Late Bronze Age Greece

By around 1600 BC, the Greeks had gotten completely mixed with the earlier Lerna people, and began to move on to bigger things. First, they started to get to know the other people living around the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Phoenicians (foy-NEE-shans), the Cretans, and the Egyptians. They seem to have started to take jobs as soldiers for the Egyptians, who paid them in gold.

Mask of Agamemnon

And they started to buy things from the Phoenicians (or Canaanites) with their gold. Greek graves from this time excavated at Mycenae (my-SEEN-ay) have a lot of gold cups and jewelry and beautiful swords in them, which are now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. The Greeks of this time are sometimes called the Myceneans (my-sin-AY-ans) after this site.

Lion Gate at Mycenae

As they got to know these other people, the Greeks began to copy their ways of doing things. The Greeks started to have kings instead of village headmen.

These kings had palaces to live in and collected taxes which they stored in big storerooms. The palaces had big stone walls around them. The stones were so big that later Greeks thought the walls must have been built by giants, whom they called Cyclops.

Some Greeks learned to write, in a sort of hieroglyphics called Linear B, so that they could keep records of what taxes had been collected. The kings made their people build paved roads.

In addition to maybe working as soldiers for other countries, the Greeks seem to have sailed around the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea picking fights with people on their own, and taking their gold, and probably also taking the people they met as slaves.

One of these raids, around 1250 BC, may have been to attack the city of Troy, in northern Turkey. Stories about the Trojan War (the war with Troy) were passed down for hundreds of years by singers until they were written down by the poet Homer around 700 BC.

Homer says that when the Greek soldiers came back from the Trojan War they found that Greece was in very bad shape, with a lot of robbers and crime. There may be some truth in this, because archaeology shows that around 1200 BC most of the Greek palaces were destroyed, including the one at Mycenae.
We don't know why this happened, but many people think that there was a general economic depression in the other countries of the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia around this time, especially in Egypt and in the Hittite kingdom. A lot of people seem to have fallen on hard times. Maybe the Greeks found themselves out of work.

To find out more about Late Bronze Age Greece, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:

The Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction, by William R. Biers (1996) This is NOT a children's book, but Biers writes very clearly and has a lot of good pictures.

The Aegean Bronze Age (Cambridge World Archaeology) by Oliver Dickinson, Norman Yoffee (Editor) (1994)

The Mycenaeans (Ancient Peoples and Places), by William Taylour (revised edition 1990).

Greek Dark Ages
Main Greek History page
Main Ancient Greece page

This page was reviewed for accuracy by Ioannis Georganas in March 2005.

Late Bronze Age Greece

To find out more about Late Bronze Age Greece, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:

Greek Dark Ages Main Greek History page Main Ancient Greece page

Greek Dark Ages
Main Greek History page
Main Ancient Greece page