Mycenaean Religion: Which Gods did the Mycenaean Greeks Worship?

Mycenaean Greeks, much like their successors, were very religious and held their gods in the highest of regards. In this video, we go through the Bronze Age origins of the famed ancient Greek Pantheon.

* This is the fixed version of the video. Thanks to the channel supporters for noticing the Potnia mistake!

✅ Please SUBSCRIBE for more content.

☑️ Follow WanaxTV:

▶️ Machinma:
Total War Saga: Troy
Total War ROME II - Emperor Edition
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

🎞️ Directed, narrated & animated by WanaxTV

📜 Sources & Further Read:
Homer: Iliad
Wood, Michael (1985): In Search of the Trojan War
Chadwick, John (1976): The Mycenaean World

#mycenaeangreece #ancientgreece #achaeanhistory #bronzeage #greekmythology

[covenawhite]

It is amazing how we translated the language of such an ancient culture

[-Anarion-]

07:35 Human sacrifices were, at the very best, shunned. This was mostly a "horror" element, and something that forebode the fall of mighty Agamemnon. That he had to sacrifice a human, and his daughter at that... It also shows how trapped he was in this war. He had mobilized a vast army, so many kings and heroes, and they were stranded before they even started.

[beyondborderfilms]

0:52 Early Greek speakers are believed to have emerged in the area what is today Greece.
Me: you don't say?

[rawru]

Zeus likely evolved from the Proto-Indo-European god Dyeus Phter, "Sky Father". The Dyeus name evolved to become Zeus and Phter became the name Jupiter.
The -meter part from Demeter might have come from the Proto-Indo-European word for mother, mehter, but there's some discussion on that still.

[ASAS-dnve]

In Lithuanian (old Indo -European language) the wife of our president is called ponia Diana Nausediene. Ponia means Mistress and is used to every married or older woman. The Lady of Grain would be Grudu Ponia, etc.

[Massimo.-zjqy]

Greeks on 31 december 1000 BC: poseidon
Greeks on 1 January 999 BC: *AND THEN ALONG CAME ZEUS*

[duskfallthreesixfive]

Awesome and informative video but just one thing I’d like to point out is that Apollo was like Aphrodite a foreign deity who was later adopted into the Hellenic Pantheon. His name has not been found within our current corpus of tablets.

The earliest references to Apollo actually come from the related but non-Greek Anatolian languages, he started off as the bringer of plagues as stated in both Anatolian sources and the Iliad. Paean, a separate god whose name was later used for both Apollo and his son of Asclepius, god of medicine, however is attested in Linear B.

Paean is the Greek god of healing who served as the physician to the gods. He makes a brief appearance in the Iliad as a healer. Apollo didn’t become a healer until much later after which he took Paean’s name as an epithet, before that he only made people sick. Asclepius who rose to prominence later on as the god of medicine also took on Paean’s name as an epithet. Despite Apollo and Asclepius later using Paean’s name as an epithet, they are in fact three separate deities with separate origins.

Also I wish you’d have mentioned Diwia aka Dione, the original wife of Zeus who’d already been sidelined by Hera during Mycenaean times. Zeus and Hera are even attested in Linear B on a tablet as a couple together with their forgotten son Drimios. In later times her worship was largely restricted to Dodona as Dione and in Pamphylia as Diwia. The names Dione and Diwia are both female forms of Zeus but in different dialects. Pamphylia in southern Anatolia was colonized by the Mycenaeans and became isolated from the rest of the Greek world after the Bronze Age Collapse.

Oh and this one’s a bit more mysterious but there’s also Posidaeia, Poseidon’s first wife who was cast aside for Amphitrite by the Archaic Period, however it’s possible she survived for a time in certain locales as well. I’m pretty sure I read about a form of her name surviving on Naxos and that she’d remained his wife there instead of Amphitrite. Not 100% on the validity of that though.

Anyway great video overall and I apologize if it sounds like I’m nitpicking as that’s not my intention. Keep up the good work!

[laurentiupacioglu]

@wana tv....would you like to make a video documentary about thracians or ilirians? they are only a few history documentaries about them and their origin....thank you..

[mercianthane]

I think this video could've been longer, because there is so much to talk.

Let me add some information, tho I do not claim to be a authority in this subject, but I have read articles and books about this.

Indeed, Poseidon was the most revered deity because the mycenaeans were a seafaring civilization. The sea became their main road, the way they took to establish connections, colonies in other parts of the Middle East. Makes sense that Poseidon was the most worshipped deity in those days. He seems to have been the personification of the otherworldy sea.

Zeus was a distant deity. Greeks knew about him but he was not a god with who you could have a special relationship. This is evident in the Vedas where Dyaus Pita, the Sky Father of the Vedic religion, is scarcely mentioned. The Indo-European Dyeus Pater was a god which indo-europeans did not truly worshipped, they hold respect towards the Father of the Gods, and they knew he was the personification of heavens, and such tradition was carried to the Greeks, an IE folk. Zeus became highly important and the main god of the greeks because he acquired the thunderbolt after the Mycenaeans were exposed to canaanite religions where Baal was ruler of the gods, the thunderer and giver of rain. Thus Zeus, in the bronze age was, possibly just the God that personified the Heavens and Laws, but he was not the thunder god.

There is no Hades figure in Mycenaean religion. Hades was, most likely, just the Underworld and the ruler there was Persephone alone. This is a very IE trope: the Underworld is ruled by a woman and she is death itself.

[Fedmarti]

Thanks for another great video.
Subscribe, voted, and commented.

[theanimeunderworld]

Honestly surprised Poseidon wasn't still king

He has his brothers' powers and his own over the sea so he'd be more powerful

[vlŭxvŭ]

Wish you went more indepth with the Indo-European origin of Mykenian deities and religion.

[ancientsitesgirl]

Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for this episode🧜‍♂️🦉🏺

[CLPth]

Wish you would have gone into detail about the indo-european origins of most of these deities.

[dravenamor]

Paean is not proven to be Apollo so is Apollo truly in the Mycenaean text?

[alexeysaphonov]

If one wants to talk any religion must understand that the religion is an order of certain rites which are connected with seasonality, human life cycle and economy (hunter-gearheres, agriculture, pastoralism, nomadic posteralism, fising, maritime life) and technology (e.g. textiles production, metal processing).

E.g. greece religion is an amalgomation of many similar rites (Zeus, Perseus, Heraclis, Theseus are doing essencially the same thing: killing a "dragon" e.g. Typhon, Hydra, Medusa and retriving with some stuff) of many pilicies which are themseld amalgamation of early anatolian farmers and later migrants from pontic step which were system similar to that which reflected in vedas or edas or in Rome grounding myth.

[nicklagoudakis]

I don't think it's accurate to say Poseidon and Hades were originally the same god who later became two

Because Pausanias preserves much older accounts and Hades is a separate entity from Poseidon.

And Poseidon in this story appears as an underworld river god ALONG with Hades being the underworld ruler.

Besides even when Hades was the ruler of the Underworld, other underworld gods existed anyway. And Poseidon appears as an underworld god, not as the ruler of it, so again, Hades can and most likely does exist in Mycenaean Greece. (Poseidon is NOT described as underworld ruler in linear B, but as an underworld deity generally)

So I think it's not True that Poseidon and Hades were originally the same person who later became two but always were two different gods.

They were separate in Pausanias and Pausanias preserves those old Mycenaean accounts, So Hades DOES exist in Mycenaean Greece.

[youlamatou]

It's Άrtemis, with the stress on the first syllable.

[mikayelalikhanyan]

Speak in long song like sentences that sounds like a song

[oskareriksson]

Yeah the Mycenaean religion was a more chronic and primitive version where several deities present later was absent, and where some deity later disappeared and his name was taken by other deities as a pseudonym, like enuvarijo with ares or pajan with Apollo.(Apollo was probably was an Asian or balkanic deity, in his place there was pajan or pajawon I don't remember. And in Delphi there was probably a female chronic oracle, maybe the death oracle of Dodona preserved something of these original prehistoric cults. The religion change with the centuries (just look at us our Christianity isn't the same of even 100 years ago when all was in Latin, at least for us Catholics, and where the church had a more traditional and reactionary line, like the church of 1870 when the Italian troops occupied Rome suppressing de facto the papal state, had few to do with the church of the XII century. Religion change as the social conditions change. Same the mycenaeans and Minoan religion: centered around a palace elite, without real temples but with cult rooms and cult open spaces (look Minoan peak sanctuaries) with an elite to pratice it that was strictly linked with the power in the palace. The religion of the dark ages was less centralized and when the writing come back in Greece in 9th or 8th century bc and the archaic Greek civilization born, the religion was changed for ever. As the Greek religion of the 9th century bc isn't the Hellenistic one. Not exactly the same. Too centuries to separate their states of mind and social conditions.