Mycenaean civilization emerged on the southern Greek mainland in the 17th century BCE, after Minoan influence had peaked, and lasted until the Bronze Age order collapsed around 1200 BCE. It takes its name from Mycenae, the great walled citadel in the Argolid; but the civilization was a network of palace centers including Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, and Athens.

Mycenaean rulers lived behind 'cyclopean' walls — stones so massive that later Greeks believed only Cyclopes could have laid them. Shaft graves yielded gold death masks, bronze weapons, and ivory ornaments. The most famous is the gold mask Heinrich Schliemann named the 'Mask of Agamemnon' in 1876 — though it actually predates the legendary Trojan War by three centuries.

The civilization's real legacy became clear when Linear B script was deciphered. In 1952 Michael Ventris and John Chadwick showed the syllabary recorded an early form of Greek — meaning Greek has an unbroken tradition reaching back a millennium before the classical period, not the shorter lineage previously assumed. The tablets list taxes, inventories, and divine names, proving the meticulous record-keeping of a palace economy.

Mycenaean culture overlapped chronologically with the Hittites; diplomatic contact between the two, probably under the name Ahhiyawa, surfaces in Hittite archives. Troy stood on the Anatolian coast just south of the Dardanelles — the western edge of Hittite influence. The historical kernel of the war Homer described in the Iliad likely echoes this friction between Mycenaean Greeks and Anatolian powers. After 1200 BCE the Mycenaean palaces fell one by one; writing was forgotten, population shrank, and Greece entered a 'Dark Age' lasting four centuries.