The Minoans and Myceneans: Foundations of European Civilization

2. MINOANS The story of European civilization really begins on the island of Crete with a civilization that probably thought of itself as Asian (in fact, Crete is closer to Asia than it is to Europe). Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. Mountains of records. For the Minoans produced a singular civilization in antiquity: one oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state.

4. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture, of course, lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece. These were a war-like people oriented around a war-chief; while they seemed to have borrowed elements of Minoan civilization, their's was a culture of battle and conquest. We call them the Myceneans after the best-preserved of their cities, and their greatest accomplishment, it would seem, was the destruction of a large commercial center across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor: Troy.

5. Shortly after this defining event, their civilizations fell into a dark ages, in which Greeks stopped writing and, it seems, abandoned their cities. It was an inauspicious start for the Europeans: while the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had enjoyed almost two thousand years of continuous civilization, in Europe the experiment began with the brilliance of the Minoan commercial states translated into the brief, war-like city-states of the Myceneans, only to slip back into the tribal groups that had characterized European civilization for almost all of its history.

6. Lost to human memory for over three and a half millenia, the Minoans stand at the very beginning of European civilization. While Europeans had known about the pre-Homeric world through the poems of Homer, only the Greeks and Romans seem to have taken these poems seriously as history. That pre-Homeric world, however, was lost in the haze of generations of oral story-telling before it finally got fixed in the poems of Homer. However, in 1870, an amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, determined to find the real Troy of the Trojan War, the war that is the center of the Homeric poems. After successfully locating and digging up Troy, he turned his sights to the Greek mainland and discovered two ancient cities, Myceanae and Tiryns, which together revealed a civilization that up until that point had only been known in the poems of Homer and Greek drama. His discoveries inspired a man named Arthur Evans to begin digging in Crete in order to discover what he thought would be an identical, Mycenean culture thriving on that island; instead, what he found was a people far more ancient than the Myceneans, and far more unique than any peoples in the ancient world: the Minoans.

7. http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MINOA/MINOANS.HTM They were a people of magnificent social organization, culture, art, and commerce. There is no evidence that they were a military people; they thrived instead, it seems, on their remarkable mercantile abilities. This lack of a military culture, however, may have spelled their final downfall. For the Minoans also exported their culture as well as goods, and a derivative culture grew up on the mainland of Greece, the Myceneans, who were a war-like people. Strangely enough, the direct inheritors of their traditions may have been the agents of their destruction.

8. Myceneans 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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. 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.

12. 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 the Myceneans were overrun by another Greek-speaking people, the Dorians, 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."

13. Reflect and Analyze Page 138 Please look back through your textbook and in your notes for the answers. Questions: # 1, 2, & 3