1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (10 page)

Of course, Schliemann—who was dramatically wrong even when he was right—had misdated the graves and remains. We now know that these shaft graves (of which there are two great circles at Mycenae) date to near the beginning of the city’s and the civilization’s greatness, from 1650–1500 BC, rather than from the time of Agamemnon and Achilles (ca. 1250 BC). He may have been off by four centuries, but at least he was digging at the correct city. Schliemann was by no means the only archaeologist to be investigating these Bronze Age remains—other scholars, such as Christos Tsountas and James Manatt, were also busy excavating and were doing better work than Schliemann—but he was the one who had the attention of the public because of his previous announcements regarding Troy and the Trojan War, as we shall see below.
⁶³

Schliemann dug at Mycenae, and at the nearby site of Tiryns and elsewhere as well, for a few more seasons before returning to Troy to conduct additional excavations in 1878 and in the 1880s. He also attempted to dig at Knossos on Crete, but without success. It was left to others, fortunately for the field of archaeology, to continue the investigations of the Mycenaeans. Two of the greatest were an American from the University of Cincinnati named Carl Blegen and an Englishman from Cambridge named Alan Wace. They eventually joined forces to lay out the groundwork for defining the civilization and its growth from beginning to end.

Wace was in charge of the British excavations at Mycenae for several decades, beginning in the 1920s, while Blegen not only excavated at Troy
from 1932 to 1938 but also dug at Pylos in southern Greece. At Pylos, on the very first day of excavations in 1939, Blegen and his team found the first few clay tablets from what would turn out to be a huge archive containing texts written in Linear B.
⁶⁴
The onset of World War II temporarily halted their work at the site, but following the war, excavations resumed in 1952. That same year, an English architect named Michael Ventris definitively proved that Linear B was in fact an early version of Greek.

The subsequent translation of Linear B texts found at sites such as Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Thebes, as well as Knossos, continues to the present day and has provided an additional window into the world of the Mycenaeans. The textual evidence has added to the details already known from excavations and has allowed archaeologists to reconstruct the world of Bronze Age Greece, just as their colleagues working at sites in Egypt and the Near East have been able to do in those countries, as a consequence of translating texts written in Egyptian, Hittite, and Akkadian. Simply put, archaeological remains combined with textual inscriptions have allowed modern scholars to reconstruct ancient history.

We now know that the Mycenaean civilization essentially began in the seventeenth century BC, at approximately the same time as the Minoans on Crete were recovering from the dramatic earthquake that marks (according to archaeological terminology) the transition from the First to the Second Palatial period on the island. Wace and Blegen christened the chronological periods belonging to the Mycenaeans as the Late Helladic period, with Late Helladic I and II dating to the seventeenth through fifteenth centuries BC and Late Helladic III divided into three sections: IIIA to the fourteenth century, IIIB to the thirteenth century, and IIIC to the twelfth century BC.
⁶⁵

The reasons underlying the rise of the Mycenaean civilization are still a matter of discussion among archaeologists. One early suggestion was that they helped the Egyptians oust the Hyksos from Egypt, but this is not a commonly accepted view today. If objects found in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are any indication, then some of the earliest influences at Mycenae came from Crete. In fact, Evans thought that the Minoans had invaded the Greek mainland, but Wace and Blegen later reversed this argument; all scholars accept their position today. It is now clear that when the Mycenaeans took over Crete, they also took over the international trade routes to Egypt and the Near East. They (relatively) suddenly became players in the cosmopolitan world—a role that they
would continue to exploit for the next several centuries, until the end of the Late Bronze Age.

The Egyptians apparently knew the Mycenaeans as
Tanaja
, while the Hittites called them
Ahhiyawa
, and the Canaanites (if the texts at Ugarit a bit farther north in Syria are any indication) similarly called them
Hiyawa
—or so we think, for those toponyms fit nobody but the Mycenaeans. If those references are not to the Mycenaeans, then these peoples are unknown in the texts of the Egyptians and the other great powers of the Late Bronze Age in the Near East, but this seems unlikely given the quantities of Mycenaean vases and vessels found in those regions in contexts dating from the fourteenth to the twelfth century BC.
⁶⁶

A
N
E
ARLY
T
ROJAN
W
AR?

If Ahhiyawa represents both mainland Greece and the Mycenaeans, and if the letter known as KUB XXVI 91 found at Hattusa shows that Ahhiyawa was involved somehow with Assuwa during its rebellion against the Hittites, then what can we conclude? The letter itself, and all of those relating to the Assuwa Rebellion, date to 1430 BC, some two hundred years before the generally accepted date for the Trojan War (usually placed between 1250 BC and 1175 BC). All of the data presented above, including the Mycenaean sword with the Akkadian inscription found at Hattusa, might be simply a series of unrelated phenomena. However, they may possibly be interpreted as indicating that warriors from the Bronze Age Aegean were involved in the Assuwa Rebellion against the Hittites. If so, it might be proposed that it was this aid that was chronicled in contemporary Hittite records and remembered rather more indistinctly in the literary traditions of later archaic and classical Greece—not as the Trojan War, but as the pre–Trojan War battles and raids in Anatolia that were also remembered and attributed to Achilles and other legendary Achaean heroes.
⁶⁷

Scholars are now agreed that even within Homer’s
Iliad
there are accounts of warriors and events from the centuries predating the traditional setting of the Trojan War in 1250 BC. These include the tower shield of the warrior Ajax, a shield type that had been replaced long before the thirteenth century BC. There are also the “silver-studded” swords (
phasganon arguwelon
or
xiphos arguroelon
) of various heroes,
an expensive type of weapon that had gone out of use long before the Trojan War. And there is the story of Bellerophon, recounted in book 6 of the
Iliad
(lines 178–240), who is a Greek hero almost certainly of pre–Trojan War date. Proteus, king of Tiryns, sent Bellerophon from Tiryns on mainland Greece to Lycia in Anatolia. After completing three tasks and overcoming numerous additional obstacles, he was eventually awarded a kingdom in Anatolia.
⁶⁸

In addition, the
Iliad
records that long before the time of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen, and Hector—in fact during the time of Priam’s father Laomedon—the Greek hero Heracles sacked Troy. He needed only six ships (
Iliad
, book 5, lines 638–42):

Of other sort, men say, was mighty Heracles, my father, staunch in fight, the lion-hearted, who on a time came hither [to Troy] by reason of the mares of Laomedon with but six ships and a scantier host, yet sacked the city of Ilios and made waste her streets.
⁶⁹

As I have said elsewhere, if one were to search for a historical event with which to link pre-Homeric traditions of Achaean warriors fighting on the Anatolian mainland, the Assuwa Rebellion, ca. 1430 BC, would stand out as one of the largest military events within northwestern Anatolia prior to the Trojan War, and as one of the few events to which the Mycenaeans (Ahhiyawans) might tentatively be linked via textual evidence such as the Hittite letter KUB XXVI 91 mentioned above. We might well wonder, therefore, whether it was this incident that was the historical basis for the contemporary Hittite tales of Mycenaean (Ahhiyawan) warriors or mercenaries fighting in Anatolia, and which generated the stories of earlier, pre–Trojan War, military endeavors of the Achaeans on the Anatolian mainland.
⁷⁰
We might also wonder whether it was this impending rebellion, which the Assuwans had probably been planning for some time, that lay behind their possible overtures to Thutmose III in the late 1440s and early 1430s BC.

C
ONCLUDING
R
EMARKS

The well-respected art historian Helene Kantor once said: “The evidence preserved to us by the passage of time constitutes but a small fraction of that which must have once existed. Each imported vessel … represents
scores of others that have perished.”
⁷¹
In fact, most of the goods sent back and forth were most likely either perishable—and have since disappeared—or were raw materials that were immediately converted into other objects, such as weapons and jewelry, as noted. Thus, we should probably understand that the trade between the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East during the Bronze Age took place on a scale many times larger than the picture that we currently see through the lens of archaeological excavation.

It is perhaps in this context that we should understand the Minoan-style paintings that Manfred Bietak uncovered in Thutmose III’s palace at Tell ed-Dab‘a in the Egyptian delta. While they may not necessarily have been painted at the whim of a Minoan princess, they are certainly evidence of the extent to which international contact, trade, and influences flowed around the ancient Mediterranean world during the fifteenth century BC, even as far abroad as Minoan Crete and back again.

We may sum up this century as a period that saw the rise of international connections on a sustained basis throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, from the Aegean to Mesopotamia. By this time, the Minoans and Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age Aegean were well established, as were the Hittites in Anatolia. The Hyksos had been evicted from Egypt, and the Egyptians had begun what we now call the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom period.

However, as we shall see next, this was only the beginning of what would become a “Golden Age” of internationalism and globalization during the following fourteenth century BC. For instance, the combination of Thutmose III’s numerous years of campaigning and diplomacy, hard on the heels of Hatshepsut’s peaceful trading expeditions and military exploits of her own,
⁷²
took Egypt to a pinnacle of international power and prosperity that had rarely, if ever, been seen before in the country. As a result, Egypt established itself as one of the great powers for the rest of the Late Bronze Age, along with the Hittites, Assyrians, and Kassites/Babylonians, in addition to assorted other players such as the Mitannians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, and Cypriots, more of whom we shall meet in the next chapter and following.

CHAPTER TWO

A
CT
II

AN (AEGEAN) AFFAIR TO REMEMBER:
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY BC