A small painted clay figurine of a woman from Mycenaean Greece
Mycenaean female figurine, 13th century BCE
Marked Mycenae

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Mycenaean Greece

Warrior kings ruled from fortified palaces at Mycenae, Pylos and elsewhere in Greece. Their clay tablets in Linear B were deciphered in 1952 and turned out to be an early form of Greek.

Place
Mycenae · Pylos · Tiryns · TroyEurope
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IGold in the shaft graves
  2. IIPalaces and walls of giants
  3. IIIReading Linear B
  4. IVTroy: legend and evidence
  5. VThe palaces burn

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Heinrich Schliemann
  • Michael Ventris
  • Alice Kober

Objects

  • The “Mask of Agamemnon”
  • Linear B tablets
  • The Lion Gate

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1750 BC to 1050 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?