Keywords
Mycenaean civilization, ancient Greece, archaeology, Vivian Pelopida, Cyclopean architecture, Agamemnon, Linear B, warrior society, ancient myths, decline of Mycenae
Summary
This conversation explores the Mycenaean civilization, its significance in ancient history, and its lasting impact on modern culture. Archaeologist Vivian Pelopida shares insights into the wealth, architecture, social structure, and eventual decline of the Mycenaeans, as well as their influence on Greek mythology and contemporary society.
Takeaways
- The Mycenaean civilization was pivotal in the development of ancient Greek culture.
- Vivian Pelopida’s passion for archaeology began in childhood.
- Understanding ancient civilizations helps us comprehend modern society.
- The Mycenaeans were known for their wealth and trade connections.
- Cyclopean architecture is a hallmark of Mycenaean engineering.
- The Mycenaean society had a complex hierarchical structure.
- Religion played a significant role in Mycenaean life.
- Environmental factors contributed to the decline of Mycenaean civilization.
- Modern Greeks engage with Mycenaean culture through theater and mythology.
- The Mycenaeans were the first to use a written language in Greece.
Sound Bites
“The Cyclopean walls are a remarkable feat.”
“Religion was important in Mycenaean culture.”
“They pioneered Cyclopean architecture.”
Timeline
00:00 – Introduction
01:00 – Meet Our Mycenologist, Vivian Pelopida
02:42 – The Rise of the Mycenaeans
04:43 – What We Know About the Mycenaeans
05:36 – Mycenaean Graves and Grave Goods
07:21 – Why Did the Ancient Greeks Rever the Mycenaeans?
09:12 – The Architecture of the Cyclopes and the Lion Gate
12:03 – A Warrior Race
13:18 – Mycenaean Warrior Society
14:50 – Religion and the Mycenaeans
16:20 – Writing: A New-Fangled Technology
18:20 – The Fall of the Myceneans and the Greek Dark Ages
21:08 – Modern Greek and Their Mycenaean Past
21:48 – Conclusion (and Souvlaki)
Transcript
Introduction (00:00)
Stephen Parker: Welcome to the Take Me to Europe podcast with your host, cultural anthropologist Monique Skidmore.
Monique Skidmore: Today’s episode is full of ancient gods, mercenaries, warriors, tombs, mountains of gold, the Cyclops and the towering figure of the Annex, or the King of the Mycenaeans, Agamemnon.
Mycenaean civilization inspired the arts and architecture of European civilizations, and it’s here that we find the birth of Greek writing.
We’ll see some fascinating parallels between our world now and the worries of the ancients about the impact that new technologies would have on their society, as well as the economic and social chaos caused by environmental disasters.
Sound familiar? Let’s meet the Mycenaeans and my guest today, Mycenaean archaeologist or Mycenologist Vivian Pelopida.
Meet Our Mycenologist, Vivian Pelopida (01:00)
Vivian, you’ve wanted to understand ancient civilizations since you were precisely nine years old. What happened to make you want to spend your life when you were nine among the sites of ancient Greece?
Vivian Pelopida: Well, I guess it all starts because I grew up bilingual, born in Greece and raised in Toronto, Canada. So in this back and forth, I visited my relatives here almost every summer.
So I was connected with two different worlds: one more present, more modern version of the little bit with my mother’s village and my grandmother, an older version of life event. I also did a lot of Greek schoolwork, which I homeschooled in Greece and Canada. That is where we learned a lot about the Greek language.
So a reader that I was reading there had a story of a bulldozer working and doing some new roadworks and suddenly it hits against something really hard and thank God there was this woman there who jumped up and stopped the bulldozers I can still see the image of the book in my face and she uncovered a beautiful Kouri, a beautiful statue, an archaic statue we have a lot of those in the Acropolis Museum now, anyway and she saved the statue.
So I started to cry and I decided that that’s what I want to do in my life -learn about these old people, the old way of life, and just study and save statues in a way.
Monique Skidmore: Well, you decided to study the. Well, let’s do the Greek way, the Mycenaeans or the Mycenaeans. So why should we care about the ancient Mycenaeans?
The Rise of the Mycenaeans (02:42)
Vivian Pelopida: Well, actually, because at least this is my personal view on the matter. First of all, I agree with the idea that learning about your past helps you learn a lot more about even the world you live in today, and so, if we’re going to be making parallels, I find it very interesting and very important that, living now in a very globalized society, we can go back to see where this happens for the first time, basically, and this happens in the Mediterranean, and the Mycenaeans happen to be right in the middle of all this.
Of course, they’re not the first. We have the Egyptians, we have the whole of the Levant area, the eastern Anatolia area, but what we also have is an eruption. So around 1620 BC is when the volcano in Santorini, in ancient Theta, exploded, and that created one of the biggest tsunamis in world history.
It’s amazing what effect that had in the world. So now we’re referring to the Bronze Age, so we’re talking from about 3300 BC until 1050 BC, that’s about two and a half thousand years.
This whole story begins with the people from the islands and, of course, the Minoans from Crete, but after the explosion, the Mycenaeans take over.
The Mycenaeans are populations from mainland Greece. The most famous site is Mycenae. What these people do, they’re the first to connect, so the islands before them worked as stepping stones connecting the East and the West.
Well, they take trade in a different level, and they’re a very big warrior society, so through them, we can see how a society can rise, how it can fall, what that impact has in the world, and a lot more.
What We Know About the Mycenaeans (04:43)
Monique Skidmore: So where can we learn about the Mycenaeans?
Vivian Pelopida: Well, let’s take Mycenae, for example. So no specific literature has survived from the Mycenaeans themselves, with one small exception that I will refer to later. But we do learn a lot about them, even from the Egyptians.
And so when the Hyksos Dynasty in the 17th century BC (because that’s pretty much where everything changes) they want to take over in Egypt, they pay mercenary soldiers from Mycenae apparently to support this whole political deal and the war that went on, and as a result they returned back home with a lot of gold.
That’s where everything starts. So where do we find that? We find it in the burial sites, and I guess they do get ideas from Egypt as well.
Mycenaean Graves and Grave Goods (05:36)
So we see these huge monumental graves. We see the three main types of graves. We have the smaller, the grave circles, where we have burials of like nine different graves, of nine different people buried in six graves.
I should say sheets, sheets of gold, literally. It’s unbelievable how wealthy these people suddenly become and how they can afford to bury all that gold, how much more they probably had if they’re willing to put all that underground and nobody to touch it.
Also, we have burial sites like the Tholos tombs, which have huge dimensions, 14 meters in diameter. They’re circular structures, sort of like pyramids, I dare say, but a little more round with huge boulder stones. Again, the construction is unbelievable.
So obviously, these are very powerful people. You have to be very powerful to make people build all these things for you and also to worship them afterwards. We see traces where they worship their ancestors on these graves, so apparently they’re very important. And jewelry, unbelievable jewelry, incredible things that are just amazing.
It just would have been amazing to be an archaeologist and this is absolutely especially finding artifacts like that, because, of course, that’s not your everyday life, but it is interesting to to realize that this, these are the, the scattered material that survived, like there was much more, which was because these are sites that have been looted.
Why Did the Ancient Greeks Revere the Mycenaeans? (07:21)
Monique Skidmore: One of the stories that I like most about the Mycenaeans is that they were the people that the ancient Greeks looked back on, but these were the people that they drew all their myths and legends and stories from.
So why was this, for ancient Greeks, the golden age?
Vivian Pelopida: Apparently, this is where it all happens. It’s the first time these people in the Mycenaean period come into contact. They become wealthy, so they want to show their status and this is something that people admire.
For the first time, they upgrade their lives. It’s the first time that we see people living a very comfortable life in mainland Greece, and a cosmopolitan, rather life, we can say because without the internet, without all these other things we have access to today, these people could trade with ancient people in Spain, with Northern Africa, with all over.
So that’s something that is completely mind-blowing even for them, and it’s so important that they kept telling, making all these stories. Their life is surrounded by the sea, by the water, so when people travel in the sea they can make even more stories and word-to-mouth.
These things actually shaped the conscious of even like school kids in classical Athens were learning about Agamemnon and the sack of Troy. Alexander the Great, when he headed towards the east, his idol was Achilles from the stories we know from Homer.
So it’s fascinating how even Homer, who writes about these stories that were orally passed on for generations, he refers to them about 400 or 500 years after the events actually took place.
The Architecture of the Cyclops and the Lion Gate (09:12)
Monique Skidmore: Can you tell us about the form of architecture that is named after that mythical race, the Cyclops?
Vivian Pelopida: Yes, that’s something that is truly remarkable and it’s something that you really have to see to believe. We should say the famous Cyclopean Wall.
So we must explain here that Mycenae is a citadel. Basically, it’s on the top of a hill, an area that takes up about 30,000 square meters, and it’s surrounded by walls that are almost a kilometer in length, 900 meters to be exact. The maximum surviving height of these walls is at 18 meters. You can see that now.
So that’s one thing. We don’t know the final length because usually these walls can have clay, dried brick, bricks made out of dried clay, uh, above all the stonework that we see today, and of course, they’ve been sacked for so many times, so it’s very little that survives.
The width is about six meters. We’re talking boulders, huge boulders that make up these walls. A boulder can weigh about 20 tons even.
And the most famous is the gate, of course, the Lion’s Gate, which is just a masterpiece it’s considered the oldest monumental gate in mainland Europe and the Cyclops who, of course, when people even their real time, were in awe of what they were having to see around them.
So obviously it’s not easy to explain how this was built and that’s where the stories came about the Cyclops building them. The Cyclops are giants. We know them from ancient Greek mythology.
Now, the archaeological artefacts and the analysis that has been done shows a lot of connections actually with similar fortifications or the similar style that we find with the Hittites in Anatolia, that’s southwestern Turkey today, like Ugarit and other places, and we see that there are many connections.
Monique Skidmore: Well, I guess the Cyclops were active all over the place, really!
Vivian Pelopida: Absolutely, and I must say also that they’re supposed to be coming from mythical Lycia.
But also, apart from the walls, another amazing construction that is within the walls too it’s within the fortification was built in the same way as the walls was this really amazing underwater cistern, underground cistern that they made very deep, very old – we’re talking 13th century BC here, to bring water from another hill that was about 350 meters away.
A Warrior Race (12:03)
Monique Skidmore: This is amazing engineering three and a half thousand years ago in addition to those fortifications too, um, what other things have we found in the archaeological record that shows us this was a real warrior race?
Vivian Pelopida: The burial sites.
All the men are buried with heavy armor, a lot of beautiful daggers and swords and so on. So we see artifacts that have to do with war.
We also see pottery. The depictions on the pottery show warriors, frescoes with warriors, because we must say that the buildings, the palaces and other public buildings, had beautiful frescoes too.
And, of course, the main source that we can really be 100% sure about comes from the Linear B tablets. That’s where we find the oldest Greek written language and that’s where they analytically, basically their accounting records for the palace, which means that we know exactly their budget, we know how much they spend, what kind of weapons they use, where they made them and so on. Amazing details with numbers too.
Mycenaean Warrior Society (13:18)
Monique Skidmore: The warfare that the Mycenaean Empire engaged in wasn’t just supported by, you know, conscripting some people, it was actually an entire, a bit like the Spartans, I guess that came well after them. It was an actual warrior social structure. Can you tell us a little bit about that Mycenaean structure?
Vivian Pelopida: Yeah, yeah, basically it all revolves around the Anax. The Anax is the chief ruler, the king, you should say so. Even Agamemnon would be such an Anax and he’s basically the ultimate figure of control.
He’s responsible for the administration and even the religious leader, again apparently from the archaeological remains.
And so we see different ranks of officials responsible for different segments of the economy and the organization of the society. We see how all this is supported by a merchant class.
Monique Skidmore: And one of the things that amazes me about this amazing warrior society, with all of its wonderful armour and swords and gold and pottery, is that it’s very it seems to be unlike all of the other societies that we’ve been looking at in this series, where every time we talk about ancient Greece we talk about religion, religious sanctuaries, religious rituals, festivals. There’s barely a peep about this in the Mycenaean culture.
What was the importance of religion? Was it important?
Religion and the Mycenaeans (14:50)
Vivian Pelopida: It was. It was definitely very important, and we can see that even through the burials that you don’t bother burying somebody the way that they did if you don’t believe in something religious in any way we do.
Also, again, the clay tablets give us a lot of information, even names of gods, so from there we also see what they spend on religious ceremonies.
We know that whoever gave the king offers this much of wheat, for instance, to this God and written names of gods, like you know Poseidon, Zeus and Hera. We see these names written for the first time way back in these clay tablets.
Of course, it’s not the Greek alphabet that we know today, but it has been deciphered since the 1950s. So we are able to read all of this information thoroughly.
And we see a very important group of graves called Grave Burial Site A, the circular grave structure inside Mycenae. Usually, they buried their dead, I must say, outside the city walls.
In this case, Grave Circle A eventually was incorporated within the city walls and around it we find structures which contained unbelievable objects or not everyday objects, like very interesting little statuettes, interesting pottery that’s very unique, obviously for ceremonial purposes.
Writing: A New-Fangled Technology (16:20)
Monique Skidmore: I just want to touch on a different kind of issue, but it’s also a central issue to societies. I understand that not everyone back then was happy with the Mycenaeans creating the first written language for Greece.
Vivian Pelopida: Yeah, well, to make it a little bit more clear here, we might say that this written language, Linear B language, is a language of the elite. Not everybody knows it. Back then a simple Mycenaean would not be able to read the clay tablets.
But they do give us the information that later on was written by Homer in the 8th century BC, which is still the beginning of everything in the written form.
Thanks to this information that survives and we go all the way to the classical period around the end of the 4th century BC, where even Plato himself in one of his works refers to how it’s such a shame that now that we’re writing everything, we lose our ability to remember.
Of course, thank God, he continued to write and we have all these things today. But it was something that bothered these people because for thousands of years all these myths, all these stories, all this information was passed on orally, and so once they started writing, they thought that they’d forget.
And let’s even remember the muses, the goddesses of the arts, whose mother was called Mnemosyne, which means memory, which means that the muses, the goddesses of the arts literature, theater come from memory. You can’t paint a picture if you don’t remember the story.
Monique Skidmore: And here are the Mycenaeans needing to trade and record what they’re trading, and so they’re having to write stuff down.
Vivian Pelopida: That’s right, they have to keep records of everything.
The Fall of the Mycenaeans and the Greek Dark Ages (18:20)
Monique Skidmore: Why did the Mycenaean society cease to be so significant? What caused the decline of the Mycenae and what caused that period that came after them, known as the Greek Dark Ages?
Vivian Pelopida: Yes, well, what goes up comes down. Of course, we learned that very well through these stories, and there are many factors that play a role. It’s not one thing and it doesn’t affect just Mycenae.
I must say that this is something that is seen all over the Eastern Mediterranean and it has a kind of a domino effect. It starts with environmental issues. A lot of events took place at the same time. This means they had a lot of very strong earthquakes and they also had a lot of drought, periods of heavy drought.
So when you don’t have any wealth to redistribute anymore, you’re losing your power. And that’s where maybe even we can talk about a society who had learned to live well and now they’re poor and they depended on this leader who helped them live a comfortable life.
Now they don’t anymore, so they might, uh, revolt against him and they might attack, and they might and again like idea.
The Bronze Age of course I must mention this is very important – it is called the Bronze Age because it’s the first time that the widespread of metal is used so much, especially bronze, of course, but also to make that you need copper and tin.
At that time we have tin coming from Afghanistan through Babylon and it’s traded throughout the Mediterranean.
So since these events don’t just take place in Mycenae, but also in Babylon, for instance, when Babylon is not a center for trade anymore because of the earthquakes or all the other problems that it had faced, the tin won’t get to Cyprus, where the copper is, and that will block trade.
So it’s an economic issue that arises from all this as well. So it’s a social, economic and ecological issue as well. It’s an environmental issue. All these things together, plus the fact that the Hittites fall just before them as well.
There is also a great theory about the people of the sea. So these are new people coming in who have some suggest, even from Northern Europe. It’s still a big mystery, but a lot of these things play a role at the same time. It’s not just one main reason, but surely the environment is a big deal.
Monique Skidmore: You just showed you how connected ancient Greece was with the rest of the world as far as Afghanistan.
Vivian Pelopida: Yes, yes, and they all relied on each other.
Modern Greeks and Their Mycenaean Past (21:08)
Monique Skidmore: So what ways now do modern Greeks encounter, engage with very ancient Mycenaean culture? What do they learn from it?
Vivian Pelopida: Well, a big part of ancient Greek mythology, as we said already, revolves around Agamemnon and the sack of Troy.
These plays continue to be played every year. We have different theatrical groups who perform them throughout the year all over Greece, and especially in the summer, where we have beautiful ancient Greek theatres that have been restored.
Monique Skidmore: I’m so pleased that Mycenean culture survives in the summer in such a wonderful way, where we have beautiful ancient Greek theaters that have been restored.
Vivian Pelopida: We’re glad for that too.
Conclusion (and Souvlaki) (21:48)
Monique Skidmore: Well, today we’ve learned about a culture that has a rigid, hierarchical military structure and that was the first to use a written language in Greece, and that pioneered a form of defensive building known as Cyclopean architecture. Do I have that one right?
Vivian Pelopida: Cyclopean, yes.
Monique Skidmore: But the firsts don’t stop there, because ancient Mycenae is also the place where the first souvlaki trays were found, which just shows you, Vivian, how long you guys have been making souvlaki.
Vivian Pelopida: Well, you know, if you eat well, you do well.
Monique Skidmore: Well, I’d like to thank you, our very own fantastic Mycenologist, Vivian Pelopida, for being such a wonderful tour guide to the sites and cultures of this ancient trading people.
Vivian Pelopida: Thank you very, very much. It was a great pleasure and I hope we get to explore more of all this.
Stephen Parker: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Take Me to Europe podcast. Hop onto our website, takemetoeuropetours.com and sign up to our newsletter to learn more about Europe’s hidden and most exciting destinations, and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast series.
