4.5 Europe: 1500 to 1000 b.c.  (Page 2/4)

The Thera volcano was not the only cataclysmic occurrence of this period. There were earthquakes all over the Mediterranean and even northern Europe while volcanoes erupted in Italy and the Sinai and seismic tidal waves "caused the sea to recede from the land and even sucked out the rivers"

Greece

Mycenaean power was dominant in the Mediterranean at least after 1,400 B.C.

At about the 13th century B.C. at the height of their power and when the Mycenaeans controlled the Aegean world, they suddenly began to fortify all their cities and strengthen their defences, indicating a premonition of disaster. Other Greek speaking tribes had begun to drift down into the Greek peninsula by about 1,500 B.C. but it was not until about 1,300 that they were sufficiently strong to begin to usurp the Mycenaean power, so that by the end of that century the Mycenaean cities and fortresses were in ruins, the art degenerated and the written language (Linear B) had been forgotten. (Ref. 215 , 176 ) 1,250 B.C. is usually given as the traditional date of the Trojan War, with complete collapse of Mycenaea by 1,200, but Cotterell (Ref. 41 ) gives the latter date as 1,150 B.C.

There were three main tribes of the new, invading Greeks, each with its own variation of the Greek language - lonic, Aeolic and Doric. The Dorians, descending from the upper Balkans about 1,200 B.C. are generally credited with the actual destruction of the Mycenaean Kingdom. They took the best lands with the less favored regions left to the other tribes. Attica became Ionian, along with a group of cities across the Aegean in the central section of the Asia Minor coast, and from these people came the master institution of Greek civilization, that is, the polis. Physically the polis consisted of a town or city with an area of farm and pasture land surrounding it. Politically it was a community governed by magistrates and laws. All of the invading warriors had ancestral ties with central Asia nomads and still lived a similar life, eating sheep, goat and wild hog. Still another tribe, the Thessalians, entered Greece in the province which now carries their name, sometime before 1,000 B.C. (Ref. 215 , 136 , 211 )