Through the epics of
the
Greek poet Homer, tales of an "age of heroes"
have been passed down
through millennia. In The
Odyssey and The
Iliad the poet told of an era
dominated by aristocratic warlords
who bore ornamented weapons and commanded
well-organized, armored chariot
troops. This "golden age" culminated in the
legendary Trojan War,
fought between Troy, located in what is now
northwestern Turkey, and Mycenaean
Greece.
Homer himself, however,
lived four centuries after the Trojan War, in a
time when the communities
around the Aegean were populated by little more
than farmers and shepherds. The
tools of the day were not finely-wrought gold
nor silver nor bronze, but
crudely forged of iron. Nevertheless, Greeks of
Homer's time—the eighth century
BC—were surrounded by powerful reminders of a
more magnificent, more prosperous
past. Mighty walls, some more than seven meters
(22') thick, built of boulders
two meters in diameter, jutted out of the soil
in some places. Every now and
then, a collapsed grave would reveal treasures
of gold jewelry, silver vessels,
beautifully painted pottery and decorated
weapons.
Since the Middle Ages,
however, Homer's historical accuracy has been in
question. It was not until
late in the last century that archeologi-cal
excavations around the
Mediterranean began to show that Homer had
indeed drawn, at least in part, on
real events.
Today, we know that
many
sophisticated feudal societies ruled the lands
around the eastern Mediterranean
between 1700 and 1200 BC, the Late Bronze Age.
The interior of Anatolia— now
part of modern Turkey—was controlled by the
centrally organized Hittite state,
whose Great King resided in Hattusa near the
Kizihrmak River (See Aramco World,
September-October 1994). It was also in this era
that in Egypt, the pharaohs of
the New Kingdom began construction of the famous
temples at Luxor, Karnak and
Abu Simbel. In Greece, small yet rich and
influential kingdoms made up the
Mycenaean civilization, which we have named
after its most famous archeological
site, Mycenae. Likewise, Syria and Palestine
were the home of numerous states
ruled by aristocrats and lesser chieftains.
At times these states
of
diverse sizes and powers were allied to one
another, and at other times they
fought. In most, the political system was
characterized by a palace
administration supported by the relatively new
development of writing. In
nearly all, autocratic rulers oversaw
professional armies and carried out the
exploitation of economic opportunities at home
and abroad. Most had
well-developed social hierarchies in which
specialized professions produced
goods of extraordinary quality. This stimulated
far-reaching international trade
throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
Modern excavations in
the
eastern Mediterranean region have also provided
evidence of the sudden, violent
demise of these otherwise thriving civilizations
of the Late Bronze Age. Within
a few years—or decades, at the most—some of
these nations collapsed completely,
with the large and powerful Hittite state in
central Anatolia disappearing most
suddenly of all. From Troy in the northwest, to
Ugarit on the coast of Syria,
and southwest to the Nile Delta, unidentified
attackers razed and burned
international trade centers and port cities.
After the assaults, most of the
shattered cities were either abandoned or
rebuilt only on an insignificant
scale. All across the eastern Mediterranean,
civilizations that had been shaped
by aristocrats became societies of herdsmen and
shepherds. When the fighting
was over, entire languages and scripts had
vanished.
This sudden collapse is
one
of the most dramatic events in the early history
of the Mediterranean, and many
archeological mysteries surround it. First,
there is the Homeric account of the
Trojan War, which would have to be placed within
this time of crisis if one
accepts that The
Odyssey and The
Iliad contain at least
a kernel of historic truth. The second group of
events that connects logically
with this historical turning point is the
invasions of the so-called "Sea
People." Coming, it seems, out of nowhere and
lacking any obvious motive,
it was these united clans that so successfully
attacked throughout the region.
Despite numerous scholarly attempts to identify
them, we still do not know
exactly who the Sea People were, where they came
from, why they attacked, and,
finally, where they disappeared after their
raids. Scholars are even uncertain
whether the Sea People's existence was a cause
or an effect of the political
collapses. Were the Sea People conquerors,
pirates, deserters, or refugees?
Our knowledge of the
Sea
People's raids rests on texts from Anatolia,
Syria and Egypt. The name
"Sea People" is, however, a modern expression
introduced in 1881 by
the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero. The
Egyptian inscriptions themselves
usually refer to the names of the individual
attacking tribes, who are said to
have come "from the midst of the sea" or "from
the islands."
What we are calling "Sea People" were clearly
separate states or
tribes who had formed a military alliance to
attack the Near East and Egypt.
The reliefs depicting
the
attacks of the Sea People, carved on the walls
of the mortuary temple of
Pharaoh Ramses III in Medinat Habu, near
present-day Luxor, are also the
earliest known illustrations of naval battle
scenes. From these walls we
know—at least approximately—what the Sea People
looked like, how they dressed,
what kinds of weapons they used, and what kinds
of ships they sailed. We even
know some of their names. But to learn anything
of their motives we have to
examine the historical context of their raids.
According to the
inscriptions, the Sea People first appeared in
about 1208 BC, the fifth year of
the reign of Pharaoh Merenptah. At this time,
Egypt was facing attacks by
Libya, its archenemy to the west, which was
approaching the frontier
accompanied by a number of allies described as
"northerners." On the
famous Victory Stela, found in 1896 at the
Temple of Merenptah in Thebes,
Merenptah declared he had overwhelmed the enemy,
and provided a list of the
allies of Libya, whom we now refer to
collectively as the Sea People: Shardana,
Lukka, Meshwesh, Teresh, Ekwesh and Shekelesh.
Most of these tribes apparently
came from the Aegean, and we do not know why
they fought on the side of Libya.
Nor can we be sure Merenptah's claim to have
overpowered them is fully
justified because, after this battle, Egypt's
domestic affairs gradually
degenerated nearly to the point of civil war.
Possibly because Egypt was so
preoccupied with its internal problems that it
failed to fulfill its treaty
obligations to come to Hatti's aid, it managed
to survive relatively unharmed
the upheavals that took place shortly thereafter
all around the eastern
Mediterranean.
Thirty years after
Merenptah's encounter with the Sea People,
around 1177 BC, Pharaoh Ramses in
ordered the construction of his own mortuary
temple and residence in Thebes, on
whose walls architects and scribes recalled the
dramatic events of the
preceding decades. According to those
inscriptions, the Sea People had
returned, this time to attack Mediterranean
shores from Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria
and Palestine to Lower Egypt. The inscription
reads:
As for the foreign
countries, they 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. Hatti,
Kizzuwatna, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alasiya were
cut off. A camp was set up in
one place in Amurru; they desolated its people,
and its land was like that
which has never come into being. They were
advancing on Egypt while the flame
was prepared before them. Their league was
Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen
and Weshesh, united lands. They laid their hands
upon the lands to the very
circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and
trusting: "Our plans will
succeed!"
But Ramses and his
troops
defeated the invaders. When the vanquished
pleaded for mercy, the pharaoh
allowed them to settle on his soil:
I slew the Denyen in
their
isles; the Tjeker and the Peleset were made
ashes. The Shardana and the Weshesh
of the sea, they were made as those that exist
not, taken captive at one time,
brought as captives to Egypt like the sand of
the shore. I settled them in
strongholds bound in my name. Numerous were
their classes like
hundred-thousands. I taxed them all, in clothing
and grain from the storehouses
and granaries, each year.
Such Egyptian
inscriptions,
however, have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Neither the scribe's intentions
nor his instructions required him to report
historical truth; for him, the laws
of symmetry, esthetics and religion had priority
over factual accuracy.
Egyptian regnal accounts often begin with the
state of disarray prevailing in
the country until the pharaoh whose reign is
being described appears to
re-establish order—that was, after all, the
function of kingship. Yet, the
widespread destruction all around the eastern
Mediterranean, and many
contemporary documents from Ugarit and Hattusa
reporting similar onslaughts by
mysterious attackers, confirm the gist of the
Medinat Habu inscriptions.
At the time of the Sea
People's second raid on Egypt, most areas
mentioned in the Medinat Habu
inscriptions were either occupied by or allied
to the Hittite kingdom in
central Anatolia. Hence, the purpose of the
raids may well have been to weaken
the Great King of Hatti from his periphery, by
attacking his allies. From royal
correspondence from Ugarit and Cyprus, it
appears that the combined fleets of
the Sea People massed off the southwestern tip
of the Anatolian peninsula, from
where they first attacked the western coast of
Cyprus.
Battles directly
between
the Sea People and Hittite troops may also have
taken place on the Anatolian
mainland, however, because extant clay tablets
inscribed with diplomatic notes
show how the Great King of Hatti had to turn to
his vassals at the port city of
Ugarit, in northern Syria, to demand additional
troops and food.
But by then, Ugarit
itself
was threatened by the Sea People. Desperately
seeking support in his turn, the
adolescent king of Ugarit wrote to his royal
colleague on Cyprus:
The enemy ships are
already
here. They have set fire to my towns and have
done very great damage in the
country.... Did you not know that all my troops
were stationed in the Hittite
country, and that all my ships are still
stationed in Lycia and have not yet
returned? The country is thus abandoned to
itself.... Consider this, my father,
there are seven enemy ships that have come and
done very great damage. Now, if
there are more enemy ships, let me know about
them so that I can decide what to
do.
This letter never left
Ugarit. Archeologists found it there in a kiln,
where it was supposed to be
fired before the courier departed with it. At
the peak of its economic and
cultural success, and showing no signs of decay,
Ugarit was wiped out and was
never resettled again.
The pressure on the
Great
King of Hatti increased further. His scribes
wrote one more text illustrating
the Sea People's assaults and what turned out to
be a successful Hittite
counterattack:
I called up arms and
soon
reached the sea—I, Suppiluliuma, the Great
King—and with me ships of Alasiya
joined battle in the midst of the sea. I
destroyed them, catching them and
burning them down at sea.
Soon thereafter,
however,
enemy forces indeed reached the Hittite capital
of Hattusa. It is doubtful that
they were Sea People forces; and in fact their
identity is still uncertain.
There may have been internal strife in Hatti,
for an inscribed bronze plate
found in 1986 indicates that two members of the
royal family had competed for
the throne. Most scholars, however, accept that
a path of destruction leads out
of the northeast into Hattusa, meaning that the
city was most likely destroyed
by the Kashka, its neighbor and bitter enemy of
several centuries' standing.
The Kashka had already destroyed the Hittite
capital on one occasion and forced
the king to move temporarily; this time, they
annihilated the 600-year-old
civilization.
A similar pattern of
destruction appears in most of the cities
attacked by the Sea People. By
targeting government buildings, palaces and
temples while leaving the
residential areas and countryside mostly
unharmed, the attackers aimed at the
control centers of the aristocratic rulership.
This tactic foreshadows the
strategy of today's warfare, and is one of the
earliest known examples of it.
Concentrating attacks on such centers, the Sea
People must have realized,
preserves strength and shortens the war.
After Hattusa and
Ugarit,
many other cities in Anatolia, Syria and
Palestine fell to the invaders. The
Sea People continued their sweep to the south
until they met the Egyptian army.
This generally accepted
outline of the Sea People's incursions leaves
many of its most significant
questions unanswered. We still do not know
either the origins or the motives of
the Sea People. It is also hard to understand
why they did not attempt to permanently
subdue the countries they overwhelmed. Finally,
virtually nothing is known
about the fate of the Sea People themselves
following these crisis years.
Now that there is a
wealth
of highly specific information in hand from
numerous excavations and text
sources relevant to those years, scholars have
become more and more inclined to
think that the time has come to begin solving
some of these riddles. Although a
search for a unifying explanation began some
time ago, and academic conferences
abound on the crisis years, the Sea People, and
the Trojan War, there has still
been little progress toward a plausible
explanation for this watershed in
history. Some archeologists suggested that the
Sea People may have been
invaders from central Europe. Others saw them as
scattered soldiers who turned
to piracy, or who had become refugees. For a
long time, researchers sought to
explain the transformations around 1200 BC by
invoking natural disasters such
as earthquakes or climatic shifts, but
earthquakes on such a broad geographic
scale are unheard of, and no field evidence has
indicated significant climatic
change. Currently, very few—if any—archeologists
would consider the Sea People
to have been identified.
I stumbled on these
problems, mostly by accident, in an unlikely
place. In the spring of 1990, I
was writing up the conclusions of my
dissertation research, which had involved
several years of investigation in the Mycenaean
heartland, searching out clues
to determine what the landscape of the Bronze
Age had been. The work had little
to do with the Sea People.
Studying numerous earth
cores taken by hand augers and power drills, I
had discovered that parts of the
lower town of Tiryns, one of the Greek citadels
from the era of the Trojan War,
had been buried under several meters of mud
deposited by a flash flood that had
occurred around 1200 BC. This catastrophe
coincided with an earthquake, for
which evidence was found in the archeological
record of the Tiryns citadel.
Both of these events occurred shortly after 1200
BC, precisely at the time when
the Mycenaean civilization suddenly collapsed.
When summarizing these
conclusions, I remembered that earthquakes,
floods, and the demise of a
brilliant culture are also mentioned in Plato's
dialogues Timaeus and
Critias .
When I turned to reread these, I noticed that
the philosopher's story may well
represent yet another account—thus far
unrecognized—of the events of the crisis
years. Plato describes two prehistoric
civilizations that possessed bronze
weapons, chariots and writing, and he describes
how a devastating war broke out
between them. Those facts, and numerous
additional elements of the account,
have much in common with the Trojan War: Plato
mentions a navy of 1200 ships;
Homer, adding up the vessels of the united Greek
army, reached a total of 1186
ships. Both Plato and Homer described the
opposing armies as consisting of many
allies. Both also allude to severe internal
problems in the Greek camp, and
both relate how the attacking Greek contingents,
in the end, overwhelmed the
defenders.
If applied to the
Trojan
War, however, Plato's account would attribute
far more political, economic and
military power to Troy and its allies in western
Anatolia than anyone has yet
credited them with. Yet, if Troy is understood
to be an equal opponent of the
united Greek army, then the traditional, Homeric
account of the Trojan War
becomes far more plausible. According to Homer,
it took 100,000 Mycenaean
soldiers a decade of siege to subdue Troy, a
city that has thus far been
believed to have been the size of a modern
athletic field.
An even more novel idea
that emerged from this reading of Plato's
account, however, was that it may
have been Troy and its allies that in fact
triggered the conflicts at the end
of the Bronze Age. Plato's source, an Egyptian
priest, says:
So this host, being all
gathered together, once made an attempt to
enslave by one single onslaught both
your country [Greece] and ours [Egypt], and the
whole of the territory within
the Straits.
This passage would
argue
that Troy and its allies were in fact the
aggressors who brought on the crisis.
At the same time, the passage is reminiscent of
the Sea People accounts at
Medinat Habu. Thus I considered a hypothesis
based on simple equivalence: The
Sea People may well have been Troy
and its confederated allies, and the literary
tradition of the Trojan War may
well reflect the Greek effort to counter those
raids.
From this new
perspective,
I realized that archeology possesses several
texts that indeed describe a
coalition of Late Bronze Age states in western
Anatolia that appears to have
played a decisive role during the
transformations around 1200 BC. Homer, for
instance, lists contingents on the Trojan side
in The Iliad, saying
that Troy's allies
came from all along the Aegean east coast
between Thrace in the north and Lycia
in the south. This coastal strip, including its
offshore islands, coincides
with the geography of what many scholars think
may represent the homeland of
the Sea People.
The same kind of
alliance
is also mentioned in several unambiguous
cuneiform tablets from Hattusa.
According to these documents, 22 states in
western Anatolia formed a coalition
against the Hittites as early as the 15th
century BC. Other documents provide
evidence that such a coalition was forming for a
second time a few years before
the Hittite state vanished. In a letter to his
wife, the Great King of Hatti
describes how states to the west were rallying
against him, and says that it
would be difficult to keep the situation under
control if they succeeded. Some
texts from Hattusa also show that Hatti felt
increasingly threatened by one
particular neighbor in the west called Ahhiyawa,
a country that many scholars
locate in northwestern Turkey and which thus may
be Troy itself.
To take stock of the
mysteries surrounding western Anatolian states
at the end of the Bronze Age, we
can outline today's knowledge in the table
above.
Seven of the known Late
Bronze Age civilizations had all of the
following attributes: a geographical
region or realm, a people, at least one
substantial city, a script and a
contemporary name. However, in each of these
categories we find one isolated
entry that is somehow related to western
Anatolia, but is considered mysterious
or inexplicable within the parameters of
traditional scholarship.
There is, first of all,
the
problem of Troy, one of the most formidable
archeological sites in the world,
whose inhabitants, realm, script and language,
and contemporary name—as well as
its history and fate—remain obscure despite more
than 120 years of excavation
and research. There are also the Sea People,
whose city, realm, script and
language and name are unknown: They came from
nowhere and then vanished. There
are the many references to Assuwa, Asiya, Ahiya
and Ahhiyawa, states or confederations
of states in western Anatolia, which played an
important role in contemporary
documents from Egypt and Hattusa, but whose city
or cities, people, language
and script are unknown. And finally there is the
Discos of Phaistos, a
unique—some would also say notorious—document,
discovered on Crete in 1908,
whose spiral inscription, using 45 different
symbols, is inscribed on a clay
disc 16 centimeters (6¼") across. Although the
origin and importance of
this artifact are fiercely disputed, its
discoverer, Italian archeologist Luigi
Pernier, claimed parallels between the
characters used in the Discos script and
images of the Sea People from the Medinat Habu
inscriptions. Indeed, the latest
attempt by scholars to decipher the Discos even
bears the title "The
Language of the Sea People," but the city,
people, realm, language and
name to be associated with the Discos are all
unknown.
Combining all these
incomplete entries into one row in our table
would produce all the attributes
of a complete civilization in western Anatolia.
We even possess a contemporary
name for such a civilization, as "Assuwa" was
the term used to
describe the confederated states, of which
Ahhiyawa seems to have been the most
important constituent. If these deductions prove
correct, archeological
scholarship has overlooked an entire, and
important, Bronze Age civilization.
In a practical sense,
the
possibility that western Anatolia hosted a
civilization equal—or in some
respects even superior—to those of Mycenaean
Greece and Minoan Crete is quite
plausible. The Aegean shore of Anatolia contains
countless natural harbors and
advantageous places for settlement. The interior
offers an abundance of natural
resources including ores, timber and water,
while the coastal maritime route
has been of strategic and economic importance
for millennia. Despite ample
evidence that it was well-inhabited during the
Late Bronze Age, and despite
archeological evidence from Troy and Beycesultan
that indicates these Anatolian
societies may well have been sophisticated
enough for them to rank with Greece
and Crete, the thought has simply never been
entertained in archeological
circles. Why not?
Two characteristics of
Old
World archeological research methods illuminate
how this may have occurred.
Building on foundations in art history and
philology, today's archeology tends
to concentrate on the study of architectural
monuments, artifacts and
documents. This tendency rests on the implicit
assumption that most of the
relevant aspects of any ancient culture will
indeed be recorded in these
remains. But the approach puts any civilization
whose people built with
perishable mud-brick and wood, instead of with
stone, at a serious
disadvantage, for the remains of their
structures will not survive. Similarly,
when a civilization has traded in metal, cloth,
timber, grain, leather, cattle
or horses, slaves and other perishable goods
rather than in pottery, the
evidence of that activity will not survive the
centuries. And if this
civilization, in addition, used papyrus, wax or
leather, rather than stone or
clay, to write on, then its people may become
almost invisible to archeological
research.
Furthermore, the
art-historical emphasis in archeology tends to
highlight research that deals
with concrete artifacts rather than the
reconstruction of past political,
economic and military relations—precisely the
matters in which the Late Bronze
Age Anatolian states seem to have excelled.
Hence, by excavating standing
monuments and artifact-rich sites, European
archeology itself may have contributed
to a slanted picture of antiquity.
The second
characteristic
goes back to the birth of scientific archeology
in 19th-century Europe. The
founders of the discipline had absorbed the
Enlightenment belief that classical
Greece and Rome were superior to the cultures of
modern times. Also, both
19th-century Europe and Greece of the fourth
century BC were engaged in
conflicts with Anatolian powers: The Ottoman
Empire's interests conflicted with
those of European powers in much the same way
that Troy's conflicted with
Mycenae and, later, Persia's with classical
Greece. As the culture of antiquity
was presented as the model for modern culture in
Europe, the antipathies born
in Greece of the fourth century BC were also
readopted and reinforced. All these
conflicts—contemporary and historical—caused
considerable anti-Anatolian
sentiment.
Early archeology, as a
strictly European discipline, unavoidably took
up these attitudes. Johann
Winckelmann, widely considered the founder of
art history, regarded the ancient
Greeks as "equal to the gods," while their
contemporaries abroad were
"barbarians." Later, the European university
system institutionalized
such attitudes through the omnipresence of
ancient Greek sculpture and
architecture in European institutions of higher
learning.
As a result, ancient
Greece
was, and to a considerable extent still is,
considered the cradle of Western
culture, despite clear indications that several
of its
achievements—agriculture, metallurgy and
elements of sophisticated architecture—actually
came to Greece from Anatolia.
If we can clear our
minds
of these inherited assumptions, we find that the
fall of the Late Bronze Age
civilizations can indeed be plausibly
reconstructed.
Early in the 14th
century
BC, as the power of the Minoan civilization on
Crete dwindled, the many small
kingdoms on the Greek and Anatolian sides of the
Aegean took advantage of the
vacuum. The Greek Mycenaean kings adopted the
system of a palace-administered
society from the Minoans, and gradually took
over Cretan trade routes. Troy
achieved sole control of some islands in the
eastern Aegean and of the
important maritime trade route through the
Dardanelles to the Black Sea. It
also assumed many of Crete's functions in the
metals trade. Thus both the
Mycenaean and the Trojan civilizations reached
the peak of their political and
economic power between 1375 and 1250 BC.
Eventually, the
equilibrium
must have shifted. Perhaps because Greek vessels
attempted to use the straits
to the Black Sea for their own trade activities,
a serious conflict arose
between the two sides of the Aegean. Traditional
accounts recall how a small
Greek contingent was sent to punish Troy in
about 1250 BC. In a surprise
attack, Greek units succeeded in destroying the
city at its absolute cultural
peak.
This first Greek
assault
was not the legendary Trojan War. It did,
however, mark the beginning of the
decline of the Late Bronze Age cultures. The
Trojans rebuilt their city, but
this time, the archeological evidence makes
clear, they built not with status
in mind, but defense. Soon after the citadel of
Troy was finished, both the
Mycenaean kings in Greece and the Great King of
Hatti reinforced their own
citadels in similar fashion. The new fortresses
followed a common plan: The
protected area was expanded to provide shelter
not only for the upper classes
but also for members of the lower echelons of
society; the walls were
reinforced to withstand massive onslaughts;
access to freshwater springs was
included in the protected areas to assure water
supply under conditions of
siege; and finally, defense galleries and secret
escape routes were
incorporated into the structures. The
similarities between the citadels at
Hattusa and Mycenae are so striking that one
might almost infer they had been
jointly designed.
Hatti's biggest
concern,
however, lay to the east, at the other end of
Anatolia. From its heartland in
upper Mesopotamia, Assyria launched a successful
attack around 1236 BC, which
captured copper mines on the eastern border of
Hatti. Rather than confront the
militarily superior Assyrian state, Hatti
determined to acquire a new source of
vital copper from an easier target. The Great
King managed to conquer Cyprus,
one of the richest mining districts in the
eastern Mediterranean. At the same
time, he barred ships from western Anatolia from
entering the ports of his
vassals in Syria, thus interrupting trade
between his rivals. This blockade was
just as much an act of aggression in the 13th
century BC as it would be today;
war became inevitable.
The first encounters
between forces from western Anatolia and those
of Hatti probably took place on
the mainland, but eventually western Anatolian
strategists developed a plan to
circumvent the stronger state by sea and attack
Cyprus and Syria instead. This
naval assault probably occurred around 1195 BC,
and it is this that became
known as the Sea People invasions.
We may never find out
whether the western Anatolian Sea People
actually aimed to end Hatti's hegemony
over central Anatolia once and for all, or
whether they were simply retaliating
against Hatti's aggressions in hope of regaining
their lost trade routes. In
either case, though the first battles may have
been indecisive, western
Anatolia soon received support from Kashka,
which used Hatti's preoccupation
with the Sea People to march again toward the
Hittite capital. They left it in
ashes in about 1190 BC.
With Hatti destroyed,
the
western Anatolian states—the Sea People—suddenly
found themselves commanding an
area stretching from the Aegean to Palestine.
Pushing farther into the Levant,
they became involved in the kind of battles that
are depicted on the walls of
Medinat Habu. Egypt, weakened by its internal
strife, was unable to overwhelm
the enemy. Only one state remained powerful
enough to fight the western
Anatolian allies, which were led by Troy:
Mycenaean Greece.
Although Greece itself
may
not have been attacked, it was clearly facing a
difficult future with a
neighbor as powerful as western Anatolia, and a
neighbor, to boot, whom Greece
had already offended sufficiently to earn
unwavering enmity. After much
preparation, a Greek army entered the
battlefield, planning attacks on the
centers of cities—the same strategy used by the
western Anatolian states. With
the Anatolians busy in the Levant and Egypt,
Greek soldiers ravaged the western
Anatolian heartland, forcing the Anatolians to
pull back to defend their homes.
Finally, the opposing armies gathered at the
city whose fate would decide the
outcome of this unprecedented war. The battles
at Troy probably took place
around 1186 BC, and they likely lasted a few
months before the Greek attackers
succeeded—again—in conquering the doomed city.
In an apocalyptic war,
there are no winners. Many famous Greek
aristocrats lost their lives in the
fighting. Those who survived had a hard time
reassuming leadership upon their
return, because provincial deputies had assumed
their thrones and the returning
warriors were too weakened and impoverished to
regain their titles. Greece and
Anatolia entered an era of anarchy. With the
disappearance of the palaces and
the aristocracy, the fine craftsmanship, the
artistry, and the knowledge of
writing disappeared as well. The
Odyssey, numerous legends, and
even the Greek historian Thucydides
all recount how the survivors of the Trojan War
spread all around the central
and eastern Mediterranean. The archeological
evidence confirms the migrations,
and names still found today—Sicilian, Sardinian,
Etruscan, Philistine and
Thracian—are first documented after the end of
the crisis years.
Although the Sea People
vanished from the political records, they left a
legacy second to none in world
history. In Palestine, where many clans from
both Greece and western Anatolia
sought refuge, the Philistine and Phoenician
civilizations arose, reviving and
spreading much of the inventiveness in
metallurgy, seafaring, warfare and trade
that had characterized fallen Troy and its
allies. The civilization of Rome
claimed to have originated with Aeneas of Troy.
And the memory of Troy and the
Trojan War stood firmly at the center of
interest for Western scholars up
through the Middle Ages. Today it still remains
one of the central legends of
the West, related by one of the most eloquent
poets the world has ever known.
GeoarcheologistEberhard
Zanggerholds
a German master's degree and a
Stanford University doctorate in geology. He
works as a senior physical
scientist on many archeological projects
around the eastern Mediterranean and
lives in Zurich. His theory on the identity of
the Sea People is detailed in
his recent bookEin neuer Kampf um
Troia, published
in
Germany by Droemer Knaur.
The Greek
Dark Age is the interval between the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization,
around 1200 BC, and the Greek Archaic Period,
around c. 800 BC. The Dark Age era begins with a
catastrophic event: the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization,
when all major Mycenaean regional centres fell out of
use after suffering a combination of destruction and
abandonment. Linear B script,
the Mycenaean writing
system, was lost shortly after c. 1200 BC; for this
reason, we have no first-hand written documents of any
kind for this period. Thus, our understanding of the
Greek Dark Age relies largely on archaeological
research.
Iron-working
is the one technological innovation that stands out
during this period, so the Greek Dark Age is also known
as the Early Iron Age. Iron-working
was an innovation that seems to have been imported into
Greece,
not developed there, and it possibly reached Greece
through Cyprus
and the Near East.
Metalworking methods during the Dark Age show signs of
technical deficiencies in warlike items at several sites
compared to earlier Bronze
Age practices.
More than a century
before the Mycenaean collapse, we find evidence
suggesting that there were already conflict and
instability in the Aegean.
During the LH IIIA-B period (see Table 1), a
fortification was built at Mycenae,
protecting the palace and part of the residential space;
some of the houses outside the citadel were destroyed
during the LH IIIB period (accidental destruction cannot
be ruled out), and after this incident the fortification
was extended and the water supply secured. Around this
time, similar initiatives were undertaken in Athens,
Tiryns,
and Gla (Boeotia), and it is possible that a wall
closing off the Isthmus of Corinth
was built, presumably to control the only access by land
to the Peloponnese.
At least some of these events might be connected with
the Egyptian and Hittite
documents recording land and sea raiding activities
around the same time.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE
GREEK DARK AGE
Although c. 1200 BC is
he accepted date of the destruction and abandonment of
several of the major Mycenaean centres, the
archaeological record does not show significant changes
until at least a century or so later; that is, Mycenaean
culture persisted after the destruction of the palace
centres for about a century, and its cultural traits are
still identifiable. The Greek Dark Age chronology does
not have any single "fixed point", which means that,
since literacy was lost, we do not have any historical
event that could be linked to world
chronology. Some scholars have proposed a date
between c. 1200 BCBCBC and c. 800 BC for the Greek Dark
Age. Others believe that it begins in c. 1100 BC and
ends in 776 BCBCBC, the date of the ft Olympian Games
(according to Hippias olis). A date between c. 1000 and
750 BCBCBC also been favoured. All these estimations
would be acceptable to most scholars today.
SETTLEMENTS
DURING THE DARK AGE WERE GENERALLY SMALL AND
SCATTERED ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE, AND THE
MATERIAL CULTURE SHOWED SIGNS OF
IMPOVERISHMENT COMPARED TO MYCENAEAN TIMES.
COLLAPSE AFTERMATH
After the destruction
of the Mycenaean palaces, there is no evidence that
these buildings were rebuilt; it seems clear, however,
that some of these sites were reoccupied, and that in
some cases there were attempts to build new structures,
although no real attempt to rebuild the old palaces can
be identified. At Mycenae, the uppermost terraces were
abandoned, but part of the citadel was reoccupied; at
Dhimini, activities at the destroyed large palatial
complex were partly restored, but abandoned soon after.
Some aspects of Mycenaean culture continued to exist for
about a century or so after c. 1200 BC. In mainland
Greece and some of the Cyclades
islands, Mycenaean pottery
and Mycenaean burials persisted.
In Crete,
although urban life continued in some coastal towns
(e.g. Palaikastro), many major Bronze
Age settlements were abandoned and a new pattern
emerged: the location of new sites on remote and easily
defensible areas. Some of these areas were not occupied
prior to 1200 BC. The site of Karphi is a good example:
most of it lies over 1,000 metres above sea level. It
seems unlikely that the people of Karphi freely chose to
settle in a spot so difflt to access, so it is safe to
assume that this choice was conditioned by a set of
circumstances, probably linked to defensive and other
strategic reasons. More than a hundred sites like this
have been recorded in Crete alone.
By about 1100
BCBCBC,anumber of changes can be identified in the
archaeological record affecting burial practices,
settlements, and pottery styles. In many regions, the
Mycenaean custom of burial in family vaults was suddenly
replaced by a new single burial practice, while
cremation was adopted in some areas. Regional variations
in burial practices have been identified and also
different practices coexisting within the same
community.
•Attica.
In Athens, inhumation in pit and cist graves was a
dominant burial practice recorded in the Kerameikos
cemetery prior to 1050 BCBCBC. Between 1100 and 1050 BC,
similar burial practices were used in Athens and Salamis
and both places show little grave
evidence for wealth distinction. During the
Protogeometric period, cremation became the main
funerary practice, and the incinerated remains were
placed inside an amphora, which was then placed inside a
pit along with grave goods, filled with earth, and
covered by a stone slab. Gender distinction was
emphasized in Athens: weapons and large kraters were
linked to men, while jewelry and amphorae were connected
to women. By the late 8th century BC, inhumation became
the dominant burial practice again.
•Euboea.
In Lefkandi, both cremation and inhumation were
practiced. Different variations existed for both:
cremated remains could be placed in a cist or left on
the pyre, and inhumations could take place in cist or
shaft graves. In some towns, pit-inhumations were
recorded under house floors. At Eretria a mix of
cremation and inhumation was found in the same cemetery.
•Thessaly.
Here some aspect of Mycenaean burial practices
persisted, such as small tholos tombs (widely present
during Mycenaean times), which continued to be built
throughout the Dark Age. Several cist grave cemeteries
(used largely for children in the beginning) are
recorded, including multiple burials in rock-cut chamber
tombs. Other practices include slab-covered pits dug in
the floor of vaulted chambers (some of them containing
cremated remains), cremation in cists, and pyres grouped
together and covered by a communal tumulus.
•Crete.
Chamber tombs remained in use in some areas (e.g. Knossos)
where collective burial was the norm, but many of the
chamber tombs found here were abandoned after no more
than two generations. Gender and age distinction was
emphasized in Knossos through grave goods, but this
practice is abandoned by the 10th century BC.
SETTLEMENTS IN THE
ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD
The study of
settlements suggests a dramatic population decline in
Greece during the Dark Age. This is reflected by the
reduction in the number of settlements in Greece that
can be identified around 1100 BCBCBC: the amount of
recorded sites and cemeteries of Greece during the LH
IIIB and LH IIIC period clearly show this tendency (see
figure 1). This is consistent with the figures propose
by Anthony Snodgrass the number occupied sites in
Greece identified on the basis of different pottery
styles:
·c.
320
sites occupied in the 13th century BCBCBC (based on
Mycenaean IIIB pottery)
·c.
130
sites occupied in the 12th century BC (based on
Mycenaean IIIC pottery)
·c.
40
sites occupied in the 10th century BC (based on
Submycenaean + Early Protogeoric pottery)
·
In some areas of
Greece, such as Laconia and the southern Argolid, very
few archaeological findings have been identified for the
c. 1100-1000 period, and the few sites that were found
are small compared to previous times. Vincent Desborough
has estimated a sharp population decline by c.1100
"about one-tenth of what it had been little over a
century ago".
Settlements during the
Dark Age were generally small and scattered across the
landscape, and the variety of material culture showed
signs of impoverishment compared to Mycenaean times. A
different picture can be seen at the site of Lefkandi
(in Euboea), considered the richest site in Greece,
around 1000 BCBCBC. Lefkandi has produced evidence of
foreign contacts (Cyprus and the Near East) and also
presents building that ranks well above any other
contemporary building in Greece. As exciting as all
these may sound, Lefkandi also reflects the material
decline of Greece: in terms of building standards,
Lefkandiwell below the level of sophistication of
Mycenaean architecture. The Greek material culture in
general became poorer during the Dark Ages, less
innovative, and places like Lefkandi are rare exceptions
rather than the rule.
POTTERY DURING THE
DARK AGE
Like burials, pottery
styles throughout Greece during the Dark Age saw the
emergence of regional variations, unlike during
Mycenaean times when pottery displayed a stylistic unit.
During some time after the destruction of the palaces,
the pottery industry continued during the LH IIIC
period, but it eventually decreaded its quality,
followed by the emergence of new regional pottery
styles.
Abstract decoration
dominated the Dark Age pottery styles. Figurative art,
largely absent during the Greek Dark Age and fairly
common during Mycenaean times, returned during the late
stage of the Geometric style, including battles, chariot
processions, and funerary scenes. Only a few examples of
figurative art in pottery have been recorded prior to
the Late Geometric style (e.g. Early Protogeometric
styles in Lefkandi and Crete).
About 1125
BCBCBC,Atticasaw the emergence of a local style known as
"Submycenaean". This style has also been recorded in
other regions, but it shows significant variations; in
Lefkandi, for example, it displays a poorer quality when
compared to Attica. In the Argolid there are differences
in quality between different sites. Submycenaean style
in general is below the standards of the Late Mycenaean
style in terms of materials and painting quality. Late
Mycenaean and Submycenaean styles coexisted until c.
1050 BCBCBC, when the Protogeometric style replaced both
and also appeared in the Argolid, Corinthos, Thessaly,
South & Central Cyclades, and West Asia Minor.
Between 950 and 900 BC, the Protogeometric style was the
most popular style in Greece, but it was absent in some
regions: Elis, Laconia, Arcadia, and Samos & Chios
(where there is no data available); Lesbos, Macedonia
and Sicily
& Italy
(local wares have been recorded), and Eastern Crete
(where the Subminoan style was used).
From 900 BC onwards
the Geometric style gradually emerged until it replaced
all earlier styles by 750 BCBCBC, except in Macedonia.
Around 725 BCBCBC, the Pro-Corinthian style emerged ith,
and shoy after othully figurative styles were also
detected in Crete.
Regional variation of
pottery can be interpreted as a loss or reduction in the
level of contact between the different groups: styles of
decoration are typically borrowed and exchanged during
interaction between groups. The lack of an overall
unifying artistic tradition, linked to the absence of a
dominant political unit in Greece, could also be a
factor to consider when trying to explain these regional
differences. Influences from foreign pottery styles are
only recorded in rare cases (e.g. Lefkandi and Athens).
PAST VIEWS ON THE
GREEK DARK AGE
Several decades ago,
scholars had a rather different view on the Greek Dark
Age compared with our current understanding. The
Mycenaean civilization, it was believed, fell after
several waves of invasions by different groups who
brought violence and chaos to the sophisticated
Mycenaeans. "Dark Age" was a suitable analogy for this
apocalyptic view of a complex society being torn apart
by nomads entering Greece and "downgrading" it to an age
of savagery. This picture was mainly supported by
ancient accounts on the Dorian invaders, a Greek tribe
that migrated into Greece, that was largely responsible
for the Mycenaean collapse. It was believed that the
Dorians
...were
still in the herding and hunting stage; [...] their main
reliance was upon their cattle, whose need for new
pasturage kept the tribes ever on the move. [...] the
hard metal of their swords and souls gave them a
merciless supremacy over Achaeans and Cretans who still
used bronze to kill. [...] [the Dorians] put the ruling
classes to the swords, and turned the Mycenaean remnant
into helot-serfs. [...] The surviving Achaeans fled
[...] every man, feeling unsafe, carried arms:
increasing violence disrupted agriculture
and trade
on land, and commerce on the seas. War
flourished, poverty deepened and spread. Life became
unsettled as families wandered from country to country
seeking security and peace. (Durant: 62-63)
Scholars in the past
took the ancient accounts of the Dorians and other
invading groups at face value. Rather than having a
critical view on these sources, they looked for evidence
that could confirm their validity. As a result, it was
proposed that some of the archaeological evidence found
around 1200 BCBCBC was a reflection of these newcomers.
Single burials and cremations, were seen as an
"intrusive" new element in the archaeological record,
usually associated with the Dorians: these were
understood as new funerary practices alien to the
Mycenaean world and introduced by the invading tribes.
It was a"crmation" of the ancient account on invading
groups.
From 1960s CE onwards,
the archaeological work on the Greek Dark Age has been
increasing significantly, and many of the old
assumptions have been challenged. Single burials, for
example, have been identified throughout the Mycenaean
period at Argos.
Cremation, another
"intrusive" element, has also been recorded during
Mycenaean times in western Anatolia,
Attica, and even in Italy. This means that we have
reasons to believe that those funerary expressions that
were interpreted in the past as a ‘'proof" of invading
groups entering Greece might actually have an indigenous
Mycenaean origin or even an origin in neighbouring
regions with strong commercial links to the Mycenaean
world, such as Italy. It may be the case that Dorian
tribes migrated into Greece around the time of the
Mycenaean collapse, and it might also be possible that
they played a role in the collapse itself, but the point
is that the evidence for it is far from conclusive, and
it has no solid archaeological basis.
CRITICISM OF THE TERM
"DARK AGE"
A number of scholars
have raised concerns about the term "Dark Age". James
Whitley has stated that the term Dark Age is a "rather
loaded term". Timothy Darvill believes that the term
"Dark Age" is "not very helpful" because it implies that
very little is known about the period despite the fact
that the archaeology
has advanced our knowledge of the Greek Dark Age. Based
on these and other observations, there are a few
alternatives to refer to this period, such as "Early
Iron Age" (based on the "Three Age" system), which can
be divided in "Protogeometric" (1050 BCBCBC to 900 BC)
and "Geometric" (900 BC to 700 BC) Greece.
Despite these new
objections on the term "Dark Age", the overall picture
suggested by archaeological data for this period fits
the general features of system collapse with no
identifiable central administration, population decline,
and impoverishment of material culture. This
is in line with the opinion of Anthony Snodgrass who
holds that in Greece during the Dark Age, little was
preserved from the Mycenaean culture and "that little
then dwindled away to almost nothing, until some
elements were artificially revived in the late "8th
century BCBCBC and later’.
RECOVERY AND
TRANSITION INTO THE ARCHAIC PERIOD
By 800 BC the number
of settlements began to rise. This growth is recorded in
mainland Greece in general, the Aegean islands, and it
is also reflected in the growth of the number of Greek
settlements outside Greece (Western Mediterranean
and the Black Sea). The increase in the number of
settlements is in line in the growing number of graves
at Athens, Attica, and Argos during the 8th century BC.
The same pattern has been recorded in Knossos and other
cemeteries across Greece. The material culture of
the8th-century-BCBCBC Greece is much varied and innoive
compared with the previous centuries. Other changes
recorded towards the end of the Dark Age are:recovery of
literacy (Greek alphabet)
after the abandonment of the Mycenaean Linear B script,
increasing contacts with regions outside the Aegean, and
the emergence of a new and successful form of political
institution (the early poleis).
These
signs are consistent with a society experiencing a
population increase and gaining a higher level of
complexity.
This time of recovery
marks the end of the Greek Dark Age and the transition
into the Greek Archaic Period, a time considered a
turning point or revival in Greek history.
-----------------------
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cristian Violatti is a
freelance writer, currently studying Archaeology at the
University of Leicester, England. He is a regular
contributor and one of the editors of Ancient History
Encyclopedia. http://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Dark_Age/
The
year
1100 B.C. or so marked the end of higher civilization in
the Aegean for a long time. The succeeding period
(1100-750 B.C.) is conventionally called the Dark Ages
of Greece, and it is aptly named. Because writing
disappeared along with Mycenaean civilization, no
written evidence exists for this period. Since it was
extremely poor and primitive in other respects too, even
the archeological remains are quite limited.
Nevertheless, the Dark Ages were formative for the later
development of the Aegean.
In
the
first place, the region was largely isolated form the
rest of the Mediterranean, a situation that differed
markedly from the Bronze Age. The Mycenaeans had traded
widely with the Near East. The Dark Ages have yielded
few goods imported into or exported out of the Aegean at
all. Trading contacts essentially ceased. This is due
partly to the poverty of the Aegean and partly to
conditions elsewhere. By 850, some limited trade began
to reappear, but regular continuous contacts did not
develop until the 700s.
This
lack
of contact meant that the Iron-Age Aegean peoples,
unlike the Minoans and Mycenaeans, were not influenced
by Near Eastern examples in creating their fundamental
institutions. On the other hand, some trade did exist
within various parts of the Lower Aegean itself
throughout the Dark Ages. As a result, Aegean peoples
came to have a distinct culture of their own, different
from that of their neighbors. The culture shared certain
broad similarities everywhere, but with lots of local
variations.
Perhaps
the most obvious illustration of this is provided by the
pattern of language that took shape in the Dark Ages. In
historic times, most peoples around the Aegean had the
same language. We call those who spoke this language
Greeks, but they called themselves (and still do)
Hellenes. This common language set them apart from other
peoples who did not speak it. Other peoples were called
barbaroi. Originally, “barbarian” simply meant
anyone who did not speak Greek. Yet, even though all
Hellenes spoke Greek, they did not all speak it the same
way. From place to place, minor differences existed in
pronunciation (and later spelling) and even in grammar.
The differences were not great enough to prevent
Hellenes from understanding each other; they could talk
together. Such minor linguistic variations are called
dialects.
Why
the
dialects arose is not absolutely certain, but they most
likely resulted from movements by various Greek-speaking
groups in the late Bronze Age and early Dark Ages.
Whether invaders ended Mycenaean civilization or not,
the evidence suggests that some Mycenaeans did migrate
across to Asia Minor in this period, and while others
resettled the older Mycenaean communities at a much
lower level of civilization after a few generations.
Also, some Greek-speaking people with different dialects
seem to have wandered into the Greek hearthland from
elsewhere, settling there. The clearest sign of this is
the distribution of dialects later on.
In
the
Dark Ages the ruling upper class of the Helladic times
had disappeared completely along with the rest of
civilization. A bit later, I will argue that there were
no clearly defined, dominant political leaders in the
Dark Ages, at least not at first. Moreover, the general
poverty of the time had reduced everyone in society to
roughly the same economic level as well. One example
will serve. The rich Mycenaean chamber tombs and shaft
graves had given way to meager cist graves for all
classes. The wide divergence in the wealth of burials
found at Mycenae never existed in Greece again until
Hellenistic times. The lack of economic and political
distinctions offers presumptive evidence for social
equality as well.
In
place of the stratified Helladic society, Dark-Age
Greeks reverted to a primitive tribal organization made
up of numerous groups of individuals united by kingship,
or some less formal style of individual leadership,
sometimes called the Big Man leadership, and by control
of contiguous lands. The Big Man is an informal leader,
identified by Anthropologists in some primitive
cultures, who maintains his influence through gift and
favor giving, and, sometimes by virtue of his leadership
in warfare. At any rate, the major social unit was the oikos
(-oi) or household. It was made up of persons who
worked together to farm a single piece of land. In most
cases, they were all members of the same family who
owned the land. In a few instances where the farm was a
bit larger than usual, the oikos might also
include one or two slaves. But this was rare. Members of
the oikios cooperated to farm the land, and to
defend it and one another from outsiders. Each oikos
also had its own religious observances to aid these
activities. Without mutual assistance of an oikos,
an individual would have difficulty in feeding or
protecting himself. Thus, the paramount loyalty of
individuals was to the family unit.
The
family
acted to protect its members from outsiders, and male
family members combined both to defend their own family,
lands and livestock, and, from time to time, to raid
neighbors and steal livestock and women. Decisions
affecting the whole oikos were made by a council of
elders, probably under the guidance and influence of the
family head.
Greece
in
the dark ages might best be described as a frontier
society. Folks to protected what was theirs and
occasionally took what they could from other oikoi.
Inter-familial activities were most often those of the
blood feud. Because there were virtually no differences
of wealth within the family, there existed a strong
assumption that all males old enough to fight were
equal.
Besides
the oikos, more extended kinship units also existed. By
the end of the Dark Ages, most Greeks came to have a genos
(-e) or clan as well. A clan is a group of
families that trace their relations to one, often
mythical or semi-mythical, ancestor. Clans may not have
existed in the early Dark Ages, but the Greeks did have
tribes. The word for tribe is phyle (-ai).
A tribe was made up of large numbers of persons thought
to have a remote common ancestor.
Tribes
probably existed in the Dark Ages, because there is good
evidence that they existed in some form earlier in the
Bronze Age. In later times, most Doric-speaking regions
had three tribes, while Ionic-speaking ones usually, but
not always, had four. These tribes often had the same
names in widely separated regions and across later
political divisions. This suggest that they already
existed before all the movement and migration took
place.
Tribal
units
based solely on kinship were important when the Greeks
were still moving around. As they settled down and took
up farming, other units based on common territorial
interests arose. Families with farms in the same local
area normally lived in villages for protection. The men
of the village would fight together to defend it and its
lands as a whole. Village families intermarried and over
time, everyone came to be related to everyone else. The
village became like a large family.
There
is a term for the interrelated families making up the
people of a village. In Doric, the term is damos;
but I normally use the more common Ionic spelling and
pronunciation, which is demos. Family ties to
the demos, which arose because families lived and fought
together gradually superseded the remoter ties to tribe.
In the Dark Ages, there were literally hundreds of these
tightly knit separate villages scattered throughout the
Aegean. Within villages, additional local territorial
subdivisions gradually emerged. Men from different
sections of the village fought together in bands within
the larger army. For that, they formed military clubs.
Club members not only fought as a unit, they carried out
religious rites to secure divine aid in war. Such clubs,
which are subdivisions of the demos, are called
phratriai, phratries or brotherhoods.
Since
members of the demos worked together and fought
together and were all related anyway, there was again a
strong presumption that they should be equal socially.
Yet, even in such a simple society, some inequities were
bound to arise. First, for one reason or another, some
individuals did not have an oikos or land of
their own, and could not fulfill the military
requirements of the family warrior-retainers who shared
in the fighting and spoils that followed success in war.
Such persons were called thetes, landless men.
They cannot have been very numerous, but they did exist
(Eumaius the swine herd in the Odyssey is one
such), and they may be considered the least fortunate
“class” during this period. Even slaves had a more
secure membership within structure of the oikos
than did thetes.
Among
the oikoi themselves within the village
structure, some had a bit more land or better land than
average. Men in these families could afford better, more
expensive armor and other equipment for war. Poorer
farmers had simpler weapons; perhaps some could not
afford any at all. Thus, the better-equipped men with
more land were more likely to become leaders of the
demos in war. That helped them extend their advantage.
As leaders, they got a bigger share of the spoils of war
and grew richer still over time. So wealthier, more
important soldiers had an edge over others in the demos,
but it was a relatively slight edge. In the Dark Ages,
there was much more equality than inequality in Greek
society.
Like
the social system, the political system of the Dark Ages
preserved few traces of earlier Mycenaean practice.
There is much more general agreement among scholars
about that I think. At the end of the Bronze Age, large
highly centralized states headed by an autocratic wanax
were replaced by these hundreds of mall, independent
villages. They did not have or need much government;
each oikos ran its own affairs and protected its
own members for the most part.
But,
as we have seen, the families of the demos did
fight together, and so they needed some kind of
organization for war. Later Greeks called the
organization that evolved an ethnos, a tribal
state or tribal organization. Each demos
had a leader (or sometimes more than one). The leaders
had different titles in different parts of later Greece;
but one of the commonest ones, and the one I use is the
title basileus. This term is often translated as
“king,” but that is misleading. None of the terms used
by other Indo-Europeans to designate a king is found
anywhere in Greece. Greeks had no such concept at first.
Basileus
is not an Indo-European word, and we do not know what it
originally meant. But other terms used for early village
leaders suggest that it signifies something like
“chief.” The basileus led the soldiers of the
demos in war; he may also have carried out some common
religious rites. But that is all he did. In the
beginning, most war leaders were probably elected for
their military ability. By the end of the Dark Ages,
however, their jobs had become hereditary in many
communities.
Even
in war, the chief’s authority was not absolute. To act,
he needed cooperation from other leading warriors in the
village. Thus, occasionally, he would call these men
together to advise him about his duties. They met with
him and gave their opinions in what was called a boule
or council.
But
when a major decision affecting the whole demos had to
be made, they would have a mass meeting called an agora.
Since the decision had to do with war, the agora
included all those who fought—the soldiers. So, it
consisted of all the adult males who could afford armor
and weapons. Practically in most villages, that meant
just about all the men of the demos, although some of
the poorest may have been left out. The agora
did not discuss and debate issues. The basileus
and his advisers merely explained what they wanted to do
and why. Then the soldiers shouted either approval or
disapproval. The procedure was not exactly democratic;
but in principle, the entire demos, or at least
most of it, made the final decision.
In
most important respects, the Dark Ages formed a new
beginning for the inhabitants of the Aegean, a beginning
largely uninfluenced by earlier or outside precedents.
Many Greeks hardly progressed beyond this beginning. As
late as the 300s B.C., many parts of Greece retained the
tribal institutions of the ethnos, which I have
described today. But the immediate future lay with those
who were to use the forms of the Dark Ages to build a
more advanced society.
The
Greek Dark Age
or Ages
and Geometric
or HomericAge (ca.
1100–800 BC)[1][2] 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 1100 BC, to the first signs of the Greekpoleis
in the 9th century BC.
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.
Contents
1 Fall of the Mycenaeans
2
Mediterranean warfare and the Sea Peoples
3 Dark
Age culture
4
Post-Mycenaean Cyprus
5
Society
6
Lefkandi Burial
7 End
of the Dark Age
8 New
writing system
9
Continuity thesis
10 See
also
11
References
12
Bibliography
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 recognizable 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[3] or
by the Sea Peoples
or the widespread availability of edged weapons of iron,
but no single explanation fits the available archaeological evidence.
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:[4]
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.[5]
A
similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to
invade Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah
about 1208 BC, and then again during the reign of Ramesses III about
1178 BC.
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,[6] 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, the Homeric
epics (8th–7th century) and Hesiod's Works and Days
(8th–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.[7]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.[8] Some
former sites of Mycenaean palaces, such as Argos or Knossos,
continued to be occupied; the fact that other sites
experienced an expansive "boom time" of a generation or
two before they were abandoned has been associated by
James Whitley with the "Big-man social organization",
which is based on personal charisma and inherently
unstable: he interprets Lefkandi
in this light.[9]
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,[10] 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 scant. In Cyprus some
archaeological sites begin to show identifiably Greek
ceramics,[11] 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-geometric pottery found in
Crete and at Samos,
off the coast of Asia Minor.[12]
Post-Mycenaean
Cyprus
Cyprus
was inhabited by a mix of "Pelasgians"
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[13] 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.
Cypriot 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.[14] 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.[15]
Lefkandi
Burial
Lefkandi on the
island of Euboea was a prosperous settlement in the Late
Bronze Age,[16]
possibly to be identified with old Eretria.[17] 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.[18]
Sometimes called 'the heroon, this
long narrow building, (50 metres by 10 metres - 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.[19] 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
of the Dark Age
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.[20] 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.[21]
New
writing system
By
the mid- to late 8th century BC 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.
Some
scholars have argued against the concept of a Greek Dark
Age, on grounds that 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.[22]
3. ^
About the so-called "Dorians' Issue" cf. Francesco
Perono Cacciafoco, Sulle piste dei Dori. Ipotesi a
confronto tra Linguistica, Archeologia e Storia [On
the Traces of the Dorians. Compared Hypotheses
According to Linguistics, Archaeology, and History],
Pisa University Press (Edizioni PLUS), Pisa 2009, link book.
7. ^
"The most striking feature of the Dark Ages is its
regionalism, its material diversity" (James Whitley,
"Social Diversity in Dark Age Greece", The Annual of
the British School at Athens86
[1991:341–365]) p. 342, 344ff.
8. ^
Snodgrass 1971:140–212.
9. ^
Whitley 1991.
10. ^
Whitley 1991:343, notes regional differences in
iron-working in A.N. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of
Greece (1971:213–95), and I.M. Morris,
"Circulation, deposition and the formation of the Greek
Iron Age," Man, n.s. 23(1989:502–19)
11. ^ V.
Karageorghis, Early Cyprus, 2002.
12. ^
R.W.V. Catling, "Exports of Attic protogeometric pottery
and their identification by non-analytical means", Annual
of the British School at Athens93
(1998:365-78), noted in Robin Lane Fox, Travelling
Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer, 2008:48; Fox
provides the cultural background to his study of Euboean
cultural contacts in the Mediterranean in the 8th
century.
13. ^ N.
Schreiber, The Cypro-Phoenician Pottery of the iron
Age, 2003
17. ^ The
candidates and their opponents are noted in Fox 2008:51
note 23.
18. ^ M.
R. Popham, P. G. Calligas, and L. H. Sackett, (eds.), Lefkandi
II: the Protogeometric Building at Toumba,
Part 2. The Excavation, Architecture and Finds,
BSA Suppl. vol. 23, Oxford 1993.
19. ^
Edward Bispham, Thomas Harrisom, Brian A. Sparkes, Ancient
Greece and Rome, page 89, The Edinburgh Companion, Ed
2006.
20. ^
Homer, Iliad XXIII
21. ^
J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece: 900–700 BC
1979
22. ^
O.T.P.K. Dickinson: The Aegean from Bronze Age to
Iron Age: continuity and change between the twelfth
and eighth centuries B.C. (2006)
Bibliography
·Francesco
Perono Cacciafoco, Sulle piste dei Dori. Ipotesi a
confronto tra Linguistica, Archeologia e Storia [On
the Traces of the Dorians. Compared Hypotheses
According to Linguistics, Archaeology, and History],
Pisa University Press (Edizioni PLUS), Pisa 2009, link book.
·Chew,
Sing C., World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation,
Urbanization and Deforestation 3000 BC -
AD 2000, 2001, [ISBN 0-7591-0031-4] Chapter
3, The second-millennium Bronze Age: Crete and Mycenaean
Greece 1700 BC - 1200 BC.
·Desborough,
V.R.d'A. (1972). The Greek Dark Ages..
·Faucounau,
Jean, Les Peuples de la Mer et leur histoire,
Paris : L'Harmattan, 2003.
·Hurwitt,
Jeffrey M., The Art and Culture of Early Greece
1100-480 BC, Cornell University Press, 1985,
Chapters 1-3.
·Langdon,
Susan, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece,
1100-700 BC, Cambridge University Press,
2010.
·Latacz, J.
'"Between Troy and Homer : The so-called Dark Ages
in Greece", in: Storia, Poesia e Pensiero nel Mondo
antico. Studi in Onore di M. Gigante, Rome, 1994.
·Snodgrass,
Anthony M. (c. 2000). The dark age of Greece :
an archaeological survey of the eleventh to the eighth
centuries BC. New York: Routledge. ISBN0-415-93635-7.
·Sandars,
N.K. (c. 1978). The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the
ancient Mediterranean 1250–1150 BC. London:
Thames and Hudson. ISBN0-500-02085-X.
·Whitley,
James,
Style and Society in Dark Age Greece: The Changing
Face of a Pre-literate Society, 1100–700 BC,
Cambridge University Press, 2003, Series : New
Studies in Archaeology.
The
centuries following the fall of the Mycenaeans are
mostly obscured from our view by an extreme scarcity of
records. As a result, this is known as the Dark Age of
Greek history. Still, there are a few things that we
know about this period that saw the transition from
Mycenaean to classical Greek civilization. It was a
period of chaos and the movements of peoples. New tribes
of Greeks, the Dorians, moved in and displaced or
conquered older inhabitants. Those peoples in turn would
migrate, oftentimes overseas, in search of new homes. It
was also a period of illiteracy and poverty leaving us
no written records or sophisticated monuments to tell us
about the culture of this period.
All
this led to the Greek world at this time being divided
up between various Greek-speaking peoples who were
distinguishable from each other by slight differences in
dialect and religious practices. However, their
similarities were important enough so that we can talk
about the Greeks as a people. Two of these Greek peoples
in particular should be mentioned: the Dorians and
Ionians. The Dorians were Greek invaders who came down
from the north to conquer many of the Mycenaean
strongholds around 1100 B.C.E. Sometimes they completely
blended in with their pre-Dorian subjects, and there was
little class conflict in their city-states. In other
places the Dorians did not intermarry and remained a
distinct ruling class over the non-Dorian population.
The most extreme cases of this were Sparta and Thessaly,
where the non-Dorians were virtually enslaved and forced
to work the soil for the ruling Dorians. Such situations
posed a constant threat of violence within city-states.
The
Ionians were pre-Dorian inhabitants who avoided conquest
by the Dorians, either by fighting them off or by
migrating. The region of Attica, centered around Athens,
was one main pocket of resistance to Dorian conquest, as
seen in the myth of the Athenian king, Codrus, who
sacrificed himself in battle to ensure Athens' safety
against a Dorian invasion. Many Ionians either chose to
migrate overseas or were forced to do so by invaders.
Most of them settled in the Cycladic Islands or on the
western coast of Asia Minor, which became known as Ionia
from the large number of Ionian Greeks there.
The birth of the Polis
The
chaos and Greece's mountainous terrain forced people to
huddle under the protection of a defensible hill known
as an acropolis. By 800 B.C.E., these fortified
centers had produced more security and settled
conditions that triggered two important developments
vital to the emergence of Greek culture. First, the more
settled conditions plus the fact that Greece was by the
sea and had few resources led to a revival of trade and
contact with the older cultures to the East. For
example, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and
added vowels to it, so literacy returned to Greece.
Also, Egyptian influence can be seen in Greek
architecture and sculpture. Here too we see the Greeks
would add their own innovations, giving their pillars
more slender and graceful lines, and creating more
lifelike statues than the stiff formal Egyptian models
they had to copy. These influences would lead to and be
the partial basis of classical Greek civilization .
Also,
the settled conditions along with Greece's poor soils
and hilly and dry conditions led to a new type of
agriculture and farmer at this time. Instead of the
overly centralized agriculture of the Mycenaean period
and the under-worked aristocratic estates of the earlier
Dark Age, farmers started developing less desirable
lands, which the nobles probably did not even want.
Rather than raising just grain crops or grazing
livestock, they developed a mixed agriculture of grains,
orchards, and vineyards that was better adapted to the
varied conditions of their lands and climate. The
intensive labor such farms required bred very
independent farmers who would be largely responsible for
the emergence of democracy in the Greek polis.
The
revival of trade and development of small independent
farms also combined to allow the settlements to grow
into towns and cities (poleis) that spread out
beyond the confines of their original acropolises.
Later, in some cities, notably Athens, the acropolis
would become a place to build temples to the gods while
also serving as a reminder of earlier more turbulent
times. In order to understand the Greeks, one must
understand what this most distinctive of all Greek
institutions, the polis (city-state), meant to
them.
The
word polis means city, but it was much more than
that to the Greek citizen. It was the central focus of
his political, cultural, religious, and social life.
Much of this was because the Greek climate was ideal for
people to spend most of their time outdoors. Therefore,
they interacted with one another much more than we do
and became more tightly knit as a community. Since
poleis were so isolated from each other by mountains,
they became largely self sufficient and self-conscious
communities. Greeks generally saw their poleis as
complete in themselves, not needing to unite with other
Greek poleis for more security or fulfillment. We can
see three main qualities that were typical of major and
minor poleis alike.
1.The
polis was an independent political unit
with its own foreign policy, coinage, patron deity, and
even calendar. For example, the tiny island of Ceos off
the coast of Attica, had four independent city-states,
each claiming the right to carry on its own business and
wage war as it saw fit-- all this on an island no more
than ten miles in length!
2.The
polis was on a small scale.
This is obvious from the example of Ceos. But consider a
major city-state such as Corinth, which controlled an
area of only some 320 square miles, considerably smaller
than an average county in one of our states. Athens, by
far the most influential of the city-states on our own
culture, controlled an area only about the size of Rhode
Island. Yet it is to Athens that we look for the birth
of such things as our drama, philosophy, architecture,
history, and democracy.
3.The
polis was personal in nature.
This follows logically from its small size. Greek
philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato thought that a
polis should be small enough for every citizen to know
every other citizen. If it got any bigger, it would get
too impersonal and not work for the individual citizen's
benefit. Even in Athens, the most populous Greek
city-state, some citizens could pay their taxes in very
personal ways, such as by equipping and maintaining a
warship for a year or by producing a dramatic play for
the yearly festival dedicated to Dionysus. This tended
to breed a healthy competition where citizens would
strive to make their plays or warships the best ones
possible, thus benefiting the polis as a whole.
The
polis' small and personal nature bred an intense loyalty
in its citizens that had both its good and bad points.
On the plus side, it did inspire members of the
community to work hard for the civic welfare. The
incredible accomplishments of Athens in the fifth
century B.C.E. are the most outstanding example of what
this civic pride could accomplish.
On
the negative side, the polis' narrow loyalties led to
intense rivalries and chronic warfare between
neighboring city-states. These wars could be long,
bitter, and costly. Sparta and Argos were almost always
in a state of war with each other or armed truce waiting
for war. The Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens
lasted 27 years, destroying Athens' empire and golden
age. Sometimes city-states would be entirely destroyed
in these wars, such as happened to Plataea and Sybaris.
In addition, there was often civil strife within the
city-state as well: between rich and poor, Dorians and
non-Dorians, and citizens and non-citizens. This
internal turmoil could be every bit as vicious and
bloody as fighting between city-states. Ultimately, the
Greeks sealed their own doom by wasting energy and
resources in their own petty squabbles while other
larger powers were waiting in the wings for the right
moment to strike.
However,
there were several factors that gave the Greeks a common
identity and some degree of unity. First of all, the
Greeks spoke a common language that largely gave them a
common way of looking at things. The Greeks generally
divided the world into those who spoke Greek and those
who did not. Those who did not speak Greek were called barbarians,
since, to the Greeks, they senselessly babbled
("bar-bar-bar").
Religion
also gave the Greeks a common identity. Athletic
contests in honor of the gods especially emphasized the
Greeks' unity as a people. The most famous of these were
the Olympic Games held every four years in honor of
Zeus. During these games a truce was called between all
Greek city-states, allowing Greeks to travel in peace to
the games, even through the territory of hostile states.
The modern Olympic Games, even though they are no more
successful than the ancient games in putting an end to
war, still serve as a symbol of peace in a less than
peaceful world.
Finally,
several city-states might combine into leagues. These
leagues might be purely for the purpose of celebrating
religious rites or kinship common to their cities. A
good example was the Delphic Amphictyony, a league of
twelve cities formed to promote and protect the Oracle
of Delphi. Some leagues were for political and defensive
purposes. The Peloponnesian League under Sparta and the
Delian League under Athens were for such a purpose and
together claimed the loyalties of most of the
city-states in Greece and Ionia. This was good for
preventing war between individual city-states. But it
backfired when Sparta and Athens went to war in 431
B.C.E. and dragged most of the Greek world into the most
tragic and destructive struggle in ancient Greek
history.
By
750 B.C.E., the Greek world had largely taken shape as a
collection of city-states, often at war with one
another, but also feeling certain common ties of
language, religion, and customs. At this point, there
was nothing remarkable about the Greeks, but forces were
at work that would transform Greece into the home of
democracy and the birthplace of Western Civilization.
The
significance of a find like Lefkandi can only be
understood in the context of its historical placement.
One has to consider the events and cultures before and
after its time to interpret the find itself. Lefkandi
belongs to the Dark Age of Greece, so we will begin by
looking at what we know of this dark period, and of the
relatively well-known ages flanking it.
Lefkandi
is considered an anomaly in Greek history not only
because of the many foreign elements it reveals and
incorporates, but because it shows remarkable wealth and
organization at a time thought to be devoid of both. The
remains unearthed at Lefkandi are dated around the 10th
century BCBC, in the midst of the Dark Age of
Greece. Placed between the 12th and 8th centuries BCBCBC,
the Dark Age is an essentially blank time between two
flourishing eras--theMycenaeand the Ionian (also called
Helladic and Hellenic). It is termed "dark" because of
the extremely scant and patchy erial evidence it left
behind, and its complete lack of any written record.
Setting
the Stage: Pre-Dark Age Greece:
Preceding
the Dark Age were the highly organized and sophisticated
palace cultures of the Minoans and Mycenaeans in
southern Greece. The "palaces" of Minoan culture on
Crete were really large community centers that supported
a people rich in communication, trade, and material
wealth. The huge Minoan palaces housed impressive works
of art and craftsmanship and stored food for thousands
of citizens, all evidence of a highly organized
civilization. We also know from palace excavations that
they engaged in overseas trade and had their own writing
system (Linear A, at this point untranslated). Minoan
culture appears to have ended in the mid 15th century
BCBCBC.
The
Mycenaean civilization that followed on Mainland Greece
was no less impressive. It is thought to have either
conquered or gradually overrun the Minoan culture, and
absorbed some of its elements. Centered similarly around
palaces--theirs more on the order of fortresses--the
Mycenaeans also had their own written language (Linear
B, a forerunner of Classical Greek). They too created
great works of art and engaged in vigorous overseas
trade, leaving evidence of Egyptian and Oriental
influences in their ruins. The Mycenaean palaces were
destroyed by unknown forces (some suggest natural
disasters, some foreign invasion) in the late 13th
century BC.
What
followed was not another age of cultural achievement,
but several hundred years of economic, political, and
social depression that left almost no imprint on
history. Little to no artifacts, ruins, or other traces
remain, so this period is termed the Dark Age.
Following
the Dark Age, which drew to a close in the 8th century
BC, the Ionian culture rose in Greece. It, like the
Mycenaean cult, featured written language, monumental
buildings, urban centers, and complex social structure.
The Ionian gradually developed into the Classical Greek
period in the 5th century BCBCBC, which closed with
Alexander of Macedon's conquests in the Mediterranean
and the Near East.
The Dark
Age--c. 1200-750 BC:
Based
on the profound lack of archeological remains from the
period, scholars have drawn some conclusions about the
state of society following the Mycenaean age. It is
believed that after the collapse of the palaces, the
people were for some reason unable to reorganize
themselves. They fell into migrating, and settled in
small groups that never collected to form a city or
widespread culture. Trade, art, architecture, and other
practices of organized civilization were virtually
abandoned, and writing completely disappeared.
This
is why Lefkandi was so unexpected, from an historical
point of view. While it has not yielded any writing in
its ruins, it has turned up evidence of wealth, social
organization, and trade with other areas of the
Mediterranean, all at levels presumed impossible in the
Dark Age.
Pottery:
Most
material remains from the Dark Age demonstrate primarily
localized cultures. Pottery decoration, one of the main
measures of social contact and exchange, was done in
many styles, but none were spread over a very large
area. For example, pottery from western Attica did not
appear outside of western Attica. The distinct styles
also did not evolve much from century to century. Since
cultures in contact via trade typically borrow and
exchange decorational styles, it is assumed there was
not much interaction between groups.
At
Lefkandi, however, pottery has been discovered that
shows influences from Cyprus in both potting style and
decoration (such pottery was also found at Athens). The
new styles, unseen before the 11th century in Greece,
are very similar to those from Cyprus categorized as
Cypriot IIIB. This would indicate that the people of
Lefkandi and Athens had not lost contact with outsiders,
and overseas ones at that. Contact was probably through
trade, and perhaps through migrations.
Writing:
No
writing--from tablets, pottery, paintings, mosaics, or
any other source--has been recovered from Dark Age
Greece. The absence of writing in any form at all seems
to indicate that there was no need for writing. The
primary uses for writing in the preceding centuries had
been record keeping in storerooms and for political
purposes. Dark Age Greeks, then, could not have had any
storerooms large enough, or political systems broad
enough, to need keeping track of in writing.
Small-scale, local economies are the only models that
would not have required such records.
Architecture:
Another
characteristic prominent in Helladic and Hellenic times
and missing from the Dark Ages was monumental
architecture. The palaces built by the Minoans and
Mycenaeans were gigantic stone constructions that
provided storage, shelter, and/or protection for
thousands of people. The colossal temples, monuments,
public places and other architectural feats of the
Classical Greeks are even better known to us. No such
buildings exist from the intervening Dark years; there
were evidently no constructions sturdy enough to
survive. The absence of ambitious architecture would
logically go hand in hand with an absence of political
or religious power structures large enough to merit such
monuments. This supports the notion that settlements
were small and self-contained.
At
Lefkandi, however, the best-known find is a huge 10th
century building--precisely what Greece at that time was
thought to lack. Similar structures were found at Thebes
and Pefkakia, and assigned to the same time period. The
house-like structure at Lefkandi measures 47 meters by
10 meters, and is made from wood, mud bricks, and stone.
It houses the graves of a man and a woman. The building
bears little resemblance to the grand architecture of
the Helladic or Hellenic ages, but its existence does
suggest that someone possessed enough wealth, skill, and
resources to execute a project of fairly ambitious
proportions. These communities must have been
sufficiently developed to support a person or group of
people with enough concentrated wealth and enough labor
at their disposal to devote to an expensive burial.
Burial
Findings:
Artifacts
excavated from the multiple graves at Lefkandi
(explained in greater detail elsewhere in this site)
also speak not only of wealth but also of wide trade
connections throughout the Mediterranean. Graves made
later than the two in the large building contain pottery
from Athens, jewelry and metal from the Near East, and
signs of contact with northern Greece and Macedonia.
There is also jewelry that may be of local workmanship,
and if so, the skill involved is unusually high for the
period.
Prior
to this discovery, Dark Age Greeks were thought to have
been nearly completely isolated from contact outside
their local communities. From the stylistic isolation of
pottery and the lack of evidence for trade in and
between other parts of Greece, it was assumed that
anything requiring more than rudimentary social
organization was lost to society. Lefkandi nearly
reverses this view, forcing archeologists to rethink
their assumptions about Greece in the Dark Age.
Lefkandi
challenges most long-held notions about what was going
on in Greece between the Mycenaean and Ionian cultures.
From a view that excluded much of any sophistication or
cultural advancement, we are brought to see that in one
area of Greece at least, people were trading, building,
and creating at levels far beyond the scope of the
primitive and nomadic peoples previously imagined.
The Dark
Age is Introduced:
The
concept of a Dark Age in GreeceÕs past was not initially
based on archeological evidence from Greece itself. The
idea was actually proposed in the late 1800s by
Egyptologists. Most all ancient Mediterranean and Near
Eastern cultures have relative chronologies, but no
absolute dates, so archeologists have relied on
correlations with Egypt--the one empire for which we do
have absolute dates--for dating those cultures. They
look for places where the Egyptian culture overlaps with
another culture, and align the chronologies accordingly.
(An example is pottery from the height of Mycenaean
culture found in a precisely dated Egyptian city,
showing that both existed simultaneously.)
Egyptologists
in the 1800s, who were certain that their calculations
regarding Egypt's past were correct, found that to
properly align the Egyptian and Greek histories, it was
necessary to place several hundred years between the
Mycenaean and the Hellenic cultures, an idea that had
not seemed logical based on Greek archeology at the
time. The archeologists were convinced, however, and it
soon became widely accepted that there was a missing
period in Greek history. Since no material evidence had
been found to support the idea, the time was called the
Dark Age. From that time very little has been discovered
from the Dark Age, and the dearth of information has led
archeologists to the above conclusions. Only in recent
decades, with the discovery of sites like Lefkandi, have
we been able to shed any light on this anonymous era.
The Dark
Age in Question:
The
matter of lost centuries in Greece's past is far from
resolved. Numerous questions and problems arose from the
separation of Mycenaean and Ionian culture with such a
lengthy and culturally vacuous gap.
Language
poses one problem: The Mycenaeans had a well-developed
written language (Linear B), as did the Ionian and
Classical Greeks, but in the intervening period there is
no reason to believe any Greeks practiced writing in any
form. Though the Mycenaean and Ionian writing systems
differ (one uses characters, the other syllables), the
language they recorded is the same, and several hundred
years of illiteracy between the two seems implausible.
The
so-called "Homeric Question" also remains an enigma: How
can the poet called Homer, who lived in the 7th or 8th
century BC, have written the amazing accounts of the Iliad
and the Odyssey in sophisticated Greek
prose, immediately following a period of widespread
illiteracy? His subject, events surrounding the Trojan
War at the end of the Bronze Age, is also surprising.
Homer writes in great detail of elements such as
metalworking that were exclusively part of Mycenaean
culture, showing excellent knowledge of far-removed
times; his accuracy of description has been verified by
Mycenaean excavations. HomerÕs relationship with ancient
history is perplexing at the least.
Another
fact that calls the Dark Age into doubt is that no
Greeks from Ionian times forward made any mention of a
Dark Age in their history. The numerous poets,
playwrights, historians, writers, and philosophers of
Classical times said nothing about it, and made no
implication that there had once been any culturally
bleak time.
Other
various archeological problems arose as well, such as
excavations that seemed to show Mycenaean and much later
Greek architecture existing without much of a gap in
time between them. Mycenaean pottery and "Geometric"
style pottery from the 8th century are also found
together in some cases, which does not prove there no
time passed between their creations, but it does make an
extremely long period between seem strange.
Some
historians and archeologists attempt to solve these
problems by proving that the creation of a Dark Age in
Greece's past was a mistake, and that the fault was on
the part of the Egyptologists. One of these is the late
Immanuel Velikovsky, who believed that rather than
adding centuries to the Greek chronology, they should be
subtracted from the Egyptian one. He researched deeply
the creation of the Egyptian chronology, and found much
evidence for its revision, ultimately concluding that
the Egyptologists were mistaken in their placement of
dates. Velikovsky's model shortens Egyptian history,
eliminating the need for a Greek Dark Age. Under this
view the period between the Mycenaean and Ionian
cultures would have been a matter of decades rather than
centuries. His extensive research and arguments are
published at http://www.varchive.org/dag/ (his original
manuscript remains unpublished). The site is itself a
summary (albeit an extensive one) of Velikovsky's work,
and so is not restated here. Anyone interested in
arguments for reconsidering the Dark Age, or in the
history of its conception, will find the site useful.
Lefkandi
and its contents would fit with relative ease into a new
view in which Greece did not suffer the cultural
desolation of a Dark Age. Its active and fairly
prosperous culture seems out of step with the Greece we
imagined during this time. Until the Dark Age is better
understood or eliminated, though, Lefkandi remains an
oddity, and challenges traditional ideas about this
little-known time in ancient Greece.
A Brief
Synopsis of the Graves at Lefkandi:
An
interesting and largely unexplained feature of many of
the Dark Age graves at Lefkandi was the absence of both
inhumed skeletal remains and cremated remains. This
encouraged speculation concerning the circumstances of
burial and the possibility that adverse soil chemistry
had in many cases consumed human bone, burnt and
unburnt. Some scientists feel that grave offerings were
systematically arranged in tombs, even though there are
no traces of human remains.
Other
scientists feel that, whether or not human remains were
originally placed in graves where no trace of them
survived at the time of excavation, there is quite
strong presumptive evidence that many of the offerings
in these graves had not only been deliberately places
where they were found, but their juxtaposition was such
that they seem to echo the outline of the human forms
which in life they had decked.
Discussion
of the Bronze and Iron Age at Lefkandi:
The
beginning of the Iron Age in the eastern Mediterranean
is currently explained as a response to a bronze
shortage following the collapse of the Mycenaean
palatial system around 1200 BC.
Around
1025 BC bronze more or less vanishes from excavated
sites in central Greece, being replaced by a previously
rare metal - iron. Scientists believe that the shift
from bronze to iron in the archaeological record can
follow two models: the "circulation" model and the
"deposition" model.
The
currently popular "circulation" model sees a decline in
long-distance trade causing a bronze shortage and the
rise of an iron-based economy. The "circulation" model
provides a motive for the adoption of innovation. At the
time, iron was known, but was rare. It was mainly used
for decoration. In the beginning, iron could be used as
a "working metal" for weapons and tools, but bronze
dominated for practical implements. Slowly iron became
the main "working metal" and remained so for a long
time. Cyprus was the first iron-based economy in the
Mediterranean.
The
"deposition" model severs the link between our data and
the use of metals in everyday life, raising the question
of what it means to speak of the "Early Iron Age" at
all. Iron reigned supreme as a prestige good and on the
battlefield, but metals were apparently little used
otherwise - until 700 BC or even later most tasks were
probably carried out with stone, bone or wood. Compared
to the Greek settlements of the fifth and fourth
centuries, the Early Iron Age was almost metal-free.
Nearly
all the Greek metal has come from burials, and the
implicit hypothesis that grave goods are a constant
cross-section of the material culture of the living is
questionable. Bronze might have equally well have
disappeared from the graves because it was no longer
appropriate for funerals. The shift from bronze to iron
is part of a larger set of changes in burial in central
Greece around 1050 BC. The new funerals made a
distinction within the community, between an elite of
perhaps a quarter to a third of the adult population,
and an inferior group.
The
collapse of east Mediterranean trade by 1050 BC was a
crucial event in that locally-obtained prestige goods -
iron artifacts - came to play a vital role in creating
and maintaining alliances and hierarchy. The dominance
of iron in graves after 1050 BC is explained as an elite
monopoly on iron.
Access
to metals need not have been easy or equal for everyone,
even if they are mined locally. If an elite could
control metal-smiths and/or the ores themselves -
situations common enough in the ethnographic record -
they could forge a powerful weapon of exclusion. By
controlling iron and making it the only metal
appropriate for grave goods in formal burial, the symbol
of membership of the elite, the leaders of Greek
communities could solidify their powers, creating a
ritual gap between themselves and those excluded from
iron and the formal cemetery. Gifts of iron weapons and
jewelry to less powerful households would admit them as
lower order members of the elite; lower still were those
households excluded entirely from the ceremonial
creation of the community in formal burials. The
prohibition of bronze for grave goods might represent
not scarcity but the inability of the elite to
monopolize it.
"Cold
Iron"
Gold is for the
mistress - Silver for the maid -
Copper for the
craftsman cunning at his trade.
"Good!" said the
baron, sitting in his hall,
"But Iron - Cold
Iron - is the master of them all".
--Rudyard Kipling
Scientists
have proposed a prestige economy, with iron monopolized
by the elites and circulated as gifts among them. But
why iron? It may have given the elite a decisive
military advantage, although we know little about its
hardness. In this case, iron would maintain the new
order not only as a prestige good but also as the means
of destruction guaranteeing unequal access to wealth.
Retaining the core idea of the "circulation model", a
decline in bronze supplies would further increase the
military advantages of control over iron. It would also
explain the elite's inability to monopolize bronze, if
most of it were spread around in recycled Mediterranean
objects rather than being concentrated in trade routes.
In
the eighth century, when iron was no longer so highly
ranked as bronze and was used for more everyday tasks,
bronze weapons appear in poetry as symbols to mark the
heroes of the Trojan War as superhumans, playing a
potent role in underwriting elite authority. Iron
weapons may have held a similar "historical" role in the
eleventh century, setting their owners off from previous
generations of bronze users, distancing the elite from
the chaos of an unwelcome past and establishing a stable
world order. During the Iron Age, the Macedonians
thought along the lines iron:bronze::male:female, while
the Athenians based their rituals on the assumption
iron:bronze::elite:commoner.
We
do not know how common bronze was. This is because
bronze objects were for the large part, not used in
burial rituals. Bronze tripods were being cast in
Lefkandi between 925 BC and 900 BC. These objects were
in circulation throughout the period, but are very rare
in the archaeological record because they were used in
situations, which provide no material residue. In Homer,
tripods moved as wedding gifts, in initiation
ceremonies, and between guest-friends. They were used at
feasts and as a treasure to gloat over. The possible
base for a giant tripod, was found in Lefkandi and is
dated between 1025 BC and 950 BC. However, the
archaeological record is not very authoritative.
Around
the Aegean (particularly in Attica and Lefkandi), iron
weapons became relatively common around 1050 BC and very
few bronzes at all date between 1025 BC and 950 BC, with
even intricate ornaments being made from iron. In
Macedonia and Crete, iron becomes common for weapons
after 1000 BC, but bronze remains the main metal for
ornaments. In the western parts of Greece, iron is very
rare in deposits until the ninth century, and such
bronzes that occur are either heirlooms or typologically
backward copies of Bronze Age objects.
When
iron lost its potency as a symbol, elites turned to
imports, encouraging Greek voyaging around the Aegean
and providing greater incentives for Phoenician traders
to come to Greece. The wealth of burials at Athens and
Lefkandi escalated until 825 BC, when a balance
returned, before the entire structure collapsed around
750 BC with the rise of the institutions of the polis.
Cemeteries
dating between1100 BC to 825 BC have been explored in
Lefkandi. A salient fact is that the period of bronze
shortage at Lefkandi comes later than its supposed
occurrence at Athens, In fact, bronze was always used
rather sparingly at Lefkandi and if bronze objects
appear numerically abundant, it must be remembered that
they are all small and their total weight is relatively
trivial. Bronze seems to be under-represented and iron
over-represented in the Lefkandi burials. The
spectacular "hero" graves of 1000 BC to 950 BC are more
ambiguous. The male cremation was in a twelfth century
Cypriot bronze burn, and some of the jewelry with the
woman went back to 2000 BC. This seems to be more like a
deliberate use of heirlooms to express the prestige of
the dead than a desperate reuse of old metalwork in
shortage, but any interpretation of this unique
discovery is highly subjective. In the Lefkandi
"heroon", bronze and iron fragments were found, probably
from a door fastening. One hundred and two bronzes were
studied at Lefkandi. Scientists conclude that there was
a ready availability of the base metals to the
metal-smiths at Lefkandi during the time span of the
cemeteries.
The
farther back in time one goes from the great turning
point of the industrial revolution, the smaller the role
played by iron. Any definition of "Iron Age" is of
course relative, but to call the Aegean an iron-based
economy before the sixth century would be a distortion.
Iron moved around in a very restricted sphere of
exchange, divorced from everyday activity, but it was
that sphere which had the greatest influence in the
creation of the archaeological record.
What
happened at Toumba so many years ago? Who was this man
buried in such heroic fashion? Was he a heroic warrior
or maybe a wealthy aristocrat? So many questions
surround the site at Toumba in Euboia. Scholars have a
difficult time interpreting the evidence because only
material artifacts were left behind, therefore, the
archaeologist must deduce from clues what happened and
who these people may have been. Those who once inhabited
the area near Lefkandi did not leave behind a written
account of their burial rituals, culture, or history.
Scholars
have interpreted tombs as the centers of communal
religious activity. Likewise, the tombs found at Toumba
have been interpreted in this same fashion. The organic
and material artifacts left behind suggest some sort of
communal rituals took place inside the structure at
Lefkandi. Features most likely intended for communal use
are those enclosed and containing an alter--like
structure, both of which are incorporated at Toumba.
Additionally features, such as niches or small chambers,
that are integral parts of a tomb are thought to have
been used for cult practices (Dickenson,
1994). Most of
these features, thought to have been used for ritual
purposes, mimic formal rituals known to have taken place
in later periods.
Unique
to the Toumba burials is the incredible wealth left
behind by these Dark Age citizens of Lefkandi. Ian
Morris elucidates, "The Toumba burials are not just
richer than the other 250 or so published tenth-century
burials in central Greece: they are beyond all
comparison (Morris,
2000)." The
enormous size of the building also sets Toumba a part
from other burial sites. Morris further elaborates, "No
building of comparable size is known in central Greece
for the next three hundred years. The Lefkandi structure
covers more than twice the area of any other
tenth-century building.
Popham,
from the British School in Athens, projects that the
Toumba mound would have required between 500 and 2000
man-days of labor to construct (Popham,
1993). Moreover,
the placement of the mound a top the hill looking over
the Xeropolis settlement and Lelantine plain is visually
breathtaking (Morris,
2000). With such
stunning majesty the question arises: who was this man
and why did his death result in such a rich burial?
Heroes
In
ancient Greek religion heroes held a elevated position
above the average mortal man. Heroes were in a class of
their own, they were neither gods nor mortal man. Carla
Antonaccio explains, "Ancient sources detail several
interlocking varieties of heroes: divinely descended or
favored, local, epic, eponymous, warriors, kings,
founders of cities, healers, prophets (Antonaccio,
1995)." Heroes were
commemorated for their extraordinary deeds only after
their deaths, but some heroes never died they simply
disappeared. In addition, in death heroes were believed
to possess the supernatural power to bring disaster upon
mortals in the form of plague, barrenness, and military
defeat (Antonaccio,
1995). Like the
gods, heroes had shrines and alters erected in their
names. Not only were heroes remembered but they were
feared, respected, and invoked by those still living.
Morris suspects that the distinctive Greek concept of
the hero took shape at the end of the eleventh century,
and thus, suspects that those at Lefkandi took part in
hero cult practices (Morris,
2000). However, not
all scholars agree with this conjecture. Antonaccio
makes a sharp distinction between hero cults and tomb
cults.
Hero Cult
Formal
hero cult worship boomed in the eighth century. A hero
cult can be distinguished by its formal expression in
continuous scheduled ritual action at a specific
location (Antonaccio,
1998). A permanent
shine would be erected in honor of the hero and his cult
followers would clearly identify him on inscriptions or
on offerings. The members of the hero cult would present
offerings and sacrifices long after the death of the
hero, sometimes extending several centuries later.
Practitioners involved in the hero cult participated in
several activities: public processions, sacrifice and
games, and construction of a monument in the form of a
alter and or naiskos. Interestingly, Antonaccio writes,
"It is striking that, contrary to expectations based on
copious written references to hero cult, none of these
early cults was connected with actual tombs, either in
the late Iron Age or in the better-known archaic and
classical periods (Antonaccio,
1998)." Usually,
the site at which the hero was honored was not his tomb,
instead, a separate sanctuary was built.
Tomb Cult
In
contrast, the tomb cult did take place at the tomb. A
tomb cult, is characterized by a none permanent shrine
and an anonymous figure. Furthermore, the offerings were
most likely modest and given on only one occasion. The
term "tomb cult" originally was used to describe
occasional familial visits to tombs after burial in
order to make offerings in the form of food or garlands
during the classical age (Antonaccio,
1998). In
comparison to the sociological definition of "cult,"
provided by Emile Durkheim, a tomb cult does not meet
the criteria. Durkheim defines cult as: "a system of
divers rites, festivals and ceremonies which all have
this characteristic, that they reappear periodically (Durkheim,
1912)." The tomb
cult does not "reappear periodically" instead the ritual
and rites that do take place happen in a short period of
time then tapper off. As we have seen a tomb cult is
much different from a hero cult.
Should
Toumba be Considered a Hero Cult?
So, with all this in mind how is it
possible that Toumba could be considered a
heroon by so many scholars? The construction of
Toumba occurred around the year 1000 B.C.E.
during the Protogeometric period. The excavators
began calling the structure a "heroon" shortly
after they began excavating. This described of
the structure as the "center of hero-cult," has
managed to stick ever since. Indeed, very little
about the building supports this interpretation.
Unquestionably, the man and woman buried at
Toumba appear to have been at the zenith of
their society due to the extravagant measure
taken for their burial, however, talk of
heroization is misleading. The excavators
premature designation of "hero cult" were
undoubtedly influenced by the heroes described
in epic poetry. Antonaccio further illustrates:
Some archaeologically based studies have
continued to stress the influence of epic on
attitudes and behavior. Now, however, burials at
Lefkandi in Euboia, in accordance with Homeric
practices have been dated to the tenth century,
well before the assumed stabilization and
diffusion of the epic poetry. (Antonaccio,
1995)
As we have seen there were indeed
similarities between the burials at Lefkandi and
those described in Homer's epic poems. However,
there were also stark differences.
The structure was deliberately buried not
long after the burials took place. The pottery
found from within the tomb indicates its used
for over fifty years, or two generations. This
disrupts any notion that Toumba could have been
associated with a hero cult because the ritual
practices ended soon after the couple was
buried. Moreover, the tumulus that covered the
building became the focal point nor a cemetery
and not. The cemetery surrounding Toumba
continued in use for at least two centuries
after the couple's death.
Antonaccio says it best when she
concludes by saying: If anything, Toumba shows
how Iron Age ritual could utilize the dead to
structure group relations through feasting and
the placement of later burials. It is not known
how the burials made in the cemetery after the
creation of the tumulus were related to the
original pair. But the tumulus provided a focus
for a burying group that ultimately included
dozens of individuals, some of whom were laid to
rest with similar offerings, man imported from
Attika, Thessaly, Cyprus, Egypt,and the Near
East. The burial offering reinforced the
solidarity of the group; their close relation to
the original pair has been confirmed by recent
finds of another pair of horses and another
double burial. All this suggest that the
structure at Lefkandi was a center for tomb cult
not a heroon. (Antonaccio,
1998) The evidence unearthed thus far
indicates that the tumulus at Lefkandi should
not be considered a heroon. Instead, the
artifacts left behind seem to confirm that its
status as a tomb cult. I suggest that the couple
buried within the tumulus were wealthy
aristocrats actively participating in trade with
other communities. This would explain the
numerous extravagant riches found within the
tombs from various regions. In fact, some
scholars have suggested that the enormous
structure at Lefkandi, before becoming his tomb,
may have been the hero’s home. So our hero may
not have been a courageous warrior but he
certainly stood out among those of his time.
Bibliography
·Antonaccio
Carla M. An Archaeology of Ancestors Ð Tomb
Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece. Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Maryland:
1995. Antonaccio Carla M. "An Archaeology of
Ancestors" Cultural Poetics in Archaic
Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. eds
Carol Dougherty Oxfor University Press, New
York: 1995.
·Dickson,
Oliver. The Aegean Bronze Age.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1951.
Durkheim, E. The Elementary Forms of
Religion. Paris: F. Alcan. English Trans.
1915.
·Lattimore,
Richard. The Iliad of Homer. University
of Chicago Press, Chicago:1951..
·Morris, Ian. Archaeology
as Cultural History. Blackwell Publishers,
Massachusetts: 2000. Morris, Ian.
"Circulation, Deposition and the Formation of
the Greek Iron Age" . Man. Vol 24, No.3
Morris, Ian. Gift and Commodity in Archaic
Greece. Man, New Series, Volume
21, Issue 1. Popham, M.R. , P.G Callingas,
& Sackett, L.H. I.S. Lefkandi II.
The British School of Archaeology at Athens, vol
23. Athens: 1993. Popham, M.R. & Lemos,
I.S. Lefkandi III: The Toumba Cemetary :
Plates. The British School of Archaeology
at Athens, Athens: 1996. Popham, M.R. &
Sackett, L.H Lefkandi II: The Protogeometric
Building at Toumba. The British School of
Archaeology at Athens, Athens: 1990. Popham,
M.R. & Sackett, L.H Excavations at
Lefkandi, Euboea: 1964-66. The British
School of Archaeology at Athens, Athens: 1968.
Rutter, Jeremy B. "Ceramic Change in Aegean
Early Bronze Age." Occasional Paper no.5.
Institute of Archaeology, University of
California, Los Angeles: 1979.
The Theogony
(Greek: Θεογονία, Theogonía,
pronounced [tʰeoɡonía], i.e. "the genealogy or birth of
the gods"[1]) is a poem by
Hesiod (8th – 7th century BC)
describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods, composed circa 700 B.C. It is
written in the Epic dialect of Homeric
Greek.
Contents
1
Descriptions
2
Other cosmogonies in ancient literature
3
First generation
4
Second generation
5
Third and final generation
6
Influence on earliest Greek philosophy
7
See also
8
References
9
Sources
10
Selected
translations
11
External
links
Description
Hesiod's Theogony
is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods,
organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be
and how they established permanent control over the Cosmos. It is the first Greekmythicalcosmogony. The initial state of the
universe is chaos, a dark indefinite void
considered a divine primordial condition from which
everything else appeared. Theogonies are a part of Greek
mythology
which embodies the desire to articulate reality as a
whole; this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the
first later projects of speculative theorizing.[2]
In many
cultures, narratives about the origin of the Cosmos and
about the gods that shaped it are a way for society to
reaffirm its native cultural traditions. Specifically,
theogonies tend to affirm kingship as the natural
embodiment of society. What makes the Theogony of
Hesiod unique is that it affirms no historical royal line.
Such a gesture would have sited the Theogony in
one time and one place. Rather, the Theogony
affirms the kingship of the god Zeus
himself over all the other gods and over the whole Cosmos.
Further, in
the "Kings and Singers" passage (80–103)[3] Hesiod appropriates to himself
the authority usually reserved to sacred kingship. The
poet declares that it is he, where we might have expected
some king instead, upon whom the Muses
have bestowed the two gifts of a scepter and an authoritative voice
(Hesiod, Theogony 30–3), which are the visible
signs of kingship. It is not that this gesture is meant to
make Hesiod a king. Rather, the point is that the
authority of kingship now belongs to the poetic voice, the
voice that is declaiming the Theogony.
Although it
is often used as a sourcebook for Greek
mythology,[4] the
Theogony is both more and less than that. In formal
terms it is a hymn invoking Zeus and the Muses: parallel
passages between it and the much shorter Homeric Hymn
to the Muses
make it clear that the Theogony developed out of a
tradition of hymnic preludes with which an ancient Greek rhapsode would begin his performance at
poetic competitions. It is necessary to see the Theogony
not as the definitive source of Greek mythology, but
rather as a snapshot of a dynamic tradition that happened
to crystallize when Hesiod formulated the myths he
knew—and to remember that the traditions have continued
evolving since that time.
The written
form of the Theogony was established in the sixth
century. Even some conservative editors have concluded
that the Typhon episode (820–68) is an
interpolation.[5]
Hesiod was
probably influenced by some Near-Eastern traditions, such
as the Babylonian Dynasty of
Dunnum,[6] which were mixed with local
traditions, but they are more likely to be lingering
traces from the Mycenaean tradition than the result of
oriental contacts in Hesiod's own time.
The
decipherment of Hittite mythical texts, notably the Kingship
in Heaven text first presented in 1946, with its
castration mytheme, offers in the figure of Kumarbi an Anatolian parallel to
Hesiod's Uranus-Cronus conflict.[7]
Other
cosmogonies in ancient literature
In the Theogony
the initial state of the universe, or the origin (arche) is Chaos, a gaping void (abyss) considered as a divine
primordial condition, from which appeared everything that
exists. Then came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the cave-like space under the
earth; the later-born Erebus is the darkness in this space),
and Eros
(representing sexual desire - the urge to reproduce -
instead of the emotion of love as is the common
misconception). Hesiod made an abstraction because his
original chaos is something completely indefinite.[8]
By contrast,
in the Orphic cosmogony the unaging Chronos produced Aether and Chaos and made a silvery egg
in divine Aether. From it appeared the androgynous god Phanes, identified by the Orphics as
Eros, who becomes the creator of the world.[9]
Some similar
ideas appear in the Vedic and Hindu cosmologies. In the Vedic cosmology the universe is
created from nothing by the great heat. Kāma (Desire) the
primal seed of spirit, is the link which connected the
existent with the non-existent [10] In
the Hindu cosmology, in the beginning
there was nothing in the universe but only darkness and
the divine essence who removed the darkness and created
the primordial waters. His seed produced the universal
germ (Hiranyagarbha), from which everything else
appeared.[11]
In the
Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish the universe was in a formless
state and is described as a watery chaos. From it
emerged two primary gods, the male Apsu and
female Tiamat, and a third deity who is the makerMummu and his power for the
progression of cosmogonic births to begin.[12]
In Genesis, the world in its early state
after its creation is described as "without form and
void". Elohim commanded that there be light,
while the spirit of Elohim moved upon the face of the
waters.[13]
Norse
mythology also
describes Ginnungagap as the primordial abyss from
which sprang the first living creatures, including the
giant Ymir
whose body eventually became the world, whose blood became
the seas, and so on; another version describes the origin
of the world as a result of the fiery and cold parts of Hel colliding.
First
generation
After the
speaker declares that he has received the blessings of the
Muses and thanks them for giving him inspiration, he
explains that Chaos arose spontaneously. Then came Gaia (Earth), the more orderly and
safe foundation that would serve as a home for the gods
and mortals, and Tartarus, in the depths of the Earth, and
Eros,[14] the
fairest among the deathless gods. Eros serves an important
role in sexual reproduction, before which children had to
be produced asexually.
From Chaos
came Erebus (place of darkness between the
earth and the underworld) and Nyx (Night). Erebus and Nyx
reproduced to make Aether (Light) and Hemera (Day). Aether and Hemera gave
birth to Gaia, and from Gaia came Uranus (Sky), the Ourea (Mountains), and Pontus (Sea).
Uranus was
disgusted with his children, the Hecatonchires, so he hid them away somewhere
in Gaia. Angered by this, Gaia asked her children the
Titans to punish their father. Only Cronus was willing to
do so. Cronus castrated his father with a sickle from
Gaia. The blood from Uranus splattered onto the earth
producing Erinyes (the Furies), Giants, and Meliai. Cronus threw the severed
testicles into the Sea (Thalassa), around which foam developed
and transformed into the goddess of Love, Aphrodite (which is why in some myths,
Aphrodite was daughter of Uranus and the goddess Thalassa).
After
Uranus's castration, Gaia married Pontus and they have a
descendent line consisting of sea deities, sea nymphs, and
hybrid monsters. One child of Gaia and Pontus is Nereus (Old Man of the Sea), who
marries Doris, a daughter of Oceanus and
Tethys, and has Nereids, the fifty nymphs of the sea,
one of whom is Thetis. Another child of Gaia and
Pontus is Thaumas, who marries Electra, a sister of Doris, and has Iris (Rainbow) and two Harpies.
In the
family of the Titans, Oceanus and Tethys marry and have
three thousand rivers (including the Nile and Skamandar)
and three thousand Okeanid Nymphs (including Electra, Calypso, and Styx).
Theia and Hyperion marry and have Helios (Sun), Selene (Moon), and Eos
(Dawn). Kreios and Eurybia marry to bear Astraios, Pallas, and Perses. Eos and Astraios will later
marry and have Zephyrus, Boreas, Notos, Eosphoros, Hesperos, Phosphoros
and the Stars (foremost of which are Phaenon, Phaethon, Pyroeis, Stilbon, those of the Zodiac and those three acknowledged
before).[clarification
needed]
Cronus,
having taken control of the Cosmos, wanted to ensure that
he maintained power. Uranus and Gaia prophesied to him that one of
his children would overthrow him, so when he married Rhea,
he made sure to swallow each of the children she birthed:
Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Zeus (in that order). However, Rhea
asked Gaia and Uranus for help in saving Zeus by sending
Rhea to Crete to bear Zeus and giving Cronus a huge stone
to swallow thinking that it was another of Rhea's
children. Gaia then took Zeus and hid him deep in a cave
beneath the Aegean Mountains.
Tricked by
Gaia (the Theogony does not detail how), Cronus
regurgitated his other five children.[16]
Joining with
Zeus, they waged a great war on the Titans for control of
the Cosmos. The war lasted ten years, with the Olympian
gods, Cyclopes, Prometheus and Epimetheus, the children of
Klymene, on one side, and the Titans and the Giants on the
other (with only Oceanos as a neutral force). Eventually
Zeus released the Hundred-Handed ones to shake the earth,
allowing him to gain the upper hand, and cast the fury of
his thunderbolts at the Titans, throwing them into Tartarus. Zeus later battled Typhon, a son of Gaia and Tartarus,
created because Gaia was angry that the Titans were
defeated, and was victorious again.
Because
Prometheus helped Zeus, he was not sent to Tartarus like
the other Titans. However, Prometheus sought to trick
Zeus. Slaughtering a cow, he took the valuable fat and
meat, and sewed it inside the cow's stomach. Prometheus
then took the bones and hid them with a thin layer of fat.
Prometheus asked Zeus' opinion on which offering pile he
found more desirable, hoping to trick the god into
selecting the less desirable portion. However, Hesiod
relates that Zeus saw through the trick and responded in a
fury. Zeus declared that the ash tree would never hold
fire, in effect denying the benefit of fire to man. In
response, Prometheus sneaked into the gods' chambers and
stole a glowing ember with a piece of reed. Prometheus
then defies the gods and gives fire to humanity (theft of fire).
For this
theft, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a
cliff, where an eagle fed on his ever-regenerating liver
every day. Prometheus would not be freed until Heracles, a son of Zeus, came to free
him. Since man had access to fire, Zeus devised woman as a
general punishment, in trade. Hephaistos and Athena built
woman with exquisite detail, and she was considered
beautiful by all men and gods. (It is generally agreed in
academic translations that this woman was Pandora.) Hesiod writes that, despite
her beauty, woman is a bane for mankind, attributing women
with laziness and a waste of resources. Hesiod notes that
Zeus' curse, womankind, can only bring man suffering,
whether by taking a woman as his wife, or by trying to
avoid marriage.
Zeus married
seven wives. The first was the Oceanid Metis, whom he swallowed to avoid
begetting a son who, as had happened with Cronus and
Uranus, would overthrow him, as well as to absorb her
wisdom so that she could advise him in the future. He
would later "give birth" to Athena from his head, which would anger
Hera enough for her to produce her own son
parthenogenetically, Typhaon, the part snake, part dragon sea
monster, or in other versions Hephaistos, god of fire and blacksmiths.
The second wife was Themis, who bore the three Horae (Hours): Eunomia (Order), Dikē (Justice), Eirene (Peace); and the three Moirai (Fates): Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Alotter), Atropos (Unturned), as well as Tyche (Luck). Zeus then married his
third wife Eurynome, who bore the three Charites (Graces):
Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia.
Poseidon
married Amphitrite and produced Triton. Aphrodite, who married
Hephaistos, nevertheless had an affair with Ares to have Eros (Love), Phobos (Fear), Deimos (Terror), and Harmonia (Harmony), who would later marry
Cadmus to sire Ino (who with her son Melicertes would become a sea deity), Semele (mother of Dionysos), Autonoë (mother of Actaeon), Polydorus, and Agave (mother of Pentheus). Helios and
Perseis begat Circe. Circe, with Poseidon, in turn
begat Phaunos, god of the forest, and, with Dionysos,
mothered Comos, god of revelry and festivity. After
coupling with Odysseus, Circe would later give birth to
Agrius, Latinus, and Telegonos.[17] Atlas' daughter Calypso would also bear Odysseus two
sons, Nausithoos and Nausinous.[18]
Influence on
earliest Greek philosophy
The heritage
of Greek mythology already embodied the desire to
articulate reality as a whole, and this universalizing
impulse was fundamental for the first projects of
speculative theorizing. It appears that the order of being
was first imaginatively visualized before it was
abstractly thought. Hesiod, impressed by necessity
governing the ordering of things, discloses a definite
pattern in the genesis and appearance of the gods. These
ideas made something like cosmological speculation
possible. The earliest rhetoric of reflection all centers
about two interrelated things: the experience of wonder as
a living involvement with the divine order of things; and
the absolute conviction that, beyond the totality of
things, reality forms a beautiful and harmonious whole.[19]
In the Theogony,
the origin (arche) is Chaos, a divine
primordial condition, and there are the roots and the ends
of the earth, sky, sea, and Tartarus. Pherecydes of Syros (6th century BC), believed that
there were three pre-existent divine principles and called
the water also Chaos.[20] In
the language of the archaic period (8th – 6th century BC),
arche (or archai) designates the source,
origin, or root of things that exist. If a thing is to be
well established or founded, its arche or static
point must be secure, and the most secure foundations are
those provided by the gods: the indestructible, immutable,
and eternal ordering of things.[21]
In ancient Greek
philosophy,
arche is the element or first principle of all
things, a permanent nature or substance which is conserved
in the generation of the rest of it. From this, all things
come to be, and into it they are resolved in a final
state.[22] It is the divine horizon of
substance that encompasses and rules all things. Thales (7th – 6th century BC), the
first Greek philosopher, claimed that the first principle
of all things is water. Anaximander (6th century BC) was the first
philosopher who used the term arche for that which
writers from Aristotle on call the "substratum".[23] Anaximander claimed that the
beginning or first principle is an endless mass (Apeiron) subject to neither age nor
decay, from which all things are being born and then they
are destroyed there. A fragment from Xenophanes (6th century BC) shows the
transition from Chaos to Apeiron: "The
upper limit of earth borders on air. The lower limit of
earth reaches down to the unlimited (i.e the Apeiron)."[24]
3. ^
Stoddard, Kathryn B. (2003). "The Programmatic Message of
the 'Kings and Singers' Passage: Hesiod, Theogony 80-103".
Transactions of the American Philological Association
133 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1353/apa.2003.0010. JSTOR20054073.
4. ^Herodotus (II.53) cited it simply as an
authoritative list of divine names, attributes and
functions.
5. ^ F.
Solmsen, Hesiod and Aeschylus (Ithaca: Cornell
Studies in Classical Philology 30) 1949:53 and note 172
with citations; "if an interpolation," Joseph
Eddy Fontenrose observes (Python:
a study of Delphic myth and its origins: 71, note
3), "it was made early enough."
6. ^
Lambert, Wilfred G.; Walcot, Peter (1965). "A New
Babylonian Theogony and Hesiod". Kadmos 4 (1):
64–72. doi:10.1515/kadm.1965.4.1.64.
7. ^
Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near
Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic
Age (Harvard University Press) 192, offers
discussion and bibliography of related questions.
8. ^
O.Gigon. Der Umsprung der Griechische Philosophie.Von
Hesiod bis Parmenides.Bale.Stutgart.Schwabe &
Co. p. 29
10. ^
"Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire the
primal seed and germ of Spirit, Sages who searched with
their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in
the non-existent." Rig Veda X.129: The
Hymns of the Rig Veda, Book X,
Hymn CXXIX, Verse 4, p. 575
·Lamberton,
Robert,
Hesiod, New Haven : Yale University Press,
1988. ISBN
0-300-04068-7.
Cf. Chapter II, "The Theogony", pp. 38–104.
·Montanari,
F.;
Rengakos, A.; Tsagalis, C. (2009). Brill's Companion
to Hesiod. Leiden. ISBN978-90-04-17840-3.
·Rutherford,
I.
(2009). "Hesiod and the Literary Traditions of the Near
East". In Montanari,
Rengakos & Tsagalis (2009).
pp. 9–35 Missing
or
empty |title= (help).
·Tandy,
David
W., and Neale, Walter C. [translators], Works and
Days: a translation and commentary for the social
sciences, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996. ISBN
0-520-20383-6
Of
course the politically correct verbiage is “climate
change.”
Between
the 13th and 11th centuries BC, most Greek Bronze Age
Palatial centers were destroyed and/or abandoned
throughout the Near East and Aegean, says this paper by
Brandon L. Drake.
A
sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures
preceded the wide-spread systems collapse, while a sharp
decrease in temperatures occurred during their
abandonment. (Neither of which, I am sure – the increase
or the decrease – were caused by humans.)
Mediterranean
Sea surface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late
Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere
and thus reducing precipitation over land, says Drake,
of the Department of Anthropology, University of New
Mexico.
This
cooling and ensuing aridity could have affected areas
that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural
productivity. The resulting crop declines would
have made higher-density populations unsustainable.
Indeed,
studies of data from the Mediterranean indicate that the
Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze
Age. The prolonged arid conditions – a centuries-long
megadrought, if you will – lasted until the Roman
Warm Period.
Those
four centuries – known as the ‘Greek Dark Ages’ – were
typified by low population levels, rural settlements,
population migration, and limited long-distance trade.
The
Late Bronze Age collapse is associated with the loss of
writing systems such as Linear B, and the extinction of
Hatti as both a written and spoken language. Writing and
literacy do not return to the Aegean until the end of
the ‘Greek Dark Ages’ in 8th century BCBCBC with the
spread of the Phoenecian alphabet.
The
collapse of Palatial Civilization occurred in different
places at different times. Many of these destructions
have been attributed to human-causes. (We love to blame
humans for climate-driven circumstances, don’t we?)
Large population migrations took place, most famously
with the incursions of the ‘Sea Peoples’ into the Nile
Delta and the Levant.
In
Egypt, several inscriptions detailed wars with ‘Sea
People’ beginning in the reign of Ramses II (1279-1213
BC). While population movements of the ‘Sea People’ were
better documented in Egypt and the Levant, they have
been tied to destabilization of the Aegean region as
well.
The
ensuing economic decline resulted in the widespread
dissolution of governments. Once the governments were
dissolved it was impossible to reestablish a central
authority.
While
economic collapse continues to be the dominant theory
for the collapse of Palatial Civilization in the Bronze
Age, climatic/environmental explanations have also been
proposed. (I think the climate conditions triggered the
economic collapse, of course.)
Conditions
improve following the introduction of iron tools, and
accelerate at the beginning of the Roman Warm Period at
350 BC, says Drake.
Wouldn’t
this make it appear that warmer climates are good for
civilization? And that cooler climates can lead to
systems collapse?
I’m
thinking that our leaders are sorely mislead
Full
text of the cited article is on the Internet at:
Drake,B.L.,
The Influence of Climate Change on the Late Bronze Age
Collapse and the Greek Dark Ages, Journal of
Archaeological Science (2012),
doi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.01.029
There
was no day on which the Greek Dark Age ended.Rather there was
a gradual remaking and revival of civilization – this time
on the City-State Model.TKW
In
Greece, the Dark Age of depopulation and poverty
persisted longer than in the Near East. Although Greek
economic improvement is evident as early as about 900
B.C., it was not until the period around 750 B.C. that
political states, now of a new kind, developed again and
the Dark Age can be seen as ended. The obscure history
of Greece in years between these general dates laid the
foundation for the pronounced social, political, and
intellectual changes associated with the creation of the
Greek city-state. Throughout this period, continued
contact with the Near East greatly influenced Greece,
not only in commerce and trade but also in the exchange
of ideas. Entrepreneurs from the Near East apparently
often made their way to Greece, bringing with them both
the knowledge of new technologies, such as iron working,
and of ideas that Greeks took over and made their own in
mythology and religion.
The Start of
Economic Revival
The evidence
from burials shows that Greeks in more and more
locations had become conspicuously wealthy by about 900
B.C. A hierarchical arrangement of society was evidently
spreading throughout Greece, and the few men and women
at the pinnacle of society had the riches to have
expensive material goods placed in their tombs with
them. In the earlier part of the Dark Age, the best
grave offerings a dead person could expect were a few
clay pots. The exceptional contents of rich graves point
to significant economic changes already under way by the
ninth century B.C.
Technological
Change: Using Iron
Metallurgical
technology eventually helped bring about the end of the
Greek Dark Age. Archaeology allows us to see this trend,
as in the evidence from the burial of a male about 900
B.C., which consisted of a pit into which was placed a
clay pot to hold the dead man's cremated remains.
Surrounding the pot were metal weapons including a long
sword, spearheads, and knives. The inclusion of weapons
of war in a male grave was a continuation of the burial
traditions of the Mycenaean Age, but these arms were
forged from iron, not bronze, which had been the primary
metal of the earlier period (often referred to therefore
as the Bronze Age). This difference reflects a
significant shift in metallurgy, which took place
throughout the Mediterranean region during the early
centuries of the first millennium B.C.: iron displacing
bronze as the principal metal used to make tools and
weapons. Greeks probably learned to work iron1 from voyaging
Near Eastern entrepreneurs who brought their skills with
them from their homelands. The island of Cyprus seems to
have been particularly important as a place where this
new technology developed and then was passed on to other
places further west. In keeping with the habit of
characterizing periods of history from the name of the
metal most used at the time, the Dark Age can also be
referred to as the Early Iron Age in Greece.
The
Greeks, like others in the Near East, turned to iron
because they could no longer obtain the tin needed to
mix with copper to make bronze. The international
trading routes that had once brought tin to Greece and
the Near East from distant sources had been disrupted in
the upheaval associated with the wide-spread turmoil
that affected the eastern Mediterranean region beginning
around 1200 B.C. Iron ore, by
contrast, was available locally2 in Greece and
in other areas throughout the Near East. Iron eventually
replaced bronze in many uses, above all in the
production of agricultural
tools3,
swords, and spear points. Bronze remained in use for
shields and armor, however. The lower cost of iron tools
and weapons meant more people could afford them, and
with iron being harder than bronze, implements kept
their sharp edges longer.
Agricultural
Resurgence
Better
and more plentiful farming implements of iron eventually
helped to increase the production of food, a development
reflected by the evidence of a burial from Athens. This
grave, from about 850 B.C., held the remains of a woman
and her treasures, including gold rings and earrings, a
necklace of glass beads, and an unusual chest of baked
clay. The necklace was an imported item from Egypt or
Syria, and the technique of the gold jewelry was also
that of the Near East. These objects reflected Greek trade with the
more prosperous civilizations of that region4, a relationship
whose influence on Greece increased as the Dark Age came
to an end in the next century. The most intriguing
object from the burial is the woman's terracotta storage
chest. It was painted with characteristically intricate
and regular designs, whose precision has led modern art
historians to give the name Geometric to this style of
the late Dark Age. On its top were sculpted five
beehive-like urns that are miniature models of granaries
(structures for storing grain5). If these
models were important enough to be buried as objects of
special value, we can deduce that actual granaries and
the grain they held were valuable commodities in real
life. This deduction in turn means that already by 850
B.C. agriculture had begun to recover from its
devastation in the early Dark Age, when herding animals
had become more prevalent and cultivation had decreased.
Whether the woman was the owner of grain fields we
cannot know, but from her sculpted chest we can glimpse
the significance of farming for her and her
contemporaries.
Repopulation
Increased
agricultural production in this period accompanied a
growth in population. It is impossible to determine
whether a rise in population preceded and led to the
raising of more grain or, conversely, whether
improvements in agricultural technology and the placing
of more fields under cultivation spurred a consequent
growth in the population by increasing the number of
people the land could support. These two developments
reinforced one another: as the Greeks produced more
food, the better-fed population reproduced faster, and
as the population grew, more people could produce more
food. The repopulation of Greece in the late Dark Age
established the demographic conditions under which the
new political forms of Greece were to emerge.
The Definition
of Aristocracy
People
like the wealthy woman buried with the granary model at
Athens and the earlier couple from Lefkandi constituted
the aristocracy that emerged during the later part of
the Greek Dark Age. The term aristocracy 6 comes from
Greek and means “rule of the best.” Although the use of
this term is traditional in accounts of ancient Greek
history, it is important to remember that “aristocracy”
in this context does not mean what it often means in,for
example, French or English history. That is, ancient
Greece never had an aristocracy that was an officially
recognized nobility, whose members inherited their
status regardless of their wealth or other
socio-economic characteristics. Rather, the term as used
in ancient Greek history refers to the social elite,
whose status depended on a combination of factors, of
which wealth and public conduct were very important.
When one speaks of a Greek aristocrat, then, it is
crucial to understand this designation as meaning “a
member of the social elite.” Aristocrats in ancient
Greece seem to have possessed more wealth than others in
their communities, but birth was also a criterion in
their enjoying general acknowledgment as the “best” in
their society — that is, the people with the greatest
social status and political influence. We can only
speculate about the various ways in which families might
have originally gained their designation as aristocratic
and thus became entitled to pass on this status to those
born into them. Some aristocratic families in the Dark
Age might have inherited their status as descendants of
the most prominent and wealthy families of the Mycenean
Age; some might have made themselves aristocrats during
the Dark Age by amassing wealth and befriending less
fortunate people who were willing to acknowledge their
benefactors' superior status in return for material
help; and some might have acquired aristocratic status
by monopolizing control of essential religious rituals.
Homer and the
Social Values of Greek Aristocrats
The
aristocrats' ideas and traditions on organizing their
communities and about proper behavior for everyone in
them—that is, their code of social values—represented,
like the reappearance of agriculture, fundamental
components of Greece's emerging new political forms. The
aristocratic social values of the Dark Age underlie the
stories told in the Iliad and Odyssey7, two
book-length poems that first began to be written down
about the middle of the eighth century B.C., at the very
end of the Dark Age. Despite the ancient origins of
Homeric poetry, the behavioral code that
it portrayed8
primarily reflected values established in the
aristocratic society of Greece of the Dark Age before
the rise of political systems based on citizenship.
The Male Ethic
The
primary characters in the Homeric poems are aristocrats,
who are expected to live up to a demanding code of
values. The men are mainly warriors, like the
incomparable Achilles9 of the Iliad.
This poem tells part of the famous story of the attack
by a Greek army on the city of Troy10, a
stronghold located in northwestern Anatolia. Although it
is commonly assumed that the Trojans were a different
people from the Greeks, the poems themselves provide no
definitive answer to the question of their ethnic
identity. In the Iliad's representation of the
Trojan War, which the Greeks believed occurred about
four hundred years before Homer's time, Achilles is, in
the language of the poem, “the best of the
Greeks11”
because he is a “doer of deeds and speaker of words12” without
equal. Achilles' overriding concern in word and action
is with the glory and recognition for all time that he
can win with his “excellence” (the best available
translation for Greek arete 13, a word with a
range of meanings). Like all aristocrats, Achilles
feared the disgrace that he would feel before others if
he were seen to fail to live up to the code of
excellence. Under the aristocratic code, failure and
wrongdoing produced public shame.
A Woman's
Excellence
A
concentration on excellence (arete ) distinguishes the
code of values of the aristocrats of the Homeric poems.
For an aristocratic woman like Penelope14, the wife of
the hero of the Odyssey, excellence consists of
preserving her household and its property by relying on
her intelligence, beauty, social status, and intense
fidelity to her husband. This curatorship requires her
to display great stamina and ingenuity in resisting the
attempted predations of her husband's rivals15 at home
because he, Odysseus, is away for twenty years fighting
the Trojan War and then sailing home in a long series of
dangerous adventures. Although Penelope clearly counts
as an exceptional figure of literature, aristocratic
women in real life, like men, could see their proper
role in life as requiring them to develop an exceptional
excellence to set themselves apart from others of more
ordinary character and status. Under this code, any life
was contemptible whose goal was not the pursuit of
excellence and the fame it brought.
The Recovery of
Writing and Homer
The
Greeks had relearned the technology of writing as a
result of contact with the literate civilizations of the
Near East and the alphabet developed there long before.
Sometime between about 950 and 750 the Greeks modified a
Phoenician
alphabet16
to represent the sounds of their own language, and the
Greek version of the alphabet eventually formed the base
of the alphabet used for English today. Greeks of the Archaic Age17 (roughly, the
period from 750 to 500 B.C.) swiftly applied their newly
acquired skill to write down oral literature, such as
the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks
believed that Homer18, a blind poet
from the Greek region called Ionia19
(today the western coast of Turkey), had composed the Iliad
and Odyssey. Modern scholarship has often
disputed this attribution on the grounds that no single
author could have been responsible for these lengthy and
complex poems if, as is commonly assumed, they were
originally composed and transmitted orally, without the
aid of writing. If, on the other hand, Homeric poetry as
we have it was composed by writing, the authorship
question is on a different footing. Whatever the truth
of this much disputed question, Homeric poetry, even if
it was put into final form by a single author, grew out
of centuries of oral performance by countless Greek
poets singing of the deeds and values of legendary
aristocrats. Stories from Near Eastern poetic tales
influenced this oral poetry, which for centuries helped
to transmit cultural values from one generations of
Greeks to the next.
The Olympic
Games of Zeus and Hera
around his
head
Excellence (arete ) as a competitive value for male
Greek aristocrats showed up clearly in the Olympic
Games, a religious festival associated with a large
sanctuary of Zeus, king of the gods of the Greeks. The
sanctuary was located at Olympia20, in
the northwestern Peloponnese (the large peninsula that
forms southern Greece), where the games were held every
four years beginning in 776 B.C. During these great
celebrations the aristocratic men of the age competed in
running events and wrestling21 as
individuals, not as national representatives on teams,
as in the modern Olympic Games. The emphasis on physical
prowess and fitness, competition, and public recognition
by other men corresponded to the ideal of Greek
masculine identity as it developed in this period. In a
rare departure from the ancient Mediterranean tradition
against public nakedness, Greek athletes competed
without clothing (hence the word gymnasium22, from the
Greek word meaning “naked,” gymnos ). Other competitions
such as horse and chariot racing23 were added to
the Olympic Games later, but the principal event
remained a sprint of about two hundred yards called the
stadion 24 (hence our
word “stadium”). Winners originally received no
financial prizes, only a garland made from
wild olive leaves25, but the
prestige of victory could bring other rewards as well.
In later Greek athletic competitions prizes of value
were often awarded. Admission was free to men; married women were
not allowed to attend26, on pain of
death, but women had their own separate festival at
Olympia on a different date in honor of Zeus' wife,
Hera. Although less is known about the games of Hera27, literary
sources report that unmarried young women competed on
the Olympic track in a foot race five-sixths as long as
the men's stadion. In later times, international games
including the Olympics were dominated by professional
athletes, who made good livings from appearance fees and
prizes won at various games held all over Greece. The
most famous of them all was Milo28, from Croton,
in southern Italy. Winner of the Olympic wrestling crown
six times beginning in 536 B.C., he was renowned for
showy stunts such as holding his breath until his blood
expanded his veins so much that they would snap a cord
tied.
Competition and
Community
The
competition of the Olympic Games originally centered on
contests among aristocrats, who prided themselves on
their innate distinctiveness from ordinary people, as
the fifth-century B.C. poet Pindar made clear in
praising a family of victors: “Hiding the nature
you are born with is impossible. The seasons rich in
their flowers have many times bestowed on you, sons of
Aletes [of Corinth], the brightness that victory
brings, when you achieved the heights of excellence in
the sacred games.”29 The
organization of the festival as an event for all of
Greece nevertheless indicates a trend toward communal
activity that was under way in Greek society and
politics by the mid-eighth century B.C. First of all,
the building of
a special sanctuary30 for the
worship of Zeus at Olympia
provided an architectural center as a focus for public
gatherings with a surrounding space for crowds to
assemble. The social complement to the creation of this
physical environment was the tradition that the Games of
Zeus and Hera were panhellenic, that is, open to all
Greeks. Moreover, an international truce31 of several
weeks was declared so that competitors and spectators
from all Greek communities could travel to and from
Olympia in security even if wars were otherwise in
progress along their way. In short, the arrangements for
the Olympic Games demonstrate that in eighth century
B.C. Greece the aristocratic values of individual
activity and pursuit of excellence by one's self were
beginning to be channeled into a new context appropriate
for a changing society. This sort of assertion of the
importance of communal interests was another important
precondition for the creation of Greece's new political
forms.
Religion, Myth,
and Community
Religion
provided the context for almost all communal activity
throughout the history of ancient Greece. Sports, as in
the Olympic Games held to honor Zeus, took place in the
religious context of festivals honoring specific gods.
War was conducted according to the signs of divine will
that civil and military leaders identified in the sacrifice32 of animals and
in omens derived from occurrences in nature such as
unusual weather. Sacrifices themselves, the central
event of Greek religious rituals, were performed before
crowds in the open air on public occasions that involved
communal feasting afterward on the sacrificed meat. The
conceptual basis of Greek religion was found in myth ( mythos 33, a Greek word
meaning “story” or “tale”) about the gods and their
relationship to humans. In the eighth century B.C., the
Greeks began to record their myths in writing, and the
poetry of Hesiod34 preserved from
this period (there was at this date not yet any Greek
literature in prose) reveals how religious myth, as well
as the economic changes and social values of the time,
contributed to the feeling of community that underlay
the creation of new political structures in Greece.
The Mythical
Origin of Justice
Hesiod35,
an eighth-century B.C. poet from the region of Boeotia
in central Greece, employed myth to reveal the divine
origin of justice. His long poem The Theogony
(“The Genealogy of the Gods”) details the birth of the
race of gods from primordial Chaos (“void” or “vacuum”)
and Earth, the mother of Sky and numerous other
children. This myth about the succession of the gods
owed its inspiration to Near Eastern myths, another
example of the importance of contact with that region
for the cultural as well as economic development of
Greece as it emerged from its Dark Age. Hesiod explained
that, when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth
persuaded her fiercest male offspring, Kronos, to
overthrow him by violence because “Sky first contrived
to do shameful things.”36 When Kronos
later began to swallow up all his own children, Kronos's
wife had their
son Zeus overthrow his father37 by force in
retribution for his evil deeds. These vivid stories,
which had their origins in Near Eastern myths like those
of the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation, carried
the message that existence, even for gods, entailed
struggle, sorrow, and violence. Even more significantly,
however, they showed that a concern for justice had also
been a component of the divine order of the universe
from the beginning. In his poem Works and Days,
Hesiod identified Zeus as the fount of justice in human
affairs, a marked contrast to the portrayal of Zeus38 in Homeric
poetry as mainly concerned with the fates of his
favorite aristocratic warriors. Hesiod presents justice
as a divine quality that will assert itself to punish
evil-doers: “For
Zeus ordained that fishes and wild beasts and birds
should eat each other, for they have no justice; but
to human beings he has given justice, which is far the
best.”39
Justice in
Dark-Age Life
Aristocratic
men dominated the distribution of justice in Dark Age
society. They exercised direct control over their family
members and household servants. Others outside their
immediate households would become their followers by
acknowledging the aristocrats' status as leaders. An
aristocrat's followers would grant him a certain amount
of authority because, as the followers were roughly
equal in wealth and status among themselves, they needed
a figure invested with authority to settle disputes and
organize defense against raids or other military
threats. In anthropological terms, aristocrats operated
as chiefs of
bands40.
An aristocratic chief had authority to settle arguments
over property and duties, oversaw the distribution of
rewards and punishments, and usually headed the
religious rituals deemed essential to the security of
the group. At the same time, a chief's actual power to
coerce unwilling members of his band was limited. When
decisions affecting the entire group had to be made, his
leadership depended on being capable of forging a
consensus by persuading members of the band about what
to do. The poet Hesiod describes how an effective chief
exercised leadership: “When his people in
their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets
matters right, persuading them with soft words.”41 In short, a
chief could only lead his followers where they were
willing to go.
Tensions
between Leaders and Followers
Aristocratic
chiefs sometimes abused their status and created
tensions between leaders and followers. Eventually this
tension contributed to the political reorganization of
the Greek world in the creation of the city-state. A story from the Iliad42 provides a
fictional illustration of the kind of abusive
aristocratic behavior that chiefs could exhibit in the
period before the city-state emerged. According to the Iliad,
when Agamemnon, the aristocratic leader of the Greek
army besieging Troy, summoned the troops to announce a
decision to prolong the war, now in its tenth year, an
ordinary soldier named Thersites spoke up in opposition.
Thersites could express his opinion because Agamemnon
led the Greeks as a Dark Age chief led a band, which
required that all men's opinions be heard with respect.
Thersites criticized Agamemnon as unjustly greedy.
“Let's leave him here to digest his booty,” Thersites
shouted to his fellow soldiers in the ranks. Odysseus,
another chief, immediately rose up to support Agamemnon,
saying to Thersites, “If I ever find you being so
foolish again, may my head not remain on my body if I
don't strip you naked and send you back to your ship
crying from the blows I give you.” Odysseus thereupon
cowed Thersites with a blow to his back, which drew
blood.
In
this fictional episode, the assembled soldiers approve
of Odysseus' inequitable treatment of Thersites, who
admittedly speaks without moderation or tact. For the
city-state to be created as a political institution in
which all free men had a stake, the idea that all men
had the right to speak their minds, even rudely, had to
emerge in the real world. Non-aristocratic men had to
insist that they deserved equitable treatment, even if
aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and
carry out the policies agreed on by the group.
The Injustice
of Chiefs to Peasants
The
poet Hesiod43 reveals that a
state of heightened tension had developed between
aristocratic chiefs and the peasants (the free
proprietors of small farms, who might own a slave or
two, oxen to work their fields, and other movable
property of value) in the eighth century. Their property
made peasants the most influential group among the men
ranging from poor to moderately well-off who made up the
bands of followers of aristocratic chiefs in late Dark
Age Greece. Assuming the perspective of a peasant
farming a small holding, the poet insisted that the
divine origin of justice should be a warning to “bribe-devouring
chiefs,”44
who settled disputes among their followers and neighbors
“with crooked judgments.” This feeling of outrage
evidently felt by non-aristocrats at not receiving equal
treatment in the settlement of disputes served as a
stimulus for the gradual movement toward new forms of
political organization in Greece.