A note on the study of the Bronze Age Aegean

The study of the Bronze Age Aegean is overshadowed by two giants who worked in the decades around the beginning of the twentieth century CE: on the one hand, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) who excavated at Mycenae and Troy and, on the other, Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941) who excavated Knossos.

In terms of the intellectual impact, it is without doubt Sir Arthur who has had the far greater influence on the development of the discipline - and it must be stated that although he was working a century ago, he hit upon many ideas which are still valid, and devised terms and systems which are still used today.

He excavated the palace at Knossos, and in the course of analysing and publishing his material he devised the chronology of the Aegean, aside from making significant advances in the study of the religion and culture of Crete (Evans 1921-35).

One example of Evans’s contribution concerns the written materials from Crete. While working on his various projects, Evans studied virtually every type of inscription known from Crete - on seals, jars and other objects. At Knossos, Evans himself had found inscribed clay tablets. Although he realized that they treated the same things and used many of the same pictographic and cursive signs, Evans recognized that there were in fact systematic differences among the inscribed tablets and this allowed him to distinguish two different groups: one older (going back to the first palaces) and a later one (linked to the last centuries of the palace).

It is at this point that Michael Ventris (1922-56) enters the picture. His contribution was not archaeological. Using a purely logical and scientific methodology combined with extraordinary intellect and perseverance, he managed (almost single-handedly) to identify and decipher the language recorded in the texts of the Bronze Age Aegean script Evans designated as Linear B. A dozen years after Evans’s death, this effort (Chadwick 1958) established that the Greek language was used and spoken in Greece and the Aegean islands in the Bronze Age.

The decipherment completely changed the nature of the study of the Bronze Age Aegean and an entire sub-discipline based on the study of the texts has since emerged. However, writing was not an important part of Mycenaean culture. It was used only for administrative records covering short periods of time and the art seems to have disappeared from the Greek world at the end of the Bronze Age. The administrative records give us some idea of the economy, but the real surprise was that the texts contained personal names and archaeologists found themselves confronted with names which came right out of the Iliad - that work which marks the birth of European mythology.

Thus, when writing was reborn in Greece, its social role stood in stark contrast to the records of the Mycenaeans - but tales of the Mycenaeans now lay at the heart of the creative efforts of the later Greeks.

Although not historical, as it had been composed centuries after the events, Homer’s Iliad was written in Greek and describes incidents from the Trojan War which complement what is known from other sources (cf. Latacz 2004). Although many of the details in Homer and these later sources were invented or imaginatively enhanced, we can now say that Troy probably lay where Schliemann said it did (at Hisarhk at the Aegean end of the Dardanelles in modern Turkey) and that the conflict which led to the fall of Troy (probably ca. 1185 BCE) actually took place in the course of the wars at the end of the Bronze Age.

Thus the archaeology of the Bronze Age Mediterranean takes us back not only to the beginnings of European history, but also back to before even the beginnings of European myth. And forwards to the birth of modern archaeology and philology.