Aegean Prehistory
Agriculture reached the Aegean region from the Near East between 5000 and 4000 BC. By 3500 BC small farming settlements were scattered throughout the Aegean coasts and islands; the largest, though still only with populations several hundred strong but densely concentrated together, were beginning to look like little towns.
These communities were active in the trade routes that spread into the Balkans and south-east Europe, and along the Mediterranean coast to the west, their sailors probably travelling as far as Spain in their little boats. These trade networks fed the Sumerian city-states with the tin and copper with which to make bronze weapons and decorations; and down the line from those cradles of civilization came bronze-making techniques and other skills with which the peoples of the Aegean enhanced their material culture.
Such places as Troy, in present-day north-west Turkey, were already showing signs of urbanization in the third millennium BC, and by its end, on the large island of Crete, one of the most advanced societies of the period had emerged, the Minoan civilization.
At Knossos and other locations on Crete, large palaces appeared around 2000 BC, surrounded by communities that can properly be called towns, with houses packed tightly along narrow streets. Shortly, roads were being built right across the island, suggesting that it was spanned by a single political system – the evidence suggests a confederation of principalities rather than one kingdom, as large palaces that look like royal residences are found in several places, famous for their lively wall frescoes of bull-vaulting games and bare-breasted (but otherwise well-clad) women.
Writing had been introduced, firstly a hieroglyphic system perhaps based on the Egyptian one, but later adapted to the Minoans’ own needs to become the Linear A script. Archaeological evidence shows that the Minoans had, by the early second millennium BC, and probably well before, strong trading links with Egypt and the Levant.
Twice during the centuries between 2000 and 1400 BC the greatest of these palaces, at Knossos, was destroyed by earthquakes, and then rebuilt, each time bigger and better than before; and around it grew a city, large by the standards of the day and a rival to most in the ancient Near East. By 1600 BC at the latest Minoan trade dominated the eastern Mediterranean, and, although there is no direct evidence, it is likely that she was able to deploy a powerful fleet which kept the seas free from pirates.
By that time, the Minoans were trading actively with the peoples of mainland Greece. These were comparative newcomers to the region, being at the vanguard of that expansion of Indo-European speaking peoples who came down from central Europe in the third millennium BC, bringing with them a warlike culture focussed around powerful chiefs and their retinues.
The rise of trade with the Minoans turned the chiefs of south-eastern Greece into middlemen in the metal routes to the west and central Europe, their fortified settlements evolving into stone- and timber-built palace-fortresses, crammed with a wealth of beautiful objects, some imported from Egypt, Syria and further a-field, others home made by increasingly skilful craftsmen. Much of this wealth was buried with their kings, to be dug up and gawped at by amazed archaeologists millennia later.
The Zenith and Fall of Knossos
On Crete, the later centuries of Minoan history saw the palace of Knossos outshine all the others, suggesting that it was now the seat of a king of the whole island. The palace was a setting for refined luxury, famous today for its elaborate drainage system and running water supply.
By this time the Linear A script had been replaced by the Linear B system, more flexible and of more use to a busy bureaucracy (all tablets found, as with the earliest Sumerian writing of a millennium previously, are concerned with administrative matters and economic transactions).
Then around 1400 BC, the palace is burnt, and this time not rebuilt – in fact it is thoroughly looted of all its gold and silver. So, too are the neighbouring coastal settlements, clear signs of widespread raiding, possibly even an invasion. Eventually civilized life does resume at Knossos, but at a lower cultural level. The evidence suggests that Crete is now in the hands of foreigners, Greeks from the mainland.
With the passing of the commercial power of Knossos, the mainland Greek principalities came into their own, under the loose leadership of Mycenae. Their societies were already literate – they received the Linear B script from the Minoans – and they were expansionist. They planted colonies on Cyprus, and probably on Sicily and southern Italy.
On the mainland their palaces increased in size and wealth, with storerooms, servants’ quarters, chariot sheds and other buildings spreading out from the central hall. Mycenae was the largest of these Greek centres, the palace-citadel surrounded by huge walls and gates, and the royal tombs of great splendour. Other places on the mainland and around the Aegean, such as Argos, Pylos and Troy (all these and others figure in Homer’s account of the Trojan Wars) also boasted fine, thick-walled palaces, and were all points in the international maritime trade networks of the period.
Decline and Fall
And then quite suddenly, this glittering Bronze Age world comes to an end, and a simpler, more primitive one takes its place, part of a larger shock to the ancient civilizations of the late second millennium Near East. The Hittite empire vanished, Assyria and Babylon shrank, the Canaanite city-states fell and even Egypt had to fend off invasions from “Sea Peoples” from the north.
Exactly what processes were at work can only be conjectured, but what may have happened is this: with the eclipse of Knossos and the rise of the Mycenaean Greeks, a unified sea-power would in all likelihood have been replaced by a more diffuse one, in which individual states had their own trading and fighting ships. While Mycenae was able to exert its control things went well, but the temptation for the individual princes to trade, and raid, on their own account must have been great. Raiding may have escalated, wounding the peaceful co-existence needed for maritime trade to flourish, and so the mainstay of civilization in this region would have been undermined.
Large-scale raids, reinforced by displaced peoples from fallen cities, may have grown in frequency and ferocity (the tale of the siege of Troy may be an elaborated account of such, and this period, later glorified as the “Heroic Age”, seems to have been one of brutal warfare). The weakened Aegean states probably also had to deal with pressure from less civilized tribes coming down from the north, and the combination of events overwhelmed them.
In any event, from around 1200 BC, the palaces and towns disappeared, along with the literate scribes and merchants who inhabited them. Large-scale migrations took place, as people crossed from mainland Greece to set up a host of small Greek-speaking settlements on the islands of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor. The Greek mainland itself seems to have experienced not only a dramatic economic and material decline, but also a startling loss of population.
Next:
The History of Ancient Greece, Part 2: The Early Greeks
Article © TimeMaps 2007.
Last updated: 13th August 2007
