also controlled craft production and were the seat of political power.
Each palace on the mainland seems to have been an autonomous political entity, but the lack of historical records precludes knowledge about the interaction of the palatial centers. These small-scale polities stand in marked contrast to the huge contemporaneous states of the Near East. Archeological findings in Egypt and the countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea show that the Mycenaeans reached those points. Nevertheless, the Mycenaeans seemingly were able to avoid entanglement in the conflicts of the superpowers of the eastern Mediterranean, such as the Hittites and the Egyptians. They were content to be lords of the Aegean for a time.
According to the traditional, semi-mythical, history, in the early times kingdoms were but inconsiderable, and of very small extent, the title of kingdom being often given to a single city, with a few leagues of land depending upon it. The most ancient kingdom of Greece was that of Sicyon; whose beginning is placed by Eusebius 1313 years before the first Olympiad in 776 BC, meaning 2089 BC. Its duration is believed to have been 1000 years.
The kingdom of Argos, in Peloponnesus, began 1080 years before the first Olympiad, in the year 1856 BC. The first king of it was Inachus. His successors were, his son Phoroneus; Apis; Argus, from whom the country took its name; and after several others, Gelanor, who was dethroned and expelled his kingdom by Danaus, the Egyptian. The successors of this last were Lynceus, the son of his brother AEgyptus, who alone, of fifty brothers, escaped the cruelty of the Danaides; then Abas, Proteus, and Acrisius.
Of Danae, daughter to the last, was born Perseus, who having, when he was grown up, unfortunately killed his grandfather, Acrisius, and not being able to bear the sight of Argos, where he committed that involuntary murder, withdrew to Mycenae, and there fixed the seat of his kingdom.
Perseus then translated the seat of the kingdom from Argos to Mycenae. He left several sons behind him; among others, Alcaeus, Sthenelus, and Electryon. Alcaeus was the father of Amphitryon; Sthenelus of Eurystheus; and Electryon of Alcmena. Amphitryon married Alcmena, upon whom Jupiter begat Hercules. Eurystheus and Hercules came into the world the same day; but as the birth of the former was by Juno's management antecedent to that of the latter, Hercules was forced to be subject to him, and was obliged by his order to undertake the twelve labors, so celebrated in fabulous history.
The kings who reigned at Mycenae, after Perseus, were, Electryon, Athenelus, and Eurystheus. The last, after the death of Hercules, declared open war against his descendants, apprehending they might some time or other attempt to dethrone him; which, as it happened, was done by the Heraclidae; for, having killed Eurystheus in battle, they entered victorious into Peloponnesus, and made themselves masters of the country.
About 1350 BC Pelops, the son of a King of Phrygia, a country in Asia Minor, settled in that part of Greece which was afterwards called from him Peloponnesus, or the island of Pelops, where he married the daughter of one of tbe native princes, whom he afterwards succceeded on the throne. In the course of his long reign, he found means to strengthen and extend his influence in Greece, by forming matrimonial alliances between various branches of his own house and the other royal families of the Peloponnesus. Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, in Argolis, who was, according to the poet Homer, the commander-in-chief of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, and Menelaus, King of Sparta, on account of whose wrongs that war was undertaken, were descended from this Phrygian adventurer.
Atreus, the son of Pelops, uncle by the mother's side to Eurystheus, was the latter's successor. And in this manner the crown came to the descendants of Pelops, from whom Peloponnesus, which before was called Apia, derived its name. The bloody hatred of the two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, is known to all the world. Plisthenes, the son of Atreus, succeeded his father in the kingdom of Mycenae, which he left to his son Agamemnon, who was succeeded by his son Orestes. The kingdom of Mycenae was filled with enormous and horrible crimes, from the time it came into the family of Pelops.
The celebrated excavations at Troy and Mycenae carried out in the 1870s by the German banker and adventurer Heinrich Schliemann -- the Indiana Jones of his day -- did so much to stoke the public's appetite for the romance of archaeology. The Mycenaean world that Schliemann discovered was the world of Agamemnon and his predecessors, the world sung by Homer in his two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, set, so far as can be judged, in Aegean Greece of the twelfth century BC, a time some have called "protohistoric" because the cumbersome form of writing, Linear B, then in existence, was usable only for accountants' ledgers. The stories of this age were preserved as oral poetry by wandering bards and written down only much later when a far more flexible form of writing came into currency that permitted the recording of epics of massive length and graceful subtlety.
Gold was among the first metals to be mined because it commonly occurs in its native form, that is, not combined with other elements, because it is beautiful and imperishable, and because exquisite objects can be made from it. The graves of nobles at the ancient Citadel of Mycenae near Nauplion, Greece, discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876, yielded a great variety of gold figurines, masks, cups, diadems, and jewelry, plus hundreds of decorated beads and buttons. These elegant works of art were created by skilled craftsmen more than 3,500 years ago.
Between 1250 and 1150 BC, a combination of peasant rebellions and internal warfare destroyed all the Mycenaean palace citadels. Some were reoccupied but on a much smaller scale, others disappeared forever. The precise circumstances of these events are unknown, but historians speculate that the top-heavy system, whose elite based their power solely on military might, contained the seeds of its own destruction.
By one reading, in the twelfth century BC, the Mycenaean Greeks were at the height of their civilization, having a well-developed culture and written language. Their armies were equipped with the best bronze weapons available. But when the Dorians invaded Mycenae from the northwest in about 1200 BC carrying iron swords, they so completely destroyed the Mycenaeans that even the Mycenaean language arts were lost and the vanquished Greeks remained illiterate for the next 500 years.
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