Ancient civilizations-2

History of exploration

The poems of Homer, which reflect an epic tradition that absorbed many changes occurring in warfare and society between the 15th and the 8th century bc, describe warriors employing bronze weapons and objects such as helmets plated with tusks of wild boar that went out of use before the end of the Aegean Bronze Age. Massive Bronze Age defense walls survived at Mycenae and elsewhere on the mainland; they were called Cyclopean because, according to Greek tradition, the Cyclopes had built them. Apart from these Cyclopean walls, virtually nothing was known about the Aegean Bronze Age before the middle of the 19th century, when in 1876 a German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, discovered unplundered royal shaft graves at Mycenae. He thought that the men buried in them were the Greek heroes of Homer’s siege of Troy. There are in fact many likenesses between Homer’s descriptions and the armour, weapons, and war imagery found in these graves. The graves, spanning about 1600 to 1450 bc, contained princely gifts from an age when Greece, Crete, and Troy engaged in trade. Schliemann’s discoveries led to intensive exploration of Bronze Age and earlier sites on the Greek mainland. On the island of Thera in 1866–67, before Schliemann, Ferdinand Fouqué, a French geologist, had already explored settlements of the Shaft Grave Period sealed in under a thick shroud of volcanic pumice and ash. He found houses, frescoes, pottery imported from as far as Cyprus, and well-preserved agricultural produce. Because Bronze Age Crete and Greece were not explored at the time, this important find lay fallow for a century.

Later in the 19th century, Christos Tsountas, a Greek archaeologist, dug cemeteries of earlier phases of the Bronze Age on other Cycladic islands and continued the work begun by Schliemann at Mycenae. At the end of the century, a British expedition excavated the important Bronze Age town of Phylakopi on Melos. When Crete eventually became independent of Turkish rule in 1898, attention was turned to Bronze Age sites there. In 1900 Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Evans, an English archaeologist, began to uncover the palace at Knossos, the largest Bronze Age centre of the island, discovering clay tablets with the first positive evidence for Bronze Age writing in the Aegean. Greek, American, French, and Italian excavators added further knowledge of the Cretan Bronze Age during the years that followed, and American and German expeditions opened new sites on the mainland. Inscribed clay tablets in the script called Linear B, such as those found at Knossos in Crete at the turn of the century, were recovered in Messenia in 1939 by the American archaeologist Carl W. Blegen; others have since come to light at Mycenae and elsewhere on the mainland. The belief that the language of these tablets was a very archaic form of Greek was established in 1952 by the English architect and cryptographer Michael Ventris, working with the linguist John Chadwick, though acceptance of this is not yet universal. In 1962 a large palace, destroyed by fire about 1450 bc at Zákros in eastern Crete, was discovered. In 1967 the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos followed up Fouqué’s explorations with excavations at modern Akrotíri on the south coast of Thera. He uncovered a whole town buried under the volcanic eruption and so preserved in wonderful detail.