.
If you would like to learn more about Mycenaean Athens, the Bronze Age Collapse, and the ensuing dark age, here are just a few suggestions to get you started:
Books:
Nezameddin Faghih and Ali Hussein Samadi, eds., Institutional Inertia: Theory and Evidence, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2024.
Robin Osborne, The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, Vol. II: Athens and Attica, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Ian Rutherford, Hittite Texts and Greek Religion: Contact, Interaction, and Comparison, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Guy D. Middleton, ed., Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean, Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020. (A variety of different interpretations of the latest evidence.)
Eirini M. Dimitriadou, Early Athens: Settlements and Cemeteries in the Submycenaean, Geometric, and Archaic Periods, Los Angeles: UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2019.
Alexandros Mazarakis Ainian, Alexandria Alexandridou, and Xenia Charalambidou, eds., Regional Stories towards a New Perception of the Early Greek World, Volos: University of Thessaly Press, 2017.
Esther Eidenow and Julia Kindt, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Barbara A. Olsen, Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos, New York: Routledge, 2014.
Jonathan M. Hall, A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE, Malden: Blackwell, 2007.
Jeremy McInerney, The Folds of Parnassos: Land and Ethnicity in Ancient Phokis, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Ancient Greek Laws: A Sourcebook, London, Routledge, 1998.
Susan Langdon, New Light on a Dark Age: Exploring the Culture of Geometric Greece, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
Paul Rehak, ed., The Role of the Ruler in the Prehistoric Aegean: Proceedings of a Panel Discussion Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America with Additions, Liège: Université de Liège, 1995.
Chester G. Starr, The Birth of Athenian Democracy: The Assembly in the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Articles:
Graham Braun, “Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Textual Evidence,” The Ascendant Historian, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2020): 6-19.
Aynur-Michèle-Sara Karatas, “Key-Bearers of Greek Temples: The Temple Key as a Symbol of Priestly Authority,” Mythos: Rivista di Storia delle Religioni, Vol. 13 (2019): 1-48.
Cécile Boëlle-Weber, “I-Je-Re-Ja, Ka-Ra-Wi-Po-Ro, and Others: Women in Mycenaean Religion,” in Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa, eds., Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, New York: Routledge, 2016.
Brandon L. Drake, “The Influence of Climatic Change on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Greek Dark Ages,” Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 39, No. 6 (June 2012): 1862-1870.
Martin Finné, Karin Holmgren, Chuan-Chou Shen, Hsun-Ming Hu, Meighan Boyd, and Sharon Stocker, “Late Bronze Age Climate Change and the Destruction of the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor at Pylos,” PLoS One, Vol. 12, No. 12 (December 2017): 1-18.
P. Petrakis, “Writing the Wanax: Spelling Peculiarities of Linear B wa-na-ka and Their Possible Implications,” Minos: Revista de Filología Egea, Vol. 39 (2016): 61-158.
Florian Ruppenstein, “The End of the Bronze Age in Attica and the Origin of the Polis of Athens,” in Nikolas Papadimitriou et al., eds., Athens and Attica in Prehistory: Proceedings of the International Conference, Athens, 27-31 May 2015, Archaeopress, 2015.
Manuel Regueiro y González-Barros, Michael Stamatakis, and Konstantinos Laskaridis, “The Geology of the Acropolis (Athens, Greece),” European Geologist, No. 38 (November 2014): 45-52.
Jonathan M. Hall, “The Rise of State Action in the Archaic Age,” in Hans Beck, ed., A Companion to Ancient Greek Government, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Barbara Tsakirgis, “Fire and Smoke: Hearths, Braziers, and Chimneys in the Greek House,” British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 15 (2007): 225-231.
Christina Aamodt, “Priests and Priestesses in Mycenaean Greece,” Ph.D. diss., U. Nottingham, 2006.
Stavroula Nikoloudis, “The ra-wa-ke-ta, Ministerial Authority, and Mycenaean Cultural Identity,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 2005.
Kevin T. Glowacki, “The Acropolis of Athens Before 566 B.C.,” in Kim J. Hartswick and Mary C. Sturgeon, eds., ΣΤΕΦΑΝΟΣ: Studies in Honor of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998.
Feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments!
A great civilization died of climate change because the institutions kept doing what they always did. Thank the gods that never happens in our time.
Those who fail to learn from history …
Good farmland can be a bad thing. (Egypt from this time period agrees with me, even though they managed to sorta keep the lights on during all this.)
As a bit of class discussion – if unburdened by tradition and inertia, what could the institutions have done to forestall, mitigate or even benefit from the changes in the climate?
Well, either they invent better civil engineering, or they order the population to spread out into empty areas to reduce the water load on any given acre of land, or they just start a big enough war to delete a neighboring city, and then claim it’s water rights as their own.
Or MAYBE something to do with factory-hunting or factory-fishing? might be worth a try.
Nice shot at the Washington Post.
I’ve read conflicting takes on the ‘Bronze Age Collapse.’ The latest I read before this page was rather that it was just a shuffling of norms over a few decades, and that having a dozen cities across 2000 miles have collapses in that time wasn’t that weird. It just looks like a lot when we narratively link it all together.
Can I ask some of your sources?
I’m presuming you meant to ask me. If you look just below the post, you should see a pull-down for further reading that will provide cites to a bunch of books and articles I found useful. Let me know if it’s not working on your device, I’ve been slowly adding these to various posts, and plan to have at least one for every topic that’s covered. And I’m going to try to add them as I go from here on. But it’s kinda pointless if it’s not working on people’s computers/phones/whatnot.
Frankly, I was expecting a lot more pushback on this one. What scholarship there was on this had been all over the place for a while, and popularized histories love to make the Bronze Age Collapse seem like a big mystery. But as with so much else, cross-disciplinary studies in the past couple of decades have made much clear that had been hazy, and undermined much that had been received wisdom.
For example, the Mycenaeans, Hittites, and other civilizations of the late Bronze Age Aegean kept really good records of their internal governmental doings, and the various kinds corresponded with each other on the regular about what was going on, in real time. And not all of those records were destroyed. When you piece together their contemporary accounts, along with modern rigorous archaeology, you get a very clear picture of governments that kept on doing what they were doing right up until all of a sudden they weren’t. They were still recording their daily activities, sending official envoys and traders literally right up to the flames. And it happened to everyone, everywhere, all at once. (Around either 1200 or 1190, depending on who you ask. 1200 is more usual, so I went with that one. Either way, it was sudden.)
It wasn’t caused by a massive invasion of Indo-European charioteers or mysterious Sea Peoples. That all came after the collapse, not before. The early raiding was very like the Vikings, with boatloads of Aegean traders opportunistically shifting to piracy and beachhead assaults on their former trading partners, once there was no organized resistance. And those raids mostly focused on the wealthier towns of the Levant, who still actually had stuff worth grabbing. As for the Sea Peoples, there was nothing mysterious about them—they were mostly dispossessed people from the Mycenaean Greek mainland and islands. Not raiders, but common folks fleeing from the destruction of their cities. Definitely common folks, too, the stuff they brought with them was the most basic stuff of farmers looking for a new place to settle. The Egyptians had to fight off (IIRC, I’m going off the top of my head here) a couple boatloads that got pushy, and that’s where the idea of them being a wave of mysterious raiders comes from, but when you look at the names the Egyptians used for them they were obviously Mycenaeans from the islands. What the Sea Peoples really did wasn’t to try to invade anywhere by force, but instead they scattered all over the place looking to re-settle and assimilate into distant communities that hadn’t suffered as much. (Few tried to flee from one famine to another.) And for the most part, they succeeded: they moved abroad and assimilated into the communities they found.
Then again, I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. Pushback is not just welcome here, it’s desired! If I got stuff wrong, let me know!
I don’t feel qualified enough to provide “pushback” on this subject, but I do feel compelled to say something.
I find it fascinating how, just 23 years ago, I was standing in the ruins of Mycenae hearing a postdoc speak on this very subject for over an hour, and his long-story-short was “Sea people led to the collapse, because that’s all we have evidence of.” And today, over the course of 23 years, we’ve constructed a very different narrative from the same archeological evidence that existed 23 years ago.
Amazing how the same evidence can tell far different stories, depending on the storyteller.
And it’s amazing how fast the consensus can shift, too!
However, I must add that just in the past 13 years, our understanding of a lot of historical and archaeological evidence has been rocked by advances in (and simply listening to) knowledge in other disciplines.
“Washington Post” ?
If you mean the picture of people in Mycenean garments in a 21st century office. That seems to be a shot at contemporary society in general, not a specific newspaper.
The Washington Post’s slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Is something wrong with the “reply” function? it seems like I can’t reply to any comment where someone else has already replied first. and I can’t reply to replies.
Thanks for the heads-up. Something must have updated in WordPress for no good reason? It looks like, when I click “reply” to a comment, I have to scroll down to the bottom to find the new reply box. That is just stupid. Looks like I’ll be diving into the CSS and javascript and god knows what else tonight to see wtf just happened, and try to put it back the way it was.
EDIT: Yeah, it was WordPress’s “Jetpack” plugin that screwed it up. I’ve disabled it for the time being until I can figure out a fix.
That isn’t intentional? In that case, I have to point out that on my devices, the comment box is still at the bottom of the comments section and not beneath the comment I am replying to.
When you click “reply,” does it at least jump to the comment box? I hate when updates undermine the code I’d set up that already worked the way I wanted it to.
Yes, that thankfully works.
Would you be willing to share some links to the sources you’re drawing from?
I have been reading this comic for a while. I have found myself relying on the parts about neuroscience and memory. I would like to read more deeply and check that I’ve not misled myself in my interpretation.
There should already be a pull-down for further reading just below the post. Let me know if it’s not working on your device, I have only tested the code on my own. (I’ve added “further reading” bits to several other posts, and am slowly working my way through.)
I’m also slowly adding pull-down transcripts to all the pages, to make them more accessible for those with vision challenges or who want to machine-translate. Lord what I wouldn’t give to just add a wiki section at the bottom of each page where I could crowdsource the transcriptions to my (astonishingly brilliant and good-looking) readers.
I for one appreciate the earworm. I wonder how the Mycenaean’s would feel about the proposition that that which doesn’t kill one can only make one stronger?
Flipside of that saying is how there are plenty of things which don’t make you stronger, and continuing to chase those sunk costs will eventually get you killed.
Nathan, you alive there buddy?
Seconding this message. I hope your studies of history are going well, and I hope to hear again from you soon.
I am beginning to wonder – his last post on facebook was in June.
Checking in here as well (mid-November)
Just adding to the check-in. It is now January 5, 2025. Between X, Bluesky, Facebook, and Patreon, Nathan’s most recent post appears to be on Facebook on December 9, 2024. Instagram won’t show me anything without an account so I don’t know if there is something more recent there.
Hopefully nothing bad has happened to the guy.