In Search Of The Trojan War by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 2016-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

A PREHISTORIC ARMS RACE?

What was the relation between Mycenae and the other palaces? Historians have been perplexed by the presence of several great fortresses in the same area, as in the plain of Argos. Were Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos and Midea under the same king or independent rulers? Why were such massive fortifications built so close to each other? It seems hard to believe they were wholly independent of each other in such a small area. We must remember that these were unsettled times, constantly threatened by outside attack, and prime agricultural land with its dense population would need a string of fortresses to protect it; Mycenae, so far from the sea, could hardly do that. The rulers of the Argolid may have had royal residences in each place, perhaps lived in by members of the royal family, kings’ brothers, sons and royal mothers, as, say, in the Saudi royal family today. It is even possible that, as now, the different places had separate functions: Tiryns the port, Argos the main market of the plain, Nauplion the posh seaside town and so on. But with its large population and its elaborate drainage system – revealed by recent discovery of a dam near Tiryns – the plain needed to be heavily defended.

It would appear, then, that mainland Greece was divided between a number of powerful ‘city states’ – larger than later classical ones – which might dominate their lesser neighbours and which might acknowledge the leadership of the most powerful in time of war. Much of their military technology may have been intended as defence against each other. In central Greece legend says that Thebes and Orchomenos were deadly enemies, and we know now that Orchomenos defended itself and its elaborate drainage works at Lake Copais by a string of forts and watchtowers around the lake and along the border with Thebes, centring on the huge fort at Gla. Thebes too had a number of fortified towns, including Eutresis whose walls were hardly less extensive than those at Gla. Had the Mycenaean world perhaps broken up into mutally hostile groups by around 1300 BC, with Thebes and Orchomenos contending in central Greece, and Mycenae the leader in the Peloponnese? Certainly we can see from the Argolid and the Copais defences that warfare was of a rather sophisticated kind, on a level recalling city-state warfare in the Near East, with material prosperity and technological skill which allowed numerous massive and elaborate fortifications to be erected in a very brief span of time. In this kind of society it was presumably easy enough to reallocate the mass of the work-force to this work outside the sowing and harvest seasons, though we do not know how compliant they were (did this massive arms race – with its conspicuous expenditure – play its part in the subsequent collapse, one wonders?).

But if the period of the Mycenaean heyday was characterised by frequent internecine warfare, it was nevertheless one of common culture and political ideas. When we think

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