Mycene

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Mycene

Postby Quintus Aurelius Orcus on Wed Mar 05, 2003 12:54 pm

Hi
This is a more of a summary of the history of the Mycenean civilization. I couldn't find that much on their economy and technology. Anyone who can find these things online, let me know, i will add it to the essay.
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The Myceneans

A) Geography

Greece (ancient Hellas) is the extension of the mountain ranges of the Balkan Peninsula, with the Ionian Sea to the west and the Aegean Sea to the east. In antiquity, northern Greece comprised Epirus, Amphilochia, and Acarnania in the west, and Macedonia, the Chalcidice (whose three peninsulas jutted into the Aegean Sea), and Thessaly in the east. Central Greece began at the Thermopylae Pass and contained Aetolia, Locris, and Phocis in the west; Boeotia in the center; and Attica to the east, with the large island of Euboea lying off its eastern coast. After the narrow Isthmus of Corinth lay the Peloponnese or “Island of Pelops.” It had six main regions: the Argolis, just south of the Isthmus, Achaea along the Gulf of Corinth in the north, Elis in the west, Messene in the southwest, Laconia (or Lacedaimon) along the eastern coast, and Arcadia in its mountainous center. Off the West Coast of Greece lay the Ionian Islands: Corcyra (Corfu), Cephalonia, and Zacynthos. The Aegean Sea was dotted with islands: in the north Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros (between the Hellespont and Euboea), and Thasos and Samothrace off the Thracian coast; a string of islands along the coast of Asia Minor, of which the most important were Lesbos, Chios, Samos, and Rhodes; and the Cyclades, stretching southeast from Attica and Euboea and including Melos, Delos, Paros, Naxos, and Thera. Some fifty miles southeast of the Peloponnese lay Crete, the largest of the Aegean islands and its southern boundary. 1 The climate of Greece is temperate. Rainfall sometimes exceeds forty inches per year in the west but is only about sixteen inches in the east, making drought a constant menace. It rarely freezes, and in the summer the midday heat can exceed 100° F. Only 18 percent of the land surface is arable, and over large areas of the country, the soil is thin and rocky, making the cultivation of grain difficult, though olives and grapes ripen well in the rainless summers. Ancient Greece was more heavily wooded and more fertile than today, as the country has suffered from severe deforestation and erosion of the topsoil. The mountainous terrain in Greece promoted the development of numerous small city-states. There were some large cities, but most Greeks lived in towns and big villages, walking out to their fields, rather than staying in small isolated hamlets. Since many areas had to import grain, seaborne commerce developed at an early stage. But the civilization of ancient Greece at no time depended primarily on manufacture or trade and was always basically agrarian.

B) Mycenean History

This period of conquest and settlement by the Greeks makes up the Middle Helladic period. These new invaders settled all the parts of Greece, in some instances settling peacefully with the previous inhabitants, and began to dominate Greek culture. They spoke an Indo-European language; in fact, they spoke Greek. Their society was primarily based on warfare; their leaders were essentially war-chiefs. They had settled a difficult land: the Greek mainland is hot, dry and rocky. Agriculture is difficult, but some crops grow extremely well, such as grapes and olives. The coastal settlers relied heavily on fishing for their diet. In spite of the ruggedness of their life and the harshness of their social organization, these early Greeks traded with a civilization to the south, the Minoans. Their contact with the Minoans was instantly fruitful; they began to urbanize somewhere in the Middle Helladic period and translated their culture into a civilization
The transition between the Middle and Late Helladic periods is indistinguishable, for the Greek settlers had begun building the rudiments of a civilization earlier in the millenium. Around 1600 BC, though, these urban centers began to thrive and the Greek settlers entered their first major period of cultural creativity. Their cities grew larger, their graves more opulent, their art more common, their agriculture more efficient, and the power of these new warlord cities began to be felt around the Aegean. This period of Greek development and prosperity is called the Late Helladic Period or simply the Mycenean period. The Greeks of this age are the Myceneans proper; for four centuries their culture thrived until it crumbled into the emptiness of history.
For almost two thousand years, the Myceneans were lost to history except for their central position in Greek literature and mythology. For the Mycenean age found its voice in the poetry of Homer in a single defining event: the Mycenean war against Troy, a city in Asia Minor. But this poetry was regarded as fiction only until an amateur archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann dug up the city of Troy in Turkey and later dug up the Mycenean cities of Mycenae (which gives the age its name) and Tiryns.
But ruins tell us very little about the Myceneans. What we can tell from their ruined cities, their art, and their records (which we can read), is that the Myceneans derived much of their culture from the Minoans, but with some dramatic differences. Mycenean society was monarchical. The monarch called a wanax, ruled over a large administration as a kind of head bureaucrat. Unlike the Minoans, though, the Mycenean kings accumulated vast wealth in concentrated form; the rest of society did not share in the prosperity, as did the Minoans. The king was also primarily a warlord, and Mycenean society was constantly geared for battle and invasion. Their cities were heavy fortresses with unimaginably thick perimeter walls. While the Minoans surrounded themselves with delicate art of everyday life, Mycenean art was about warfare and hunting. Not only did the Myceneans stay on the defensive, they actively went looking for trouble. There are Hittite records in Asia Minor and the Middle East chronicling Mycenean invasions, and the Egyptians list them among groups of raiders. And, after Minoan civilization had been weakened in a series of earthquakes, the Myceneans conquered Crete and other Aegean civilizations, establishing themselves over the culture that so deeply influenced their own. The most famous of the Mycenean raids, of course, is the war against Troy, a wealthy commercial city on the coast of Asia Minor. This city, according to the archaeological evidence, was totally destroyed by the Myceneans.
So the Myceneans ranged far and wide looking for all sorts of trouble. They also ranged far and wide as merchants, trading raw goods such as oil and animal skins for jewelry and other goods from Crete, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Some of this commercial activity was not exactly above-board; the Mycenean kings were not above a little piracy or rapine. All of this activity concentrated a great deal of wealth in the hands of the kings and a few officials. Most of the wealth, of course, was spent on warfare and defense; a large part of it, though, went into other activities: crafts, jewelry, and expensive burials. Like most societies dominated by an extremely powerful ruler, the Myceneans spent a great deal of wealth and labor burying that ruler. Initially, the most powerful Myceneans were buried in deep shaft graves, but sometime around 1500 BC, they began burying their most powerful people in tholos tombs, which were large chambers cut into the side of a hill. Like most monumental architecture, their principle purpose was probably a display of power.
At the very peak of their power, shortly after the destruction of Troy, the Myceneans suddenly disappear from history. Around 1200 BC, the populations of the cities dramatically decrease until they are completely abandoned by 1100 BC. The Greeks believed that another Greek-speaking people, the Dorians overran the Myceneans, and there is some evidence that invasions may have taken place. If that were the case, the Dorians were uninterested in the Mycenean cities but chose to live in small, tribal, agricultural groups. It may be that no invasions took place, but that economic collapse drove people from the cities out into the countryside. Whatever happened, the great Mycenean cities were abandoned to their fates; Greek society once again became a non-urbanized, tribal culture. The Greeks also stopped writing, so the history of this period is lost to us forever; for this reason it's called the "Greek Dark Ages."

C) Early- and Middle Helladic period:

Early Helladic I. Around 2800, Greece, like Crete, seems to have been invaded from northwest Asia Minor. The beginning of the Bronze Age corresponds roughly with this invasion. Probably the immigrants were the Pre-Hellenic population of Greece who left the non-Indo-European place names in Greece and elsewhere ending in -ssos (e.g., Knossos and Parnassos), and in -inth (Corinth). New villages sprang up throughout Greece, and there is evidence of trade with the Aegean Islands and especially Crete. Northern Greece and Thessaly were not as advanced in material culture as the southern mainland.

D) The Late Helladic Period:

Late Helladic I: The Rise of Mycenaean culture. The shaft-grave culture continued but became wealthier. The shaft graves in Circle A (found earlier but dating later than Circle B) contained a remarkable 80 pounds of gold objects. Mycenaean architecture, called Cyclopean, is characterized by use of enormous stones. The rectangular megaron was now the typical private building, consisting of a portico (aithousa), vestibule (prodomos),and main room (domos). The largest and most important settlements were Mycenae and Tiryns. Major centers existed at Orchomenos and Thebes in Boeotia. Lake Copais, which covered a large area of western Boeotia, was drained during the Mycenaean period, providing fertile land. The fortress at Gla was built to protect the region. Athens was an important city and Cyclopean fortifications were built on the Acropolis. Pylos was one of the few early Mycenaean sites in western Greece.

E) Mycenean Religion

In many ways we know Mycenean religion for much of it survives into classical Greece in the pantheon of Greek gods. But we really don't know how much of Greek religious belief is Mycenean, and how much is a product of the Greek Dark Ages or later. Like everything else about ancient cultures, it is hard to reconstruct a religious system from only ruins and a few fragments of writing.
There are several reasonable guesses that we can make, however, Mycenean religions was almost certainly polytheistic, and the Myceneans were actively syncretistic, adding foreign gods to their pantheon of gods with surprising ease. The Myceneans probably entered Greece with a pantheon of gods headed by some ruling sky-god which linguists speculate might have been called *Dyeus in early Indo-European. This *Dyeus shows up in almost all Indo-European languages, suggesting that this god is a common heritage for all Indo-European peoples. In Greek, this god would become "Zeus," among the Hindus, this sky-god becomes "dyaus pitar" ("pitar" means "father"); we still encounter this word in the etymologies of the words "deity" and "divine."
At some point in their cultural history, the Myceneans adopted the Minoan goddesses and associated these goddesses with their sky-god; scholars believe that the Greek pantheon of gods do not reflect Mycenean religion except for Zeus and the female goddesses. These goddesses, however, are Minoan in origin. In general, later Greek religion distinguishes between two types of gods: the Olympian or sky-gods (which you have all heard of in some form or another), and the gods of the earth, or chthonic gods—these chthonic gods are almost all female. The Greeks believed that the chthonic gods were older than the Olympian gods; this suggests that the original Greek religion may have been oriented around goddesses of the earth, but there is no evidence for this outside of reasonable speculation. Mycenean religion certainly involved offerings and sacrifices to the gods, and some have speculated that they involved human sacrifice based on textual evidence and bones found outside tombs. In the Homeric poems, there seems to be a lingering cultural memory of human sacrifice in King Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia; several of the stories of Trojan heroes involve tragic human sacrifice. This, however, is all speculation.
Beyond this speculation we can go no further. Somewhere in the shades of the centuries between the fall of the Mycenean civilization and the end of the Greek Dark Ages, the original Mycenean religion persisted and adapted until it finally emerged in the stories of human devotion, apostasy, and divine capriciousness in the two great epic poems of Homer.

F) Mycenean Timeline

- 2500- 2200 Early Helladic II. Houses in this period were larger and some contained large storage facilities for grain. At Lerna there are remains of what may have been a palace (House of Tiles), indicating some sort of central authority. Large settlements at Zygouries and Tiryns, with gold and silver jewelry buried in tombs, suggest a rising prosperity.
- 2200- 1900 Early Helladic III. Signs of massive destruction are present at almost all Early Helladic period III sites. A new material culture was introduced, characterized by Minyan Ware (also called Orchomenos ware), a fine, wheel-made pottery. Whether the break in material culture represents the invasion of Greek-speakers into the region is debated. Scholars date the intrusion of the Greeks from as early as 2200 to as late as 1500 B.C.E., though most agree that the Greeks seem to have settled for some time in Thessaly before moving into the rest of the peninsula. In classical times, Greek was divided into three dialect groups: Aeolian, Ionian, and Dorian. Originally thought to predate the Greek invasion, some scholars believe the dialect division occurred after the Greeks took over the peninsula.
- 1900-1600 Middle Helladic. A rapid rise in wealth and sophistication is associated with a palace-based civilization, which developed under Minoan influence. Kings and other royal persons were buried in shaft graves within a sacred precinct. One such grave at Mycenae, called Circle B, contained gold and silver objects on a small scale. In this period, Mycenaean culture was centered in the eastern Peloponnese and central Greece
- 1500-1400 Late Helladic II: The “Tholos-Tomb” Dynasty. Around 1500 the Mycenaean burial style changed from the shaft grave to circular rock-lined chambers cut out of hillsides: so-called tholoi or “beehive” tombs. After c. 1450, the Mycenaeans conquered Crete and established themselves at Knossos. Evidence of Mycenaean presence is found in the Cyclades, Rhodes, Sicily, and Italy, although where political control ended and trade began is unknown. The prosperity of Mycenaean Greece was due largely to an expansion of trade: wealthy palace-based governments, which fostered international exchange, ruled all Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and the Hittite Empire.
- - 1400- 1200 Late Helladic III: The Height of the Mycenaean Age. After 1400, the Mycenaean culture spread throughout Greece, eventually penetrating virtually the entire mainland. The fine pottery found even in nonroyal tombs suggests a general prosperity, and the most impressive Mycenaean architecture dates to the 14th century. Around 1350, the citadel at Mycenae was enlarged, and an immense 23-foot-thick wall was constructed of Cyclopean blocks, which included the famous Lion Gate. The royal palace at the summit of the acropolis contained a throne room, living apartments, and a shrine. Its walls were covered with painted frescoes showing military scenes. Similar large palaces from this period were found at Tiryns and Pylos. The largest beehive tombs date to after 1300: the so-called “Treasuries” of Atreus at Mycenae and Minyas at Orchomenos. (The buildings have no connection to these mythical characters.) Linear B tablets have been found at Pylos, Mycenae, and Thebes on the mainland, as well as at Knossos in Crete. While limited to accounts and inventories, they give important information on Mycenaean language, government, economy, and religion. The king, or wanax, exercised supreme authority, followed by the lawagetas, or Leader of the People (or Army). There were a series of lower officials, including the basileus, later the Greek word for king. A special class of priests existed (unlike in the Classical period), as well as a palace economy with a complex division of labor, with numerous slaves. The names of later Greek gods, such as Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, and Athena, were already present. After 1300 Mycenaean trade with Egypt and Syria declined, although the reasons for this are unclear.
- 1200-1100 Late Helladic C: The Decline of Mycenae. Around 1230 most of the large Mycenaean cities, with the exception of Athens and Mycenae itself, were destroyed. Texts from Pylos, written just before the city's destruction, discuss military dispositions against an apparent invasion. Around the same time, the export of Mycenaean pottery to Syria and Egypt ceased completely. A number of factors probably brought Mycenaean culture to an end, but a major one was probably the movement of the Sea Peoples, which affected the Middle East at the same time
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