As small agrarian states rose and fell throughout Mesopotamia, the expansion of trade networks and often of people themselves meant that small states began to rise (and fall) in all directions from present-day Iraq. There are only a few that will be discussed and that you need to know something about for this class. (Also in your text, pp. 532-541)
The earliest in Europe proper was the Minoan state or "civilization" on the large Mediterranean island of Crete, today part of Greece. One of the most popular stories in later Greek mythology concerned the legendary King, Minos, who was the son of the Greek god Zeus with a human mother, and who lived on the island of Crete. As part of this story, the wife of Minos, who has fallen helplessly in lust with a great white bull given by the gods, conceives a child by the bull (the half human/half bull Minotaur). Daedalus, an architect, builds a labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur, but then helps the lover of Minos' daughter kill the Minotaur and escape from the labryrinth. As punishment, Minos imprisons Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth. To escape, they make wings of feathers and wax; Icarus flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, and Icarus is killed. [Click here for a more complete version of these events, and click here for the complete story of Daedalus and Icarus.]
The British archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851-1941) believed the stories were based upon a very early, and real, culture. Little archaeology had been done in Crete when Evans purchased the site of Knossos and started excavating there in 1900. He named the culture and the people Minoans; nobody has any idea what they called themselves. No one knows what language they spoke, or if it was even an Indo-European language, the language family which includes most of the languages of India, Southwest Asia, and Europe. [Click here to view list of languages in the Indo-European family.] Their writings, called Linear A, have not been deciphered. The importance of their culture, as a center of trade in the early Mediterranean, is now undeniable.
First occupied by farmers sometime after 7,000 BC, Crete is today almost completely deforested. The timber that once stood there was an important resource for the Minoan state as it developed out of chiefdoms by 2600 BC. Timber, including the much desired cyprus wood, was exported to Egypt and to states in southwest Asia, as well as the Greek mainland. In addition to lumber, the Minoans exported wine, olive oil, wool, cloth, and purple dye; it imported copper, ivory, silver, gold, and other raw materials. Many of the palace sites of Crete were destroyed around 1700 BC, either by earthquakes or unknown invaders, but they were subsequently rebuilt, including the palace of Knossos. You are required to read this site on Knossos, and particularly to click on all the pictures at the bottom. Crete was the center of a thriving state until after the destruction of most of its cities by 1450 BC, due again either to earthquakes, the colossal eruption of the nearby Thera volcano, and/or foreign invasion.
Minoan Container; when tipped, liquid came from the bull's mouth. [From The Epic of Man, Time Inc., 1961, p.147]
Evans was one of the first archaeologists to establish that oral tradition, even if written down a thousand or more years later, could be of great assistance to archaeologists. One of the stories the Greeks told about the people at Knossos was that young men and women would do handstands over the backs of running bulls as a sport. On the walls of Knossos, Evans uncovered the fresco below.
Minoan Bull Leaping, ca. 1500 BC [from The Epic of Man, Time Inc., 1961, p.147]
Early states also developed on the Greek mainland, and by 1600 BC one of them centered at the site of Mycenae. Ultimately this state expanded throughout much of Greece, and invaded Crete. The Mycenaeans were long thought to be a largely fictitious culture, the subject of centuries of story tellers, of which one may have been a man named Homer, who may (or may not) have written of their exploits in some of the earliest works of Greek literature, the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both were written down probably sometime between 800-700 BC (perhaps later), and though it was known that both were the ultimate written versions of ancient oral traditions, many gave little credence to the validity of that tradition. (Ancient Greece and Rome both accepted that the poems were dealing with actual history, but later this was rejected by many.) Both epic poems deal with the unification of Greece to fight the Trojan Wars,ca. 1200 BC and were the ultimate sources for the Brad Pitt movie of a few years back, Troy.
Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), a wealthy German business man with an interest in Greek history, came to believe that the Iliad and the Odyssey were literal fact. Retiring young, he decided to devote the rest of his life to proving that Troy and the people and places described in Homer's epic poems actually had once existed. In 1871 he began excavations at a site near the coast of northwestern Turkey called Hisarlik. Thinking Troy would be at the bottom of a multi-layered site, he rapidly dug through the earlier levels with none of the excavation techniques of modern archaeology. Later dates run on the site indicated that Hisarlik was too recent to be Troy, but modern excavation at the site has indicated a vast walled city in even lower levels, one that may have held as many as 10,000 people. This city was destroyed around 1200 BC, the same time as the Trojan Wars of Homer. Most archaeologists now think Schliemann really did find Troy. ( Click here for more information on Mycenae; be sure to click on the slide show for five additional examples of artifacts.)
In 1875, Schliemann began excavations at Mycenae, again using dismal archaeological techniques, but again discovering the Mycenae had been an actual early and militaristic state, much as Homeric stories described it.
The "Lion Gate" at the citadel of Mycenae,ca. 1350; Mycenaean Gold cup from tomb [From The Epic of Man, p. 152 and 151]
The Mycenaeans, though like their neighboring states based upon intensive agriculture, were also very active in trade throughout the Mediterranean. Mycenaean pottery has been found from Egypt around the Mediterranean coast all the way to Italy. For a while they monopolized the trade from copper and tin in Turkey, and kept their records in an early form of written Greek called linear B. They were excellent architects, and buried their dead with elaborate gold artifacts and bronze weapons. Ultimately, a combination of earthquakes and invasions may have destroyed the state; the city of Mycenae was sacked and abandoned in 1125 BC. An invasion of militant chiefdoms (often called the Doric invasion), probably from the northern part of Greece and Macedonia, brought Greece into a brief "dark ages", and ultimately gave rise to classical Greece, usually dated from 1100 BC to the conquest of Greece by the Romans in 146 BC.
Mycenaean cities, including Knossos (Cnossos) on Crete (see text p. 532 for bigger map!)