Eric Cline
speaker
372 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Eric Cline’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We think there's something like 600,000 Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland or Mycenaeans and Minoans in like the 13th century.
By the 11th century, they're down to 300,000.
They've lost over half their population.
So it was not a good time.
Yeah, I do.
Much to my own chagrin when I listed how well everyone did in the aftermath.
Well, after 1177, I've got the Mycenaeans and Minoans down in category four out of five.
They did almost worse than everyone else.
Only the Hittites did worse, basically.
The problem, it turns out, we think now there's a lot of new work going on.
Joseph Moran, the excavator at Tiryns, for example, thinks that the Mycenaeans were much more fragile and vulnerable than they appear, even to outsiders, and that they may have overextended during the good periods, like in the 14th and into the 13th centuries.
And when the drought hit, they weren't ready, and they had overexploited the peasants themselves.
in doing things like building the Lion Gate at Mycenae and draining the Copaeus Basin.
So it may be that the Mycenaeans were not as all-fired powerful as they appeared to others, kind of like a Wizard of Oz effect, if you will.
But he also says, and others as well, Martin Finney and Erika Weiberg,
from Uppsala, they have suggested that the overexploited peasants in the Mycenaean hinterland, if you will, they might have actually rejoiced when the palaces fell.
They're like, oh, finally, now we can have some peace.
So yes, I do think the Mycenaeans did worse than almost everyone else at the time.
But the question is why?
And that's what we're still trying to figure out, which is a really interesting question.
Showing 301–320 of 372 · page 16 of 19
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