The emergence of the state in the prehistoric Aegean

It is widely accepted that distinctive polities of an institutional complexity sufficient to consider as ‘states’ first appeared in the Aegean area shortly after c. 2000 B.C. Most scholars would also agree that the origins of these palace-centred societies of Minoan Crete cannot be understood without extensive reference to developments taking place within and beyond the Aegean during a long formative period spanning the late fourth and the whole of the third millennia B.C. Yet that is an era so remote that it lies well beyond the reach of even the most enthusiastic adherent of Homer as a source of information about the Bronze Age, beyond any demonstrable relevance of later Greek memory in myth and legend, well before the period to which the Mycenaean Linear B tablets refer – indeed, before the existence of written records of any sort in the region, at least in a form we can read at present. Such a dearth of documentary evidence, even of a very indirect or secondary character, might seem prima facie to damn the investigation of the emergence of the first states on Greek soil as inherently speculative and, to a degree, that is so; but in many respects the same or similar problems have to be faced in studying the later emergence of the Greek city-state. As Snodgrass has reminded us, the ancient Greek political analysts provide a wide range of ostensibly confident statements about the nature and aetiology of many early legal and religious institutions, yet they have scarcely anything to say about the appearance of the political entity of which they themselves claimed citizenship and they throw very little light on the origins of what they were analyzing. Indeed, he claims ‘it is doubtful how far, if at all, contemporary consciousness of the emergence of a “state” existed.’