The New Kingdom has just begun in Egypt the Hyksos have been gone for around 100 years, as well. To finish setting the scene, though, the Minoans have disappeared, and by 1350 BCE, the Mycenaeans are the big naval force in the Mediterranean. It will be a much larger focus of our discussion in the future, when the Phoenician people rise to preeminence, but I wanted to talk about Byblos before we move on to the Mycenaeans because it is so central to everything that happens during the Bronze Age collapse, and because it factors heavily in some letters that are our focus today. A particular city in the group was Byblos, the famed city that is among the oldest of cities on earth. Thutmose III had used naval forces in conjunction with Egypt’s armies to conquer much of Syria and the Levant, including some of the coastal cities that we’ll discuss today. We are roughly 100 years removed from the reign of Thutmose III, a pharaoh you may remember from our discussions of Egypt. Depending on the chronology to which you ascribe, either Ahmenhotep III or his son, Akhenaten, is the pharaoh. To set the scene, here are a few realities from 1350 BCE. This map shows the major groups mentioned throughout the Amarna Letters the kingdom of Alasiya and Retenu (Canaan) are the major players from the letters we discussed. We’ve reached this point already in our looks at Egypt and Mesopotamia, so I trust that all this jumping around isn’t too disorienting. We can explore the nuance more fully next time, by looking to archaeological evidence from the Mycenaean period, but for today I want to fast forward to around 1350 BCE. Generalizations, indeed these are, but I think they will suffice for now. Yes, the Mycenaeans traded with many of the same civilizations that the Minoans had traded with, but as a very broad observation, it seems that the Mycenaeans were more war-minded and less commercially attuned than the Minoans had been. It’s reasonable to surmise that this is because the Mycenaeans weren’t nearly as worried about policing the sea routes as the Minoans had been. The true nutshell of what we’ll discuss more fully next time is that by the time the Mycenaeans had fully displaced the Minoans, piracy had arisen in the region. We can look to 1500 as the rough timeframe of the Mycenaean emergence as a true power in the region then, and it was at this point that they likely began to push out the Minoans. The first Mycenaean artifacts of note are the shaft graves at Mycenae itself, dated roughly to 1600 BCE, with the continuing use of these graves until 1500 BCE. Obviously, the shift from Minoan to Mycenaean was gradual. But, once the Minoans were weakened, round about 1500 BCE, the Mycenaeans moved in, taking over Crete and exerting their influence over the region the Minoans once occupied. Though it’s also doubtful that the Minoans possessed a naval force, especially a centrally-controlled navy like the modern navies we are familiar with, Thucydides called Minos the first king to establish a navy, using it to “put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.” Thalassocracy or no, it seems a likely thing that the Minoans did indeed put a damper on piracy in the Mediterranean, because before the Minoan decline, we have little historical mention of piracy in the region. The Minoans, though probably not a full-fledged thalassocracy as we’ve also seen, were ubiquitous on the Bronze Age Mediterranean, controlling trade routes around the Cyclades and making frequent contact with Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, and perhaps even west to the very Pillars of Heracles. A nutshell synopsis of their early influence is needed today, though, so here goes. We’ll likely talk about the Mycenaeans more next time, but almost all of the archaeological evidence from the Mycenaeans comes from around 1300 to 1100 BCE, so it makes sense to talk about that in its turn. As we’d discussed last time, the Thera eruption rocked the Bronze Age Mediterranean around 1628 BCE, but the Minoan Civilization wasn’t completely off the scene for another 150 years or so, at which time they were supplanted by their Mycenaean neighbors. Today we’re going to take a brief excursus, one that I hadn’t planned to take but that I think will be helpful and enlightening at this point in our discussion. Our last two episodes have looked at the so-called Minoan peoples and their heyday on the Mediterranean followed by their slow decline after the Thera eruption though, as we saw, the eruption wasn’t the sole cause of their decline, but was likely a contributing factor.
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