Greek Dark Ages

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Greek Dark Ages
Geographical rangeGreek mainland and Aegean Sea
PeriodAncient Greece
Datesc. 1050 BC – c. 750 BC
CharacteristicsDestruction of settlements and collapse of the socioeconomic system
Preceded byMycenaean Greece, Minoan civilization
Followed byArchaic Greece

The Greek Dark Ages was the period of

Mycenaean palatial civilization, around 1100 BC, to the beginning of the Archaic age, around 750 BC,[1] It followed the so-called Late Bronze Age collapse of civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean world in c. 1200-1150, as the great palaces and cities of the Mycenaeans were destroyed or abandoned. At around the same time, the Hittite civilization also suffered serious disruption, with cities from Troy to Gaza being destroyed. In Egypt, the New Kingdom fell into disarray, leading to the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. Following the collapse, there were fewer, smaller settlements, suggesting widespread famine and depopulation. In Greece, the Linear B script used by Mycenaean bureaucrats to write the Greek language ceased to be used, and the Greek alphabet did not develop until the beginning of the archaic period. The decoration on Greek pottery
after about 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. 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

Classical Antiquity include the first Olympics, in 776 BC, and the composition of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey
.

Mediterranean warfare and Sea Peoples

Map of the Late Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200 BC) in the Eastern Mediterranean

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

Geometric-style box in the shape of a barn. On display in the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, housed in the Stoa of Attalus. From early geometric cremation burial of a wealthy pregnant woman, 850 BC.

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]

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 is inherently unstable: he interprets Lefkandi in this light.[8]

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

edged weapons were now within reach of less elite warriors. Though the universal use of iron was one shared feature among Dark Age settlements,[9] it is still uncertain when the forged iron weapons and armour achieved strength superior to those that had previously been cast and hammered from bronze
. From 1050, many small local iron industries appeared, and by 900, almost all weapons in grave goods were made of iron.

The distribution of the

Al Mina on the Syrian coast, and the revival of an Aegean Greek network of exchange can be detected from 10th-century BC Attic Proto-geometric pottery found in Crete and at Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor.[11]

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

Ancient Agora Museum
(Athens); exhibit 14–16: broad gold finger rings; exhibit 17–19: gold finger rings; 20: pair of gold earrings with trapezoid endings

Cyprus was inhabited by a mix of "

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 that 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

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

heroon", this long narrow building, 50 metres by 10 metres, or about 164 feet by 33 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.[20]

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

An Ancient Greek pair of terracotta boots. Early geometric period cremation burial of a woman, 900 BC. Ancient Agora Museum in Athens.

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

Villanovan culture to the north of Rome.[22]

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

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 "

Eteocypriot inscriptions until the Hellenistic era
.

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

  1. ^ 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
  2. ^ Knodell, Alex (2021). Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History. Oakland: University of California Press. p. 11.
  3. ^ Martin, 43
  4. ^ 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
  5. ^ Snodgrass 1971:360–68.
  6. ^ "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.
  7. ^ Snodgrass 1971:140–212.
  8. ^ Whitley 1991.
  9. ^ 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)
  10. ^ V. Karageorghis, Early Cyprus, 2002.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. JSTOR 43646246
    .
  13. ^ N. Schreiber, The Cypro-Phoenician Pottery of the Iron Age, 2003
  14. ^ Snodgrass (1971).
  15. ^ Snodgrass (1971).
  16. ^ Hurwitt (1985).
  17. ^ "Excavations at Lefkandi: Publications". Lefkandi.classics.ox.ac.UK. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
  18. ^ The candidates and their opponents are noted in Fox 2008:51 note 23.
  19. ^ 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.
  20. ^ Edward Bispham, Thomas Harrison, Brian A. Sparkes, Ancient Greece and Rome, page 89, The Edinburgh Companion, Ed 2006.
  21. ^ Homer, Iliad XXIII
  22. ^ J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece: 900–700  BC, 1979.
  23. ^ Homer, Iliad XXIII
  24. ^ J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece: 900–700  BC, 1979.
  25. ^ Dickinson 2006, p. 1.
  26. ^ Knodell 2021, p. 10.
  27. ^ Whitley 1991, p. 5.

Bibliography