Aegean Bronze Age  

Aegean Bronze Age

The third and second millenium BCE in the Aegean witnessed the emergence and blossoming of the first European high cultures, most notably the Minoans and Mycenaeans.

3 comments | 3000BC - 1200BC

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Aegean Bronze Age

16 events | 3 comments | 3000BC - 1200BC

3000BC

Reaching the Bronze Age

 From around 9500 BCE, possibly the most important process in the history of mankind began in the Near East. People started gathering wild grain and eventually cultivating the fields, embracing agriculture that replaced the practices of hunting...

3000BC

1 comment

2700BC

Bronze Age society

 Thus, the adaption of agriculture and the civilizing effect that came with it had actually brought harder work, inequality and war to the Aegean region. Ambitious and clever men perhaps forced other to work for them and held communities together...

2700BC

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2600BC

Life in the Early Bronze Age

 Life at the settlement of Lerna, as well as in other centres of the Aegean region, was certainly faster paced, more sophisticated and more exciting than life in a small village. There would have been music, pomp and pageant and impressive...

2600BC

2 comments

2500BC

Cycladic civilization

 The pre-Greek population of the Aegean region included two groups of people who left behind evidence of remarkable cultural achievements. While we cannot be certain of the details regarding the extent and duration of the Greeks’ interaction with...

2500BC

1 comment

2400BC

Minoan civilization

 After about 2000 BCE, the Cyclades fell under the influence of a civilization that had developed on the island of Crete and that came to dominate the Aegean area generally. We refer to this new force in the Aegean world as the “Minoan”...

2400BC

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2300BC

Violent upheavals

 Around 2300 BCE, the House of Tiles burned to the ground, along with most major sites in mainland Greece. By 2200 BCE, figurines had disappeared from graves in the Cyclades and by 2000 BCE, settlement had contracted to just a few sites...

2300BC

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1900BC

The Middle Bronze Age

 In most accounts of the Aegean Bronze Age, the Proto-Greeks are assumed to have arrived in the south Balkan region during the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE. If the migration did take place, then the newcomers probably arrived in groups of...

1900BC

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1700BC

Social stratification on the mainland

 Between around 1750 and around 1700 BCE, as Minoan power reached its height, something strange was happening in the mainland Greek town of Mycenae. People carved into the rock a large stone-lined circle, 75 feet across, what we now call Grave...

1700BC

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1650BC

Emergence of the Mycenaeans

 Around 1650 BCE, while Grave Circle B was still in use, the Mycenaeans built a second monument, Grave Circle A (so called since it was discovered by archeologists before Grave Circle B), 150 meters uphill...

1650BC

2 comments

1600BC

Rise of Mycenaean Greece

 The civilization on mainland Greece in the Late Bronze Age – that approximately began in the 17th century BCE – is usually conventionally called Mycenaean after the site of Mycenae. There, the famous archeologist Heinrich Schliemann made his...

1600BC

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1500BC

Mycenaean government

 All over Greece, new men had seized power – probably brutal warlords, but connoisseurs of the best Minoan art, who understood the value of an organized bureaucracy in running their chiefdoms...

1500BC

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1450BC

Mycenaean conquest of Crete

 Around 1600 BCE, Mycenaean civilization was still in the shadow of the Minoans, but by 1400 BCE, Linear B, a Greek writing system was in use at Knossos. Mycenaean Greeks now sat in the throne room of the greatest Cretan palace...

1450BC

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1400BC

Mycenaean architecture

 By the mid-second millennium BCE, the Mycenaean Greeks dominated the Aegean. The mighty wanakes ruled from their individual palaces that looked very different from the Minoan ones: the Mycenaean settlements were on hilltops and heavily fortified...

1400BC

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1350BC

Mycenaean society

 Mycenaean society appears to have been divided into two groups of free men: the king's entourage, who conducted administrative duties at the palace; and the people (da-mo, later Greek demos) – craftsmen, farmers and others – who lived at commune...

1350BC

1 comment

1250BC

Mycenaean religion

 As far as we know there is a double stream of religious attention on the Greek mainland from the Middle Bronze Age onwards. The pattern is probably more complicated, but scholars generally agree that the Mycenaeans managed somehow to fuse the...

1250BC

1 comment

1200BC

End of the Mycenaean civiliazation

 It is reasonable to consider the time around 1200 BCE as the end of the Mycenaean civilization, but there is no way of knowing why the Mycenaean civilization came to an end. There is evidence of physical destruction of and fire at many of the...

1200BC

1 comment

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