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The Mycenaean World
An extensively illustrated general account of Greece in the 14th and 13th centuries B.C., as reconstructed from contemporary documents and archives by a leading world authority who presents a vivid picture of a long-obscure era.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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About the author
John Chadwick
73 books12 followersJohn Chadwick, FBA was an English linguist and classical scholar who was most notable for the decipherment, with Michael Ventris, of Linear B.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 16, 2022
Before the Mycenaeans there were the Minoans, who built a wide-ranging empire based on their capital of Knossos on the island of Crete. They were a seafaring people, confident enough in their navy that their cities were unfortified. At the height of their power the Mycenaeans entered mainland Greece from the northwest, conquering the previous inhabitants and settling in the Peloponnese, the southern part which a thousand years later would be the land of the Spartans.
Minoan civilization eventually collapsed. Around 1600 B.C. A massive volcano exploded on Thera (present day Santorini) which caused widespread destruction across the eastern Mediterranean. The Minoans rebuilt but never fully recovered, and an earthquake around 1450 B.C. spelled the end for them as a unified power. The Mycenaeans took advantage of their weakened state and invaded, setting up a second power base for their civilization.
Three hundred years later the Mycenaeans themselves were destroyed, probably by the invaders known as the Sea Peoples, who laid waste to ancient civilizations across the region, including in Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, and Cyprus. The Egyptians under Ramses II managed to turn them back but at such a high cost that it took centuries to recover. After the collapse of the Mycenaeans Greece entered what are called the Dark Ages from 1100-750 B.C., when the cities were laid waste, art and science vanished, and stone palaces were replaced by mud and wattle shacks.
The Minoans had a written language, called Linear A, which to this day has resisted translation. After their conquest by the Mycenaeans it was replaced by Linear B, which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1953 and found to be an early form of Greek. Thousands of tablets of Linear B have been recovered from various Myceneaean sites, and have yielded a great deal of information about the civilization.
The first writing is attested around 3500 B.C., in the form of Sumerian pictographs, which would later evolve into cuneiform, which would become the standard for recording dozens of languages across Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran for three thousand years. The very last cuneiform tablets are from Egypt in the first decades A.D. Writing came into existence for very mundane reasons: to record items and quantities. These were useful for merchants, but especially so for rulers, because as leaders expanded their span of control they quickly found they needed a system for keeping track of who had paid their taxes and where things were stored.
Eventually cuneiform would also become a literary form of expression, recording speeches, prayers, rituals, and even the first epic, the story of Gilgamesh. If the Mycenaeans made similar use of Linear B, it has vanished, because what remains are only administrative records, and only for those on the eve of their civilization’s destruction.
The evidence suggests that the Mycenaeans kept their current-year records on clay tablets, as a quick way of keeping track of day to day accounts, and at the end of the year summarized the results on parchment and destroyed or recycled the clay. Most of the tablets were in the form of flattened cigar-shapes, which would result from rolling up clay and then pressing it flat. Records were stored in a central repository, and everything for a single type of transaction was stored in reed baskets, with a clay marker on front explaining what was inside. The baskets were then placed on wooden shelves in a storeroom. Scholars know all this because they have found markers whose reverse sides show the impressions of the baskets onto which they were pressed. When the end came for Mycenaea it came quickly. The palace was looted and burned, and the heat from the burning shelves and baskets fired the clay tablets, which were never meant to be permanent, so that they can still be read three thousand years later. As the shelves collapsed, however, tablets were broken and scattered, and much of the work of scholars is to fit fragments back together and read the contents.
Sometimes the scholars get lucky, and can trace words back to Homeric or Classical Greek. However, as with all invasions, the invaders absorbed much of the language of the original inhabitants, and the meaning of many of those words were lost during the Dark Ages. Some can be guessed at from context, but many of their meanings will never be known.
One of the largest groups of tablets is from Pylos, a kingdom in what is now southwest Greece, the domain of Homer’s Nestor. According to its Wikipedia article, it covered approximately 2000 square kilometers, and had at least 50,000 people, and possibly as many as 80,000-120,000. Managing that many people and their crops, livestock, and other resources was no easy task, and while the tablets record only dry administrative details, they shed light on the life of the kingdom. The scribes recorded taxes due and received, cloth and metal sent to artisans, food rations delivered, and offerings to the gods, some of whom can be traced to the Classical pantheon, and some who were local and vanished with the fall of the city.
There are also some tablets which seem to record the military preparations as the last days approached, accounting for things such as how many chariots were in serviceable condition, and who was issued weapons or armor. The invasion appears to have come from the sea, and overwhelmed the defenders, causing the population to flee the city and into the mountains. The fact that very few bodies were found in the remains of the looted and burned palace suggests the people had fled beforehand.
Three thousand years was a long time ago, so it is fascinating that we can re-create so much about this ancient society. It was highly organized and efficiently administered, complete with records of partial payments and rebates offered on taxes. Considering the administratively disorganized city that I live in today, I’m not sure our computers and automated systems have made any real improvements. This book was published in 1976, which is itself ancient by modern standards, and much of what it says has probably been updated or contradicted. Still, it is a useful introduction, especially in the way the scholars use deduction and inference to make up for having only partial information. If, for instance, they know A and B, they can infer C and from that make an educated guess at D. The book is not a general history of the Mycenaeans, being focused solely on what can be learned from the surviving tablets, but it tells an interesting story, both of those ancient times and of the modern experts who try to restore what they can from the fragments that have survived the ravages of time.
Minoan civilization eventually collapsed. Around 1600 B.C. A massive volcano exploded on Thera (present day Santorini) which caused widespread destruction across the eastern Mediterranean. The Minoans rebuilt but never fully recovered, and an earthquake around 1450 B.C. spelled the end for them as a unified power. The Mycenaeans took advantage of their weakened state and invaded, setting up a second power base for their civilization.
Three hundred years later the Mycenaeans themselves were destroyed, probably by the invaders known as the Sea Peoples, who laid waste to ancient civilizations across the region, including in Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, and Cyprus. The Egyptians under Ramses II managed to turn them back but at such a high cost that it took centuries to recover. After the collapse of the Mycenaeans Greece entered what are called the Dark Ages from 1100-750 B.C., when the cities were laid waste, art and science vanished, and stone palaces were replaced by mud and wattle shacks.
The Minoans had a written language, called Linear A, which to this day has resisted translation. After their conquest by the Mycenaeans it was replaced by Linear B, which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1953 and found to be an early form of Greek. Thousands of tablets of Linear B have been recovered from various Myceneaean sites, and have yielded a great deal of information about the civilization.
The first writing is attested around 3500 B.C., in the form of Sumerian pictographs, which would later evolve into cuneiform, which would become the standard for recording dozens of languages across Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran for three thousand years. The very last cuneiform tablets are from Egypt in the first decades A.D. Writing came into existence for very mundane reasons: to record items and quantities. These were useful for merchants, but especially so for rulers, because as leaders expanded their span of control they quickly found they needed a system for keeping track of who had paid their taxes and where things were stored.
Eventually cuneiform would also become a literary form of expression, recording speeches, prayers, rituals, and even the first epic, the story of Gilgamesh. If the Mycenaeans made similar use of Linear B, it has vanished, because what remains are only administrative records, and only for those on the eve of their civilization’s destruction.
The evidence suggests that the Mycenaeans kept their current-year records on clay tablets, as a quick way of keeping track of day to day accounts, and at the end of the year summarized the results on parchment and destroyed or recycled the clay. Most of the tablets were in the form of flattened cigar-shapes, which would result from rolling up clay and then pressing it flat. Records were stored in a central repository, and everything for a single type of transaction was stored in reed baskets, with a clay marker on front explaining what was inside. The baskets were then placed on wooden shelves in a storeroom. Scholars know all this because they have found markers whose reverse sides show the impressions of the baskets onto which they were pressed. When the end came for Mycenaea it came quickly. The palace was looted and burned, and the heat from the burning shelves and baskets fired the clay tablets, which were never meant to be permanent, so that they can still be read three thousand years later. As the shelves collapsed, however, tablets were broken and scattered, and much of the work of scholars is to fit fragments back together and read the contents.
Sometimes the scholars get lucky, and can trace words back to Homeric or Classical Greek. However, as with all invasions, the invaders absorbed much of the language of the original inhabitants, and the meaning of many of those words were lost during the Dark Ages. Some can be guessed at from context, but many of their meanings will never be known.
One of the largest groups of tablets is from Pylos, a kingdom in what is now southwest Greece, the domain of Homer’s Nestor. According to its Wikipedia article, it covered approximately 2000 square kilometers, and had at least 50,000 people, and possibly as many as 80,000-120,000. Managing that many people and their crops, livestock, and other resources was no easy task, and while the tablets record only dry administrative details, they shed light on the life of the kingdom. The scribes recorded taxes due and received, cloth and metal sent to artisans, food rations delivered, and offerings to the gods, some of whom can be traced to the Classical pantheon, and some who were local and vanished with the fall of the city.
There are also some tablets which seem to record the military preparations as the last days approached, accounting for things such as how many chariots were in serviceable condition, and who was issued weapons or armor. The invasion appears to have come from the sea, and overwhelmed the defenders, causing the population to flee the city and into the mountains. The fact that very few bodies were found in the remains of the looted and burned palace suggests the people had fled beforehand.
Three thousand years was a long time ago, so it is fascinating that we can re-create so much about this ancient society. It was highly organized and efficiently administered, complete with records of partial payments and rebates offered on taxes. Considering the administratively disorganized city that I live in today, I’m not sure our computers and automated systems have made any real improvements. This book was published in 1976, which is itself ancient by modern standards, and much of what it says has probably been updated or contradicted. Still, it is a useful introduction, especially in the way the scholars use deduction and inference to make up for having only partial information. If, for instance, they know A and B, they can infer C and from that make an educated guess at D. The book is not a general history of the Mycenaeans, being focused solely on what can be learned from the surviving tablets, but it tells an interesting story, both of those ancient times and of the modern experts who try to restore what they can from the fragments that have survived the ravages of time.
August 10, 2013
How did I become so interested in ancient Greece? Public schooling certainly didn't discourage it, since certain modern myths about the classical world form part of the secular religion of the state. When I took Latin in high school, the interest was already present. Perhaps it was the series of Time-Life books which my paternal grandmother gave me which had a beautifully illustrated volume by Moses Hadas about them. Certainly the pictures were familiar, the later art realistic, the architecture replicated all over the place.
Whatever the case, I've exercised a preferential option for the Greeks and the classics since at least junior high school, an interest which was repeatedly reinforced in school, an interest which influenced book selections during periods, like summer vacations, when I could read anything I wished.
Chadwick, with Ventris, decoded the previously unreadable script of the Mycenaean culture. This is an account of that and a synthesis of what the reading of Linear B inscriptions has taught us about their civilization.
Whatever the case, I've exercised a preferential option for the Greeks and the classics since at least junior high school, an interest which was repeatedly reinforced in school, an interest which influenced book selections during periods, like summer vacations, when I could read anything I wished.
Chadwick, with Ventris, decoded the previously unreadable script of the Mycenaean culture. This is an account of that and a synthesis of what the reading of Linear B inscriptions has taught us about their civilization.
February 24, 2022
John Chadwick is of course famous for his part in the decipherment of Linear B in 1952, and he wrote this book in 1976 out of frustration that all of the surveys of the Bronze Age Aegean were still largely written from the view of the physical archaeological finds rather than the documentary evidence in Linear B. A noble enough goal, but the execution is often haphazard, and while a tremendous amount of work happened in the years immediately following Linear B's decipherment, 1976 is still a very long time ago in Mycenaean studies—particularly the chapters on the social structure and religion of Mycenae and the one on Homer are hit especially hard by more recent developments in our interpretation of the tablets and our understanding of Mycenaean Greek itself. (The Homer chapter also suffers from Chadwick's clear lack of expertise in the Homeric epics in general, but it's nice to see the effort made.)
Nice in its time—surprisingly accessible to the general public without being useless to people with more background—but now definitely out of date.
Nice in its time—surprisingly accessible to the general public without being useless to people with more background—but now definitely out of date.
July 28, 2021
An excellent book for ancient history enthusiasts, John Chadwick provides his readers with a vivid introduction to the Mycenaean World, including sections on relgion, agriculture, trade and the system of kingdoms which existed in the period before the bronze age collapse.
What is particularly valuable, especially for the amateur scholar, is the detailed decipherment and explanation of linear b tablets, one of the earliest forms of writing ever discovered and an invaluable source for scholars of the period.
There are also large numbers of supporting photographs and maps.
What is particularly valuable, especially for the amateur scholar, is the detailed decipherment and explanation of linear b tablets, one of the earliest forms of writing ever discovered and an invaluable source for scholars of the period.
There are also large numbers of supporting photographs and maps.
April 16, 2025
Εξαιρετική δουλειά, μοναδικής αξίας πρωτογενής μελέτη και τεκμηρίωση. Ο οξυδερκής συγγραφέας επιχειρηματολογεί για κάθε πρόταση που διατυπώνει, απορρίπτοντας ταυτόχρονα και άλλες εναλλακτικές. Ένα κλασικό αριστούργημα της ελληνικής αρχαιολογίας. Ένα must-read για κάθε Έλληνα!!
September 7, 2017
A terrific research book full of useful facts.
Read
October 9, 2022*early greece*
April 29, 2011
Great Book. Very thorough.
October 8, 2012
A decent "picture book" about the world of Agamemnon by the man who helped to decipher Linear B.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews