Chronicle 5. THE ENIGMATIC SEA PEOPLES

Chronicle 5. THE ENIGMATIC SEA PEOPLES

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 5. ΟΙ ΑΙΝΙΓΜΑΤΙΚΟΙ ΛΑΟΙ ΤΗΣ ΘΑΛΑΣΣΑΣ

● Famine Led to the Bronze Age Collapse ● Trojan War and Anatolian Sea Peoples ● Philistines and Pelasgians ● The Merneptah Stele and Exodus

by Michales Loukovikas
 

The “Great Green” Mediterranean

BEFORE WE GO WEST, we need to sail into the “Great Green” (the Mediterranean to the Egyptians) in search of the Sea Peoples, meeting more migrant bands on the way. Voyaging in space and time, in history, legend and myth, we must go back to the explosive finale of the 17th century BCE, the “big bang” of the Minoan volcanic eruption on Thera-Santorini, for it occurred very close to the period the Sea Peoples initially appeared in Egypt. If we take into account the wrecking of the Minoan navy policing the seas, we can presume that these peoples were nothing but pirates at the time, and we also realize how interdependent the great powers were in the ancient world. Later the Egyptians started identifying various bands of Sea Peoples in their own style, and one of the first mentioned were the Sherden or Shardana, a large group of pirates.

Ancient ship, Egyptian papyrus painting

They disrupted trade in the end of the 13th century and contributed greatly to the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. Nonetheless, they are not mentioned in either Hellenic or Hittite legends or documents, suggesting that they did not originate from either sphere of influence. Many scholars relate the Shardana to Sardinia due to the similarity between the two words. Based on the same principle, the archaeologist Margaret Guido proposed that the Shardana might have ultimately derived from Sardis and the Sardinian plain nearby, in Lydia, and perhaps migrated later to Sardinia. It seems that many people, and not only the Trojans that would become Romans, left Anatolia and the Aegean for the Italian peninsula and its islands due to the Bronze Age collapse, rather than before. There is evidence that gives credit to Virgil’s Aeneid – without excluding the possibility of earlier migrations. Recent genetic studies indicate that the populations not only of people, but even of cattle, in various Italian regions, especially in Tuscany, are more related to Anatolia, mainly in the northwest, than to anywhere else.

Etruscans dancing, wall painting in a tomb

A famous passage from Herodotus portrays the migration and drifting of Lydians because of famine:

“Their king divided the people into two groups, so that the one should remain and the other leave the country. His son, Tyrrhenus, was to be the head of those who departed. They went down to Smyrna and built themselves ships. After sailing past many countries they came to the Ombrici, where they founded cities and called themselves Tyrrhenians.”

We can’t but remember that Anatolia faced the same acute problem of famine in the time of the collapse and, as a result, the Sea Peoples, then a coalition of seagoing migrants, closed ranks seeking relief from scarcity. Drought could have easily precipitated socio-economic problems and wars. As regards the story told by Herodotus and its link to the Sea Peoples, several scholars contend that those called Teresh by the Egyptians were none others than the Tyrrhenians, or Tyrsenians, who are often identified with the Tusci (hence Tuscany), the Latin exonym for the Etruscans, or Rasena, as they called themselves. The Tyrsenian linguistic family, together with Etruscan, includes the Lemnian language, spoken on the Aegean island of Lemnos until the 6th century BCE. Another Aegean tongue possibly related to the Etruscan was the Minoan Cretan. A third Aegean island close to Anatolia mentioned as their possible homeland by Thucydides is that of Lesbos. The Romans, as Virgil’s readers, identified the Teresh with the Trojans. This version would serve their interests for the Etruscans were their rivals. If they showed that they had a common ancestry, any further animosity between them would be considered fratricidal. There are some clues to support this view. Several writers, as e.g. Andrea Salimbeti in “The Greek Age of Bronze: Sea Peoples”, note that a Trojan connection in the case of the Teresh or Tursha should be at first taken under consideration:

Hittite chariot

“Troy appears in a Hittite record as Taruisa. It is a reasonable assumption that the people of Taruisa called themselves by some name close to this; stripped of vowels so that it can be compared to the Egyptian spelling”.

The Troad was outside the territory but within the sphere of influence of Hatti. However, another Hittite record points to a different location, for it contains a list of cities, among them Tarsa, most likely Tarsus. These toponyms and corresponding ethnicities would be written down in Egyptian hieroglyphs or in any Semitic script as “T-r-s” or “T-r-sh” – that is, without vowels.^(a)

• ^(a) A very good example of how important the Hellenic innovation with the vowels in the alphabet has been. If the Egyptian script had vowels, as well, the enigma of the Sea Peoples might have long since been solved!

The Asia Minor/Anatolia amalgam:
the most important regions and peoples

Anatolian connections have been suggested for other Sea Peoples, as well, like the Lukka (Lycians). Most striking is that the vast majority of them seem to have descended from the Troad. Therefore, some researchers, such as the Swiss geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, have proposed that “the Sea Peoples may well have been Troy and its confederated allies, and the literary tradition of the Trojan War [e.g. the Iliad] may well reflect the Greek effort to counter those raids.”^(b) Therefore, despite the attempts of many historians to discredit the historicity of the Iliad, the Trojan War is considered a historical event and a key to grasp the underlying causes of these epoch-making developments. “For sure, the Sea Peoples’ movement was one of the largest and most important migrations in history that changed the face of the ancient world more than any other single event before the time of Alexander the Great”, Andrea Salimbeti remarks. This long, ravaging war, in combination with the widespread famine in the entire peninsula, created the explosive conditions leading to the collapse. Under the circumstances, many Trojans, allies or neighbours became refugees, and some survived by their wits and swords. Archeological evidence leads to the conclusion that the Sea Peoples were not pirates anymore, nor raiders plundering and pillaging established cities, but instead a mass of people looking for a place to settle, in search of a home. This was obvious since their first invasion of Egypt under Libyan leadership when they were accompanied by their families and belongings. The Libyan tribes also played a role in the first campaigns against Egypt. Herodotus and Hecataeus mentioned one of them centuries later. It was the Berber tribe of the Maxyes or Mazyes, the Mazaces to the Romans or the Meshwesh to the Egyptians, who also claimed to have a Trojan heritage.

Despite the attempts to discredit the historicity of the “Iliad”, the Trojan War is considered a historical event. “The Sea Peoples may well have been Troy and its confederated allies, and the literary tradition of the Trojan War may well reflect the Greek effort to counter those raids.” (Eberhard Zangger)

Trojan War scenes on pottery

• ^(b) According to this scenario, the Trojan War was a ‘just’, defensive war on the part of the Greeks, not intended for conquest and destruction of the city controlling the passage to the Black Sea.
• In his Anatolian hypothesis, Eberhard Zangger caused a sensation because of his controversial identification of Troy as Atlantis. Zangger’s point of view is that Plato used an Egyptian version of the story about Troy for his legendary report on Atlantis. He based his argument on comparisons between Mycenaean culture and Plato’s account of the Hellenic civilization facing Atlantis, as well as parallels between the recollections of the Trojan War and the one supposedly fought between Greeks and Atlanteans (a Titanomachy variation). He interpreted the legend of the Trojan War to be the memory of the momentous chaos leading to the Bronze Age collapse, and arrived at the conclusion that Troy must have been much bigger than most scholars had presumed, with artificial harbours inside the modern floodplain. In order to prove it, he prepared a helicopter-based geophysical exploration of the plain of Troy to locate settlement layers and artificial port basins using ground-penetrating techniques. Having granted an exclusive excavation license for Troy to the German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, the Turkish government rejected Zangger’s request and, as a consequence, he withdrew from science with a lecture in the Heidelberg Academy of Science. It was his “swan song” as a scientist before he turned to more “lucrative” activities as a business consultant specializing in corporate communications and public relations. In my view, his last project was jeopardized not by Korfmann’s… exclusive rights to excavate for Troy [!] (Zangger’s plan did not entail any real excavations) but rather by Turkey’s unwillingness to authorize any disclosure of sensitive military data for the sake of science.

Ilium/Troy: the wider area and, below on the right, the modern coastline in red and, therefore, the floodplain that interested Zangger – next to the strategic straits and the Greek border…

• Geoarchaeology is a multi-disciplinary approach which uses the techniques and subject matter of geography, geology and other Earth sciences (those dealing with our planet) to examine topics which inform archaeological knowledge and thought. Geoarchaeologists study the natural processes that affect archaeological sites such as geomorphology, as well as soil and sediments, to contribute to archaeological studies.

A Peleset captive in Egypt, and the particular Phaestos disc symbol (below on the right)

An important Sea People have been the Peleset, identified with the Philistines, the Palestinians:

“One of the theories links them to the Pelasgians who were allies of Troy, and one group of them lived in Thrace”, Andrea Salimbeti explains.^(c) “Those Pelasgians would have migrated south, overrunning and fatally damaging Achaean Greek civilization. Shortly after, many would have gone farther south to Crete.” In addition, there are Biblical references to the Philistines as coming from a place called Caphtor, identified by certain scholars with Crete.^(d) “This theory”, Salimbeti adds, “has been somewhat strengthened by the discovery in Crete of the Phaestos disc. One of the symbols shows the head of a man crowned with feathers – very similar to the feather-topped helmets of the Peleset depicted” at the Temple of Ramses III.^(e)

The Cycladic civilization, one of the most important Pelasgian cultures: here’s a frying pan of 2800 BCE (some imaginative people see on its design a map of Atlantis!)

• ^(c) What was the Philistine language? In Wikipedia we are ‘informed’ of “possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, [which] support the independently-held [?] theory that immigrant Philistines originated among ‘sea peoples’.” And what do we know about the Pelasgian language(s)? “In the absence of certain knowledge about the identity (or identities) of the Pelasgians, various theories have been proposed. Since Greek is classified as an Indo-European language, the major question of concern is whether Pelasgian was [also] an Indo-European language”. For further information we are forwarded to the Aegean language family, proposed by Giulio M. Facchetti, due to some alleged similarities between Etruscan and Lemnian, and some other languages of the area, such as Minoan, Eteocretan, Eteocypriot, and Philistine. These languages could constitute a pre-Indo-European phylum stretching from Canaan to the Alps. However, this is not a view held in common; there are attempts to link Eteocretan and Eteocypriot with Semitic. Of course, all the above are nothing but hypotheses, as Facchetti himself admits. What really counts is the idea the ancient Hellenes had about the Pelasgians who had survived even in the classical period in several locations of mainland Greece, Crete and other parts of the Aegean. Those identified as “Pelasgian” spoke a language or languages that the Hellenes described as “barbaric” – that is, incomprehensible to them. A tradition also survived that many parts of Greece had once been Pelasgian before being Hellenized. Taking this into account, we can relish watching all scholarly theorizations crumbling and crashing down…

The Nile Delta with Pelusium in the East, the Hellenic colony Naucratis in the West, and further on the location Alexandria was to be built. The ancient canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Seas is also shown.

• ^(d) Wikipedia: “Caphtor is a locality mentioned in the Bible and related literature. The people of Caphtor are called Caphtorites (or Caphtorim) and are named as a division of the ancient Egyptians. Traditional Hebrew sources place Caphtor in the region of Pelusium [in the Nile Delta]. Other sources associate Caphtor with localities outside Egypt such as Cilicia, Cyprus or Crete.” The least probable scenario is “hard truth” for certain scholars. A measure of their “credibility”…
• ^(e) Well, it was almost unavoidable: “The similarity [of the Peleset helmet] with Maya and Aztec feather headdresses is truly amazing, given the distance that separated the Mesoamerican culture” from the Mediterranean… Galloping imagination somewhere in the Internet Sea, while far in the distant horizon the land of Atlantis is gradually emerging….

Another ‘Trojan’ Sea People might have been the Weshesh. The scarcity of information led ‘necessarily’ to speculation about possible links between their name and that of Ilion, as the city of Troy was also called by the Greeks, or Wilusa (Wilusiya) by the Hittites – after king Ilus (thence the Iliad). “The W of Weshesh”, Salimbeti notes, “is a modern invention for ease of pronunciation; the Egyptian records refer to Uashesh”. Some scholars associate this people with Assos, also in the Troad, or with Iasos (Iassos) in Caria, or with Issos in Cilicia. Others have theorized that they became part of the Israelite confederacy, as the tribe of Asher. Another people connected with the Hebrews were the Tjeker. Moving to Canaan, they captured the city-state of Dor and turned it into a large, well-fortified capital of their kingdom. Dor was violently destroyed in the mid-11th century BCE by the expanding Phoenicians, who were checked by the Philistines, and then by the Hebrews. King David (if he was something more than just a mythological figure) supposedly conquered Dor and the Tjeker were mentioned no more.

Achilles and Ajax playing a dice game: an amphora by painter-potter Exekias, ca 540-530 BCE

A possible linguistic connection has been proposed between the Tjeker and the Tekrur, identified with the Teucri, a tribe described by some ancient sources as inhabiting northwest Anatolia to the south of Troy. Tradition offers basically two candidates for a homeland: Crete or Attica. Legend links all three places and goes even further, following two heroes with the same name: Teucer (or Teucrus). According to Virgil, the older Teucer was from Crete but left the island with a third part of its inhabitants during a great famine (how many such stories…). They settled near a river, which was named Scamander after his father. Dionysius of Halicarnassus claims Teucer had gone to the Troad from Attica. Scamander (or Xanthos) was said to have been a river-god, a son of Oceanus. According to Homer, he fought on the side of the Trojans after Achilles insulted him. He was the personification of the river that flowed by Troy. The Hellenes had set up their camp near its mouth, and their battles with the Trojans were fought on its plain. With the arrival of Dardanus there, Teucria was renamed as Dardania (thence Dardenelles), and later Troad (from king Tros). But these toponymic changes would not deter the Trojans to often call themselves Teucrians. Aeneas e.g. is described as “the great captain of the Teucrians”.

The Judgement of Paris (1904), by Enrique Simonet: Aphrodite, the winner in this ancient beauty pageant, stepping forward triumphantly naked, while Hera and Athena stay behind humiliated…

The younger Teucer (or Teucrus) was a son of king Telamon of Salamis, the island of Attica where the decisive naval battle of the Graeco-Persian Wars would be fought. He was half Trojan because his mother was a princess of Ilion. He also fought in the Trojan War, but on the side of the Hellenes, having his half-brother, Ajax, as a co-fighter, while his cousins, Hector and Paris, and his uncle Priam were ‘enemies’. After all, war was a family affair – let alone for Teucer Jr! On his return to Salamis, however, his father accused him for not bringing Ajax’s body back home. He was disowned, exiled, and set out to find a new home. With his departing words that Horace turned into a moving ode, he exhorted his companions to “despair in no way… tomorrow we shall set out upon the vast ocean”.^(f) This speech, related later to the theme of voyages of discovery, is also found in Dante’s Inferno and in Tennyson’s Ulysses. Teucer eventually joined the Phoenician king Belus of Tyre in his campaign against Cyprus, and when the island was seized, Belus handed it over to Teucer as a reward. He founded there the city of Salamis, named after his homeland.

• ^(f) “Wherever fortune may bear us, kinder than my father, / We shall go, o men and comrades! / Do not despair with Teucer as your leader and as protector, / Surely resolved Apollo has promised uncertain / Future to Salamis in a new world. / O men, who with me often have endured / Worse fortunes, now, banish cares with wine; / Tomorrow we shall set out upon the boundless sea!” Horace, Odes.

Leda and the Swan, from the Sanctuary of Aphrodite, Paphos, Cyprus (3rd century CE)

The “copper island”, a vital node in the trade networks, experienced two waves of Greek settlement: The initial consisted of Mycenaean traders around 1400 BCE. Towards the end of this period, great amounts of ‘Mycenaean’ pottery were produced in Cyprus. A major second wave, connected with Teucer’s story, took place just after the Bronze Age collapse ca 1100 BCE, with the island’s predominantly Hellenic character dating from this era, due to the ‘invasion’ of Helladic refugees. Apart from Salamis, Teucer is credited as a founder of other cities, as well. A local legend in Galicia, in northwestern Iberia, relates the foundation of Pontevedra to ‘Teucro’. The legend seems to be based more on the conjecture that Greek traders might have arrived there in ancient times. Though legends appear for a certain reason, historians and archaeologists tend to agree that the initial settlement was probably formed when Gallaecia was integrated into the Roman Empire (1st century BCE). Pontevedra, which means “the old bridge”, in reference to an old Roman bridge across the Lérez River, is sometimes poetically called The City of Teucro, and its inhabitants teucrinos – like the Trojans.^(g)

Oil lamp, Tróia, Portugal

• ^(g) It seems as if Tróia, across Setúbal, Portugal, was named after Troy but we do not know why. Tróia peninsula has been inhabited since prehistoric times when it was an island called Acalá. In the 1st century CE the Romans built a town and named it Cetóbriga. It served as a fishery centre until 412 when it was destroyed completely by an earthquake with tsunami. If the town’s initial name had been Tróia, one could surmise that the Romans, considering themselves as Trojans, decided to build a ‘Troy’ in the vicinity of the city of Odysseus – Olisipo, Lisbon! According to José Pedro Machado, in the Onomastic-Etymologic Dictionary of the Portuguese Language, Tróia is not a toponym found exclusively in the area of Setúbal. There are more ‘Tróias’ in Portugal and a Troya in Galicia. Their ‘godfathers’ were probably inspired by the famous Iliad but used the name of the Portuguese town. Based on an article in the Great Portuguese and Brazilian Encyclopedia, Machado referred to the possibility this name to originate from Cetóbriga: > Cetóbria > Cetróbia > Cetróia > Xetróia > Atróia – though it seems too much of an adventure for a toponym… Or perhaps the name comes not from Troy but from either Troyes or Truyes, two cities of France; or its origin is the Latin phrase ‘Trogia (villa)’, derived from the Celtic name Trogus.

Trojan Horse: its oldest known depiction on the Mykonos vase; ca 670 BCE

Up to now, with the sole exception of Teucer attacking Cyprus in collaboration with the Phoenicians and representing the people who found refuge there (well, at the expense of the locals), we have seen no Hellenes fighting alongside the Sea Peoples, but rather against them, in the Trojan War. It is what Sanford Holst already said in our previous Chronicle:

“The Mycenaeans attacked the Anatolian people from the seaward side. To deal with this problem, warriors and ships in the Sea Peoples confederacy poured from Anatolia and the Black Sea into the Aegean, where they ravaged the Mycenaeans.”

Let us try to verify this in Wikipedia:

“The invaders, that is, the replacement cultures at those sites, apparently made no attempt to retain the cities’ wealth but instead built new settlements of a materially simpler cultural and less complex economic level atop the ruins. For example, no one appropriated the palace and rich stores at Pylos, but all were burned up, and the successors (whoever they were) moved in over the ruins with plain pottery and simple goods. This demonstrates a cultural discontinuity.”

This may demonstrate a logical discontinuity, as well! The author leaves the question of who the invaders were open. However, he/she identifies them with “the replacement cultures”, who were stupid enough to “burn up the palace and rich stores” instead of appropriating them. Quite simply, the invaders had no plan to settle there; they went there just to destroy: they were not “the replacement cultures”.

Captive Sea Peoples in Egypt

The Anatolians predominated among the Sea Peoples but were not alone. Names of tribes with dubious or unknown origin are several in the Egyptian files – like the Shekelesh, probably the Siculi, who moved to Sicily from the Italian mainland.

“There was a gigantic series of migratory waves, extending all the way from the Danube valley to the plains of China”, Michael Grant comments, and Moses I. Finley agrees: “A large-scale movement of people is indicated… The original centre of disturbance was in the Carpatho-Danubian region of Europe… pushing in different directions at different times.”

However, if we have faith in Michael Wood, they were Greeks:

“Were the sea peoples in part actually composed of Mycenaean Greeks – rootless migrants, warrior bands and condottieri on the move? Certainly there seem to be suggestive parallels between the war gear and helmets of the Greeks and those of the Sea Peoples”. Moreover, including the Sherden and Shekelesh among the ‘villains’, he reminds us that “there were migrations of Greek-speaking peoples to [Sardinia and Sicily] at this time”. Troy, he concludes, “was sacked by essentially [!] Greek Sea Peoples”…^(h)

• ^(h) Pity there were… “essentially” no Iberian or Britannic “condottieri on the move”. Or else the… “thinking woman’s crumpet” (as Wood was humorously dubbed by British newspapers for his good looks most appealing to women) would have found Hellenic colonies even on Mars!

Cycladic head: a Pelasgian suspect as an “islander” (more than obvious for he has deformed his features)!

Michael Wood is not alone, too. The identification of the Denyen and Ekwesh with the Danaans and Achaeans respectively are long-standing issues in Bronze Age scholarship, especially as the “suspects” lived “in the isles”…⁽ⁱ⁾ Were the Egyptian scribes so naïve to use two names for one and the same people? What kind of Bronze Age scholars are they if they (pretend to) ignore that Achaeans and Danaans are synonymous terms? Have they not been schooled in the Iliad? Homer mentions the name Achaeans 598 times; Danaans 138 times; Argives 182 times; and Hellenes only once. According to a version of the myth, they were ancestors of the Greeks and their tribes: Hellen, Graecos, Magnes, and Macedon (Makednos) were sons of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of the Great Flood. Sons of Hellen were Dorus, Xuthus, and Aeolus; sons of Xuthus were Ion and Achaeus. Danaus from Egypt, Pelops from Anatolia, and Cadmus from Phoenicia gained a foothold in Greece and were assimilated and Hellenized. At least for the Danaans, perhaps due to their ‘Egyptian’ origin, there is some “flexibility”: they are either identified with the people of Adana in Cilicia, or possibly related to the land of the Danuna near Ugarit in Syria, or perhaps they are rumoured to have joined Hebrews to form one of the original 12 tribes of Israel, that of Dan.

• ⁽ⁱ⁾ Although even the connection of the Hittite toponym Ahhiyawa or Ahhiya with Achaea is strongly disputed (Wikipedia: “the exact relationship of the term Ahhiyawa to the Achaeans beyond a similarity in pronunciation is hotly debated by scholars”), the… “Wikipedists” are absolutely sure about the identification of the Achaeans with the Ekwesh. So, if you search information on the latter, you are redirected to the former… As for the phrase “in the isles”, used by the Egyptians when referring to Sea Peoples and quoted by scholars as an argument, it ends up meaning: “Whoever is not a landsman is a suspect”!

The major event in Pharaoh Merneptah‘s reign (1213-1203 BCE) was a war against a confederacy termed the ‘Nine Bows’ acting under the leadership of the king of Libya. The pharaoh states that he defeated the invasion, killing 6,000 soldiers and taking 9,000 prisoners. To be sure of the numbers, among other things, he took the penises of all uncircumcised dead and the hands of all the circumcised. We mention this macabre detail because, as it turned out, the Ekwesh were circumcised, a fact that would certainly have obliged any Bronze Age scholar to ‘acquit’ the Greeks.^(j)

• ^(j) …“a fact causing some to doubt they were Greek,” is what we read indeed in Wikipedia! Perhaps they were circumcised as a… camouflage! Or just to baffle our Bronze Age scholars! What the latter do remember is Virgil’s aphorism: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”; “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” – in our case: bearing circumcision! At least they have been schooled in the Aeneid… Note that not only the Ekwesh, but also the Shekelesh and Shardana were circumcised, as the Egyptians made clear (unfortunately they did not inform… Michael Wood!) Therefore, these two peoples had also been Oriental in origin and settled in Sicily and Sardinia only later. Those who were not circumcised were the Peleset…

The stele ‘appropriated’ by Israel; Merneptah was the first to blame for he usurped it from his predecessor, Amenhotep III: he turned it round and used the rough surface for his text.

• The pharaoh’s victories over the Libyans and their Sea People allies are glorified on the Merneptah Stele, a black granite slab over three meters high, discovered by Flinders Petrie in Thebes in 1896. There is, however, a kind of a footnote in the final two of the 28 lines, which refers to a separate campaign in Canaan. There the king boasts of defeating and destroying four cities, the fourth one being most probably a city and valley in northern Canaan, called Jezreel – a word so similar to… Israel! Certainly that would be far more convenient and beneficial for all: for the whole Jewish diaspora, the emerging Zionism, formally established as a movement the next year after the discovery, for many Christians, especially the clergy, and, of course, Petrie himself! That same day he wondered: “Won’t the reverends be pleased?” and then he prophesied: “This stele will be better known in the world than anything else I have found.” He was not a fool: if this set of hieroglyphs on Line 27 could be read as “Israel”, it would represent the first documented instance of this name in the historical record, and the only mention in Ancient Egypt!
  Despite the fact that the readings in many places are illegible due to the rough surface and the poor cutting (Petrie’s own translation of the text contains dozens of question marks; only next to the controversial word the mark is missing…), most biblical archeologists accept Petrie’s version. That is how his find was also proclaimed as… Israel Stele: based on a disputed word in the penultimate line of a text dealing with another subject! What a disgrace for Merneptah: a proud pharaoh boasting of a triumph over a handful of poor villagers! In his time, there were no more than about 25 villages in the highlands of Canaan. Archaeologists and historians attempting to trace the origins of these villagers have found it impossible to identify any distinctive features that could define them as specifically Israelite. Archaeologist Paula McNutt says: “It is probably… during Iron Age I [(1200-1000 BCE) that] a population began to identify itself as ‘Israelite’.” The Kingdom of Israel emerged as an important, worth-mentioning local power even later, by the 9th century BCE, before falling to the Assyrians in 722. Thus, there was no “Israel” for Merneptah to mention – unless he was as prophetic as Petrie himself…

Departure of the Israelites, by David Roberts (1829)

• This “misspelling” trick was a kind of “compensation” for the Egyptians’ historical “error” not to mention either the celebrated Exodus or the calamitous Biblical plagues. The archeologists are equally to blame for they also failed to find any evidence to support the story of the Hebrews departing Egypt… The consensus among biblical scholars is that there was never any exodus of the proportions described in the Bible. According to the book of Exodus, arguably the most important in the Bible, the population leaving the country would have numbered some 2 million people, compared with an entire Egyptian population in 1250 BCE of around 3 to 3.5 million. Marching ten abreast and without accounting for livestock, they would have formed a line 240 kilometers long! No evidence has been found that Egypt ever suffered such a demographic and economic catastrophe or that the Sinai desert ever hosted (or could have hosted) these millions of people and their herds. The date proposed initially of an Exodus around 1450 BCE is also problematic: digs in the 1930s had failed to find traces of the simultaneous destruction of Canaanite cities ca 1400 BCE – in fact many of them, such as Jericho, the first one to fall to the Israelites according to the Bible, were uninhabited at the time. A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness, and most archaeologists have abandoned their investigation of Moses and the Exodus as “a fruitless pursuit”. According to archaeologist William Dever, there is “no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness.”

Flinders Petrie’s “fine”, “Caucasian”, “dynastic race”
just before landing in Egypt…!

• Flinders Petrie, who could possibly “address the issue”, had died a long time ago and was buried on Mount Zion, in Palestine. Furthermore, he remains a controversial figure as a committed advocate of “eugenics” and of the “superiority” of the Northern peoples over the Latinate and Southern peoples, as well as for his affiliation with a variety of fascist groups and anti-democratic thought in England. His views on archaeological issues were equally racist: He contended that the Egyptian civilization was derived from a “fine”, invading “Caucasian” (“white”) “Dynastic Race” which had conquered Egypt in predynastic times of late prehistory and introduced the Pharaonic, dynastic culture to the “inferior” “mulatto” race then inhabiting the country. These views spilled over into disputes with E. A. Wallis Budge. The British Museum‘s Egyptologist declared that the ancient Egyptians were an African people with roots in eastern Africa and their religion was essentially identical to the religions of the peoples of northeastern and central Africa. However, all but a few of his colleagues followed Petrie – a most revealing fact about the dominant ideology at the time, at least among intellectual circles. Thus Petrie and his followers derided Budge’s ideas as impossible and “unscientific”…

The great Pharaoh proudly presented his captives: from left to right
the Libyan, Nubian, Syrian, Shasu, and Hittite
(the… Hellene probably escaped!)

The next round in this protracted war took place some three decades later, during the reign of Ramses III (1186-1155 BCE), the last great pharaoh of Egypt. His inscriptions state that the ‘Nine Bows’ re-appeared as a “conspiracy in their isles”. Most tribes mentioned above were there again; we also learn that there were at least two great battles, one in the sea and the other on the land.

“When it was over”, the Wikipedia article on the Sea Peoples says, “several chiefs were captive: of Hatti, Amor, and Shasu among the ‘land peoples’, and the Tjeker, ‘Sherden of the sea’, ‘Teresh of the sea’ and Peleset or Philistines (in whose name some have seen the ancient Greek name for sea people: Pelasgians).”

Ramses III vs the Sea Peoples

What conclusions can we draw? We are surprised first of all since our scholars were not… surprised at all when they read about a Hittite chief among the captives: Hatti had been a Sea Peoples’ arch-enemy – and one of their greatest victims! But scholars are usually aware of such “details” and are not taken by surprise. Furthermore, the same thing had happened before and the pharaoh’s complaints had been officially forwarded to the Hittite monarch – as long as the Hittite kingdom still existed. OK, but why don’t they bother to explain, instead of wasting their time trying to involve the Greeks in this… “conspiracy theory”? We eventually realize that the destruction of the established civilizations, above all the Hittite and Mycenaean, was a deliberate tactics of the Sea Peoples to garner more strength at sea and amass land forces, as well. After all, the empires belonged to the aristocracies, Hittite or Mycenaean. What else could a desperate Hellene or a destitute Anatolian do under the circumstances but to follow the peoples with whom he shared the same aspirations for a better life? But what a pity for our scholars: not even one Greek among the captive chiefs… He probably managed to escape! The other captives were chiefs of the Amorites, who lived in Syria and part of Mesopotamia, and possibly of the Hebrews: Shasu is a term for nomad wanderers, and at least one of their tribes worshipped the Jewish god Yahweh. The rest were captains of ships. The pharaoh concluded his report as follows: “I slew the Denyen in their isles” and “burned” the Tjeker and Peleset… He thus implied some maritime raids of his own, some punitive expeditions elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In the Aegean? Where, what and whose were these “isles”? Whatever the answers, the chain reaction of the raids went on; it was the Egyptians’ turn to destroy – but destruction bears no signature.

The destruction of the established civilizations was a deliberate tactics of the Sea Peoples to garner more strength at sea and amass land forces, as well. After all, the empires belonged to the aristocracies, Hittite or Mycenaean. What else could a desperate Hellene or a destitute Anatolian do under the circumstances but to follow the peoples with whom he shared the same aspirations for a better life?

Lady of Mycenae (fresco)

Homer mentions an Achaean attack upon the Nile delta, and Menelaus speaks of the same in the Odyssey recounting his own return home from the Trojan War. This was not the only such action by Mycenaeans against Egypt, where they went ‘just for the fun of it’, and some gain, of course. Taking into account the turbulence among and within the great Mycenaean royal families, the hypothesis that they may have destroyed themselves completely is long-standing and seems to find support by the reputable historian Thucydides:

“For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands… were tempted to turn to piracy, under the conduct of their most powerful men… They would fall upon a town unprotected by walls… and would plunder it… no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.”

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Mycenaean gold diadem

Chronicle 3. MYCENAE: FROM KNOSSOS TO TROY

Chronicle 3. MYCENAE: FROM KNOSSOS TO TROY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 3. ΑΙΓΑΙΟΝ: ΚΝΩΣΟΣ, ΜΥΚΗΝΑΙ, ΙΛΙΟΝ

● Stonehenge ● Dorians and Sea Peoples ● Eleusinian, Cabeirian, and Orphic Mysteries ● The Trojan War and the Bronze Age Collapse

by Michales Loukovikas

 

The Atreid dynasty palace at Mycenae

AS HEIRS of the Minoans, the Mycenaeans assumed control of the “Tin Routes” – that is, the maritime trade network of metals from the Occident. Their acme lasted for about 250 years until the Bronze Age collapse. This extensive network sheds some light on the reason why Mycenaean artifacts have been found well outside the limits of the Mycenaean world: swords located as far away as Georgia in the Caucasus; an amber object inscribed with Linear B symbols in Bavaria, Germany; double axes and other objects from the 13th century BCE in Wessex and Cornwall, England, and in Ireland. There is convincing evidence that during the final phase of construction of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, around 1600 BCE, the builders were in commercial contact with “the great contemporary Mediterranean civilizations of Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, Egypt, and the ancestors of the travelling-trading Phoenicians,” as Gerald Hawkins said.^(a) The grave of a Mediterranean teenage boy that died ca 1550 BCE and several items of Mediterranean origin have been found in the burial ground of Stonehenge.

Sunset at Stonehenge

• ^(a) Thus, according to Hawkins, the Mycenaeans were already included among the navigating merchants of long distance voyages even before the conquest of Minoan Crete, while the Phoenicians (their “ancestors”, as he put it) made their first steps. Hawkins was an English astronomer and author, most famous for his work in the field of archaeoastronomy. He published an analysis of Stonehenge in 1965 and was the first to propose its purpose as an ancient astronomical observatory used to predict movements of the sun and stars. Archaeoastronomy is the study of how people in the past “have understood, or used, phenomena in the sky, and what role the sky played in their cultures.”

Mycenae, Lion Gate

The Mycenaean period (ca 1600–ca 1100 BCE) is the historical setting of much Hellenic literature and myth, including the Epic Cycle and Greek tragedy. Historians have traditionally blamed the collapse on an uprising or an invasion by another Hellenic ethnic group, the Dorians, though at least one of the Mycenaean centres, Pylos, was most probably destroyed by the so-called Sea Peoples.^(b) There are also theories of natural disasters or large-scale drought, which could have contributed, as well. The movements of people from the Balkans and Anatolia to the Near East at that time were quite real. The internal factors theory has the Mycenaean civilization falling in the course of societal conflicts brought on by a rejection of the palatial system by the underprivileged strata of society, who were quite impoverished by the period’s finale. Another hypothesis mingles social with ethnic divisions. In this context it has to be stressed that the Iron Age made large numbers of comparatively cheap weapons accessible to all. War was no longer a privilege of the aristocracy. The iron weapons were not as good as the bronze ones, but they could still kill… (See the previous Chronicle 2).

Heracles

• ^(b) The Dorian invasion is a concept devised by ancient Greek historians to explain why pre-classical dialects and traditions in southern Hellas were replaced by the ones that prevailed in the classical era. Greek legend asserted that the Dorians took possession of the Peloponnese in the so-called ‘Return of the Heracleidae’. The meaning of the concept has changed several times, as historians, philologists, and archaeologists used it in attempts to explain the cultural discontinuities expressed in the data of their fields. The pattern of the arrival of Dorian culture on certain islands such as Crete is also not well elucidated. Despite 200 years of investigation, the historicity of the Dorian invasion has not been established.

Sea peoples depicted as prisoners in Egypt

• The Sea Peoples were a confederacy of seafaring raiders from Southern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean, especially the Aegean Sea area, who sailed (and then also marched) east invading Hatti, Cyprus, Syria, Canaan, and Egypt, and bringing about the Bronze Age collapse. Pharaoh Merneptah explicitly refers to them by the term “the foreign-countries (or ‘peoples’) of the sea”. Omitting Mycenaean Hellas from the list of the victims, some scholars believe that they can identify most of the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egyptian records: They were supposedly Achaeans (Ekwesh; if they were, why then should they destroy Pylos? – “Because they were Hellenes!”, is the sardonic answer…); Tyrrhenians (Teresh), ancestors of the Etruscans; Lycians (Lukka); Sardinians (Sherden); Sicilians (Shekelesh); Philistines, that is Palestinians (Peleset), possibly coming from Crete; and Teucrians (Tekrur), who could be either Trojans or Greeks! The Peleset and Tekrur were the only major tribes of the Sea Peoples that settled permanently in Canaan. Note that several of these peoples had been used as mercenaries or ‘allies’ by the Egyptian and Hittite Empires before they turned against them (see Chronicles 4 and 5).

A Mycenaean woman with her chest exposed but… in profile – not en face
as the Cretan fashion was…

Mycenaean settlements were not confined in southern Hellas, but also appeared in Epirus, Macedonia, islands of the Aegean, the Asia Minor coast, Cyprus, Canaan and Italy. The towns were well fortified, in contrast to Minoan Crete. The best Mycenaean palaces were excavated at Mycenae , Tiryns, and Pylos. They were the heirs of the Minoan palaces but inferior to them. The heart of the palace was the megaron, the throne hall. Staircases found in Pylos indicate that the palaces had two stories. Located on the top floor were probably the private quarters of the royal family. Supreme power appears to have been held by a king, identifiable in the Homeric ἄναξ (‘divine lord’, ‘sovereign’, ‘host’). His role was military, judicial, and religious. Occurrences of the word in texts having to do with offerings suggest that the sovereigns were worshiped. Apart from that, no priestly class has yet been identified. Furthermore, it remains problematic to pick out a place of worship with certainty. It seems that many gods and religious conceptions of the Minoans were fused in the Mycenaean religion, the mother of the classical Greek religion. The Eleusinian mysteries were established during the Mycenaean period on a pre-Hellenic vegetation cult with Minoan elements. Demeter and other gods appear in Arcadian myths as animal-headed. Representations of processions with animal masks, or of ‘daemons’, remind us of the Hellenic myth of the Minotaur. Dionysos, the only Greek god who died in order to be reborn as he often appeared in the religions of the Orient, was related to the Minoan myth of the ‘Divine Child’ who was abandoned by his mother and then brought up by the powers of nature.^(c) Mycenaean painting was very much influenced by Minoan art. Bull-jumping frescoes are found at Mycenae and Tiryns, as well. However, the Mycenaeans depicted the animals only in relation to man or as victims of the hunt, and thus displayed a different relation to nature compared to the Minoans.

A procession of lion-headed “daemons” offering libation jugs to the seated goddess who raises a ritual vessel. The sun wheel and the crescent moon are in the sky. Gold signet ring, the largest from the Mycenaean world, found in Tiryns, but made by a Minoan workshop (15th century BCE)

• ^(c) The stories of the ‘Divine Child’, or ‘Baby Moses’, or Habis, an Odysseus and Calypso’s son (we will meet him when we voyage to Iberia, see Chronicle 6), etc. are anything but unique, as they are found in many cultures, based on the same idea but without necessarily from the same origin. Similarly, the Deluge myths, in connection with a Megaflood due to the last deglaciation, are also widespread among many cultures all around the world. The Mesopotamian Atrahasis, Deucalion, Noah etc. are heroes with the same background. It is a pity that modern Greeks are more familiar with Noah than Deucalion. The reason is that these stories are related as myths, tales, except those in the Bible, which are considered ‘sacred’. But what else is the Bible if not Hebrew mythology?

Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis, by Henryk Siemiradzki (1889)

• The Eleusinian mysteries (Ἐλευσίνια μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in Hellas. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient times, these were held to be the ones of greatest importance. It is acknowledged that their basis was an old agrarian cult which probably goes back to the Mycenaean or rather Minoan periods. The mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of the daughter (“kore”) from her mother by the king of the underworld Hades, in a cycle with three phases: the “descent”, the “search” and the “ascent”, when Persephone was reunited with Demeter. Her resurrection was symbolic of the rebirth of all life. The rites, ceremonies, and beliefs were kept secret. Since the rituals involved visions and conjuring of an “afterlife”, some scholars believe that their power and longevity came from psychedelic agents. The only requirements for membership were freedom from “blood guilt”, meaning never having committed murder, and not being a “barbarian” (unable to speak Greek). Nevertheless, the festival later spread to Rome. Women and even slaves were also allowed initiation. Comparative studies show parallels between these Hellenic rituals and similar systems in the Near East, such as the cults of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, the Syrian and Persian cults and, of course, the Thracian–Phrygian Cabeirian mysteries.

A Samothracian relief showing Agamemnon being initiated into the Cabeirian rites: it gives credit to the idea that the Eleusinian mysteries originated from the Cabeirian cult through Thracians
who settled at Eleusis.

• The Cabeiri (Κάβειροι) were enigmatic chthonic deities, protectors of sailors, who were imported into Hellenic ritual and may have also included Hittite and proto-Etruscan elements. They were worshiped in a mystery cult closely associated with that of Hephaestus, centered οn the north Aegean islands of Lemnos and Samothrace, and also at Thebes. Other places of worship included Imbros and Seuthopolis in Thrace, and various sites in Macedonia, Asia Minor and the rest of the Aegean. The Samothracian cult spread during the Hellenistic period, eventually initiating Romans. As the cult’s origin was non-Greek, the “barbarians” were also accepted: the initiation had no prerequisites for age, gender, status or nationality. Everyone, men and women, adults and children, the free or the enslaved, Hellenes and non-Hellenes, could participate. After all, both the Samothracians and Lemnians were originally non-Greek: the Lemnians were possibly related to the Etruscans; they were Hellenized after Athens conquered the island in the 6th century BCE; however, the cult of the Cabeiri survived the period of Hellenization. The Samothracians were associated with the Trojans and Pelasgians; in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods they used a so-called “barbarian” language even in Roman times. Thebes was connected to Samothrace, primarily through the wedding of Cadmus and the Samothracian Harmonia. The Cabeiri also bear many similarities to other fabulous races, such as the Telchines, Cyclops, Dactyls, Corybantes, and Curetes. These groups were often confused or identified with one another since many of them were also associated with metallurgy – just like Hephaestus.

The Myth of Orpheus, by Marc Chagall

• The Orphic mysteries (Ὀρφικά) may have also had their origins with the Cabeiri. They were religious beliefs and practices originating in the Hellenic and Thracian worlds, associated with literature ascribed to the mythical musician and poet Orpheus, who descended into Hades for his beloved Eurydice and returned. Orphics also revered Persephone and Dionysus for the same reason. As in the Eleusinian mysteries, initiation into Orphism was associated with an “afterlife”.

Behold Alaric, the “Messiah” of the Christian mob, entering Athens, having ravaged Attica! He invaded the Peloponnese, sold citizens of Corinth, Argos, Sparta, etc into slavery, crossed the Gulf of Corinth marching to Epirus…

• Emperor Theodosius I closed the sanctuaries by decree in 392 CE. Two years before, in 390, he had ordered his troops to commit one of the most horrific massacres in history, slaughtering at least 7,000 Thessalonians in the Hippodrome, because they had rebelled against the emperor’s Germanic garrison,⁽*⁾ and the imposition of Christianity with the abolition of the Edictum Mediolani (313 CE) on freedom of religion. As soon as the Christians were free of persecution, they started persecuting all the others, thanks to Theodosius the “Saint” (for the Christian Church), the “Great” (for the official History)… The last remnants of the Mysteries were wiped out in 396, when the Goth king Alaric invaded Eleusis accompanied by Christians “in their dark garments” – the “Blackshirts” and “Sturmabteilung” (SA) of the time – desecrating the old sacred sites and killing all the priests… Alaric halted slaughter and plunder only when he was appointed magister militum by the emperor. He surely deserved better: sanctification!
• ⁽*⁾ Most of the Theodosian dynasty emperors, as well as the last ones of the Western Empire, were puppets of Germanic kingmakers, the so-called magistri militum (military masters) or stratelates, such as Aspar in the East, and Ricimer in the West. (See Chronicle 7⁺ on the violent Christianization of the Empire).

The choral dancers frieze from the Temenos in Samothrace

A Mycenaean jar with an octopus and fish

Commerce remains curiously absent from the written sources in Linear B. However, it is known that the Minoans exported fine fabrics to Egypt; the Mycenaeans no doubt did the same. Most probably they borrowed knowledge of navigational matters from the Minoans, as is evidenced by the fact that their maritime commerce did not take off until after the collapse of the Minoan civilization. It seems that certain products, notably fabrics and oil, even metal objects, were meant to be sold outside the kingdom, because they were made in quantities too great to be consumed solely at home. Pottery was also produced in great quantities. Especially after the conquest of Minoan Crete, production increased considerably, notably in Argolis, the area of Mycenae, with great numbers exported outside Hellas. The products destined for export were more luxurious and featured heavily worked painted decorations incorporating mythic, warrior, or animal motifs. The Mycenaeans’ network extended as far as southern Spain, Britain, and central Europe, while their pottery has been found in Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, the Aegean, Asia Minor (amongst others at the old settlement of Miletus where high-quality Minoan and Mycenaean ceramics have been recovered), other parts of Anatolia, Cyprus, Canaan and Egypt. Minoan and Mycenaean foreign trade is one of the most important chapters of the Bronze Age history and an open challenge to every archaeologist and historian.

The Mycenaean maritime commerce did not take off until after the collapse of the Minoan civilization. Especially after the conquest of Crete, production of goods meant to be sold outside the kingdom increased considerably…

The gold funeral Mask of ‘Agamemnon’

The Mycenaeans, as conquerors of Crete, became heirs to the Minoan thalassocracy; but they did not last long. The Trojan War, that took place in 1194-1184 BCE according to Eratosthenes,^(d) the Sea Peoples’ raids, and the great instability of the epoch, led to their downfall during the Bronze Age collapse. Many historians believe the transition to the Iron Age was violent, sudden and culturally disruptive. The Aegean and Anatolian palatial civilizations were replaced, after a hiatus, by the isolated village cultures of the so-called Greek Dark Ages, which were dark, indeed, but not only Greek. In just 50 years, in the first half of the 12th century, the downfall of the Mycenaean world and the Hittite Empire, the catastrophe in Syria, Canaan, and Egypt, and the cultural collapse that followed, resulted in the interruption of trade routes and the severe reduction of literacy. The Mycenaean Linear B writing was forgotten. The Hellenes would need to re-invent writing in the late 9th or early 8th century BCE.^(e) In this period almost every city was violently destroyed and often left unoccupied thereafter, such as Hattusa, the Hittite capital, Mycenae, and Ugarit. Troy was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned. Fewer and smaller settlements suggest famine and depopulation.

• ^(d) Eratosthenes (Ἐρατοσθένης, ca 276–ca 195 BCE), from Cyrene, was a geographer, astronomer, mathematician, poet and music theorist (characteristic of the ancient scholars’ global knowledge and eruditeness). He was the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth and also the tilt of the Earth’s axis with remarkable accuracy. He may have also accurately calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun. He was the first person to use the word ‘geography’, invented a system of latitude and longitude, and made the first world map incorporating parallels and meridians in his cartographic depictions based on the available geographical knowledge of the era. He invented the leap day, and was the founder of scientific chronology, trying to fix the dates of the chief political and literary events from the conquest of Troy.

The map of Eratosthenes

• Eratosthenes was a chief librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. The library, a major centre of science and learning in the ancient world, was repeatedly destroyed by Romans (Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, Aurelian in the 3rd century CE), Christians (Theodosius and Patriarch Theophilus in 391) and Muslim Arabs (`Amr ibn al-`As in 642), resulting to an irretrievable loss of knowledge for mankind.

A Linear B tablet

• ^(e) The Greek alphabet, probably derived from the Phoenician ‘alphabet’, was in turn the ancestor of numerous other European and Middle Eastern scripts, including Latin and Cyrillic. However, a very important change was made in adapting the Phoenician system to Hellenic, namely the introduction of vowel letters. The Greeks were obliged to make the same innovation twice because the vowels are significant in their language. Adapting the Minoan Linear A script to their needs, the Mycenaeans borrowed 87 Cretan symbols; 82 corresponded to syllables and five to vowels. Linear A is still not deciphered and so we ignore if this brilliant idea of the vowel letters was Cretan or Hellenic. According to the definition used by modern authors, this feature makes Greek the first alphabet in the real sense, as distinguished from the purely consonantal Semitic ‘alphabets’, which are called “abjads” (derived from the Arabic word for ‘alphabet’). The Phoenician abjad belonged to the family of the closely related West Semitic scripts.

Achilles discovered by Ulysses (Odysseus), by Jan de Bray

The Trojan War was just an act of this tragedy on a big scale involving numerous ethnicities: the fighters in the alliance of Troy are depicted in the Iliad as speaking various languages and thus needing to have orders translated to them by their commanders. On the Greek side instead the Trojan campaign was anything but Pan-Hellenic: even the great hero, Achilles, tried to evade ‘conscription’ disguised as a girl in the palace of Skyros! Several areas, e.g. Macedonia, Epirus, and in part Thessaly, stayed away, probably because they were under the control of the Dorians, who would proceed to the Peloponnese some time later, filling the vacuum created by the demise of the Mycenaeans. None of the palaces survived and up to 90% of small sites were abandoned suggesting depopulation on a major scale. Athens and some other cities continued to be occupied but with a more local sphere of influence, limited trade and an impoverished culture, from which they took centuries to recover. The Dark Ages would last for more than 400 years. After ca 1100 BCE, the decoration on Hellenic pottery lacks the figurative adornment of Minoan or Mycenaean ware and is restricted to simpler, generally geometric styles (1000–700 BCE). It’s the reason why this age is also called Geometric, or Homeric, due to the composition of Homer’s epics, ca the 8th century, and the entire Epic Cycle. Those epics, a by-product of the new alphabet and inspired mainly by the Trojan War and its repercussions that would later feed the tragedians’ imagination, together with the emergence of the Greek poleis in the 9th century, were the first signs of recovery in Hellas.

The Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, Attica,
with its Doric order columns at sunset

The catastrophe was even worse in Anatolia. Every important site shows a layer of destruction. Here civilization possibly did not recover to the level of the Hittites for another thousand years. Cyprus witnessed two waves of destruction: by the Sea Peoples ca 1230, and by Aegean refugees ca 1190 BCE. In Syria, Ugarit was burned to the ground. In addition, the cities along the coast from Gaza northward were destroyed. However, strangely enough, the raids did not affect the Phoenician cities; they were confined in southern Canaan. Assyria, who was protected by the best army in the world, also remained intact; nevertheless, it withdrew to its borders for a long time. As for Egypt, although victorious against the invaders and surviving for a while, it succumbed some time later. Robert Drews describes the Bronze Age Collapse as “the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire”. A number of people referred to the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a “lost golden age”. Hesiod e.g. spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the modern harsh cruel world of the Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes. It seems that the disruption of long distance trade, an aspect of the so-called ‘systems collapse’, cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to produce.

The celebrated Winged Nike (Victory) of Samothrace that stood at the island’s Temple complex dedicated to the Great Gods on a rostral pedestal representing the prow of a ship
(c. 200–190 BCE)

The disruption of long distance trade cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to produce.

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