Standing now on archaeology and history, what do we know about the late Bronze Age context given archeological finds in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Asia Minor? Who were the Minoans? How and why did they give way to the Mycenaeans? Why and how did the Mycenaeans rise to regional dominance? Legend and story become real as archaeology rises to claim authority away from literature in deciding matters of the past, a story that includes Schliemann, Evans, Blegan, and the rest. Archaeology discovers a people we’ve been reading about for 2,700 years but didn’t know existed. This lecture will explore the rich visual, documentary, and literary evidence recovered from Bronze Age Anatolia (Hittites, Luwians / Trojans, and others), from Crete, and from the Levant (especially Ugarit) that can help us to fill in some of the missing pieces of Mycenaean performance culture.īronze Age Myth Morphs into History / Ian Morris ( Classics, Stanford). No literary or musical texts survive from the Bronze Age Greeks but our steadily-growing knowledge of several of their neighbors’ literatures and musical performance traditions, along with vital clues preserved within the poems of Homer and Hesiod, enables us to recreate-or to surmise with some degree of confidence-key elements of the song-types, dances, instrumental tunings, and epic stories about gods and heroes that they adopted from and shared with those neighbors. Lecture / Performance / Demonstration: Mycenaean Literature, Music, and Performance Culture – What Do We Know? What Can We Reconstruct ?/ Mark Griffith ( Classics, UC Berkeley). We’ll illustrate the stories as Western civilization always has, with great art, and suggest what they might tell us about the historical Mycenaeans. Perseus, Theseus, Bellerophon and Pegasus). Trojan Horse, the Oresteia) and those not (e.g. the Judgment of Paris), follow the storyline through the Iliad and Odyssey, and finish with a mention of other Mycenaean-derived myths, those connected to the Iliad story (e.g. We’ll begin with the mythic backstory (e.g. Let us stand a moment in this beautiful innocence, when myth was our only window on the Late Bronze Age Aegean. For twenty-six centuries before that, Homer stood like a colossus over Western culture, even as educated opinion generally denied that the civilization he sang of actually had existed. Yet these were stories adrift from history archaeology caught up with Homer barely a century ago. Western Civilization once knew the Late Bronze Age Aegean only through the Homeric tales. Once Homer Was Enough / Douglas Kenning ( Sicily Tour). Humanities West is delighted to bring the Mycenaeans to you, including the archaeologists who uncovered the latest Mycenaean finds (2017), as this still-young archaeological field continues to deepen our understanding of our Western Civilization. Then a few romantically-minded 19 th-century amateur archaeologists (most memorably Heinrich Schliemann) took those tales seriously and those brilliant predecessors of the ancient Greeks exploded from obscurity. Yet most scholars came to assume that Homeric tales and even the society they described largely were fiction. Only their oral tales remained, composed half a millennium later by Homer into the Iliad and the Odyssey, and these have stood ever since like colossi dominating Western literature. When the Bronze Age collapsed, all signs of state-level society disappeared from Greece, and both Minoans and Mycenaeans disappeared from history. A prehistoric culture from mainland Greece, now called the Mycenaeans, inherited the fabulous brilliance of Minoan Crete.
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