Damn you, Agamemnon!

I don't know how I missed it.

Knossos was sacked between 1380 - 1350. It almost certainly had a Mycenaean presence afterwards but it was not a Mycenae capital; basically, the palace was abandoned from that date on.



That's the problem with historical research. Most of the stuff you will read is concerned with patterns and similarities, changes and processes. They don't really care if a particular example or discussion is happening on a specific date or range of dates. This is why almost all generalist work that discusses Knossos focuses on the Minoan and then touches upon the Mycenaean. Or even if the focus is on the Mycenaea, will randomly drop stuff about the Minoans into the mix.

And, yeah. I'm getting into a depth where there sort of aren't books. The few books written for a generalist audience aren't specific or detailed enough. That specificity and detail is in papers, and papers are written by specialists for specialists. There are very few books on "A Primer on Linear B" because either you just want a gloss on it or you are an academic who is going to be studying original inscriptions. So a doc search tends to pull up, instead, "A new interpretation of the meaning of pa-a-mo-ta in the inscriptions of Scribe 143."

I should have seen the signs. Knossos never got the cyclopean walls that almost define LHIIIB on the mainland. It retained much more of the Minoan flavor than other edifices of Mycenaean culture. And there's otherwise an odd paucity of detailed descriptions of Crete in LHIIIB.

Thing is, the two big collections of Linear B tablets are at Pylos and Knossos. Everything I read inferred the Pylos tablets came from just before the mainland destructions around 1190. And the Knossos tablets were always described in contemporary terms, with words and symbols being cross-referenced between them.

And the Homeric sources omit any mention of this destruction (they also skirt over the whole Minoan issue, too). Odysseus proudly proclaims himself grandson of King Minos himself and no-one blinks an eye. The Catalog of Ships lists several Cretan sites.

And the various and sundry maps I've been studying that document waves of invaders to and fro across the Aegean have the same little icons of cities on fire in Crete as they do for the mainland, and with contemporary dates.



So, what next?

First is to confirm. I'm not sure how; the problem I identified above is still there. There's not a good way to refine search terms to separate the final destruction of Knossos from the destructions at the end of the Minoan period. And check the firmness of the dating; it might just be possible to slide the destruction close enough to the point where things go generally to hell (although at the moment, it doesn't look so).

Next, and even harder, is to try to detail. Who was still there, what were they doing? What did it look like, and more importantly, can this still work as my setting?

Or move to another capital. Because I'm pretty rooted to the whole Palatial Workshop at this point. Except I also love the idea of Crete, not just the Minoan heritage, but the whole package. Still, an island outpost town that isn't a Mycenaean capital has some potential.



Okay, I feel a little less stupid; it is a question that's been bugging archaeologists since the 1970s. Enough for them to question Sir Arthur Evans' dating, even. The similarities between tablets inscribed 200 years apart is suspicious. The lack of any mention in Homer or similar texts is suspicious. But on the other hand...the problems seems to have been resolved to most people's satisfaction within the same era.