In Greece, the invasion of the Mycenaeans in the seventeenth century BCE brought a chariot-borne aristocracy to southeastern Europe. The Mycenaean Greeks were part of the larger Indo-European migrations who spread from their original location in the steppe region north of the Black Sea to India, Iran, and Europe. The Mycenaeans entered Greece from the north and successfully challenged the Minoans, a civilization based on Crete, for mastery of the Aegean. By 1400 BCE, the Mycenaeans established several city-states in Attica near modern-day Athens and on the Peloponnesus especially noted for their fortified palace centers built on hills surrounded by large stone walls. These Bronze Age palace centers formed a loose confederation of independent states including Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, and Orchomenos, with the city-state of Mycenae the primary hegemon.

Historians know little about Mycenaean warfare. What is known comes from a combination of pottery, bronze weapons, wall murals and limited textual evidence from the Bronze Age itself, supplemented by the remarkable epic poetry of Homer, written sometime in the eighth century BCE. Homer’s Iliad stands as the beginning of European literature and as Western Civilization’s most influential war poem. The origins of the Iliad date back to the Aegean Dark Ages (c.1100-c.800 BCE) and are in the oral tradition of reciting poems recounting the deeds of heroes in the Mycenaean Age. Homer made use of these oral traditions to compose the Iliad, his account of the wrath of Achilles and the war between the Mycenaeans and the Trojans.

Top photo: Thetis giving Achilles armor made by Hephaestus. Attic black-figure hydria, c.575-550 BCE. Louvre Museum, Paris. In the Public Domain, click to enlarge.

Middle photo: Marching soldiers, painted on crater pottery and found at Mycenae. Late Bronze Age, twelfth century BCE. National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Full armor includes helmet, cuirass, greaves, shield, spear. Carrying supplies hanging from spears. Mycenaean Pictorial Style, from the "House of the Warrior Krater". In the Public Domain, click to enlarge.

Bottom photo: Map of important Mycenaean palace complexes and other settlements, Greece c.1400-c.1100 BCE. In the Public Domain, click to enlarge.

The story of the Trojan War, the Bronze Age conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece, straddles the history and mythology of ancient Greece and inspired the greatest writers of antiquity, from Homer (eighth century BCE), Herodotus (c.484-425 BCE) and Sophocles (c.496-c.405 BCE) to Virgil (70-19 BCE). Since the nineteenth century rediscovery of the site of Troy in what is now western Türkiye (Çanakkale province), archaeologists have uncovered increasing evidence of a kingdom that peaked and may have been destroyed around 1180 BCE, forming the basis for the tales recounted by Homer some four hundred years later in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Major excavations at the site of Troy in 1870 under the direction of German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) revealed a small citadel mound and layers of debris twenty-five meters deep. Later studies have document more than forty-six building phases grouped into nine bands representing the site’s inhabitation from 3000 BCE until its final abandonment in 1350 AD. Recent excavations have shown an inhabited area fifteen times the size of the citadel, making Troy a significant Bronze Age city. Layer VII-A of the excavations, dated to about 1180 BCE reveals charred debris and scattered skeletons, evidence of a wartime destruction of the city that may have inspired portions of the story of the Trojan War.

During Homer’s lifetime, some four hundred years later, its ruins would have still been visible. Modern scholars believe that Bronze Age Troy had stronger ties with Anatolia than with the Aegean. This conclusion comes from tons of local pottery and small finds, such as a seal with a local hieroglyphic inscription, as well as the overall settlement picture, mud-brick architecture, and cremation burials. Research by Anatolian specialists has shown that what we today call Troy was in the Late Bronze Age the Kingdom of Wilusa, powerful enough to conclude treaties with the Hittite Empire. In fact, even the New Kingdom Egyptians were familiar with the city. Furthermore, according to Hittite records, there were political and military tensions around Troy precisely during the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BCE, within the time frame of Homer's Trojan War. There certainly could have been a Trojan War between the Mycenaeans and Trojans, one that featured the great heroes of Homer’s later epics; however, the evidence is still inconclusive. Homer's Iliad can assist us with some understanding of Late Bronze Age Aegean warfare, it is also a window into how warfare was conducted at the time Homer was alive at the beginning of Greece's Archaic Age (c.800-c.500 BCE) as modern scholars believe his writing projected current trends in classical warfare back to the Mycenaean "Age of Heroes." This mixing of what was for Homer contemporary tactics with an oral history of martial events pased down for generations provides modern scholars with a difficult task of separating one era from the other when evaluating the Iliad as a primary source.

The themes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were also inspiration for later Greek artwork in the Archaic (c.800-c.500 BCE), Hellenic (c.500-338 BCE, and Hellenistic (338-30 BCE) eras, where the chief protagonists of both epics are often portrayed in contemporary arms and armor or reflecting the fashion of that historical.  In fact, these pictorial representations also present modern scholars with additional primary source material for our understanding of the panoplies of these historical periods.

Suggested Readings:

Primary sources

Fagles, Robert, Homer, and Bernard Knox. The Iliad. Penguin, 1991.

Secondary sources

Allen, Susan Heuck. Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik.  Univ of California Press, 1999.

Drews, Robert. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East.  Princeton University Press, 1988.  

Strauss, Barry. The Trojan War: A New History. Simon and Schuster, 2007.