Writing came into existence for very mundane reasons: to record items and quantities. The very last cuneiform tablets are from Egypt in the first decades A.D. The first writing is attested around 3500 B.C., in the form of Sumerian pictographs, which would later evolve into cuneiform, which would become the standard for recording dozens of languages across Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran for three thousand years. Thousands of tablets of Linear B have been recovered from various Myceneaean sites, and have yielded a great deal of information about the civilization. After their conquest by the Mycenaeans it was replaced by Linear B, which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1953 and found to be an early form of Greek.

The Minoans had a written language, called Linear A, which to this day has resisted translation. After the collapse of the Mycenaeans Greece entered what are called the Dark Ages from 1100-750 B.C., when the cities were laid waste, art and science vanished, and stone palaces were replaced by mud and wattle shacks. The Egyptians under Ramses II managed to turn them back but at such a high cost that it took centuries to recover.

Three hundred years later the Mycenaeans themselves were destroyed, probably by the invaders known as the Sea Peoples, who laid waste to ancient civilizations across the region, including in Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, and Cyprus. The Mycenaeans took advantage of their weakened state and invaded, setting up a second power base for their civilization. spelled the end for them as a unified power. The Minoans rebuilt but never fully recovered, and an earthquake around 1450 B.C. A massive volcano exploded on Thera (present day Santorini) which caused widespread destruction across the eastern Mediterranean. Minoan civilization eventually collapsed. At the height of their power the Mycenaeans entered mainland Greece from the northwest, conquering the previous inhabitants and settling in the Peloponnese, the southern part which a thousand years later would be the land of the Spartans. They were a seafaring people, confident enough in their navy that their cities were unfortified.

Before the Mycenaeans there were the Minoans, who built a wide-ranging empire based on their capital of Knossos on the island of Crete.

The Mycenaean World by John Chadwick