Imagine the surprise of Classical Historians in the 1870s to discover that the ancient
city of Troy was real. Before then, everyone assumed it was as mythical and nonexistent
as Atlantis — just a story dreamt up by that Homer guy as an object-lesson about the perils
of spousal-kidnapping. But whaddyaknow, when an archaeologist wanders around the western coast
of Anatolia and starts digging roughly where Homer said the city was, one might happen to
discover a Troy or two, or in this case nine, as Mr. Heinrich Schliemann found nine distinct layers
of urban settlement, stretching back from the late Stone Age into the Bronze Age and down through the
Roman empire. That same decade, Schliemann applied this winning strategy on the Greek mainland to
find the home of King Agamemnon, and, of course, take all his stuff. Not that he was still using it
nor deserved to keep it, but motives aside, sure enough Homer’s descriptions led to the fabled
site of Mycenae, Rich In Gold, whereupon Heinrich discovered a metric ass-ton of golden treasures
and artifacts – Among them a solid gold death-mask that Schliemann, oh-so-dramatically insisted was
Agamemnon’s, which is like digging up a Guy Fawkes mask and proclaiming that’s American icon George
Washington because who else would it be. But this is also the same eccentric gentleman who swiftly
developed a reputation for peppering his dig sites with outside relics and straight-up-forgeries to
tie his findings to the Homeric heroes. In spite of his shifty habits, it turns out the findings
were far more consequential than just a facemask of the suckiest character in the Epic Cycle,
because modern archaeology dates the treasure trove to 1600 BC, four centuries before the
supposed time of the Trojan War. And when taking the discoveries at Troy and Mycenae together,
we find out that there was a broad, long-lasting, and robust Bronze Age civilization in the Aegean
a full millennium before Greece’s Classical period. So, to find out what this Mycenaean
civilization was like, and understand why it disappeared, Let’s do some History.
As with all sufficiently-ancient civilizations, Mycenaean origins are murky and unknowable. But
as best we can guess, some Indo-Europeans crossed over from Anatolia into the Greek
peninsula sometime around 2000 BC and either joined or subjugated the native population,
and the lasting outcome of that collision was an early form of the Greek language. Granted,
it took this shiny new civilization a while to get going, as we don’t see this society come
into full form until the mid-millennium, when Schliemann’s beloved palace-cities start popping
up by the hundreds, from the Peloponnese to Thessaly. The 1500s BC also see the construction
of bling-filled shaft tombs in grave circles right outside the cities. Echoing the Egyptians,
albeit on a much smaller scale, the Mycenaeans made a point to bury their VIPs with truly obscene
amounts of wealth – weapons, precious stones from far east, and goldwork in a distinctly
Minoan style. So while this directly shows how the Mycenaeans were active participants in the
expansive Mediterranean trade networks of the time, their aesthetic choices might
also indicate a power dynamic with the mysterious Minoan civilization from the island of Crete.
Now unlike the mainlanders, the Minoans did not speak Greek, and as a result we have only
the loosest, most disappointingly-flimsy grasp on their culture – but, they had a killer aesthetic,
and the Mycenaeans didn’t need a translator to figure that out, so the mainland Greek
palaces took heavy influence from their Cretan neighbors: in their pottery, their mural-work,
and in their architecture. Because much as the labyrinthine palaces of Crete served
functions from administration to religion to manufacturing commerce & food storage,
the mainland palaces were similarly designed to handle all these tasks. This Minoan influence
kept up all throughout the Bronze Age, but the Mycenaean palaces had a distinct character to
them because of a little thing called monarchy. This is first evident in the elaborate burials
of the 16 and 1500s BC, where only someone of such singular importance could justify throwing
all of that wealth in the ground, and we don’t see that on Crete. And the Mycenaean concept of
royalty is confirmed by the word Wanax appearing in Mycenaean ledgers, which is what Homer calls
the Achaean kings. Then, when the palaces really take shape two centuries later, their central
feature is a Megaron, a cozy throne room with splendid frescoes all around and a giant hearth
in the center, along with huge banquet rooms like we hear about from Homer – channeling that Minoan
grandeur on a much more compact scale. The palaces topped out at a hundred rooms max, and the Greek
mainland has so many of them that it seems each Mycenaean king had a little pocket-sized realm
to call their own. The Palace of Nestor at Pylos was one of many Mycenaean sites nestled among the
mountains of the mainland, looking out over a valley and down toward the sea – most Mycenaean
kings only ruled what was in line of sight, making them much smaller fish than the Minoan palace of
Knossos which seemed to rule the entire island of Crete. As we’ll see throughout Greek history,
the land is so thick with mountains that any one city will naturally struggle to hold power across
a long distance, so smaller domains-per-kingdom make sense when the geography itself is
figuratively and literally Balkanized. And this might go a ways to explaining why the
Mycenaeans were so frantically militaristic. Their art is all about hunting and warfare, they buried
kings with prized weapons, and kept huge armories in their palaces – so whether they were constantly
fighting each other for gold or taking their talents to the mercenary business for the Minoans,
there’s clearly more to this than empty macho vibes, because the Mycenaeans perceived enough
of a threat lurking behind the hills and off the coasts to take some drastic measures. By the
1200s BC, the terrain and their military must have stopped being sufficient for protection,
because major cities surrounded themselves with truly colossal walls, of giant stones
stacked up over 50 feet high, and sometimes nearly as thicc. Later Greeks attributed these
massive fortifications to the giant Cyclopes, but terrified humans could also do the job in a pinch.
Whatever it was that got them so spooked, it was so bad that Mycenae and nearby Tiryns took the
extra step of fortifying the cisterns, presumably to ensure their water supplies could withstand a
siege. Inconsiderate neighbors, I tell you, they play music until 3 am, they steal the
buried treasures of your ancestral kings, and they poison your water supply. So selfish…
That said, the builders at Mycenae weren’t too busy quaking with terror at the unknown to show
off a little, and took the Cyclopean Walls as an opportunity to flex with the centerpiece Lion Gate
leading into the city, featuring a giant heraldic sculpture that would’ve been completely unmatched
in the Aegean. Yet the broader trend was much the same as it had been earlier, with most of the
fancy new construction going to use underground – as dozens of cities built Beehive-shaped Tholos
tombs for their last few generations of kings. So we’ve got a steady embellishment of mainland
cities right alongside increasingly dangerous neighbors. And the Mycenaeans were right to be
wary of each other, because Greeks had a habit of destroying civilizations.
See, back a century and a half in the mid 1400s BC, the Minoan palaces on Crete got slammed into
the shadow realm so hard that their entire society spontaneously disintegrated. A rough way to start
the week. But the exception was the main palace at Knossos, which stayed in use for one more century
and conveniently left us some written records before its abandonment. The tablets use the same
Linear A script the Minoans used for centuries, but now recorded the Mycenaeans’ spoken language
of Greek. Before too long, this Linear B was found on tablets all across the mainland – implying
that, one way or another, Crete had been destroyed, and the Mycenaean Greeks were gleefully
benefitting from it – a most curious coincidence. This century after the Cretan conquest and before
the cyclopean fortifications saw the Greeks hit their stride by drawing on Cretan writing,
visual aesthetics, and palace structure; ultimately resembling the dead-ified Minoans here
in the 1300s more than they ever had before. And it’s from their adoption of Cretan writing
that we get a glimpse of Mycenaean religion. While most of the clay tablets left behind are
warehouse logs, armory tallies, and other admin stuff, we can clearly spot some familiar names:
like Po-se-da-o, A-ta-na, A-re and Di-wo-nu-so. The gang’s not all here yet,
no Aphrodite or Hades to speak of, but we can see nearly all 12 Olympians even this
far back. One oddball quirk here is that it seems Poseidon was the big boy deity, not just at sea,
but also on land and possibly in the underworld, since Hades has no known mentions at this point
and likely came later. Very weird, very cool, and while I am definitely not the myth guy, we can use
the stories we know to clarify one particularly pesky part of their history: the collapse.
Records left by the Hittites and Egyptians in the 13 and 1200s mention the great kings of Ahhiyawa,
referring to the lands of Achaea where the Mycenaeans lived – but just two centuries later,
the Hittites were gone, the Egyptians were struggling, and Greek writing was
forgotten after all those fortified Mycenaean palaces were abandoned. Alright gang, get your
conspiracy boards, because theories to explain this bizarrely widespread cross-Mediterranean
collapse range from climate change to internal upheaval to earthquakes to inter-palace
warfare – but we’ve seen busted palaces get a makeover and stay in use post-collapse,
that’s why Troy has 9 layers – so the question is not so much why they died, but why they
stayed dead, and this is where the myths might help us. For example, the sudden death of Minoan
Crete could be adequately explained by “Invasion”, but we can pull a far more compelling thread by
considering how the myth of the Minotaur fits in – as spoils of Minoan piracy taken to a maze-like
palace with bull aesthetics becomes ritual sacrifice to the monster in the labyrinth, and an
Athenian hero’s daring victory in Crete reflects the actual Mycenaean conquest of the island.
Likewise, the Mycenaeans’ rabid militarism and massive fortifications on their palaces would be
costly to maintain, indicating that whatever threat they were facing had them so scared
the cost didn’t matter to them; and archaeology shows that Troy was a large,
wealthy city between the Greek and Hittite worlds, guarding the trade routes into the Black Sea. If
resources got scarce because of drought and famine somewhere, or if new trade routes bypassed Greece,
or there was too much piracy for goods to flow, or just because the Mycenaeans spent all their
cash on walls and weapons – competition in the already-militant Mycenaean civilization would
intensify, and Troy - with its favorable location and vast wealth – would surely be a coveted prize,
but even a mild disruption to the city, let alone a sack, would wildly destabilize the regional
trade that kept Bronze Age societies running. Ahaaah, we’re getting somewhere, now looking at
the Greeks’ own tale of the Trojan War and peeling off the mythical embellishments, we see a giant
conflict that ended in the total sacking of Troy and the deaths of several Greek hero kings.
“Realistic” explanations of the Trojan War play up the angle of a “fight over trade routes”. But
taken all together, we get something like “Piracy against the single richest city in the Aegean
world at a time when the flows of wealth that supported a massive warrior class were rapidly
drying up, resulting in the martial power of the Mycenaean warrior elite spending its last dying
effort on trying to conquer Troy in the hopes that their pirated wealth would stave off the collapse
of their civilization, but failing.” Because sure, Troy gets got, but look what happens after:
very few heroes make it back home alive, and Odysseus had to fight off hordes of suitors
once he finally did a decade later. All the Trojan gold in the world won’t help if every palace is in
a succession crisis. So it’s possible the epic stories retold over centuries are the distant,
imprecise memories of a doomed military expedition to Troy, and the potential cause
of a mass power-vacuum that leads to the chaos we see in the archaeological record. First,
the more vulnerable palaces start falling in the 1200s, then Troy has a burn-layer at 1180 BC,
Pylos is burned that same year – and just a couple years later, Egypt’s Pharaoh Ramesses III has to
fight off the suspiciously-Greek-sounding Ekwesh and Denyen sailing down from the North. This
indicates a broad migration of Greeks and others fleeing the wreckage of the Aegean
for safer ground, resulting in oddities like Peloponnesian Greek spoken in Cyprus
and Mycenaean pottery in Palestine. Whatever happened in the 1200s to set things in motion,
Troy was the tipping point of a widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Whoops.
And that is roughly how the Mycenaean Greeks turned on themselves and took down everybody
along with them, leaving Greece without writing or large urban centers for centuries after,
but with one hell of a story about the time they destroyed the f*cking world.
Thank you for watching. After investigating the history of the Minoans, it’s great to see that
Greek civilization in Achaea started right out the gate as an absolute disaster. Supremely on-brand,
excellent work all around. With our Bronze-Age preamble complete, we can dig into the history
of Classical Greece in future videos down the line, so I’ll see you then.