Knossos, Mycenae, Troy: The Enchanting Bronze Age and its Tumultuous Climax

Natale Barca

Mar 2023 · Oxbow Books

About this ebook

This work puts a particular emphasis on the mixing and osmosis of the first Mediterranean civilizations, with particular reference to the Minoan, Cycladic, Mycenaean, and Trojan, and on the causes of their decline, which are to be identified in a jumble of natural and human causes, and in a long-lasting, slow, but irreversible crisis. It takes into account that the Mediterranean Dimension of the Bronze Age is a garden in which many legends flourished, clearly distinguishing between myth and history, and always bearing in mind that legends are not to be taken literally (nonetheless, they often have a grain of truth). It does not aim to provide an exhaustive report but to compose a broad and evolutionary picture, in which the facts and their connections, which are deducible from archaeological evidence or from the accounts of ancient historians, find their place, in their consequentiality. Its originality lies not in the choice of the subject, but in the way of treating it. The author introduces and explains, in order to be read, and perhaps to get excited. Another characterizing element of Knossos, Mycenae, Troy is the wide use of the ‘historical present’ that is made there to represent events and construct the text, to reduce the reader’s distance from the narrated events, and facilitates their approach to them. This book aims to provide the reader with an overall picture of the cultures that laid the foundations of Western civilization, which is not generic, but rather detailed and updated, and which has scientific solidity.

About the author

Natale Barca was a visiting scholar researcher at University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, and an academic visitor at the University of London’s Institute of Classical Studies and is a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies (Roman Society), London. He is the author of thirteen monographs, many focused on the political and military history of the Roman Late Republic.