The World of Homer - Mycenaean Greece
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Related resources
Homer and the Oral Tradition
Monsters of the Mediterranean
The Bronze Age Collapse
The Odyssey - The Long Journey Home
The Odyssey Goes to Hollywood
The Trojan War - Myth vs. History
What students do
- Explain who the Mycenaeans were and how their real Bronze Age world lies behind Homer's epics
- Describe the Cyclopean walls, the Lion Gate, and the shaft-grave gold at Mycenae
- Analyze what the Linear B tablets do and do not tell us about the Mycenaean world
- Read an excerpt of Pausanias' Description of Greece as a primary source on the ruins
What it covers
- Why the "Mask of Agamemnon" predates any Trojan-War-era king by roughly 300 years
- What Schliemann's 1876 excavation found at Mycenae, and what he got wrong
- How historians separate the real Bronze Age past from Homer's later poetic memory
Learning targets
- Explain who the Mycenaeans were and how their real Bronze Age world lies behind Homer's epics
- Describe the archaeology of Mycenae - the Cyclopean walls and Lion Gate, the shaft-grave gold, and the Linear B tablets - and what each does and does not tell us
- Analyze how historians separate the real Bronze Age past from the later poetic memory preserved in myth
From one teacher to another
I used to let the Mask of Agamemnon sit on a slide without mentioning it's roughly 300 years too old for any Trojan War king, and this lesson is where I finally correct that. Students spend most of the class with the real Mycenae instead: the walls, the Lion Gate, the shaft graves, and a Linear B tablet that turns out to record inventories, not epics. I want the myth-versus-history habit to start here, before the unit ever reaches Troy.
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