The Mycenaeans

Rodney Castleden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134227815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Following on from Rodney Castleden's best-selling study Minoans, this major contribution to our understanding of the crucial Mycenaean period clearly and effectively brings together research and knowledge we have accumulated since the discovery of the remains of the civilization of Mycenae in the 1870s.

In lively prose, informed by the latest research and using a full bibliography and over 100 illustrations, this vivid study delivers the fundamentals of the Mycenaean civilization including its culture, hierarchy, economy and religion. Castleden introduces controversial views of the Mycenaean palaces as temples, and studies their impressive sea empire and their crucial interaction with the outside Bronze Age world before discussing the causes of the end of their civilization.

Providing clear, easy information and understanding, this is a perfect starting point for the study of the Greek Bronze Age.

1
INTRODUCTION

Odysseus, Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Helen of Troy – their names resonate through history, legend and literature like the plucked strings of an ancient lyre. When he wrote their stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer called them Achaeans, Danaans or Argives. When we write about the historical or archaeological reality that lies behind them we call them Mycenaeans – but that name is a modern invention. Some Mycenaeans, such as Agamemnon, came from the city of Mycenae and were therefore Mycenaeans in both ancient and modern senses of the word, but others came from other bronze age cities. Menelaus came from Lakedaimon in Laconia, Nestor from Pylos in Messenia and Odysseus from Polis in Ithaca.¹

Homer, writing in the eighth century BC, left us tantalizing epic poems that provide a vivid image of bronze age Greece, the Greece of five or eight hundred years before, in a mix of bronze age proto-history and fictional embellishment that is very hard to disentangle. The ancient Greeks of the classical period were themselves divided about Homer. Some accepted the Homeric epics as history. Others distrusted them as sources. Thucydides, who cast a critical eye on any account of past ages, accepted that there had been a pan-Achaean expedition against Troy, but thought Homer had exaggerated its scale and importance. The later Greeks connected the final destruction of the Mycenaean centres with the invasion of the Dorians, a wave of imagined migrants. In Greek legend, the Dorians are described as the descendants of Heracles, and the invasion itself as ‘the Return of the Heraclidae’. Hyllos, the son of Heracles, was defeated and killed in battle against Atreus, king of Mycenae; the Heraclidae were forbidden by the Delphic oracle to return to Greece for a hundred years. Modern scholars dispute this account, but the legend of the Dorian invasion played a major role in later, classical Greek consciousness. Athens represented itself as the only city to have held out against the Dorians and so to have become a stepping-stone for Ionian (pre- Dorian) migration across to Anatolia. The traditional division between the ‘Dorians’ of the south, such as the Spartans, and the ‘Ionians’ of the north, such as the Athenians, reinforced and seemed to justify on ethnic grounds the frictions that resulted in the debilitating Peloponnesian War. Ancient perceptions of the Mycenaean civilization and its aftermath were to be profound influences on later events. Although the Mycenaeans are long dead, the achievements and ideals attributed to them lived on to become vital forces in later centuries.

The Mycenaean heroes of Homer and the events surrounding them were generally accepted as historical until modern times. Ironically, it was not until the nineteenth century that scholars began to question Homer’s historicity, and it became orthodox to dismiss as legend everything that might have happened before the founding of the Olympic Games in 776 BC.²

It was in the midst of this nineteenth-century climate of scepticism that Heinrich Schliemann set out to prove the historical accuracy of the Iliad by identifying the places described by Homer. His first major achievement was to uncover the site of Troy, which most scholars believe he did at Hisarlik in north-west Anatolia, though he misidentified the archaeological layer. He had the English archaeologist Frank Calvert to thank for guiding him to Hisarlik, though it was not in Schliemann’s nature to express gratitude.

Schliemann next turned his attention to Mycenae, where he began work in 1876. The Lion Gate had already been exposed in 1841 and the walls of the citadel were fully visible; there was never any doubt about the identity of the site. Schliemann’s excavations, or to be more precise the excavations undertaken by the young Greek archaeologist Panagiotis Stamatakis and a team of fifty-five workmen hired by Schliemann, spectacularly uncovered royal burials in an unexpected location within the walls of the citadel although, as at Troy, Schliemann once again misidentified the period; at both sites he focused on finds dating from centuries earlier than the Homeric period, which was around 1250 BC.

Schliemann followed a passage in Pausanias describing the tombs of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra as ‘a little further from the wall, as they were not judged fit to be buried within, where Agamemnon lay and those who were murdered along with him’.³ The tholos or beehive tombs were popularly named ‘treasuries’ and most scholars in 1868 reasoned that the kings of Mycenae would not have placed their wealth, whether in tombs or treasuries, outside the city wall; they reasoned that the existence of the treasuries outside the citadel argued for the former existence of a city wall much further out. Schliemann, who was not only an amateur but new to the subject, was unaware of the academic issues involved and therefore assumed, correctly, that Pausanias was referring to the citadel walls. Ironically, it was Schliemann’s ignorance of the nineteenth-century antiquarian literature that led him to discover the shaft graves inside the citadel walls.

But he had another, altogether less inspiring, reason for digging there, which he mentioned in Ithaca but not in later works, and that was the deep pit that someone else had already opened there.⁴ He says it was 6m deep, and there is nowhere within the citadel at Mycenae except the site of Grave Circle A where it would be possible to dig down that far without striking bedrock. It seems likely that this was a clandestine dig by locals and that Schliemann heard rumours in Nauplion that the dig was producing gold; with characteristic deception, he preferred to emphasize his literary evidence and prove his worth as a scholar.⁵ In his diary Schliemann noted that he would have to dig ‘at least 30 feet to reach . . . the tombs of the heroes’. This is a figure he could not have deduced from any literary source or from the topography of the site; it suggests that someone had already dug down into Grave Circle A and reached a bronze age burial.⁶ Controversy surrounded Schliemann, his discoveries and his interpretation of his discoveries both during his lifetime and subsequently.

Schliemann and other archaeologists such as Christos Tsountas provided archaeological evidence that there had been a ‘Mycenaean’ civilization in bronze age Greece, for which the only previous evidence had been literary. Since Schliemann’s time, scholars have remained divided in their attitudes towards Homer and other ancient sources. Arthur Evans was an ambivalent admirer of Schliemann, and acquired the Cretan site of Knossos with the intention of unearthing a bronze age building that he would name ‘the Palace of Minos’ after the legendary king of Crete. In the process he discovered that there had been another bronze age civilization, slightly earlier than the Mycenaean civilization, the Minoan. Belief in the historicity of ancient tradition was proving very fruitful, though many scholars continued to maintain a sceptical attitude towards traditionary accounts.

After Schliemann, it seemed to some that Homer must be a rich seam of information about the Mycenaean heroes and the places where they lived – just waiting to be quarried. Yet we have to be wary of Homer as a source – he is no use, as history or proto-history, unless corroborated by archaeology, so the familiar image gained from Homer of the Mycenaean world and its denizens may need adjusting.

For instance, Homer describes a letter entrusted to a traveller, yet when the poetry was composed and orally transmitted through the Dark Ages writing was totally unknown. Homer is either completely anachronistically describing the letter-writing of his own time or recalling a much earlier time when letters were written, which takes us back to the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean period, the Homeric heroic age.⁷ The boar’s tusk helmet Homer describes was unknown in the eighth century; it was a genuine bronze age artefact, described just as it would have looked in the bronze age.⁸ The description of the helmet must therefore have been handed down from the bronze age. The objection that the whole of Book 10 might have been added to the Iliad later in antiquity goes no way at all towards explaining the presence of genuine late bronze age material. There are some inconsistencies in the references to iron. In Mycenaean Greece bronze was used for making weapons, so the mention of an iron arrowhead is an anachronism, perhaps imported into the poem by a story-teller retelling it for the thousandth time in 800 BC.⁹ On the other hand, Achilles’ offer of a lump of iron as a prize in the funeral games of Patroklos is a closer reflection of the metal’s scarcity and value in the late bronze age.¹⁰

Other anachronisms are more elusive. Homer has been criticized for describing cremation as the standard method for disposing of the dead in the Iliad, but warrior aristocrats killed on campaign far from home at Troy could not have been buried in the customary way in their family chamber tombs or tholos tombs back in Greece; nor would there have been time to build such tombs in the Troad. As a matter of expediency it would have been necessary to dispose of their bodies in some other way.¹¹

The accuracy of Homer’s political geography is variable. The Odyssey treats the Hither and Further Provinces of Messenia as separate kingdoms, though we know from bronze age documents that both provinces were ruled from Pylos. The Odyssey also gives the River Alpheius as the northern frontier of the kingdom of Pylos, but the tablets imply that the River Nedha, 35km to the south, was the frontier. Perhaps Homer did not have first-hand knowledge of the geography of western Greece. He may not have understood the Argolid well either, since he gives Mycenae a kingdom with a coastline on the Corinthian Gulf rather than the Bay of Argos. The modern province boundary separating Argolida from Korinthia follows the main watershed, immediately to the north of Mycenae, and this mountain ridge is where I would have expected the bronze age frontier no-man’s-land to have been. But this is dangerous ground – and not just because of the prowling lion of Nemea – as we cannot be absolutely sure where Mycenae’s power reached and the logic of physical geography may have been overridden by some political consideration or some accident of dynastic history; in other words, we cannot tell from the archaeological evidence whether Homer was right or wrong.¹²

Archaeology has yet to tell us the origins of the Mycenaeans. We know who they were – the people who inhabited central and southern Greece in the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC – but little of where they came from. One theory is that they migrated into Greece from the area north of the Black Sea, the region that is now the Ukraine.¹³ They were probably nomadic pastoralists organized at a tribal level. But beyond these points there is wide disagreement; there is no consensus as to when and how the ancestors of the Mycenaeans entered Greece. It is likely that there was no mass migration but a sporadic movement of small groups over a long period between 2200 and 1600 BC.¹⁴ What we can be sure of is that they were a people of exceptional dynamism and enterprise who enthusiastically took over key ideas from neighbouring cultures – Egyptian, Hittite and Minoan – cross-fertilized them, and grafted them onto the proto-urban society developing at Greek mainland centres such as Lerna and Tiryns to make a dazzling and original new civilization.

For several centuries before the Mycenaean civilization emerged villages had been evolving into towns. The site of Malthi in Messenia had had five successive towns built on it by 1600 BC. The first two were unwalled and had been destroyed by 1900 BC; the next three were walled and centred on a major building that seems to have been a forerunner of the Mycenaean ‘palaces’. The houses, upwards of three hundred of them, were huddled together with party walls, as at Thermi and Poliochne, showing a centralized, unified and purposeful community. It was already a genuinely urban society, one that would provide a firm foundation for the development of the Mycenaean civilization.

The achievements of this civilization are today looked back on with admiration and awe, though it was not always so. Pausanias described how its ruins had passed from general notice in the second century AD: ‘Distinguished historians have explained the Egyptian pyramids in the greatest detail, and not made the slightest mention of the Treasure House of Minyas or the walls of Tiryns, which are by no means less marvellous.’¹⁵

2
CITIES AND KINGDOMS

FRAGMENTATION

‘Without a geographical basis, the people, the makers of history, seem to be walking on air.’¹ The writer had France in mind, but the saying is as true of Mycenaean Greece. Understanding the well-defined physical geography of Greece helps enormously in understanding its political history. It is a country unusually sharply divided into many small physical units. In the Aegean that physical division is extreme, with water separating land areas from one another and imposing socio-political isolation. The mainland of Greece is not much less divided, with the Peloponnese very nearly severed from the rest of Greece by the ragged slash of the Gulf of Corinth, and high rugged mountain ridges enclosing and separating small fertile plains. Here too the sea separates, with deeply penetrating gulfs (the Saronic, Argolic, Laconian and Messenian Gulfs) breaking the land up even further. It seems quite natural to find that in the bronze age southern and central Greece was divided into many separate political units, each with a focus on a fertile, food-producing plain, and often with a harbour town on a bay. This is what Homer describes: a multitude of small kingdoms and principalities, each with its own towns, its own army, its own king, its own aristocracy, its own court and its own intrigues.² Homer says the kings owed allegiance to a High King, Agamemnon, and there is some documentary evidence from a Hittite inscription that the Hittite king (a High King ruling most of Anatolia) was ready to address a Greek king as his equal. The king of Ahhiyawa (the Hittite version of the name) is thought by many scholars to have been the king of Achaea (the classical Greek version) – and according to Homer Agamemnon was king of the Achaeans. There are hints in the Odyssey of special bonds tying the three southernmost kingdoms of mainland Greece, Messenia, Laconia and Argolis. Menelaus refers to ‘the Argive country’, by which he appears to mean these three kingdoms or possibly even the Peloponnese as a whole (including the kingdoms of Elis, Achaea and Arcadia as well); he uses the name ‘Hellas’ to describe northern Greece.³

Plate 2.1 The rugged mountain landscape of Greece. Steep slopes provided natural defence. This is the Chavos ravine, which defended the citadel of Mycenae, off the picture immediately to the left.

Figure 2.1 Location map: Mycenaean sites in Greece.

The best literary source for the political geography of the bronze age is Book 2 of the Iliad, which lists the contingents in the Greek combined expeditionary fleet. This Catalogue of Ships tells us not only how many ships were contributed by each kingdom, but which towns the men came from. It is still possible, even after nearly three thousand years, to identify two-thirds of the towns Homer listed. More significantly still, of those, all except Ithaca are known from archaeological evidence to have been important Mycenaean sites: even those which by Homer’s time had been reduced to villages, like Mycenae, or wiped off the map altogether, like Pylos.⁴ There are many problems in interpreting the Catalogue of Ships – it parades an absurdly large military force, for one thing – but it nevertheless sketches an ancient geography of the Aegean that is startlingly close to what we now know from archaeological evidence to have been the heartland of the Mycenaean civilization.

As the present interglacial dawned, ten thousand years ago, Greece was deserted. It was not until after 7000 BC that farmers migrated into northern Greece from Anatolia, settling in the most fertile plains opening onto the Aegean, facing the lands they had come from. Until 3000 BC, agriculture was restricted to the most fertile floodplains. Only then, with the introduction of the plough, was it possible to advance onto steeper and stonier slopes in Thessaly and the foothills round the Plain of Argos, then, after 2000 BC, into southern Argolis and Messenia. The effect of this spread of agriculture was deforestation on a large scale. The pine forests in Messenia, in the south-west Peloponnese, were rapidly reduced. The combination of deforestation and ploughing led to accelerated soil erosion on hill slopes and accelerated rates of sedimentation in r...