original condition it must have been a very vibrant image testifying to a highly
developed appreciation of beauty.
In Cretan pottery there are bull pots, that is, pots not simply with bulls decorating
them but actually in the form of a bull’s head. Cretan vessels have been found in
various parts of the Aegean, notably in considerable quantities at Akrotiri, an island
in the southern Cyclades, which suffered a fate similar to that of Pompeii when it was
overwhelmed in a volcanic eruption in 1628. At the least, this indicates thriving
trading relations with neighbouring islands, though perhaps falling short of an empire.
The palace at Cnossus was evidently the centre of a successful highly developed
mercantile society.
Further evidence of sophisticated Cretan development is the presence of writing
on clay tablets and other objects from 1800 to 1450. Not enough of this script, known
as Linear A, survives for modern scholars to decipher but it is agreed from study of
it that the Cretans were not Greek speaking. Many of these tablets contain numbers
and are thought to be accounts and evidence of a developed bureaucracy. Some
Minoan specialists have concluded that the palaces were centres that took in grain
and olive oil from palace lands or from outlying farmers in the form of tax. This means
the palace community of the well-to-do and their workers were supported. Surpluses
were redistributed to villages and outlying communities and sold overseas. A second
script starting in the mid-fifteenth century was discovered at Crete similar in its form
to Linear A and so designated Linear B. This script was also discovered on the
mainland at Mycenaean centres such as Thebes, Tiryns, Pylos and Mycenae itself.
Linear B was deciphered in the 1950s and shown to record an early form of Greek.
These Linear B tablets are all records or inventories. Their decipherment places the
Mycenaeans in Crete probably as conquerors and establishes an ancestral connection
between the Mycenaeans and the later Greeks.
Mycenaean civilization
This civilization is centred upon royal palaces on the Greek mainland and is called
Mycenaean after what seems to have been its most powerful centre. In Homer’s Iliad,
Mycenae, called in Homer’s Iliad ‘rich in gold’, ‘well built’ and ‘broad-streeted’, is the
home of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition, and the city that sends the
largest contingent of ships. When he visited Mycenae in about 150 AD, Pausanias
reported that it is the location of the graves of Atreus (the father of Agamemnon) and
his children (Description of Greece, 2,16,6). The amateur German archaeologist
Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) first excavated the site in the 1870s, and he
believed that he had found the tombs of Agamemnon’s family. Subsequent scholars
have rejected his conclusion that these graves could have been contemporary with
EARLY GREECE: HOMER AND HESIOD 5