History, language families and textual content

One other matter which still remains a matter of discussion is the decipherment of Linear A, and the implications for Aegean prehistory. The Linear B texts associated with the latest phases of the palaces and citadels are written in an early form of Greek (as noted above, probably an east Greek dialect) which we term Mycenaean.

Linear A probably records the same language as Cretan hieroglyphic which is certainly a little older than the Linear A script, but the degree to which the earlier forms actually recorded a “language” cannot be clarified, whereas Linear A definitely recorded a language, as did the hieroglyphs of the Phaistos disc which remains undeciphered. The language recorded in Linear A is likewise widely assumed to be an undeciphered Indo-European language, yet persistent efforts over the last half century have failed to identify any relevant support for this idea. The fact that the concept behind the script which was used for writing both Linear A and B is not really suitable for an Indo-European language should also be drawn into consideration, as should adjustments in Linear B which suggest modifications necessary to write an Indo-European language - meaning that Linear A probably was not one.

This should encourage scholars to adopt the idea of a north-western Semitic dialect, as originally proposed in the 1950s by Cyrus Gordon (cf. Gordon 1965, 1966), but this idea continues to be disputed, at least partially because of the bias against Near Eastern influences supporting, and generated by, Renfrew’s work. The basis of Gordon’s approach was to apply the phonetic values assigned to Linear B which were the basis for establishing that the words could be read once it was recognized that the language was Greek. Thus the vocalization of the language depicted in the Linear A script is not really a matter of debate. On this basis, one can “read” the Linear A texts, in the sense of vocalizing them, but one cannot understand the texts unless one can link identifiable words with syntax and grammar which makes sense.

Gordon and a few others claim to recognize a West Semitic language in the texts as they read them. Even those who are not persuaded by the Semitic argument can recognize that, for example, based on the vocalization of Linear B applied to Linear A the word for “total” at the end of a series of figures is probably Semitic (ku-ro = kullo, “all”, “entire”). Nevertheless, the claim for the successful decipherment of the language as Semitic is contested, although as noted, not one single effort to identify an Indo-European has succeeded in persuading anyone; even Etruscan, which is not recognized as an Indo-European language, has been unsuccessfully argued. However, as noted, the archaeological and philo-logical evidence largely contradicts Renfrew, and the presence of Semitic words in the vocabulary of Linear A is not contested. On the other hand, however, Semitic words in Greek are also found in Linear B, such as “gold” found in Linear B as ku-ru-so, which is Greek χρυσός/khrusos, but also Akkadian hurasum. Since it can likewise be argued that Semitic elements in Linear A are mere “loanwords” (Younger & Rehak 2008: 176), the recognition of a successful decipherment of the language is probably the only hope of resolving the issue.

Of key importance, in any case, is that the Mycenaean Greeks were an Indo- European people who appeared in mainland Greece at the same time as their Indo-European relatives and contemporaries, the Hittites, who established themselves in Anatolia early in the second millennium BCE. It is clear from the iconography and artifacts found in their tombs and citadels that when the Mycenaean Greeks arrived, they came into contact with the Minoan civilization, which they obviously perceived as being superior to their own. However, in addition to adopting certain Minoan customs, they also brought their own Indo- European heritage with them.

The behaviour of the Hittites was largely similar: as the Mycenaeans adopted the Linear A of the Minoans to write their language, the Hittites adopted the cuneiform writing inherited from the Sumerians to write their own language and used the Semitic Akkadian language for diplomatic communications. Like the Mycenaeans, the Hittites had their own pantheon, rituals and iconography (for literature, cf. the contributions and bibliographies in Richter et al. 2001). Interestingly, like the Mycenaeans, the Hittites shared the concept of situating their capital in a citadel on a mountain.

Significantly, the people we call the “Mycenaeans” appear in the Hittite texts as those of the kingdom of Ahhiyawa, who are the “Achaeans” known from Homer, and thus this designation is probably the one which would be more appropriate for the culture (rather than “Mycenaean”). The Hittites actually came into contact with the Mycenaeans/Achaeans on the Aegean coast where Miletus was among their capitals, and the Hittite texts also allow us to locate Troy/Wilusa/Ilios in the Troad and thus probably at the site identified by Schliemann. Yet the capital and the homeland of the Mycenaeans clearly lay in mainland Greece and they only began their expansion to the east at the end of the Late Bronze Age (see Latacz 2001; Taracha 2001; Mee 2008: 373-4; R. Fischer 2010; Beckman et al.

As Mycenaean appears to be east Greek, this might mean that the Mycenaeans had arrived on the eastern coasts of the Aegean, and it was only later that they moved to the mainland Greece when they established their states and began writing (using the Linear A script, as the Greeks would later use the Phoenician alphabet) in the middle of the second millennium BCE. Thus it was as the Mycenaeans moved further east in historical times in the Late Bronze Age that they came into conflict with the Hittites. Evidently, the vast difference between the Hittite and Mycenaean languages means that the two developed independently and separately for some time, meaning that the two separated from Proto-Indo-European long before the two came into conflict in the eastern Aegean around the fifteenth century BCE.

Nevertheless, this allows us to understand the destruction of Troy in the sense depicted by Homer: as a conflict between peoples with effectively similar cultures and a shared pantheon. In fact, the weather god pre-eminent in the Levantine cultures was also central to the Hittite pantheon, just as Zeus with his thunderbolt stands before the other gods of the Greek pantheon.

But, peculiarly, the end of Troy was accompanied by the destruction of the citadels of the Mycenaeans and Hittites as well. The fact that Pylos (in western Greece) and Ugarit (on the Syrian coast) were among the states also threatened and destroyed at this time indicates that the conquest of Troy was part of a general upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean. We now know that the end of the Bronze Age was in part due to a pattern of movements of peoples; in the eastern Mediterranean several of the groups, many Indo-European, are amalgamated and known to us as the Peoples of the Sea (a name drawn from the Egyptian inscriptions, cf. Oren 2000). These developments led to the total collapse of the Hittite Empire, the Egyptian abandonment of their colonies, and the Assyrian withdrawal from the Levantine coast.

Significantly, the Minoans had dominated trade in the Aegean before the Late Bronze Age and the Mycenaean expansion; the earliest texts at Miletus (on the Anatolian coast) are Minoan Linear A, and it would appear that there was also a Minoan palace at Miletus (J. L. Davis 2008: 199). Thus the Mycenaeans apparently moved into the Minoan world from the north when approaching Crete and from the west when approaching the Anatolian coast which had also been previously dominated by the Minoans. When dislodging the Minoans, the Mycenaeans came into conflict with the Hittites who had been expanding into Syria until halted by the Egyptians and Assyrians.

The question of languages is also related to the content of the texts and the means of communication. I would argue that the texts as preserved represent whatever discourse there was in the society, that is, that economic activities were carefully tracked in written form. By contrast, I would contend that religion was largely conveyed through images and practices without accompanying texts in the sense of liturgies or hymns (let alone myths). As noted, one can read a certain amount from the images presented here, but one cannot get at the “meanings” which are usually assumed to lie in the written texts.

What should be particularly striking for students of religion is the fact that complicated narrative-type iconography with scenes does not appear anywhere in the world until after the appearance of the states with writing systems in the Near East. Since then such imagery has appeared in societies with little or nothing in the way of writing traditions.

Likewise, the fact that a single basic libation formula is preserved from the Minoan - but not the Mycenaean - world should be taken at face value. The only clear elements preserved in this genre of Minoan text name the deity and the place and perhaps the donor (Younger & Rehak 2008: 176-7). Such information does not do anything except confirm a religious practice which could be interpreted from the archaeological material alone: there is no hint of a coherent body of thought behind the practice. Although it is correctly observed that the principle of making offerings implies that one performs actions for the gods so that the gods might respond in kind, even this simple thought is not actually recognizably expressed in any of the known texts from the Bronze Age Aegean. Yet precisely such simple expressions with such specifications are routine in the contemporary Near East, where narrative myths only gradually developed long after the iconography had outpaced the economic texts and religious formulae. Coherent narratives took time to develop.

Furthermore, Shelmerdine (2008: 11-14) stresses that there is substantially more evidence for literacy and widespread use of writing-media in the Minoan than in the Mycenaean world. Indeed, Shelmerdine (ibid.: 14) stresses that “no evidence suggests” that the Mycenaeans “used parchment as the Minoans did”. By contrast, what we have from Homer seems to give a garbled image of historical memories of the turmoil at the end of the Late Bronze Age - and certainly nothing that takes us back much earlier. Only later, with Hesiod, do we have evidence that the Greeks incorporated Near Eastern thought into cosmogonies.

Given the fact that the Mycenaean material seems to reflect an even less sophisticated society than the Minoan, I would argue that the more elaborate forms of religious thought only emerged during the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Mycenae. Ventris and Chadwick (1956: 107-8) allow that there may have been oral traditions but do not contend that literacy was widespread or that any poetry was written down. Yet the later Greek traditions do not seem to imply the conservation of memories going back to before the Mycenaeans. Lopez-Ruiz (2010) correctly notes that it was through the Phoenicians that the Greeks seem to have acquired the ancient Near Eastern conceptual basis of the cosmological system prevalent in classical Greece. However, she also suggests that the practices of cosmology and mythmaking were already present in the Late Bronze Age, for which there is no evidence.

On the other hand, however, Louden (2011) stresses not only links with the ancient Near East, but also the Old Testament. Although Louden (ibid.: 322) does suggest that the exchanges to which the Odyssey bears testimony could have occurred before 900 BCE, he does recognize that “much of Genesis clearly postdates the Odyssey”. Whether the Old Testament influenced Homer or Homer the Old Testament is immaterial. What is reasonable is to date the borrowings in an era when exchanges of this type were known to be taking place, that is, the first half of the first millennium BCE. I would thus argue with Dietrich (1974) that there is some considerable continuity in Mycenaean places of worship from the Bronze Age into the classical era, but against Dietrich and Lopez-Ruiz (2010) on the issue of the inheritance of myths from the Mycenaean era (where Dietrich consciously tried to follow Nilsson 1934).

To judge by their legacy, the Mycenaean Greeks were not active thinkers and not receptive to the contemporary development of religion in Egypt and the Levant. Their history, and especially the tales of the end of the Bronze Age, probably gave birth to the traditions about the Mycenaean world. The Mycenaeans themselves could hardly have had (or left) any real poetic legacy. Thus in my view, it was not the ancient Near Eastern conceptual systems that reached the Aegean in the second millennium BCE, but rather the fundamental building blocks of cult practice and iconography. The independent development of both cult and burial rituals will have culminated in elaborate systems of practice, but not necessarily systems of belief. The Minoans may have adopted the iconographic and administrative practices of the Near East, but their own approach to religion would appear to have been quite different, developing in a different direction: one which the Mycenaeans may have inherited and narrowed while enlarging it with their Indo-European heritage.

The implications are that the Mycenaean Greeks arrived in mainland Greece from the eastern Aegean, but originally entered the Aegean from the north, and came into contact with the Minoans who were already present in the Aegean and Crete. The Hittites probably came into Anatolia over the Caucasus at the same time as other Indo-Europeans arrived in India. A millennium later, at the end of the Bronze Age, the Peoples of the Sea likewise contributed to the mixing of the peoples in the eastern Mediterranean, many of these will have flowed out of the steppe.

Significantly, however, the Celtic archaeologist Vincent Megaw (pers. comm.) suggests that most cultural exchange did not take place across the steppe itself, but that instead the various streams flowed into the Mediterranean from east and west, and then again north-wards to Europe and Asia, so the concept of a Eurasian cultural domain should probably be abandoned. This interpretation accounts for many curious aspects of the variation, preservation and distribution of iconographic motifs across Eurasia. At the same time it would also explain why so much originality will be found in the eastern Mediterranean: it was the crucible where cultures and concepts collided, melted and crystallized.

It was in the eastern Mediterranean that the Levant and the Aegean met, and it was in the eastern Mediterranean that the dramatic events at the end of the Bronze Age took place. It was here that generations of new traders representing the new peoples will have developed new trade networks after the collapse of the great empires of the Bronze Age. The spirit of Greece arose in this era: there are no tales taking us back to an era before the Mycenaeans.

Thus Homer’s tales bear no historical relation to events, but are rather a reworking based on dim memories and imagination. But memories there were. The Hittite texts identify one of the contemporary fourteenth-century BCE kings of Troy as “Alaksandu”, the feminine form of which is preserved in the Linear B texts as A-re-ka-sa-da-ra (= Greek Αλεξάνδρα/Alexandra), which means that the Hittite texts probably identify an Αλέξανδρος/Alexandras/Alexander. This is the name of the prince whose behaviour unleashed the Trojan War (admittedly due to the wiles of Aphrodite) albeit two centuries later than the Hittite texts.

In this sense, one can date the origins of Greek mythology to the Dark Ages at the start of the first millennium BCE. The tales of the end of the Mycenaean world gave rise to this earliest European mythology. Curiously, the emergence of Israel owes its origins to the same era and the same political context, and the creation of the national identity is based on mythology founded on the same principle of forgotten events used to develop heroic tales based on the ruins in the landscape, while incorporating fragments of reworked Babylonian myth.

Regardless of the debate, one neglected point is that the classical Greek and Mycenaean traditions seem to include aspects of the Indo-European tradition which are typical of Hindu religion, such as the association of divinities with springs and groves, viewed as aesthetically pleasing and pleasant places where the divine might wish to linger (and not necessarily mere sources of water and wood: cf. e.g. Odyssey 5.59-76). Based on archaeological finds and descriptions by the authors of classical antiquity, parallels might be found among the Celtic and Germanic tribes as well. Thus the issues of migration and diffusion harbour many insights into shared philosophies which have been insufficiently stressed when dwelling on identities, continuity and regional interaction.