“Unraveling the Mysteries: What Sparked the Dawn of Ancient Greece?”
Like later Greeks, they spread out and founded settlements and trading outposts across the Mediterranean. We know they grew rich via trade by 1500 BCE and established themselves in the Aegean, spreading out across the Eastern Mediterranean and trading with the Hittites and Egyptians.
As previously alluded to, the Mycenaeans relied on trade to get Bronze as well, and they were masters at working the metal. They crafted fine weapons with them, funerary masks, and other luxury goods. They had an upper class and a lower class, and the wealth difference was high compared to the later dark age. The resources from trading went to the top and were spent on fineries like bronze works, and on building large defensive walls for the palaces. The chief or king was called a Wanax, and he ruled the main palaces while lesser chiefs ruled the sub palaces. The Wanax and the elites were also buried in vaulted tombs and with finery.
The Mycenaeans also adapted the Minoan Linear A script to produce what we call the Linear B script. The script’s Greek closely resembles the Arcado-Cypriot dialect of ancient Greek. It is a syllabic script, meaning it doesn’t record letters, but combinations of consonants with a vowel – think Chinese. Like Chinese, there are some pictographic symbols, but for the most part it is syllabic, with the syllables strung together to form words Greek speakers may be familiar with.
Don’t get excited just yet. If you thought that Linear B is a repository of Ancient Greek myths, poems, philosophy, or science, you and the scholars who cracked it would be very disappointed. Surprisingly, considering the Mycenean civilization was what Homer was trying to describe, Linear B tablets are almost all strictly business, mostly records; administrative and mercantile records of goods traded, catalogues, lists of animals and supplies, and very little else. They had numbers, units of measurement, and were very well organized, especially compared to Minoan Linear A.
