Sublime

None of the fragments have been found in their original context at Mycenae. In other words, we have no idea how they were originally used at the site. But the mere fact that they are at Mycenae, and nowhere else in the world, indicates that there is probably a special relationship between this site and Egypt during the time of Amenhotep III,

In 1987, Mario Liverani, of the University of Rome, laid the blame for the Collapse upon the concentration of power and control in the palaces, so that when they collapsed, the extent of the disaster was magnified. As he wrote, “the particular concentration in the Palace of all the elements of organization, transformation, exchange, etc.—a

The suggestion that we are looking at the documentation of an early fourteenth-century BC voyage from Egypt to the Aegean, rather than a record of Mycenaeans and Minoans coming to Egypt, seems plausible for the following fascinating reason. There are a number of objects with the cartouche (royal name) of either Amenhotep III or his wife Queen Tiyi

She suggested instead that “mounting internal conflicts and gradual decline, culminating in the final assault on the major political and religious foci of the city’s elite, provides the most plausible alternative framework for the explanation of the destruction and abandonment of Hazor.”

However, as we have seen, soon after 1200 BC, the Bronze Age civilizations did collapse in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Near East, and they exhibit all of the classic features outlined by Renfrew, from disappearance of the traditional elite class and a collapse of central administrations and centralized economies to settlement shifts,

The house itself has still not been completely excavated, but is already known to have covered at least one thousand square meters, so Yabninu must have been a reasonably successful merchant. The sixty or more tablets that were discovered within the ruins of this house are thought to have originally been kept on the second floor, and include

loess

“a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste.” Here, sometime around or after 1200 BC, “loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads—one of them found stuck in the side of a wall of a building—and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof