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A Mycenaean Hegemony? A Reconsideration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
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There are two possible positions with regard to the Mycenaean hegemony: that it existed or that it did not. Modern scholars who accept its existence appear to be more vocal in arguing their position than are those who question the existence of Mycenaean unity. Desborough, for example, states forcibly:
I am firmly convinced that there was one ruler over the whole Mycenaean territory, with his capital at Mycenae, although the tablets are of no assistance one way or the other in this matter, and although the overlordship of Agamemnon clearly envisaged by Homer can perhaps be explained simply as a military leadership for the purpose of waging war against Troy. The burden of proof must therefore depend on other evidence, the archaeological material taken in conjunction with the fairly frequent mention by the Hittites, in the fourteenth and much of the thirteenth centuries, of the king of a land called Ahhiyawa, which I believe to represent the entire Mycenaean orbit.
The opposite position is represented largely through hints given in a larger context. Stubbings, for example, writes of ‘the Mycenaean Greeks of the mainland and the Mycenaean rulers of Cnossus’ and of ‘the mainland kingdoms’ (italics mine). Catling speaks of ‘metropolitan Greeks grown jealous of the wealth and power which their Knossian relatives had built up’. This emphasis on plurality, it seems to me, is the best way not only to view the events of the Mycenaean Greek world but also to understand the nature and degree of change in Greece during the Dark Age period.
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References
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8 The Linear B tablets are instructive in a negative fashion: the tablets from both Knossos and Pylos make no reference to other major Mycenaean centres. The nature of the tablets and the method of their preservation prevent us from placing much emphasis on this fact, however.
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