Practice question · Multiple choice
After the Bronze Age collapse, writing disappeared from Greece for roughly four centuries. Why would a script be lost when the population was not?
Hints
- Ask who could read and write in a Mycenaean palace, and why.
- A skill needs a use to be passed on.
Show the answer
D. Because Linear B was a palace tool with nothing left to administer
Why
Narrow, institutional literacy dies with its institution. When Greece wrote again it borrowed an alphabet from Phoenicia rather than recovering Linear B, the chain of transmission had genuinely broken.
Practise The Bronze Age Collapse
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Bronze Age Collapse
- After the Mycenaean palaces burned, Linear B was forgotten. Roughly how many years were the Greeks illiterate?
- What actually happened in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200–1150 BCE?
- Drought, famine, earthquakes and trade disruption are all attested around 1200 BCE. Why do historians treat…
- The Bronze Age collapse is often blamed on a single cause, drought, invaders, earthquakes. Why does the…
- The Sea Peoples are now generally regarded as the single cause of the Bronze Age collapse.
- Why did interconnection make the Late Bronze Age world fragile rather than resilient?
- Complete the account of the Ugarit tablet.
- Sort each factor: a plausible stressor in the collapse, or a misreading of it?
- Order the unravelling.