ABSTRACT
The Linear B tablets, as we saw in the previous chapter, do not enable us to write a history properly so called of the late Mycenaean period. However, the use of tablets made of clay does suggest at least a prima facie comparability with the contemporary civilizations of Egypt, Anatolia and the Levant and so provides a convenient transition to what I believe to be a proper context for studying late Mycenaean Greece. The documentary evidence for contact or conflict between the Mycenaean Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the political, diplomatic or military spheres may in many cases merely be the spurious outcome of ‘a sort of philological game of hopscotch’ (Carpenter 1966, 45). But the intercourse in articles of trade (actual finds and inferences from the Linear B tablets), linguistic borrowings, artistic interconnections and, I should say, the very use of the unsuitable medium of clay for Linear B script-these are not so easily dismissed. I am of course far from believing that Mycenaean Greece was just ‘a peripheral culture of the Ancient East, its westernmost extension’ (Astour 1967, 357f.). But I find it implausible that the contemporaneity of the Mycenaean ‘time of troubles’ with the series of destructive upheavals engulfing the whole eastern Mediterranean basin was just a coincidence, even if the nature of the connection between them cannot be precisely demonstrated.
