In Search of the Trojan War (31 page)

My Brother once wrote to me saying, ‘You have acted aggressively towards me.’ But at that time, my Brother, I was young [new to the job?]; if at that time I wrote anything insulting it was not done deliberately. … Such an expression comes naturally to a soldier, a general. …

With the snow swirling down outside at the end of the long central Anatolian winter, he had to plan new campaigns almost every year against his many enemies and must have spent long hours with the braziers burning low discussing with his diplomats the treaty obligations with Wilusa, or the past dealings with Ahhiyawa. On file in his Foreign Office archive were tablets covering over 200 years of diplomacy with the west. Their knowledge of the Aegean world may have been sketchy, their interest even less, but it was now an important part of their policy. Both Hattusilis and Tudhalias composed memoirs or ‘autobiographies’, and it is a great pity that they have only survived in fragments;if we had them in full, perhaps many of the questions could be answered. In the meantime, on all these matters, as on the alleged Anatolian context of the Trojan tale, we can only hope that future discoveries of further Hittite archives – perhaps in the as yet undiscovered southern capital of the Hittites – will throw fresh light on old mysteries. It is, however, at least pleasing to imagine that the real Paris, Helen’s lover, may not have been the playboy and habitué of dance-halls described by Homer, ‘women-crazy’, sneered at by friend and foe alike, notable only for his physical beauty, but instead a grizzled, middle-aged man-of-war, veteran of twenty years of battles from Syria to the Aegean.

SEVEN

THE PEOPLES OF THE SEA

Now in earlier times the world’s history had consisted so to speak of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of which being as widely separated as their localities, but from this point onwards history becomes an organic whole: the affairs of Italy and Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end
.

POLYBIUS,
World History

SO POLYBIUS,
the late-second-century-BC historian of the wars between Rome and Carthage, assessed the significance of the rise of Rome. In fact, the more we discover about the Late-Bronze-Age world the more we find that the unity of the eastern Mediterranean had its roots much further back in time than Polybius thought: roots in the sense of the cultural and commercial relations between the Aegean world, western Anatolia, Crete and the Near East in the Bronze Age. Men had travelled on the sea since Neolithic times, populating islands and exploiting their natural resources as far as their technology allowed. By the end of the Bronze Age land and sea routes had been established between these different areas which were to persist for millennia. Hence, as most experts believe, Mycenaean merchants were resident in Cyprus and in Ugarit in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, and may have been active elsewhere, as for instance at Tell Abu Hawam near Haifa, and at Sarafend in south Lebanon where a remarkable tomb of this period has been found. The importance of these routes meant that as early as the Middle Bronze Age connections had been established between the different regions of the eastern Mediterranean, and by the Late Bronze Age their destinies were to a certain extent bound up; indeed, though it has not yet been proved, it is likely that the collapse of centralised power in many
places in the Aegean and Anatolia may have been brought about by a combination of similar and even related circumstances. Accordingly this last stage of our search will broaden out to look at the wider context of the destructions of Troy, and the end of the Mycenaean ‘empire’.

TRADE ROUTES AND CONTACTS

Trade was on an organised footing in the Near East even before the Greeks came to the Aegean world, and its influence crept westwards. There were already Assyrian merchant communities at Kanesh in Anatolia in 1800 BC, living in their own quarter, over an acre in extent, bound by treaty, their caravan routes stretching across to the western sea. Perhaps ‘the great city of Smyrna’, as it was called by the Anglo-Saxon traveller Saewulf, who around AD 1100 sailed through the Aegean, is the Ti-Smurna mentioned in the tablets found at Kanesh. Kings controlled commerce early, for it was the best way of bringing in surplus income and luxury products. The tremendous detail of the Linear B archives at Knossos and Pylos shows that Mycenaean kings of the thirteenth century BC had precisely that control. Among their imports were ivory, cumin, coriander and Cypriot copper, products which came by sea; perhaps there were even tiny foreign communities at Mycenaean Knossos, with people like the ‘Egyptian’ and the ‘Lykian’ mentioned in the tablets, and Pijamunu and others whose names are Anatolian. Just such a population must have existed in the mixed-race city of Miletus which has been such an important part of our story.

If, as I have argued, the kingdom of Ahhiyawa in the Hittite tablets is part of mainland Greece, then we can add to this picture Greek ships sailing to Amurru in Syria with goods bound for Assyria in the Euphrates valley. We hear mention of textiles, and copper vessels in the ‘Ahhiyawan style’; they may have exported olive oil to Egypt where the olive does not thrive; their pottery appears on Near Eastern sites so extensively that one wonders whether it had some sort of snob value – or is it simply a mark
of Greek commercial expertise? Is the ubiquitous stirrup jar just the ‘Coke’ bottle of its day?

To Greece came slaves from Asia Minor (and Africa?). The Knossos tablets mention cyperus seed from Cyprus, sesame, cumin, gold, and purple dye from Syria – all known by their Semitic names. Copper was a major economic need (it came of course from Cyprus, whose very name indicates its origin) and for this reason throughout the Bronze Age – bronze is made by alloying tin with copper – Cyprus was of central importance in the Mediterranean, the main entrepôt between the Greek and Aegean world on the one hand, and Syria, Ugarit and the Near East on the other.

Remarkable evidence of such trade has been uncovered recently in the first of what are likely to prove numerous Bronze-Age wrecks on the dangerous southern shore of Turkey. Off Cape Gelidonya a thirteenth-century-BC shipwreck brought to light fragments of up to 100 copper ingots, each weighing about 50 lb, clearly the main cargo of a boat heading westwards into the Aegean from Cyprus. Among the wreckage was a large toolkit of picks, shovels, axes, blades, an anvil, two mortars, storage jars, whetstones and so on. Perhaps belonging to the merchant himself were a spit, a set of weights, bronze wire, a lamp, a reed basket, a personal razor and mirror, Egyptian scarabs and a Near Eastern cylinder seal which the owner possibly used as his personal seal: a marvellous insight into the life of one of the individual captains or traders who criss-crossed the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age. A ship found off Kars in south-west Turkey in 1982 was carrying around 100 Aegean pithoi – perhaps heading eastwards with a cargo of grain or oil. Such trade can be traced further back into the Bronze Age: the oldest yet found is a wreck of the sixteenth century BC found in 1975 at Seytan Deresi near Bodrum (Halicarnassos); again the vessel was loaded with large pithoi, testimony to a trade which flourished for at least 3000 years, despite the rise and fall of civilisations, and the ever-present threat of piracy.

That such commerce could be organised on a ‘state’ level has
already been suggested by the exporting of building stones from the Mani to Mycenae and Knossos, and indeed in the thirteenth century BC we find large-scale grain exports from Ugarit to Hittite country ‘because of the famine there’. Presumably such transactions were organised at government level through diplomacy. Hence a trade embargo could appear in a treaty between Egypt and the Hittites, or a letter between the Hittites and Ahhiyawa. Likewise it seems reasonable to assume that the flood of Mycenaean pottery into the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries – with its remarkable uniformity of style – came from factories in the Argolid directly controlled by the king of Mycenae.

The path by which the Mycenaeans had come to dominate Aegean trade seems broadly clear. After the Old Assyrian trade network across Anatolia disintegrated, the Minoans of Crete seem first to have grown in commercial enterprise in the Aegean between the eighteenth and fifteenth centuries BC. This is what Thucydides alleged in his account of Minos’ domination of the Cyclades, and archaeology is proving him right. British excavations at Phylakopi on Melos showed a Minoan ‘colony’ there, and another was found at Kythera. American digs on Keos have revealed a fortified town with strong Cretan connections at Ayia Irini in the sixteenth century BC. In the Cyclades, Amorgos, Thera, Siphnos and Delos have produced evidence of Minoan trading connections and even, as on Delos and Keos, the exporting of Minoan textile techniques. By the sixteenth century BC the Cretan influence is extremely marked on mainland Mycenaean pottery and especially in the craftsmanship of such Mycenaean masterpieces as the shaft grave daggers and cups. Westwards the Minoans reached southern Italy and Sicily (where one ancient authority alleges that Minos died on an expedition) and eastwards they planted settlements in Rhodes, Kos, Samos and even on the coast of Asia Minor at Iasos and Miletus: the last named gave Minoan traders access to the hinterland of Anatolia. Further afield Minoan merchants dealt with Syria and Egypt, and their ambassadors are portrayed in Egyptian wall-paintings: Keftiu
(Cretan) ships were evidently a common sight in Near Eastern ports, and the Minoans were the middlemen in the trade westwards. A high degree of commercial organisation is implied in some of our sources. Texts from Mari on the Euphrates show Cretans as permanent residents at Ugarit – with their interpreters – to buy Elamite tin which the king of Ugarit supplied from caravans crossing into Syria from the Euphrates valley: a typical train numbered twenty-nine donkeys and forty-four ‘bronze men’. It was natural that the kings should wish to control these crucial raw materials and hence they organised the trade in a strikingly modern way. The Hittites, for instance, maintained officials at Ugarit to conduct their business, and a ‘house of documents’, a kind of bank, was set up by Ugarit at Hattusas. In Ugarit, finely built chamber tombs have been excavated, suggesting that the Minoan settlers there were people of wealth and sophistication, at ease in a multiracial and multilingual city. The Mycenaeans had already started to encroach into this world before they destroyed the power of the Minoans and occupied Knossos in around 1420 BC. In the previous century or so their own wares reached Melos and Naxos in quantity, and a certain amount went to Keos and Delos; further out, Minoan ware was still dominant. But after the sack of Knossos Mycenaean pottery is found right across the Cyclades. At Phylakopi, at Iasos, Miletus and many other places, Mycenaean traders step into Cretan shoes, and in Minoan settlements on islands like Kos and Rhodes Greek settlers seem to take the place of Minoan ones, at least as the ruling or commercial élites. By the thirteenth century BC (LH III B) Mycenaean pottery is all over the Aegean and found in quantities throughout Syria, Palestine and Egypt; new discoveries of it have even been made in the heartland of the Hittites.

The quantities of Mycenaean pottery from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC found at Near Eastern sites at least enable us to say that the trade was important to the rulers of the Argolid and their neighbours: over sixty sites have produced such material in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, about a quarter of them in notable quantity. Over twenty more sites are presently known
in Egypt, as far south as Luxor and Thebes and including a major deposit at Tell el Amarna, which the excavator Flinders Petrie variously estimated at 200–300 and 800 pots: the smaller figure is more likely. Whatever was in these consignments – perfume and oil remain two possibilities – it is evident that we are dealing with no small-scale or casual trade over the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean as a whole, but with a commerce central to the economy of the Late-Bronze-Age palaces. As we would have guessed from the meticulous detail of the Linear B archives, the palaces were geared to efficient production.

It will be obvious, then, for all the self-contained look of the kingdoms of the Argolid and Messenia, for all the smallness of their immediate heartlands, they depended greatly on outside contacts for their raw materials and luxury products. The conspicuous consumption of the great palaces and their estates in their heyday relied on overseas trade, and with their fragile economies they needed their world to remain relatively static in order to preserve their social and political order. They needed a continued supply of bronze, that is, of copper from Cyprus and of tin, in order to make the weapons with which they equipped their fighting forces. They needed a continued supply of slaves from Asia Minor, from Miletus, Cnidus, Halicarnassos (Zephyrus), Chios and Lemnos, to work their estates, not only producing for their own consumption, but making a surplus – textiles, oil or whatever for export. Another source of slaves may have been from the more backward mountain peoples who inhabited the fringe of their world within Greece. They needed to make constant armed raids overseas or into neighbouring territories in order to seize not only slaves but also treasure and booty with which to reward their armed followers, on whose strong arm their power rested. This is a condition of all early kingships. They needed, in short, a stable Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world in order for their trade routes to exist, and for their markets to be accessible.

Our indications are that the fourteenth and most of the thirteenth centuries were indeed static periods for the mainland
palaces of Greece, in which they rose to great wealth and architectural splendour. But this was also a period of massive defensive military building – clearly a world which needed to be constantly on its guard.

THE PEAK AND FALL OF THE MYCENAEAN WORLD

How does our (at present) fragmentary knowledge of trade in the late Bronze Age fit with what we know of the Mycenaean world? As we have seen, Mycenae reached ‘capital’ status in the fourteenth century; from then on it may have been the chief power in Greece, and may have been known to the Hittites as the kingdom of Ahhiyawa. The peak of its extent and architectural development was in the thirteenth century (LH III B). But before the end of III B, that is, before 1200, the major centres were destroyed by fire; these included Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, Orchomenos, Araxos, Krisa and Menelaion – virtually all the major dynastic centres, the most famous palaces in Greek legend. Among the main ones only the Athens citadel seems to have escaped. Until recently it was conventional to associate this with what the ancient writers called the invasion of the Dorians, which Greek tradition held to have been the arrival of Greeks. This, however, seems to have no archaeological basis and it is now believed that the Dorians were already within Greece, and that they were Greek-speaking people (the lower classes?) who succeeded their masters after the fall of the palaces. The problem of what happened over this period is one of the most contentious in Aegean history, and the difficulties in providing an answer involve most of the classic problems of historical explanation which have engaged historians from Thucydides to Ibn Khaldun, Gibbon and Fernand Braudel. What ‘happened’ around 1200? Are all the destructions of the same time? Are they of the same cause? Or many different causes – possibly varying according to local conditions? Are they all man-made or was there some sort of natural catastrophe? Is external invasion involved, or internal feuding? Inter-dynastic strife or class war, peasants rising against
lords? Simply to reel off possible arguments is to show how complex the problems are, and the reader should appreciate that no satisfactory explanations have yet been brought forward by the experts. Perhaps the error is to think that there can be one all-embracing solution.