influences from the wider world, and the presence of rich and exotic grave
goods indicates that wealth and conspicuous consumption were starting to
become important to the expression and reinforcement of social and political
status. In particular, using material culture to advertise contacts with the
Minoan elites became a new way for members of the emerging Mycenaean
elites to show how rich and powerful they were. In the political sphere, we
see the development of a powerful military culture that was expressed through
the material elaboration of the lifestyle of the warrior.^12I will argue that this was indeed a fundamental break rather than a development:
the military culture, that is, was the result not of a process but of an event, a sudden
interruption of the longue duréeon the Greek mainland.^13
Through most of the Middle Helladic period the Greek mainland had resembled,
if we may answer Oliver Dickinson’s question in the affirmative, a “third-world”
country when compared to Middle Kingdom Egypt or Minoan Crete.^14 The
material remains from Greece show no sign of a formal state, a ranked society,
or anything other than a simple village economy. Parts of the mainland, especially
if they had important natural resources, were apparently under the control of the
ruler at Knossos.
Two hundred years later, ca. 1400 BC, the Greek mainland was home to one
of the most important kingdoms in western Eurasia. Knossos and the rest of Crete
were now under the control of this mainland kingdom, which was also embark -
ing on expeditions to western Anatolia and Cyprus. Evidence for this kingdom
comes from Hittite texts, which complain of trouble from what was originally
written as Ahhiya, and later as Ahhiyawa.^15 Ahhiya, or Achaea, was apparently
the name that in the middle of the second millennium BCwestern Anatolians
applied to the land mass that mariners encountered when sailing west from
the Dardanelles. The land mass began at the Vardar river (called the Axios by the
Classical Greeks) and ran south to the tip of Lakonia in the Peloponnesos. Of course
the rulers about whom the Hittite kings were concerned, and with whom they
were occasionally in correspondence, did not rule more than a fraction of this
Ahhiya. A Great Kingdom was evidently centered at Mycenae, and its authority
seems to have extended through most of the Peloponnesos and through central
Greece so far to the west as—but not beyond—the Pindus range.
Ca. 1400 BCthe Hittite king Arnuwanda I, in a tablet that Hittitologists call the
“Indictment of Madduwatta,” reminded Madduwatta (whose small kingdom lay
somewhere in western Anatolia) of the time that Attarissiya, “the man of Ahhiya,”
led his army against Madduwatta and would have prevailed had not the Great King
of Hatti sent an army to rescue his vassal and restore him to his kingdom.^16 Further
on in the same tablet Arnuwanda accuses Madduwatta of collaborating with
Attarissiya in raids on Alashiya (Cyprus).^17 It is barely possible that the Atreus of
Greek legend was a dim recollection of Attarissiya. The tablet in which Attarissiya
appears is the first of at least twenty-six Hittite tablets that refer to Ahhiya/
Ahhiyawa. The rulers in Achaea, in order to have merited the title of “Great King”
and of “Brother” to the Great King of Hatti, must have had a network of vassal
178 Militarism in Greece