In the years around 1500 BC Crete experienced not just massive economic changes but very significant political changes. The arrival of a Greek dynasty on the island occurred around the time that many settlements such as Arkhanes were abandoned; Knossos alone survived among the great palaces, and one Minoan site after another was destroyed. Earthquakes and fires have been blamed; so too have invaders from Greece. Since no one really knows who was to blame, clever attempts have been made to integrate the explanations with one another, and to argue that the Greeks took advantage of chaos within Crete to seize charge; or perhaps the Cretans were in need of strong leaders who would take charge, and turned to the Greeks. Unarguably, though, Minoan Crete was drawn into the developing world of the Mycenaean Greeks. An area which had been of relatively minor importance in the trade networks of the Early and Middle Bronze Age now became the focus of political and possibly commercial power in the Aegean: the great centres of Mycenaean culture and power were a line of settlements along the edges of eastern Greece, and a little way inland, from Iolkos (Volos) in the north, through Orchomenos, Thebes, Mycenae, Tiryns, and down to Pylos in the south-west. Early signs of success were already visible in the early fifteenth century, when the kings of Mycenae were laid to rest in Grave Circle A (as it has come to be known), their faces covered by masks of hammered gold that seem to copy their bearded features, and which suggest an attempt to imitate the infinitely grander gold masks of the buried Pharaohs.1 Still, Mycenae ‘rich in gold’ retained its special role and reputation. By the twelfth century BC, if we are to believe the evidence of Homer’s ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (an archaic text incorporated in the Iliad), these statelets generally recognized as their leader the wanax or ruler of Mycenae.2
Descriptions of the Minoans merge imperceptibly with accounts of the Mycenaeans. In part this is because the imprint of Cretan art on that of the Greek mainland was so heavy; objects produced by the Mycenaeans, such as ceramics, only gradually acquired individuality as local potters tentatively developed their own shapes and designs. In part, too, the fuzzy boundary between Minoans and Mycenaeans is the result of the apparent Mycenaean conquest of Crete, and the occupation of Knossos by a Greek-speaking elite from the mainland; but even then the continuities are plain, and the writing system the Mycenaeans developed to record their Greek dialect was an adaptation of the Linear A syllabic system created in Minoan Crete – the Linear B script triumphantly deciphered by Ventris and Chadwick in the 1950s.3 At Knossos the Mycenaeans reconstituted, and at Pylos they developed, elaborate archives of clay tablets on which they recorded the tribute paid to their kings and gods by the subject population. Even in southern Greece, their religious cults were little different from those of the Minoans, to judge from the artefacts left behind: images on seals of goddesses and priests, a depiction on a cup and a panel of the sport or rite of bull-leaping (and even if these objects, though found in Greece, were really made in Crete, as some have argued, their presence in Greece reveals an interest in the bull rituals).4 The names of gods and goddesses worshipped in classical Greece often betray pre-Greek roots, and these deities can sometimes be identified in the written records of the Mycenaeans. Trade, too, shows continuities, as Greek and Cretan goods were ferried to Rhodes, Syria and Troy, but longer voyages were now made deeper into the Mediterranean, as far as Sicily and Italy.
What distinguished the Mycenaeans was their warlike character. The Mycenaeans were good learners; they immersed themselves in the existing culture. The classical Greeks told how founding fathers such as Pelops had arrived in Greece from other lands, in his case Anatolia, though the ancestry of the Mycenaeans probably lay in the mountainous southern Balkans. They were great builders of fortifications. The lightly defended palaces characteristic of Minoan Crete became a rarity – Pylos on the south-western Peloponnese is the one significant example, and it almost certainly secured its protection by maintaining a large sea fleet – ‘wooden walls’, as the Delphic oracle would later describe the fleet of Athens. The sea had an important role in Mycenaean civilization; but so did land battles and sieges, represented in their art and even more dramatically by the massive retaining walls of the citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns. Parts of the walls of Mycenae were seven metres thick; at Tiryns narrow tunnels, which can still be visited, ran through the masonry, described by wondering classical writers as the work of Cyclopean giants. The Linear B tablets also reveal the importance to this warrior society of chariots, which were enumerated on the tablets, and which were described by Homer in archaic references to a vanished world full of bronze weapons and helmets made of boar’s tusks.5 Bronze weapons were buried, in quantity, in the tombs of their great war leaders, though they were also well acquainted with paper-thin arrow-heads made of obsidian brought to them from Melos and Lipari.
What the ‘Mycenaeans’ called themselves is an important question. ‘Mycenaean’ is a modern label for Bronze Age Greek civilization; in the fourteenth century BC, it would have conveyed only the sense of an inhabitant of the citadel and surrounding villages that made up the settlement (barely a town) of Mukenai. The plural form of this place-name, as of some others from this period (notably Athenai, Athens), may reflect the fact that these centres were conglomerations of villages.6 Their rulers were a warrior caste, who by the fourteenth century BC lived very luxurious lives. They were buried not just with weapons but with gold and silver goblets, and with delicately inlaid ceremonial knives showing hunting scenes. When historians speak of ‘Mycenaean trade’ what they mean is the trade of those who lived within the political sphere of these early Greek warlords, though it is anybody’s guess whether the merchants and peasants spoke Greek; many, in fact, must have been multilingual Cretans living in the Knossos and Phaistos of the Linear B tablets. References to neighbours known as Ahhiyawa in the Hittite archives, and to the Ekwesh in Egyptian documents, suggest that the name Akhaiwoi, in classical Greek Akhaioi, ‘Achaeans’, was used if not by themselves, at least by outside observers, who took them extremely seriously as a major regional power.7 Building on the trading ties established by the Minoans, Mycenaean merchants maintained links with Cyprus, rich in copper (which continued to use a version of the Linear script right into classical times), as well as a trading presence on Rhodes, at Miletos on the Anatolian coast and on the Syrian coast. There may even have been some contact with the Black Sea, if the story of Jason’s Argonauts has any historical basis. The ‘Gelidonya wreck’, a thirteenth-century shipwreck off the coast of southern Turkey, illuminates the trading world of the Mycenaeans. Most of the wreck was swept away by the waters, but its cargo was too heavy for the seas to shift: half a ton of big copper ingots, as well as bronze goods and seals that suggest the ship had visited Syria and Cyprus. Another slightly older wreck, found at Uluburun off the Turkish coast, contained even larger amounts of copper and, intriguingly, one tenth the amount of tin, the right proportion for the manufacture of bronze.8
One new feature of Mycenaean trade was the link to Italy, with which Minoan Crete did not engage. The first evidence of contact between the Greek mainland and Sicily may reach back as far as the seventeenth century BC, to judge from similarities between Greek (‘Middle Helladic’ period) pottery and that of eastern Sicily, where a handful of Middle Helladic pots have also been found. This does not necessarily indicate regular, direct contact, so much as spasmodic links through a series of intermediaries as these pots passed from Greece through the Ionian Sea, and then around the heel and toe of Italy to Sicily.9 Hard evidence of regular contact comes a little later, when large numbers of Late Bronze Age ceramics were brought to Lipari, and large amounts of obsidian were sent back to Greece; the merchants also left behind faience beads, apparently of Egyptian origin, suggesting that a trade network had come into existence which encompassed great tracts of the eastern and central Mediterranean. By the time Knossos was in Mycenaean hands, however, obsidian was beginning to lose its attraction; new veins of copper and tin were being exploited across the Mediterranean and in Anatolia, and the search for metals was what now brought Mycenaean sailors as far as Ischia and its smaller neighbour Vivara, where they left their ceramics, before heading up the coasts of Tuscany (which offered tin) and Sardinia (where they left behind some copper ingots).10 Representations of ships in the frescoes from Thera leave no doubt that shipping technology had made significant advances, with the use of sail as a supplement to oars and the building of larger vessels with higher bulwarks able to withstand more turbulent seas; to these must be added more detailed knowledge of the shoals, reefs and currents of the eastern and central Mediterranean, without which it was impossible to navigate between the Greek islands and towards Sicily. Coast-hugging routes still prevailed, for the passage taken by Mycenaean pottery traces a line linking the Dodecanese to the heel of Italy, and around the instep down to Sicily.
Close links to Italy resulted in the emergence of overseas trading-stations.11 Although the Mycenaeans sent a great amount of pottery to Lipari, including large pithoi, there is no evidence that the Lipariots were under Mycenaean rule; but the inhabitants of Lipari did establish links with lands further north, as far as Luni in northern Tuscany.12 The attraction of Lipari increasingly became not just its obsidian, but its role as a staging-post between the waters around Sicily and areas to the north. The pithoi were standard products, not objects of beauty, and they contained goods – oil, most likely, for that was one of the favoured exports of the Greek lands. An amber necklace found in a Lipari cemetery has been attributed to the northern Adriatic, not to the eastern Mediterranean. All this indicates that the Mycenaeans were the wealthiest but not the sole merchants who ventured across the waters of the central Mediterranean at this period. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Lipari lived in wooden hut-like buildings clinging to the slopes of the island’s volcano; for them, luxury consisted of amber and glass beads, not of gold and silver jewellery.
A settlement at Thapsos, an offshore island in eastern Sicily, offers evidence of a sophisticated, imported culture, Mycenaean in origin. The settlers created a grid-like town with streets up to four metres wide, spacious houses built round courtyards, and tombs full of Late Helladic wares from the Greek lands, suggesting ‘a veritable foreign colony on the site’.13 Indeed, the closest analogy to the layout of the houses in Thapsos is to be found at the other end of the Mycenaean world, on Cyprus, at Enkomi near Famagusta. It is almost as if a blueprint for a trading colony had been created and then transformed into reality at both ends of the Mycenaean world. Thapsos has yielded very many small perfume containers of Mycenaean origin.14 For it was a centre of industry, specializing in the production of perfumed oils for an ‘international’ market. But Thapsos was not simply an offshoot of Mycenae. It produced plenty of coarse grey pottery in Sicilian styles, indicating that Thapsos contained a mixed population. In the same period, another Mycenaean settlement at Scoglio del Tonno near modern Taranto gave access to Adriatic goods, especially south Italian copper, and acted as a way-station for shipping bound for Sicily.15 It was in the Mycenaean period, then, that the Mediterranean became significantly enlarged in the eyes of those who sailed across its surface.
Far more significant to the Mycenaean traders than the undeveloped west were the coasts of what are now Syria and Lebanon.16 By the fourteenth century, traders were leaving large numbers of Mycenaean pots (in the style known as ‘Late Helladic II’) at Ugarit and Byblos, in Syria, and along the coast of Canaan at Gezer and Lachish. A Levantine trade network was coming into being, buoyant enough to sustain wealthy cities in which Aegean merchants mixed with Canaanites, Cypriots, Hittites, Egyptians and other residents and visitors.17 The Levantine ports possessed even older links to the Nile Delta; the tomb of Kenamun at Egyptian Thebes, no longer extant, contained a wall-painting which showed the unloading of goods at an Egyptian port, under the oversight of Canaanite merchants, and these included textiles, purple dye (a speciality of the Levantine coast, made from the murex shellfish), oil, wine and cattle.
Ugarit was an important centre of trade, active since the third millennium; it fell for a time under Egyptian suzerainty, and one of its kings, Niqmadu, married into Pharaoh’s family. The city supplied Egypt with cedar-wood from the mountains of Lebanon – supplies of timber within Egypt were scanty. It acted as a bridge between the Mesopotamian world, from which it adapted its curious cuneiform alphabet, and the eastern Mediterranean lands – the Nile Delta, the Aegean, Crete (named as Kabturi in the Ugaritic tablets), and in particular Cyprus, 100 miles away, which functioned as a transit point to which goods from Egypt and the Greek lands were transferred.18 Tablets in a Cypriot syllabic script have been found at Ugarit, suggesting that merchants from Cyprus lived in the city. The inhabitants of Ugarit were of very varied origins: there were mercenaries known to the Egyptians as maryannu, or ‘young heroes’, who came from Anatolia and the Greek world; there were administrators whose names are not local ones – the region around Ugarit was inhabited by speakers of Canaanite, the language out of which Phoenician and Hebrew evolved. A special official was appointed to look after the affairs of the foreign merchants, who were subject to restrictions on their right of residence and on their right to acquire houses in Ugarit. Minoan influence was felt in the art of Ugarit, to judge from an ivory box cover of the thirteenth century BC, portraying a goddess in a style that combines local features with those typical of Minoan artists.19 Ugarit had a vibrant literary culture, and a number of the religious poems preserved on clay tablets display striking similarities to later Hebrew religious poetry. These contacts also had a revivifying effect on the art of the Aegean world. Once Knossos had been absorbed, the Mycenaean world had more to offer: the craft works of the Cretans, as well as items produced in Greece itself which now matched in mastery their Minoan models; the fine textiles of Crete too – the word ri-no which appears on the Linear B tablets is an early spelling of the classical Greek linōn, ‘linen’. By now it is possible to think of little colonies of traders and settlers of Aegean origin, living in the port towns of the eastern Mediterranean; and along with the merchants and their goods, mercenaries arrived with their arms and armour. While trade was beginning to transform the character of the eastern Mediterranean, it was warfare that would alter it decisively, to the detriment of trade and the high cultures of these lands, ushering in (as will be seen) a long winter.
So far, more attention has been paid to impoverished Sicilian villagers than to the subjects of the Pharaohs, and their relative absence from the discussion needs an explanation. Following the unification of the marshlands of Lower Egypt with the long strip of naturally irrigated land bordering the Nile, the Egyptians created a complex, city-based society; as early as the third millennium, with the building of the pyramids, they showed themselves able to organize massive labour forces. The works of art produced for the royal court, including magnificent objects made of gold and semi-precious stones, surpassed the finest works crafted in Minoan Crete. The influence of Egyptian art on the techniques, if not the subject-matter, of Cretan fresco painting is not in doubt; Egyptian objects were treasured in the early Greek world; the political influence of Egypt was felt along the shores of Canaan and Syria, notably at Byblos. The search for staple necessities such as tin, wood and copper prompted the Egyptians to extend their influence into and beyond Sinai. And yet, when thinking of Egyptian maritime trade, it is the links to the south that come to mind first of all: trading expeditions down the Red Sea towards the land of Punt, in the late second millennium, bringing luxuries such as ivory and ebony to the court of the Pharaohs.20 Although some Pharaohs did build extensively in Lower Egypt – the Bible recalls the construction of a great store city named after Ramesses – the focus of their power in the period after about 1570 BC was generally Upper Egypt, though Ramesses (in ancient Egyptian, Piramesse) did serve as Egyptian capital at a point in the thirteenth century when the Pharaohs were actively pursuing their interests in Canaan and western Asia, and sought a base closer to their theatre of operations.
The year 1570 marks the expulsion of the Hyksos dynasty, who had ruled Lower and Middle Egypt for over a century. These rulers were later reviled as crude Asiatics (their exact identity remains a mystery); however, it was they who introduced important innovations into Egypt – chariots and bronze armour.21 Whether they conquered Egypt in an armed invasion or trickled into the country and eventually seized power, they possessed a technological advantage over the native Egyptians; and they maintained ties with their neighbours in Syria and Crete, which was vital if they were to obtain the supplies they needed for their military machine. The end of Hyksos rule ushered in a period of extraordinary artistic vitality, best known from the discoveries in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Even when, around 1340 BC, the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten built a new capital for his sun-god at Tell el-Amarna, he chose a site relatively close to the traditional centres of Pharaonic power in Upper Egypt. For the ancient Egyptians, the waters that mattered most were neither the Mediterranean nor the Red Sea, but the Nile; the Mediterranean was their horizon, and (though they drew on the resources of the eastern Mediterranean) Pharaonic Egypt cannot be described as a Mediterranean power, politically or commercially. It was only with the foundation of Alexandria in the fourth century BC that a major city was created on the shores of the Mediterranean, looking outwards to the Greek world. But in this period foreign merchants came to Egypt more often than Egyptian ones travelled overseas; the sailors depicted on reliefs at Sahure, dating to about 2400, are mostly Asiatic, and the design of sea-going vessels seems to have been copied from Levantine models – some may have been able to navigate upriver as well, functioning as warships as well as trading vessels. The overall impression is that the Egyptians relied on outside agents to build, manage and sail their ships, at least across the Mediterranean.22
The term ‘Great Green’ appears in Egyptian texts of this period, but it was used for a number of waters – Lake Fayyum was one, the Nile another; occasionally it was used to describe the Red Sea. In the second half of the second millennium BC the term Y-m was very occasionally used for the sea, including the Mediterranean, and the word itself was of Semitic origin (yam is ‘sea’ in Hebrew). The Mediterranean did not have such significance for them that it was assigned its own distinctive name.23 There were ports in the Delta which were visited by shipping bound to and from Syria, such as Tjaru (Tell Hebua) at the end of the eastern arm of the Delta; it had been used by the Hyksos and was then rebuilt by the new rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty. In the fifteenth century BC, under Thutmose IV, Tjaru was the seat of a governor who was also given the title ‘royal messenger in all foreign lands’, and one of his responsibilities was the exploitation of turquoise mines in the Sinai desert. Turquoise adorns much Egyptian jewellery of this period. But Tjaru also functioned as a base for trade with the outside world, as is demonstrated by finds of pottery originating in Syria and Cyprus, lands rich in the timber the Egyptians craved. More important, though, was Avaris, also in the eastern Delta. As early as the eighteenth century BC the population included many settlers of Canaanite origin, including soldiers, sailors and artisans. The Hyksos made it into their capital, and under their rule it occupied a space measuring over 200 square kilometres. The end of Hyksos rule did not spell the end of Avaris.24 The palace constructed there after the fall of the Hyksos was decorated with frescoes in the Cretan style, further evidence of the ties between the Keftiu of Knossos and the court of the Pharaohs.25
Another port, one which grew in importance, was Tanis; from here an Egyptian emissary from Karnak in the deep south was sent on a frustrating mission to the Canaanite king of Byblos in the early eleventh century. His task was to secure a supply of timber, to be used to rebuild a river boat dedicated to the high god Amun; he was ‘Elder of the Portal’ or senior administrator of the god’s temple. This man, Wenamun, left a report of his journey of which a copy on papyrus survived in an Egyptian tomb; there he described setting out from Tanis on 20 April 1075.26 From the beginning he faced problems: the Nile Delta was to all intents independent of the weak Pharaoh Ramesses XI, and the local ruler, Smendes, did not feel it was worth the trouble of commissioning a ship to take Wenamun to Byblos, so he placed him on board the vessel operated by a local sea captain named Mengebet, who was about to set out on a trading expedition with a Syrian crew. The route taken followed the coastline, and they put in at Dor, south of present-day Haifa; this was a centre of the so-called Tjekker, one of the ‘Sea Peoples’ who will be discussed shortly.27 There the governor was polite (he gave Wenamun bread, wine and meat). However, a sailor in Mengebet’s crew was tempted by the fat treasure Wenamun had brought with him to pay for the timber: this consisted of several pounds’ weight of silver and some golden vessels weighing over one pound. He carried all Wenamun’s assets away with him, and disappeared. Wenamun went to the governor to complain; of course, the governor said, if the thief had been a man of Dor, he would have indemnified Wenamun, but all he could do was launch an investigation. This investigation lasted nine exasperating days, but nothing was found, and Wenamun decided his only option was to continue his journey northwards. On arriving at Byblos he managed to find nearly the amount of silver he had lost, squirrelled away on Mengebet’s ship; this was evidently someone else’s property, but he ungraciously insisted he would keep it until the owners of the boat recompensed him for the theft of his own goods by one of their crewmen.
The ruler of Byblos, Zekerbaal, was even more unhelpful than that of Dor. He would not receive Wenamun, whose messages sent up from the port received the terse reply that he should go away; ‘the chief of Byblos sent to me saying, “Get out of my harbour!” ’28 This was repeated day after day, for twenty-nine days. September arrived; Wenamun was worried that he would not be able to leave until sailings resumed in the spring (so evidently there was a close season, which applied even to coast-hugging journeys along the coast of Canaan). Later on, the king reminded Wenamun that he had once kept similar emissaries waiting for seventeen years! Wenamun decided to reserve space on a ship that was ready to leave, for Mengebet had moved on to his next port of call and had left him behind. And then suddenly, while the royal court was sacrificing to Baal, one of the king’s courtiers experienced a vision, and in the fervour of the moment the excited king decided that he must see the messenger of the Egyptian high-god Amun. This, at least, was the official explanation, but Wenamun thought the aim was to separate him from his property, miss his sailing, and pillage his silver while he was in the royal presence. Still, Wenamun had little choice; the papyrus describes how he entered the king’s upper chamber, where Zekerbaal sat, ‘and when he turned his back against the window, the waves of the great sea of Syria were breaking against the rear of his head’.29 The king showed no politeness to Pharaoh nor to the high priest of Amun; he berated Wenamun for not being able to produce his credentials, which had been left behind at Tanis, and he dismissed Egyptian sailors as incompetent fools by comparison with his fellow-Syrians. The king insisted that twenty ships of Byblos traded with Egypt, and as many as fifty ships of Sidon, though Wenamun expressed the official Egyptian view that, by trading with Egypt, they were not really foreign vessels but ships sailing under the protection of Pharaoh. Thus there were constant attempts to score points, and the king clearly relished the opportunity to insult Egypt and its rulers at a time when they were weak. He admitted that earlier kings had supplied wood just as requested, but he expected payment; he ordered the accounts of the kingdom to be brought to him – an interesting sign of the sophistication of administration – and he proved from the accounts that the Egyptians had sent large quantities of silver in the past.30 Wenamun lost his temper and began to berate the king for his disrespect to the great land of Egypt and to the king of the gods.
Wenamun knew, though, that angry words would achieve nothing, and sent a message to Egypt asking for handsome gifts for Zekerbaal. The Egyptians took his request seriously. They sent a mixture of luxury items such as gold and silver vases and supplies of basic materials such as ox-hides, linen, fish, lentils, rope and 500 rolls of papyrus, on which Zekerbaal would be able to record yet more financial accounts.31 Still, what Wenamun was asking for was not to be given lightly. The king assigned 300 men and as many oxen to fell and move the timber. Zekerbaal processed down to the shore to watch it being loaded, and sent Wenamun signs of his new goodwill: wine, a sheep and a female Egyptian singer to console him. Wenamun was allowed to depart on a ship manned by sailors from Byblos. He escaped pirates from Dor who tried to capture his vessel, but then it was driven by storms to Cyprus, where the inhabitants pounced upon him, and he was only saved from death by the kindly queen.32 The surviving text does not go further. However, the whole tale has the flavour of a series of excuses for a mission that ended in failure – it is far from clear whether the wood arrived in Egypt. Of course, this account does not portray everyday trading contacts across the eastern Mediterranean; but it is extraordinarily precious as the first account of a trading voyage, and of the political difficulties which would ever after ensnare those who tried to conduct business at the courts of foreign rulers.
The Egyptians were the wealthiest power in the region, but they had serious rivals. The emergence of the Hittite empire in central Anatolia, with its formidable metal resources, threatened Egyptian interests in Syria. Ramesses II aimed to recover influence in the region, waning since the troubled reign of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten; the Hittites responded by mobilizing their allies, who included vassals in western Asia such as the Lycians and the Dardanians (a term Homer later used for the Trojans). Thousands of chariots were committed to battle at Kadesh in July 1274; although Ramesses, typically, claimed the contest as a great Egyptian victory, even so boastful a Pharaoh could not hide the massive destruction on both sides, for the Hittites had begun the battle by wiping out large segments of the Egyptian army.33 By 1258 both sides at last admitted that the outcome had been at best a draw, and a treaty between them defined the boundaries of their spheres of influence in Syria, drawing a line near Damascus and creating half a century of stability. However, the battle of Kadesh can be seen as the beginning of a cataclysmic cycle of interlocked events, including the fall of Troy (supposedly ninety years later), the destruction of the Mycenaean strongholds and, not least, the arrival of the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’.