Greek Dark Ages
Geographical range | Greek mainland and Aegean Sea |
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Period | Ancient Greece |
Dates | c. 1050 BC – c. 750 BC |
Characteristics | Destruction of settlements and collapse of the socioeconomic system |
Preceded by | Mycenaean Greece, Minoan civilization |
Followed by | Archaic Greece |
History of Greece |
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Greece portal |
The Greek Dark Ages was the period of
It was previously thought that all contact was lost between mainland Hellenes and foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth. But archaeologist Alex Knodell considers that artifacts from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine Plain in the island of Euboea in the 1980s "revealed that some parts of Greece were much wealthier and more widely connected than traditionally thought, as a monumental building and its adjacent cemetery showed connections to Cyprus, Egypt, and the Levant as markers of elite status and authority, much as they had been in previous periods",[2] and this shows that significant cultural and trade links with the east, particularly the Levant coast, developed from c. 900 BC onwards. Additionally, evidence has emerged of the new presence of Hellenes in sub-Mycenaean Cyprus and on the Syrian coast at Al-Mina.
During the Dark Ages of Greece, the old major settlements were abandoned (with the notable exception of Athens), and the population dropped dramatically. Within these three hundred years, the people of Greece lived in small groups that moved constantly in accordance with their new pastoral lifestyle and livestock needs, while they left no written record behind leading to the conclusion that they were illiterate. Later on (between 950 and 750 BC), the Greeks relearned how to write, but using the alphabet of the Phoenicians instead of the Linear B script used by the Mycenaeans, "innovating in a fundamental way by introducing vowels as letters. The Greek version of the alphabet eventually formed the base of the alphabet used for English today."[3]
Life was harsh for the Greeks of the Dark Ages. One major result of the period was the deconstruction of the old Mycenaean economic and social structures. The strict class hierarchies and hereditary rule were forgotten, and gradually replaced with new socio-political institutions that eventually allowed for the rise of democracy in 5th c. BC
Mediterranean warfare and Sea Peoples
Around this time, large-scale revolts took place in several parts of the eastern Mediterranean. 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. Parts of Western Anatolia were possibly attacked by the so-called Sea Peoples, whose origins, perhaps from different parts of the Mediterranean region such as the Black Sea, the Aegean and Anatolian regions, remain obscure.
Culture
With the collapse of the palatial centers, no more monumental stone buildings were built, and the practice of wall painting may have ceased. Writing in the Linear B script also ceased, and vital trade links were lost as towns and villages were abandoned. Writing in the Linear B script ended particularly due to the redistributive palace economy crashing; there was no longer a need to keep records about commerce.[4] The population of Greece declined.[5] 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.
The emerging fragmented, localized, and autonomous cultures lacked cultural and aesthetic cohesion and are noted for their diversity of material cultures in pottery styles (e.g. conservative in Athens, eclectic in Knossos), burial practices, and settlement structures. The Protogeometric style of pottery was stylistically simpler than earlier designs, characterized by lines and curves. Generalizations about the "Dark Age Society" are considered simplifications, because the range of cultures throughout Greece at the time cannot be grouped into a single "Dark Age Society" category.[6]
Some regions in Greece, such as Attica, Euboea, and central Crete, recovered economically from these events faster than others, but life for common Greeks would have remained relatively unchanged as it had for centuries. There was still farming, weaving, metalworking and pottery but 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 Protogeometric style (1050–900 BC), such as the superior pottery technology that included 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 the clay. However, the overall trend was toward simpler, less intricate pieces and fewer resources being devoted to the creation of beautiful art.
The smelting of iron was learned from
The distribution of the
Religion in the Greek Dark Ages is seen to be a continuation of Bronze Age Greek Religion,[12] specifically the ideas of Hero worship, and how the gods' powers were attributed.
Post-Mycenaean Cyprus
Cyprus was inhabited by a mix of "
Society
Greece during this period was likely 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 has led to speculation that this was the chieftain's house.[14]
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 religious significance and communal storage of food. 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.[15] Most Greeks did not live in isolated farmsteads but in small settlements. It is likely that at the dawn of the historical period two or three hundred years later, the main economic resource for each family was the ancestral plot of land of the Oikos, the kleros or allotment. Without this, a man could not marry.[16]
Lefkandi burial
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 breastplates, an heirloom necklace, an elaborate Cypriot or Near Eastern necklace made some 200 to 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.
Between this period and approximately 820 BC, rich members of the community were cremated and buried close to the eastern end of the building, in much the same way Christians might seek to be buried close to a saint's grave; the presence of imported objects, notable throughout more than eighty further burials, contrast with other nearby cemeteries at Lefkandi and attest to a lasting elite tradition.
End
The archaeological record of many sites demonstrates that the economic recovery of Greece was well underway by the beginning of the 8th century BC. Cemeteries, such as the
The decoration of pottery became more elaborate and included figured scenes that parallel the stories of Homeric Epic. Iron tools and weapons improved. Renewed Mediterranean trade 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.[23] Other coastal regions of Greece besides Euboea were once again full participants in the commercial and cultural exchanges of the eastern and central Mediterranean and communities developed governance by an elite group of aristocrats, rather than by the single basileus or chieftain of earlier periods.[24]
New writing system
By the mid-to-late-8th century BC, a new
The ceramic Euboean artifact inscribed with a few lines written in the Greek alphabet referring to "
Continuity thesis
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") is an accident of discovery rather than a fact of history.[25][26] As James Whitley has put it, "The Dark Age of Greece is our conception. It is a conception strongly coloured by our knowledge of the two literate civilisations that preceded and succeeded it: the bureaucratic, palace-centred world of Mycenaean Greece and the chaotic and creative Archaic age of Hellenic civilisation."[27]
See also
References
- ^ Martin, Thomas R., (October 3, 2019). "The Dark Ages of Ancient Greece": "...The Near East recovered its strength much sooner than did Greece, ending its Dark Age by around 900 B.C...The end of the Greek Dark Age is traditionally placed some 150 years after that, at about 750 B.C..." Retrieved October 24, 2020
- ^ Knodell, Alex (2021). Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History. Oakland: University of California Press. p. 11.
- ^ Martin, 43
- ^ The Early Greek Dark Age and Revival in the Near East. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0009%3Achapter%3D3 Retrieved 2016-12-4
- ^ Snodgrass 1971:360–68.
- ^ "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 Athens 86 [1991:341–365]) pp. 342, 344ff.
- ^ Snodgrass 1971:140–212.
- ^ Whitley 1991.
- ^ 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)
- ^ V. Karageorghis, Early Cyprus, 2002.
- ^ R.W.V. Catling, "Exports of Attic protogeometric pottery and their identification by non-analytical means", Annual of the British School at Athens 93 (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.
- JSTOR 43646246.
- ^ N. Schreiber, The Cypro-Phoenician Pottery of the Iron Age, 2003
- ^ Snodgrass (1971).
- ^ Snodgrass (1971).
- ^ Hurwitt (1985).
- ^ "Excavations at Lefkandi: Publications". Lefkandi.classics.ox.ac.UK. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
- ^ The candidates and their opponents are noted in Fox 2008:51 note 23.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Edward Bispham, Thomas Harrison, Brian A. Sparkes, Ancient Greece and Rome, page 89, The Edinburgh Companion, Ed 2006.
- ^ Homer, Iliad XXIII
- ^ J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece: 900–700 BC, 1979.
- ^ Homer, Iliad XXIII
- ^ J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece: 900–700 BC, 1979.
- ^ Dickinson 2006, p. 1.
- ^ Knodell 2021, p. 10.
- ^ Whitley 1991, p. 5.
Bibliography
- Chew, Sing C., World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization and Deforestation 3000 BC ‒ AD 2000, 2001, ISBN 0-7591-0031-4Chapter 3, The second-millennium Bronze Age: Crete and Mycenaean Greece 1700 BC – 1200 BC.
- Desborough, V.R.d'A. (1972). The Greek Dark Ages. St. Martin's Press.
- Dickinson, Oliver (2006). The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC. New York: ISBN 0-4151-3589-3.
- 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.
- Knodell, Alex R. (2021). Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History. Oakland: ISBN 978-0-5203-8053-0.
- 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. ISBN 0-415-93635-7.
- ISBN 0-500-02085-X.
- Whitley, James (1991). Style and Society in Dark Age Greece: The Changing Face of a Pre-literate Society 1100–700 BC (New Studies in Archaeology). Cambridge: ISBN 0-5213-7383-2.