UNTIL A CENTURY AGO historians accepted the distinction first made in a slightly different form by the Greeks themselves, between legendary Greece and historical Greece. It was not of course an absolute distinction; the Greek legends about the age of heroes, and in particular the poems of Homer, were thought by many to be a distorted reflection of a real past, from which it might in principle be possible to discover what had actually happened, even if no reconstruction had yet won general acceptance. What was needed was a basis of solid fact against which to determine both the time-scale and the comparative reality of the events related in heroic myth.
This basis has been provided by archaeology. From 1870 to 1890 Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant who left school at the age of fourteen and taught himself Greek in order to read Homer, excavated at Troy, at Mycenae, and at other sites in mainland Greece, in order to prove the reality of Homer’s Trojan War and the world of the Greek heroes. He discovered a great bronze age palace culture, centred on ‘Agamemnon’s palace’ at Mycenae; later archaeologists have added other palace sites in central and southern Greece, and have defined the limits of Mycenean influence as far as the Greek islands and Asia Minor. The age of heroes reflected the existence of a lost culture, which had lasted from about 1600 BC until the destruction of the main palace sites around 1200.
The excavations of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete from 1900 onwards revealed a still earlier non-Greek palace culture, with its zenith from about 2200 to 1450 BC; it was named Minoan, after the legendary king of Crete, the first lawgiver in Greece and judge in the underworld. The influence of Minoan civilization explained the rise of a palace culture in the comparatively backward area of mainland Greece; from about 1450 the Myceneans seem indeed to have taken control of Knossos itself. Thus the origins of the earliest civilizations in the land of Greece and the existence of a historical core to the Greek legends about the heroic age were established. But whereas Minoan culture was definitely non-Greek, the status of Mycenean culture was uncertain, until in 1952 a young English architect, Michael Ventris, deciphered the tablets from the destruction levels at Pylos on the mainland and at Mycenean Knossos. The syllabic script known as Linear B had been developed from the earlier still undeciphered Minoan Linear A; but the language it was used to record was shown by Ventris to be Greek, of a form closest to the most archaic elements in Greek previously known. For the first time it was shown that the history of Mycenean culture is both geographically and ethnically part of the history of Greece.
But this world of Mycenae is separate from the world of classical Greek civilization, both as a subject of study, in the way in which its history can be reconstructed, and also in reality. The Mycenean written records consist of lists of equipment and provisions stored in the palace, and relate to the particular year of destruction (the clay tablets survive only because they were accidentally baked in the fires which burnt the palaces). Moreover the limitations of the script make it unlikely that it was used for any other purpose: Mycenean culture was not properly literate. Thus the culture of the Mycenean world has to be reconstructed almost entirely from archaeology, in terms of its material remains. For if Greek myths have been vindicated as containing a historical basis by the discoveries of archaeology, they still cannot be used to supplement archaeology to any great extent. The studies of psychology, comparative mythology and anthropology, by men such as Freud, Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss, have as a common factor the basic assumption (which is surely correct) that myth is not history, but rather a means of ordering human experience related primarily to the preoccupations of the age that produces or preserves it: the social and psychological attitudes expressed in Greek myths about gods and heroes are those of the successive generations who shaped and reshaped them, from Homer and Hesiod onwards; and the hypothesis that the nature of Mycenean society could be reconstructed from myth or heroic poetry has been shown to be untenable, by the disparity between the evidence on social institutions provided by archaeology and the Linear B tablets, and that implied in the Greek legends.
The detailed reconstruction of the Mycenean world therefore rests on archaeology, and must in general be confined to its material culture; in this sense, to use a conventional distinction, it belongs to prehistory rather than to history. In contrast, the Greek world from the eighth century onwards is a fully historical world, in which the evidence of archaeology can be combined with the expression of the thoughts and feelings of contemporary individuals, to produce a comparatively detailed account, not only of what men did, but of why they did it, and of the pressures and limitations on their actions. The reason for this difference is the advent of literacy: rather than contrast prehistory with history, we should perhaps talk of the difference between our knowledge of non-literate and literate societies.
Again, in reality the civilization of Mycenae is fundamentally different from that of later Greece. It is an example of a phenomenon found elsewhere, when a warrior people falls under the influence of a more advanced civilization: the barbarian kingdoms of the early Byzantine world, such as the Ostrogoths in north Italy or the Vandals in north Africa, or later in the Middle Ages the Normans, offer obvious parallels. The world which influenced Mycenae was the world of Knossos, itself on the fringes of an area where the centralized palace economy and the oriental despotisms of Mesopotamia and Egypt had already flourished for some two thousand years. Mycenean civilization is linked far more to these cultures than to later developments in Greece.
The period from 1250 to 1150 was one of widespread destruction in the eastern Mediterranean. The Hittite Empire in Asia Minor collapsed about 1200; the resulting pressures caused movements of population which seriously disturbed Syria and Palestine, and which are recorded in Egyptian history in attempted invasions of Egypt itself by ‘the Peoples of the Sea’, who may have included groups of Achaeans or Mycenean Greeks in flight. In the Mycenean world itself, the destruction of Troy found in level VIIa, between 1250 and 1200, is generally agreed to be the historical basis of the Homeric Trojan War, and to represent the last major effort of the Myceneans. At almost the same time there are clear signs of preparations against attack in the settlements of the Greek Peloponnese. Then around 1200, Mycenae, Pylos and other centres were burned; and the surviving remnants of Mycenean culture were again attacked around 1150. The whole military and political organization of the palace economy disappeared, with its attendant skills in the fine arts and writing; most sites were deserted or only partially occupied; some were even given over to the dead. This was accompanied by emigration to outlying areas of the Mycenean world such as Cyprus, and widespread depopulation on the mainland. The archaeological evidence of a certain continuity in the debased style of sub-Mycenean pottery serves to demonstrate the level to which material culture had sunk.
The result of the collapse of Mycenean culture was a dark age, lasting for some three hundred years. Discontinuity with the past was virtually complete: later Greeks were unaware of almost all the important aspects of the world that they portrayed in heroic poetry, such as its social organization, its material culture and its system of writing. Even the Dark Age itself dropped out of sight: in his sketch of early Greece in book 1 of his history, Thucydides saw a gradual but continuous advance from the world of the Homeric heroes to his own day. Records of the past such as genealogies reached back only as far as about 900: in dim awareness of the resulting gap between their world and that of the heroes, the Greeks resorted to adding spurious names to the lists, and reckoning the average length of a generation at forty years instead of the more correct thirty years.
The Greek world from the eighth century onwards is a product, not of Mycenae, but of the Dark Age. Its darkness is the darkness of a primitive society with little material culture, and consequently one which has left little trace for the archaeologist. But in order to understand the society which emerged, it is necessary to know something of the preceding centuries. Three types of evidence can be used to reconstruct the outlines of Dark Age history.
The first is once again legend. These legends of course have to be treated with caution, in this case not only because folk tradition becomes distorted to fit the interests of later generations, but also because the