What Happened in Pylos?

Abstract

The question mark in the title is important. What happened in Athens is reasonably clear, what happened in Pylos is a question. Mycenae was captured and destroyed, Athens resisted capture and survived to be one of the chief links between Mycenaean and Hellenic Greece -between the "Homeric Age" and Homer. It would seem that Pylos was another such link: tradition connects the Asiatic Greeks with Pylos, and surely Homer had a rather ample store of Pylian reminiscence on which he could draw: yet Nestor's palace at Navarino was destroyed as utterly as Agamemnon's at Mycenae, and the site was left desolate. So far, practically no Protogeometric pottery has been found in Asiatic Greece: the inference, that the Hellenic Greeks did not go to Asia till near the beginning of the Geometric Age (that is to say, till well into the First Millennium), seems to me to accord with other likelihood. What was happening to the Pylians in the long space between the destruction of the Navarino palace in the twelfth century and the arrival of the Pylians in Asia in the tenth? Did they at once take refuge in Attica, and wait there until the migration to Asia?