Aegean civilization

So, what you'll be hearing are approximations as best we can make them of what's going on.

We begin our story with the emergence of the Bronze Age in the Aegean Sea area.

That appears to have taken place about 3000 B.C.

I think these days they date it down about another century to about 2900.

That's the most narrow definition of cities.

Of course, with cities we typically find a whole association of cultural characteristics which we deem civilization.

Well, that's what we see for the first time in the Aegean area on the island of Crete.

That civilization was uncovered by the archeologists right at the beginning of the twentieth century.

And this story begins today's story, The Priestess of Crete Who Vanished Without a Trace.

You are standing at the edge of the world's most magnificent palace, and the sun is dying over the Aegean Sea.

It is approximately 1500 BCE.

The palace of Knossos glows amber in the last light.

The Minoans were also supreme seafarers.

At the height of their power, their trade networks extended from the coast of Egypt to Anatolia, from the Levant to the Adriatic.

Minoan pottery, textiles, and metalwork have been found across the eastern Mediterranean, suggesting a commercial and cultural reach that made Crete the closest thing the ancient Aegean had to a global hub.

And yet, unlike virtually every other major civilization of the Bronze Age, the Minoans left almost no imagery of warfare.

Leave the mounds and the parking lots and the suburban sprawl.

Move east across the Atlantic, south across the Mediterranean, to an island in the Aegean Sea.

Move backward in time, far backward, past the medieval period, past the Roman Empire, past classical Greece, past the archaic period, back to the Bronze Age, back to the very beginning of what we call European civilization.

You are on the island of Crete on the north coast at a site called Knossos.

Ventris showed that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the warriors who besieged Troy, the language of the palace bureaucracies that Homer dimly remembered six centuries later.

The decipherment was a triumph, confirmed by the discovery that the tablets recorded exactly the kind of mundane administrative content – inventories of chariots, lists of workers, records of olive oil and grain and sheep – that a palace bureaucracy would be expected to produce.

The discovery proved that Greek had been spoken in the Aegean 500 years earlier than previously thought, and it established a direct linguistic link between the Mycenaean civilization and the later classical world.

Because Linear B borrowed many signs from Linear A, scholars can read the phonetic values of many Linear A signs.

Until the 20th century, the Minoans were sort of lost to history.

But thanks to these incredible discoveries, we know that they weren't just a prehistoric myth, right? That they were really one of the first complex civilizations of the Aegean.

And they were foundational architects who really established trade networks, images, languages, myths that were all later connected to and interpreted and inherited by the Greeks.

folding those things into their classical societies.

That pins Ugarit's final crisis very late in the story, likely within a decade or two of Ramesses III's Sea People's Wars.

Over in the Aegean, the palace of Pylos in Greece burns somewhere in this same broad frame.

We date it using pottery sequences, the style of the Linear B tablets that were baked in that final fire, and a few imported objects that tie Mycenaean layers to better dated Egyptian material.

It doesn't line up down to the year, but it's late.

They have those strange upturned ends too, but without the tall ornamental papyrus-style finials Egyptian artists love to give their own vessels.

Many scholars see a different hull shape altogether, broader beams, higher freeboard, a silhouette.

Some have linked to Aegean or Anatolian types.

The two lines close.