Practice question · Estimate
After the Mycenaean palaces burned, Linear B was forgotten. Roughly how many years were the Greeks illiterate?
Estimate on a scale from 0 to 1,000 (1000).
Hints
- Long enough that the alphabet, when it came, was borrowed fresh from Phoenicia.
- About four centuries.
Show the answer
400 (answers within ±80 count)
Why
~400 years. An entire technology of memory vanished, and when writing returned it was a different system borrowed from Phoenician traders. Literacy is not a ratchet, it can be lost, and it was.
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
- What actually happened in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200–1150 BCE?
- After the Bronze Age collapse, writing disappeared from Greece for roughly four centuries. Why would a script…
- 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.