Aegean civilization
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Aegean civilization is a general term for the
Aegean Neolithic farmers
A DNA study from 2019 indicates that agriculture was brought to Western Europe by the Aegean populations, known as "Aegean Neolithic farmers".[citation needed] These Neolithic groups arrived in northern France and Germany around 5000 BC. About 1000 years later, they arrived in Britain.[2][3]
When they left the Aegean, these peoples split into two groups with somewhat different cultures. One group went north along the Danube, while the other took a southerly route along the Mediterranean and reached Iberia. This latter group then arrived in Britain.[4] Previously, these areas were populated by hunter-gathererer cultures known as the 'western hunter-gatherers', similar to the Cheddar Man.[2]
Most of the ancestry of the population after 4000 BC (74% on average) is attributable to the Aegean Neolithic farmers. This indicates a shift in ancestry with the transition to farming.[3]
The Chalcolithic (Copper Age) started in Europe about 5500 BC. Numerous megalithic structures and monuments were erected in this period.[citation needed]
Periodization
Mainland
- Early Helladic (EH): 3200/3100–2050/2001 BC
- Middle Helladic (MH): 2000/1900–1550 BC
- Late Helladic (LH): 1550–1050 BC
Crete
- Early Minoan (EM): 3200–2160 BC
- Middle Minoan (MM): 2160–1600 BC
- Late Minoan (LM): 1600–1100 BC
Cyclades
- Early Cycladic (EC): 3300–2000 BC
- Kastri (EH II–EH III): c. 2500–2100 BC
- Convergence with MM from ca. 2000 BC
Commerce
Commerce was practiced to some extent in very early times, as is shown by the distribution of
Discoveries, later in the 20th century, of sunken trading vessels such as those at
Evidence
For details of monumental evidence the articles on
Internal evidence
- Structures: Ruins of palaces, palatial intaglios and frescoes. From the sources and from inlay-work we have also representations of palaces and houses.
- Structural decoration: Architectural features, such as columns, friezes and various mouldings; mural decoration, such as fresco-paintings, coloured reliefs and mosaic inlay. Roof tiles were also occasionally employed, as at early Helladic Lerna and Akovitika,[7] and later in the Mycenaean towns of Gla and Midea.[8]
- Furniture: (a) Domestic furniture, such as vessels of all sorts and in many materials, from huge store jars down to tiny unguent pots; culinary and other implements; thrones, seats, tables, etc., these all in stone or plastered terracotta. (b) Sacred furniture, such as models or actual examples of ritual objects; of these we have also numerous pictorial representations. (c) Funerary furniture, for example, coffins in painted terracotta.
- Art products: for example, plastic objects, carved in stone, or ivory, cast or beaten in metals (gold, silver, copper and bronze), or modelled in clay, faience, paste, etc. Very little trace has yet been found of large free-standing sculpture, but many examples exist of sculptors' smaller work. Vases of many kinds, carved in marble or other stones, cast or beaten in metals or fashioned in clay, the latter in enormous number and variety, richly ornamented with coloured schemes, and sometimes bearing moulded decoration. Examples of painting on stone, opaque and transparent. Engraved objects in great number for example, ring-bezels and gems; and an immense quantity of clay impressions, taken from these.
- armour from Dendra.
- Articles of personal use: for example, brooches (fibulae), pins, razors, tweezers, often found as dedications to a deity, for example, in the Dictaean Cavern of Crete. No textiles have survived other than impressions in clay.
- Written documents: for example, clay tablets and discs (so far in Crete only), but nothing of more perishable nature, such as skin, papyrus, etc.; engraved gems and gem impressions; legends written with pigment on pottery (rare); characters incised on stone or pottery. These show a number of systems of script employing either ideograms or syllabograms (see Linear B).
- Excavated tombs: Of either the pit, chamber or the tholos kind, in which the dead were laid, together with various objects of use and luxury, without cremation, and in either coffins or loculi or simple wrappings.
- Public works: Such as paved and stepped roadways, bridges, systems of drainage, etc.[6]
External evidence
- Monuments and records of other contemporary civilizations: for example, representations of alien peoples in Egyptian frescoes; imitation of Aegean fabrics and style in non-Aegean lands; allusions to Mediterranean peoples in Egyptian, Semitic or Babylonian records.
- Literary traditions of subsequent civilizations: Especially the Hellenic; such as, for example, those embodied in the Homeric poems, the legends concerning Crete, Mycenae, etc.; statements as to the origin of gods, cults and so forth, transmitted to us by Hellenic antiquarians such as Strabo, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus, etc.
- Traces of customs, creeds, rituals, etc.: In the Aegean area at a later time, discordant with the civilization in which they were practiced and indicating survival from earlier systems. There are also possible linguistic and even physical survivals to be considered.
Mycenae and Tiryns are the two principal sites on which evidence of a prehistoric civilization was remarked long ago by the ancient Greeks.[6]
Discovery
The curtain-wall and towers of the Mycenaean
There had been, however, a good deal of other evidence available before 1876, which, had it been collated and seriously studied, might have discounted the sensation that the discovery of the citadel graves eventually made. For instance, scholars had noted that tributaries appearing in Egyptian art resembled modern Greeks, but were unable to definitely recognize them as such. Nor did the Aegean objects which were lying obscurely in museums in 1870, or thereabouts, provide a sufficient test of the real basis underlying the Hellenic myths of the
Ludwig Ross, the German
Meanwhile, in 1868, tombs at Ialysus in Rhodes had yielded to Alfred Biliotti many painted vases of styles which were called later the third and fourth "Mycenaean"; but these, bought by John Ruskin, and presented to the British Museum, excited less attention than they deserved, being supposed to be of some local fabric of uncertain date. Nor was a connection immediately detected between them and the objects found four years later in a tomb at Menidi in Attica and a rock-cut "bee-hive" grave near the Argive Heraeum.[9]
Even Schliemann's initial
Schliemann resumed excavations at Hissarlik in 1878, and greatly increased our knowledge of the lower strata, but did not recognize the Aegean remains in his "Lydian" city now known as Late Bronze Age Troy. These were not to be fully revealed until Dr. Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who had become Schliemann's assistant in 1879, resumed the work at Hissarlik in 1892 after Schliemann's death. But by laying bare in 1884 the upper stratum of remains on the rock of Tiryns, Schliemann made a contribution to our knowledge of prehistoric domestic life which was amplified two years later by Christos Tsountas's discovery of the palace at Mycenae. Schliemann's work at Tiryns was not resumed till 1905, when it was proved, as had long been suspected, that an earlier palace underlies the one he had exposed.[9]
From 1886 dates the finding of Mycenaean
In 1890 and 1893, Staes cleared out certain less rich tholos-tombs at Thoricus in
Prehistoric research had now begun to extend beyond the Greek mainland. Certain central Aegean islands,
A map of Cyprus in the later Bronze Age (such as is given by J. L. Myres and M. O. Richter in Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum) shows more than 25 settlements in and about the Mesaorea district alone, of which one, that at Enkomi, near the site of Salamis, has yielded the richest Aegean treasure in precious metal found outside Mycenae. E. Chantre in 1894 picked up lustreless ware, like that of Hissariik, in central Phtygia and at Pteria, and the English archaeological expeditions, sent subsequently into north-western Anatolia, have never failed to bring back ceramic specimens of Aegean appearance from the valleys of the Rhyndncus, Sangarius and Halys.[6]
In
One land, however, has eclipsed all others in the Aegean by the wealth of its remains of all the prehistoric ages— Crete; and so much so that, for the present, we must regard it as the fountainhead of Aegean civilization, and probably for long its political and social centre. The island first attracted the notice of archaeologists by the remarkable archaic Greek bronzes found in a cave on
Thus the "Aegean Area" has now come to mean the
End
The final collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation appears to have occurred about 1200 BC. Iron took the place of bronze, cremation took the place of burial of the dead, and writing was lost.
See also
References
- ^ "Aegean civilizations". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved February 1, 2019.
- ^ a b Paul Rincon, Stonehenge: DNA reveals origin of builders. BBC News website, 16 April 2019
- ^ PMID 30988490.
- ^ Josh Davis (April 2019), "Neolithic Britain: where did the first farmers come from?" The Natural History Museum, London
- ^ Hogarth 1911, p. 247.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Hogarth 1911, p. 246.
- ^ Joseph W. Shaw, The Early Helladic II Corridor House: Development and Form, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 91, No. 1. (Jan. 1987), pp. 59–79 (72).
- ^ Ione Mylonas Shear, "Excavations on the Acropolis of Midea: Results of the Greek-Swedish Excavations under the Direction of Katie Demakopoulou and Paul åström", American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 104, No. 1. (Jan. 2000), pp. 133–134.
- ^ a b c d e f g Hogarth 1911, p. 245.
- ^ Hogarth 1911, pp. 245–246.
- public domain: Hogarth, David George (1911). "Aegean Civilization". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 245–251. This includes illustrations and a history of the civilizations, as understood in the early 20th century. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
External links
- Jeremy B. Rutter, "The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean": chronology, history, bibliography
- Aegean and Balkan Prehistory: Articles, site-reports and bibliography database concerning the Aegean, Balkans and Western Anatolia