Page 12 - Resources

One way archaeologists can tell that there is a class of rich people whose children

inherit their wealth is by finding graves with children buried in them who have gold
jewellery and bronze tools and weapons with them. Can you see why this shows us
that there was a rich class?

Lerna is an example of an Early Bronze Age village that has been excavated. Like

Dimini, Lerna had a big house in the centre, at the top of the hill, which may have
been the house of the chief. This house is called the House of the Tiles, because it
had clay tiles for the roof. Lerna also had many baskets which had been sealed with
a special mark pressed into a lump of clay (project idea). This shows that people

cared about protecting their property so it would not be stolen.

Lerna also had big stone walls, built with defensive tricks to make it hard for invaders
to break in. But around 2100 BC, just as the people of Lerna were in the middle of

rebuilding these walls to make them even stronger, some new people invaded Greece
and burned down the whole town. Many other towns all over Greece and much of
Europe were also destroyed around this time.

Late Bronze Age Greece

By around 1600 BC, the Greeks had gotten completely mixed with the
earlier Lerna people, and began to move on to bigger things. First, they

started to get to know the other people living around the Mediterranean
Sea, especially the Phoenicians (foy-NEE-shans), the Cretans, and the
Egyptians. They seem to have started to take jobs as soldiers for the Egyptians, who
paid them in gold.

Mask of Agamemnon
And they started to buy things from the Phoenicians (or
Canaanites) with their gold. Greek graves from this time

excavated at Mycenae (my-SEEN-ay) have a lot of gold cups and
jewellery and beautiful swords in them, which are now in the
National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. The Greeks of this time are

sometimes called the Myceneans (my-sin-AY-ans) after this site.

Lion Gate at Mycenae
As they got to know these other people, the Greeks began to copy their ways of
doing things. The Greeks started to have kings instead of village headmen.

(Greek Grandeur, Hebrew Heart) 10