Knossos, Mycenae, Troy: The Enchanting Bronze Age and its Tumultuous Climax

by Natale Barca

This work puts a particular emphasis on the mixing and osmosis of the first Mediterranean civilizations, with particular reference to the Minoan, Cycladic, Mycenaean, and Trojan, and on the causes of their decline, which are to be identified in a jumble of natural and human causes, and in a long-lasting, slow, but irreversible crisis. It takes into account that the Mediterranean Dimension of the Bronze Age is a garden in which many legends flourished, clearly distinguishing between myth and history, and always bearing in mind that legends are not to be taken literally (nonetheless, they often have a grain of truth). It does not aim to provide an exhaustive report but to compose a broad and evolutionary picture, in which the facts and their connections, which are deducible from archaeological evidence or from the accounts of ancient historians, find their place, in their consequentiality. Its originality lies not in the choice of the subject, but in the way of treating it. The author introduces and explains, in order to be read, and perhaps to get excited. Another characterizing element of Knossos, Mycenae, Troy is the wide use of the ‘historical present’ that is made there to represent events and construct the text, to reduce the reader’s distance from the narrated events, and facilitates their approach to them. This book aims to provide the reader with an overall picture of the cultures that laid the foundations of Western civilization, which is not generic, but rather detailed and updated, and which has scientific solidity.

Table of Contents

Timeline
Preface
The geographical context
1. The origins of the Minoan civilization
2. The geography of Protopalatial Crete
3. War weapons and defensive architecture
4. Maritime trade
5. Religion and worship
6. The transition to the Neopalatial Period
7. Neopalatial Crete
8. Mutual influences
9. The volcanic catastrophe of Santorini
10. The Proto-Greeks
11. The emergence of the Mycenaeans
12. The search for raw materials
13. Calamity and resilience
14. The Mycenaean conquest of Crete
15. The Mycenaeans seize mercantile trade from the Minoans
16. The pre-colonization of the West
17. Kingdoms and city-palaces
18. Crete in the age of Minos I
19. Minos II
20. The catastrophe of Pylos. The Sea Part I
21. The Trojan War
22. Which Troy?
23. The decline of the palace-cities
24. The Sea Part II
25. The recovery without the palaces and the final crisis

Genres: History

272 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2023

Reviews

[Sense of History]

I should have known: that subtitle ("enchanting/tumultuous") didn't predict much good. In the Preface alone there was an accumulation of questionable statements: a detailed but very dubious description of the ordinary clothing of the Minoans, the presentation of Troy as the third civilization of the Aegean on a par with Minoan Crete and Mycenae, and the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations ending shortly after the war with Troy. I know the aim of the author is to make things as accessible as possible to a general public, but this level of generalization made me suspicious. And then, the statement in the first chapter that agriculture in the 9th millennium was developed in the valleys of the Nile, the Jordan, the Tigris and the Euphrates (manifestly untrue, as it was not in the valleys but in the hillside areas of the Fertile Crescent), made my cup run over. Perhaps I'm too harsh, but I can't recommend this, I'm afraid.