The Mycenaean World

Before 1200 BC, the ancient world was more connected than you'd ever imagine. Egyptian pharaohs, Hittite emperors and Mycenaean warrior-kings trading gifts, forging alliances and going to war across the glittering Mediterranean. Then, in just a few decades, it all collapsed... Professor Eric Cline joins us to unravel this lost Bronze Age world: the real diplomacy behind Homer's epics, the letters that rewrote history, and the catastrophes that erased Mycenaean civilisation. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  Hi, folks. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was a world built on the sea. Merchant ships carrying copper, gold, ivory, olive oil, textiles across hundreds of miles of sparkling ocean. Kings exchanged lavish gifts and assurances of eternal friendship one year and sailed to war the next. Fishermen cast their nets. Pirates prowled the coastlines. Cities grew on international trade. The fate of entire kingdoms could rest on a particular ship making it safely into harbor.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  This is the world of 1200 B.C., the closing years of the Bronze Age. Another name for it is the Mycenaean Age, and it's in that period that we believe the Odyssey takes place. Stretching across the Eastern Mediterranean was a network of powerful civilizations unlike anything Europe would see again for centuries. The Egyptians that ruled the Nile Valley, the Hittite Empire dominating Anatolia, the kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece controlling the Greek archipelago and mainland, while wealthy trading ports like Ugerit connected east to west and beyond that inland where

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Babylon and Assyria competed for power in Mesopotamia. It's in this world that the Odyssey is set, a time of voyages, of peril and prizes, unknown lands, peoples, dangers, mighty empires, exotic discoveries, and wealth. But I love studying this period for reasons that extend far beyond the Odyssey, because this was a time when everything came to a sudden end. This glittering golden age of Mediterranean trade collapsed, and we're still trying to explain why. Today, I'm joined by Professor Eric Klein, leading expert on the Mycenaean world. His new book, Love, Diplomacy, and War, explores this remarkable period of history through one of its most extraordinary surviving sources.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  We're very lucky to have it. The correspondence exchanged between the great kings of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, and Cyprus. Can you believe we still have these documents? These extraordinary letters that offer a rare glimpse into the late Bronze Age world and its alliances, rivalries, trade, and politics. This is the final episode in our series explaining everything you need to know about the Odyssey and its world.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the pod.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Do you know the one thing that I regret most about my early days of historical awareness and research is thinking about Egypt and Greece and the ancient Near East in these little sort of silos. And what work like yours does is just remind me that, of course, these places are next door to each other. They are sharing. This is why there's an explosion of activity in this part of North Africa and Eurasia. It's all happening because of, partly because of collaboration and competition.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yep. Collaboration, competition, good way to put it. It's a tightly interconnected world back then. I mean, we're talking 1500 B.C. down to about 1200 B.C.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  So, what, late Bronze Age? Is that what we can call the late Bronze Age, right?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Late Bronze Age, yes. Across the Mediterranean, everybody's talking to everybody else.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  And is that because of the geography, the technology? I mean, you can obviously travel on land between, as we know, Ramses does, for example. He travels up into what's now Syria. But also with the Greek world, it's pretty easy, is it, to go Crete into the Nile Delta and back again, and we can trace that?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Definitely. You could definitely sail counterclockwise around the Mediterranean, no problem. Like you said, Greece down to Crete, down to Egypt, and then up around the Levant and then to what's now Turkey. Yeah. And upon occasion, you could go the other way as well. But you can also, if you're over in the Eastern Mediterranean, of course, you can go by land to get from Egypt to Mesopotamia and the Hittites and all that. So it's a tightly interconnected, I would say, globalized Mediterranean world. I kind of like that, globalized Mediterranean, for its time.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  I was in Crete once in the museum, and I saw the images of Egypt on some of the paintings that are so extraordinary. So we've got maritime trade, because the thing about those mariners is they don't stop, do they, Eric? I mean, that's one thing. We call them smugglers, call them pirates, raiders, traders, whatever you like. They will move stuff around and sell it, won't they, in these ships?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  They will, and sometimes they had dual roles. You could be a merchant and a pirate at the same time.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  An explorer, and who knows what else? Now, what about elite diplomacy? Because this is something I'm so interested in your work. There are these letters and requests and marriage alliances across reasonably different types of states, aren't there?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are. So we've got a number of archives from back then, including a famous one, the Amarna Archive, which was found back in 1887, dates to the middle of the 14th century B.C., high point of the Mycenaeans, but also a high point of the Egyptian New Kingdom period. And in this archive, which were the royal letters of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, and his father, Amenhotep III.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  So, but the 18th dynasty, so peak New Kingdom era. Okay, these guys are ballers. Okay, fine.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Yes, you don't get more peak than that. And they're writing back and forth to the other great kings, the king of Assyria, king of Babylonia, king of the Hittites. And yeah, there's marriage negotiations, there's alliances, there's pleas from the others for the Egyptians to send gold. I mean, we've got all kinds of diplomatic things going on back then. Embassies, embargoes, you name it. I mean, it's really similar to us today, more similar than you might expect.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  And so it's not all Ramses taking on the Hittites or taking on the people of Kadesh and, you know, fighting. Sometimes you're saying these Egyptian pharaohs actually saw quite a lot of kinship with rulers of these other states. There was a sort of international elite, almost.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Actually, I call them the G8 of the ancient world. Absolutely. So, and yeah, sometimes they're fighting, absolutely, but other times they are in diplomatic negotiations. So the Hittites and the Egyptians are a very good example, right? You've got the Battle of Kadesh, like you mentioned, but you've also got eventually a peace treaty, like the world's first peace treaty. I think there's a part of it in the United Nations. So, yeah, again, it's very similar to today.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  And where do the Mycenaeans fit into all of this? And are they across Greece at this point? Are they just in Mycenae? What's going on with these guys?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  So the Mycenaeans are on the Greek mainland, right? You've got the Minoans on Crete, but you've got the Mycenaeans on the mainland. They both are on the periphery of the world that we've just described. So we've got mentions by the Egyptians of the Mycenaeans. They knew them as Tanaya. That was their name for mainland Greece. They knew the Minoans as the Kefteu. And we've also got the Hittites mentioning the Mycenaeans. They're probably Akayawa. But we don't have, like, any evidence of kings marrying daughters or princesses from the other area. We don't have that for the Mycenaeans. So while they're in the commercial orbit, and probably also diplomatic to a certain

• 8:37Speaker 03

  extent, they don't seem to be in the middle of the rest of them, as you might imagine. But then again, Greece is out on the edge, if you look at a map.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Perhaps a little bit uncivilized. They're out there on the frontier between what lies beyond, like the Italians beyond. I mean, God knows what's going on with those guys.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Yes, but the Mycenaeans themselves, they're in control of the whole Greek mainland. We've got a whole series of kingdoms or city-states, if you will.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Okay, so city-states that share a culture, a language, religions?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, absolutely. Culture, language, religion, absolutely. In fact, a lot of the later Greek gods and goddesses, Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Athena, they're already around in the Mycenaean period. We know this because we're able to read their writing. It's very early type of Greek. We call it Linear B, but it is very early Greek, deciphered by Michael Ventress back in 1952. And we can find out a lot about the Mycenaean culture at that time. Now, we've got different city-states, kingdoms, if you will. You've got the famous ones, Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, and so on. Each of them has their own king, which we know from the Linear B tablets. He's called a wanax.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Each of those wanax or wanakai has a warrior caste beneath them. And then below that, you've got your normal people, and below that, you've got your peasants. We can figure out the social classes back then, and we can also figure out exactly what's going on in the palaces. Simply put, they're in charge of everything: taxes, economy, administration. When the capital cities, when the king, when the palace is doing well, everybody's doing well. When they fall, the whole thing collapses.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Right, and this is the world that gives us, we think, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yes, we think, that's a good way to put it. Homer's writing a couple of centuries later, or rather, Homer's pulling everything together a couple of centuries later. But he seems to be describing kind of a combination of his own period, but with memories of the Bronze Age. So he does mention things that were not around in his time period, but are Bronze Age.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  And one of these things, as you've already mentioned it, but there's a centripete of that palace and the king. If people familiar with Greek history were thinking, you know, we talk about democracies and oligarchies and despilisms, and that's all much later on. This is, in some ways, I suppose, more familiar. There is a charismatic war leader, there is a guy with a crown on his head, basically.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Right, I mean, think Agamemnon, that's basically what it is. Think Metaleus, right? So that's what we're talking about, a charismatic king. I mean, Agamemnon is described as the king of kings, and so he would have been in charge. You want a flotilla and armada, you got to go up to Agamemnon and ask for this. So whether or not he existed, somebody like him existed.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  And you think probably he held sway. So when he, we think about empires differently now, don't we? But if he requested troops from his allied city-states, they would probably say, how many do you need, sir?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Yes, sir, they would jump. Yes, exactly. Right. Well, it wasn't always clear that the others understood this. And by the others, I mean the other powers. Like, when the Hittites talk about Achyawa, we're not sure if they just mean Mycenae, or if they mean Thebes, or if they mean the whole of the Greek mainland. And they don't seem to have been clear about it themselves either. So the Mycenaeans were this known unknown, if you will, on the far edge of the world at that time.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Interesting. And we're talking warfare very prominent. You think about Tiryns in particular, which I've been to, and Mycenae, massive walls, I mean, astonishing fortifications. And are those for show, or do you think that tells us this is a pretty warlike society?

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Those are not for show. Those are fully functional. Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, they're all heavily fortified. We've got the Lion Gate at Mycenae, for example. Most of them fit the same kind of a pattern. And I tell my students, for example, if you're running up to capture one of the cities, and you've got your shield on your left hand, because it didn't matter if you're left or right-handed, you've got your shield on your left hand, you're protected from the guys on the wall above you on your left. You're not protected from the guys on the tower to your right, and you're going to be dead before you even make it through the Lion Gate. So they planned these fortifications at these cities extremely well. And at some of them, they even had their water supply inside the town, the big tunnel

• 13:07Speaker 03

  going down and out to the spring. So it is definitely a warrior society, and a lot of the tablets, the Linear B tablets that we've got, are actually economic. They're documenting what came into the palace and what went out: chariot wheels, bronze, things like that. But we also have the stories that Homer tells us, like the hospitality for strangers, right? That was a big thing in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and it seems to have been something they practiced back then. So invite the stranger in, feed him, and then ask who he is, that kind of thing.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Okay, but Eric, just because you've brought that up, I'd like to have a little tiny detoy. I've always wondered what that means, because Odysseus is always being invited in. Five minutes later, he's eating with the princess and the king. Do you think they would have been able to recognize other members of the elite? So we're saying strangers and travelers, do we mean by that that when a shepherd's straggling along the road, the king's not going to get him in and give him a good meal at his table, is he? I mean, how do you think, deep down, that culture of hospitality really works?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Well, it's an excellent question, because honestly, we don't know. We don't have the records telling us about that. But we do have adjacent things. For example, we've got a lot of gift-giving, especially in the Near East, those letters at Amarna in Egypt that I mentioned. The kings, when they're writing back and forth, they are always saying, with my message, I am sending a gift. Here it is, three chariots, five people, this, that, and the other. And that whole idea of gift-giving goes, I think, along with the idea of friendship to strangers and all of that. It does make sense in a way, to me. And, you know, could you tell the elite from a regular person? I think, of course. For one thing, they would have an entourage with them and all of that.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  But, you know, to be honest, it is guesswork, because at least from the Mycenaean records, their tablets are not talking about that. They're strictly accounting and all that. So it is a little bit, as I say, of guesswork there.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Is there an element of which, to travel, to voyage, to knock on the door of Tiryns and then the next city? Are you laying claim to being some kind of important and interesting and elite person just simply by doing that? You're not going to get just random tillers of the soil maybe doing that, and so perhaps the kings felt they could let these interesting folk in to hear what they'd say?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Maybe, maybe. I definitely think you're not going to get your average tiller of the soil traipsing around, right? What you're going to have, though, rather than the kings, unless they're going fighting, you're going to have their emissaries, you're going to have the merchants, you're going to have the diplomats, going from one place to another, from Mycenae to Tiryns, Mycenae to Pylos. And we do see things in the Linear B tablets where they're talking about shipments from other kingdoms, basically, within the Mycenaean world.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  And all of those kind of people are sources of fantastic, essential intelligence, right? You want to hear bits of gossip about who's in and who's out, not just in Tiryns, but, you know, dare I even ask, in Crete and beyond. So actually, maybe it is in your interest to invite these people in, give them a drink, hear what they've seen and heard on their travels?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. That's how you would spread the news back then. They didn't have the internet or texts, you know, and phones and all that. So for sure. We also, we have, for instance, there's one wall painting from Pylos down in south of mainland Greece, where we can actually see a bard singing with his harp or lyre. And that may have been another way to spread the news as well, with these kind of traveling bards, probably better than traveling minstrels, but something like that. So yes, spreading the news that way. But the merchants and the diplomats would have carried the news as well as the messages.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  And we talk about the endemic warfare. Do you think this is a time when actually alliances and subservience had to be earned and might be quite short-lived? I mean, do you think that if the charismatic king warrior dies, or is injured, or declines, it wouldn't necessarily pass to his son? There wouldn't be a sort of orderly succession of obedience to his son? I mean, another city-state may emerge and become hegemonic.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's always the possibility. We see that in later Greece, so it may have been the case here as well. We do get some idea that there might be some dynastic succession. And I mean, we've got, you know, Telemachus and Odysseus and all of that. But again, we don't have a record of that in the Linear B tablets. It doesn't say that. It's not that it couldn't have happened, it's just that they don't mention it. But we do have that kind of thing over in the Near East. We do have dynastic succession for the Hittites, for the Egyptians, for the Assyrians, for the Babylonians. So I would imagine it would be something similar for the Mycenaeans as well, if they're on a parallel track.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Just before we leave Mycenae behind and talk about that wider well a little bit more, is it possible to characterize what these other states thought of the Mycenaeans? I mean, they were obviously regarded as a little bit on the edge, a little bit fringy. You don't want to marry your daughter off to one of them. But were they seen, you know, did they drink too much? Were they particularly violent? You know, is there anything that you can say kind of characterizes these Mycenaeans in the eyes of the Egyptians and others?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  No, they don't mention anything like that. What we do get are things like wall paintings in the tombs of the nobles in Egypt, where they're showing a diplomatic embassy bringing gifts to the pharaoh. That's about it, yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 00

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  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving tables been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

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  Time to kick end of year into high gear.

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• 20:34Speaker 00

  So the place they ought to inhabit, they should be subservient, they should be bringing gifts, they should be...

• 20:40Speaker 03

  They should be, yes. I would think in the grand scheme of things, they were a power, but not a great power. I mean, at this time, the Egyptians and the Hittites are the two great powers in the area, Assyrians and Babylonians behind them. Mycenae and the Minoans, yeah, they're going to be on the periphery, but you know, they're dangerous, you've got to watch out. If there's any truth to the Trojan War, you can see the Mycenaeans have a bite.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Yep, they can project force overseas. Let's talk about New Kingdom Egypt and the Hittite Empire, because you write so blue about these. New Kingdom Egypt, I mean, again, these lines on the map didn't mean quite what they do now, but what are the sort of bounds of this kingdom that the boy king Tutankhamun may have ruled over or attempted to, but certainly some of his predecessors, certainly Horemheb, one of his successors, Ramses II and his father Seti tried to rebuild. You know, what are we talking about? Down to the Cataracts, to now as far as Khartoum today or not quite that far to Sudan?

• 21:35Speaker 03

  I wouldn't go quite that far, but certainly down to Aswan, if you will. And of course, you've got all this new kingdom, all the rulers are in what is now Luxor, Karnak, right? The old kingdom was up in Giza. Now the new kingdom is down in Thebes and Luxor in Upper Egypt. So the Mycenaeans, Minoans, they're in touch with these guys. I mean, this is the high point of the New Kingdom period in Egypt. It's really, it's the Golden Age. Yeah, King Tut is emblematic of it, but everybody else, you go back to Hatshepsut and then Thutmose III, come through Akhenaten. And in fact, if I can bring up Amenhotep III again, middle of the 14th century, and

• 22:19Speaker 03

  he mentions the Aegean. There's one statue base list, which we call the Aegean List now, on which Amenhotep III lists Mycenae, Knossos and other places, and actually calls them Tanaya and Kefteu, mainland Greece and Crete. It's quite obvious that Amenhotep III knew about the Mycenaeans and the Minoans. And whether that list on the statue base is a geographical itinerary, which I kind of think it is, at the very least, you know, there are connections. And in fact, at Mycenae itself, there are some phion's plaques. This is halfway between clay and glass.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  And on those plaques, there's about 10 of them, is the name Amenhotep III, both on front and back. They are not found anywhere else outside of Egypt, except at Mycenae. So there must have been connections of some sort during that mid 14th century, which means Amenhotep III and Akhenaten would have known about the Mycenaeans.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Well, would they have heard the story of Troy? Who knows? That's amazing. Was Troy sung of in the court at Thebes? We don't know for the moment. That's amazing. Okay, so then we got the Hittite, we go up through Sinai into what is today is real Palestine, Syria. Where do the Hittites, who are roughly speaking in Turkey, are they in Anatolia? Is the question that Ramses spent a career trying to answer. Where's the fault line between the Egyptians and the Hittites?

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Excellent question. So the Hittites are up in central Anatolia, modern day Turkey. They actually captured the whole thing. They go all the way out to the west coast, to Troy, which we'll get to. But they also come down to the south, the southeast, if you will, down into what is today, northern Syria, and even further down into, well, almost down to Lebanon, I would say. The fault line, as you put it, between the Egyptians and the Hittites would have been at about the city of Kadesh. And in fact, that's why they fight their famous battle there in about 1279 B.C. for control of the Levant. Egyptians want to push north of Kadesh, Hittites want to push south of Kadesh, fight a major battle, it's a draw, right?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  And since it's a draw, they both claim they won, when in fact neither one did. So we've got, as I mentioned, the Hittites and the Egyptians are the two greatest powers at that time, and they are duking it out for control of Canaan at that time. So and eventually they sign a peace treaty, the Egyptian pharaoh seems to marry one of the Hittite princesses. We may even have the Hittite king come on a visit to Egypt at that time. Yeah. So this is the world that we find the Mycenaeans involved in, and perhaps the Trojan War as well, if it takes place in about the 13th century B.C. We're going to have Troy, where it is now on the western coast of Anatolia.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  It's on the periphery of both the Mycenaean world and the Hittite Empire. It's what I call a contested periphery.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  So it's a little bit like the Kadesh of the Aegean, right? So it's this city that sits, unfortunately for it, in between these two great empires.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to put it, yes. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if the story of the Trojan War, in actuality, if we were able to go back and look at it, if it weren't actually a war between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, and it just happens to be held at Troy, and Troy is kind of collateral damage, if you will. So I think there's a bigger picture here, and we actually do have evidence, textual evidence from the Hittites, that the Mycenaeans were fighting on the western coast of Anatolia all the way back in the 15th century B.C. So one might think in terms of Iliad, the Odyssey, if the story of the Trojan War is

• 26:13Speaker 03

  not a telescoping of two or 300 years of fighting in that region that Homer and the other epic poets managed to distill down into one epic tale. So we've definitely got the Mycenaeans around, and in a warlike posture, I would add, on that western coast. And I think that's how they're interacting with the Hittites, because most of the mentions of Ahliawa, as the Hittites call the Mycenaeans, are in a militarized context.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that idea of telescoping. It's not quite the same, but I imagine Shakespeare, he writes Henry V. He's basically sort of writing about the way that the English tend to fight the French in that part of the world, and it's sort of, there's a sense of that there as well. So if that is true, that was part of this. At times, there could have been this exchange of gifts, as you've pointed out, this is kind of interconnected world, but at times that breaks down and there will be violence. And then perhaps some sort of peace settlement, there would be an agreement afterwards, marriage alliances made and tribute swapped around, depending, I suppose, on the outcomes on the battlefield.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, if we look at the archaeology of Troy, we can see the Mycenaeans are happily trading with the Trojans before the so-called war breaks out. We've got imported Mycenaean pottery in the earlier levels at Troy. But we've also, again, have the Hittite records. The Hittites knew Troy as Willusa, and they document peace treaties that they signed with the rulers of Willusa, including one guy named Alexandu of Willusa. And Alexandu of Willusa sounds a lot like Alexander of Ilios, which is the other name for Paris and Troy. In fact, in the Hittites record, four of these battles and treaties and such.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  And I think two of them, they talk about the rule of Troy having been overthrown by another power, and that the Hittites have put him back on, have reinstalled him. So I do wonder, I mean, I think there is a nucleus of truth at the basis of everything that we're told by Homer, and I think he is reflecting some memories. And so I'm wondering if one of those mentions by the Hittites is also the one that Homer talks of. So in my mind, it's not was there a Trojan War, it's which one of the ones the Hittites mentioned is the one that Homer is mentioning.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  And when you're reading Homer, what are the bits as a historian really speak to you? We talked about the hospitality, we've talked about seafaring. I think from what you're saying, it's the idea of this kind of coalition building's very interesting, Agamemnon and Menelaus, they kind of reach out, Odysseus doesn't really want to go, they kind of half-strong army. So the idea of what Mycenaean power meant at the time, you know, yes, they're city-states, yes, they have all these little kinglets, but it's clear that there's one king, that there's a sort of supreme king who most of them have to kind of do what they say. Although that gives them all sorts of wonderful friction, like Achilles falls out with Agamemnon. As I say, Odysseus doesn't want to join in at such. So does that feel quite real to you?

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. But as a historian, I want to figure out if it's real to that period, or if it's more real to Homer's period, because he's living in the Iron Age. So as a historian, I want to go in and kind of dissect it, and I'm looking for things that could be true Bronze Age versus later Iron Age. So I'll give you just like one example. It gets really nitpicky, like how many spokes are there in a chariot wheel?

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. Are there, you know, six spokes? Are there four spokes? Are there two spokes? How did you make a Boerstens helmet? Well, Homer might have seen one, but they weren't being worn in his day. And yet Homer describes a Boerstens helmet absolutely accurately. So things like this, including the shields that they were using, an Achilles shield, the way it's described, is that actually Bronze Age? Is it Iron Age? And then, of course, you've got the famous catalog of ships, right, which you're referring to. When Agamemnon says, "Jump," everybody says, "Sure," and how many ships do you want? There is in Book Two of the Iliad, a catalog of ships where it says, "Agamemnon brought this many ships and Menelaus brought this many ships."

• 30:26Speaker 03

  And that seems to be a true memory of the Bronze Age that was handed down orally. So as a historian, I go in and try and dissect what Homer is saying. And yes, we can believe this. No, this is probably, you know, epic poetry. And I try and, you know, fish out the nuggets that we can use.

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• 32:13Speaker 00

  Which other nuggets have really come to your attention? I mean, I suppose the interplay of violence, acquisition, and then also kind of marriage, if we want to call it marriage or sexual slavery, whatever it might be. But it's this landing on a foreign shore, taking goods, cattle, that things are described in very bold terms. And then women, and then how sometimes those women can forge subsequent alliances. I mean, that feels very interesting to me.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, and to me as well. And it rings true. We've got in the linear B text, like at Pylos, we have mentions of women from Asia Minor who are now slaves. And they must have been captured in raids or battles or small wars or whatever, much like the Trojan War. The other things, though, that kind of ring true to me, even though they're a bit fantastical, is when Homer talks about the stories of various people traveling in foreign areas or objects that came from foreign areas. I mean, he mentions a mixing bull from the king of Sidon that makes its way back to Greece. That's totally plausible. And somebody like Odysseus trying to get home, landing in a place like Egypt and spending some time there.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  That also is certainly within the realm of plausibility, if you will. It is, of course, extremely difficult, if not impossible, to try to trace his actual voyage. You can't do that, but, but.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Eric, there's a, I'm sure you know, but there's a whole industry. It seems to be retired, rather cheerful, British officers who've left the army and go and retire to Greece, and they travel around looking for all sorts of possible sites.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice project of retirement, yes.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  The interesting thing is that Homer's describing this Bronze Age world, all the things we've just talked about, there is then some kind of cataclysm in Homer's writing after that. So there's a veil of tears through which Homer, in a way, is looking at this period. And we call it the Bronze Age collapse. Around 1200, this sort of community of nations, this globalized order collapsed. I'm feeling, hang on, I'm feeling a bit stressed talking about this at the moment. But this kind of international order, which was far from perfect, but this international order seems to quite dramatically, something happens to it.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely. What had been going along, I mean, going along merrily, if you will. They were happy for 500 years, give or take, the usual problems, but whatever. But yes, just after 1200 B.C., everything collapses just within a couple of decades. Basically, that international network that we've been describing, that collapses. And everybody is split asunder, if you will. There's probably supply chain shortages. You can't get tin anymore, hard to get copper, that kind of thing. But you've also got a series of natural catastrophes. You've got, it looks like, drought, you've got famine, you've got earthquakes. We have some textual evidence of disease.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  I mean, basically, everything that could go wrong did go wrong pretty much simultaneously. So the whole thing collapses and they have to rebuild. Greece goes back to almost ground zero. But, you know, you mentioned the veil of tears and a curtain and such. I frequently call it in my lectures now a porous membrane. Some things made it through, some things got through, but most did not. The names of the gods and goddesses, yes, those got through. But the Wannox, the king, there's no Wannox in the Iron Age. There's no Wannox in Homer's time. It's now Basileus. Name for king is Basileus in his time. There was a Basileus, there were a bunch of them back in the Bronze Age, but they were much lower officials. They were below the Wannox.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  So, you know, so some things make it through and some things don't. But Greece, Greece takes until the early 8th century, just before the time of Homer, to get back up to where it had been at the time of the Mycenaeans. I mean, there was a huge population decline, maybe as much as 60%. We think there's something like 600,000 Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland or Mycenaeans and Minoans in like the 13th century. By the 11th century, they're down to 300,000. They've lost over half their population. So it was not a good time.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  And do you think Greece suffers worse than, I mean, Egypt has its time of troubles and, but do you think that Greece is an outlier even in the troubles that afflicted this entire globalized Mediterranean system?

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do, much to my own chagrin when I listed how well everyone did in the aftermath. Well, after 1177, I've got the Mycenaeans and Minoans down in category four out of five. They did almost worse than everyone else. Only the Hittites did worse, basically. But the problem, it turns out, we think now, there's a lot of new work going on. Joseph Maran, the excavator at Tiryns, for example, thinks that the Mycenaeans were much more fragile and vulnerable than they appear, even to outsiders, and that they may have overextended during the good periods, like in the 14th and into the 13th centuries. And when the drought hit, they weren't ready.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  And they had overexploited the peasants in doing things like building the Lion Gate at Mycenae and draining the Copaeus basin. So it may be that the Mycenaeans were not as all fired powerful as they appeared to others, kind of like a Wizard of Oz effect, if you will. But he also says, and others as well, Martin Fine and Erica Viberg from Uppsala, they have suggested that the overexploited peasants in the Mycenaean hinterland, if you will, they might have actually rejoiced when the palaces fell. They're like, oh, finally, now we can have some peace. So yes, I do think the Mycenaeans did worse than almost everyone else at the time. But the question is why?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  And that's what we're still trying to figure out, which is a really interesting question.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  And you mentioned Hittites. Well, they disappeared. And I wondered, now that you say that, I wonder if that's why they're sort of not mentioned in Homer, because they've disappeared as a political entity by the time Homer's writing. So this Mycenaean Hittite war, Homer's not going to be quite as familiar with the the former political structure, you know, centuries old political structures in what is now, you know, Asia Minor, Turkey. So maybe that's why they didn't get the part they deserve in Homer. I don't know, just thinking.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you're quite right. Absolutely. I mean, the Hittites are basically not mentioned by Homer. Why not? So yeah, it's because they're completely gone by the time he's living. We do have the Neo-Hittites that do survive, the remnants in North Syria, and they keep going for a couple of hundred years. It is those Hittites, the Neo-Hittites, that I think the Bible mentions. Because the Bible doesn't know the actual Hittites either. But they do know the remnants that survived, the scrappy ones up in what is now North Syria. So there's a lot of interest and parallels between Homer and the Bible in terms of oral transmission, which is eventually written down and so on. But the lack of knowledge of Hittites in both of them is another parallel.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  We're all talking about Homer this year. We're all interested in Homer. As more discoveries are made, as archaeologists and scientists push back the frontier of what we know, on the whole, does it make Homer more or less fascinating as a source? I mean, do you think now, oh, jeez, a lot of that is just fantasy? Or is it a bit of both? Or do we think, wow, this was more in this than we thought initially?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  I'm on the side of wow, this is great. Yeah, everything that we find, it brings Homer to life and Homer brings that period to life. So we have so few sources from that time period. I mean, as I mentioned, even the Linear B tablets, they're just straight economic accounting tablets. We don't have epics and stories and poems from the Late Bronze Age in Greece. We have them elsewhere, but not from Greece. So Homer and then he sees it, I mean, welcome to the party, gentlemen, and thanks for bringing your gifts. So yeah, for me, Homer used very carefully, I will stress that, using Homer carefully, he does add light and life to this whole period.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  And in turn, your archaeological colleagues are adding stone and bone and pottery and earthenware and gold to the stories in Homer.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Putting flesh on the bones, if you will. Yes, between the two of them. Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  We're developing a full picture. Well, Eric, and then you're encapsulating that whole picture in your wonderful book. So thank you for those. Tell us what the latest one is called.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  The one that just came out is on the Amarna Letters that we've mentioned. It's called Love, War and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and What They Told Us About the Bronze Age World, something like that.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Just quickly on that, they were discovered around about the late 19th century. Did people know at the time what an astonishing resource they were?

• 41:03Speaker 03

  They did not know because when they were found in 1887, there was a big race, a race to decipher them. Akkadian and cuneiform had only been deciphered 30 years earlier. So that's what I do in half of the book is talk about the race to decipher. There were two British scholars, well-known, Archibald Henry Sase, an Assyriologist, he was at Oxford, and the famous Wallace Budge, the infamous Egyptologist at the British Museum. And the two of them were part of the race to translate, along with five young German scholars, who I dubbed the Young Berliners. And the whole race to translate, I think it's as

• 41:43Speaker 03

  interesting as the race to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on. And they did not realize before they translated them, the world of the Late Bronze Age at that time. And in fact, Sase, Sase said that besides the Hebrew Bible, the Amarna Letters are the most important source we've got textually for the Late Bronze Age. So it was a real revelation. It rewrote history as we knew it. And it was only, what, 140, 150 years ago?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  And just why were they preserved? Was it a rubbish tip they'd been thrown out? Or was it part of the archive, as we has other parts of the ancient Near East? The archive had just sort of collapsed, the library had collapsed for whatever reason, and they were just there ever since then?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  They seem to have been left behind because they're in Akhenaten's capital city, which he built and only inhabited for 10, 20 years. When Akhenaten died in about 1330 B.C. and King Tut moved the capital back down to Luxor and Karnak, they left behind this archive. The thinking is that what they left behind is the closed cases. Oh, this is done. We don't need it anymore. And they only moved the correspondence that was still open, if you will. So no, they're not burnt or anything like that, which is really unusual. But given the climate in Egypt, they're just preserved.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Wonderful. Oh, makes you think what else we may find to shed light on these periods. It's so exciting. Eric, thank you so much, as ever, for coming on the podcast.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Oh, always a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Well, thank you so much to Eric and actually to all the guests who joined me on this series, explaining the Odyssey and the world that it springs from. It's just, it's been such a pleasure. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts and we'll do more of these series, explaining the history behind the big movies. Just say the word. But the content never stops. Certainly there's a top here. No, no, don't you worry. As we head into deep summer, latest week, we're kicking off a new season on shows that we've recorded all over the world. So we've got the history of the Great Wall of China, medieval Krakow, from one end of the Silk Road to the other, the Siege of Malta, and much more as well. So whether you're traveling or in need of a little escapism, this podcast has got you covered, folks. And we're starting, well, we're being quite literal where most

• 44:02Speaker 00

  journeys begin. We're starting at the airport with a short history of why those strange and important places are the way that they are. See you Thursday.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving tables been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

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  Time to kick end of year into high gear.

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