"And upon his (Agamemnon's) head he set his helmet with two horns and with bosses four, with horsehair crest, and terribly did the plume not from above. And he took two mighty spears, tipped with bronze; keen they were, and far from him into heaven shone the bronze, and thereat Athene and Hera thundered, doing honour to the king of Mycenae, rich in gold." - The Iliad
The city of Mycenae dates from the 2nd Millennium B.C., but the site itself (19 kilometers/12 miles inland from the Saronic Gulf, on a hill) has been inhabited since 5000 B.C. Its overall timeline dates from 1600 B.C. to approximately 1200 B.C. and from 1550 B.C. to 1200 B.C. Mycenae was the dominant civilization throughout the Aegean, having overtaken the Minoan civilization of Crete around 1400 B.C. , and records of its existence are found in Egyptian records circa 1400 B.C. Its success has given its name to this period, the Mycenean Age.
The city perished in the great Bronze Age collapse of 1200 B.C. to 1150 B.C. The city never recovered its former glory, passing into relative obscurity in the Classical Age, briefly reviving in the Hellenistic Age, and then slowly dwindling in the Roman Era.
Its most "famous" inhabitant was the king Agamemnon, the Commander in Chief of the Greeks in the Trojan War. The time of the Mycenean Age is the setting for Homer's Iliad, although the poem itself was written at least 400 years later.
Thinking of the effort to move such blocks. Those vids really give a good scan of the views at that location. Really enjoying your visit there TB.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nylon12! This was not as emotionally "engaging" in the sense that Delphi or Olympia or even Sparta was, but satisfying in the sense that this is something I have read about for years; seeing the actual thing itself was spectacular in that sense.
DeleteSo did the Greeks use slaves to move the blocks like their neighbors the Egyptians across the Mediterranean?
ReplyDeleteEd, I have looked and can find nothing on the construction.
DeleteOn the one hand, slave labor makes sense given the period. On the other hand, there is a fair amount of engineering there. Probably slave labor was used, but perhaps supplemented by actual ancient experts, engineers, and even possibly corvee labor. The wanax (The word we have in Mycenean Greek for "king") suggests an overking or "High King" (As in Celtic Ireland), who may have been able to gather a lot of labor from throughout his sphere of influence.
A fascinating place with a fascinating history. It looks like it has a very different feel to it than the other sites you've visited.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, it was very different. This harkens back to a very different period of Greece than the one we know as Classical Greece (say 510 B.C. to 323 B.C. the founding of the Athenian Democracy to the death of Alexander the Great) or even Ancient Greece (1200 B.C. to 600 A.D.), echoes of which we only hear whispers of in The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Greek Dark Ages after the fall of Mycenean Greece largely obscured it to their descendants, and even we know less that we maybe should - for example, we have examples of Mycenean Greek (the so called Linear B) which is a form of ancient Greek but uses a completely different alphabet and for which the records we have are largely administrative.
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