What Factors Caused The Collapse Of Palatial Mycenaean Civilization

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What factors caused the collapse of palatial Mycenaean civilization and what theories support this collapse?

The Mycenaeans were a warlike people - warriors who set out from their fortified cities of Southern mainland Greece for the Mediterranean Sea, looking for metals such as copper, tin and gold. Establishing their society around 1700 BC, the Mycenaeans came to power at 1600 BC and ruled to 1100 BC, with the city of Mycenae as the focal point of their civilization. Flourishing for roughly five hundred years, the collapse of Mycenaean society occurred at approximately 1100 BC. Though there are various theories offered for the collapse, actual suppositions remain to be completely authenticated.

Theorists propounding as to what caused the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, present numerous suppositions. Desborough posed one of the theories in 1964. He cautiously suggested that an attack from the north by the Dorians instigated the collapse. While he theorized, Desborough was acutely cognizant of the reality that there was virtually no evidence, with the exception of the destruction levels and widespread abandonments themselves, for the presence of such invaders. A new type of sword, (from Central Europe, named the ‘Naue II’), and an inventive type of pin called a ‘fibula,’ (or safety pin), were both perceived to be Dorian trademarks by archaeologists.

Unfortunately, there is a principal protestation to this theory - only half a dozen of these goods were found for the fifty years that the Dorians were supposed to have rampaged. Furthermore, neither item appeared at the same time as the other, so they could not be related to a single invasion, a further objection to Desborough’s theory.

A decade earlier, in 1954, Andronikos posed a supposition that deals with a wholly different matter than Desborough’s theory. Andronikos proposed that the collapse came about as the result of extreme social unrest, with...