In the Bronze Age, around 1600 to 1100 BCE, Greek speakers lived in palace centers like Mycenae, Pylos, Knossos, and Thebes. They recorded their acts in clay using Linear B — inventories, offerings, lists of labor. On those tablets we find familiar names: Zeus, Poseidon, and a title like Potnia. The voice of later Greeks did not begin with Homer; it echoes the voice of those bronze-age scribes.

Then came the collapse. Between 1200 and 1100 BCE, the palaces fell. Trade faltered. Writing vanished for centuries. Many call that era “dark,” but darkness is not empty. In that silence, stories lived. Singers traveled, keeping alive memories of kings, fortified citadels, long voyages, war and glory.

By the time writing returned and city-states reconstituted themselves, those stories became the foundation. The Iliad and Odyssey are not eyewitness accounts of Mycenaean courts. They are echoes: mythopoetic refractions of a world already gone but not forgotten.

In later Greece, society changed. Kings gave way to new forms: oligarchies, tyrants, experiments in citizen rule. The polis replaced the palace. Yet language and ritual remained threads connecting past to present. The Greeks of the classical world spoke a language that developed from Mycenaean Greek. The gods named in Bronze Age lists found new sanctuaries. Heroes rooted in the older age remained close companions in discourse.

To say that the Greeks were Mycenaean descendants is not a gesture to ancestry alone. It is the map of how culture survives. Through memory. Through continuity in words, in worship, in story. The Parthenon is not a palace reborn. It is architecture borne of remembering.

What part of the Mycenaean past do you think the Greeks most insisted on preserving? And why?

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