History Summarized: Mycenaean Greece & the Bronze Age Collapse

As a historian and archaeologist in training I am compelled to point out that Frank Calvert was the one who actually asked the locals where Troy was, Schliemann just showed up with money after the fact :P

I don’t think people understand how wacky it would have been to find THE Troy. Imagine you just go to where Tolkien said the Shire would have been and then you actually find a Hobbit hole. Fuckin crazy.

As Red said: Mycenaean Greece is ' basically Ancient Greece squared '

Mycenaean King: They burned our crops, poisoned our water supply, and delivered a plague unto our houses! Mycenaean people: They did? Mycenaean King: No, but are we gonna wait until they do? builds massive fortress complex

I suggest you do a History Summarised for Thessaly, because being a Thessalian, it is extremely difficult to get any detailed information about my region's history and I walk by an ancient theatre every day knowing almost nothing about it.

I feel like we need to call out that Schliemann excavated using dynamite and destroyed centuries of strata that we can no longer study with modern methods.

Heinrich Schliemann: discovers nine layers of Troy. Also Heinrich Schliemann: destroys eight layers of Troy with dynamite.

These palace maps make me tempted to repurpose them as DND megadungeons. So fun to find a real-world ancient structure that is actually so vast and elaborate.

This feels like a dark gritty reboot of the Trojan War story where the Mycenaeans realize that they were the bad guys all along. I love it.

1870's Historians: Did you ever hear the Tragedy of the Collapse of the Troy? I thought not, it's not a story anyone but Homer would tell you. It's a classical legend.

fistfights Schliemann because of all the dynamite and thievery It's probably also worth noting that Odysseus kills basically the entire noble population of Ithica was fits in well with a theme of all the nobles dying because of civilisational collapse

You know- The idea that the Trojan war was the catalyst which caused the entire collapse of the Mycenaean Aegean- which spiraled out of control to also cause the collapse of the rest of the bronze age Med. is actually my new favorite interpretation of this widely unknown period of history- and it seems to me to be one of the best in regards to making sense as well, it has all the most common reasons for empire/civilizational collapse along with a lot of loosely fitting but great evidence to back it up- good work Blue, Also I love the idea that the Odyssey/Illiad are the distant echoes of the actual historical fact which caused untold suffering, poverty and what not for hundreds of years- kept alive by the people reminiscing about how their ancestors caused the collapse of civilization- but they were totally badass heroes who went out with a bang to do it- totally epic, as it should be.

Certainly explains why Greek mythology all seems to end with the Trojan war.

I really did not expect this video to end with the thesis of "The aggression of the Mycaneans in the Trojan War led to the entire Bronze Age collapse" but you know what, I'm absolutely here for it

“a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste." Here, sometime around or after 1200 BCE, "loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads - one of them found stuck in the side of a building - and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof of war.” ― Eric H. Cline,

I’m willing to bet this is one of Blue’s saddest moments in history, somewhere around his top 5 next to the fall of Rome and the Byzantine Empire. Me too… :(

Let’s not forget how Schliemann nearly blew up a lot of Troy with dynamite. He’s the Sigmund Freud of Archaeology.

I'm equal parts fascinated any annoyed with Mycenaean Greece, honestly, it might border on a longer-term obsession for me. There's this entire even more ancient Greece! So much to possibly discover! So much history! But also, all intransparent to us because lost language. Ugh.

"The Sea Peoples" being itinerant Mycenaeans is an angle I've never heard about the BA Collapse until now...it makes sense too.

Who would've thought that by digging where we read Troy is, we actually found Troy. A true mistery