Background

The scope of this book is the Aegean Bronze Age: the history and material cultures of Crete, the Greek mainland, and the Aegean islands during the period when bronze had replaced stone as the dominant material for tools and weapons, and had not yet been supplanted by iron. The period began around 3100/3000 bce and continued until about 1070 bce; during its course different groups of people rose from basic subsistence to cultural prominence, interacted with each other and with civilizations around the Mediterranean basin, and subsided again beyond our reach. Serious study of the Aegean Bronze Age began over 120 years ago, fueled by several early projects, including exploration by the French on Santorini, the British at Phylakopi on Melos, and Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns. Schliemann was motivated by a fascination with mythical accounts of the Trojan War, and Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos, by curiosity about the signs, in an unknown script, incised into lumps of clay found on Crete.

None of these pioneers could have imagined the quantities of sites and artifacts that would subsequently be found, the proliferation of new techniques for everything from excavation itself to scientific dating and provenience studies, or the textual information revealed by the decipherment of the Mycenaean script. Early investigators of the Bronze Age tried to characterize and contrast the material culture of different ethnic groups, with special attention to aspects that could be mapped onto a Homeric vision of the Greek past (Ch. 5, pp. 105–6).

Chronological Phases

When the interregional culture of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean collapsed, a period on the mainland of Greece followed that archaeologists term Middle Helladic (MH; Ch. 1, p. 3; Fig. 1.1). During much of this time the countryside was largely depopulated and there is very little evidence of trade and craft production. Because of the paucity of settlements discovered through excavation, only a few places have good stratified deposits: Lerna (level V), Kolonna on the island of Aegina (City VII-X), and Pefkakia in Thessaly.

Scholars during much of the twentieth century ce argued for a break between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, theorizing in particular the arrival of Indo-European speaking peoples at this time. Research in the past thirty years, though, shows that despite destruction and abandonment of some settlements after EH II and EH III, the transition between these periods shows many signs of continuity (Ch. 2, pp. 36-7). Furthermore, the succeeding transition between EH III and MH I seems to have been less abrupt than previously thought, with evidence of continuity in some of the ceramics and lithic traditions at Lerna (Ch. 2, p. 41). Likewise, it was thought through the 1970s that the shaft graves at Mycenae announced a dramatic cultural change beginning in LH I (with some scholars even arguing that Indo-European Greek speakers arrived at this time), but this view no longer prevails. We often cannot distinguish MH III from LH I, and frequently refer to assemblages as MH III/LH I, because the society that was developing into what we commonly refer to as Mycenaean civilization had deep roots in the indigenous Middle Helladic cultural forms (Ch. 1, p. 3).

Introduction

The culture of the Mycenaean Greeks can best be accessed through the tangible record they have left of their life and death in the four centuries from their emergence as a power at the end of the Middle Helladic period to the destruction of their palaces at the end of Late Helladic IIIB. Schliemann’s first great archaeological discoveries at Mycenae in 1876 named both the civilization and the age of its supremacy. The great amount of gold in the deeply buried shaft graves immediately captured the world’s attention, particularly the gold face masks. In one of these Schliemann thought he had looked upon the face of Agamemnon. Archaeologists now know that the early date of the graves precludes such an identification and we no longer equate these finds with things mentioned in Greek legends and the epics of Homer. We realize that oral tradition and subsequent literature have many components, only some of which may carry memories or preserve details of the Mycenaean world - after all, the time span between the shaft graves and the Parthenon exceeds a thousand years. The decipherment of the Linear B texts as Greek in 1952 (Ch. 1, pp. 11–12) opened another window into the culture but, because of their limited subject matter, we are left without discussion of some of the most important aspects one would wish to know about a society. So the material remains provided by archaeological endeavors since 1876 are the primary source for our understanding of Mycenaean culture.

Introduction

In chronological overviews of the Aegean Bronze Age, after discussions of the “climax” of the Minoan civilization in the Neopalatial period, the focus of interest often shifts to the incipient palace-states of the Greek mainland, and, with the exception of Knossos, Crete becomes something of a backwater, viewed as an increasingly marginalized region in a now Mycenocentric world. Yet in fact, although interactions with the mainland were indeed intensive, Crete’s rich archaeological record has revealed an equally significant picture of internally focused, fast-paced political and cultural changes.

The ceramic phases LMII-IIIB cover the period from the fifteenth-century horizon of destructions that devastated most of the Minoan palaces (marking the end of what we term the Neopalatial period) down to the later thirteenth century, which witnessed a general disintegration of urban centers on the island. For reasons explained below, opinions differ among archaeologists regarding the appropriate “political” terminology to use - the labels “Final Palatial,” “Third Palatial,” and “Postpalatial” have all been applied to all or part of this period. This discussion will use the ceramic phases as chronological labels, as a more neutral alternative, but the issue of Crete’s changing political organization is nevertheless important in any analysis of this period, involving as it did the demise of state societies on the island.

Religion and Cult Practice

In the modern world, Western societies tend to separate religion and ritual from other aspects of society in a way that ancient or “primitive” societies did not. In ancient cultures religion was an integral part of daily life, including the treatment of the deceased after death. For a heavily agrarian society, cult practice centered on daily and seasonal activities and on human involvement with a perceived supernatural world. Although it is difficult to reconstruct belief systems without documentary evidence (below, pp. 173-82), the archaeological record preserves much evidence for ritual equipment and activities. What makes Minoan society interesting, as well as difficult for us to understand, is the apparent overlap between religion, society, and politics. Some of these issues have been addressed in detail, but no consensus has emerged among scholars - an impossibility, perhaps, in any discussion of religion!

We assume that the foundations of Neopalatial religion were laid in the Protopalatial period, and probably much earlier, in the form of cults at caves (some at quite remote locations), at sanctuaries on mountain peaks throughout the island where offerings were made of terracotta human and animal figures, and at communal tombs, often deliberately situated to provide easy access from the homes of the living (Ch. 4, p. 93).

Introduction

From its very beginnings, Aegean archaeology has been haunted by graves: early travelers marveled at the Treasury of Atreus, nineteenth-century museum collections were enriched from rifled chamber tombs such as those on Rhodes, and Schliemann dazzled his contemporaries with reports of gold from the shaft graves at Mycenae (Ch. 11, pp. 258). In the twenty-first century CE, this emphasis can seem misplaced: our concern is how people lived during the Bronze Age, not how they were buried. How can the study of burials be justified? Quantity is one justification: whereas the number of excavated settlements can be counted in tens, the number of cemeteries is in hundreds, tombs in thousands, and burials in tens of thousands. Moreover, whereas the more extensively excavated settlements are important palaces, the cemeteries give us a better feel for the smaller provincial centers, towns, and villages where most Mycenaeans lived. (Intensive survey has now also helped rectify that imbalance; Chs. 1, pp. 8-10; 12, p. 308). Furthermore, although funeral rituals are not everyday occurrences to tell us how people lived their everyday lives, archaeologists hope that the remains from the grave can inform us about important themes: social structure; status and wealth; the sense of community; the presentation of peoples' identities as male, female, or child or as official, craftsman, villager, or slave; the relation of individuals to their forebears. Certainly such hopes may not always be fully realized. The way an individual is portrayed in ceremonies such as funerals can be manipulated by the living to misrepresent their own status and that of the deceased.

Introduction

In the Late Helladic period the Mycenaeans established an extraordinary network of overseas contacts, which stretched the length of the Mediterranean and beyond. A prime motive will have been the acquisition of crucial raw materials that Greece lacked, but it is clear that there were other contributory factors, especially at the elite and palatial levels of society. A number of key questions therefore must be addressed. Was there trade and, if so, in what, for whose benefit and by whom? Were political alliances negotiated with foreign states? Did the Mycenaeans conduct military campaigns or settle overseas? What, if any, influence did they have on other societies? This chapter first looks at the evidence provided by texts from the Aegean, the Near East, and Egypt for the organization of trade at this time, and then uses the evidence of shipwrecks in particular to consider what was traded. The regions that came into contact with the Mycenaeans - the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Macedonia, Troy and the Black Sea, Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria-Palestine, Egypt, and Italy - are each treated separately, because the evidence cannot be satisfactorily interpreted unless it is put into context. Finally, the key questions are reviewed in the Conclusions.

Introduction

As one moves through a Cretan museum, with its galleries arranged chronologically, the material culture of the Protopalatial bursts onto the scene. This is not to say the preceding room did not contain some striking Prepalatial artifacts; or that stunning finds displayed in the following Neopalatial halls will not also fire the imagination; but arguably the material culture from the Protopalatial period has the most profound aesthetic impact. Kamares ware pottery in particular, with its white and red painted designs set against a lustrous black ground, somehow presents a more vibrant and varied overall impression than what comes before or after (Fig. 9.2; Pl. 8.9). Other periods may offer more stunning individual pieces, but in terms of the overall “assemblage,” the Protopalatial can make a strong claim to primacy.

There are attendant dangers to this kind of sweeping characterization. Material from different parts of Crete may be arranged side by side, and may in fact derive from different phases (MM IB, MM IIA, MM IIB) in the 150-year span of the period. It is important to take these temporal and regional variations seriously; as we shall see, the end of the Protopalatial period does not much resemble its beginning.

This approach has not often been taken, though, in part because it is difficult to isolate each phase securely. For example, we do not have much of an idea what the palace at Knossos looked like in MM IB, IIA, and IIB, respectively. In the east of the island, the MM IIA phase has barely been differentiated at all. The weight of evidence is concentrated in the destruction horizons at the end of the period. A more significant obstacle is the abiding focus on the origins of Protopalatial Crete, to the detriment of a proper understanding of its actual character and internal development.

Introduction

Mainland Greece in the Early Mycenaean period (LH I-II) was home to a number of political centers competing for resources, power, and territorial control (Ch. 10, pp. 242- 51). By the beginning of LH III the most successful developed into full-fledged states, political structures administered from central places of power. These central places are marked archaeologically by the monumental buildings we call palaces (Fig. 11.1; Ch. 11, pp. 261-4), and in most cases by administrative records inscribed on clay tablets in an early form of Greek. Recent scholars prefer “state” or the even more neutral “polity” (politically organized society) to the older term “kingdom,” to avoid possibly misleading presumptions about internal political organization. Palace-centered states were not universal in Mycenaean Greece; regions such as Achaea and Laconia apparently never developed a monumental center like Mycenae or Pylos. These areas may have continued to operate at the level of the Early Mycenaean village-centered societies, outside the control of any particular center; and indeed they benefited from the collapse of the palatial administrations ca. 1190 bce, at the end of LH IIIB (Ch. 15, pp. 395, 397-9, 405-6). We do know something about a number of Late Mycenaean states, however, particularly those controlled from Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, Thebes in Boeotia, Pylos in Messenia, and Knossos on Crete.

Instability and Decline

At the end of LH IIIB2 - conventionally dated to ca. 1190 bce - the Mycenaean palatial period came to a dramatic end. The palaces were destroyed and the palace system collapsed, never to be rebuilt. The causes of the catastrophes have long been the subject of controversial scholarly discourse, and consensus is not in the offing. One thing, however, has become increasingly clear: the breakdown of the palace system was the result of a process that had started considerably earlier. It is generally assumed that the decline of the Mycenaean states was triggered by a first series of destructions at the end of LH IIIB1. At Mycenae several palace-related buildings outside of the citadel were destroyed and abandoned. At Tiryns the structures on the knoll below the palace (the Lower Citadel) were destroyed, and the palace of Thebes was also damaged. Nor were nonpalatial communities spared. Earthquakes have been blamed for the destructions at Mycenae and Tiryns. At other sites causes cannot be defined with certainty.

Whatever caused these earlier catastrophes, they seem to have brought to an end the heyday of the Mycenaean palace civilization. The archaeological record of the last decades of the thirteenth century bce (LH IIIB2) reflects instability and decline. Mycenae and Tiryns were damaged by further destruction, and the great citadel of Gla in Boeotia was burnt down and deserted, whereas other settlements were gradually abandoned. The Aegean islands also seem to have undergone a period of insecurity and change.

Introduction

The chronological span of this chapter is the late fourth, the third, and the early second millennium bce, i.e., the Final Neolithic, Early Helladic, and early Middle Helladic periods. The Early Helladic period was approximately 1000-1100 years in length, as long as the Middle and Late Helladic periods combined (Fig. 1.1). During the Early Bronze Age on the Greek mainland, small-scale complex societies emerged in a number of regions. This experiment in complexity held promise, but sweeping changes brought it to an end during the later part of the EH period. These changes have been connected with the “Coming of the Greeks” (that is, Indo-European speakers) as precursors to Mycenaeans of the later Bronze Age. This chapter surveys the archaeological data and interpretations of that data from the Greek mainland for the period spanning from the end of the Neolithic to the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, including the problem of the “Coming of the Greeks” (below, pp. 38-41).

Study of the EH period began with Carl Blegen’s excavation at Korakou, near Corinth, in 1916-1918. The well-stratified remains allowed him to isolate ceramics of the various periods of the Bronze Age and, along with Alan Wace working at Mycenae, to devise a classification of the ceramics of the pre-Mycenaean period, the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The excavation of several important sites with EH remains, such as Tiryns, Asea, and Zygouries, contributed additional information, especially about architecture. The picture of the EH period changed fundamentally, however, with the excavation of Lerna in the 1950s.

Introduction

The nature of Minoan involvement in the Aegean islands is an intrinsically fascinating question for a prehistorian of Greece, one that has been debated since the very beginning of our field. It also constitutes an excellent case study of broader interest in world archaeology. What causes promote the cultural assimilation of one group by another? How do the opposing forces of socio-economic domination and resistance manifest themselves in material culture? For at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, the communities of the Cyclades and of other islands of the Aegean Sea were so radically altered by contact with the Minoan civilization that scarcely an aspect of life in them was left unaffected. As for the field of Aegean prehistory in general, fundamental research questions that concern Minoan Crete and the Aegean islands have often been framed in response to testimonia preserved in Greek texts of the historical period. Literary sources are thus an aspect of the problem that deserves attention before we consider archaeological data.

In the following section, therefore, we will first review the ancient written tradition. Then we will examine the actual archaeological evidence, as it has been uncovered at several representative and well known sites in Greece and western Turkey. Finally we will turn to the reasons that Cretans may have been attracted to the Cycladic and Dodecanesian islands, and to their impact on these areas.

Introduction

The archaeology of prehistoric Crete is dominated by the Minoan “palaces”: monumental court-centered building compounds, which first appeared in the early second millennium bce. By the Neopalatial period of the mid-second millennium bce, they are found (or predicted) in various sizes and configurations all over the island. Arthur Evans' uncovering of the 1-hectare (10,000 sq. m. or about 2.5 acres) palace at Knossos startled the Classical world at the beginning of the twentieth century ce, with both its scale and early date (Fig. 6.1). The grand, pre-Classical civilization that could build such an edifice seemed at least a junior member of the great ancient Near Eastern world of palaces and temples that was revealed to the colonial powers during the nineteenth century ce. Evans’s vision of a “priest-king” at the top of a hierarchical theocratic power structure has remained in some form the dominant interpretative paradigm ever since.

Furthermore, the Minoan palace was seen from its creation as the centralized redistributive authority for a wider territory. This was an anachronistic inference from the Late Bronze Age palaces. The decipherment in 1952 of Linear B records recovered from the Late Minoan II–IIIA2 palace of Knossos, and also Pylos and Mycenae in mainland Greece, seemed to show that the Minoan–Mycenaean palaces were the centers of elaborate palace economies like those in the Near East, with goods redistributed through or by rulers and officials at the palaces (Chs. 1, pp. 12–14; 12, pp. 291–2).