The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Read Online Free PDF

The island, depopulated and defenceless, would have been an easy prey to foreign invaders. Minoan civilisation was over.

     
    Exactly how the civilisation of Greek Mycenae became the heir and successor to that of Crete is not altogether clear. There had been people living in this little mountain stronghold since the sixth millennium BC , but not until the middle of the second did they distinguish themselves in any particular way. Then, from one generation to the next around 1500 BC , they became very much richer and more sophisticated, their shaft graves on the acropolis filled with ornaments and accoutrements of gold. Curiously enough, none of these show any Minoan influence. Did the Mycenaeans, perhaps, hire themselves out as mercenaries to the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, bringing back with them the Egyptian belief in life after death, the custom of packing their graves with necessities for that afterlife, and the fashion for golden death masks–one of which was to cause Heinrich Schliemann, while digging at Mycenae, to cable to the King of Prussia: ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!’? It would be pleasant to think that they did; alas, we shall never know.
    Very soon after this, however–and still well before the eruption and earthquake–Minoan ideas took hold. Here, suddenly, all over Mycenae, are the bulls, the double axes, the horns of consecration and all the insignia of Knossos. Were they the result of one or more important dynastic marriages? Probably: it is hard to think of any other convincing explanation. At all events, Mycenae underwent a rapid education, and when the Minoans suffered their mysterious eclipse their successors were ready. By about 1400 BC their cultural influence had spread all over the Peloponnese, with commercial links extending yet further afield. In Italy, which they seem to have reached towards the end of the fifteenth century BC , there were Mycenaean settlements along the southern coast of the Adriatic, the Gulf of Taranto and even as far as Sardinia, Ischia and the Bay of Naples. In Mycenae itself the Cyclopean walls surrounding the acropolis, with their famous Lion Gate in the northwest corner, went up around 1300 BC ; there was gold and bronze in abundance, with craftsmanship sufficiently developed to produce the massive chariots for which the city had long been famous. Mycenae, then at the height of its power, was ready for the Trojan War.
    Troy stands at the northwestern corner of Asia Minor. The city today–or what remains of it–seems a small enough settlement, and indeed the war itself, which is nowadays usually ascribed to some time in the middle of the thirteenth century BC , may well have been of no great historical significance. Culturally, on the other hand, it was one of the most important wars ever fought, since it supplied the subject for the world’s first great epic poems. Homer’s
Iliad
, written in the eighth century BC , tells the story of the ten-year siege of Troy; its successor, the
Odyssey
, follows the wanderings of the war’s hero Odysseus before he eventually returns to his own kingdom of Ithaca. Here is the beginning of poetry–and perhaps of history too–as we know it today.
    The story is familiar to us all. Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, abducts Helen, who is not only the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, but is also–having been hatched out of an egg laid by Leda after her adventure with Zeus in the guise of a swan–the most beautiful woman in the world. In revenge, a league of Greek cities declares war on Troy and sends against it a huge fleet, carrying an army under the command of Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. For ten years the Greeks besiege the city; finally, by means of the wooden horse, they capture it. The horse can safely be ascribed to legend; so, too, can the beauty of Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’; so, very probably, can Helen herself. But the
Iliad
is by no means all