SUMMARY OF LECTURES
The Greek Dark age or Ages' and Geometric
or Homeric Age (ca. 1200 BC–750 BC) are terms which have
regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial
civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek poleis in the 9th century BC.
These terms are gradually going out of use, since the former lack of
archaeological evidence in a period that was mute in its lack of
inscriptions (thus "dark") has been shown to be an accident of discovery
rather than a fact of history.[1]
The archaeological evidence shows a widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the eastern
Mediterranean world at the outset of the period, as the great palaces
and cities of the Mycenaeans were destroyed or abandoned. Around this
time, the Hittite civilization suffered serious disruption
and cities from Troy
to Gaza
were destroyed. Following the collapse, fewer and smaller settlements
suggest famine and depopulation. In Greece the Linear B
writing of the Greek language used by Mycenaean bureaucrats
ceased. The decoration on Greek pottery after ca 1100 BC lacks the
figurative decoration of Mycenaean ware and is restricted to simpler,
generally geometric styles (1000-700 BC). It was previously thought that
all contact was lost between mainland Hellenes and foreign powers
during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth;
however, artifacts from excavations at Lefkandi
on the Lelantine Plain in Euboea
show that significant cultural and trade links with the east,
particularly the Levant coast, developed from c 900 BC onwards, and
evidence has emerged of the new presence of Hellenes in sub-Mycenaean Cyprus
and on the Syrian coast at Al Mina.
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Fall of the Mycenaeans
From around 1200 BC, the palace centres and outlying settlements of
the Mycenaeans' highly organized culture began to be abandoned or
destroyed, and by 1050 BC, the recognisable features of Mycenaean
culture had disappeared. Many explanations attribute the fall of the
Mycenaean civilization and the Bronze Age collapse to climatic or environmental
catastrophe combined with an invasion by Dorians or by the Sea
Peoples or the widespread availability of edged weapons of iron, but
no single explanation fits the available archaeological
evidence.
[edit]
Mediterranean warfare and
the Sea Peoples
Around this time large-scale revolts took place in several parts of
the Eastern Mediterranean, and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms
were made as a result of economic and political instability by
surrounding people who were already plagued with famine and hardship.
Part of the Hittite kingdom was invaded and conquered by the
so-called Sea Peoples whose origins - perhaps from different parts of
the Mediterranean, such as the Black
Sea, the Aegean and Anatolian regions - remain obscure. The
thirteenth and twelfth-century inscriptions and carvings at Karnak and
Luxor
are the only sources for "Sea
Peoples", a term invented by the Egyptians themselves and recorded
in the boastful accounts of Egyptian military successes:[2]
The foreign countries...made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms...Their league was Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh.—[3]
A similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to invade Egypt
twice, once during the reign of Merneptah
about 1224 BC, and then again during the reign of Ramesses
III about 1186 BC.
[edit] Dark Age Culture
With the collapse of the palatial centres, no more monumental stone
buildings were built and the practice of wall painting may have ceased;
writing in the Linear B script ceased, vital trade links were lost, and
towns and villages were abandoned. The population of Greece was reduced,[4]
and the world of organized state armies, kings, officials, and
redistributive systems disappeared. Most of the information about the
period comes from burial sites and the grave goods contained within
them. To what extent the earliest Greek literary sources, Homeric epics
(8th-7th century) and Hesiod's Works and Days (7th century) describe
life in the 9th-8th centuries remains a matter of considerable debate.
The fragmented, localized and autonomous cultures of reduced
complexity are noted for such diversity of their material cultures in pottery styles (conservative in
Athens, eclectic at Knossos), burial practices and settlement
structures, that generalizations about a "Dark Age society" are
misleading.[5]
Tholos tombs are found in early Iron Age Thessaly
and in Crete but not in general elsewhere, and cremation
is the dominant rite in Attica, but nearby in the Argolid it was inhumation.[6]
Some former sites of Mycenaean palaces, such as Argos or Knossos,
continued to be occupied; other sites' experiencing an expansive "boom
time" of a generation or two before they were abandoned, James Whitley
has associated with the "Big-man social organization", based
on personal charisma and inherently unstable: he interprets Lefkandi
in this light.[7]
Some regions in Greece, such as Attica, Euboea and central Crete,
recovered economically from these events faster than others, but life
for the poorest Greeks would have remained relatively unchanged as it
had done for centuries. There was still farming, weaving, metalworking
and potting in this time, albeit at a lower level of output and for
local use in local styles. Some technical innovations were introduced
around 1050 BC with the start of the Proto-geometric style
(1050-900 BC), such as the superior pottery technology, which resulted
in a faster potter's wheel for superior vase shapes and the use of a
compass to draw perfect circles and semicircles for decoration. Better
glazes were achieved by higher temperature firing of clay. However, the
overall trend was toward simpler, less intricate pieces and fewer
resources being devoted to the creation of beautiful art.
During this time the smelting of iron was learnt from Cyprus and the Levant,
exploited and improved upon, using local deposits of iron ore previously
ignored by the Mycenaeans: edged weapons were now within reach of less
elite warriors. Though the universal use of iron was one shared feature
among Dark Age settlements,[8]
it is still uncertain when the forged iron weapons and armour achieved
superior strength to those that had been previously cast and hammered
from bronze. From 1050 BC many small local iron industries appeared, and
by 900 almost all weapons in grave goods were made of iron.
The distribution of the Ionic Greek dialect in historic times
indicates early movement from the mainland of Greece to the Anatolian
coast to such sites as Miletus, Ephesus,
and Colophon, perhaps as early as 1000 BC,
though the contemporaneous evidence is scanty. In Cyprus some
archaeological sites begin to show identifiably Greek ceramics,[9]
a colony of Euboean Greeks was established at Al Mina on the Syrian coast, and a reviving
Aegean Greek network of exchange can be detected from 10th-century Attic
Proto-geometic pottery
found in Crete and at Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor.[10]
Post-Mycenaean Cyprus
Cyprus was inhabited by a mix of "pelasgian" and Phoenicians, joined during this period by the
first Greek settlements. Potters in Cyprus initiated the most elegant
new pottery style of the 10th and 9th centuries, the 'Cypro-Phoenician'
'black on red' style[11]
of small flasks and jugs which held precious contents, probably scented
oil. Together with distinctively Greek Euboean ceramic wares it was
widely exported and is found in Levantine sites, including Tyre
and far inland in the late 11th and 10th centuries. Cypriote metalwork
was exchanged in Crete.
Society
It is likely that Greece during this period was divided into
independent regions organized by kinship groups and the oikoi or
households, the origins of the later poleis.
Excavations of Dark Age communities such as Nichoria
in the Peloponnese have shown how a Bronze Age town was abandoned in
1150 BC but then reemerged as a small village cluster by 1075 BC. At
this time there were only around forty families living there with plenty
of good farming land and grazing for cattle. The remains of a 10th
century building, including a megaron,
on the top of the ridge have led to speculation that this was the
chieftain’s house. This was a larger structure than those surrounding it
but it was still made from the same materials (mud brick and thatched
roof). It was perhaps also a place of communal storage of food and of
religious significance. High status individuals did in fact exist in the
Dark Age, but their standard of living was not significantly higher
than others of their village.[12]
Most Greeks did not live in isolated farmsteads but in small
settlements. It is likely that, as at the dawn of the historical period
two or three hundred years later, the main economic resources for each
family was the ancestral plot of land of the oikos, the kleros
or allotment; without this a man could not marry.[13]
Lefkandi
on the island of Euboea was a prosperous settlement in the Late Bronze
Age,[14]
possibly to be identified with old Eretria.[15]
It recovered quickly from the collapse of Mycenaean culture, and in
1981 excavators of a burial ground found the largest 10th century
building yet known from Greece.[16]
Sometimes called 'the heroon, this long narrow building (150 feet by 30
feet) contained two burial shafts. In one were placed four horses and
the other contained a cremated male buried with his iron weapons and an
inhumed woman, heavily adorned with gold jewellery.[17]
The man's bones were placed in a bronze jar from Cyprus, with hunting
scenes on the cast rim. The woman was clad with gold coils in her hair,
rings, gold breast plates, an heirloom necklace (an elaborate Cypriot or
Near Eastern necklace made some 200–300 years before her burial) and an
ivory handled dagger at her head. The horses appeared to have been
sacrificed, some appearing to have iron bits in their mouths. No
evidence survives to show whether the building was erected to house the
burial, or whether the 'hero' or local chieftain in the grave was
cremated and then buried in his grand house; whichever is true, the
house was soon demolished and the debris used to form a roughly circular
mound over the wall stumps.
Within the next few years and down to c 820 BC, rich members of the
community were cremated and buried close to the eastern end of the
building, in much the same way as Christians might seek to be buried
close to a saint's grave; the presence of imported objects, notable
throughout more than eighty further burials, contrast with other nearby
cemeteries at Lefkandi and attest to a lasting elite tradition.
End
The archaeological record of many sites demonstrates that the
economic recovery of Greece was well advanced by the beginning of the
8th century BC. Both cemeteries such as the Kerameikos
in Athens or Lefkandi and sanctuaries such as Olympia, recently-founded Delphi or
the Heraion of Samos, first of the colossal
free-standing temples, are richly provided with offerings including
items from the Near East, from Egypt and from Italy made of exotic
materials such as amber or ivory, while exports of Greek pottery demonstrate
contact with the Levant coast at such sites as Al Mina and with the region of the Villanovan culture to the north of Rome. The
decoration of pottery becomes more and more elaborate and includes figured
scenes which parallel the stories of Homeric Epic.
Iron tools and weapons become better in quality, while renewed
Mediterranean trade must have brought new supplies of copper and tin to
make a wide range of elaborate bronze objects such as tripod stands like those offered as
prizes in the funeral games celebrated by Achilles
for Patroclus.[18]
Other coastal regions of Greece besides Euboea were once again full
participants in the commercial and cultural exchanges of the eastern and
central Mediterranean, while communities developed which were governed
by an elite group of aristocrats rather than by the single basileus
or chieftain of earlier periods.[19]
New Writing System
By the mid- to late eighth century a new alphabet system was adopted
from the Phoenicians by a Greek with
first-hand experience of it. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician writing
system, notably introducing characters for vowel sounds and thereby
creating the first truly alphabetic (as opposed to abjad)
writing system. The new alphabet quickly spread throughout the
Mediterranean and was used to write not only the Greek language, but
also Phrygian and other languages in the
eastern Mediterranean. As Greece sent out colonies west towards Sicily
and Italy (Pithekoussae, Cumae), the
influence of their new alphabet extended further. The ceramic Euboean
artifact inscribed with a few lines written in the Greek alphabet
referring to "Nestor's cup", discovered
in a grave at Pithekoussae (Ischia) dates from c. 730 BC; it seems to be
the oldest written reference to the Iliad.
The Etruscans benefited from the innovation: Old Italic variants spread
throughout Italy from the 8th century. Other variants of the alphabet
appear on the Lemnos Stele and in the alphabets of Asia Minor. The
previous Linear scripts were not completely abandoned: the Cypriot syllabary, descended from Linear A,
remained in use on Cyprus in Arcadocypriot Greek and Eteocypriot inscriptions until the Hellenistic era.
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