1.  While the precise causes of this collapse are still debated, it seems clear that no one factor could have brought such widespread and profound effects.  The breakdown could thus have been the result of a systems collapse, as the ponderous palace bureaucracies were unable to deal with natural disasters or disruptions to international trade.  The end of this stage of Greek civilization led to the rise of a very different sort of era.  When later Greeks looked back to this period, they could only imagine a kind of mythical dream world, a time when gods and humans mingled together and great ventures were planned and executed.

2.  1250-1150 almost all Mycenaean sites torched  Sea Peoples?  Mass migrations?  Destruction of Hittites  Severe weakening of Egypt.  Philistines?--Peleset

3.  A people called the P- r-s-t (conventionally Peleset ). From a graphic wall relief at Medinet Habu, c.1150 BCE, during the reign of Ramesses III.

4.  The proposed connection between Mycenaean and Philistine culture was further documented by finds at the excavation of Ashdod, Ekron, Ashkelon, and more recently Gath, four of the five Philistine cities in Canaan. The fifth city is Gaza.  Especially notable is the early Philistine pottery, a locally made version of the Aegean Mycenaean Late Helladic IIIC pottery, which is decorated in shades of brown and black. This later developed into the distinctive Philistine pottery of the Iron Age, with black and red decorations on white slip known as Philistine Bichrome ware.

5.  At Ekron--a large, well-constructed building covering 240 square metres (2,600 sq ft),. Broad walls, designed to support a second story, and its wide, elaborate entrance leads to a large hall, partly covered with a roof supported on a row of columns.  In the floor of the hall is a circular hearth paved with pebbles, as is typical in Mycenaean megaron hall buildings; other unusual architectural features are paved benches and podiums.  Among the finds are three small bronze wheels with eight spokes. Such wheels are known to have been used for portable cultic stands in the Aegean region during this period, and it is therefore assumed that this building served cultic functions.

6.  Homer—Agamemnon’s return? Murder.  Telemachus at Ithaca? Civil revolt?  Internal revolts? If warriors away, did lower classes revolt?  Do the Iliad and Odyssey depict civil war?  Extenal revolts? Invaders from the outside?  Dorians—descendants of Heracles. Arrival or return (a coming down)?  Trojan War—massive fleet—deforestation?  Natural disaster: earthquake, flood, natural disaster, overpopulation, overfishing

7.  Mycenaean exports and luxury goods level off  Quality of pottery deteriorates  City walls strengthened in Mycenae and Tiryns  Disruption of trade (difficulty getting copper or tin)  1200 Mycenaean civilization disintegrates; 1100 had disappeared.  Fleeing Mycenaeans = Philistines.

8.  Wave of destruction of Mycenaean palaces. Indeed, the Pylos tablets recorded the dispatch of "coast- watchers", to be followed not long after by the burning of the palace, presumably by invaders from the sea.  Blegen wrote: "the telltale track of the Dorians must be recognized in the fire- scarred ruins of all the great palaces and the more important towns which... were blotted out at the end of Mycenaean IIIB."

9.  Possible that the Mycenaean world disintegrated through the feuding clans of the great royal families.  Some sort of internal struggle. Chadwick, after following and critiquing the development of different views, in 1976 settled on a theory of his own: there was no Dorian invasion.  Palaces destroyed by Dorians who had been in the Peloponnesus all along as a subservient lower class (Linear B: do-e-ro, "male slave"; latter Greek form: δο ῦ λος ), and now were staging a revolution.  Chadwick espoused the view that northern Greek was the more conservative language, and proposed that southern Greek had developed under Minoan influence as a palace language.

10.  Marriages political events  Menelaus became king by marrying Helen— matrilineal succession?  Don’t need Helen  Strategic location? Wealth from tolls? Fishing?  Trade with Black Sea area?  Grain?

14. KORFMANNPROBLEMS  Large city of 10,000  Bustling lower city  Sprawling metropolis— center for trade  Settlement walls, moats  A Venice of the Bronze Age  No Hittite imports;  Few Mycenaean and Cypriot goods  No evidence of Black Sea trade  No material evidence for 95% of lower city  Settlement wall never a city wall  Moat really a drainage ditch.

15.  Disappearance of Linear B; no bureaucracy  Reemergence of village  No fortified stone citadels  Basic pottery styles  Few indications of luxury trade  Little manufacturing.