Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username
Footnotes
See Cemal Pulak, “Shipwrecked! Recovering 3,000-Year-Old Cargo,” AO 02:04.
In the first half of the second millennium B.C.E., the Minoans on Crete invented a script, the as-yet undeciphered Linear A, to write their own language. When Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland conquered Crete, they adapted Linear A to record an ancient form of Greek; this script, called Linear B, was deciphered by the English architect Michael Ventris in the 1950s. Tablets inscribed with Linear B have been found on Crete and at Mycenaean sites on the Peloponnesus.
Endnotes
The destruction of the palace at Knossos has been dated c. 1400–1380 B.C.E. by Sir Arthur Evans. A review of the evidence from Knossos, however, makes it likely that the palace continued to exist under Mycenaean rule into the 13th century B.C.E.
For a survey of sites, see R. Hope Simpson and O.T.P.K. Dickinson, A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilization in the Bronze Age, Vol. 1: The Mainland and Islands (Göteborg: Âström, 1979); and Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 21–26.
See V.R. d’A. Desborough, “The End of the Mycenaean Civilization and the Dark Age: (a) The Archaeological Background,” in I.E.S. Edwards et al., eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd ed., vol. II, part 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 658–671.
R.W. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), pp. 320–325; d’A. Desborough, “Mycenaean Civilization,” pp. 675–677; Drews, End of the Bronze Age, pp. 26–29.
Michael C. Astour, “New Evidence on the Last Days of Ugarit,” American Journal of Archaeology 69 (1965), p. 255. For a different interpretation of this letter, see Harry A. Hoffner, “The Last Days of Khattusha” in William A. Ward and Martha S. Joukowsky, eds., The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C.: From the Danube to the Tigris (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1992), p. 49.
J. Neumann and Simo Parpola, “Climatic Change and the Eleventh-Tenth-Century Eclipse of Assyria and Babylonia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46:3 (July 1987), p. 178. See also D.J. Wiseman, “Assyria and Babylonia c. 1200–1000 B.C.,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, p. 465.
Amèlie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East (New York: Routledge, 1995), vol. 1, p. 380. For the entire epic see Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 771–801.
See, for example, Philip P. Betancourt, “The End of the Greek Bronze Age,” Antiquity 50 (1976), pp. 40–47; Nancy K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, rev. ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 47–49, 77–79, 197; Carlo Zaccagnini, “The Transition from Bronze to Iron in the Near East and in the Levant: Marginal Notes,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 110 (1990), pp. 493–502; and Oliver Dickinson, The Aegean Bronze Age (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 307–309.
See the summary in Drews, End of the Bronze Age, pp. 33–37. See also Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven: Deciphering the Atlantis Legend (New York: William Morrow, 1992), pp. 82–85.
See, for example, Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); R.A. Bryson, H.H. Lamb and D.L. Donley, “Drought and the Decline of Mycenae,” Antiquity 48 (1974), pp. 46–50; B. Weiss, “The Decline of Late Bronze Age Civilizations as a Possible Response to Climatic Change,” Climatic Change 4 (1982), pp. 172–198; William H. Stiebing, Jr., “Climate and Collapse—Did the Weather Make Israel’s Emergence Possible?” Bible Review, August 1994.
Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 30–33; P.A. Kay and D.L. Johnson, “Estimation of Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow from Regional Paleoenvironmental Proxy Data,” Climatic Change 3 (1981), pp. 251–263.
See, for general tree-ring sequences, H.H. Lamb, “Reconstruction of the Course of Postglacial Climate Over the World,” in A.P. Harding, ed., Climatic Change in Later Prehistory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 147–148; and, for Gordion, P.I. Kuniholm, “Dendrochronology at Gordion and on the Anatolian Plateau,” Summaries of Papers, 76th General Meeting, Archaeological Institute of America (New York, 1974), p. 66.