Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece

c. 2000 B.C.Palaces without walls

About 2000 B.C., on an island where villages had stood for three thousand years, the Cretans began to build palaces. At Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia great courts were laid out and ringed with storerooms, shrines, workshops and stairways rising three and four storeys. The storerooms held rows of jars taller than a man, filled with oil, grain and wine; the walls were plastered and painted with processions, dolphins, lilies, and young men and women vaulting over charging bulls. Nothing like it existed anywhere else in Europe. Egypt and Mesopotamia had been building cities and writing accounts for a thousand years, but this was the first time the habits of civilisation crossed the water to European soil.

The man who uncovered Knossos, Arthur Evans, began digging in 1900 and named the civilisation after Minos, the king whom Greek legend made master of Crete and of the sea. The name is his, not theirs: the palace people left no history, and their two scripts, a hieroglyphic and the linear script Evans called Linear A, remain unread. What is known of them is known from the ground. They traded with Egypt, where paintings show tribute-bearers from a land called Keftiu in Cretan dress, and with the Levant and the islands. Their palaces had no fortification walls worth the name, and Thucydides, writing fifteen centuries later, records the tradition that Minos ruled the Aegean with a fleet and cleared it of pirates. Whether a Cretan sea-power really kept the peace, or whether the island was simply hard to reach, the archaeologists have argued ever since.

c. 1700–1450 B.C.The second palaces and the island of fire

The first palaces were wrecked, by earthquake it seems, about 1700 B.C., and rebuilt at once on a grander plan. The Knossos a visitor sees today is mostly this second palace: the throne room with its gypsum seat, the light-wells, the drainage. In the middle of this second age the volcano of Thera, sixty miles to the north, exploded and buried the town of Akrotiri under ash, preserving its frescoed houses like a Bronze Age Pompeii. The date is one of the sharpest quarrels in Aegean archaeology. Radiocarbon and tree-ring evidence point to the later seventeenth century B.C.; the traditional dating by Egyptian cross-references puts it a century later, around 1530. The eruption did not destroy Cretan civilisation, which flourished for a further century, but it did nothing to help it.

About 1450 B.C. every palace on Crete except Knossos was burned. Knossos survived, and its new masters wrote a different script. This is the hinge of the chapter.

c. 1600 B.C.Gold in the shaft graves

On the mainland the Greeks arrive in the record with gold on their faces. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from Troy, dug inside the walls of Mycenae and found a circle of deep shaft graves packed with gold masks, inlaid daggers, silver cups and amber from the Baltic. He telegraphed that he had looked on the face of Agamemnon. He had not: the graves are dated about 1600 B.C., three or four centuries before any date the Greeks themselves gave the Trojan War. But the men in them were warrior princes who had become rich very fast, and their treasures show Cretan craftsmen working for mainland taste, which ran to hunting, war and horses rather than lilies and dolphins.

Over the next two centuries the chieftains of the mainland became kings. At Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes and elsewhere they built palaces with a central hall, the megaron, around a hearth and throne, and buried their dead in beehive tombs of dressed stone, the largest of them, the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, roofed by a dome forty-three feet high. Their walls were built of blocks so vast that later Greeks said the one-eyed Cyclopes must have laid them. The Lion Gate of Mycenae still stands in them.

1952The tablets speak Greek

Evans found at Knossos, and Carl Blegen found in 1939 at Pylos, thousands of clay tablets in a script Evans named Linear B. Evans believed it Minoan and non-Greek. In 1952 a young English architect, Michael Ventris, working from the grid of signs and the guess that the language might after all be Greek, read it. It was Greek, an archaic Greek some five hundred years older than Homer. The tablets are not literature. They are the palace’s year-end accounts: flocks of sheep counted by the thousand, rations of figs and barley for women workers, bronze allotted to smiths, chariot wheels in store, offerings of oil to gods whose names are already those of Olympus: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, Athena, and a Dionysus whom scholars had thought a late arrival.

The tablets also fix the shape of the state. At its head was the wanax, the king; below him the lawagetas, perhaps the leader of the host; then landholders, priests, officials of districts, and at the bottom the doeroi, slaves. Everything flowed to the palace and was redistributed from it. It was a tightly managed economy, run by scribes, and it left no room for the citizen; that idea would have to wait for the ruin of the whole system.

c. 1450–1400 B.C.Greeks at Knossos

Because the Knossos tablets are in Greek, and because they date from after the burning of the other Cretan palaces, the conclusion is hard to avoid: about 1450 B.C. mainland Greeks took Crete. Evans, who loved his Minoans, had argued the other way, that the mainland was a Cretan province. Alan Wace and Blegen argued from the pottery that the mainland was always its own culture, borrowing Cretan art but not Cretan rule. Ventris’ decipherment settled the last act if not the first. By 1400 B.C. Greek-speaking lords sat in the throne room of Knossos, kept their accounts in Greek, and worshipped, alongside the old goddesses of the island, the gods their descendants would carry to Troy.

With Crete in their hands the Mycenaean kings faced outward, toward the empires of the east, as the next chapter tells.