Linear A and BThe Bronze Age Aegean

The Mycenaeans

Greek speakers of the mainland from about 1600 BC, with palaces at Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes and Tiryns; by about 1450 BC Greek speakers ran Knossos too.

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While the palaces of Knossos and the Cretan Palaces flourished on Crete, a different culture grew on the mainland. We call its people the Mycenaeans, after Mycenae, the hilltop citadel in the Peloponnese where rich royal graves were found in the 1870s. They spoke Greek, the language that would later give us Homer, Plato and the New Testament.

Key idea

The Mycenaeans were Greek speakers of the mainland in the Late Bronze Age, from about 1600 BC. They built palace states at Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes, Tiryns and elsewhere, and by about 1450 BC Greek speakers also ran Knossos on Crete. Their records are in Linear B.
Mainland Greece, with the places where Linear B has been found.

Minoans and Mycenaeans: not the same people

Two cultures that traded, borrowed and, at Knossos, met.
MinoansMycenaeans
HomelandCreteMainland Greece
LanguageUnknown, not Greek as far as we can tellGreek
ScriptCretan hieroglyphs, then Linear ALinear B
Palace ageAbout 1900 to 1450 BCAbout 1400 to 1200 BC
StrongholdsMostly unwalled palaces and townsFortified citadels with huge stone walls

The Mycenaeans learned a great deal from Crete: styles of painting, crafts and, above all, writing. They took the Minoan script, Linear A, and adapted it to write Greek. The result was Linear B. After the destructions on Crete around 1450 BC, Knossos itself was run by Greek speakers, and its huge archive of tablets is in Linear B. How that came about, by conquest or by some other road, is still debated.

Why it works

Why are we sure the Mycenaeans spoke Greek? Because their tablets, read with the values Michael Ventris worked out in 1952, give Greek words: ti-ri-po (tripod), ka-ko (bronze), wa-na-ka (king). The same values turn thousands of words into Greek, which chance cannot do. You will follow that story in The Breakthrough: Cretan Place Names.

Common mistake

Treating Minoans and Mycenaeans as one people, or treating the Mycenaeans as Homer's heroes exactly as the poems tell them. They were two cultures with different languages. And Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were composed centuries after the palaces fell; they remember some old things, like boar's-tusk helmets, but they are poems, not records. Check yourself: ask whether a "fact" comes from a tablet or a dig, or from a poem written much later.

The palace states

Each Mycenaean palace ruled its own region. Pylos ran the southwest Peloponnese; Thebes ruled part of Boeotia; Mycenae and Tiryns stood close together in the Argolid. Their tablets name a ruler, the wa-na-ka, and officials below him (see The Wanax and the Lawagetas). The palaces kept careful accounts of flocks, land, workers, bronze and offerings until their fall around 1200 BC.

The Late Minoan and Mycenaean periods, the Mycenaean palaces, and the spans of Linear A and Linear B.

Worked example: Whose script?

Tablets from Thebes are written in Linear B. Which people kept them, and in what language?
  1. Thebes is on the mainland, a Mycenaean palace.
  2. Linear B writes Greek.

Answer: Mycenaean officials, in Greek.

Worked example: Why Linear B at Knossos?

Knossos is on Crete, the Minoan homeland. Why are most of its tablets in Linear B, not Linear A?
  1. Linear B writes Greek, the Mycenaeans' language.
  2. After the destructions around 1450 BC, Knossos was run by Greek speakers.
  3. Their officials kept the records in their own language, using the script adapted from Linear A.

Answer: Because Greek speakers ran Knossos in its later phase.

Practice

Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 2 XP.

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Sources and further reading

@teddyrookbook GitHub