The Clay Thickens

Sir Arthur had a thing on about the Minoans. He was so adamant that the Palace of Knossos represented a Minoan structure he insisted on interpreting the final fire and destruction as happening at the end of the Minoan era.

His reconstruction of the palace included tearing down many of the later Mycenaean additions to the structure. Even worse, he was the one that came up with the nomenclature Linear A and Linear B as he insisted the latter were Minoan. He even blocked access to many of the Linear B clay tablets -- one possible reason why it wasn't until the 1950's that Michael Ventris figured out they were actually Greek.

So. Back in 1958 Blegen took a look at the collected tablets of Pylos and Knossos and asserted that due to their strong similarity the destruction horizon must be the same for both. And he wasn't the only one. A Belgian epigraphist was able to show scribal communication between sets of the Knossos tablets, leading to a general consensus that they all shared a horizon; so if one set could be securely dated, they would all be securely dated.

The arguing heated up in the 1970's with in-depth studies of the earlier excavation notes in an attempt to reconstruct the primary data Evans and others had been making assumptions from. There was also primary excavation -- this made vastly more difficult by the multiple stages of reconstruction by Evans and his followers (originally with native materials, which decayed far more quickly than expected and were replaced a decade later with poured concrete and iron reinforcement...which in turn did not last the ages in the harsh Cretan climate and have had to be reworked since.)

Oh, yeah. And fold into all of this that archaeological dating is generally relative, using identified phases (usually pottery) as markers and attempting to correlate those between different civilizations. In the late bronze age, we have the Santorini problem (cultural and isotope dating of the eruption disagree by up to 200 years), the Egyptian Dating problem (trying to measure dynasties by the Counting of the Cows), and the difficulties of correlation when the same pottery sequence is not duplicated in societies that share only distant trading connections.

And then there's the Linear B archives themselves. After all, I came up with the core idea of the Cretan book based on what was in the Knossos tablets.

 I think I can get away with shifting the final destruction of the Palace -- the one that took place during the Mycenaean era -- to closer to the final days of the Aegean Bronze Age. That fire that swept through the structure seems a bit of a fluke. There's no systemic explanation for it; it happens before even the first-wave destructions (generally blamed on earthquake) that came at the start of the final phase of the palatial era.

Crete is different than the mainland, but so is Cypress. The documentation is thinner and thinner as you get to the close of the 1200's. One could argue for it being almost everything from a developed Mycenaean city to full-on anarchy to completely abandoned. Thematically and dramatically, it works well to have that final conflagration recorded in the archaeological ruins happen at the climax of the book. And practically speaking, I need to stop with the primary research and start into actually writing.

And when you come down to it; most of the people who know enough to realize I've shifted the date to be in a more useful place are the same people who will fully recognize why I did it -- to make the fullest possible use of those Linear B tablets. I think they will be more pleased with this than they are upset that I left the Palace of Knossos stand an extra hundred years.