Lecture 1 - Agamemnon

Agamemnon
or, What modern Europe takes from ancient Greece

Troy (2004)

prisca theologia
primitive
archeology
Philhellenism
- Schliemann (Troy, Mycenae)
- Arthur Evans (Knossos)

Homer, Iliad, Odyssey

set ca. 1200 B.C. - Troy > Trojan
composed ca. 750 B.C. (Homer)
edited into current form in 3rd century B.C. (Hellenistic)

Paris - Helen - Menelaus
Hector - Achilles - Patroclus
Agamemnon

myth = the memory of national trauma

Greek Periodization

2000	-	1380	Minoan Civilization (Crete)
1600	-	1200	Mycenean Civilization
1200	-	750	Greek Dark Ages
750	-	480	Archaic Greece
480	-	338	Classical Greece
post	-	338	Hellenistic Greece

Points of Reference

ca. 1645 eruption of Thera (Knossos destroyed, rebuilt)
ca. 1380 Mycenean conquest of Crete, eastern Mediterranean
ca. 1200 Trojan War
ca. 750 Homer
479 Persian invasion

Minotaur
Minos, king of Crete > Minoan Civilization
Knossos
Poseidon
Pasiphae
Daedalus
labyrinth

Bronze Age - 3,500 to 1,200 B.C.

organize large numbers of people
engineering
writing
hierarchy

Mesopotamia / Fertile Crescent
- Sumer
- Assyria
- Babylon
- Persia
Egypt
Greece
- Mycenean (southern Balkans)
- Minoan (Crete)

Minoan	Mycenean
Eteo-Cretan (non-Indo-European)	Greek (Indo-European)
ca. 3000 B.C. to Peloponnesus ca. 2000 B.C. destroyed on Peloponnesus but flourished on Crete	invaded Peloponnesus ca. 2000, destroying/enslaving Eteo-Cretans
economy = trade, shipping	economy = warfare
matriarchal organization	tribal organization (warlords)
Greek Linear A unrelated to any known language undeciphered (derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs)	Greek Linear B (ca. 1400 B.C.) ancestor of modern Greek deciphered 1950s
sports	hunting
mother-earth goddesses	Olympian Zeus