Missing evidence and evidence dismissed: Mycenaean archaeology and its struggle with contemporary written sources

Abstract

Ever since Emil Forrer's 1924 identification of Greek names in Hittite texts, scholars have clashed over the identification of Hittite ‘Ahhiyawa' as Greek ‘Achaea' – Greece. It is now generally agreed that the term somehow relates to the Mycenaean Greek world, but where precisely it should be sought, and if it referred to a specific region in the first place remains contested. Much of this debate is fuelled by the reference to a LUGAL.GAL, ‘Great King' of Ahhiyawa in two of these texts, and another three texts where the Ahhiyawan king is addressed as ‘brother' (a sign of parity and amiable relations between the correspondents). The term ‘Great King' was otherwise exclusively used to refer to the kings of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and the Hittites themselves; all of whom ruled extensive territories, comprised of several (previously independent) smaller polities.1 The notion that a Mycenaean king controlled an extensive territory, however, is incompatible with the archae-ological paradigm of several culturally similar, yet politically independent Myce-naean palace-states. As a result, archaeologists and Hittitologists have sought to dismiss the references to a Mycenaean Great King as Hittite misunderstandings of Mycenaean political reality, or merely as a result of political flattery, whereas the apparent absence of archaeological evidence for political unity was taken as conclusive evidence for the absence of a single Great King. Strangely, few have con-sidered the possibility that the archaeological paradigm itself may be flawed, and that the Hittite texts present a largely correct picture of the Mycenaean world. This paper will not only highlight some of the problematic assumptions that lie at the root of the paradigm, but also how groupthink and disciplinary divides have ham-pered our understanding of Aegean prehistory as a whole.