Dan Snow's History Hit - The Mycenaean World

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Before 1200 BC, the ancient world was more connected than you'd ever imagine. Egyptian pharaohs, Hittite emperors and Mycenaean warrior-kings trading gifts, forging alliances and going to war across the glittering Mediterranean. Then, in just a few decades, it all collapsed...Professor Eric Cline joins us to unravel this lost Bronze Age world: the real diplomacy behind Homer's epics, the letters that rewrote history, and the catastrophes that erased Mycenaean civilisation.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Hi folks, you're listening to Dan Snow's history hit. It was a world built on the sea. Merchardships carrying copper, gold, ivory, olive oil, textiles, across hundreds of miles of sparkling ocean. Kings exchanged lavish gifts and assurances of eternal friendship one year and sailed to war the next. Fishermen cast their nets.

Pirates prowled the coastlines. Cities grew on international trade. The fate of entire kingdoms could rest on a particular ship, making it safely into harbour. This is the world of 1200 BC, the closing years of the Bronze Age. Another name for it is the Mycenaean Age, and it's in that period that we believe the Odyssey takes place. Stretching across the eastern Mediterranean was a network of powerful civilizations, unlike anything Europe would see again for centuries. The Egyptians that ruled the Nile Valley.

The Hittite Empire dominating Anatolia. The kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece controlling the Greek archipelago and mainland, while wealthy trading ports like Ugarit connected east to west and beyond that inland where Babylon and Assyria competed for power in Mesopotamia. It's in this world that the Odyssey is set, a time of voyages, of peril and prizes, unknown lands, peoples, dangers, mighty empires, exotic discoveries and wealth. But I love studying this period for reasons that extend far beyond the Odyssey, because this was a time when everything came to a sudden end.

This glittering golden age of Mediterranean trade, collapse. and we're still trying to explain why. Today I'm joined by Professor Eric Klein, leading experts on the Mycenaean world. His new book, Love, Diplomacy and War, explores this remarkable period of history through one of its most extraordinary surviving sources. We're very lucky to have it. The correspondence exchanged between the great kings of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, and Cyprus. Can you believe we still have these documents?

These extraordinary letters that offer a rare glimpse into the late Bronze Age world and its alliances, rivalries, trade and politics. This is the final episode in our series explaining everything. You need to know about the Odyssey and its world. Eric, great to see. Thanks to coming back on the pod. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back. Do you know the one thing that I regret most about my early days of historical awareness and research

is thinking about Egypt and Greece and the ancient Near East in these little sort of, silos. And what work like yours does is just remind me that, of course, these places are next door to each other. They are sharing. This is why there's an explosion of activity in this part of North Africa and Eurasia. It's all happening, partly because of collaboration and competition. Yeah, collaboration and competition, good way to put it. It's a tightly interconnected world back then. I mean, we're talking 1,500 BC down to about 1,200 BC. So, late Bronze Age, is that what we can call the late Bronze Age, right? Absolutely. Late Bronze Age, yes, across the Mediterranean, everybody's talking to everybody else. And is that because of the geography, the technology? I mean, you can obviously travel on land between, as we know,

Ramesses does, for example. He travels up into what's now Syria. But also with the Greek world, it's pretty easy. Is it to go Crete into the Nile Delta and back again? And we can trace that. Definitely. You can definitely sail counterclockwise around the Mediterranean, no problem. Like you said, Greece, down to Crete,

down to Egypt and then up around the Levant and then to what's now Turkey. Yeah, and upon occasion you could go the other way as well. But you can also, if you're over in the Eastern Mediterranean, of course you can go by land to get from Egypt to Mesopotamia and the Hittites and all that. So it's a tightly interconnected, I would say, globalized Mediterranean world. I kind of like that globalized Mediterranean for its time. I was in Crete once in the museum and I saw the images of Egypt on some of the paintings that are so extraordinary.

So we've got maritime trade, because the thing about those mariners is they don't stop, do they, Eric. I mean, that's one thing we need. Call them smugglers, call them pirates, raiders, whatever you're like, they will move stuff around and sell it, won't they in these ships?

They will, and sometimes they had dual roles. You can be a merchant and a pirate at the same time. An explorer, and who knows what else? Now, what about elite diplomacy? Because this is something I'm so interested in your work. There are these letters and requests and marriage alliances across reasonably different types of states, aren't it? Yeah, they are. So we've got a number of archives from back then, including a famous one, the Amarna Archive, which was found back in 1887, dates to the middle of the 14th century BC, high point to the Mycenaeans, but also high point of the Egyptian New Kingdom period. And in this archive, which were the royal letters of Akhenaten, the heretic Pharaoh, and his father, Abanhotep III.

So the 18th dynasty, so peak New Kingdom each. Okay, these guys are ballers. Okay, fine. Yes, you don't get more peak. that. And they're writing back and forth to the other great kings, the king of Assyria, king of Babylonia, king of the Hittites. And yeah, there's marriage negotiations, there's alliances, there's pleas from the others for the Egyptians to send gold. I mean, we've got all kinds of diplomatic things going on back then. Embassies, embargoes, you name it. I mean, it's really similar to us today, more similar than you might expect. And so it's not all Ramesses taking on the Hittites or taking on the people of Kadesh and, you know, fighting.

Sometimes you're saying these Egyptian ferries actually saw quite a lot of kinship with rulers of these other states. There was a sort of international elite almost. Yeah, actually, I called them the G8 of the ancient world. Absolutely. So, and yeah, sometimes they're fighting, absolutely. But other times they are in diplomatic negotiations. So the Hittites and the Egyptians are a very good example, right?

You've got the Battle of Kadesh, like you mentioned. but you've also got eventually a peace treaty, like the world's first peace treaty. I think there's a part of it in the United Nations. So, again, it's very similar to today. And where do the Mycenaeans fit into all of this? Are they across Greece at this point? Do they just in Mycenae? What's going on with these guys?

So the Misenians are on the Greek mainland, right? You've got the Minoans on Crete, but you've got the Misenians on the mainland. They both are on the periphery of the world that we've just described. So we've got mentions by the Egyptians of the Misenians. They knew them as Tanayah. That was their name for mainland Greece. They knew the Manoans as the Kephtiou. And we've also got the Hittites mentioning the Misenians.

They're probably Akiyawa. But we don't have, like any evidence of kings marrying daughters or princesses from the other area. We don't have that for the Misenians. So while they're in the commercial orbit and probably also, diplomatic to a certain extent. They don't seem to be in the middle of the rest of them, as you might imagine. But then again, Greece is out on the edge, if you look at a map. Perhaps a little bit uncivilized. They're out there on the frontier between what lies beyond,

like the Italians beyond. I mean, God, knows what's going on with those guys. Yes, but the Mycenaeans themselves, they're in control of the whole Greek mainland. We've got a whole series of kingdoms or city-states, if you will. Okay, so city-states that share a culture, a language, religions? Yes, absolutely. Culture, language, religion, absolutely. In fact, a lot of the later Greek gods and goddesses, Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Athena, they're already around in the Mycenaean period. We know this because we're able to read their writing. It's very early type of Greek. We call it linear B, but it is very early Greek, deciphered by Michael Ventress back in 1952. And we can find out a lot about the Mycenaean culture at that time. Now, we've got different city-state kingdoms, if you will. You've got the famous ones, Mycenae, Tyran's, Pylos, and so on. Each of them has their own king, which we know from the linear B tablets. He's called a Wanaks. Each of those Wanaks or Wanakai has a warrior cast beneath them. And then below that,

you've got your normal people. Below that, you've got your peasants. We can figure out the social classes back then. And we can also figure out exactly what's going on in the the palaces. Simply put, they're in charge of everything. Taxes, economy, administration, when the capital cities, when the king, when the palace is doing well, everybody's doing well. When they fall, the whole thing collapses. Right. And this is the world that gives us, we think, the Iliad and the honesty. Yes, we think. That's a good way to put it. Homer's writing a couple of centuries later, or rather Homer's pulling everything together a couple of centuries later, but he seems to be describing kind of a combination of his own period, but with

memories of the Bronze Age. So he does mention things that were not around in his time period, but our Bronze Age. And one of these things, as you've already mentioned it, but there's a centrality of that palace and the king. If people familiar with Greek history, we're thinking, you know, we talk about democracies and oligarchies and despotisms, and that's all much later on. This is, in some ways, I suppose, more familiar. There is a charismatic war leader. There is a guy with a crown on his head, basically. Right. I mean, think Agamemnon. That's basically what it is. Think Melaleus, right?

So that's what we're talking about. Charismatic king. I mean, Agamemnon is described as the king of kings. And so he would have been in charge. You want a flotilla and armada. You got to go up to Agamemnon and ask for this. So whether or not he existed, somebody like him existed. And you think probably he held sway. So when he, we think about impires differently now, don't we?

but if he requested troops from his allied city states, they would probably say, how many do you need, sir? Yes, exactly. Yes, sir, they would jump. Yes, exactly. Right. Well, it wasn't always clear that the others understood this, and by the others, I mean the other powers.

Like when the Hittites talk about Akiyawa, we're not sure if they just mean Misenai, or if they mean thieves, or if they mean the whole of the Greek mainland. And they don't seem to have been clear about it themselves either. So the Mycenians were this known, unknown, if you will, on the far edge of the world at that time. How interesting. And we're talking warfare, very prominent. You think about Tyrians in particular, which I've been to and Miceini, massive walls. I mean, astonishing fortifications.

And are those for show, or do the thing that tells us this is a pretty warlike society? Those are not for show. Those are fully functional. Mycenae, Tyrans, Pylos, they're all heavily fortified. We've got the lion gate at my C&I, for example. Most of them fit the same kind of a pattern. And I tell my students, for example, if you're running up to capture one of the cities,

you've got your shield on your left hand, because it didn't matter if you're left or right-handed, you've got your shield on your left hand. You're protected from the guys on the wall above you on your left. You're not protected from the guys on the tower to your right, and you're going to be dead before you even make it through the lion gate. So they plan these fortifications at these cities, extremely well. And at some of them, they even had their water supply inside the town, the big

tunnel going down and out to the spring. So it is definitely a warrior society. And a lot of the tablets, the linear B tablets that we've got, are actually economic. They're documenting what came into the palace and what went out. Chariot wheels, bronze, things like that. But we also have the stories that Homer tells us, like the hospitality for strange. Right? That was a big thing in the Illyid and the Odyssey, and it seems to have been something they practiced back then. So invite the stranger in, feed him, and then ask who he is, that kind of thing. Okay, but Eric, just because you brought that up, I'd like to have a little tiny detoy. I've always wondered what that means, because Odysseus is always being invited in.

Five minutes later, he's eating with the princess and the king. Do you think they would have been able to recognize other members of the elite? So we're saying strangers and travelers, do we mean by that that? that when a shepherd's straggling along the road, the king's not going to get him in and give him a good meal at his table. I mean, how do you think deep down that culture of hospitality really works? Well, it's an excellent question because honestly, we don't know. We don't have the records telling us about that. But we do have adjacent things.

For example, we've got a lot of gift giving, especially in the Near East, those letters at Amarna and Egypt that I mentioned, the kings, when they're writing back and forth, they are always saying, with my message, I am saying, sending a gift, here it is, three chariots, five people, this, that, and the other. And that whole idea of gift giving goes, I think, along with the idea of friendship to strangers and all of that. It does make sense in a way to me. And could you tell the elite from a regular person? I think, of course, for one thing, they would have an entourage with them and all of that. But, you know, to be honest, it is guesswork, because at least from the Mycenaean records, their tablets are not talking about that. They're strictly accounting and all that.

So it is a little bit, as I say, of guesswork there. Is there an element of which to travel, to voyage, to knock on the door of Tirins and then the next city? Are you laying claim to being some kind of important and interesting an elite person just simply by doing that? You're not going to get just random tillers of the soil maybe doing that. And so perhaps the kings felt they could let these interesting folk in to hear what they'd say. Maybe, maybe. I definitely think you're not going to get your average tiller of the soil traipsing around. Right. What you're going to have, though, rather than the kings, unless they're going fighting, you're going to have their emissaries, you're going to have the merchants,

you're going to have the diplomats going from one place to another, from Mycenae to Tyrans, Mycenae to Pylos. And we do see things in the linear B tablets where they're talking about shipments from other kingdoms, basically, within the Mycenaean world. And all of those kind of people are sources of fantastic essential intelligence, right? You want to hear bits of gossip about who's in and who's out, not just in Tirens, but, you know, dare I even ask it in Crete and beyond. So actually, maybe it is in your interest to invite these people in, give them a drink, hear what they've seen and heard on their travels. Yeah, I think so. That's how you would spread the news back then.

They didn't have the internet or texts, you know, and phones and all that. So for sure. We also, we have, for instance, there's one wall painting from Pylos. down in south of mainland Greece, where we can actually see a bard singing with his harp or lyre, and that may have been another way to spread the news as well, with these kind of traveling bards, is probably better than traveling minstrels, but something like that. So, yes, spreading the news that way, but the merchants and the diplomats would have carried the news as well as the messages. And we talk about their endemic warfare. Do you think this is a time

when actually alliances and subservience would have to be earned and might be quite short-lived. I mean, do you think that if the charismatic king warrior dies or is injured or declines, it wouldn't necessarily pass to his son? There wouldn't be an orderly succession of obedience to his son. I mean, another city-state may emerge and become hegemonic. Yeah, that's always the possibility. I mean, we see that in later Greece, so it may have been the case here as well. We do get some idea that there might be some dynastic succession.

And, I mean, we've got Telemachus and Odysseus and all of that. But again, we don't have a record of that in the linearie tablets. It doesn't say that. It's not that it couldn't have happened. It's just that they don't mention it. But we do have that kind of thing over in the Near East. We do have dynastic succession for the Hittites, for the Egyptians, for the Assyrians, for the Babylonians. So I would imagine it would be something similar for the Mycenaians as well if they're on a parallel track.

just before we leave mycenae behind and talk about that wider world a little bit more, is it possible to characterize what these other states thought of the Misceneans? I mean, they were obviously regarded as a little bit on the edge, a little bit fringy. You don't want to marry your daughter off to one of them, but were they seen, you know, did they drink too much? Were they particularly violent? You know, is there anything that you can say kind of characterizes these Miscanians in the eyes of the Egyptians and others? No.

They don't mention anything like that. What we do get are things like wall paintings and the tombs of the nobles and Egypt, where they're showing a diplomatic embassy bringing gifts to the pharaoh. That's about it. Yeah. You're listening to Dan Snow's history here. There's more to come. So the place they ought to inhabit, they should be subservant. They should be bringing gifts. They should be. They should be, yes. I would think in the grand scheme of things, they were a power, but not a great power. I mean, at this time, the Egyptians and the Hittites are the two great powers in the area. Assyrians and Babylonians behind them, Mycenaans and Minoans, yeah, they're going to be on the periphery, but, you know, they're dangerous.

You've got to watch out. If there's any truth to the Trojan War, you can see the Misenians have a bite. Yep, they can project force overseas. Let's talk about New Kingdom Egypt and the Hittite Empire, because you write so blue about these. New Kingdom Egypt, I mean, again, these lines on the map didn't mean quite what they do now. But one of the sort of bounds of this kingdom that the boy King Tutankham may have ruled over or attempted to, but certainly some of his predecessors, certainly Horam, had one of his successes. Bramesey's the second and his father, Setti, tried to rebuild.

You know, what are we talking about? Down to the cataracts, the Nile, as far as Khartoum today, or not quite that far into Sudan? I wouldn't go quite that far, but certainly down to Aswan, if you will. And of course, you've got all this new kingdom, all the rulers are in what is now Luxor, Karnak, right? The old kingdom was up in Giza. Now the new kingdom is down in Thieves and Luxor in Upper Egypt. So the Mycenaans, no one's, they're in touch with these guys. I mean, this is the high point of the New Kingdom period in Egypt. It's really, it's the golden age. Yeah, King Tut is emblematic of it, but everybody else, you go back to Hatsepsut, and then Tupmosis III, come through Akhenaten. And in fact, if I can bring up Ammanhotep III again, middle of the 14th

century, and he mentions the Aegean. There's one. One statue-based list, which we call the Aegean list now, on which Amunhotep III lists Mycenae, Knoissos, and other places, and actually calls them Tanaya and Kephtiou, mainland Greece, and Crete. It's quite obvious that Amunhotep III knew about the Mycenaeans and the Minoans, and whether that list on the statue base is a geographical itinerary, which I kind of think it is, at the very least, you know there are connections. And in fact, at Mycenae itself, there are some phaiance plaques. This is halfway between clay and glass. And on those plaques, there's about

10 of them, is the name Ammanhotep III, both on front and back. They are not found anywhere else outside of Egypt, except at Mycenae. So there must have been connections of some sort during that mid-14th century, which means Amundhotep III and Akhenaten would have known about the Misenans. Well, would they have heard the story of Troy? Who knows? That's amazing. Was Troy sung of in the court at Thebes?

We don't know for the moment. That's amazing. Okay, so then we got the Hittite. We go up through Sinai into what is today Israel, Palestine, Syria. Where do the Hittites, who are roughly speaking in Turkey? Are they in Anatolia? This is the question that Ramesi spent a career trying to answer. where's the fault line between the Egyptians and the Hittites?

Excellent question. So the Hittites are up in central Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. They actually captured the whole thing. They go all the way out to the west coast, to Troy, which we'll get to. But they also come down to the south, the southeast, if you will, down into what is today northern Syria, and even further down into, well, almost down to Lebanon, I would say. The fault line, as you put it, between the Egyptians and the Hittites would have been at about the city of Kadesh. And in fact, that's why they fight their famous battle there in about 1279 BC

for control of the Levant. Egyptians want to push north of Kadesh. Hittites want to push south of Kadesh. Fight a major battle. It's a draw. And since it's a draw, they both claim they won, when in fact neither one did. So we've got, as I mentioned, the Hittites and the Egyptians are the two greatest powers at that time. And they are, duking the out for control of Canaan at that time. So, and eventually they signed a peace treaty. The Egyptian pharaoh seems to marry one of the Hittite princesses. We may even have the Hittite king come on a visit to Egypt at that time. Yeah. So this is the world that we find the Misenians involved in, and perhaps the Trojan War as well. If it takes place in about the 13th century BC,

we're going to have Troy, where it is now on the western coast of Anatolia, it's on the periphery of both the Mycenaean world and the Hittite Empire. It's what I call it contested periphery. So it's a little bit like the Qadash of the Aegean, right? So it's this city that sits, unfortunately, for it, in between these two great empires. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to put it. Yes. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if the story of the Trojan War, in actuality,

if we were able to go back and look at it, if it weren't actually a war between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites. And it just happens to be held at Troy, and Troy is kind of collateral damage, if you will. So I think there's a bigger picture here, and we actually do have evidence, textual evidence, from the Hittites,

that the Misenians were fighting on the western coast of Anatolia all the way back in the 15th century BC. So one might think, in terms of Ili and the island, if the story of the Trojan War is not a telescoping of two or three hundred years of fighting in that region that Homer and the other epic poets managed to distill down into one epic tale. So we've definitely got the Misenans around and in a warlike posture, I would add, on that

Western coast. And I think that's how they're interacting with the Hittites, because most of the mentions of Ahiawa, as the Hittites called the Miscanians, are in a militarized context. Yeah, I love that idea of telescoping. It's not quite the same, but I imagine Shakespeare, he writes Henry V. He's basically sort of writing about the way that the English tend to fight the French

in that part of the world. And it's sort of, there's a sense of that there as well. So if that is true, that was part of this. At times, there could have been this exchange of gifts, as you've pointed out, this is a kind of interconnected world, but at times that breaks down and there will be violence. And then perhaps some sort of peace settlement. there would be an agreement afterwards marriage alliances made and tribute swapped around,

depending, I suppose, on the outcomes on the battlefield. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, if we look at the archaeology of Troy, we can see the Mycenaeans are happily trading with the Trojans before the so-called war breaks out. We've got imported Mycenaean pottery in the earlier levels at Troy. But we've also, again, have the Hittite records. The Hittites knew Troy as Willusa, and they document peace treaties that they, They signed with the rulers of Willusa, including one guy named Alexandu of Willusa. And Alexander of Willusa sounds a lot like Alexander Villios, which is the other name for Paris and Troy.

In fact, in the Hittites record four of these battles and treaties and such. And I think two of them, they talked about the rule of Troy having been overthrown by another power and that the Hittites have put him back on, have reinstalled him. So I do wonder, I mean, I think there is a nucleus of truth at the basis of everything that we're told by Homer. And I think he is reflecting some memories. And so I'm wondering if one of those mentions by the Hittites is also the one that Homer talks about.

So in my mind, it's not was there a Georgia War. It's which one of the ones the Hittites mention is the one that Homer is mentioning? And when you're reading Homer, what are the bits as a historian really speak to you? We talked about the hospitality. We've talked about seafaring. I think it, from what you're saying, the idea of this kind of coalition building is very interesting. Agamemnon and Menelaus, they kind of reach out. Odysseus doesn't really want to go. They kind of half-strong army. So the idea of what Meissenian power meant at the time, yes, they're city-states.

Yes, they have all these little kinglets, but it's clear that there's one king, that there's a sort of supreme king who most of them have to kind of do what they say. although that gives them all sorts of wonderful friction, like Achilles falls out with Agamemnon. As I say, Odysseus doesn't want to join in. So does that feel quite real to you? Yes, it does. But as a historian, I want to figure out

if it's real to that period or if it's more real to Homer's period because he's living in the Iron Age. So as a historian, I want to go in and kind of dissect it, and I'm looking for things that could be true Bronze Age versus later Iron Age. So I'll give you just like, One example, it gets really nitpicky.

Like, how many spokes are there in a chariot wheel? Yeah. Right. Are there six spokes? Are there four spokes? Are there two spokes? How did you make a Boers Tuskelemut? Well, Homer might have seen one, but they weren't being worn in his day.

And yet Homer describes a Boers Tus helmet absolutely accurately. So things like this, including the shields that they were using, and an Achilles shield, the way it's described, is that actually Bronze Age? Is it Iron Age? And then, of course, you've got the famous catalog of ships, right, which you're referring to. When Agamemnon says, jump, everybody says,

sure, and how many ships do you want? There is in Book 2 of the Iliad a catalog of ships where it says, Agamemnon brought this many ships, and Mennelais brought this many ships. And that seems to be a true memory of the Bronze Age that was handed down orally. So as a historian, I go in and try and dissect what Homer is saying. And yes, we can believe this.

Now this is probably epic poetry. And I try and fish out the nuggets that we can use. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. Which other nuggets have really come to your attention? I mean, I suppose the interplay of violence, acquisition, and then also kind of marriage, if we want to call it marriage,

or sexual slavery, whatever it might be. But it's this landing on a foreign shore, taking goods, cattle, the things are described in very bold terms, and then women, and then how sometimes those women can forge subsequent alliances. I mean, that feels very interesting to me. Yeah, absolutely, and to me as well. And it rings true. We've got in the linear B-text, like at Pylos,

we have mentions of women from Asia Minor who are now slaves, and they must have been captured in raids or battles or small wars. wars or whatever, much like the Trojan War. The other things, though, that kind of ring true to me, even they're a bit fantastical, is when Homer talks about the stories of various people traveling in foreign areas or objects that came from foreign areas. I mean, he mentions a mixing bull from the King of Sidon that makes its way back to Greece. That's totally plausible. And somebody like Odysseus trying to get home landing in a place like Egypt and spending some time. time there. That also is certainly within the realm of plausibility, if you will. It is, of course,

extremely difficult, if not impossible, to try to trace his actual voyage. You can't do that, but, but. Eric, I'm sure you know, but there's a whole industry. It seems to be retired, rather cheerful British officers who've left the army and go and retire to Greece and they travel around looking for all sorts of possible sites. Yeah, nice project in retirement, yes. interesting is that Homer's describing this Bronze Age world, all the things we've just talked about, there is then some kind of cataclysm, and Homer's writing after that, so there's a veil of tears which Homer in a way is looking at this period, and we call it the Bronze Age collapse. Around 1,200, this sort of community of nations, this globalized order collapsed.

I'm feeling, hang on, I'm feeling a bit stressed talking about this at the moment, but this kind of international order, which was far from perfect, but this international order seems to quite dramatically, something happens to it. Absolutely. What had been going along, I mean, going along merrily, if you will, they were happy for 500 years, give or take. The usual problems, but whatever. But yes, just after 1,200 BC, everything collapses just within a couple of decades. Basically, that international network that we've been describing, that collapses. And everybody is split asunder, if you will. There is probably supply chain shortages. You can't get 10 anymore. Hard to get copper. that kind of thing. But you've also got a series of natural catastrophes. You've got it looks like drought, you've got famine, you've got earthquakes, we have some textual evidence of disease. I mean, basically everything that could go wrong did go wrong pretty much simultaneously. So the whole thing collapses and they have to rebuild. Grease goes back to almost ground zero. But, you know,

you mentioned a veil of tears and a curtain and such. I frequently call it in my lectures now a porous membrane. Some things made it through. Some things got through, but most did not. The names of the gods and goddesses, yes, those got through. But the Wannox, the King, there's no Wannocks in the Iron Age. There's no Wannocks in Homer's time. It's now Basileus. Name for King is Bacelais in his time. There was a Bacelais. There were a bunch of them back in the Bronze Age, but they were much lower officials. They were below the Wannocks. So, you know, so some things make it through, and some things don't. But Greece, Greece takes until the early 8th century just before the time of Homer to get back up to where it had been at the time of the Mycenaeans. I mean, there was a

huge population decline, maybe as much as 60%. We think there's something like 600,000 Misenians on the Greek mainland, or Misenians and Mnouins in like the 13th century. By the 11th century, they're down to 300,000. They've lost over half their population. So it was not a good time. And do you think Greece suffers worse than, I mean, Egypt has its time of troubles? But do you think that Greece is an outlier, even in the troubles that afflicted this entire globalized Mediterranean system? Yeah, I do.

Much to my own chagrin when I listed how well everyone did in the aftermath. Well, after 1177, I've got the Mycenaeans and No one's down in category four. out of five. They did almost worse than everyone else. Only the Hittites did worse, basically. But the problem, it turns out, we think now there's a lot of new work going on. Joseph Moran, the excavator at Tirans, for example, thinks that the Mycenaeans were much more fragile and vulnerable than they appear, even to outsiders, and that they may have overextended during the good periods, like in the 14th and into the 13th centuries. And when the drought hit, they weren't ready.

And they had over-exploited the peasants in doing things like building the lion gate at Mycenae and draining the Coppaeus basin. So it may be that the Mycelians were not as all-fired powerful as they appeared to others. Kind of like a wizard of Oz effect, if you will. But he also says, and others as well, Martin Finlay and Erica Viberg from Uppsala, they have suggested that the over-exploited peasants in the Misenaian hinterland, if you will, they might have actually rejoiced when the palaces fell. They're like, oh, finally, that we can have some peace.

So, yes, I do think the Misenans did worse than almost everyone else at the time. But the question is why, and that's what we're still trying to figure out, which is a really interesting question. And you mentioned Hittites, well, they disappeared. And I wonder now that you say that, I wonder if that's one. they're sort of not mentioned in Homer because they've disappeared as a political entity about the time Homer's writing. So this Meissenian-Hittite war, Homer's not going to be quite as familiar with the former political structure, you know, centuries-old political structures in what is now, you know,

Asia Minor Turkey. So maybe that's why they don't get the part they deserve in Homer. I don't know, just thinking. Yeah. No, you're quite right. Absolutely. I mean, the Hittites are basically not mentioned by Homer. You know, why not?

So, yeah, it's because they're completely gone by the time he's. living. We do have the Neo-Hittites that do survive the remnants in North Syria, and they keep going for a couple of hundred years. It is those Hittites, the Neo-Hittites, that I think the Bible mentions, because the Bible doesn't know the actual Hittites either, but they do know the remnants that survived, the scrappy ones, up in what is now North Syria. So there's a lot of interest in parallels between Homer and the Bible in terms of oral transmission, which is eventually written down and so on. But the lack of knowledge of Hittites in both of them is another parallel. We're all talking about Homer this year. We're all interested in Homer. As more discoveries

are made, as archaeologists and scientists push back the frontier of what we know, on the whole, does it make Homer more or less fascinating as a source? I mean, do you think now, oh, geez, a lot of that is just fantasy. Or is it a bit of both? Or do we think, wow, this was more in this than we thought initially? I'm on the side of, wow, this is great. Yeah, everything that we find, it brings Homer to life and Homer brings that period to life. So we have so few sources from that time period. I mean, as I mentioned, even the linear B tablets, they're just straight economic accounting tablets. We don't have epics and stories and poems from the late Bronze Age in Greece. We have them elsewhere, but not from Greece. So Homer and then he see it, I mean, welcome to the party, gentlemen,

and thanks for bringing your gifts. So, yeah, for me, Homer used very carefully, I will stress that, using Homer carefully, he does add light and life to this whole period. And in turn, your archaeological colleagues are adding stone and bone and pottery and earthenware and gold to the stories in Homer. Yeah, absolutely, putting flesh on the bones, if you will. Yes, between the two of them. We're developing a full picture. Well, Eric, and then you're encapsulating that whole picture in your wonderful book, so thank you for those. Tell us what the latest one is called. The one that just came out is on the Amarna letters that we've mentioned. It's called Love, War, and Diplomacy, the discovery of the Amarna letters and what they told us about the Bronze Age world, something like that.

Just quickly on that, they were discovered around about the late 19th century. Did people know at the time what an astonishing resource they were? They did not know because when they were found in 1887, there was a big race, a race to decipher them. Acadian and Cuneiform had only been deciphered 30 years earlier. So that's what I do in half of the book is talking about the race to decipher. There were two British scholars, well-known, Archibald Henry Seiss and his seriologist. He was at Oxford. and the famous Wallace Budge, the infamous Egyptologist at the British Museum, and the two of them

were part of the race to translate, along with five young German scholars who I dubbed the young Berliners and the whole race to translate. I think it's as interesting as the race to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on, and they did not realize before they translated them the world of the late Bronze Age at that time. And in fact, Seis, Seis said that besides the Hebrew Bible, the Amarna letters are the most important source we've got textually for the late Bronze Age. So it was a real revelation. It rewrote history as we knew it. And it was only what, 140, 150 years ago. And just why were they preserved? Was it a rubbish tip they'd been thrown out? Or was it part of

the archive, as we have other parts of the ancient Near East? The archive had just sort of collapsed. The library had collapsed for every reason. And they were just there ever since then. They seem to have been left behind because they're in Akanaten's capital city, which he built and only inhabited for 10, 20 years. When Akanaten died in about 1330 BC and King Tut moved the capital back down to Luxor and Karnak, they left behind this archive. The thinking is that what they left behind is the closed cases. Oh, this is done.

We don't need it anymore. and they only moved the correspondence that was still open, if you will. So, no, they're not burnt or anything like that, which is really unusual. But given the Klamin in Egypt, they're just preserved. Wonderful. Makes you think what else we may find to shed light on these periods. It's so exciting. Eric, thank you so much, as ever, for coming on the podcast.

Oh, always a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you so much to Eric. And actually, to all the guests who joined me on this series, explain the Odyssey and the world that it springs from. It's just, it's been such a pleasure. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll do more of these series, explaining the history behind the big movies. Just say the word. But the content never stops. Certains are the top here. No, no, don't you worry?

As we're heading to Deep Summer. Later this week, we're kicking off a new season on shows that we've recorded all over the world. So we've got the history of the Great Wall of China, medieval Krakoff, from one end of the Silk Road to the other. The Siege of Malta, and much more as well. So whether you're travelling or in need of a little escapism, this podcast has got you covered, folks. And we're starting, well, we've been quite literal where most journeys begin. We're starting at the airport with a short history of why those strange and important places are the way that they are.

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