The Bronze Age Aegean is a difficult period of history to glimpse into, because it has just enough contextual material to intrigue and not enough to answer the many thoughts that come to mind. There are basic questions about ‘the Mycenaeans’, as we call them, that are difficult to answer and may never be satisfactorily answered. This applies equally to the collapse of their complex states and the fading away of their distinctive culture.

To understand what happened to them, archaeologists and historians of this period sieve through a very limited pool of sources to find anything that might give information. This makes a lot of their conclusions necessarily cautious, or heavily caveated, even about simple things like ‘what is going on here’ and ‘what are we looking at’. The concensus on the subject changes frequently because of how big an impact new interpretations and evidence can make, since we have so little to go on. For example, I feel like my answer that Bentresh linked in another comment to is simplistic in places and outdated in others, and that’s something I only wrote in 2012 (though in internet years that’s a long time ago).

Collapse, genuine collapse of complex society, is relatively rare in historical eras. We’re not talking about a matter of conquest, or a state breaking up, but a sudden and massive shift in political organisation, economic specialisation, population levels, the use of technologies, and much more besides. There is an entire historical discipline based around the study of collapse, drawing on the known historical examples. An important lesson from that discipline is that drastic collapses are compound events that never boil down to a single event or factor. For any one potential reason a society collapsed, we can evidence many others who experienced similar events and who withstood the events in question. When thinking of plague, to pick the example you brought up, think how many European states endured the Black Death and continued to exist, despite the deaths of so many (in some countries perhaps half their population died), or other deadly epidemics. This is a sensible approach to take with the Mycenaeans, especially because of the very patchy nature of the evidence, and how circumstantial a number of bits are. I’m going to proceed with the assumption that there is no one primary factor or silver bullet in identifying why the Mycenaeans collapsed, and exactly what happened to them.

So let’s talk about what we do know. We know that Mycenaean society was politically and economically centered around complex urban locations that we tend to call palaces. Those palaces had a complex bureaucracy, with scribes using a modified version of Cretan Linear A script (known as Linear B), appointed officials with specific duties, military leaders with particular functions and responsibilities. In most cases we are fairly certain the palaces were the capitals of various smaller kingdoms or were at the head of semi-independent states attached to larger ones. We also know that across a 25 year period, covering the end of the 13th century BCE and the beginning of the 12th, every palace that has been excavated was either abandoned or burned to the ground. There were almost no contemporary attempts to resettle or rebuild these palaces, though their walls and defensive locations were often reused by later Greek communities. In fact that are very few complex buildings known at all from the periods immediately after the Mycenaean collapse. This is accompanied by an abrupt halt to the existence of Linear B texts, a script which is never picked up again, nor a script that the later Greeks could read.

In the Mycenaean era, the visible population distribution and size of urban areas was seemingly comparable to that of Greece in later eras of prosperity. We can evidence complex crafts like shipbuilding, chariot-making, and almost industrial-scale linen-weaving, along with the aforementioned political complexity to match. Mycenaean graves and art indicate the presence of luxury trade goods from many other Mediterranean regions, and the remains of Mycenaean goods have been found across the Mediterranean, not to mention anchors from Mycenaean ships. In the period associated with the destruction/abandonment of the palaces and its aftermath, the visible population of Greece reduces to 1/8th of its previous size. Not by 1/8th, to 1/8th. This can be a little misleading as this can also reflect a change in settlement patterns rather than simply death. If that is what we’re seeing, then it reflects a mass movement of populations away from urban areas and towards the countryside, which itself represents a massive event. The complex crafts and industries of the Mycenaean era can’t be evidenced in the period that follows, accompanying a lack of art showing these activities taking place. The intense pan-Mediterranean trade of the Mycenaean era slows, and in some cases ceases completely, in the late 13th and then 12th centuries BCE. This latter phenomenon is true for most of the Mediterranean at this time.

The language represented by Linear B is a Hellenic one, which is termed Mycenaean. We cannot automatically treat Linear B texts as meaning a Greek speaking majority in that area, particularly as so many come from Knossos at the heart of Minoan Crete, but all areas that Linear B have been found in are areas with Greek populations in the Archaic-Classical eras. Mycenaean Greek is not ancestral to most of the later Hellenic languages and not at all to Modern Greek. For example, the Dorian languages and Ionian languages (including Attic) are Hellenic but from different branches of that family to Mycenaean, meaning that populations speaking different Greek languages already existed during the Mycenaean era and almost certainly before it. A number of deities familiar to the later Greeks can be evidenced in the Linear B texts, some more haphazardly than others, but there are some deities that are not found in Archaic-Classical Greek practice, and some important later Greek deities that don’t appear in the extant Linear B corpus. In addition to the collapse of Linear B as a writing system, we also find that the later Greeks were totally unaware that they had ever possessed writing before their adapted Phoenician alphabet was developed. This coincides with a total lack of Greek knowledge about the existence of the Mycenaeans, or the fact that a ‘Dark Age’ had happened at all. There are certainly Greek stories and legends that are associated with the period, but these are considered to be the historical background to their own culture, not stories of a now-vanished civilization.

You can see the evidence clearly shows that something happened, or in fact many somethings. But it’s easy to spin whatever explanation you like on top of something with so little context, where the evidence is so easily interpreted. The traditional modern explanation for what happened to the Mycenaeans was that the Dorians, the ancestors of the Dorian speaking peoples of the Archaic and Classical world, came and conquered the Mycenaeans, and destroyed most of their civilization. This was because of the number of stories about Dorian migrations in Greek texts, and what they seemed to suggest about mythologising large shifts in Greek culture. Other explanations have included plague, an invasion of the Sea Peoples (which is a whole historical mess in its own right), or even climate change. But assuming that it was a complex event with many, many factors takes the pressure away from finding the one golden explanation, and reduces the need to cherry pick evidence for a pet theory.

We can also complicate this picture with things puncturing the older idea of the Mycenaean Collapse, where the civilization vanished overnight with no trace of any kind. Despite how many complex crafts vanished not all of them did, and we can still evidence things like ceramics being made in the Mycenaean style for over a century after this period where the palace system collapsed, albeit usually in a less accomplished style. This is called the Submycenaean period, with the birth of a new style coming with what we term the Proto-Geometric in the mid 11th century BCE. In other words, the trappings of Mycenaean material culture were still being made and produced for at least a century after the Collapse had happened. We can also find exceptions to the general rule of urban abandonment, and lack of complex buildings in general, if we turn to areas that never had palaces to begin with. The understanding of which areas had no palaces may change as more sites are identified, but we are fairly sure that the lack of palaces in some parts of Greece was not accidental, and that the palace system represents a particular type of government/state that was not the only model being used at the time. Central Greece has, in the past few decades, begun to turn up evidence of larger structures that have continuity of use from the end of the Mycenaean era well into later periods, with the most famous example being the site of Lefkandi on the island of Euboia. Across the past two decades more and more of these areas of physical continuity have been found, with others including the sites of Mitrou, Kynos, and Elateia. I have no doubt that more will follow in the decades to come.

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