The Rise and Fall of Ancient Greece

I want to talk to you today about the beginnings of the Greek experience as far as we know it. And I should warn you at once that the further back in history you go, the less secure is your knowledge, especially as I will be doing at the beginning of our talk today, when you are in a truly prehistoric period. That is, before the there is any written evidence from the period in which you are interested. So, what we think we know derives chiefly from archaeological evidence, which is before writing, mute evidence that has to be interpreted and is very complicated and is far from secure. Even a question such as date, which is so critical for historians, is really quite approximate. Professor Robert R. And subject to controversy, as is just about every single thing I will tell you for the next few days, will be even more than usual subject to controversy about the most fundamental things. So, what you'll be hearing are approximations as best we can make them of what's going on. Well, we begin our story with the emergence of the Bronze Age in the Aegean Sea. area. That appears to have taken place about 3000 B.C. I think these days they date it down about another century to about 2900. Precision is impossible, don't worry about that. And what we find, the first example of a Bronze Age, and I use the word civilization now for the first time, because before the Bronze Age there is nothing that we would define as a civilization. civilization. Civilization involves the establishment of permanent dwelling areas that we call cities as opposed to villages. Agricultural villages will have existed all over the place in the late Stone Age in the Neolithic period as it is known, but there is a difference and a critical difference is that a city contains a number of people who do not provide for their own support, that is to say they don't produce food. They need to acquire it from somebody else. They do various things like govern and are priests and are bureaucrats and are other non-productive activities that depend upon others to feed them. That's the most narrow definition of cities. Of course with cities, we typically find a whole association of cultural characteristics which we deem civilization. Well, that's what we see for the first time in the Aegean area on the island of Crete. That civilization was uncovered by the archaeologists right at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sir Arthur Evans, an Englishman, was responsible for the major work that has revealed that civilization. He was activated by it. At one point I think he convinced himself that he was a descendant of the kings of that civilization, but in any case he named it. He named it after the legendary king of Crete, who appears in the Greek mythology by the name of Minos, M-I-N-O-S. So, he referred to that civilization as the Minoan civilization. When we use the word Minoan, we mean the civilization whose home is Crete. It's spread out beyond Crete because the Minoans established what we might want to call an empire in various parts of the Mediterranean. It starts with Crete. It is a Bronze Age culture and it is the first civilization we know in the area. What we find in the Minoan civilization The chiefly, I mean the main place we can learn about this civilization from was the city of Knossos, located on the northern shore of Crete, where a great palace complex was discovered and is available. By the way, it's an absolutely beautiful site, great tourist site. You can see quite a lot there. Professor Robert R. Anyway, when you examine that site and draw the conclusions that are inevitable from examining it, and also I should have said all of them I know in settlements, you realize that they look and seem very much like older civilizations that have grown up in the ancient Near East, the real sort of typical home of the kinds of things we're talking about. Professor Robert R. Is Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, spreading out beyond Iraq and going up into Syria and neighboring places. It too was very similar to the civilization, apparently a little bit newer, in the Nile Valley in Egypt, about which we know a great deal more than we know about the Minoans because, as you know, in the nineteenth century, Scholars discovered how to read the languages that were written in Egypt and in Mesopotamia and are able to develop something approaching history for the period we're talking about. That is not true for Crete because although they had a script and we have available to us tablets with those writings on them, to this day no one has deciphered. Professor Robert R. The language written by the Minoans and therefore we don't have that kind of knowledge. So, barring that nonetheless what we see reminds us very much of these ancient bronze age early civilizations and so that will be significant as we talk about how the Greeks differed from that, which gets us to the Greeks. Excuse me, the Minoans are not Greeks. Strictly speaking, what do we mean when we say somebody is Greek? We mean that his native language, not one that he's acquired subsequently, but the one that he learned as a child, was Greek, some version of the Greek language. These are linguistic terms, but of course the people who spoke then, especially in the early years, tended to be part of a relatively narrow collection of people who intermarried with each other chiefly and therefore developed common cultural characteristics. So, of course, the language is only a clue. When you speak about Greeks, you will be speaking about something more than merely the fact that they spoke a certain language. In the nineteenth century, there was a lot of talk about races. There were people who spoke about the Greek race or similar races for quite a long time. In the science of anthropology Professor Donald Kagan Subjects like that, it's been determined that those terms are inappropriate. They suggest there's something in the genes that explain the characteristics of a particular people. That is certainly not true. So, let's understand each other. We're talking about a culture when we're talking about the Greeks, which is most strikingly signified by the language that is spoken. Well, the way we can reason things out from the evidence we have is to suggest that that Greek speaking peoples came down into the area around the Aegean Sea, perhaps around 2000 B.C., about a thousand years later than the emergence of the Minoan civilization of Crete. Again, I think these days they tend to down date it by another century or so, so it might be around 1900 B.C. We really don't know very much about these early Greek settlers. Professor Charles Schultz, M.D.: We begin to know more about those three, four hundred years down the road when there appear buildings and settlements in the world later inhabited by the Greeks as we know, to which we give the name Mycenaeanan. Now that derives from one site in the northeastern Peloponnesus called Mycenaean, and the name is given because In the poems of Homer, Neleus and the Odyssey, the leading Greek king, the man who is the leader of the expedition to Troy, is Agamemnon, who is king of the Argolid region and his palace and his home are at Mycenaean. That's why we call the entire culture Bronze Age culture, running from about 1600 to perhaps but perhaps not so late. That's what we mean when we speak about the Mycenaeanans, the Mycenaeanan period. Professor Donald Kagan Keep it in mind that they are Greek speakers and we know that with confidence, something we didn't know at the beginning of the twentieth century, because written evidence is available on a bunch of clay tablets that were accidentally baked in some conflagration in these places. The same thing is true of Knossos in Crete. Crete and perhaps a few other sites in Crete, not at the same time, but the reason we have any written evidence at all is that where we have it, there was some kind of conflagration that produced a fire that baked clay into a pottery. In the normal course of events, clay dissolves and disappears and any message on it is erased. In other words, this was not meant to be a record to be left for the future. It was an accident. These things that we discover, these writings that we discover were meant as practical, for practical usage in ways that I will tell you about in a little while. So anyway, that writing, let me back up a step. When Evans found writing at Knossos, he found two, well he actually found seven, but only two that turned out to be significant, two kinds of script. I shouldn't even say script. Professor Donald Kagan That sounds like he's writing a nice cursive line. Two kinds of writing. One, because he couldn't figure out what they were, he called one linear, meaning it's a linear script, A, and linear B, because he could tell by careful analysis that they were different and he could tell which pieces belonged to which. Linear A is earlier and it is associated, it is clearly the language used used by the Minoan kings at Knossos and other places. Linear B resembles linear A, but it is clearly different and later and one reason we know that, we know it mostly from stratigraphy, but we can also tell because it's a much simpler script but by no means simple. These are not alphabets, these are syllabaries. Every symbol represents a syllable. In other words, typically two letters rather than one. That's a nice step over having loads and loads and loads of symbols representing lots of things, which is true more of linear A than linear B, but it's still we're talking about something approaching sixty symbols in a syllabary. When you think about how hard it is to learn to read when you're only using twenty-six symbols and how few Americans do learn to read, I keep reading in the paper. Professor Donald Kagan It's not an easy thing. It's not a simple matter. Imagine what it would be like if you had to learn about 60 such things. Well, of course, what follows from all of that is ordinary people did not. What we learn ultimately from our decipherment of Linear B, which I've just skipped over, which was done in the 1950s by a brilliant young architect who loved solving problems of this kind and was able to discover that this was an early form of Greek and that he could essentially make out what it said. At first there was doubt and controversy, which has completely gone away as more and more examples of this writing have become available and scholars are now able by and large to be confident that they know what these things say. So that The fact that this was a Greek script that was available in the Mycenaeanan period tells us very confidently that the Mycenaeanans were Greeks. But of course, a lot was known about these Mycenaeanans well before the syllabary was deciphered. It's worth saying a word about that because I want to undermine any great confidence that you may have in what you can believe that scholars tell you because we keep finding out how wrong we are about all kinds of things. But I would say if you walked into the leading universities in the world, there would probably be German In the 1850s, and you went to the classics people, and you said, well, you know, Homer wrote about these places, Mycenaean and other places. Can you tell me where that was? And they said, you silly fellow, that's just stories, that's mythology, that's poetry. There never was an Agamemnon, there never was a Mycenaean, there isn't any such thing. And then in 1870, A German businessman by the name of Heinrich Schliemann, who had not had the benefit of a university education and didn't know what a fool and how ignorant he was, believed Homer and he said he wanted to look for Troy. So, he went to where people thought Troy might be and he began digging there and before you know it, he discovered a mound filled with cities, which he believed was Troy. After the usual amount of scholarly debate, there seems to be no doubt that it was the city of Troy. So having succeeded with that, he thought, well, now that I've seen Troy, how about Mycenaean? Off he went to the northeast Peloponnesus to the site where he thought it might be Mycenaean from Homer's account, and I wouldn't be telling you this story, and you know the outcome. He found it. And It was the excavation of the site of Mycenaean, which was soon followed by the excavation of other sites from the same period, that made it possible for people to talk about this culture, even before they could read the script. The culture is marked by some of the following features. Let's take Mycenaean, which is maybe the best example of the whole culture. Certainly, it's the... It's a perfect model for what we're talking about. What you have to begin with is a town or a city or a settlement of some kind built on top of a hill, and it's usually intended to be a formidable hill, one not easily accessible to anybody who comes walking along. A place in other words that would make a very nice fort, a citadel, and that's indeed what we find at Mycenaean. On that citadel, on that strongly rocky fort or citadel, they built what we now identify as the royal palace, the palace of the king. That was, I should point out, maybe about ten miles from the sea. Now, not all Mycenaeanan sites are so far from the sea. Professor Donald Kagan Some of them are closer, but what it's important to say is that none of them are right on the sea. They're always back some few miles. The reason for that I think is that the early times in which these civilizations arose saw all kinds of dangers coming and the most, the swiftest, the least suspected, the one that could come upon you overnight came from the sea. People who came by land, you would be hearing rumblings about it. down the road from villages that were spread out, but if somebody comes in from the sea on a ship, you may find them there in the morning and you don't know what's what. So, the idea for security and safety, they built their states far from the sea, but not far because as we shall see, the Mycenaeanan civilization was a commercial one that relied for its wealth upon trade and that meant trade by sea more than by land. The citadel is typically always surrounded by farmland. And that is, of course, you cannot live in ancient society if you are not surrounded by farmland because the food that comes from the soil is essential for life. You can't count on trade to provide it to you with any security. Later on, when times are more secure, there's trade for grain as well as for everything else, but when you're settling a place in the first place, you can't rely on somebody bringing it to you. You're going to have to have your own people working it and bringing it up to you themselves. So the citadel and the farmland surrounding it make up fundamentally the unit, which is the Mycenaeanan kingdom. Professor Robert R. Well, the first thing that Schliemann found when he dug at Mycenaean was this remarkable circle of graves, which were shafts dug straight down into the soil, and they are referred to this day technically as shaft graves. And then in other places not very far from that main hill, they found even more remarkable burials, what we call burials. beehive tombs. Just imagine a huge beehive in which let's say the center of the inside of that might be as much as 50 feet high or more and these were built of extraordinarily huge heavy stones and very well worked too. Here's the marvelous thing. The reason they had to uncover it was that these beehive tombs like everything else were buried and this wasn't just the result of centuries of neglect, it is clear that they were built in order to be buried. That is to say, it was some kind of a big religious thing going on here where the king, it was obviously a royal thing because the cost of it was so enormous nobody else could afford a tomb of that kind. So, that here was a royal tomb closed forever and yet built at a fantastic It's a fantastic expense, an enormous kind of labor. And the same is true in a general way of what we find in the royal palace up on top of the hill at Mycenaean. And so what is perfectly clear is the people who ruled these places were enormously powerful, at least locally, and wealthy because even if you imagine that slaves did the work, you would need a hell of a lot of them over a long period of time and you had to feed them if nothing else. So that we are talking about a wealthy group and of course the other thing that struck Schliemann almost amazingly was that in the circle of graves that we've been talking about he found all kinds of precious things buried, the most striking of which were death masks made of pure gold on the remains of the body, but also jewels and Implements and weapons of very high expense. That's what of course makes it clear they were royal in their character. By the way, and there are only a few of these graves over a large period of time. So, you must imagine these are successive kings who are being buried in this what must have been sacred soil. So, that makes it clear we're talking about a wealthy civilization, at least in which the rulers are wealthy, and in which the rules, of course, are very powerful. Now what we learn both from archaeology and from references in the Linear B tablets is that they engage these cultures in trade to a significant degree. You find Mycenaeanan... Elements, tools, other things, pottery particularly of a certain kind, all over the Mediterranean Sea. You find it in dateable places and that's why we can give this some kind of date, such as in Egypt. The Mycenaeanans had a regular trade with Egypt. You find Egyptian things in Mycenaean and vice versa. And also, presumably, much of it must have gone into Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia. Some of it went all the way to the western Mediterranean. This was a civilization that was not shut in on itself, but was in touch with the entire Mediterranean region. The major thing they seemed to be selling were aromatic oils in little vials. Think of them as, well, some combination of oil and perfume. I better say something about oil. the ancient world, so you get a grip on what's going on here. The ancient Greeks had no soap. Think about that for a moment. That's a problem, isn't it? And yet, they wanted to get clean, and so what the device they used was to take oil, typically olive oil, spread it on themselves, then get a scraper, a metal scraper and and scrape off the oil with it, what was underneath the oil, and then finally take their bath and out they would come and be clean. Professor Robert Shiller Now, oil is a wonderful thing. Olive oil is a great thing. In certain forms you eat it. The olive itself, you use it to cook with as oil. Some people just put oil on their salad. I myself can't stand it, but the point is it has to take place. But that's not all. If you get oil, crush the oil from the olives that come down from the trees, that's a nasty smell. that it has. So, if you're going to use it for this purpose, it's not going to be good by itself. You've got to put some nice perfume onto it in order for it to be usable, just as your soap would be pretty horrible without any perfume on it. So, it looks as though what the Mycenaeanans did, Greece is filled with wonderful olive trees, and so they obviously took the The oil from those olives, I'm sure they sold it in various forms, but one of the most popular was for this purpose. Everybody in the Mediterranean wanted it for the same reasons and obviously these Mycenaeanan sites had access to what they needed. It looks like, by the way, that they got much of the perfume from areas outside of Greece. Some of the best of it came from northeast Africa, as a matter of fact. You remember the Queen of From the Bible, I say that but I shudder to think how many of you have read the Bible. But anyway, she was so rich as to attract the interest of King Solomon because that's where those wonderful fine smelling things, frankincense and myrrh and stuff like that was available, useful for this purpose. So they had to import that. to make their goods as saleable as they wanted and so on. So you have trade with the Mediterranean and most especially the eastern Mediterranean, because that's where the older, more sophisticated, more civilized cultures were and that's where wealth was too compared to what was out in the west. So that's the pattern of trade and what you see is a kind of cultural unity, first of all, within the Mycenaeanan world itself. It is evident that these different Mycenaeanan towns all through the Greek world on both sides of the Aegean Sea were in touch with each other. One of the things that's interesting about that is you can see pottery styles that you can hardly tell whether they came from one end of the Mediterranean or another if they're of the Mycenaeanan variety, because it was a single culture. I don't mean there were no local variations, but there was this general unity. I'm going to contrast that with the situation in Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeanan world. And I was going to say not just in the Mycenaeanan towns themselves, but over the entire Aegean Sea, and indeed across the Mediterranean, in the years of the Mycenaeanan period, roughly from 1600 to 1100 or so BC. You are dealing with a largely unified culture. What is it, what do we talk about the world like these days? What's the cliché? Globalized world. It was a globalized world, except it was a little piece of the globe, but they didn't really know or care about very much outside of the Mediterranean area. Now Professor Robert R. In the respects that I have spelled out, I mean chiefly the fact that they were engaged in commerce and industry to some degree, and that they were trading peoples, and that they were in touch with one another and so on, they were already similar to the civilizations that came before them in the ancient Mediterranean Near East. In those places, in Egypt, the Pharaoh, in Mesopotamia, the first individual City-states were ruled in the same way as everybody I'm going to be talking about now, by somebody who is a king, a monarch, a one-man ruler, who is the warlord, commander of the armies, who has the control of the power in the state, but more than that. All the economic activity that we find in, and our best example of what I'm about to say, is in Mesopotamia. Professor Robert R. In the cities of the Tigris Euphrates Valley, the ruler there from his palace, assisted by vast groups of bureaucrats, directed the economy of his land entirely and fully. Agriculture was overwhelmingly the activity, the most important activity of the people of that area, of any area, and so we have Evidence that the king doled out seed for planting, instructed people just exactly when to plant, where to plant, what to plant there, when to fertilize it if they did. In Mesopotamia, they usually didn't need to because of the richness of the soil and so on. In other words, you have a degree of centralized control of true monarchical power of a wealthy monarchical power, already the model is there in Asia. Again, I want to say it's the same, but in a special way in Egypt, because in Egypt the whole Nile Valley, because I think of the nature of the Nile Valley, became totally centralized under the rule of one man, the pharaoh, and he commanded the whole thing. It took longer for anything like that to happen. Mesopotamia, although it ultimately did. When we get, for instance, down to about 1750 B.C. in Mesopotamia at Babylonia, which is at that point the dominant kingdom of the area, King Hammurabi has just about the same power as a pharaoh would in Egypt. It's also worth pointing out that these rulers, had full religious authority for their rule. In the case of the pharaohs of Egypt, the pharaoh was himself a god and insisted on being worshipped in that way. In Babylonia, for instance, and this I think was typical, Hammurabi was not a god, but as we know, thank God, by the great that he left that's now in the Louvre, the law code of Hammurabi is available to us and there's a preface to it in which he basically explains why should you obey the rules that I am now laying down for you? His answer is because the top god of our world, Marduk, appointed me in that place. And I'm doing what he wants me to do. And if you cross me, you cross him. And that's bad news. That's a rough translation. So, this is very important. You have a full monarchy in the sense that both we in America... talk about the separation of church and state. That is a very rare and unusual thing in the history of the world. The normal situation in cultures pre-civilized and civilized as well is for there to be a unity between religious things and non-religious things and all of that to be ruled by a single individual who is the monarch. of that territory with religious sanction as well as through his power and through the legitimacy of his descent. That's the normal human way of living. You should always be aware, I think, about how peculiar we are. We are the oddballs in the history of the human race and anybody who follows our pattern. And it's important to realize that because There's nothing inevitable about the development that has come about to be characteristic of the world. And when we find people challenging it, I think they have the bulk of time and human experience on their side when they say, you guys got it wrong. So. Let me say something about the nature of the society and economy that we find in the Mycenaeanan world revealed both by the archaeology and by what we learn in the records provided by Linear B. The remains and records of these strongholds make it clear that the political organization was an imitation of Oriental. monarchy. The sovereign at Mycenaean and at Pylos, another important site for the period, and at Thebes, which was another one, was somebody that the tablets refer to as the Oanax, and that is the same as a later Greek word which drops the W at the beginning, oanax. And as we shall see, that word in later times means Some powerful individual, but it doesn't mean what it means here. The boss, the single monarchical controller of everything. He held a royal domain that belonged directly to him, which was very significant in size and wealth. He appointed bureaucratic officials, he commanded royal servants, and he recorded royal goods. which by the way, most of the tablets are inventories, lists of things that exist in the palace that belong to the king. There are other things that have to do with instructions that the king is sending out to people from the palace. There is no reference in any of the tablets. I don't know how much we can make of that because the tablets limit themselves to such a limited kind of thing that maybe doesn't prove anything, but in this case I think it does. There is no reference to law. There is no reference to some objective or anything other than the king himself in the administration of justice. One scholar says it is natural to infer that the king, all-powerful controller of the all-seeing bureaucracy, possessed supreme authority also in the region of lawmaking and law enforcement. An omnipresent bureaucracy with its detailed and all-encompassing records gives the clearest picture of the power exercised by the centralized monarchs of the Mycenaeanan Age. The records discovered at Pylos here are particularly interesting. They cover only one part of a year, and yet they carry details of thousands of transactions in hundreds of places. These files, as we might call them, are both sweepingly inclusive and penetratingly minute. For instance, bronze is allocated to different places for the manufacturer of arrowheads or swords, with a note telling how many smiths in each place are active and how many are not. Cretan sheep are enumerated to the amount of 20,000 I'm sorry, that's not right. I don't want to get this wrong. 25,051. And we learned that in a Cretan village, two nurses, one girl, and one boy are employed. We are told how much linen is expected from a place called Rion, what is the acreage of the estate of a man called Electruon, and what a guy named Dunius owes the palace. The answer is 2200 liters of barley, 526 of olives, 468 of wine, I hope you're remembering all this, 15 rams, one fat hog, one cow, and two bulls. We even learn the names of two oxen owned by Terzaro, Glossy and Blacky. The records make it perfectly clear that the kingdom of Pylos and Knossos, the kingdoms, ...were bureaucratic monarchies of a type unexpected in Greece, but in many ways similar to some contemporary and earlier kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean. It is very unlike anything we associate with the Greeks or anything that ever again existed in the Greek world, and that's really the point I want to make. This, although these people are Greeks, are ruling a culture which is thoroughly different from the one we will be studying for the bulk of the semester. semester. So, like the Eastern states, you have a powerful ruler who's a warlord, there's a palace economy, there is a script, there is a bureaucracy, and there is collectivized agriculture under the central control of the economy. That economy and that society go forward and flourishes for, as I say, about 400 years, maybe perhaps about 400 years. Professor Donald Kagan And then a bunch of terrible things obviously begin to happen that shake the security of this society and ultimately bring it down. Roughly speaking, about 1200 B.C., we hear of general attacks that are going on around the Mediterranean against the various civilizations of which we know. Egypt experiences A number of attacks from the outside world, chiefly what we hear about is from in the area of the Nile Delta, right there on the Mediterranean Sea. Among those attackers, there are others besides, there are attackers from Libya we hear, but there are also attackers that are simply called from the sea, the sea people attacking. At roughly the same time, the dominant empire in Asia Minor, Anatolia, It is that run by a people called the Hittites, who have been there for hundreds of years in security and are now suffering assault. We know that because they also have a writing which we can read and it speaks of it as well as the archaeological remains that show destruction. Similarly, attacks are going on against the kingdoms of Syria and of Palestine which It's always hard to know what that piece of land should be called at any particular moment, but I call it Palestine because one of the Sea Peoples that attacked the Nile around 1200 in Egypt are called the Peleset, and most scholars suggest that that is the same name as came to be the name for this region when they ruled it called Palestine. And you will remember that when the Bible talks about This, it refers to a people called the Philistines. These are thought to be all the same people. So since they ruled it until, what's his name, Samson took them out with the jawbone of an ass. And Samson took them out with the jawbone. I think it's proper to call it Palestine at that moment. Cyprus likewise suffers from these attacks and so far west as Italy and Sicily are under attack. Something is going on. The question of course is, is what? Scholars have disagreed and continue to disagree because the evidence simply will not permit any confident answer, but I ought to just mention a few of the theories that have been tossed around, a few among many, many, many. One that seems to be in fashion these days, although you never know how long the fashion class is. Internal uprisings that somehow these monarchical areas, when life got tough, the people must have risen up against them. I think this reflects hopeful Marxist wishes. fulfillment rather than any reality. But it's not entirely, but that's not what poor people have done in history. If you look at revolutions, revolutions come typically when things are getting better and the people don't like the fact that they don't have more than they already have. Professor Donald Kagan But in any case, that's one theory. Earlier theories, it's wonderful to have scientific theories that you can use to handle these problems which you cannot demonstrate any facts for whatsoever. I'm being a bit strong, but not too much. One theory made some investigations of earth spores, hoping to find, what do you call that stuff that floats around and makes you sneeze? Pollen. Pollen. Behind that, as a result, they said there were droughts in these areas throughout that period and that caused tremendous unhappiness and discontent. Other people have suggested climatic shift. I keep waiting for somebody, I think the time is ripe for somebody to come up with a theory and explain it by global warming. Also, we know that the island in the middle of the Aegean Sea called Thera blew up in the most enormous kind of an explosion. At some point back there in prehistoric days, One theory is it was the explosion on Thera that caused so much climatic trouble that it can explain what went on here. The trouble is you just don't know when that explosion took place. Since there are several periods in this general area that we're talking about now in which something big happens, some great change takes place, it turns out different people want to have their explosion at different times. It's like a movable feast. You put your explosion where you need it at any particular moment. I am making light of it, and I think it's somewhat justified because the evidence is just so scanty. I think it's fun to play the game these guys do, but we shouldn't take it too seriously. Now, let's go back to a theory which has at least got the virtue of being very old, although hardly anybody believes it anymore. That is the theory that what happened in the Mycenaeanan world, let's forget what was happening elsewhere, was the result of a movement of tribes, of ethnic groups who were outside the Mediterranean region, say at the beginning of this period, say in 1600, but who press into it. Usually the picture is that they are coming from the north or the northeast. and pressing down into it. I have to believe that whoever came up with that theory for the first time was aided in coming to it by thinking about the end of the Roman Empire, when something precisely like that did happen. These Germanic and other tribes who were largely located north and northeast of Europe came down, or I should say not only Europe, of the Roman Empire came down and ultimately destroyed it by invasion. And even of course, theories about the fall of the Roman Empire than there are about the fall of the Mycenaeanan world. But anyway, connected to all of this was a very interesting Greek myth which speaks about the return of the Heracles. They are the sons of the mythical hero Heracles, who was a Peloponnesian figure, and the story goes that the Heracles were expelled from the Peloponnesus and then promised that they would come back a hundred years later and conquer it, and so they did come back a hundred years later and conquer it. And since, this is the link that explains the old story, since in historical Greek times, let us say the fifth century B.C., the people who inhabited the Peloponnesians were mainly speakers of the Greek dialect called Doric. It was thought that Heracles'sons and Heracles being Peloponnesians no doubt spoke Doric too, and so this was referred to by scholars in the 19th century, not by the ancient Greeks, as a Dorian invasion. In other words, another ...kind of Greek, the Greeks who lived in the area before the fall of the Mycenaeanan world. What were they called? Well, Homer gives us several names for them, three stick out for me. The most common and the most widely used was Achaeans, another one is Danaeans, and a third one is Argives. Argives comes from the fact that they rule over the land of Argos in Greece. Now, the one that has some clout historically is Achaeans because in the records of the Hittites, kings, there are references to people, I'm trying to think, I think they are called, I want to get this right, but I don't remember whether this is the Egyptian or the, something like Ahai-Washa, unless that's the Egyptian form. Anyway, they are called by names that sound something like that, one among the Hittites, one among the Egyptians, and it's so easy given the fact The letter W dropped out of the Greek language between the Mycenaeanan period and the classical period. You could easily imagine that these people were referred to themselves as a-chi-oi and when the W drops out they are a-chi-oi, which is what Homer calls them. And so the idea here is that the original Greeks who came in were what we call Achaeans. and that when these disturbances came and if the Dorian theory is true, Dorians either killed them all or dominated them, possibly intermarried with them, but dominated them and washed away, wiped out the use of the Achaean language and imposed their own Dorian language upon it. And supporting such an idea, among other things, if you go to the mountains in the center of the Peloponnesus, where it's awfully hard to get to, there is a region called, well actually beyond those mountains on the northern shore, is a place called Achaia, where the people are Achaeans. So, the theory might be, well they were driven away from their old homes in the southern Peloponnesus and went up to the northern Peloponnesus. Then there are the people in the mountains of Arcadia. who also don't speak the Doric language and maybe they were driven up there to escape. So, those are the things that help people decide that the Dorians may really have been the sons of Heracles who actually invaded and that what we find after the fall of the Mycenaeanan world in Greece are some of the following things, things that were not typically found in the Mycenaeanan world. First of all, the Dorians. Not bronze ones. A kind of a pin used to hold your cloak together called a fibula, unknown in the previous period. The building of buildings in the shape of what the Greeks called a megaron, a rectangular center which has a hearth in it, a front porch and a back porch, which will be the style in which Greek temples are built in the historical period. Professor Donald Kagan That appears for the first time after the fall of the Mycenaeanans. We know that the Mycenaeanans buried their dead by inhumation, those great tombs, those great grave things, and even the common people outside them are buried in graves. Whereas, in the historical period, these people were cremated rather than buried. in the world of Homer, that's what we see. So, the idea that was put forward in the nineteenth century was that the Dorians who were a less civilized, tougher, meaner, harder fighting people, assisted by the use of iron in their weapons, which is superior allegedly to the bronze, came down, defeated the Achaeans, imposed themselves on them where they could, drove them away where they couldn't, Professor Robert R. That explains how things. That has been attacked and is largely not believed these days for a whole lot of technical reasons that I don't want to trouble you with right now. I do not think we can believe that simple story as it stands. It is too simple and there are too many things that it doesn't account for and there are too many things that would suggest that it's not correct. However. I am not sure there is nothing in that story. And here I really am influenced most strongly by my colleague, Professor Jerry Pollet, now retired, who was our history of art and archeology guy, who has a notion that is very nuanced and sophisticated and it appeals to me quite a lot. He suggests that there were indeed Greek tribes from the north who spoke Dorian dialects. who came down during this period attempting to come into the richer and better settled world of the Mycenaeanans. They didn't come down and then go away for a hundred years and then come back, but rather they came down in waves of tribes and families and so on, exerting gradual pressure, pushing in when they could, retreating when they couldn't, and so on. For this I think there's a very good Professor Donald Kagan Whether or not you accept the Dorian idea, I think we should find attractive the idea that if there was an external invasion, it came in this way over a period of time, a century or two, with success and then retreat, not having success, flight, all that kind of stuff going on, because the Mycenaeanan centers all reveal for that stretch of time that they're scared. The proof of it comes from Strengthening their already quite strong walls in almost all the sites that we see. And also, this is a very important fact, if you're expecting to be attacked and besieged as all these citadels would be by an invader, you want more than anything else a water supply. But they didn't necessarily have good water supplies in such circumstances, and so we see the building of water holders. places, there's a very striking one. The next time you go to Mycenaean, don't miss the cistern that was dug in the mountains on the hillside within the walls at that period. It's deep and you better take a flashlight because it's as black as it can possibly be, but they've spent a lot of time, energy, and money on being sure that they would have a supply of water to hold them for a long siege. I think That indicates that something of the kind is going on. Then we see that when this culture comes to an end, it is accompanied by people fleeing, getting away from the Mycenaeanan world. Some of them go only so far as Athens, which had the good fortune somehow of not being destroyed, one of the few important Mycenaeanan places that is not destroyed. So, for some reason it was safe in Athens and some others fled to Athens, others had to keep going and settled on the islands of the Aegean Sea. For others, it was necessary to go further and to settle the west coast of Asia Minor, which indeed this is the great period of Greek settlement on the west coast of Asia Minor. And then it looks like there came a moment where there was a final blow, where whatever was attempting to overthrow these cities and this civilization succeeded. Not the same in every place. The fall of Pylos is generally thought to be around 1200 BC, Mycenaean itself maybe 50 years later, and other places later than that. I think it's very important to notice that some of these places that were big in the Mycenaeanan world were entirely abandoned and not settled again by the Greeks. Buried, lost, people didn't even know where they were. That's extraordinary. That only happens when something very, very large drives people away from an inhabited site. And so, here's where Jerry Pollet's analogy to the fall of Rome seems so very appealing. That is more or less what did happen in the Roman world, and I don't see anything that suggested it couldn't happen in the Roman world. The Greek world at the time we're talking about. Trying to figure out, we quit when? Ten to one, right? Professor Robert R. Right? Yeah, okay. Now, I suppose the most important aspect of all of this for our purposes are the results of all of this and they were tremendous. You have the destruction completely of the Mycenaeanan Bronze Age culture. Greece never sees anything like it again. This is not the way it was in the ancient Near East. This is not the way it was in Egypt. There you see continuity for a very, very long time. The Greek world has this tremendous discontinuity. It's like the door slams and you got to go into a new room. Among the things that are lost for a long time, there is writing. There is no writing in Greece from, let us say, 1100 or so on until the middle of the eighth century BC, rough date 750. And then the writing that they do have is completely unrelated to the writing that was lost. They get it from a different place, the letters, the the design of the writing comes in fact from Asia, probably from, almost certainly from Phoenicia, the land that is now called Lebanon, and the language that was for that script was a Semitic language. Hebrew is close to what's going on there, but they don't take the language. They borrow the characters from what had been already something quite close to an alphabet. and had only a relatively small number. I forget the exact number of the ones in the Semitic alphabet, but we're talking about roughly 25. You're into the ball game for an alphabet such as ours. The Greeks borrow that with typical Greek innovation. They do the big step of inventing vowels. So that now you don't have to remember anything, you can read every sound that is made and they produce their alphabet, but their alphabet has got nothing to do with Mycenaean. This is a new thing altogether. The Greeks are totally illiterate from around 1100 to 750. Another characteristic of these years between which Scholars refer to as the Dark Ages, just as they do the years after the fall of the Roman Empire. Dark for two reasons. Dark in the most obvious way because we don't have any writing, no record of them, we can't see, it's dark. The other, dark in the sense of gloomy, not good, bad. This is a hard time, a poor time, wretched time, miserable time. These are dark times. So, that's what is meant by the term dark. Dark Ages and that's what does follow the fall of the Mycenaeanan world. Part of the story is that that old connection that the Mycenaeanan world had with the Mediterranean in general, most particularly with the east stops, we don't find in the excavations we make of Greek towns in the Dark Ages, we don't find implements, jewels, goodies, anything. Egypt or Mesopotamia or anything like that. It is clear and nor by the way do you find Greek things in those places. The Greeks are isolated during this period. Of course, everything I'm saying is somewhat exaggerated. I'm sure there must have been individual exceptions to everything, but we're talking about the overwhelming reality. Professor Robert R. And not only are the Greeks as a whole cut off from the rest of the world, but Greece itself, which used to be an area of easy exchange where people could go from one place to the other and did, localism now comes into the picture. The unity is broken. It's again like, think, I hope you know something about the early Middle Ages where places were simply cut off from one another and there were no roads. roads kept or made and just going from one village to another was a strange and dangerous thing, because nobody was in charge. Things were completely out of control. That's the way things clearly For instance, you can see pottery, which used to have this, remember, this largely unitary quality. You can tell if you're at all experienced with it very easily if you go, let's say, to the year 900 BC. You can tell if a pot comes from Athens or if it comes from Pylos or Pylos, it may probably be out of business, Thebes or someplace else because they have their local characteristics which are perfectly obvious, which suggests that they're not seeing each other's goods. They're not trading. them. They're simply working within their own very narrow ambit. That's the kind of a world that is being created. Something less easy to say confidently, but probably clear, I think, is the whole legacy of Mycenaeanan culture is really lost. Not fully though. There is always something that we call folk memory that has a recollection of the distant past which may have truth to it, but may not, or may have only an element of truth to it, and it's always very hard. What comes back in this form is usually what we call legend, and anybody who rejects legend across the board as simply being invention is just dead wrong. Anybody who tries to use it as an accurate account of what really happened is no less wrong. Someplace in the middle is where the truth is and it's hard to find. But in any case, what we find are a number of units in the Greek world. Call them towns for the sake of argument. Sounds too urban, but call them that. Small, that means to say small in extent, few people. Of course, the population surely went down since the capacity to grow food, to distribute it, that whole system that depended on the existence of a central palace and a strong king running everything, running production, running distribution, it's gone. And you know, that doesn't come back. When that's destroyed, You're in terrible shape. So the population surely dropped and all the evidence we have supports that. So what you have are these small, poor, weak units and that's a miserable situation. And now they have no choice. They cannot rely as human beings typically do on just doing what what your parents did, just inheriting a tradition that functions, that works, that keeps you going. They couldn't do it. The survivors had to figure out a new way to do things, and they didn't do anything new in a hurry. This all came hard and at the cost I'm sure of a lot of human life and a lot of misery, but what comes out of it is something different. Now, I jumped though. We do know that certain memories lasted. the Greeks always thought there was an earlier age, the Greeks of the classical period, always thought there was an earlier age that was much better than the age in which they lived. An age in which men were heroes. They were bigger, they were stronger, they were tougher, they were faster, they were more beautiful, they lived longer. Those were the great old days. And then there's us, we poor miserable wretches. That's the picture that the Greeks carried with them. The legends, just stories from generation to generation, changed, molded, but nonetheless retaining certain elements of the earlier tradition. And then finally, we have to believe that there's no escaping it, I think, that there was another thing that provided for memory, something we call the epic tradition. When we get to Homer, We will find a highly developed epic poetry and once we come to grips with the fact that it was orally composed and recollected poetry then you get some idea of the length of time that must have been involved in the creating of it and once we'll turn to this we get to the Homeric issues once you realize that there are clearly accurate depictions of aspects of the Mycenaeanan world that show up in those poems which appear to have been written down for the first time perhaps around 750 BC or so, then you must realize there had to be an epic tradition, a poetic tradition of the same kind that goes back all the way to the Mycenaeanan period. And I think we must remember that there were people creating and repeating and working out and changing a poetic tradition. that started in the Mycenaeanan world and lasted for the rest of Greek history. Now, the legacy from the Mycenaeanans to Greek civilization later is very limited, but what there is is very important, and no part of it is more important than the Homeric poems themselves. But if we look at the society that emerges, this dark age society that emerges from The ancient world of Mycenaean, what you have is a rare human experience. The creation almost of a clean slate. Even more so, I would argue, than the disruption that came after the fall of Rome. Because there's one big difference. The fall of Rome did not destroy one of the most important, tenacious, and significant Aspects of the old culture, the Roman Catholic Church, which remained and became a central fact for the new culture. There's nothing like that in the Mycenaeanan world. We are really talking about something that's almost entirely fresh. The Greeks had no choice but to try to find their own way, uninfluenced as Mycenaean was influenced by Mesopotamia and Egypt, uninfluenced by anything, starting from the lowest possible place and having to make a living and to go forward and to shape a world which was their own because there wasn't anything else to guide them. Next time we'll take a look at the Dark Ages and the world of Homer.

So, what we think we know derives chiefly from archaeological evidence, which is before writing, mute evidence that has to be interpreted and is very complicated and is far from secure. Even a question such as date, which is so critical for historians, is really quite approximate. Professor Robert R. And subject to controversy, as is just about every single thing I will tell you for the next few days, will be even more than usual subject to controversy about the most fundamental things.

So, what you'll be hearing are approximations as best we can make them of what's going on. Well, we begin our story with the emergence of the Bronze Age in the Aegean Sea. area.

That appears to have taken place about 3000 B.C. I think these days they date it down about another century to about 2900. Precision is impossible, don't worry about that. And what we find, the first example of a Bronze Age, and I use the word civilization now for the first time, because before the Bronze Age there is nothing that we would define as a civilization. civilization. Civilization involves the establishment of permanent dwelling areas that we call cities as opposed to villages.

Agricultural villages will have existed all over the place in the late Stone Age in the Neolithic period as it is known, but there is a difference and a critical difference is that a city contains a number of people who do not provide for their own support, that is to say they don't produce food. They need to acquire it from somebody else. They do various things like govern and are priests and are bureaucrats and are other non-productive activities that depend upon others to feed them.

That's the most narrow definition of cities. Of course with cities, we typically find a whole association of cultural characteristics which we deem civilization. Well, that's what we see for the first time in the Aegean area on the island of Crete. That civilization was uncovered by the archaeologists right at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sir Arthur Evans, an Englishman, was responsible for the major work that has revealed that civilization. He was activated by it. At one point I think he convinced himself that he was a descendant of the kings of that civilization, but in any case he named it. He named it after the legendary king of Crete, who appears in the Greek mythology by the name of Minos, M-I-N-O-S.

So, he referred to that civilization as the Minoan civilization. When we use the word Minoan, we mean the civilization whose home is Crete. It's spread out beyond Crete because the Minoans established what we might want to call an empire in various parts of the Mediterranean. It starts with Crete.

It is a Bronze Age culture and it is the first civilization we know in the area. What we find in the Minoan civilization The chiefly, I mean the main place we can learn about this civilization from was the city of Knossos, located on the northern shore of Crete, where a great palace complex was discovered and is available. By the way, it's an absolutely beautiful site, great tourist site. You can see quite a lot there. Professor Robert R. Anyway, when you examine that site and draw the conclusions that are inevitable from examining it, and also I should have said all of them I know in settlements, you realize that they look and seem very much like older civilizations that have grown up in the ancient Near East, the real sort of typical home of the kinds of things we're talking about.

Professor Robert R. Is Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, spreading out beyond Iraq and going up into Syria and neighboring places. It too was very similar to the civilization, apparently a little bit newer, in the Nile Valley in Egypt, about which we know a great deal more than we know about the Minoans because, as you know, in the nineteenth century, Scholars discovered how to read the languages that were written in Egypt and in Mesopotamia and are able to develop something approaching history for the period we're talking about. That is not true for Crete because although they had a script and we have available to us tablets with those writings on them, to this day no one has deciphered.

Professor Robert R. The language written by the Minoans and therefore we don't have that kind of knowledge. So, barring that nonetheless what we see reminds us very much of these ancient bronze age early civilizations and so that will be significant as we talk about how the Greeks differed from that, which gets us to the Greeks. Excuse me, the Minoans are not Greeks.

Strictly speaking, what do we mean when we say somebody is Greek? We mean that his native language, not one that he's acquired subsequently, but the one that he learned as a child, was Greek, some version of the Greek language. These are linguistic terms, but of course the people who spoke then, especially in the early years, tended to be part of a relatively narrow collection of people who intermarried with each other chiefly and therefore developed common cultural characteristics. So, of course, the language is only a clue. When you speak about Greeks, you will be speaking about something more than merely the fact that they spoke a certain language.

In the nineteenth century, there was a lot of talk about races. There were people who spoke about the Greek race or similar races for quite a long time. In the science of anthropology Professor Donald Kagan Subjects like that, it's been determined that those terms are inappropriate. They suggest there's something in the genes that explain the characteristics of a particular people.

That is certainly not true. So, let's understand each other. We're talking about a culture when we're talking about the Greeks, which is most strikingly signified by the language that is spoken.

Well, the way we can reason things out from the evidence we have is to suggest that that Greek speaking peoples came down into the area around the Aegean Sea, perhaps around 2000 B.C., about a thousand years later than the emergence of the Minoan civilization of Crete. Again, I think these days they tend to down date it by another century or so, so it might be around 1900 B.C. We really don't know very much about these early Greek settlers. Professor Charles Schultz, M.D.: We begin to know more about those three, four hundred years down the road when there appear buildings and settlements in the world later inhabited by the Greeks as we know, to which we give the name Mycenaeanan. Now that derives from one site in the northeastern Peloponnesus called Mycenaean, and the name is given because In the poems of Homer, Neleus and the Odyssey, the leading Greek king, the man who is the leader of the expedition to Troy, is Agamemnon, who is king of the Argolid region and his palace and his home are at Mycenaean.

That's why we call the entire culture Bronze Age culture, running from about 1600 to perhaps but perhaps not so late. That's what we mean when we speak about the Mycenaeanans, the Mycenaeanan period. Professor Donald Kagan Keep it in mind that they are Greek speakers and we know that with confidence, something we didn't know at the beginning of the twentieth century, because written evidence is available on a bunch of clay tablets that were accidentally baked in some conflagration in these places.

The same thing is true of Knossos in Crete. Crete and perhaps a few other sites in Crete, not at the same time, but the reason we have any written evidence at all is that where we have it, there was some kind of conflagration that produced a fire that baked clay into a pottery. In the normal course of events, clay dissolves and disappears and any message on it is erased. In other words, this was not meant to be a record to be left for the future. It was an accident.

These things that we discover, these writings that we discover were meant as practical, for practical usage in ways that I will tell you about in a little while. So anyway, that writing, let me back up a step. When Evans found writing at Knossos, he found two, well he actually found seven, but only two that turned out to be significant, two kinds of script.

I shouldn't even say script. Professor Donald Kagan That sounds like he's writing a nice cursive line. Two kinds of writing.

One, because he couldn't figure out what they were, he called one linear, meaning it's a linear script, A, and linear B, because he could tell by careful analysis that they were different and he could tell which pieces belonged to which. Linear A is earlier and it is associated, it is clearly the language used used by the Minoan kings at Knossos and other places. Linear B resembles linear A, but it is clearly different and later and one reason we know that, we know it mostly from stratigraphy, but we can also tell because it's a much simpler script but by no means simple.

These are not alphabets, these are syllabaries. Every symbol represents a syllable. In other words, typically two letters rather than one.

That's a nice step over having loads and loads and loads of symbols representing lots of things, which is true more of linear A than linear B, but it's still we're talking about something approaching sixty symbols in a syllabary. When you think about how hard it is to learn to read when you're only using twenty-six symbols and how few Americans do learn to read, I keep reading in the paper. Professor Donald Kagan It's not an easy thing. It's not a simple matter.

Imagine what it would be like if you had to learn about 60 such things. Well, of course, what follows from all of that is ordinary people did not. What we learn ultimately from our decipherment of Linear B, which I've just skipped over, which was done in the 1950s by a brilliant young architect who loved solving problems of this kind and was able to discover that this was an early form of Greek and that he could essentially make out what it said. At first there was doubt and controversy, which has completely gone away as more and more examples of this writing have become available and scholars are now able by and large to be confident that they know what these things say. So that The fact that this was a Greek script that was available in the Mycenaeanan period tells us very confidently that the Mycenaeanans were Greeks.

But of course, a lot was known about these Mycenaeanans well before the syllabary was deciphered. It's worth saying a word about that because I want to undermine any great confidence that you may have in what you can believe that scholars tell you because we keep finding out how wrong we are about all kinds of things. But I would say if you walked into the leading universities in the world, there would probably be German In the 1850s, and you went to the classics people, and you said, well, you know, Homer wrote about these places, Mycenaean and other places. Can you tell me where that was? And they said, you silly fellow, that's just stories, that's mythology, that's poetry.

There never was an Agamemnon, there never was a Mycenaean, there isn't any such thing. And then in 1870, A German businessman by the name of Heinrich Schliemann, who had not had the benefit of a university education and didn't know what a fool and how ignorant he was, believed Homer and he said he wanted to look for Troy. So, he went to where people thought Troy might be and he began digging there and before you know it, he discovered a mound filled with cities, which he believed was Troy.

After the usual amount of scholarly debate, there seems to be no doubt that it was the city of Troy. So having succeeded with that, he thought, well, now that I've seen Troy, how about Mycenaean? Off he went to the northeast Peloponnesus to the site where he thought it might be Mycenaean from Homer's account, and I wouldn't be telling you this story, and you know the outcome. He found it. And It was the excavation of the site of Mycenaean, which was soon followed by the excavation of other sites from the same period, that made it possible for people to talk about this culture, even before they could read the script.

The culture is marked by some of the following features. Let's take Mycenaean, which is maybe the best example of the whole culture. Certainly, it's the... It's a perfect model for what we're talking about.

What you have to begin with is a town or a city or a settlement of some kind built on top of a hill, and it's usually intended to be a formidable hill, one not easily accessible to anybody who comes walking along. A place in other words that would make a very nice fort, a citadel, and that's indeed what we find at Mycenaean. On that citadel, on that strongly rocky fort or citadel, they built what we now identify as the royal palace, the palace of the king.

That was, I should point out, maybe about ten miles from the sea. Now, not all Mycenaeanan sites are so far from the sea. Professor Donald Kagan Some of them are closer, but what it's important to say is that none of them are right on the sea. They're always back some few miles. The reason for that I think is that the early times in which these civilizations arose saw all kinds of dangers coming and the most, the swiftest, the least suspected, the one that could come upon you overnight came from the sea.

People who came by land, you would be hearing rumblings about it. down the road from villages that were spread out, but if somebody comes in from the sea on a ship, you may find them there in the morning and you don't know what's what. So, the idea for security and safety, they built their states far from the sea, but not far because as we shall see, the Mycenaeanan civilization was a commercial one that relied for its wealth upon trade and that meant trade by sea more than by land.

The citadel is typically always surrounded by farmland. And that is, of course, you cannot live in ancient society if you are not surrounded by farmland because the food that comes from the soil is essential for life. You can't count on trade to provide it to you with any security. Later on, when times are more secure, there's trade for grain as well as for everything else, but when you're settling a place in the first place, you can't rely on somebody bringing it to you.

You're going to have to have your own people working it and bringing it up to you themselves. So the citadel and the farmland surrounding it make up fundamentally the unit, which is the Mycenaeanan kingdom. Professor Robert R. Well, the first thing that Schliemann found when he dug at Mycenaean was this remarkable circle of graves, which were shafts dug straight down into the soil, and they are referred to this day technically as shaft graves.

And then in other places not very far from that main hill, they found even more remarkable burials, what we call burials. beehive tombs. Just imagine a huge beehive in which let's say the center of the inside of that might be as much as 50 feet high or more and these were built of extraordinarily huge heavy stones and very well worked too.

Here's the marvelous thing. The reason they had to uncover it was that these beehive tombs like everything else were buried and this wasn't just the result of centuries of neglect, it is clear that they were built in order to be buried. That is to say, it was some kind of a big religious thing going on here where the king, it was obviously a royal thing because the cost of it was so enormous nobody else could afford a tomb of that kind.

So, that here was a royal tomb closed forever and yet built at a fantastic It's a fantastic expense, an enormous kind of labor. And the same is true in a general way of what we find in the royal palace up on top of the hill at Mycenaean. And so what is perfectly clear is the people who ruled these places were enormously powerful, at least locally, and wealthy because even if you imagine that slaves did the work, you would need a hell of a lot of them over a long period of time and you had to feed them if nothing else.

So that we are talking about a wealthy group and of course the other thing that struck Schliemann almost amazingly was that in the circle of graves that we've been talking about he found all kinds of precious things buried, the most striking of which were death masks made of pure gold on the remains of the body, but also jewels and Implements and weapons of very high expense. That's what of course makes it clear they were royal in their character. By the way, and there are only a few of these graves over a large period of time. So, you must imagine these are successive kings who are being buried in this what must have been sacred soil.

So, that makes it clear we're talking about a wealthy civilization, at least in which the rulers are wealthy, and in which the rules, of course, are very powerful. Now what we learn both from archaeology and from references in the Linear B tablets is that they engage these cultures in trade to a significant degree. You find Mycenaeanan...

Elements, tools, other things, pottery particularly of a certain kind, all over the Mediterranean Sea. You find it in dateable places and that's why we can give this some kind of date, such as in Egypt. The Mycenaeanans had a regular trade with Egypt. You find Egyptian things in Mycenaean and vice versa. And also, presumably, much of it must have gone into Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia. Some of it went all the way to the western Mediterranean. This was a civilization that was not shut in on itself, but was in touch with the entire Mediterranean region. The major thing they seemed to be selling were aromatic oils in little vials. Think of them as, well, some combination of oil and perfume.

I better say something about oil. the ancient world, so you get a grip on what's going on here. The ancient Greeks had no soap. Think about that for a moment. That's a problem, isn't it?

And yet, they wanted to get clean, and so what the device they used was to take oil, typically olive oil, spread it on themselves, then get a scraper, a metal scraper and and scrape off the oil with it, what was underneath the oil, and then finally take their bath and out they would come and be clean. Professor Robert Shiller Now, oil is a wonderful thing. Olive oil is a great thing.

In certain forms you eat it. The olive itself, you use it to cook with as oil. Some people just put oil on their salad.

I myself can't stand it, but the point is it has to take place. But that's not all. If you get oil, crush the oil from the olives that come down from the trees, that's a nasty smell.

that it has. So, if you're going to use it for this purpose, it's not going to be good by itself. You've got to put some nice perfume onto it in order for it to be usable, just as your soap would be pretty horrible without any perfume on it. So, it looks as though what the Mycenaeanans did, Greece is filled with wonderful olive trees, and so they obviously took the The oil from those olives, I'm sure they sold it in various forms, but one of the most popular was for this purpose. Everybody in the Mediterranean wanted it for the same reasons and obviously these Mycenaeanan sites had access to what they needed.

It looks like, by the way, that they got much of the perfume from areas outside of Greece. Some of the best of it came from northeast Africa, as a matter of fact. You remember the Queen of From the Bible, I say that but I shudder to think how many of you have read the Bible.

But anyway, she was so rich as to attract the interest of King Solomon because that's where those wonderful fine smelling things, frankincense and myrrh and stuff like that was available, useful for this purpose. So they had to import that. to make their goods as saleable as they wanted and so on. So you have trade with the Mediterranean and most especially the eastern Mediterranean, because that's where the older, more sophisticated, more civilized cultures were and that's where wealth was too compared to what was out in the west.

So that's the pattern of trade and what you see is a kind of cultural unity, first of all, within the Mycenaeanan world itself. It is evident that these different Mycenaeanan towns all through the Greek world on both sides of the Aegean Sea were in touch with each other. One of the things that's interesting about that is you can see pottery styles that you can hardly tell whether they came from one end of the Mediterranean or another if they're of the Mycenaeanan variety, because it was a single culture. I don't mean there were no local variations, but there was this general unity. I'm going to contrast that with the situation in Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeanan world.

And I was going to say not just in the Mycenaeanan towns themselves, but over the entire Aegean Sea, and indeed across the Mediterranean, in the years of the Mycenaeanan period, roughly from 1600 to 1100 or so BC. You are dealing with a largely unified culture. What is it, what do we talk about the world like these days? What's the cliché?

Globalized world. It was a globalized world, except it was a little piece of the globe, but they didn't really know or care about very much outside of the Mediterranean area. Now Professor Robert R. In the respects that I have spelled out, I mean chiefly the fact that they were engaged in commerce and industry to some degree, and that they were trading peoples, and that they were in touch with one another and so on, they were already similar to the civilizations that came before them in the ancient Mediterranean Near East.

In those places, in Egypt, the Pharaoh, in Mesopotamia, the first individual City-states were ruled in the same way as everybody I'm going to be talking about now, by somebody who is a king, a monarch, a one-man ruler, who is the warlord, commander of the armies, who has the control of the power in the state, but more than that. All the economic activity that we find in, and our best example of what I'm about to say, is in Mesopotamia. Professor Robert R. In the cities of the Tigris Euphrates Valley, the ruler there from his palace, assisted by vast groups of bureaucrats, directed the economy of his land entirely and fully.

Agriculture was overwhelmingly the activity, the most important activity of the people of that area, of any area, and so we have Evidence that the king doled out seed for planting, instructed people just exactly when to plant, where to plant, what to plant there, when to fertilize it if they did. In Mesopotamia, they usually didn't need to because of the richness of the soil and so on. In other words, you have a degree of centralized control of true monarchical power of a wealthy monarchical power, already the model is there in Asia. Again, I want to say it's the same, but in a special way in Egypt, because in Egypt the whole Nile Valley, because I think of the nature of the Nile Valley, became totally centralized under the rule of one man, the pharaoh, and he commanded the whole thing.

It took longer for anything like that to happen. Mesopotamia, although it ultimately did. When we get, for instance, down to about 1750 B.C.

in Mesopotamia at Babylonia, which is at that point the dominant kingdom of the area, King Hammurabi has just about the same power as a pharaoh would in Egypt. It's also worth pointing out that these rulers, had full religious authority for their rule. In the case of the pharaohs of Egypt, the pharaoh was himself a god and insisted on being worshipped in that way.

In Babylonia, for instance, and this I think was typical, Hammurabi was not a god, but as we know, thank God, by the great that he left that's now in the Louvre, the law code of Hammurabi is available to us and there's a preface to it in which he basically explains why should you obey the rules that I am now laying down for you? His answer is because the top god of our world, Marduk, appointed me in that place. And I'm doing what he wants me to do. And if you cross me, you cross him.

And that's bad news. That's a rough translation. So, this is very important. You have a full monarchy in the sense that both we in America... talk about the separation of church and state.

That is a very rare and unusual thing in the history of the world. The normal situation in cultures pre-civilized and civilized as well is for there to be a unity between religious things and non-religious things and all of that to be ruled by a single individual who is the monarch. of that territory with religious sanction as well as through his power and through the legitimacy of his descent. That's the normal human way of living.

You should always be aware, I think, about how peculiar we are. We are the oddballs in the history of the human race and anybody who follows our pattern. And it's important to realize that because There's nothing inevitable about the development that has come about to be characteristic of the world.

And when we find people challenging it, I think they have the bulk of time and human experience on their side when they say, you guys got it wrong. So. Let me say something about the nature of the society and economy that we find in the Mycenaeanan world revealed both by the archaeology and by what we learn in the records provided by Linear B. The remains and records of these strongholds make it clear that the political organization was an imitation of Oriental. monarchy. The sovereign at Mycenaean and at Pylos, another important site for the period, and at Thebes, which was another one, was somebody that the tablets refer to as the Oanax, and that is the same as a later Greek word which drops the W at the beginning, oanax.

And as we shall see, that word in later times means Some powerful individual, but it doesn't mean what it means here. The boss, the single monarchical controller of everything. He held a royal domain that belonged directly to him, which was very significant in size and wealth.

He appointed bureaucratic officials, he commanded royal servants, and he recorded royal goods. which by the way, most of the tablets are inventories, lists of things that exist in the palace that belong to the king. There are other things that have to do with instructions that the king is sending out to people from the palace. There is no reference in any of the tablets. I don't know how much we can make of that because the tablets limit themselves to such a limited kind of thing that maybe doesn't prove anything, but in this case I think it does.

There is no reference to law. There is no reference to some objective or anything other than the king himself in the administration of justice. One scholar says it is natural to infer that the king, all-powerful controller of the all-seeing bureaucracy, possessed supreme authority also in the region of lawmaking and law enforcement. An omnipresent bureaucracy with its detailed and all-encompassing records gives the clearest picture of the power exercised by the centralized monarchs of the Mycenaeanan Age.

The records discovered at Pylos here are particularly interesting. They cover only one part of a year, and yet they carry details of thousands of transactions in hundreds of places. These files, as we might call them, are both sweepingly inclusive and penetratingly minute.

For instance, bronze is allocated to different places for the manufacturer of arrowheads or swords, with a note telling how many smiths in each place are active and how many are not. Cretan sheep are enumerated to the amount of 20,000 I'm sorry, that's not right. I don't want to get this wrong.

25,051. And we learned that in a Cretan village, two nurses, one girl, and one boy are employed. We are told how much linen is expected from a place called Rion, what is the acreage of the estate of a man called Electruon, and what a guy named Dunius owes the palace. The answer is 2200 liters of barley, 526 of olives, 468 of wine, I hope you're remembering all this, 15 rams, one fat hog, one cow, and two bulls.

We even learn the names of two oxen owned by Terzaro, Glossy and Blacky. The records make it perfectly clear that the kingdom of Pylos and Knossos, the kingdoms, ...were bureaucratic monarchies of a type unexpected in Greece, but in many ways similar to some contemporary and earlier kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean. It is very unlike anything we associate with the Greeks or anything that ever again existed in the Greek world, and that's really the point I want to make. This, although these people are Greeks, are ruling a culture which is thoroughly different from the one we will be studying for the bulk of the semester. semester.

So, like the Eastern states, you have a powerful ruler who's a warlord, there's a palace economy, there is a script, there is a bureaucracy, and there is collectivized agriculture under the central control of the economy. That economy and that society go forward and flourishes for, as I say, about 400 years, maybe perhaps about 400 years. Professor Donald Kagan And then a bunch of terrible things obviously begin to happen that shake the security of this society and ultimately bring it down.

Roughly speaking, about 1200 B.C., we hear of general attacks that are going on around the Mediterranean against the various civilizations of which we know. Egypt experiences A number of attacks from the outside world, chiefly what we hear about is from in the area of the Nile Delta, right there on the Mediterranean Sea. Among those attackers, there are others besides, there are attackers from Libya we hear, but there are also attackers that are simply called from the sea, the sea people attacking. At roughly the same time, the dominant empire in Asia Minor, Anatolia, It is that run by a people called the Hittites, who have been there for hundreds of years in security and are now suffering assault.

We know that because they also have a writing which we can read and it speaks of it as well as the archaeological remains that show destruction. Similarly, attacks are going on against the kingdoms of Syria and of Palestine which It's always hard to know what that piece of land should be called at any particular moment, but I call it Palestine because one of the Sea Peoples that attacked the Nile around 1200 in Egypt are called the Peleset, and most scholars suggest that that is the same name as came to be the name for this region when they ruled it called Palestine. And you will remember that when the Bible talks about This, it refers to a people called the Philistines. These are thought to be all the same people. So since they ruled it until, what's his name, Samson took them out with the jawbone of an ass.

And Samson took them out with the jawbone. I think it's proper to call it Palestine at that moment. Cyprus likewise suffers from these attacks and so far west as Italy and Sicily are under attack. Something is going on. The question of course is, is what?

Scholars have disagreed and continue to disagree because the evidence simply will not permit any confident answer, but I ought to just mention a few of the theories that have been tossed around, a few among many, many, many. One that seems to be in fashion these days, although you never know how long the fashion class is. Internal uprisings that somehow these monarchical areas, when life got tough, the people must have risen up against them. I think this reflects hopeful Marxist wishes.

fulfillment rather than any reality. But it's not entirely, but that's not what poor people have done in history. If you look at revolutions, revolutions come typically when things are getting better and the people don't like the fact that they don't have more than they already have.

Professor Donald Kagan But in any case, that's one theory. Earlier theories, it's wonderful to have scientific theories that you can use to handle these problems which you cannot demonstrate any facts for whatsoever. I'm being a bit strong, but not too much. One theory made some investigations of earth spores, hoping to find, what do you call that stuff that floats around and makes you sneeze? Pollen.

Pollen. Behind that, as a result, they said there were droughts in these areas throughout that period and that caused tremendous unhappiness and discontent. Other people have suggested climatic shift.

I keep waiting for somebody, I think the time is ripe for somebody to come up with a theory and explain it by global warming. Also, we know that the island in the middle of the Aegean Sea called Thera blew up in the most enormous kind of an explosion. At some point back there in prehistoric days, One theory is it was the explosion on Thera that caused so much climatic trouble that it can explain what went on here.

The trouble is you just don't know when that explosion took place. Since there are several periods in this general area that we're talking about now in which something big happens, some great change takes place, it turns out different people want to have their explosion at different times. It's like a movable feast.

You put your explosion where you need it at any particular moment. I am making light of it, and I think it's somewhat justified because the evidence is just so scanty. I think it's fun to play the game these guys do, but we shouldn't take it too seriously.

Now, let's go back to a theory which has at least got the virtue of being very old, although hardly anybody believes it anymore. That is the theory that what happened in the Mycenaeanan world, let's forget what was happening elsewhere, was the result of a movement of tribes, of ethnic groups who were outside the Mediterranean region, say at the beginning of this period, say in 1600, but who press into it. Usually the picture is that they are coming from the north or the northeast. and pressing down into it.

I have to believe that whoever came up with that theory for the first time was aided in coming to it by thinking about the end of the Roman Empire, when something precisely like that did happen. These Germanic and other tribes who were largely located north and northeast of Europe came down, or I should say not only Europe, of the Roman Empire came down and ultimately destroyed it by invasion. And even of course, theories about the fall of the Roman Empire than there are about the fall of the Mycenaeanan world. But anyway, connected to all of this was a very interesting Greek myth which speaks about the return of the Heracles.

They are the sons of the mythical hero Heracles, who was a Peloponnesian figure, and the story goes that the Heracles were expelled from the Peloponnesus and then promised that they would come back a hundred years later and conquer it, and so they did come back a hundred years later and conquer it. And since, this is the link that explains the old story, since in historical Greek times, let us say the fifth century B.C., the people who inhabited the Peloponnesians were mainly speakers of the Greek dialect called Doric. It was thought that Heracles'sons and Heracles being Peloponnesians no doubt spoke Doric too, and so this was referred to by scholars in the 19th century, not by the ancient Greeks, as a Dorian invasion.

In other words, another ...kind of Greek, the Greeks who lived in the area before the fall of the Mycenaeanan world. What were they called? Well, Homer gives us several names for them, three stick out for me. The most common and the most widely used was Achaeans, another one is Danaeans, and a third one is Argives. Argives comes from the fact that they rule over the land of Argos in Greece.

Now, the one that has some clout historically is Achaeans because in the records of the Hittites, kings, there are references to people, I'm trying to think, I think they are called, I want to get this right, but I don't remember whether this is the Egyptian or the, something like Ahai-Washa, unless that's the Egyptian form. Anyway, they are called by names that sound something like that, one among the Hittites, one among the Egyptians, and it's so easy given the fact The letter W dropped out of the Greek language between the Mycenaeanan period and the classical period. You could easily imagine that these people were referred to themselves as a-chi-oi and when the W drops out they are a-chi-oi, which is what Homer calls them.

And so the idea here is that the original Greeks who came in were what we call Achaeans. and that when these disturbances came and if the Dorian theory is true, Dorians either killed them all or dominated them, possibly intermarried with them, but dominated them and washed away, wiped out the use of the Achaean language and imposed their own Dorian language upon it. And supporting such an idea, among other things, if you go to the mountains in the center of the Peloponnesus, where it's awfully hard to get to, there is a region called, well actually beyond those mountains on the northern shore, is a place called Achaia, where the people are Achaeans.

So, the theory might be, well they were driven away from their old homes in the southern Peloponnesus and went up to the northern Peloponnesus. Then there are the people in the mountains of Arcadia. who also don't speak the Doric language and maybe they were driven up there to escape. So, those are the things that help people decide that the Dorians may really have been the sons of Heracles who actually invaded and that what we find after the fall of the Mycenaeanan world in Greece are some of the following things, things that were not typically found in the Mycenaeanan world. First of all, the Dorians.

Not bronze ones. A kind of a pin used to hold your cloak together called a fibula, unknown in the previous period. The building of buildings in the shape of what the Greeks called a megaron, a rectangular center which has a hearth in it, a front porch and a back porch, which will be the style in which Greek temples are built in the historical period. Professor Donald Kagan That appears for the first time after the fall of the Mycenaeanans.

We know that the Mycenaeanans buried their dead by inhumation, those great tombs, those great grave things, and even the common people outside them are buried in graves. Whereas, in the historical period, these people were cremated rather than buried. in the world of Homer, that's what we see. So, the idea that was put forward in the nineteenth century was that the Dorians who were a less civilized, tougher, meaner, harder fighting people, assisted by the use of iron in their weapons, which is superior allegedly to the bronze, came down, defeated the Achaeans, imposed themselves on them where they could, drove them away where they couldn't, Professor Robert R. That explains how things. That has been attacked and is largely not believed these days for a whole lot of technical reasons that I don't want to trouble you with right now.

I do not think we can believe that simple story as it stands. It is too simple and there are too many things that it doesn't account for and there are too many things that would suggest that it's not correct. However.

I am not sure there is nothing in that story. And here I really am influenced most strongly by my colleague, Professor Jerry Pollet, now retired, who was our history of art and archeology guy, who has a notion that is very nuanced and sophisticated and it appeals to me quite a lot. He suggests that there were indeed Greek tribes from the north who spoke Dorian dialects. who came down during this period attempting to come into the richer and better settled world of the Mycenaeanans. They didn't come down and then go away for a hundred years and then come back, but rather they came down in waves of tribes and families and so on, exerting gradual pressure, pushing in when they could, retreating when they couldn't, and so on.

For this I think there's a very good Professor Donald Kagan Whether or not you accept the Dorian idea, I think we should find attractive the idea that if there was an external invasion, it came in this way over a period of time, a century or two, with success and then retreat, not having success, flight, all that kind of stuff going on, because the Mycenaeanan centers all reveal for that stretch of time that they're scared. The proof of it comes from Strengthening their already quite strong walls in almost all the sites that we see. And also, this is a very important fact, if you're expecting to be attacked and besieged as all these citadels would be by an invader, you want more than anything else a water supply. But they didn't necessarily have good water supplies in such circumstances, and so we see the building of water holders. places, there's a very striking one.

The next time you go to Mycenaean, don't miss the cistern that was dug in the mountains on the hillside within the walls at that period. It's deep and you better take a flashlight because it's as black as it can possibly be, but they've spent a lot of time, energy, and money on being sure that they would have a supply of water to hold them for a long siege. I think That indicates that something of the kind is going on. Then we see that when this culture comes to an end, it is accompanied by people fleeing, getting away from the Mycenaeanan world. Some of them go only so far as Athens, which had the good fortune somehow of not being destroyed, one of the few important Mycenaeanan places that is not destroyed.

So, for some reason it was safe in Athens and some others fled to Athens, others had to keep going and settled on the islands of the Aegean Sea. For others, it was necessary to go further and to settle the west coast of Asia Minor, which indeed this is the great period of Greek settlement on the west coast of Asia Minor. And then it looks like there came a moment where there was a final blow, where whatever was attempting to overthrow these cities and this civilization succeeded. Not the same in every place.

The fall of Pylos is generally thought to be around 1200 BC, Mycenaean itself maybe 50 years later, and other places later than that. I think it's very important to notice that some of these places that were big in the Mycenaeanan world were entirely abandoned and not settled again by the Greeks. Buried, lost, people didn't even know where they were. That's extraordinary. That only happens when something very, very large drives people away from an inhabited site.

And so, here's where Jerry Pollet's analogy to the fall of Rome seems so very appealing. That is more or less what did happen in the Roman world, and I don't see anything that suggested it couldn't happen in the Roman world. The Greek world at the time we're talking about. Trying to figure out, we quit when? Ten to one, right?

Professor Robert R. Right? Yeah, okay. Now, I suppose the most important aspect of all of this for our purposes are the results of all of this and they were tremendous.

You have the destruction completely of the Mycenaeanan Bronze Age culture. Greece never sees anything like it again. This is not the way it was in the ancient Near East.

This is not the way it was in Egypt. There you see continuity for a very, very long time. The Greek world has this tremendous discontinuity. It's like the door slams and you got to go into a new room. Among the things that are lost for a long time, there is writing.

There is no writing in Greece from, let us say, 1100 or so on until the middle of the eighth century BC, rough date 750. And then the writing that they do have is completely unrelated to the writing that was lost. They get it from a different place, the letters, the the design of the writing comes in fact from Asia, probably from, almost certainly from Phoenicia, the land that is now called Lebanon, and the language that was for that script was a Semitic language. Hebrew is close to what's going on there, but they don't take the language. They borrow the characters from what had been already something quite close to an alphabet. and had only a relatively small number.

I forget the exact number of the ones in the Semitic alphabet, but we're talking about roughly 25. You're into the ball game for an alphabet such as ours. The Greeks borrow that with typical Greek innovation. They do the big step of inventing vowels. So that now you don't have to remember anything, you can read every sound that is made and they produce their alphabet, but their alphabet has got nothing to do with Mycenaean. This is a new thing altogether.

The Greeks are totally illiterate from around 1100 to 750. Another characteristic of these years between which Scholars refer to as the Dark Ages, just as they do the years after the fall of the Roman Empire. Dark for two reasons. Dark in the most obvious way because we don't have any writing, no record of them, we can't see, it's dark. The other, dark in the sense of gloomy, not good, bad.

This is a hard time, a poor time, wretched time, miserable time. These are dark times. So, that's what is meant by the term dark. Dark Ages and that's what does follow the fall of the Mycenaeanan world.

Part of the story is that that old connection that the Mycenaeanan world had with the Mediterranean in general, most particularly with the east stops, we don't find in the excavations we make of Greek towns in the Dark Ages, we don't find implements, jewels, goodies, anything. Egypt or Mesopotamia or anything like that. It is clear and nor by the way do you find Greek things in those places. The Greeks are isolated during this period.

Of course, everything I'm saying is somewhat exaggerated. I'm sure there must have been individual exceptions to everything, but we're talking about the overwhelming reality. Professor Robert R. And not only are the Greeks as a whole cut off from the rest of the world, but Greece itself, which used to be an area of easy exchange where people could go from one place to the other and did, localism now comes into the picture. The unity is broken. It's again like, think, I hope you know something about the early Middle Ages where places were simply cut off from one another and there were no roads.

roads kept or made and just going from one village to another was a strange and dangerous thing, because nobody was in charge. Things were completely out of control. That's the way things clearly For instance, you can see pottery, which used to have this, remember, this largely unitary quality.

You can tell if you're at all experienced with it very easily if you go, let's say, to the year 900 BC. You can tell if a pot comes from Athens or if it comes from Pylos or Pylos, it may probably be out of business, Thebes or someplace else because they have their local characteristics which are perfectly obvious, which suggests that they're not seeing each other's goods. They're not trading. them. They're simply working within their own very narrow ambit.

That's the kind of a world that is being created. Something less easy to say confidently, but probably clear, I think, is the whole legacy of Mycenaeanan culture is really lost. Not fully though.

There is always something that we call folk memory that has a recollection of the distant past which may have truth to it, but may not, or may have only an element of truth to it, and it's always very hard. What comes back in this form is usually what we call legend, and anybody who rejects legend across the board as simply being invention is just dead wrong. Anybody who tries to use it as an accurate account of what really happened is no less wrong. Someplace in the middle is where the truth is and it's hard to find.

But in any case, what we find are a number of units in the Greek world. Call them towns for the sake of argument. Sounds too urban, but call them that. Small, that means to say small in extent, few people.

Of course, the population surely went down since the capacity to grow food, to distribute it, that whole system that depended on the existence of a central palace and a strong king running everything, running production, running distribution, it's gone. And you know, that doesn't come back. When that's destroyed, You're in terrible shape.

So the population surely dropped and all the evidence we have supports that. So what you have are these small, poor, weak units and that's a miserable situation. And now they have no choice.

They cannot rely as human beings typically do on just doing what what your parents did, just inheriting a tradition that functions, that works, that keeps you going. They couldn't do it. The survivors had to figure out a new way to do things, and they didn't do anything new in a hurry. This all came hard and at the cost I'm sure of a lot of human life and a lot of misery, but what comes out of it is something different.

Now, I jumped though. We do know that certain memories lasted. the Greeks always thought there was an earlier age, the Greeks of the classical period, always thought there was an earlier age that was much better than the age in which they lived.

An age in which men were heroes. They were bigger, they were stronger, they were tougher, they were faster, they were more beautiful, they lived longer. Those were the great old days.

And then there's us, we poor miserable wretches. That's the picture that the Greeks carried with them. The legends, just stories from generation to generation, changed, molded, but nonetheless retaining certain elements of the earlier tradition.

And then finally, we have to believe that there's no escaping it, I think, that there was another thing that provided for memory, something we call the epic tradition. When we get to Homer, We will find a highly developed epic poetry and once we come to grips with the fact that it was orally composed and recollected poetry then you get some idea of the length of time that must have been involved in the creating of it and once we'll turn to this we get to the Homeric issues once you realize that there are clearly accurate depictions of aspects of the Mycenaeanan world that show up in those poems which appear to have been written down for the first time perhaps around 750 BC or so, then you must realize there had to be an epic tradition, a poetic tradition of the same kind that goes back all the way to the Mycenaeanan period. And I think we must remember that there were people creating and repeating and working out and changing a poetic tradition. that started in the Mycenaeanan world and lasted for the rest of Greek history.

Now, the legacy from the Mycenaeanans to Greek civilization later is very limited, but what there is is very important, and no part of it is more important than the Homeric poems themselves. But if we look at the society that emerges, this dark age society that emerges from The ancient world of Mycenaean, what you have is a rare human experience. The creation almost of a clean slate.

Even more so, I would argue, than the disruption that came after the fall of Rome. Because there's one big difference. The fall of Rome did not destroy one of the most important, tenacious, and significant Aspects of the old culture, the Roman Catholic Church, which remained and became a central fact for the new culture.

There's nothing like that in the Mycenaeanan world. We are really talking about something that's almost entirely fresh. The Greeks had no choice but to try to find their own way, uninfluenced as Mycenaean was influenced by Mesopotamia and Egypt, uninfluenced by anything, starting from the lowest possible place and having to make a living and to go forward and to shape a world which was their own because there wasn't anything else to guide them. Next time we'll take a look at the Dark Ages and the world of Homer.

Transcript for:The Rise and Fall of Ancient Greece

Transcript for:
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Greece