Mycenae

Heracles was the greatest of all the Greek heroes.

He was the son of Zeus and of a mortal woman named Alcmene, a princess of the royal house of Mycenae.

who lived in the city of Thebes.

And from the very beginning of his life, he was hated by Zeus' wife, the goddess Hera, who resented every child her husband fathered with another.

In a fit of madness sent by the goddess, he killed his own wife and children.

And when he came to his senses and learned what he had done, he went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi to ask how he could be purified.

The oracle told him to go to Tiryns, near Mycenae, and to serve its king, Eurystheus, for twelve years, and to perform whatever labours the king set him.

These were the famous labours of Heracles, usually counted as twelve.

Thanks to Homer's epic, the Iliad, their leader Agamemnon became a legend.

But was he real? Who were these Mycenaeans? Where did they come from? And why did they disappear? Today, I'm pleased to welcome Dr.

Steve Kershaw to lift the veil on the mystery of the Mycenaeans in Bronze Age Greece.

I'm Tristan Hughes.

Welcome to the Ancients.

And you think it takes you straight back to Aeschylus' plays there, where the beacon fires bring the message of the fall of Troy at the start of that mighty play, the Agamemnon, and the watchman sees it and all the horror is then

unleashed.

And so today we're talking about the Bronze Age people that are known as the Mycenaeans.

Este, que tiene varios ciclos, tiene el ciclo de las hazañas, pero tiene un montón de otras historias que se entrelazan.

Casi no, no, no hay otro personaje mitológico que tenga tantas leyendas anexas, ¿no? Y hoy vamos a terminar la historia de las doce hazañas de Heracles que le fueron encargadas por su enemigo, el rey Euristeo de Micenas.

Mmm.

Que en realidad lo que quería era que Heracles muriera.

«Lleváselo.

Pero haceme un favor, dice, ayudame, me voy a poner una almohada.

Sostenemela un cachito la, la bóveda, que me pongo una almohada acá en el hombro y después andá vos a, a Micenas a llevarle las manzanas a Euristeo».

Mmm.

We might have some distant memories of this collapse, but we have no great histories attesting to the kind of transformation that we know happened through archaeology.

In the late 12th century, historian Eric Klein decisively dates this to 1177 BC, you see a broad systems collapse across the eastern Mediterranean, in which the great Hittite empire collapses altogether, as we discussed in our previous episode, in which the great Mycenaean palaces, like that at Mycenae itself, are wholly abandoned.

and in which the Egyptian empire, which had previously stretched up into the modern day lands of, you know, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, suddenly recedes back to the Egyptian heartland.

This Bronze Age collapse was also associated with a decrease in trade, a decrease in the standard of living, probably had some connection with natural crises such as earthquakes and drought, but broadly speaking, led to a less interconnected, less literate, and less prosperous society.

We see the symbolic slaughter of the goddess Athena, which seems to usher in the destruction of all literate civilization.

Near the end of the film, Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, tells his son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, that our stories must be sung, not spoken, as writing is rapidly disappearing.

Indeed, the Bronze Age Linear B writing system of Mycenaean Greece did disappear after the Bronze Age Collapse, being replaced by the phonetic alphabet introduced, of course, by the Phoenicians.

Nolan's interpretation of the Greeks as the Sea Peoples squares the circle of how Greek-speaking peoples appear to have been involved not only in destructive acts across the Mediterranean, but also in the destruction of their own civilization.

where there's all these Canaanite cities that appear to be destroyed in some fashion or another.

And then there's also the Greek mainland or the Peloponnese, where you have these places like Knossos and Pylos and Mycenae that are destroyed.

What happened? Well, in this episode, we're going to try and figure that out.

Historian Robert Drew narrates the century-long period of unrest that we call the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

Maybe it truly is a natural disaster of some kind.

But that's just one part of this geopolitical world that exists, the Assyrians and Babylonians.

There's also, there's Crete, there's Mycenae, there's the Egyptians and the Hittites and the Mitanni, and the Egyptians and the Hittites sort of define this other portion of the geopolitical world, mostly through a singular instant called the Zananza Affair.

So we've talked about geopolitical things being, you know, mostly stable, and that's probably a simplistic way of looking at it.

Big high one, basically, Charlotte.

So, I mean, the walls are the sort of the elemental bit, aren't they, of castles? If we trace the origins of castles and fortifications way, way, way back, I mean, through the Iron Age with hill forts, back through the Bronze Age with the fortified citadels, you know, I mentioned Troy already, but think of Mycenae.

We could go back a bit further and think of the walls of Jericho, you know, these fortified cities of the Neolithic into the Bronze Age.

You can go as far back as the last Ice Age and see that the archaeology on the first sort of settlements where nomadic hunter-gatherers might stay for a season when they were chasing mammoths around, Europe.

But the walls are the starting point.

So I've got a soft spot.

I won't keep harping on about the Bronze Age, but I've got a soft spot for the Mycenaean walls, the Cyclopean walls, the idea that in the Bronze Age, these walls built of these huge blocks of stone were so improbably large for their time that they could only have been built by the Cyclopes, the demigods.

However, I think this castle needs to be fit for purpose.

Birds make fair distribution of their food.

Ulysses hastens back to the rocks of his Ithaca as eagerly as Agamemnon speeds to the kingly walls of Mycenae.

For no man loves his native land because it is great.

He loves it because it is his own.