The Kingdom of Mycenae: A Great Kingdom in the Late Bronze Age Aegean

185 Pages·2016·4.04 MB·English

by  Kelder J.M.

THE KINGDOM OF MYCENAE
To my parents and my brother
The Kingdom of Mycenae
A Great Kingdom
in the Late Bronze Age Aegean
by
Jorrit M. Kelder
CDL Press
Bethesda, Maryland
2010
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kelder, Jorrit M.
The kingdom of Mycenae : a great kingdom in the late Bronze Age
Aegean / by Jorrit M. Kelder.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-934309-27-8
1. Mycenae (Extinct city) 2. Aegean Sea Region--Antiquities. 3. Bronze
age--Aegean Sea Region. 4. Historic sites--Aegean Sea Region. 5.
Excavations (Archaeology)--Aegean Sea Region. 6. Aegean Sea Region--
History, Local. 7. Aegean Sea Region--History. I. Title.
DF221.M9K45 2010
938'.01--dc22
2010000179
© 2010. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publisher, CDL Press.
ISBN 978-1934309-278
— CONTENTS —
List of Maps vi
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue viii
Introduction 1
The Textual Evidence 7
The Linear B Tablets 1
Ahhiyawa and Western Anatolia 21
The Egyptian Perception 35
Iconography 40
The Mycenaean World according to the Texts 44
The Archaeological Evidence 49
Mycenaean Artefacts on the Anatolian West Coast 49
Ahhiyawa in Western Anatolia 61
Mycenaean Artefacts in Egypt 62
Tanaju, the Kingdom of Mycenae and Ahhiyawa 85
Search for the Heartland 85
Thebes or Mycenae? 88
Archaeology of Empire 99
Archaeology of the Mycenaean Empire 107
Synthesis: The Reconstruction of a Great Kingdom 119
Appendix 121
Sites in Western Anatolia 121
Table 1: Chronological Overview 137
Table 2: Trojan Chronology 139
Table 3: Sites in Western Anatolia with Mycenaean Pottery 140
Table 4: Mycenaean Pottery at the Site of El Amarna /
Akhetaten, Egypt 141
References 147
Index 169
— v —
— LIST OF MAPS —
Map 1: The Major States in the Late Bronze Age Eastern
Mediterranean 4
Map 2: Mycenaean Palatial States 5
Map 3: A Reconstruction of the Pylian Kingdom
according to the Linear B Texts 10
Map 4: Western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age 22
Map 5: Mycenaean Finds in Western Anatolia 51
Map 6: Ahhiyawan Activity in Western Anatolia 53
Map 7: The Eastern Mediterranean 60
Map 8: New Kingdom Egypt 65
Map 9: The Site of El-Amarna 66
— vi —
— ACKNOWLEDGMENTS —
This author owes a great debt to several persons and institutions.
Financial support for research in Egypt and Greece was provided by the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the Alexander S.
Onassis Foundation.
This work could not have been written without the continual
encouragement of Bert van der Spek and Frans Wiggermann, my
teachers at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. And I would like to
thank Calie Sharman, Matthew Haysom, and Frans Wiggermann for
their proofreading of the original manuscript of this work.
Much of this study was written in Athens, in the library of the
Netherlands Institute at Athens, and in the library of the British School
at Athens. I am indebted to the librarians and staff of those institutions,
particularly to Mrs. Janta van Lienden (NIA) and Amalia Kakissis (BSA).
Many friends and colleagues have encouraged me and improved
this work with their frank comments. I am indebted to Diederik
Burgersdijk, Jan Paul Crielaard, Floris van den Eijnde, Petra Goedege-
buure, Willem van Haarlem, Matthew Haysom, Myrte Jansen, Jacke
Phillips, Willemijn Waal, Fred Woudhuizen, and Gert Jan van
Wijngaarden.
Amsterdam 2009
— vii —
— PROLOGUE —
The study at hand presents a new evaluation of the data and our
understanding of the political landscape in Greece during the Late
Bronze Age, especially during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries
BC. Over the last several years there has been a flood of new publica-
tions on this topic, in popular magazines, monographs, and scholarly
publications. It seemed time to bring together the various different
views and to evaluate them. During this effort, I increasingly came to
see the Mycenaean world as a unified state, a concept that, as a result of
my research, has become the main argument of this work. My thesis is
the existence of a large territorial entity covering most of the Greek
mainland, the isles in the Aegean, and the center on the Anatolian west
coast that was later known as Miletus. This entity was known as
Ahhiyawa to the Hittites and as Tanaju to the Egyptians, and Mycenae,
its capital, was its focus of economic, political, and ritual life.
In the pages below, I will deal with contemporary scholarship, but
before that I should perhaps provide an overview of earlier scholarship.
As seems to be customary in this field, I begin with the very man that is
generally considered to have been the “father” of the study of Aegean
prehistory, Heinrich Schliemann.
Schliemann’s excavations at Hissarlık brought him fame with the
general public and, certainly at the end of his life, recognition by most
of his fellow colleagues in the field of archaeology and philology.
Notwithstanding the many objections to the man, his methods and his
interpretations, Schliemann brought to life a society that was far older
than the known Classical Greek world.
Before Schliemann, the Mycenaean world could be studied only by
reading the Classical texts (mainly Homer), which had, essentially since
Antiquity, been considered to be a more or less accurate reflection of
the Greek world in the Late Bronze Age. It was not until the late
— viii —
PROLOGUE ix
eighteenth century that it was felt necessary to check the reality of the
Homeric epic and question whether The Iliad was largely, or even
wholly, fictional. From these questions sprang two “groups” of scholar-
ship, which Joachim Latacz calls the “Positivisten” (those who believed
that at least the essence, Grundtatbestände, of the Homeric stories
reflected Bronze Age reality) and the “Fiktionalisten” (those who
believed that even the essence of the stories was fictional). I use the
word “believed” deliberately, as both opinions at that time were based
on nothing but conviction. It is worthwhile to quote here a protagonist
from each conviction: first, the fictionalist Rückert, who argued that
the Homeric tales were composed as a justification for the seizure of the
Troad by Aeolic settlers in the eighth century BC:
Die Sage, die sich später an den ungeheuren kyklopischen Trümmern
Ilions und den hohen Grabhügeln am Gestade des Hellesponts empor-
rankte, schiebt ihn [the Aeolic seizure of the Troad] weit in die my-
thische Zeit zurück und lässt die Mythischen Ahnherren der Achäer,
die Aeakiden und Pelopiden, ihren Nachkommen die Ansprüche auf
jenes schöne Land erkämpfen...
Second, the positivist Welcker, who argued that a story as grand as The
Iliad could not possibly have been the product of imagination or the
need to justify the seizure of new lands:
Die Sänger der Aeolischen Kolonisten mussten Taten von diesen, etwa
die Eroberung einer Stadt, im Zusammenhang der Zeitverhältnisse
sowohl in Griechenland als in Troas, darstellen und konnten dabei
[durchaus] eine frühere Besitznahme durch Achilleus und unter
Agamemnon erdichten, um durch diesen Vorgang das Recht der Enkel
noch mehr hervorzugeben, der erworbenen Heimat ein höheres Alter
zu geben. Aber etwas Gedichtetes und Früheres von solchem Umfang
und Zusammenhang an die Stelle von etwas Wirklichem und Späterem
das doch selbst gross und denkwürdig war, zu setzen, alle Helden und
deren Taten und Geschicke gänzlich fallen zu lassen und völlig
verschiedene zu erfinden, [das] konnte Niemanden einfallen…
The excavations of Schliemann changed this discussion. Schlie-
mann’s uncovering of a powerful Bronze Age settlement at the site of
what, at least in later Classical times, was known as Ilion (even if his
initial identification of the second stratigraphic layer at that site as the
“Homeric Troy” was utterly wrong), as well as his discoveries at
Mycenae, Tiryns, and Orchomenos, showed that the world described
in the Homeric epics was remarkably reminiscent of Bronze Age reality.
Many scholars took this as evidence that the Homeric songs were