Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History

tinued. This is a good indication that underneath the veneer of great wealth and stability the Mycenaean economy and government were shallowly rooted, essentially fragile systems.

We will probably never know for certain why the Mycenaean civilization ended so abruptly and with such finality. This we do know: with the end of the first stage of Greek civilization came the beginning of a new era, so different that when the Greeks looked back upon their Late Bronze Age past they could only imagine it as a kind of mythical dream world, a time when gods and humans mingled together.

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. 1994. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York and London: Norton. The history of textile manufacture as women's work and art from the Paleolithic through the Iron Age, including weaving techniques and myths about weaving. A major study of women's principal contribution to the ancient economy.

Chadwick, John. 1967. The Decipherment of Linear B. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press. The story of how the Linear B tablets were deciphered told by one of the principal investigators.

Chadwick, John. The Mycenaean World. 1976. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press. A lavishly illustrated description of the workings of the palace societies of Mycenaean Greece, with emphasis on the kingdom of Pylos.

Dickinson, Oliver. 1994. The Aegean Bronze Age. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press. A scholarly, but accessible, survey of all aspects of the prehistoric Aegean cultures from the Early Bronze Age to the collapse of Mycenaean civilization.

Drews, Robert. 1993. The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. An overview and detailed analysis of the latest theories of the fall of the great civilizations of the Late Bronze Age.

Hooker, J. T. Mycenaean Greece. 1976. London: Routledge. A good general introduction to the ancient Aegean societies.

McDonald, William A. and Carol G. Thomas. 1990. Progress into the Past. The Rediscovery of Mycenaean Civilization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. An account of the major and minor discoveries of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations written from the point of view of the archaeologists themselves, from Evans and Schliemann to the present.

van Tjerd Andel and Curtis Runnels. 1987. Beyond the Acropolis: A Rural Greek Past. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. A description of the topography, flora and fauna, and subsistence strategies of ancient Greek farming life.

Vermeule, Emily. 1972. Greece in the Bronze Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. One of the foremost experts of early Greek culture describes the land, art, culture, and life of prehistoric Greece from the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age.

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