According to Archeology magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, the discovery of a man’s grave filled with more than 2,000 artefacts outside the Palace of Nestor in Pylos, on the southwestern coast of Greece, has changed the way archaeologists view two great ancient Greek cultures. In the past, scholars debated long on the nature of the relationship between Mycenaean and Minoan civilisation, which centred on whether Mycenaean culture -and what is thought of as ancient Greek culture, dating to half a millennium later- was imported from Crete or was a homegrown phenomenon. But the exceptional discovery in Pylos of an intact tomb of the Mycenean warrior, later dubbed the “Griffin Warrior”, filled with over 2,000 artefacts suggests that the concept of competing cultures might obscure a deep interconnectedness.
“Archaeologists have a way of cutting the world up into well-bounded cultural entities, but it seems that in the Late Bronze Age new identities were being formed,” archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis of the University of Colorado Boulder stated, adding that “there used to be clear lines between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, but a lot of work now points out that these are our categories, not theirs.”
Excavations at Pylos and at sites all over mainland Greece have provided a great deal of evidence of the Mycenaeans in their prime. This research has revealed that at their peak they were tied into a world that encompassed most of the eastern Mediterranean, including ancient Egypt, the city-states of the Near East, and the islands of the Mediterranean. One such link, though, stands out as perhaps the most important: a deep connection to the island of Crete, which, in the Late Bronze Age, was inhabited by members of a civilisation that scholars call Minoan after the legendary King Minos, a civilisation very different from that found on the mainland.