Transport and Travel in the Mycenaean World

Between about 1700 and 1050 BCE, travel linked settlements, citadels, coastal landing places and islands across mainland Greece and the Aegean. During the palatial centuries, especially around 1400–1200 BCE, bridges improved some overland routes while ships carried people and heavy cargo between regions. These journeys were part of the work and obligations of daily life in the Mycenaean world.

Roads across the Argolid

The clearest surviving road structures cluster in the Argolid, in the northeastern Peloponnese. Near Kazarma, three Mycenaean bridges crossed ravines on roads connecting the Epidaurus region with major centers such as Mycenae and Tiryns. The best-known Kazarma bridge dates to about 1300 BCE. Its large, roughly shaped limestone blocks were fitted without mortar; this heavy masonry carried the roadway across a break in the ground, allowing travelers and loads to continue along the route. This road connection between the centers and Epidaurus shows how bridge building tied local passages into a regional route.

At Tiryns, a 47-metre approach ramp carried people up from the plain to the eastern entrance, about 4.7 metres wide. Deeper inside, the Great Gate had a four-metre threshold and double wooden doors that could be secured with a crossbar. The ramp and successive gateways channelled movement through the fortified citadel; passages and courtyards then connected the entrance with the palace, while a central street served homes, workshops and stores in the lower citadel.

A terrain-based study of Mycenaean roads compares possible routes around Nichoria, Kazarma and Berbati. Its models show how road traces and the assumed effort of travel shape a route, helping explain how local paths connected settlements.

Overland freight could travel in ox-drawn wagons. Thomas Palaima notes that oxen, usually yoked in pairs, were the principal draught animals for farm and transport wagons across the Balkans and Crete by the second millennium BCE. He also describes wagon models from early second-millennium Anatolia and Crete.

A chariot was a horse-drawn wheeled vehicle. A Knossos delivery tablet, dated about 1400–1375 BCE, records the palace assigning one, a horse and a cuirass to Triopas. A cuirass is protective body armor; the entry records military equipment. Nearly four hundred Late Helladic III chariot kraters, mixing bowls painted with horse teams and vehicles, were made on the mainland; some reached Cyprus and the Levant.

People assigned to ships

At Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese, clay tablets from the palace archive around 1200 BCE record how local men were assigned to crews. In a study of Linear B, the Greek script used for these records, scholar Thomas G. Palaima identifies tablet An 610 as a list of rowers grouped by locality and status. Its preserved lines name 569 men, with further entries lost. Palaima interprets the list as likely connected with military manpower. Another tablet, An 1, lists thirty rowers from five localities assigned to Pleuron; he reads them as one ship’s crew. The records show officials organizing men from several communities for service at sea.

Bulk cargo between Crete and the mainland

Transport stirrup jars were a common Mycenaean container for liquids such as oil and wine. The Met’s 13th-century example, just 8.5 centimetres tall, illustrates the paired handles that give the vessel type its name; the larger transport jars studied at Tiryns document cargo movement. Tiryns, a coastal citadel in the Argolid, has yielded more than four hundred transport vessels and fragments, including stirrup jars and Canaanite jars, from deposits dating roughly 1300–1070 BCE. Most of the transport stirrup jars in the studied group belong to the final palatial phase around 1200 BCE.

Petrographic comparison of minerals in clay with geological sources traced about two-thirds of the stirrup jars studied at Tiryns to Crete, especially the Chania plain in western Crete and the western Mesara in south-central Crete. Their concentration at Tiryns links a mainland receiving center with Cretan production areas across the sea. Some jars from western Mesara also reached Tiryns after the palatial period, showing that this connection continued as political organization changed.

Some stirrup jars carry short Linear B inscriptions painted before firing, including personal or place names. The Tiryns study’s authors interpret a portion as possible palace-directed contributions, or tribute: goods supplied under an obligation. A jar could thus carry liquid and marks used to identify its place or context of collection.