Synchronizing the Destructions of the Mycenaean Palaces

This monograph presents the proceedings of an international workshop dedicated to the destructions of the Mycenaean palaces that happened during the later 2 nd millennium BCE. The Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces in southern and central Greece stood at the head of the earliest state system on the European continent. The authors, all leading scholars in Bronze Age research and often engaged in excavating the palace sites themselves, focus on the most recent progress in pottery studies, in order to arrive at precise relative chronological dates of intermediate as well as final destruction events. They are also discussing the highly debated topic of inter-regional synchronisms throughout Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. The investigated archaeological sites range from Crete in the south to the Peloponnese with the palaces of Pylos, Ayios Vasileios, Mycenae and Tiryns and further north to central Greece with the palace of Thebes, while contemporary sites on Cyprus and in Syria are taken into consideration as well. A precise chronology of those multilayered sites is a precondition for placing the administrative texts from the palace archives in a historical sequence as well as for writing the building history of the palaces themselves. Ultimately, this chronological sequence must also form the backbone of each theory seeking to explain the causes of the palace destructions and their final abandonment. The search for those historical causes is subject of this publication as well. The authors arrive at relative chronological dates linking the different sites with each other and to a single sequence of phases based on their studies of pottery vessels from closed deposits that were buried during the destructions of the various sites. The relative sequence of pottery phases are then linked to absolute dates (in terms of calendar age BCE) via pottery-based synchronisms with Near Eastern sites, which in turn are dated to the reigns of kings by written documents found at those sites together with the dated pottery. The book contains primary data from the investigated sites in many cases illustrating the relevant archaeological finds for the first time. It is the first comprehensive analysis of the topic and is based on the most recent archaeological excavation results.