The Middle Bronze Age in the Aegean: palaces on Crete, graves at Dimini

The frame

The Met's timeline for southern Europe, 2000-1000 B.C., gives "Middle Bronze Age, ca. 2000-1600 B.C." for Greece and opens it with the entry for ca. 2000 B.C.: the Minoans build great palaces at Knossos and Phaistos around "a great central court", and "the absence of fortification walls permits expansion of a complex as the need arises". The Dartmouth chronology names the period by subregion: "the Middle Helladic (abbreviated MH) period" on the mainland, Middle Cycladic phases MC I-III in the islands, and "the Middle Minoan (abbreviated MM) period" on Crete. Sources 1, 2.

Boundaries and overlaps

On Crete the round date and the ceramic sequence disagree. Dartmouth states that the palaces "were first built at the beginning of MM IB" and dates the "Protopalatial (or Old Palace) MM IB - MM IIB" phase ca. 1925/1900-1750/1720 B.C.; before it the "Pre-palatial EM I - MM IA" phase runs to ca. 1925/1900 B.C., so on Crete the first decades of the Met's Middle Bronze Age are still Pre-palatial. At the other end, the "Neopalatial (or New Palace) MM IIIA - LM IB" phase, ca. 1750/1720-1490/1470 B.C., crosses 1600 B.C. into the Late Bronze Age. Dartmouth also warns that absolute dates for the Aegean Stone and Bronze Ages "are not yet very reliable". Sources 2, 1.

On this site

Two pages are placed here. The article "Knossos and Phaistos: the first palaces of Crete" sets the Met's ca. 2000 B.C. against Dartmouth's ca. 1925/1900 B.C. and asks what a palace without walls means in these sources. The article "Dimini: six stone enclosures and two dates" is listed here only for a later phase of that hill: "In the Middle Bronze Age the hill was used as a cemetery, of which sixteen cist graves have been revealed to date", a phase dated by period name, without numbers. Not yet covered: a Middle Bronze Age object, and a settlement of the Middle Helladic mainland or of the Middle Cycladic islands. Sources 1, 2, 3.