Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 3, Greek Civilization Version 1.0. I’m Scott Emmons. 

 That title, Greek Civilization Version 1.0, is just my geeky way of saying this episode is about an early phase of Greek culture, one that rose and fell centuries before the Parthenon, the Olympic games, Greek drama, all the things we usually picture when we think of ancient Greece. This is the civilization known as Mycenaean, named after the city of Mycenae — not because it was in any way dominant over the rest of Greece, but because that’s where the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered this Bronze Age culture. 

 But Mycenaean culture didn’t spring up out of nowhere. It borrowed heavily from the earlier Minoan civilization, which developed on the island of Crete. It makes sense that Crete would be home to the first advanced civilization in the Aegean, because it was the biggest and southernmost of the Greek islands, so it was perfectly situated for trade and cultural contacts with Egypt and points east. Once it was fully developed, Minoan Crete became the trendsetter for the Aegean world, including Mycenaean Greece. To draw a rough analogy, it’s a little like the way, centuries later, Rome absorbed so many influences from Greece that it became kind of a hybrid Greco-Roman culture. Something similar is going on here. So, in order to understand Mycenaean Greece, we really need to look back first and get a handle on the basics of Minoan culture.

 Now, just as Heinrich Schliemann will forever be remembered as the excavator of Troy and Mycenae, Minoan Crete has its own legendary excavator, a British archaeologist named Arthur Evans. That’s Sir Arthur Evans to you and me, because he was eventually knighted for his contribution to archaeology. Evans was a bit of an eccentric in his own right, but he had a more conventional upbringing and education than Schliemann. He came from a wealthy family and attended Oxford. He doesn’t seem to have had any life-altering run-ins with drunken millers reciting Homer, but one thing he did share with Schliemann was a lifelong interest in archaeology.

 Now, in Evans’s time, there was a lot of buzz about the site of Knossos on Crete. You may hear that pronounced “Nossos,” which is fine, but I just like the Greek pronunciation, with the full-on K-N sound. Knossos. Anyway, in 1878, very shortly after Schliemann made his great discoveries at Mycenae, a Greek amateur archaeologist by the name of Minos Kalokairinos discovered some exciting architectural remains at Knossos that were clearly part of a bigger complex. For political reasons that I won’t go into, a full-scale excavation had to wait over 20 years. But in 1900, Arthur Evans was the one who got the funding and the permits to continue the work. And what he discovered was a huge, elaborate palace complex that belonged to a civilization very different from others in the Mediterranean — one that predated the Mycenaean palaces by centuries.

 The discoveries at Knossos caused a sensation, because here was a highly developed civilization that had been forgotten for millennia. And as the palace emerged, the architecture turned out to be spectacular. At the center was a huge, open-air courtyard that was probably used for public rituals. And that courtyard was surrounded by hundreds of rooms, which included residential quarters but also storerooms for agricultural produce, workshops, and religious shrines. Parts of the palace had multiple stories with staircases connecting them. There were distinctive Minoan columns with an unusual tapered shape, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. There was even indoor plumbing with terracotta pipes. The travel guidebooks love to point out that one room had a primitive version of a flush toilet. 

 If you’re a fan of Greek mythology, you’ve probably heard the legend that the Cretan King Minos had the labyrinth built to imprison the Minotaur — the monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull. The labyrinth was a maze so complicated that once you were in, it was impossible to find your way out. Well, as the excavation revealed more and more rooms of the palace, Evans suggested that the confusing layout might have been the basis for the legend of the labyrinth. There’s no way to prove that, but it’s interesting to think the legend might preserve a folk memory of the palace at Knossos. Incidentally, Evans was drawing on the tales of King Minos when he named this culture Minoan.

 If you go to Knossos today, it’s a very impressive tourist attraction. And one reason it’s so impressive is that Evans did a lot of reconstruction. That was partly for preservation, because some parts of the architecture would deteriorate after being exposed to the weather. But Evans had a special zeal for restoring the palace, because he wanted other people to experience its original glory. He seems to have developed a personal connection with the Minoans — he identified with them in some profound way — and that gave him a passion for rebuilding. And he was rich, so if he couldn’t get funding, he’d do it at his own expense. Now, today’s archaeologists tend to frown on extensive reconstruction, because when you reconstruct something, you may be mistaken about how it was originally built, and then you’ve destroyed the evidence that might have led to a correct interpretation. Even in his time, some archaeologists thought Evans was going too far with his restorations. On the other hand, it does make for a memorable experience when you visit the palace and can see some of the architecture more or less as it originally looked. 

 Well, if the architecture was impressive, so was the decoration. A lot of the rooms had frescoes covering whole walls, and they were strikingly different from palace art in the surrounding cultures. In a place like Egypt or Mesopotamia, you’d very often have depictions of war, of the king asserting his power, smashing his enemies in battle or trampling the people he’d vanquished. The Minoan frescoes typically showed things like religious processions, dolphins and other sea life, and daily life scenes that had nothing to do with war and conquest. 

That has contributed to a popular, simplistic view that the Minoans were a sort of “kumbaya” culture that had no taste for war. Well, there are enough swords and daggers in Minoan graves to show that they had their warlike side. But whatever importance war may have had for the Minoans, it wasn’t something they emphasized in their art. 

 One thing they did emphasize in their art was a set of iconic images that appear over and over. Probably the best-known example is a strange practice called “bull-leaping,” which appears on one of the most famous wall paintings from Knossos. Whether it was a sport, a religious rite, or both, it involved young men doing a sort of handspring over a charging bull. Anyhow, this image appeared on frescoes, seal stones, signet rings… there’s even an ivory carving of a bull-leaper in mid-leap. Bulls were clearly sacred to the Minoans, and another common image is what Evans called the “horns of consecration” — a stylized pair of bull’s horns that would be displayed on rooftops or tombs, probably to indicate that there was something sacred about the place. Another religious icon was the double axe, which was often shown with a goddess, never with a male god. So it seems to be a symbol of the primal Earth Mother or Mother of Creation, who was the central deity in Minoan religion. 

 Now, Knossos was not the only Minoan palace on Crete. It was the biggest, but other regions had their palace centers too. And those palaces were the centers of political, religious, and economic life. They followed the example of Egypt and some Near Eastern kingdoms, where a palace or temple would function as the hub of a redistributive economy — that is, it would receive goods from the surrounding town and countryside and distribute them under the direction of a powerful ruler. That ruler would most likely have both political and religious authority. Evans saw the Minoan rulers as a priest-king and queen, and he even identified the priest-king with a male figure from one of the palace frescoes. A lot of that is guesswork, though. Unlike so much palace art in the neighboring cultures, the Minoan frescoes don’t include any figures who can definitely be identified as a king or queen. 

 So that’s a very sketchy and incomplete overview of Minoan culture. But it gives us enough to recognize Minoan influence outside of Crete. It’s easy to spot that influence because of those iconic images I mentioned earlier. The double axe, bulls and bull-leaping, the horns of consecration, and that distinctively serene style of painting are all telltale signs of Minoan influence. So what does that mean about Minoan power in the region? According to classical Greek legends, our old friend King Minos had a powerful navy and ruled over the islands. Evans was no Schliemann — he didn’t uncritically think of Greek legends as history — but he did believe in a Minoan empire that ruled over the Aegean. These days, most archaeologists tend to see it more as a trade empire rather than political or military domination. But there were certainly Minoan settlements in the Aegean islands. Other places may or may not have been actual settlements from Crete, but their culture looks very Minoan. 

 There’s no better example of that than the site of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini. Unfortunately, Santorini, which is one of the most beautiful Greek islands, is now suffering from the overtourism that’s run rampant in so much of Europe. So I hesitate to recommend adding to the tourist crowds. But if you’re interested in Minoan culture, Akrotiri is a place you don’t want to miss. The island is volcanic, and sometime probably in the 16thcentury BCE, it exploded in the biggest volcanic eruption of recorded history. Ash from the volcano buried the town and preserved it, very much like the way Mount Vesuvius preserved Pompeii in Roman times. So you can actually wander through the excavated site and you’re in the middle of a Bronze Age town. I mentioned earlier that Knossos had been heavily restored, but Akrotiri didn’t need as much restoration, because it was so well preserved. In fact, it’s an important site for understanding Minoan art, because the wall paintings are in so much better shape than most of the ones on Crete.

 So Akrotiri is a prime example of the dominance of Minoan culture in the Aegean. Inevitably, that Minoan influence spread to Mycenaean Greece. The Mycenaeans imitated the Minoans in all kinds of ways. The palace at Tiryns, just a few miles away from Mycenae, had a full-on bull-leaping fresco! Whether that means the Mycenaeans actually practiced bull-leaping or they just liked it as a subject for a wall painting, we don’t know. The palace of Nestor at Pylos had frescoes of nature, animals, griffins, and other Minoan-type subjects. There were some more typically Mycenaean elements — most notably scenes of war and hunting — but the general impression from Mycenaean art is that Minoan cultural influence was pervasive. Because it was so strong, it seemed clear to Arthur Evans that the Minoans ruled over Mycenaean Greece. It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, and a lot of the evidence seemed to support it. But in the middle of the 20th century, that theory was stood on its head. And the key was a groundbreaking discovery that I’ve deliberately held back until now — namely, clay tablets inscribed with Bronze Age writing. 

I think that’s a good place for our first break. When we pick up again, we’ll see how the decipherment of a mysterious script changed the paradigm of the power dynamic between Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. Meanwhile, let’s break for… 

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 I’ve opened the last couple of episodes by saying hello and then giving an ancient Greek equivalent, Χαίρετε. That’s still a common greeting in modern Greek, although it’s now pronounced, Χαίρετε. It’s a command form of the verb χαίρειν, which means “to be happy.” So when an ancient Greek would say, “Χαίρε” to one person or the plural “Χαίρετε” to a group, they were literally saying something like, “Be happy.” I’ve sometimes heard it translated as “Rejoice!” But that sounds way too celebratory. When words develop into standard greetings, their literal meanings tend to fade a bit. Χαίρε is really just a friendly way to say hello. Or goodbye. Like “ciao” in Italian, it could be used for both. Which means we can now say “Χαίρε” to our moment of Greek and get back to the main story.

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Before the break, I went for dramatic effect and held back a crucial part of the story. So let’s start with a flashback to a time before the discovery of the Knossos palace, when Arthur Evans was visiting Athens. He was poking around the shops one day, and he bought some seal stones that the seller told him had come from Crete. What do I mean by a seal stone? It was a small gemstone or sometimes a piece of ivory carved with a design that the owner could press into a lump of clay or wax, and that would be their signature. The ones Evans bought that day were especially interesting because they had curious markings on them that looked like a form of writing. Now, at this time, writing was something like a missing puzzle piece in Greek bronze age archaeology, because Schliemann and others hadn’t yet found any at Mycenae or Tiryns. Later excavations did turn up a little writing at those places, but at this point it was still undiscovered. Evans thought it was unlikely that a civilization as complex as Mycenaean Greece could operate without writing, so he thought he might get a clue if he could find evidence of literacy in Crete. 

 Well, when he started digging at Knossos, it wasn’t long before clay tablets started to turn up with writing on them. And similar finds were turning up in excavations in other parts of Crete. There were actually several forms of Cretan writing, but the most common were two related scripts that Evans named Linear A and Linear B. It was clear that Linear A was the earlier one, because Linear B seemed to be an adaptation of it. Both scripts were unreadable, but they included some pictograms and other markings that were clearly numbers. So these tablets were evidently some sort of inventories or palace records. Evans assumed that the two scripts were both used for writing the Minoan language. Linear A almost certainly was, and to this day no one has been able to decipher it. Linear B is a different story.

 The decipherment of Linear B is fascinating in itself, and it could easily lead me down a rabbit hole. But this particular rabbit hole is so deep, I decided to save it for a short episode that I’ll release separately. To cut to the chase, in the 1950s a young British architect by the name of Michael Ventris, building on the work of others, cracked the code and determined that Linear B was an early form of Greek. Now, I understand if that doesn’t sound like a big reveal. Oh, so the writing they found on a Greek island turned out to be Greek. Whoop-de-do, right? But at the time, it came as a huge surprise. Because it was still widely assumed that the tablets were written in Minoan, a completely unknown language. So the revelation that it was Greek was quite a bombshell.

 And it meant the whole power dynamic had to be rethought. Remember, Evans thought the Minoans had ruled over Mycenaean Greece. That assumption seemed to gain support in 1939, when Linear B tablets turned up for the first time on the Greek mainland, at the site of Pylos. As long as the writing was still unreadable, they fit very neatly with the idea that the Minoans had been in charge there, using their writing system for administrative purposes. The revelation that it was Greek flipped the script. From about 1450 BCE on, Greek was the language used for administration at Knossos as well as in mainland Greece. So instead of Minoans ruling over Greece, Mycenaean Greeks had now gotten control in Crete. Culturally, Greece was still heavily influenced by the old Minoan civilization, but the Mycenaeans were now the dominant power.

 So who were these Mycenaean Greeks, and where did they come from? Well, we know that what we call Greece had been continuously inhabited for a very long time, since around 40,000 BCE. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the stone age inhabitants were Greek in any meaningful sense. There’s some evidence of a population or populations that lived there before the Greeks. Ancient authors often refer to an indigenous, pre-Greek people called Pelasgians. There’s also some interesting linguistic evidence. The Greek language as we know it includes some words with sounds that in theory shouldn’t be there. For example, in a place name like Corinth, or in a word like “hyacinth,” which we get directly from Greek, you have the consonant cluster “-nth,” which doesn’t normally exist in the branch of the Indo-European language family that Greek belongs to. So it looks like Greek must have absorbed some words from a pre-Greek language — just the way American English has taken on native American words like moccasin, opossum, and especially place names like Topeka or Tallahassee.

 One theory that tries to account for all this is what some scholars call “the coming of the Greeks.” This is a very hotly debated topic because the evidence is so hard to interpret. But according to this view, sometime around 2300 BCE, Greek-speaking people came in from the north and either conquered or gradually came to dominate the existing populations. There’s archaeological evidence of widespread destructions and cultural shifts that would be consistent with invasions or at least an influx of a new population. As I said, this is very much debated, and I don’t have anything close to the expertise to weigh in on it. I’m putting it out just as one theory that’s worth knowing about. But however it happened, we can be confident that Greek-speaking people inhabited mainland Greece by the end of the third millennium BCE.

 But those first Greek inhabitants were not yet what we’d call Mycenaeans. The term “Mycenaean” really refers to a culture rather than an ethnicity. When Schliemann excavated the shaft graves at Mycenae, the treasures he found there were beyond anything that had previously been known from the Bronze Age Aegean. That was a mystery, because the Middle Bronze Age in Greece had been marked by economic decline and a return to a simpler society. People lived in small agricultural villages without very sharp divisions between elites and commoners. So the spectacular goods in the shaft graves came out of nowhere and made it look like there was a sudden explosion of wealth and a much more hierarchical society around 1600 BCE. The discovery of an earlier grave circle helped archaeologists fill in some gaps and understand the transition a bit better. But still, those social and economic developments seem to have happened very quickly. Evidently within just a few generations, local elites got organized, consolidated power, and established ruling dynasties. 

 Now, for the first 2 centuries of Mycenaean civilization, most of what we know comes from objects found in those shaft graves — as well as from graves in other parts of the Mycenaean world. That should give you an idea of how limited our frame of reference is for this early period. Obviously, there was a larger community of people living, farming, doing craft work, all the things that people do… but at least at Mycenae, there are few physical remains to tell us what their lives were like. That’s not to say there are none, but the later palace and its surroundings were built on top of what was there before, making earlier evidence hard to find. Because of that narrow body of evidence, some scholars refer to this as the “shaft grave era.” But those grave goods can at least tell us some important things about the ruling-class people who were buried there.

 For one thing, this was unmistakably a warrior culture. Mycenaean rulers identified as warriors and wanted to present themselves that way in death. Some were buried with armor in the form of breastplates made of sheet gold. That would have been useless in battle, of course, but it made a statement about the man’s warrior status as well as his wealth. The shaft graves also held a great number of swords and daggers, plus spear and arrow heads. Some weapons had dents and scratches, which probably means they’d actually been used in battle. Others were much more delicately crafted and decorated, and they would have been for display or ceremonial use. One of the real treasures from the shaft graves is a beautifully inlaid dagger with a scene of warriors hunting a lion. Women weren’t buried with weapons, of course, but they had elaborate gold diadems and other jewelry. So even for those who didn’t go into battle, the burials signal that these are powerful, important people, and part of that elite warrior class.

 The grave goods also show that the Mycenaeans at this time were well connected to trading networks across the Mediterranean. One of the graves contained a scarab with the cartouche of an Egyptian queen. There were necklaces with beads made of amber, which had to be sourced from the Baltic region far to the north, and objects made of African and Asian ivory. I’ll talk more about trade when we get to the palatial period, but it’s clear that in this shaft grave era, elites already had access to luxury goods from all over the Mediterranean world. Almost certainly, an important part of that trade was in the form of gift exchange. In other words, important people from different parts of the world would cement friendships and alliances by exchanging valuable items. That was a standard kind of diplomacy in the ancient Mediterranean, and it comes up again and again in the Homeric epics.

 Finally, the grave goods show that the influence of Minoan Crete has already taken hold. There were gold signet rings with Minoan bull-leaping designs. Others show the Earth Mother goddess flanked by animals. Minoan-style motifs like spirals and rosettes appear on a variety of objects. But Mycenaean culture was not just a clone of Minoan society. In the last episode I mentioned those striking gold death masks from Grave Circle A that made Schliemann think maybe he’d seen the face of Agamemnon. Those were evidently a purely Greek thing, without Minoan precedents. And even when artifacts show Minoan influence, they’re not necessarily just knock-offs. That dagger I mentioned earlier with the inlay depicting a lion hunt is a great example. The technique is Minoan, but the subject matter is unmistakably Greek. So there we have a Minoan artist, or at least an artist trained in Minoan techniques, creating a work designed to appeal to Mycenaean taste.

 Now, again, for this early period, all of this — warrior culture, trade links, and Minoan influence — it’s all based on the objects found in those shaft graves. The Mycenaeans haven’t started building those big palaces yet. And so far, no one has turned up any lavish residences from this period that come anywhere close to what’s been found in the graves. Some scholars have speculated that the elites of the shaft grave era must have saved their displays of wealth for funerals and weren’t much concerned about showing it off in life. Personally, I’d be very surprised if they limited their shows of wealth and power to funerals. I would imagine they’d use other occasions like religious festivals, weddings, any chance they could get to reinforce their image as the top dogs. But without more evidence, that can’t be anything more than a guess. What we do know is that around 1400 BCE, the picture changes. The Mycenaeans start building big, sprawling palaces that dominate the landscape and direct the local economy.

 And that brings us to our second break. When we pick up again, we’ll look at the palatial period of Mycenaean Greece and its connections with the broader Mediterranean world. But now let’s break for 

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 I’ve been throwing around the term “Bronze Age,” and I thought I’d use today’s random fact to clarify what that means. Naturally, it refers to a time when bronze was the chief metal used for tools and weapons. And it starts with a technological breakthrough. Metal workers in the Near East had known how to smelt copper for centuries. But in the late fourth millennium BCE they discovered that if they added about 10% tin to their copper, they got an alloy that was stronger and more durable — namely bronze. Naturally, that technology spread, and it came to Greece sometime around 3000 BCE. 

 But you can’t just go out and dig up some ore and make bronze. You have to get the raw materials from somewhere. Copper was hard enough to come by, although there was a very good source on the island of Cyprus. Tin was practically non-existent in Greece. For that, you had to tap into trading networks reaching far into Asia and northern Europe. That was expensive, even at a time before there was such a thing as money. Wealth was essentially agricultural produce. And if you were one of the lucky people who had a surplus of your grain or olives or whatever you were growing, you’d be in a better position to trade for bronze goods. Which means you’d have better farm tools and weapons than your poorer neighbors, and your wealth and power would likely increase. So the advent of bronzeworking is connected with the rise of more complex societies with greater differentiation between classes. Highly developed social hierarchies — like the Minoan and Mycenaean societies — are a defining feature of the Bronze Age. 

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 We’ve seen that around 1450 BCE, Mycenaean Greeks replaced the Minoans as the rulers at Knossos on Crete. And it’s not too long after this time that some more elaborate buildings start to appear on the mainland, culminating in the great palaces that we know from places like Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos. Now, we can’t tell what was in their minds, but I would guess that as the Mycenaean elites observed the Minoan palace system, and especially after they started running the palace at Knossos, they thought, “That’s the way to run a kingdom. You’ve got to have an impressive palace, beautifully decorated, and it’s got to have lots of rooms for storage, workshops, religious rites… That’s the way they’ve done it in Crete, and we need that here.” Well, however it happened, the height of the Mycenaean period is the era of great palaces.

So what were these palaces like? Superficially they resembled the Cretan palaces, but there were important differences. They were usually situated at the top of a hill, and they were typically protected by massive fortification walls built in a style known as Cyclopean masonry. These walls were made of huge limestone boulders, sometimes roughly cut into rectangular blocks, but often just assembled in whatever way they’d fit. They got the name Cyclopean because later Greeks found them as impressive as we do today, and they came up with the story that they must have been built by Cyclopes — the plural of Cyclops, those one-eyed giants from mythology. It’s really no more far-fetched than modern claims that aliens must have built them. But there’s a much simpler explanation — a very powerful, extremely wealthy elite that could command the enormous labor force required for such a feat of engineering.

 Well, inside the fortification walls is the palace itself. At Mycenae, the entrance is marked by the famous lion gate leading inside. Now, there’s no standard plan for a Mycenaean palace, but they do have some features in common. Instead of the big central courtyard we saw on Crete, a Mycenaean palace has the “great hall” or the megaron as the Greeks called it. This is where the king’s throne stands, and it also contains a very large hearth — so large, in fact, that it was probably not just a place for a fire to keep the place warm, but had a religious function and was used for burnt offerings. That’s a good reminder that the palace is a religious as well as a political center, and the king is probably best thought of as a priest-king. Some people even argue that we really ought to call these complexes temples rather than palaces. I’m not sure it’s all that important a distinction, since there was no separation of religion and politics. In any case, the megaron is sort of the command center, and it’s surrounded by a great number of rooms with different functions, just as we saw at Knossos. 

 So the Mycenaean kings now had magnificent palace complexes to signal their wealth and power, but that doesn’t mean they’d given up their lavish funeral displays. Instead of shaft graves, they now used a monumental structure called a tholos, also known as a “beehive tomb” because of its domelike shape. A beehive tomb was made of huge blocks of stone arranged in circles that get narrower as you go higher in the structure. Of course it was an extremely expensive kind of tomb to build, so it would only hold burials from the royal family or maybe others at the very top of the social hierarchy. And there would be the usual array of grave goods — although most of those are lost, because a beehive tomb was easier to get in and rob than a shaft grave. If you visit Mycenae, you can see the biggest and most impressive of those tombs. A lot of the tourist books and websites call it the Tomb of Agamemnon. Like the fortification walls, it’s one of those monuments that will leave you in awe of what Bronze Age people were capable of building.

 Now, back in the shaft grave era, I mentioned that most of what we know comes from the burials themselves. For the palatial period, we have access to a lot more information, thanks to those Linear B tablets that became readable in the 1950s. Unfortunately, nobody was writing history or literature in Linear B, at least as far as we know. The tablets were just a way of recording inventories and transactions. But even that can tell us a lot about Mycenaean society, religion, and economics. It’s kind of a lucky accident that we have the tablets at all, because they were never meant to be permanent records. They weren’t baked, and when unbaked clay is left to sit, it just dries out and crumbles into dust. So when we have Linear B tablets, it’s because the palace — or at least that part of it — was destroyed by fire, which baked the clay into ceramic. And for that reason, the tablets never give us a record of developments over a span of years. What we get is a snapshot of what was going on at a time the palace was destroyed.

 In any case, the tablets reveal a lot about the organization of Mycenaean society. And what we see is a strict social hierarchy with multiple levels. At the top is the king, who’s called the wanax. He seems to be an absolute ruler. It’s an interesting word, because Homer still used it centuries later, with the initial W sound dropped, so that it was now “anax.” In Homer, all the Greek heroes at Troy are kings and princes, but “anax” is only used for Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition. So it’s preserved its meaning as the man at the very top of the hierarchy. Directly below the wanax in the Mycenaean system is someone called the lawagetas, which would literally mean “leader of the people.” Most likely he’s a high-ranking military figure. And there are various other officials below him. So the tablets show us that these nobles had well-defined ranks with different levels of power, wealth, and prestige.

 Some intriguing details about Mycenaean religion also emerge from the tablets. The most important deity seems to be a goddess called Potnia, who’s pretty clearly the Earth Mother who was so important to the Minoans. But we can also see that many of the gods familiar from classical Greece were already worshipped in Mycenaean times. The names of Zeus, Hera, Hermes, and others appear, although we can’t be sure if they had the same characteristics as the versions we know from later Greek art and literature. Still, the tablets show that Poseidon was an important god in the vicinity of Pylos, which of all the palaces was the closest to the sea. So that at least suggests that he was already identified as a sea god in Mycenaean times. 

 Finally, the tablets give us a clear picture of just how closely economic activity was monitored, even to the point of micromanagement. Most of our documents from the mainland come from Pylos, which we learn was divided into two provinces with 16 administrative units. A document from there records that someone named Eumedes received 18 units of olive oil from a guy named Kolakos and 38 jars from another guy called Ipsewas. At Knossos, a group of tablets refers to a couple of ox-drivers and even includes the names of the animals they look after. Their Greek names have been translated as Dapple, Dusky, Noisy, and Whitefoot. 

 I’ve only scratched the surface, but you can see how the Linear B tablets give us a wealth of information about the Mycenaean world. The writing system itself is a testament to how uniform that world was. The same Linear B script was used at Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes, and Knossos, after it fell into Mycenaean hands. If you look at pottery from different parts of the Mycenaean world, there are some regional differences, but on the whole they’re very similar. Clearly these palace centers were in contact with each other, and they were seeing and trading each other’s goods. They may well have had craftsmen moving from one center to another, producing their goods in different areas and teaching their techniques to others. 

 And the Mycenaeans weren’t just in touch with each other. As we saw from the goods buried in the shaft graves, they were hooked into active trading networks throughout the Mediterranean world. It would be hard to overstate how interconnected that world was. We can get a good sense of it from Bronze Age shipwrecks — trading vessels that sank and were rediscovered in modern times. One of the best known is the Uluburun shipwreck, a 14th-century Canaanite merchant vessel that went down off the coast of what’s now Turkey. Its cargo included ten tons of copper and one of tin, those two raw materials that were so important for making bronze. But it also included tools, edible items, jewelry, hippopotamus and elephant ivory, amber from the Baltic region, even an Egyptian scarab inscribed with the name of the queen Nefertiti. At the height of the Late Bronze Age, we have to imagine hundreds of ships like that one, going from port to port, unloading some goods, taking on others, and exchanging cultural influences in all directions.

 We know the Mycenaeans were very active in international trade, and not just because of the luxury goods found in their tombs. Mycenean pottery is found all over the Mediterranean. The most common Mycenaean pot used in overseas trade is a small item called a stirrup jar, and the actual trade good is not the jar but what’s inside it — namely, olive oil. Greece has always been a great producer of olives, and the oil from those olives was a tremendously important commodity in the ancient world. People used it for cooking, of course, and it was the fuel that you’d use in a lamp. But it was also the number one personal hygiene product, because soap hadn’t been invented. The standard way of cleaning yourself was to smear olive oil on your body, let it mix with the sweat and the dirt, and then use some kind of tool to scrape it off. In later Greece and Rome, this was a little curved instrument called a strigil. And just as we add perfumes to our soaps today, ancient people added scents to their olive oil. The tablets from Pylos record a variety of different scents to be added to oil for export. No question, olive oil was big business for the Mycenaeans.

 So the picture we get of Mycenaean civilization is one of powerful kingdoms led by warrior kings who ruled over a strictly hierarchical society, where the palace served as the center of both the local economy and trade with the larger Mediterranean world. Now, some recent research suggests that this picture may be a little skewed, because if we look out beyond the palaces and their immediate surroundings, there are plenty of small, agricultural villages that may not be under their direct control. In other words, the economy as a whole may not be as tightly regulated as it seems if we just focus on the palaces and the Linear B records. But sticking for the moment with the great centers like Mycenae, Pylos, and the rest, we’ve seen that they’re part of a very tightly interconnected world. Which is great for trade and cultural exchange, but there’s a downside. If disaster strikes in one part of the world, its ripples are felt everywhere. Starting sometime around 1200 BCE, an event known as the Bronze Age collapse sweeps over the Near East and the Mediterranean. And when that happens, the Mycenaean culture I’ve just described implodes. 

Let’s leave that as a cliffhanger. In a future episode we’ll dive deeper into the Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath in the Greek world. Meanwhile, that’s a wrap for Episode 3! If you’d like to see photos of things and places I’ve mentioned, you can find them — plus suggestions for reading — at epicgreekhistory.substack.com. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and if so, please subscribe, like, share, review… whatever you can do to help this podcast grow. If you have comments, facts I’ve missed, or different perspectives to share, I’d love to hear from you at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. I’m Scott Emmons, the music for my theme song and interstitials was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.