THE WESTERN STRING IN THE LATE MBA AND LBA I-II: POPULATIONS AND ACCOUNT BALANCES

Abstract

Summary
Three Aegean islands – Melos, Thera, and Kea – between Crete and the eastern mainland of Greece have been singled out as
composing the Western String principal trade route during the Bronze Age (Fig. 1). Each has a single town and at least the
remains of a good harbor, and the towns have the archaeological evidence of out-of-the-ordinary wealth: fortification walls,
at least one monumental building, sophisticated fresco wall paintings in some of the buildings, and high-value imports. My
question is: How did such small islands with so few productive resources and populations, get so rich? My answer is that they
charged for port services, earning something like monopoly profits off their natural harbor facilities. I test this hypothesis with
the interruption of commercial shipping following the destruction of the middle island – Thera – by a volcanic explosion
around 1630 BCE. As the shipping through the remaining two islands tapered off, partly due to reduced demand from Crete
and partly due to emergence of new, work-around shipping routes, so did those two islands’ ability to sustain the monumentality
of architectural structures as earthquakes required repairs that increasingly came out of savings and shipping income
dwindled. Eventually the towns were abandoned.