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Mycenaean Thebes
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Ancient Thebes
In this course, Professor Paul Cartledge (University of Cambridge) explores the history of Thebes from the Mycenaean period (1600-1100 BC) to its destruction at the hands of Alexander the Great in 335 BC. In the first module, we think about the ‘prehistory’ of the city of Thebes in the Mycenaean Age, including its location in Greece and the earliest mentions of the city in Greek (and non-Greek) literature. After that, in the second module, we think about cult in ancient Thebes, before turning in the third and fourth modules to consider the prominence of Thebes in the Greek epic tradition and in Greek tragedy. In the final four modules, we trace the history of Thebes in four key periods – the Greco-Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian, the fourth century BC up to the death of Epaminondas at the Battle of Mantinea, and the final decades of Thebes’ existence before its destruction in 335 BC.
Mycenaean Thebes
In this module, we think about the prehistory of the city of Thebes, focusing in particular on: (i) the foundation of Thebes in myth; (ii) the location of the city of Thebes in Greece and Boeotia; (iii) the archaeological remains of Mycenaean Thebes; and (iv) the first mentions of Thebes in literature, both Greek and non-Greek.
Section one
00:00:05I've labelled broadly Homeric or Mycenaean thieves.
00:00:07Now there are two different types of labels.
00:00:12Homeric is a reference to the poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey,
00:00:15in which thieves get to mention.
00:00:20Whereas Mycenaean is an archaeological description of
00:00:23appeal period of ancient Greek history,
00:00:27we now know it's Greek because we know the language spoken by Mycenaean.
00:00:29Greeks was Greek because we have deciphered their texts,
00:00:34written in a script called Linear B
00:00:38and Thieves is one of the main cities of the late bronze Age of Greece.
00:00:41Tablets on clay
00:00:47writings of an administrative nature have been turned
00:00:50up in thieves because thieves had a palace
00:00:54and
00:00:59we tend to refer to the late Bronze Age in Greece as the world of the palaces,
00:00:59as opposed to the historical period of Greece coming down several centuries later
00:01:05to the world of the policies or city, state or city Zen state.
00:01:11So the themes that I'm looking at, the lost City of Ain Street is the lost policy.
00:01:16But I am interested
00:01:22in the distant past, and that's where I'm going to start.
00:01:24So thieves in myth was founded not by a Greek but a bye bye called Cadmus.
00:01:27Cadmus came from modest today, Lebanon from Tyre.
00:01:35So he was what the Greeks called a finish in.
00:01:39We don't actually know what the Phoenicians called themselves,
00:01:43but we know a considerable amount about their archaeology, their civilisation,
00:01:46the fact that they developed an alphabet, for example.
00:01:52And the Greeks.
00:01:56Interestingly, they call their script, their alphabetic script, cadmium in.
00:01:57And the reason for that is they knew that their script alphabet
00:02:03was not an original creation of theirs.
00:02:08But it was a borrowing from an adaptation
00:02:11of a Semitic script which had been invented by
00:02:14as we because of the Greeks. Call the Phoenicians.
00:02:19So we're in the second half off of the second
00:02:22millennium BC were between 1512 100 BC late Bronze Age.
00:02:25The alphabet is a much later creation. Cadmus is a pure myth.
00:02:32The Greeks, of course,
00:02:38really would not have had any notion of how
00:02:39and why the City of Thieves was originally founded.
00:02:41But in the late Bronze Age, the Acropolis of thieves, very big and high
00:02:45and thieves is INBio OSHA in central Greece. So it's
00:02:52north and to the slightly to the west of Athens.
00:02:58B OSHA is a region of about 3000 square
00:03:03kilometres is bigger than the territory of Athens,
00:03:07not as big as the territory of Sparta.
00:03:11Within this plane, it's a large plane and there's actually a couple of basins.
00:03:15One is where Thebes is.
00:03:21And then there's another depression further to the north,
00:03:23where there had been a big lake which is now drained, called Lake Copious.
00:03:26So Thebes is a natural Acropolis.
00:03:31It's an obvious place if you want to have a defensible site rather like Athens.
00:03:34Acropolis.
00:03:39Well, the theme is called their Acropolis the Cad Meyer.
00:03:40Because
00:03:45it was, they thought. Founded by Cadmus,
00:03:46they surrounded it with walls. So late.
00:03:49Bronze Age Mycenaean themes is comparable to tear IANS, My Seanie
00:03:52Pylas
00:03:59in that it has a major palace,
00:04:00and it's it's comparable to my Seanie two Terrans to Athens in that it has big walls,
00:04:03defensive walls.
00:04:12But it's nothing like as well preserved as if you
00:04:13go today to my senior Terrans down in the Peloponnese,
00:04:18in the article it or if you look up at the
00:04:22Acropolis and you see some whacking great boulders surrounding the across
00:04:24Thebes is Acropolis is not beautifully preserved like that.
00:04:30When does thieves first get a mention in any literature will.
00:04:34Paradoxically, it's in an Egyptian text,
00:04:39not in the Greek text were in the 14th century.
00:04:43So already by then,
00:04:46thieves was making enough of a sort of figure in the Greek world
00:04:48for the Egyptians to pick it up and refer to it in an official
00:04:53document by one of the pharaohs.
00:04:57The first Greek mention
00:05:00is in. I've mentioned already these linear B tablets.
00:05:02These are the official administrative archives of the Mycenaean, these urban.
00:05:06So the palace kept document records on clay
00:05:11when the palace was burned and destroyed. And this is very common.
00:05:17It's the same fate for my senior for tear IANs,
00:05:21for pilots for other cities of 13th century Greece.
00:05:24BC
00:05:29Thebes tablets were burned in some way, so preserved,
00:05:30and so the word. These bones for the first time occurs in Greek in linear B script.
00:05:35In terms of literature,
00:05:42that is much, much later. We're talking about alphabet.
00:05:44We're talking about a script. You write it on papyrus.
00:05:48It's preserved. It's copied.
00:05:52Eventually it passes down through the Middle Ages.
00:05:54Finally, the age of printing in the 16th century.
00:05:58So Homer and other Greek literature is preserved
00:06:01in the famous poem The Iliad,
00:06:05which is all about the attempt by Greeks are
00:06:09successful to recover Princess or Queen Helen of Sparta.
00:06:13From Troy, she'd been in vague Aled away by Paris, the prince,
00:06:18son of King Priam of Troy.
00:06:24And so the Greeks under Agamemnon, who is the sister in law of Helen,
00:06:26brother in law of Helen.
00:06:30Sorry, his brother, MENA less is the husband of
00:06:32they mount a big expedition. This is the story of Troy
00:06:36well, at one point early on in the poem The Poet,
00:06:40and we're not sure exactly who the poet or poets were, But nevertheless,
00:06:43it's a big tradition.
00:06:48Epic tradition
00:06:49lists all the contingents that Agamemnon has managed to
00:06:51persuade to follow him to recover Helen from Troy
00:06:56and second on the list. After his own Mycenaean
00:07:01group
00:07:06comes the bi oceans,
00:07:07in which the two principal cities are themes
00:07:09and or common knows,
00:07:14and that that divergence that bit vocation. So, in other words, it's not just
00:07:16that Thebes has it all to itself, actually,
00:07:23or common office gets a very big right up as well
00:07:26and there is archaeological evidence that in the Bronze Age,
00:07:29late Bronze Age, Thebes was not alone or common.
00:07:32Nose was also a major site in the northwest of by OSHA. Thebes is in the southeast,
00:07:36thieves is mentioned, but only in a curious kind of reference as lower thieves. So
00:07:44typically in a Mycenaean Palace site, you have the upper town
00:07:51and you have the lower town. Why would Homer or the poet
00:07:56only cite lower themes? You know, what about the Acropolis themes, anyway?
00:08:00There's a suggestion.
00:08:05I think there's a bit of a rivalry going on here between or common nose and themes
00:08:06and the rivalry between the epic tradition focusing on Troy
00:08:12and, on the other hand, the theme Been cycle, which I'm going to come back to.
00:08:17So Thebes is a big deal. Already
00:08:21in the 14th and 13th centuries, BC
00:08:26
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Cartledge, P. (2021, February 17). Ancient Thebes - Mycenaean Thebes [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/ancient-thebes/thebes-in-greek-tragedy
MLA style
Cartledge, P. "Ancient Thebes – Mycenaean Thebes." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 17 Feb 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/ancient-thebes/thebes-in-greek-tragedy