The Mycenaean Collapse: A Massacre in the Palaces?

Bronze Age Greece is seen as a golden age. This is Homer’s Greece, the Greece of the Iliad and the Trojan War, of city states and island kingdoms, of great heroes and gods and monsters.

But it may surprise some to find that we actually know very little of this time. Once all the epic poetry is put aside there is really only the archaeology to go on, separated from recorded history by a centuries-long dark age.

The collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms is, of course, part of the famous “Bronze Age Collapse” where most of the world’s civilizations suddenly collapsed, populations declined, and trade pretty much died out.

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Many of the empires that fell were indeed driven into decline by the sudden severing of links between themselves and other cultures. This impacted the Mycenaean kingdoms too, but in an interesting way.

For the narrative that these city states suddenly fell apart, and centuries of a “Greek Dark Age” followed is perhaps too simple an explanation. Much can be gained by closely looking at what actually happened, and there are some startling conclusions one might draw from the sudden changes in Greece around 1200 to 1100 BC.

What caused something so widespread to happen to all the Mycenaean states at once? What was it that caused the interdependent network of kingdoms to lose their identity, and to fall and never rise again?

The palaces remained, but where were the kings? 

A Lost Culture but an Enduring People

Firstly, let us look at what was happening in Bronze Age Greece just before the collapse. We have a Greece where power was shared between maybe a dozen competing kingdoms, all of which ruled from palace citadels with mighty walls and all of whom maintained diplomatic and trade relationships.

There were several trends in this Bronze Age world, however. The first was the steady stream of Greek migrants leaving their homelands and population the islands of the Aegean and the lands beyond.

This is (probably) the period of Homer’s famous Iliad. Historians are divided as to whether something like the Trojan War in fact happened, but if so it would certainly account for the series of empty kingdoms across the Greek mainland as their kings and heroes went to war.

And they went for a long time, too. Conflicts overseas could be akin to permanent migrations and likely lasted years, if not perhaps the decade of Homer’s version. This would have meant the Greek kingdoms functioning with an unusual degree of autonomy under whatever government was left behind.

Now it is important to look at the Mycenaean collapse in terms of what happened. During these times of emigration, during times when kings may well have been absent, something happened in the palaces of Greece. In short order they emptied and the lower social orders jolted to a halt.

It is commonly believed that the Dorian Greeks from the north swept through Mycenaean Greece, destroying the social order and replacing it with their own. And while this certainly happened in the long run, the timing doesn’t quite work for the period of actual crisis. 

What few contemporary(ish) records that document this collapse talk more of the Dorians as moving in and taking over, rather than overthrowing the existing order. The palaces may have been burned before they ever arrived.

Whatever its actual cause, his led to the Greek Dark Age, which runs from around 1100 BC to 750 BC and traditionally pictured as a fractured society taking centuries to heal. This is what we are told by the ancient historians: that Greece after the Trojan War is so beset with infighting that their golden age came was lost.

But what survives from the archaeology suggests something a bit different. Pottery fragments and other trade wares reappear relatively quickly, within maybe a century of the collapse, and although they are often nothing like what came before their decoration and craftsmanship speak of a society which quickly rebounded. All but the palaces came back.

This looks a little bit like a society who, faced with weak substitute leaders back home, suddenly found themselves with no leaders and a society which quickly came to terms with this power vacuum. Were there massacres in the palaces of the great? Were the Greek heroes returning home to lost kingdoms?

This may strike some as a supposition too far, but it has a strong defense. Aside from anything else, it is literally what happened. We see the sudden removal of the ruling class and the social disarray that followed, and then the recovery of a system where the farmers kept going and the palace builders never came back to finish their citadels. All were abandoned, and the only the reoccupied ones remained as regional strongholds.

So, why does the Greek Dark Age have that reputation? Well, this can be traced to one thing that was lost with the Bronze Age Collapse: the Greeks forgot how to read and write. We have no written records to tell us what happened, and it would be centuries before Dark Age Greek traders borrowed the Phoenician language and taught themselves to write again.

This gap in the record where ancient Greece is silent is where the Iliad and the Odyssey came from, oral recollections of the epic tales of heroes and gods, carefully remembered for centuries until they could again be codified and preserved in the new Greek language. A shared language gave the disparate Greek city states that sprung up through the Dark Ages a common language, and when they read of the deeds of their great ancestors their cultural identity and unity strengthened even further.

For city states had indeed formed in the Dark Age, and the type of state the survivors of the collapse created is again telling. This is the era of the polis, the city state of the people, and the dawn of “power to the people”: demos kratos, democracy.

No ruling class reemerged to unite their people and sit again in the dusty palaces as kings. This new Greece gave the world a whole new way of governing, something much of the world aspires to perfect today.

Did it work for the Greeks? Well, no, not entirely: they were beset by infighting, both within their governments and with each other. They emerged from the Dark Age into what is known as the Greek Archaic Period around 750 BC as a group of largely bitter rivals, but they also had something else on their hands: a population boom.

Greece did decline in the early Dark Age, its waves of emigrants leaving a country bereft of people which started to forget its very culture. But something special happened to these Greeks: they discovered iron.

Iron Age farming tools meant higher crop yields, which meant surpluses of grain. This led to larger and larger populations, and a second wave of Greek emigrations began.

Unlike the first these were sustainable, population movements driven by too many people at home rather than a declining kingdom. These were also the newly rediscovered Greeks, those who had all learned to read the same language together and who felt united in a shared cultural identity from the legends of their heroic forebears.

And these were the Greeks who took their culture and spread it all around the Mediterranean.

Header Image: Mycenaean warriors depicted on a vase. Something sudden happened to the Bronze Age palaces which caused them to be abandoned as society collapsed, and the social order which replaced them looked decidedly different. Source: Sharon Mollerus / CC BY 2.0.