Palace Cities, Urbanism & Long-Distance Trade — HIST 304: Greek Civilization (Stephenson)

Nomads, Villages & the First Exchange c. 12000 – 4000 BCE

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The persistent baseline. Village subsistence and seasonal transhumance are the foundation against which urbanism emerges, not a stage it replaces. Mobile herders, goat-keepers, and seasonal pastoralists coexist with — and supply — palace cities throughout this entire sequence. The Thessalian transhumance pattern, Pindus mountain communities, and the continuing centrality of sheep and goat herding in the classical period confirm that rural and pastoral life is always the majority experience for most people in the ancient Mediterranean world.

c. 7500 – 5700 BCE · Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia

Proto-urban settlement — and the Anatolian obsidian sources exchange

Çatalhöyük (one of the world’s first large settled communities, 5000–10000 people) sits within the immediate supply zone of the Acıgöl/Cappadocian obsidian sources — sites within roughly 300 km of the source where obsidian is abundant enough to make up the large majority of stone tools. Obsidian is already moving hundreds of kilometres further, through down-the-line exchange networks, centuries before writing exists. Central Anatolia shows that long-distance trade and proto-urban life appear together, not in sequence.
Catalhoyuk Research Project — excavation archive excavation database under “Research” → Database

8000–5000 BCE

geographic context

Obsidian sources and exchange networks, c. 8000–3000 BCE

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Two distinct Near Eastern exchange systems operate alongside the Aegean system, all active from c. 8000 BCE. Central Anatolian system (Acıgöl/Cappadocia): supplies Çatalhöyük within its immediate supply zone and exchanges westward. Eastern Anatolian system (Nemrut Dağ, near Lake Van): reaches Çayönü directly and, through down-the-line exchange, Jericho (>700 km) and the Zagros foothills (Jarmo). Aegean system (Melos): Melian obsidian appears at Franchthi Cave from at least 11000 BCE — the Aegean is already a maritime interaction zone millennia before any palace or city. Obsidian abundance falls off exponentially with distance from each source, the pattern Renfrew, Dixon and Cann documented as the ‘law of monotonic decrement.’

Sources: Renfrew, C., Dixon, J.E. and Cann, J.R., “Obsidian and Early Cultural Contact in the Near East,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 32 (1966), 30–72 — Cambridge Core (open access); Renfrew, C., Cann, J.R. and Dixon, J.E., “Obsidian in the Aegean,” Annual of the British School at Athens 60 (1965), 225–247 — DOI; Renfrew, C., Dixon, J.E. and Cann, J.R., “Further Analysis of Near Eastern Obsidians,” PPS 34 (1968), 319–331 — DOI.

Anatolian obsidian sources

Aegean source (Melos) & sites

Near Eastern receiving sites

c. 11000 – 3000 BCE · Melos (Cyclades) and Franchthi Cave (Argolid)

Melian obsidian — the Aegean’s first long-distance trade good key date

The island of Melos holds the Aegean’s principal obsidian source. Melian obsidian appears at mainland Neolithic sites before domesticated agriculture arrives. The Aegean is a maritime exchange network from its earliest human occupation: the configuration that will define Greek civilization for the next ten millennia is already in place.

The Uruk World System c. 4000 – 2800 BCE

c. 3400 – 3000 BCE · Southern Mesopotamia to eastern Anatolia

The Uruk Expansion — the ancient world’s first long-distance trade network key date

The city of Uruk develops a system of colonies, trading posts, and exchange stations stretching from southern Iraq to the Iranian plateau and eastern Anatolia. Uruk administrators invent proto-cuneiform writing precisely to track this trade — the first writing in human history is a commercial accounting tool. The network collapses c. 3000 BCE but its organisational inheritance survives: palace economies, scribal record-keeping, and the city itself.
CDLI — Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (Uruk-period tablet images and transliterations) search within: filter the catalogue by “Uruk” period or enter a P-number

c. 2600 BCE · Southern Mesopotamia broadly

The Royal Standard of Ur — trade and tribute visualised object

The “Peace” panel of the Standard of Ur (already encountered in the Foodways unit) depicts not only feasting but the delivery of tribute goods by procession — animals, cloth, and precious materials. Commerce and tribute are the two modes of exchange that sustain the Sumerian city, and both are already fully developed by 2600 BCE.
British Museum — Standard of Ur

3400–2600 BCE

c. 3200 – 2700 BCE · Aegean broadly

Early Helladic Bronze Age — copper, tin, and the first Aegean bronze

Bronze-working spreads into the Aegean. Copper from Cyprus and tin from distant eastern sources begin moving through maritime exchange. Early Cycladic culture flourishes: distinctive marble figurines appearing across dozens of island sites attest to regular inter-island contact. The Aegean is already part of a wider eastern Mediterranean system centuries before the palace cultures of Crete and Mycenae emerge.

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Course theme: Writing emerges from trade accounting The Uruk beer-ration tablet (c. 3300 BCE), the Standard of Ur banquet panel, and the Uruk trading-post network are all aspects of the same palace economy. The olive and grain surplus of that economy funds long-distance exchange. Cuneiform begins as a ledger, not a literary medium — a distinction the course explores further in the treatment of writing and literacy.

Bronze Age Palace Economies c. 2500 – 1600 BCE

c. 2400 – 1800 BCE · Tell Mardikh (Ebla) and Tell Hariri (Mari), Syria

Ebla and Mari — Syrian palace cities at the centre of overland trade

Excavated royal archives at both cities reveal thousands of clay tablets documenting trade in timber, textiles, metals, and foodstuffs across a network linking at least thirty major cities. Ebla’s palace (destroyed c. 2300 BCE) contained its library still on the shelves. Mari’s archives include diplomatic correspondence with Babylon demonstrating an integrated inter-state economic system. The physical infrastructure of Bronze Age trade — standardised weights, written contracts, professional merchant families — is already fully mature. From around 1770 BCE, Mari’s own palace archives record tin shipped west to a place called Kaptara — Crete — and one text places a man of Kaptara, with his interpreter, at Ugarit on the Syrian coast: the first textual trace of Crete entering this Near Eastern trading world.

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Lecture 3, §I — An Eastern Inheritance: this is the system Crete joins around 2000 BCE, not one it invents. The lecture opens with Uruk, Ebla, and Mari running a palace-and-ledger economy for a millennium and a half before the first Cretan palace appears.

2400–1800 BCE

c. 2000 – 1450 BCE · Knossos, Phaistos, Akrotiri (Thera)

Minoan Crete — the Aegean’s first palace economy

Knossos redistributes olive oil, textiles, and pottery across Crete and beyond. Linear A script (still undeciphered) records palace accounts. Minoan trade goods — distinctive painted pottery, metal vessels, cloth — appear in Egypt, Cyprus, the Levant, and Anatolia. Minoan frescoes at Akrotiri (Thera) show exotic goods and foreign landscapes, evidence of a wide-ranging commercial world. The palace itself was found by accident: the Cretan antiquarian Minos Kalokairinos struck its storage jars in 1878, and Arthur Evans began full excavation in March 1900, naming the civilisation after the mythical King Minos before a single tablet had been read. What he uncovered was less one building than a machine for storage and display — a great central court, magazines of storage jars holding, on the highest estimates, tens of thousands of litres of olive oil, and workshops for potters, lapidaries, and metalworkers. The palaces collapse c. 1450 BCE; Mycenaean Greeks absorb Minoan administrative and artistic traditions.

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Lecture 3, §II & §IV — Minoans / Pax Minoica: the lecture follows this discovery in detail — Kalokairinos’s test pits, Evans’s 1900 dig — and then asks whether Minoan Crete’s wide trade reach reflects Evans’s peaceful “Pax Minoica” or a harder system of fortification and dependent labour the frescoes do not show.

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Nomadic and pastoral peoples as trade intermediaries. The Amorites (c. 2100–1700 BCE) and later the Arameans demonstrate a recurring pattern: pastoral-nomadic groups who move between palace cities, providing seasonal labour, herding flocks for palace estates, and carrying goods across the steppe routes that donkey caravans cannot reach efficiently. Urbanism does not replace nomadism; the palace economy depends on it.

The Late Bronze Age Peak — Ugarit at the Centre c. 1600 – 1200 BCE

c. 1450 – 1185 BCE · Ras Shamra (Ugarit), modern Syria

Ugarit — the greatest trading emporium of the Late Bronze Age ★ key site

The port city of Ugarit stands at the intersection of every major Bronze Age trade route: copper from Cyprus, tin from the east, gold and grain from Egypt, cedar timber from Lebanon, textiles from Mesopotamia, olive oil and Mycenaean pottery from the Aegean. Its multi-ethnic merchant quarter housed Cypriots, Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaean Greeks, and Canaanites. The city’s scribal school produced texts in at least seven languages and four scripts. When Ugarit fell to the Sea Peoples c. 1185 BCE, clay tablets were still in the kiln. One of the last letters reads: “The enemy ships have come; seven have appeared offshore.”
ORACC TCMA — Middle Assyrian texts excavated at Ugarit a small collection of Akkadian cuneiform tablets found at Ras Shamra, with transliterations, translations, and bibliography — traces of Assyrian contact reaching the Levantine coast
K. L. Younger Jr. (ed.), Ugarit at Seventy-Five (Penn State, 2007) — Towson ProQuest Ebook Central background reading for this section; see esp. Calvet on the city’s urban features, Bordreuil on the House of Urtenu archive, and Younger on the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition

c. 1400 – 1200 BCE · Ugarit

Ugaritic merchant archive — trade documents and the Baal Cycle together texts

In the same building (“Maison du Grand-Prêtre”) at Ugarit, the same trained scribes copied the Baal Cycle (mythological poetry treated at length in the course mythology discussions), commercial contracts, diplomatic letters in multiple languages, and practice tablets for the world’s first true alphabet. Mythology and commerce share a single scribal institution. The merchant who traded copper also knew the storm-god myths that would eventually reach Hesiod. The connection between the Baal Cycle and Hesiod’s storm-god narrative is a thread worth following across the course.
ORACC TCMA — Middle Assyrian texts excavated at Ugarit Akkadian tablets from Ras Shamra, with transliterations and translations
K. L. Younger Jr. (ed.), Ugarit at Seventy-Five (Penn State, 2007) — Towson ProQuest Ebook Central on the scribal and archival world see Bordreuil on the House of Urtenu; on Ugaritic myth see Wyatt and Pitard

c. 1400 BCE · Ugarit

The Ugaritic alphabet — the world’s first true alphabet writing

Ugaritic scribes adapt an alphabetic principle (one sign per consonant) to cuneiform tablet technology, producing history’s first alphabet — only 30 signs, learnable in weeks, compared with hundreds in standard cuneiform. This is the direct conceptual ancestor of the Phoenician consonantal script that the Greeks adapt c. 800 BCE. The course treatment of writing and literacy develops the full argument about the Greek alphabet and Homer.

1600–1200 BCE

c. 1600 – 1200 BCE · Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos

Mycenaean palace economy — Linear B and eastern trade

Mycenaean Greece develops a palace-centred economy documented by Linear B clay tablets (deciphered 1952 by Michael Ventris as an early form of Greek). The tablets record the redistribution of grain, olive oil, bronze, and textiles — but no literature, no myth, and no poetry. Mycenaean pottery appears across the eastern Mediterranean, including in quantity at Ugarit. The palace economies of Mycenae and Ugarit are commercial partners. Heinrich Schliemann’s 1876 excavation of the Mycenae shaft graves (Grave Circle A) found nineteen burials heaped with gold masks, weapons, and Minoan-style vessels — wealth that predates the citadel’s fortification walls by two centuries. Ancient DNA now shows Minoans and Mycenaeans shared most of their ancestry: the mainland elite absorbed Crete’s administrative system at least as much as it conquered it. Linear B records appear in the course discussions of foodways and mythology as well.

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Lecture 3, §V — Mycenaeans: the lecture sets the Schliemann graves and the ancient-DNA evidence side by side against a simple conquest narrative — the mainland citadels inherited a Minoan world already in place.

geographic context

Late Bronze Age palace centres and trade routes, c. 1500–1200 BCE

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Ugarit occupies the central node of the Late Bronze Age network, equidistant between Egypt, Mesopotamia, Cyprus (Enkomi), the Hittite empire (Hattuşa), and the Aegean palace centres. The Uluburun wreck (⚓) encapsulates this interconnected world in a single cargo.

Palace centres

Ugarit (central node)

Uluburun wreck site

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The Uluburun shipwreck, c. 1300 BCE — the Bronze Age in one cargo Discovered 1982 off Cape Uluburun (Turkey) at 44–61 metres depth. Cargo: ten tonnes of Cypriot copper ingots (oxhide shape); tin ingots of probable Afghan origin; ebony from sub-Saharan Africa; cobalt-blue, turquoise, and lavender glass ingots; Canaanite amphorae of terebinth resin; Baltic amber (>3000 km from source); Mycenaean pottery; and a gold scarab of Nefertiti. A Cypriot merchant’s tool kit and a set of balance weights were also found. A Syrian house mouse aboard, taken on by accident, points to loading at Ugarit itself, where Cypriot copper, Afghan tin, Egyptian gold and grain, and Aegean pottery all crossed the same quays; the Amarna letters, Akhenaten’s fourteenth-century diplomatic archive, show the ruler of Alashiya (Cyprus) apologising in one letter that his own copper shipment is short because plague has killed the men who work his mines. George Bass (INA, Texas A&M) directed eleven seasons of excavation. The cargo is the single most vivid physical proof of Bronze Age interconnection. INA — Uluburun excavation project page

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Lecture 3, §I — An Eastern Inheritance: Uluburun opens the lecture, alongside the Amarna letters and the Alashiya copper shortage — used there to show a world of palace economies, from the Nile to the Aegean, exchanging metals and goods under royal supervision: the system Crete joins, not invents. (The wreck also has its own student task in the Lecture 2 discussion document, where it closes the geography unit.)

The Bronze Age Collapse c. 1200 – 1100 BCE

c. 1185 – 1150 BCE · Eastern Mediterranean broadly

Ugarit, Hattuşa, and the Levantine palace cities destroyed collapse

Ugarit is destroyed c. 1185 BCE; the Hittite capital Hattuşa falls at approximately the same moment; dozens of Levantine coastal cities are burned or abandoned. The Ugaritic alphabet, palace trade archives, and the city’s entire scribal tradition vanish. The direct transmission route from Mesopotamian and Levantine civilisation to the Aegean world is severed. The causes remain debated: Sea Peoples raids, drought, internal revolt, earthquake, and the fragility of over-integrated trade networks all feature in Eric Cline’s systems-collapse model.
Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton, 2014)

1200–1100 BCE

c. 1200 – 1100 BCE · Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos

Mycenaean palace system destroyed — Linear B writing disappears

Pylos burns c. 1180 BCE; Mycenae and Tiryns are destroyed or sharply contracted. Linear B writing vanishes with the palace bureaucracies that used it. The Greek world contracts: population falls, long-distance trade collapses, and settlements revert to village scale. At Pylos alone, more than 1,200 tablets survive from this single final year: the kingdom’s roughly 2,000 km² was run from one palace through sixteen districts, with raw material issued to specialists under the ta-ra-si-ja system and tracked back rather than stockpiled — nearly 300 smiths across seventeen communities received bronze this way. At its head stood the wanax, below him the lawagetas; a single land register (tablet Er 312) sets the king’s own estate at thirty units of seed grain. The collapse disrupts the palace grain economy and the mythological transmission routes — both threads traced in the related course discussions.

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Lecture 3, §VI — Sandy Pylos: this is the lecture’s closing section in miniature — a kingdom legible only through the accident of its own destruction. Student Task B below works through the Pylos archive in detail.

⚡ Systems collapse, not simple destruction

Eric Cline’s analysis of the Bronze Age collapse (1177 B.C., 2014) identifies it as a “perfect storm” of compounding failures: the same hyper-connectivity visible in the Uluburun cargo made the system fragile. When trade networks break, palace economies lose the raw materials (Cypriot copper, Afghan tin) needed to produce the goods (bronze tools, weapons) needed to sustain armies needed to protect trade routes. The Uluburun cargo simultaneously illustrates the achievement and the vulnerability of Bronze Age interconnection.

Phoenician Revival & Greek Colonisation c. 1100 – 600 BCE

c. 1050 – 800 BCE · Tyre, Sidon, Byblos (Lebanese coast)

Phoenician city-states rebuild maritime trade — on a new model

Canaanite city-states on the Lebanese coast survive the collapse and reconstruct long-distance maritime trade on a new basis: not palace redistribution but merchant enterprise and colonial settlement. Phoenician ships reach Cyprus, the Aegean, North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and by c. 800 BCE the Atlantic coast of Spain. They carry purple-dyed textiles (porphyra, the origin of “royal purple”), glass, and metalwork — and with them their consonantal alphabet, which travels as a commercial tool, not an elite administrative system.

c. 825 BCE onward · Al-Mina, mouth of the Orontes River (southern Turkey)

Al-Mina — the Syrian emporion and Euboean contact point key site

Al-Mina is an archaeologically identified trading post where Greek (especially Euboean) pottery appears from c. 825 BCE. Robin Lane Fox (Travelling Heroes, 2008) argues this is the site of maximum Greek contact with the Near Eastern mythological world — Ugaritic and Aramaic traditions available at their most concentrated, 500 years after Ugarit’s fall. Lane Fox’s thesis that Hesiod’s cosmogony was assembled from stories heard by Euboean sailors at al-Mina is one of the most productive arguments to carry across the course.

1100–750 BCE

c. 1100 – 800 BCE · Greek Aegean broadly

The Greek Dark Ages — village scale, oral tradition, pastoral continuity

Following the Mycenaean collapse, the Greek world contracts sharply. Population falls, long-distance trade collapses, and writing disappears entirely. Village-scale communities and pastoral economies fill the gap. But oral tradition survives: the stories that will become Homer and Hesiod are composed and transmitted in exactly this period. The Greek Dark Ages are not darkness but a reorganisation at a smaller, more resilient scale — the kind of period that allows new cultural configurations to form without the constraints of a palace bureaucracy.

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Dark Age continuity — pastoral life as the bridge. The contraction of the 12th–9th centuries BCE is a return to village and pastoral configurations that had always coexisted with the palaces. Thessalian transhumance, the Pindus communities, and the herding economies of Arcadia demonstrate that rural and nomadic patterns persist as a structural reality throughout. When polis urbanism re-emerges, it is a new layer added on top of this still-functioning pastoral base, not a replacement for it.

c. 814 BCE · North African coast (modern Tunisia)

Carthage founded — Phoenician colonial model at its western limit

Tradition dates the founding of Carthage to 814 BCE by settlers from Tyre. Whether or not this exact date is accurate, Carthage becomes the greatest Phoenician colonial foundation and the dominant western Mediterranean commercial power from the 8th century BCE onward. The Phoenician and Greek colonial models run in parallel — and in competition — across the western Mediterranean for the next five centuries.

800–600 BCE

c. 750 – 550 BCE · Euboea, Corinth, Miletus

Greek colonisation — trade expansion as city-founding key date

Greek poleis plant colonies across the Mediterranean and Black Sea: Cumae (Italy, c. 740 BCE), Syracuse (Sicily, 734 BCE), Massalia (Marseille, c. 600 BCE), Olbia (Black Sea, c. 645 BCE), Naucratis (Egypt, c. 620 BCE). Each is simultaneously a trading post and a polis. Colonial trade wealth finances the architectural and intellectual flowering of the Archaic period. Miletus — the most prolific coloniser — also produces the first Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximander). The connection between a trading city and the birth of philosophy is explored in the course treatment of writing and literacy.

geographic context

Greek colonies, c. 750–500 BCE

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Greek poleis plant colonies across the Mediterranean and Black Sea from c. 750 BCE. Corinth founds Syracuse (734 BCE), one of the largest and most powerful western colonies. Miletus colonises the Black Sea; Massalia (Marseille) anchors the far west. Each colony carries its founding city's civic cults and constitution. The Phoenician colonial sphere (Carthage, Tyre, western Mediterranean) is shown separately in the map below.

Greek colonies

Corinth (founding metropolis)

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Phoenician expansion and trade routes, c. 11th–6th centuries BCE

Phoenician expansion map, World History Encyclopedia

The Phoenician colonial sphere and trade network from the 11th to 6th centuries BCE. Purple shading shows areas of direct Phoenician influence; dashed lines show principal trade routes. Phoenician foundations (Carthage, Utica, Gades) and origin cities (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos) are marked. The overlap between Phoenician westward expansion and Greek colonisation is visible in Sicily and the western Mediterranean. Map: World History Encyclopedia (worldhistory.org), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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Course theme: al-Mina as a convergence point for trade, mythology, and writing Al-Mina is where trade, mythology, and writing technology converge at the same place and moment: it is a trade emporion; the site where Euboean sailors encounter Near Eastern mythological traditions (Lane Fox’s thesis); and the point of contact with the Phoenician consonantal alphabet (Barry Powell’s argument). These three strands — each traced separately across this course — travel through the same networks.

The Polis, Persia, and Alexander c. 600 – 323 BCE

c. 550 – 330 BCE · From the Indus to the Aegean

The Achaemenid Persian Empire — the largest pre-Alexandrian trade zone

The Achaemenid empire creates a single administrative zone with royal roads, standardised weights and measures, and a functioning postal service from the Indus to the Aegean. Greek cities in Ionia are incorporated into it. Persian patronage of Phoenician merchant fleets integrates the eastern Mediterranean. Persepolis ration tablets record thousands of workers receiving standardised grain, wine, and beer — the same administrative logic as Uruk, now spanning a continent. Greek-Persian trade continues throughout the Persian Wars (490–479 BCE).

600–400 BCE

c. 700 – 300 BCE · Greece broadly

The polis — an urban form enabled by colonial trade wealth

The Greek polis is not an inevitable form. It emerges in the Archaic period partly because colonial trade generates surpluses that can support a citizen class, public architecture, and competitive civic culture. Athens, Corinth, and Miletus — all significant trading centres — are among the first and most culturally productive poleis. The polis is one outcome of the trade-city relationship, coexisting with village communities and pastoral economies that remain the majority experience for most Greeks throughout the classical period.

336 – 323 BCE · From Macedonia to the Punjab

Alexander’s empire — the largest single trade zone in ancient history synthesis

Alexander’s conquests recreate, at a vastly larger scale, the interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age: a single political zone, standardised coinage, Greek as administrative lingua franca, and new cities (over twenty “Alexandrias”) at strategic trade nodes. The empire is economically the heir of the Uruk, Bronze Age palace, and Persian systems. It fuses Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian traditions in the Hellenistic synthesis that becomes the direct ancestor of Rome, early Christianity, and the Byzantine world. Alexander’s conquests also carry the Greek alphabet and the philosophical tradition of the Axial Age across the known world — a thread the course treatment of writing and literacy pursues further.

336–323 BCE

Through the classical period

The polis as a special case — most Greeks are not Athenians

The cultural dominance of Athens in the literary and historical record should not obscure demographic reality. Most Greeks live in villages, farm marginal land, herd animals, and never attend an assembly or a symposium. The palace world that preceded the polis is legible to us in only a handful of administrative archives, the richest of which — the Linear B tablets from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos — survived only because the fire that destroyed the palace around 1200 BCE baked its working notes hard. One year’s records, preserved by catastrophe, are all we hold of centuries of Mycenaean administration. See Student Task C.

Palace Cities, Urbanism, and Long-Distance Trade

Student Activities