Two soft mounds on a plain in the Argolid, where the land asks nothing of you and travellers look straight through. But those mounds are not natural at all â they are the oldest fortresses of mainland Greece, built by a people who left almost no writing of their own, and the story of the Mycenaeans is a story we have only recently learned to read.
From the first shaft graves and the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, through the great palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos, the war-chariots and the lion-head daggers, the workshops where women wove wool into the currency of the age â and the clay tablets that, when at last they were read, turned out to be Greek. We follow the palatial economy to its height, the collapse that burned the archives, the Sea Peoples and the drought, and the long silence of the Greek Dark Age â and the nineteenth-century dreamer who brought the whole age back to the surface.
A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About 69 minutes.
Sources (a selection): Dickinson, The Aegean Bronze Age (3rd ed., 2005) · Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (1958) · Ventris & Chadwick, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives,” JHS 73 (1953) · Blegen, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos (1950–64) · Schliemann, Tiryns (1886) · Mylonas, Mycenae and Mycenae (1966) · Robinson, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B (2002) · Halstead, “Redistribution in Aegean Palatial Societies,” AJA 115/2 (2011) · Davis & Stocker, “The Lord of the Gold Rings,” Hesperia 85/2 (2016) · Cline, 1177 B.C. (Princeton, 2014) · Kaniewski & Kenney, Radiocarbon 61 (2019) · Parry & Lord, the oral-formulaic tradition.
