The Mycenaeans   2000 BC - 1100 BC
The last period of Aegean civilization, the two and one-half centuries following 1450 B.C. when the center of Aegean political power and culture lay on the Greek mainland, is called Mycenaean after its most important site at Mycenae.  The legendary King Agamemnon ruled Mycenae.

History
About 2000 B.C. the first Indo-European Greek tribes entered Greece.
They came from the grasslands of southern Russia.
They absorbed the earlier settlers.
They ruled from strongly fortified citadels at Mycenae, Pylos, Athens, and other sites.
By 1600 B.C. the Mycenaeans had adopted much of the culture of the Minoans.
Center of Aegean civilization shifted to the Greek mainland.

Cities
Mycenae, Thebes, Athens, Tiryns, and Pylos were regional towns.

Expansion
They planted  colonies in the eastern Mediterranean.

Clothes
Mycenaean women adopted Cretan fashions.
They added a variety of jewelry from bracelets to earrings.

Social Order
A king, the wanax.
A warrior caste, the heqetai.
A class of slaves or serfs, the doeroi and doerai.
Priests and priestesses of particular divinities , as well as "slaves" of divinities.
A series of local administrative officials (koreter, prokoreter, possibly also quasileus) and possibly local councils (geronsia).

People
The bulk of the population lived in scattered villages.
They worked either communal land or land held by nobles or kings.
The nobles were under the close control of the kings.
Landowners gave the king horses, chariots, weapons, wheat, farm animals, honey, and hides.
In exchange the landoners received protection.

Warriors
They remained warlike.
They used large hide shields with wooden frames, spears, and swords in battle. 
The leaders wore bronze armor.
They plied the seas as raiders as well as traders.
They conquered Knossos about 1450 B.C.

Food
Mycenaeans relied on hunting to get meat. 
They hunted rabbit, deer, boar, bulls, and birds.

Government
The Mycenaean centers were fortified palaces and administrative centers.
The main feature of these palaces was the megaron.
The Megaron was a throne room. 
The king held council meetings in here.
Administrative records were kept daily by a large number of scribes.
Records of the disbursement of grain and wine as wages.
The collection of grain and wine as taxes.

Trade
The most important item of income was olive oil.
It was operated as a royal monopoly.

Troy
In 1870 Schliemann began excavations at the legendary site of Troy, where he unearthed nine buried cities, built one on top of another. He discovered a treasure of golden earrings, hairpins, and bracelets in the second city (Troy II), which led him to believe that this was the city of Homer's epics.  Excavations in the 1930s, however, showed that Troy II had been destroyed about 2200 B.C., far too early to have been the scene of the Trojan War, and that Troy VIIa, clearly destroyed by human violence about 1250 B.C., was probably the one made famous by Homer. Neither the view that Troy was the victim of commercial rivalry nor the other widely held theory that it was destroyed by Achaean pirates seeking booty corresponds to Homer's view that the Trojan War was caused by the abduction of Helen, queen of Sparta, by the Trojan prince Paris.  Led by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, the wrathful Achaeans besieged Troy for ten long years. Homer's Iliad deals only with a few weeks during the tenth year of the siege.

The Fall Of Mycenaean Civilization
Within 100 years after the Trojan War, most of the Mycenaean fortress-palaces were destroyed.
About 1200 B.C. the Dorian Greeks invaded Greece.
Their weapons were made of iron instead of bronze.
Pylos was the first of the Mycenaean strongholds to fall.
Linear B archives contain references to preparations to repel the invaders. (1)
We find orders directing women and children to places of safety.
Instructions to armorers, "rowers," and food suppliers.
The preparations were in vain, however.
Pylos was sacked and burned.
Destruction of the other major Mycenaean citadels soon followed.
Mycenaean refugees found a haven at Athens and in Ionia on the western coast of Asia Minor.

Dark Ages 1200 BC - 700 BC.
Began after the fall of the Mycenean civilizations and ended with the readoption of writing.
After the Trojan Wars the Mycenaeans went through a period of civil war.
The country was weak and a tribe called the Dorians took over.
Some speculate that Dorian with iron weapons laid waste the Mycenaean culture.
From c. 1200 to 750 BC, the Greeks lived a sedentary, non-urbanized, agricultural life.
Many villages were abandoned.
It seems likely that many Greeks returned to a nomadic life in small tribal groups.
Many Greeks in this period took to the sea and migrated to the islands in the Aegean.
They were soon followed by the Dorians.

[Footnote (1): See Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), ch. 5, "The Last Days of Pylos."]