The End of Everything

[This information is adapted from Prof. J. Rutter's materials, on-line @ Dartmouth]

The areas suffering the violent destruction of major administrative centers in the late LH IIIB period and massive depopulation in the subsequent LH IIIC phase lie along a roughly north-south axis (Boeotia, western Attica, Corinthia, Argolid, Messenia, Laconia). Population influxes, where these have been detected, are in evidence both west (Achaea, Ionian Islands) and east (eastern Attica, Cyprus) of this major north-south axis and have also been claimed further south on Crete. It is, however, too early to establish coherent patterns with any confidence from the limited amount of data currently available. Above all, more information is needed on the course of events in Thessaly and Macedonia at this time. ... Evidence from stratified settlement sites occupied during this period in such areas as Achaea, the Ionian islands, and eastern Attica is also highly desirable. Full publication of the long LH IIIC sequence at Lefkandi in Euboea will be very informative, but this site is unlikely to provide much useful information on the transition from LH IIIB to LH IIIC in this area.

Questions to consider

How stable was Mycenaean palatial civilization in the first place? Was it flexible enough to withstand substantial "shocks"?

Were there certain "shocks" which affected Mycenaean palatial civilization as a whole? Were these in every case ultimately responsible for the destruction of individual palatial centers or were such destructions often the final links in highly localized chains of causation?

Why were the palaces never rebuilt?

Why were large areas of the Peloponnese, including some of the richest agricultural zones in southern Greece, so thoroughly depopulated during the century following the destruction of the palaces? What percentages of the population which disappeared died in Greece of famine and disease or in battle, and what percentage migrated south to Crete, east to Cyprus, or west to Achaea and the Ionian islands?

A SELECTION OF THEORIES on the COLLAPSE

Andronikos (1954)

The collapse came about as the result of extreme social unrest within Mycenaean society and in the form of revolts of the peasantry against the ruling class.

Comment

While it is possible to believe in social revolutions at isolated sites such as Mycenae or Tiryns or even within a province containing one or more such kingdoms (e.g. the Argolid or Messenia), it is far more difficult to believe that more or less simultaneous revolutions took place throughout most of the Peloponnese as well as central Greece. In any event, this Neo-Marxist theory of internal social revolution as a the cause of the Mycenaean collapse fails to explain the ensuing widespread depopulation of large and fertile areas such as Messenia and Laconia.

Vermeule (1960)

"This disruption of commerce in the late 13th century may have been more disastrous for Greece than direct invasions and this followed inevitably on the coming of the Sea Peoples whose hunt for land and subsistence threw the Aegean into chaos." The theory posits that the Sea Peoples crippled Mycenaean commerce by severing the normal trans-Aegean trade routes. Since the palaces, according to this view, depended on external trading contacts for their continued existence, the widespread elimination of such commerce led directly to the destruction of the palaces, although at whose hands is uncertain and perhaps ultimately not very important.

Comment

The activities of the Sea Peoples are securely attested only through Egyptian sources which mention battles against them on the frontiers of Egypt fought by the pharoahs Merenptah and Ramesses III at the end of the 13th and early in the 12th centuries respectively. The Egyptian sources specify that these raiders had also caused havoc in the Levant, Cyprus, and Anatolia. Most scholars are therefore willing to see in them the destroyers of such prominent Levantine city-states as Ugarit. However, there is no sound evidence for their presence as far north and west as the Aegean. In fact, the limited amount of archaeological evidence available from the central and southeastern Aegean islands (Naxos, Melos, Rhodes, Kos) in the century ca. 1250-1150 B.C. suggests that these areas survived the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces on the Greek Mainland relatively unscathed. Only at the site of Koukounaries in northern Paros has a major early LH IIIC destruction level of a flourishing Cycladic settlement been documented. Vermeule's theory is a better response to the question of why the palaces were not rebuilt than it is to that of who destroyed them and why.

Desborough (1964)

Desborough cautiously suggested the possibility of an invasion by land from the north, although at the time he wrote he was acutely conscious of the fact that there was virtually no evidence, except for the destruction levels and widespread abandonments themselves, for the presence of such invaders. He did point out that a few new classes of bronze objects, the fibula [or safety-pins] and the cut-and-thrust sword of the so-called "Naue II" type, make their first appearance in the Mycenaean world ca. 1200 B.C. However, these objects always appear in "good Mycenaean" contexts such as chamber tombs with otherwise standard Mycenaean funeral assemblages. They consequently do not appear to have belonged exclusively to an intrusive, non-Mycenaean population element. As a result, Snodgrass (1974) concluded that objects of these kinds need not be taken as evidence of the invasion or immigration of northern peoples from the western Danube basin into the Aegean (as argued by Grumach, Milojcic, and Gimbutas, among others) because they could be considered simply as "good ideas" which "caught on" in the Aegean area at much the same time as similar objects first appeared in northern Italy and in the early Urnfield cemeteries of the Danube basin. All such objects, Snodgrass argued, could have been imported initially and locally copied thereafter by peoples indigenous to the areas in question, rather than necessarily being the belongings of invaders.

Mylonas (1966)

Mylonas felt that too much emphasis had been placed on the supposed contemporaneity of the palatial destructions. In his view, specialists had been too busy looking for a single cause for what were a large number of distinct localized destructions. That individual Mycenaean centers were destroyed by quite different people for a variety of distinct reasons is supported by the destruction sagas associated with a number of these centers in the body of Greek myth: Thebes and the Epigonoi, the sons of the more famous "Seven against Thebes", a group of Peloponnesian heroes who had themselves failed, under the leadership of the Theban renegade Polyneices and the Argive king Adrastus, to sack Thebes a generation earlier; Mycenae and the House of Atreus which destroyed itself in a series of intrafamilial squabbles (Atreus vs. Thyestes, Aegisthos and Clytemnestra vs. Agamemnon, Orestes vs. Aegisthos and Clytemnestra); etc. Documentary evidence of a different sort, contemporary Linear B tablets as opposed to later mythological tales, appears to show that Pylos may have been destroyed in a surprise piratic raid by the people(s) against whom the "watchers-by-the-sea" mentioned in the O-KA tablets had been posted.

Comment

Mylonas' approach fails to take sufficient cognizance of the remarkable coincidence of the complete collapse of palatial civilization on the Greek Mainland within a relatively short period of time, arguably no more than a generation at most in the Peloponnese. It is unclear from his explanation why the palaces should never have been rebuilt. The myths concerned with the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese and other disturbances at this approximate time are summarized by Buck (1969).

Carpenter (1966)

Carpenter suggested that in the years around 1200 B.C., that is, around the end of the LH IIIB period, there was an extended drought which disrupted agriculture in the areas of Crete, the southern Peloponnese, Boeotia, Euboea, Phocis, and the Argolid but which did not particularly affect Attica, the northwest Peloponnese, Thessaly and the rest of northern Greece, or the Dodecanese (e.g. Rhodes, Kos, etc.). Since Carpenter was not a meteorologist, many scholars felt that he lacked the requisite expertise to substantiate his theory. In 1974, a group of meteorologists evaluated Carpenter's thesis from two points of view: (a) was a pattern of drought such as that postulated by Carpenter in fact possible? (b) did such a drought in fact occur ca. 1200 B.C.? In response to the first question, their answer was that the proposed pattern was indeed possible and had in fact occurred as recently as 1954-55. While in that particular instance the drought lasted for only one year, it was perfectly possible for such a drought pattern to persist for the longer period of time required by Carpenter's theory. In response to the second question, the meteorologists' response was less definite, for the simple reason that relatively few data presently exist from the Aegean which can be brought to bear on the problem in question. Most recently, studies by Kuniholm and his associates of tree-growth rings from Turkey suggest that there may have been a drought in central Anatolia at the time in question which may be connected with the collapse of the Hittite Empire ca. 1200 B.C.

Comment

This theory has the virtue of being a hypothesis for which objective tests can be quite easily devised. Further meteorological data concerning the climate of Greece in the 13th and 12th centuries may result in the partial or total confirmation of the postulated drought. The question as to who destroyed the palaces is not specifically addressed by this theory, although presumably it would have been the work of Mycenaeans seeking to gain access to the agricultural surpluses kept in palatial storerooms rather than that of non-Mycenaean outsiders.

Iakovides (1974)

The Mycenaean palatial economies were dependent on trade with Cyprus and the Levant. When the trade routes connecting Greece with these areas were cut as the result of the activities of the Sea Peoples, Mycenaean palatial civilization fell apart in a short space of time.

Comment

This theory, a slightly revised version of Vermeule's hypothesis of 1960, takes cognizance of the fact that the Sea Peoples' activities are only well documented in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean and therefore postulates a collapse of Mycenaean trading mechanisms at their eastern termini rather than within the Aegean. Like Vermeule's theory, Iakovides' thesis accounts for the disappearance of the Mycenaean palatial system after the destructions of ca. 1200 B.C. but fails to address the widepread depopulation of the Peloponnese in the LH IIIC period or to identify who actually destroyed the Mycenaean palaces. A decline in contacts between the Mycenaean Greek Mainland and both Cyprus and western Anatolia begins to be noticeable in the latter part of the LH IIIB period, a fact which suggests that the disruption of Mycenaean commercial activities with the east was a gradual and potentially rather drawn out process rather than the relatively sudden result of a small number of closely spaced events. The scarcity of raw materials, and of copper in particular, for specialized workers within the kingdom of Pylos is clear from Linear B texts found at that site. Although no comparable documentary evidence has been found at other Mycenaean centers, this shortage of imported raw materials and the breakdown in exchange networks which such a shortage implies is usually considered to have existed throughout the southern Aegean by the end of the 13th century B.C.

Rutter (1975, 1990), Walberg (1976), Deger-Jalkotzy (1977, 1983), Small (1990, 1997), Pilides (1994), Bankoff, Meyer, and Stefanovich (1996)

Rutter, following in the footsteps of E. French, identified a non-Mycenaean handmade and burnished class of pottery in early LH IIIC contexts at Korakou, Mycenae, Lefkandi, and a few other sites in central and southern Greece. Since this pottery was locally made, it constituted evidence for the presence of a non-Mycenaean population element within Mycenaean Greece in the period immediately following the destruction of the major Peloponnesian centers. This handmade and burnished pottery, in Rutter's view, had its closest parallels in the "Coarse Ware" of Troy VIIb1 and in the pottery of the Final Bronze Age Coslogeni culture of southeastern Rumania. Rutter therefore suggested that there might be a connection between the makers of this non-Mycenaean pottery and the destroyers of both Troy VIIa and of the Mycenaean centers in the Peloponnese.

Deger-Jalkotzy, publishing similar non-Mycenaean ceramics from early LH IIIC contexts at the coastal site of Aigeira in Achaea, argued that similar pottery was to be found not only in Troy and Rumania but also in Sicily and southern Italy. In all cases, this pottery had no local ancestry and was presumably evidence for intrusive population groups. Such groups were probably not large (i.e. not comparable in scale to the migrating tribes who contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.), but rather small bands of pirates, freebooters, and unemployed mercenaries. The original homeland of these groups, from which they filtered down into various areas of the Mediterranean by a number of different routes, was the central Danube. These warrior bands, comparable in terms of their activities and organization to the Vikings of the 7th to 10th centuries A.D., may indeed have constituted the nucleus of the raiders known later to the Egyptians as the Sea Peoples.

Comment

Despite the discovery of considerable amounts of handmade and burnished pottery at both Tiryns and the Menelaion since Rutter's and Deger-Jalkotzy's original publications, far too little of this pottery has yet been published for any sort of reliable estimate of its significance. Kilian has suggested that the closest parallels for this material come from northwest Greece (Epirus) and has maintained that the earliest examples of such pottery from Tiryns come from contexts immediately predating the major destruction at that site at the end of the LH IIIB period. It is also apparent from Tiryns that, at least at that site, the handmade and burnished pottery persisted in use throughout the LH IIIC period, while at Korakou and the Menelaion such material seems to be restricted to early LH IIIC levels. Moreover, at Tiryns standard Mycenaean shapes are imitated in the dark-surfaced, handmade and burnished fabrics. It thus appears that there is considerable local variability in the manner in which this intrusive class of ceramics manifests itself. Technologically comparable material has recently been identified at the sites of Kommos and Chania in Crete. That from Kommos dates from the LM IIIA2-B periods and has its closest parallels on Sardinia; that from Chania, on the other hand, appears to be later in date and has better parallels in southern Italy. In both cases, the pottery in question is imported rather than locally made and consequently need not represent resident pottery producers of Italian origin at the sites in question.

Perhaps most significantly, the pottery of this technologically inferior variety constitutes precisely the sort of material for which Desborough searched in vain to bolster his theory of northern invaders in 1964. Deger-Jalkotzy has connected the fibulae and "Naue II" cut-and-thrust swords identified long ago as evidence for northern intruders into the Mycenaean world at this time with the much humbler, dark-surfaced, handmade-and-burnished pottery and views all three artifactual classes as representative of a single phenomenon. But most authorities see no compelling reason to accept such a connection. The pottery has nevertheless often been categorized as "Barbarian Ware", or even "Dorian Ware", especially in German scholarship on the subject. The larger topic of Mycenaean contacts with central Europe at this time has been most recently summarized independently and with quite different conclusions by Harding (1984) and Bouzek (1985).

An alternative approach to the interpretation of this pottery, which may be best referred to in an abbreviated as well as neutral fashion by the term HMBW (= HandMade and Burnished Ware), has been to view it as the result of a new mode of production: due to the collapse of the palaces and the centralized industries which they supported, production at the household level by non-specialized, indeed relatively inexperienced personnnel was required for the first time in centuries (Walberg 1976, Small 1990). This approach, however, fails to take cognizance of two very important aspects of the available evidence: first, the typological peculiarities of HMBW in shape and decoration [e.g. the recurrence of non-Mycenaean shapes like the deep wide-mouthed jar with multiple lugs of three or four characteristic varieties interrupting a finger-impressed plastic cordon below the rim at a number of sites spread over a wide area including the Corinthia (Korakou), the Argolid (Mycenae and Tiryns), Laconia (the Menelaion), and even northwestern Anatolia (Troy)]; and second, the fact that standard wheelmade Mycenaean cooking and table wares continued to be produced in quantity throughout the Mycenaean period, thus showing that the long-established technological norms of indigenous ceramic production on the Greek Mainland continued in be operative with respect to the vast majority (probably 90% or even higher) of pottery being manufactured after the palatial collapse (Rutter 1990).

The most recent review of all HMBW material so far published has extended its distribution to Cyprus (Pilides 1994), where it seems to make its appearance at much the same time as Mycenaean refugees are aupposed to have colonized the island in substantial numbers at the beginning of the LH IIIC period (see above). An attractive recent suggestion for how HMBW ought to be interpreted has invoked the analogy of the creolized ceramic products of slave societies of the 16th-19th centuries A.D. in the Americas (Bankoff, Meyer, and Stefanovich 1996). Appropriately acknowledging the heterogeneous typology, retrograde technology, and undistinctive intrasite as well as intersite distribution of HMBW, this analogy suggests that this pottery represents an intrusive population element in the 12th century B.C. Aegean playing a subservient rather than dominant role in the climactic events of that age.

Winter (1977)

Winter has made the important point, on the basis of analogies with the 3rd century B.C. Galatian invasion of Anatolia and the 6th century A.D. Slavic invasion of Greece, both of them undisputed historical events, that invaders on a lower cultural level than the inhabitants of the area which they invade often do not leave behind any sign of their presence other than destruction levels and evidence for drastic depopulation. Even when they remain in the invaded area, as both the Galatians and the Slavs did, they are often not archaeologically detectable or observable since they may wholeheartedly adopt the existing material culture of the population which they have conquered.

Comment

In other words, regardless of whether the handmade and burnished pottery and the new bronze types have any significance as indicators of the identity of a group of invaders, the destruction levels and depopulation evident in Greece during the period ca. 1250-1150 B.C. are themselves sufficient evidence to sustain the theory of invasion from outside of Mycenaean Greece as a rationale for the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial system. This thesis has not found universal favor with archaeologists and historians, as responses to Winter's original article by Thomas (1978, 1980) show.

Betancourt (1976)

Betancourt has argued that the Mycenaean economy was so specialized that a short period of disruption of any kind, whether the result of internal social upheavals, invasion from outside, or a period of poor weather, would lead inevitably to the collapse of the major economic centers, the palaces, a phenomenon which would in turn cause the sort of internal chaos leading to the widespread depopulation of large areas of the Greek Mainland, even if they were agriculturally fertile and hence potentially productive.

Comment

Both Betancourt and Hutchinson (1977) focus their efforts on establishing how fragile the Mycenaean palatial economy was and hence address more the issue of why palatial civilization disappeared from Greece after 1200 B.C. than that of what the initial shock or shocks may have been which led to the destructions of the palaces in the first instance.

Drews (1993)

In a wide-ranging review of the relatively sudden demise of numerous kingdoms and empires throughout the eastern Mediterranean region in the later 13th and early 12th centuries B.C., Drews suggests that these collapses occurred as the result of a fundamental change in the nature of warfare in this period. In his view, what is at issue is the replacement of the massed chariotry that had been dominant on Near Eastern battlefields since the introduction of the horse-drawn chariot in the 18th-17th centuries B.C. by light-armed and highly mobile infantry who relied principally on the javelin as a weapon. The success of these new troops against chariot forces of the traditional type on 13th-century battlefields dealt a fatal blow to militaristic polities whose power had been based on chariots and on the socially and economically privileged warrior elite who manned them (e.g. the Hittite Empire, the Mycenaean kingdoms, the city states of coastal Syria and the Levant, the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, the Kassite kingdom of Babylon, etc.). Since the new mode of warfare entailed the abandonment of an entire social order based on the prominence of horse-drawn battle-cars, traditional forms of kingship were likewise either altogether scrapped or at the very least greatly modified.

Comment

The virtue of Drews' treatment of the Mycenaean collapse is that he places it in the context of a much larger series of military, economic, and political changes that affected all of the "civilized world" of western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age. But in identifying a single cause for a very complex and multifaceted combination of events that involved a very large area over a century or more of time, Drews has unquestionably been guilty of the same kind of oversimplification that characterizes all of the "single-answer" approaches to the widespread "systems collapse" in question. Liverani (1994) has provided a brief critique of Drews' approach from a Near Eastern perspective. From an Aegean point of view, what is surprising is how popular the chariot continues to be in post-palatial Mycenaean art of the 12th century B.C... In fact, rather than disappearing from the pictorial vocabulary of the LH IIIC vase painters who decorated the kraters ...chariots are not only as popular as they ever were, but are now more often explicitly connected with warfare through the warrior garb of their occupants than was the case in the palatial era. Since many specialists have difficulty imagining chariot-borne warriors playing any significant role on Aegean battlefields in the first place because of the region's highly irregular topography, there is understandably a good deal of skepticism in this particular part of the eastern Mediterranean as to the significance of the supposed passing of massed chariotry from the military scene.

Conclusions

The theories outlined above can be roughly categorized as follows:

Economic Factors: Vermeule, Iakovides, Betancourt.

Climatic Change: Carpenter.

Internal Social Upheaval: Andronikos, Mylonas.

Invasion from Outside the Aegean World: Desborough, Rutter, Winter, Deger-Jalkotzy.

Changes in the Nature of Warfare: Drews.

In fact, the relatively sudden, extensive, and thorough eradication of Mycenaean palatial civilization is likely to have been caused by a combination of factors. In any case, no one of the theories outlined above addresses all of the questions inherent in a reconstruction of the Mycenaean collapse.