The Iliad and Mycenaean civilisation

Homer's Iliad tells of a punitive Greek expedition against Troy, led by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae in southern Greece. The story is set in a remote heroic age, distinct from and superior to the present, in which war and warrior leaders are the norm. In historical terms this heroic age is to be identified with the Mycenaean civilisation of the second millennium b.c. (c. 1600–1100) and Homer's Greeks (called ‘Argives’, ‘Danaans’ or ‘Achaeans’) with the Mycenaeans, known from archaeological excavations at Mycenae and elsewhere.

The Mycenaeans were the first Greek speakers to establish a civilisation on Greek soil. Their ancestors had come from the north, c. 2000, completing one of many prehistoric migrations undertaken over several millennia by Indo-European-speaking peoples from (probably) somewhere to the north-west of the Black Sea. On their arrival they encountered a non-Indo-European ‘Minoan’ culture, which they eventually absorbed and displaced. The Greece they then created seems to have been a coherent miniature empire based on several palace centres, including one at Mycenae itself. It was bureaucratic and centralised, although its orderly surface no doubt concealed many divergencies, including new dialect groupings. Among its sophisticated features was writing in the syllabic script now known as Linear B. Among its foreign contacts was the ancient city of Troy, now Hissarlik in Turkey, situated a few miles from the Hellespont and the Aegean sea.