In Search of the Trojan War (32 page)

Part of the problem lies in our evidence: the fact that no major Mycenaean palace except Pylos has been fully excavated with modern techniques. Some, such as Mycenae and Tiryns, were dug by Schliemann, while others, such as Orchomenos and Iolkos, have been touched piecemeal and their pottery remains unpublished. But Schliemann himself realised that the destructions at Mycenae and Tiryns were contemporary and had great significance not just for the Argolid but for Greece as a whole. It is Schliemann’s successors at Tiryns who are coming up with some startling new answers to these questions.

Although, as at Mycenae, there was a lesser destruction in the citadel at Tiryns in the later thirteenth century BC (perhaps by a small earthquake), it is at about 1200 that the major one is placed, at the end of LH III B. The present excavators of Tiryns, working on the untouched ‘lower citadel’, think that this destruction was an earthquake of exceptional severity, and that it also caused the destruction at Mycenae (whose excavator agrees with this). At Tiryns all the great buildings collapsed, and the survivors rebuilt only with tiny temporary dwellings, before they reorganised themselves in the twelfth century BC with a well-planned town with insulae and north–south streets. To the surprise of the excavators this town contained a very much larger population, as if swelled by refugees from outside (architecturally the nearest analogies suggested were the new Greek colonies on Cyprus). From the 1190s to
c
.1150 this town thrived; then the population probably started to decline (though not so drastically as would be seen after 1100), pottery output fell, and poorer decoration appears. At a guess the population fell by half in this area. A similar decrease of population in Messenia and Lakonia has been observed after the end of the thirteenth century. Evidently, because the Argolid was on the sea and had good trade routes
with the Levant and Italy, its economy survived longer than that of the western Peloponnese. For well over a century after 1200 the people here still thought of themselves as belonging to that earlier world – still Mycenaeans, as we would say: clear continuity was found, for instance, in the position of the cult rooms which were on the same spot until 1050 BC. In none of this detail do the Dorians have any role to play: archaeologically they are not even there. Here at least, then, the destructions do not appear to be the result of war. The evidence from Tiryns is recent, and needs to be properly evaluated. It suggests, though, that Mycenaean society – at least in its powerhouse in the Argolid – was experiencing quite complex change. Elsewhere, though, the evidence – both documentary and archaeological – seems to indicate that the ‘foul din of war’, as Hesiod put it, may have played its part in the process of decline.

The mid-thirteenth century BC, the Age of Agamemnon, was a militarist one. Archaeology tells us so clearly. At Mycenae and Tiryns immense fortifications were built, and elaborate precautions taken to ensure the water-supply by tunnelling into the rock under the citadel walls. At Athens, too, where remains of a massive Mycenaean defence wall from this period still survive on the Acropolis entrance, another deep cistern was dug, which was in use for only a few decades around 1200. Elsewhere on the Greek mainland huge forts were built in isolated places which can only have been intended as outer defence works, coastal or promontory forts serving as frontier works at a time when a hostile outer world began with the sea. At Araxos on the northwestern tip of the Peloponnese great walls survive from this period, on a precipitous crag over the sea with wonderful vistas over the sea westwards. Perhaps this was ‘Myrsinos the outermost’ in Homer’s catalogue of the ships which went to Troy. Again, on a wild and desolate promontory in the Mani in the far south of the Peloponnese, another Cyclopean fortress stood on 100-foot-high cliffs haunted by seabirds where the later Frankish castle of Maina stood, perhaps a front line of defence for the kingdom of Lakonia, Homer’s ‘Messe of the many pigeons’. In
the north-east of the Peloponnese, at the isthmus of Corinth, a wall seems to have been commenced blocking the whole isthmus against attack from the north. The cumulative effect of this kind of evidence from the Peloponnese suggests a society expecting attack from the sea, and indeed this is plausible: Egyptian texts from as early as
c
.1300 BC show that sea raiders were troublesome in the Eastern Mediterranean and could mount dangerous concerted attacks which threatened well-organised kingdoms. Proof of this kind of interpretation has been sought in the tablets found in the palace of Pylos, from which some scholars think preparations for seaborne attack can be deduced. These dramatic documents afford us a fascinating insight into the world of a major palace on the eve of its destruction.

The last tablets at Pylos, for instance, speak of rowers being drawn from five places to go to Pleuron on the coast. A second list, incomplete, numbers 443 rowers: originally crews for at least fifteen ships. A much larger list, almost a Mycenaean catalogue of ships, speaks of 700 men as defensive troops: gaps on the tablet suggest that when complete around 1000 men were marked down, the equivalent of a force of thirty ships. If we reckon the possible size of the king’s standing army as a couple of thousand or so, these represent sizeable forces, at least comparable to the ninety ships which Nestor took to Troy according to the
Iliad
. Pylos does not appear to have had any fortifications at this time: the king lived in his beautifully decorated palace high above the bay of sandy Pylos confident in his military might, or so it would appear. Now, however, we seem to see an organisation watching over the long coastline of the Peloponnese. One of the most important tablets is entitled ‘Thus the watchers are guarding the coasts’. It reads rather like Home Guard instructions in England during the Second World War. Local feudal barons such as Ekhelawon and Wedaneu sent forty and twenty men respectively:

Command of Maleus at
Owitono
… fifty men of
Owitona
to go to Oikhalia … command of Nedwatas … twenty men of Kyparissia, at
Aruwote
, ten Kyparissia men at
Aithalewes
… command of Tros at
Ro-o-wa
:
Ka-da-si-jo
a shareholder, performing feudal service … 110 men from Oikhalia to
A-ra-tu-wa
.

What happened then is something of a mystery. It is certain that immediately after the tablets were written the palace was burned down in a great fire and completely destroyed. No human remains were found, so perhaps there was no fight for the palace. If the disaster was by human agency we must assume that the king’s treasures were looted and the women and children enslaved: the fate of Troy was now that of Pylos. The date was early in the year, as there had been no sheep-shearing or vintage: probably it was in the ‘sailing month’, Plowistio (March), when navigation resumes. The last act of the king of Pylos was to order sacrifices, perhaps human: ‘Perform the rituals at the shrine of Zeus, and bring the gifts: to Zeus one gold bowl, one man, to Hera one gold bowl, one woman.’ The tablet on which this was written was found unfinished, hastily scribbled and ill-written, perhaps executed immediately before the palace fell. Pylos was never lived in again by men or women.

It is a dramatic tale – if we have read it right. But we cannot be sure that these documents speak of a special emergency, a last-ditch defence, or even that the catastrophe was man-made. And even if it was, was the fate of Pylos the fate of the rest of the Mycenaean world? Many other places were destroyed at this time, as we have seen. Some, like Pylos, the Menelaion, Krisa, Zygouries, Midea and Eutresis, were never rebuilt. Some, like Mycenae, Tiryns and Araxos, were rebuilt and survived until later destructions in the twelfth century. Some escaped altogether, such as Athens and, surprisingly, Asine, on the coast near Tiryns. How are we to interpret such evidence? Historians are now moving away from the view that one catastrophe enveloped the Greek mainland, inundated by invaders: now it is thought that a whole variety of local conditions and multiple causes contributed to a decline which in some places was rapid, and accelerated by disasters like that at Pylos, but in others comprised a slow decline which lasted over a century and even experienced upturns in
economy and population as at Tiryns. However, there was one external element which may have been significant, whether as cause or effect of the gradual worsening of the mainland economy towards the end of the thirteenth century; a new element which may have shaken the wealthy and static world of the mainland princes, and which may have necessitated the kind of military precautions we have seen all over southern Greece. These were the invaders who have often been seen as harbingers of the violent end of the Aegean Bronze Age: the Sea Peoples.

THE SEA PEOPLES: WHO WERE THEY?

The modern term ‘Sea Peoples’ is derived directly from the term used by the ancient Egyptians themselves to describe the people who threatened them in two major attacks in
c
.1210 BC and
c
.1180 BC. In fact the Sea Peoples are known in Egyptian sources from considerably earlier, but the two well-known references describe major assaults on Egypt. In
c
.1210 the Pharaoh Merenptah tells of his victory in the western desert over Libyans who had brought with them as allies ‘Sherden-people, Sheklesh-people, Aqaiwasha-people of the foreign lands of the Sea … Aqaiwasha the foreigners of the Sea’. Though the Aqaiwasha are the ones specified as ‘Sea Peoples’ it is clear that there are others who are regarded in the same way, and they appear in other Egyptian texts and inscriptions. In a list of the northern enemies of Ramses III (
c
.1180 BC) a Sherden chief is called ‘Sherden of the Sea’;with him are ‘the chief of the Tjekeryu-foes’ and ‘Tursha of the Sea’ and the ‘chief of the Pulisati (Philistine) foes’. Another inscription of Ramses III commemorating his successes against Libyan enemies in the west and Nubians in the south mentions as northern enemies ‘peoples of the sea’, literally ‘the foreign lands, the isles who sailed over against his lands’, and they included Philistines and ‘Tursha from the midst of the Sea’ (in all these references it must be understood that the Philistines have not yet settled in their biblical homeland: they are among the migrants from the north, the isles where biblical tradition insists
their original home was Kaphtor, that is, Crete). Finally, in the Harris papyrus in the British Museum, Ramses III says: ‘I overthrew all who transgressed the boundaries of Egypt, coming from their lands. I slew the Danuna from their isles, the Tjekkeru and Philistines … the Sherden and Weshesh of the Sea were made as if non-existent.’

Whoever these mysterious invaders were, the Egyptians had known them for a while. Some time around 1290 BC Ramses II had already had to fight sea raiders in the Delta, including Sherden ‘who came in warships from the midst of the sea’. This may have been a major confrontation: the Delta ‘now lies safe in its slumbers’, says a source of 1278 BC, now that the King ‘has destroyed the warriors of the Great Green Sea’. In fact so many prisoners were taken after this foray that Ramses was able to employ Sherden auxiliaries in his battle with the Hittites at Kadesh in 1274.

It seems likely then that the sea raiders had represented a growing threat to the Eastern Mediterranean for a century before the climactic raids. Where were they from, and who were they? These are contentious questions, but the general picture is reasonably clear: if some of the Peoples of the Sea were migrants, many were demonstrably traditional pirates. The Lukka, for instance, who lived on the Anatolian coast opposite Rhodes, made piratical raids by sea to Cyprus, then beyond to Phoenicia, and southwards to North Africa, where they participated in the Libyan attack against Merenptah. The term ‘sea’ in these sources, or ‘Great Green’, comes to mean the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole. Peoples like the Aqaiwasha, the Philistines, the Sherden and the Lukka have no original connection with Syria–Palestine, or with Egypt: they are from
outside
their world, over seas to the north-west. Very likely the ‘islands’ they are from are in the Aegean, and it is in this context that a fascinating suggestion has been put forward: could the Egyptian Aqaiwasha be Homer’s Achaiwoi (despite being circumcised, as the Egyptians tell us – a custom which the historical Greeks did not practise)? Is it possible to detect Homeric Trojans, Teucrians, beneath the
Tjekeryu? Or Tyrsenoi (Lydians in western Anatolia who were later said to have emigrated to Italy) in the ‘Tursha of the Sea’? In short, were the Sea Peoples a flood of migrating peoples who came through the Aegean world from the north on their way to Egypt, and helped bring down the world of the Mycenaean palaces? Or were they in part actually composed of Mycenaean Greeks – rootless migrants, warrior bands and
condottieri
on the move as other conditions, economic, social or whatever, broke apart the fragile stability of their world? Certainly there seem to be suggestive parallels between the war gear and helmets of the Greeks as depicted on, say, the warrior vase at Mycenae, and those of the Sea Peoples shown on Egyptian wall-carvings and tiles; and, remarkably, when the Philistines (Pulisati) were settled by the Egyptians in the Gaza Strip after their defeat, their pottery and weapons indicate close affinities with the Aegean. Furthermore, biblical tradition actually links the Philistines with Kaphtor (Crete) and the Aegean. Of the other peoples mentioned among the northern invaders, despite the tantalising similarities of name we have no means of making any secure identifications beyond the Lukka and Danuna. Some are quite obscure and likely to remain so, but, like the Philistines, the Sherden and Sheklesh
can
be traced later: the etymology of their names connects them with Sardinia and Sicily respectively. So perhaps elements migrated westwards after the convulsions of the early twelfth century BC. Interestingly enough, both Greek tradition and archaeology show that there
were
migrations of Greek-speaking peoples to the same places at this time.