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A Mycenaean Hegemony? A Reconsideration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

C. G. Thomas
C. G. Thomas
Affiliation:
The University of Washington
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Extract

There are two possible positions with regard to the Mycenaean hegemony: that it existed or that it did not. Modern scholars who accept its existence appear to be more vocal in arguing their position than are those who question the existence of Mycenaean unity. Desborough, for example, states forcibly:

I am firmly convinced that there was one ruler over the whole Mycenaean territory, with his capital at Mycenae, although the tablets are of no assistance one way or the other in this matter, and although the overlordship of Agamemnon clearly envisaged by Homer can perhaps be explained simply as a military leadership for the purpose of waging war against Troy. The burden of proof must therefore depend on other evidence, the archaeological material taken in conjunction with the fairly frequent mention by the Hittites, in the fourteenth and much of the thirteenth centuries, of the king of a land called Ahhiyawa, which I believe to represent the entire Mycenaean orbit.

The opposite position is represented largely through hints given in a larger context. Stubbings, for example, writes of ‘the Mycenaean Greeks of the mainland and the Mycenaean rulers of Cnossus’ and of ‘the mainland kingdoms’ (italics mine). Catling speaks of ‘metropolitan Greeks grown jealous of the wealth and power which their Knossian relatives had built up’. This emphasis on plurality, it seems to me, is the best way not only to view the events of the Mycenaean Greek world but also to understand the nature and degree of change in Greece during the Dark Age period.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 90 , November 1970, pp. 184 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1970

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References

1 Desborough, V. R. d'A., The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors (Oxford, 1964) 218.Google Scholar

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6 The Mycenaean basis of Greek religion is developed in the work of Nilsson, M. P. especially, Geschichte der griechischen Religion i (2nd edn., Munich, 1955)Google Scholar; Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion (2nd edn., Lund, 1950); The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (Berkeley, 1932).

7 Vermeule, E., Greece in the Bronze Age (Chicago, 1964) 232 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mrs Vermeule's position on the question of unity is essentially one of compromise: ‘It is doubtful whether late Mycenaean Greece was either really an empire, … or a string of local kingdoms who neither respected nor supported one another.’ Ibid., 236.

8 The Linear B tablets are instructive in a negative fashion: the tablets from both Knossos and Pylos make no reference to other major Mycenaean centres. The nature of the tablets and the method of their preservation prevent us from placing much emphasis on this fact, however.

9 This is the terminology used by Dow, S., ‘The Greeks in the Bronze Age’, Rapports du Xle Congres International des Sciences Historiques (Stockholm, 1960).Google Scholar

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35 ‘The Roots of Homeric Kingship’, Hbtoria xv (1966) 387–407.

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43 Odyssey i 35–52, iv 546–7.

44 Odyssey iv 90–6.

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