Mycenaean

The inhabitants of Greece during the 2nd millennium BC are called Mycenaeans after famous and impressive citadel of Mycenae, which was excavated at the end of the 19th century.

In Mycenae, the palace was first built around 1600 BC. The Mycenaeans centered their lives around great palace complexes.

In around 1400 BC the center of Minoan power in Crete, Knossos, was destroyed, by an earthquake.

The Mycenaeans of mainland took advantage of this disaster take over Crete; they rebuilt Knossos as a Mycenaean palace and Crete became a Mycenaean kingdom in 1450 BC.

Between 1400 and 1200 BC, they erected great citadels at Mycenae, Tiryns and elsewhere with Cyclopean walls of huge, irregularly shaped stone blocks.

The Mycenaeans used their regional dominance to expand their trading networks and developed close contacts with surrounding civilizations, notably those of the Near East such as the Hittites, Syrians and Egyptians.

The Mycenaeans themselves seem to have engaged in extensive internal warfare among the competing towns. These wars wreaked them sufficiently that they fell to a new wave of nomads from the north, the Dorians.

The disaster of 1200 BC violently ended the Mycenaeans’ political and economic domination of the Mediterranean, but their culture lingered on for another one hundred years.

A few of the palaces were inhabited again and some Mycenaeans fled eastward, where they settled on the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus.
Mycenaean