Why can't I find the names of any Mycenaean kings outside of Greek Mythology?

by hiim379

We have been able to decode linear b, so why when ever I look into the bronze age do I never hear of the rulers of Mycenaean Greece, I've heard the names of the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrian, Egyptian, and even the Mitanni even though we don't even know where their capital is and I've tried to look up names and all I can find is the ones from Greek Mythology.

KiwiHellenist

You don't hear any names because none are known. The surviving documents from Bronze Age Greece are products of the Mycenaean palace culture, ranging in date from ca. 1400 to 1200 BCE (plus one or two decades on either side).

All the documents that have survived, survived by chance thanks to being filed in a temporary storage area (not long-term archives) and being fired when the building was destroyed. And that's what the texts are: administrative records of economic activity, not political or historical records. The New Pauly sums up their content as

instructions, inventories, deliveries and allocations of persons, animals, and goods, furthermore receivables and deficits of the accounting year in which the respective residence was destroyed by fire.

Plenty of names do appear in these documents -- nearly 2000 names (the number may have passed 2000 by now) -- and they are people who had economic interactions with the palatial centre: herders, craftspeople, landowners, military officers, priests and their gods. Not rulers.

Our only chance for knowing any rulers' names would come from diplomatic correspondence with the Hittite king at Hattusa, and some correspondence does survive, but unfortunately not with any names.

Names in classical-era myths are just that: classical era (700 BCE and later), and mythical.

If you're interested in the prosopography of the Mycenaean palace culture, I recommend Dimitri Nakassis' Individuals and society in Mycenaean Pylos (2013) as an informative read.